Twitter diplomacy: Who Follows Whom Among World Leaders - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/04/twitter-diplomacy-world-leaders/

<comment><USER2> When a nation's A leader unfollows nation B's leader I expect that they'll summon nation A's ambassador to explain their actions.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you host your own side-projects? - <AUTHOR>

I've got a bunch of side-projects, each with a non-trivial database (dozen gigs or so each), and I want to consolidate hosting providers. What do you recommend, and why?
I've looked at AWS, and I'm not sure I trust their EBS volumes. I've looked at NearlyFreeSpeech, but their data storage rates ($10/GB/mo) are far too high. I've looked at Heroku, but all the add-ons get pretty expensive. I've looked at renting a plain dedicated server, but not sure I'm ready to handle backups and such.
I don't have much experience in this, so please correct my assumptions where wrong.
Thanks very much. <comment><USER2> In the last decade or so I have tried a lot of options for my own projects. Currently I have 3 year commitments for a small EC2 instance and a micro EC2 instance, and I sometimes use Heroku.

I also keep a large memory large EC2 instance configured but paused 99% of the time and I just use it for a few hours occasionally when I need more horsepower. I also use Elastic MapReduce.

I like EBS volumes, BTW, because they are easy to backup with S3 snapshots and I have nothing that requires very high I/O performance. For customers, I set up RAID 0 on EBS, but for my stuff, I don't bother.

I used to rent conventional VPS's but "standardizing" on Amazon's infrastructure seemed like a good move because all of my customers (except for perhaps 1 or 2) in the last 4 years use AWS.

Knowing AWS inside-out is a good job skill, and running your own projects on AWS helps learn reusable skills.

</comment><comment><USER3> Checkout <http://lowendbox.com> for cheap options and postings on <http://webhostingtalk.com> for more. Or just pay for something known to be reliable like linode or heroku.

Edit: Actually- my advice would be to either use Heroku if stuff is small, or pick a VPS service you like and put everything on one VPS box. Again, Linode is a great option.

</comment><comment><USER4> If they're small enough, I'll self-host. Cable modem has enough bandwidth and servers are cheap, but admittedly can be a pain to administer yourself.

I recently looked around at 3rd parties and Rackspace's "cloud" offering looked competitive, depending on your needs.

BTW, you really should list your platform. For example, you have way more choices for PHP hosting than for Java/JVM.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, thanks. I'd never self-host.

I have a mid-size Sinatra.rb app that's getting subjected to the Slicehost reboot which is causing the desire to consolidate, but I've written in PHP and Haskell. I can be pretty flexible language-wise, as long as it runs in Unix.

<comment><USER4> I've no experience with Slicehost or their reboot policy. I'm guessing they won't let you put a graceful shutdown/startup script in the relevant /etc/rc* directory? Seems like they should have some hook for that if the servers reboot/fail that often. Assuming that even solves your problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> No no, they're turning off their old datacenter (afaict) and they're fully integrating with Rackspace who bought them a few years ago. They've been superstable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> MediaTemple's (ve) product line is pretty good, I host my blog there (<http://mediatemple.net/webhosting/ve/>) and I use Linode for some stuff too.

</comment><comment><USER6> A VPS or Dedicated server might fit your needs.

I'd also look into Linode.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hm, Linode's disk space looks too small for me. What VPS or Dedicated Server do you recommend? Google searches are mostly spam for me.

<comment><USER7> I'm curious: What do you need the disk space for? Is it something that can be farmed out to say, Amazon S3?

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently, I've got a 60GB database of indexed n-grams, for an art project / data vis. I've also got ~20GB of relational data running a Latin website. I like manipulating and visualizing lots of data, so it'd be better not to denormalize it too early.

<comment><USER8> I found your Latin project through your profile. That's very cool—I also did the vaunted CompSci/Classics combo and I've considered doing something like this before. It's nice to see that something is already out there.

To be more on topic, I've found Linode to be pretty excellent along with everybody else. If your relational data happens to be in MySQL, Dreamhost has an enormous quota. Not the best for performance but I assume your data set is static, aside from user accounts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I use Chunkhost and Bluemile Cloud; I've never had any issues with bluemile cloud (and I run a traffic heavy tor relay, SILC server, and several sites off my box) but I'm not sure if they offer VMWare instances any more. Chunkhost is generally decent but the network on the boxes is definitely slower than my other VPSes.

EDIT: forgot to mention I've used Heroku and Joyent's Smart Machines before as well. The Smart Machines are pretty solid, but I haven't used my Heroku app enough to say much about it.

</comment><comment><USER10> Slicehost or Linode. Linode is cheaper but Slicehost does more hand holding if you're new to using VPSs.

</comment><comment> saiko-chriskun seconding linode, or perhaps tilaa.nl if you want something a bit cheaper. had good experiences with each.

</comment><comment><USER11> I love my linode!

</comment><comment><USER12> Linode

</comment><comment><USER13> Linode.</comment>


How fucked is SSL? - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/alex/5760270

<comment><USER2> Google actually has forward secrecy which prevents an attacker from doing anything passive even if they have google'e key. [http://www.imperialviolet.org/2011/11/22/forwardsecret.html](http://www.imperialviolet.org/2011/11/22/forwardsecret.html)

Of course, if they have access to google's servers(and can get the ephemeral keys) or can mount active attacks, this doesn't stop anything.</comment>


IPhone 4 Tips: Things New Users Should Know - <AUTHOR> http://mrboks.info/2011/01/30/iphone-4-tips-10-things-new-users-should-know/

<comment><USER2> That's a pretty good list. I certainly concur with the death grip advice.</comment>


The Psychological Cost of Boring Buildings - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/04/the-psychological-cost-of-boring-buildings.html <comment><USER2> "So the trick, it seems, is to design a world that excites but doesn't overly assault our faculties with a constant barrage of information"

I just got back from my first trip to Chicago. I've been to quite a few cities, but the variety of architecture and juxtoposition of certain styles throughout the city made for a very enjoyable experience. Not every single building in the city is pretty either. But taken as a whole and hearing how history, art, architecture, and engineering shaped the city was fascinating. I actually did the architectural river tour, which I found to be one of the most enthralling guided tours I've ever been on. Highly recommended.

<comment><USER3> This is one of the "secret" reasons I left the Bay Area to return to Chicago - downtown Chicago (aka The Loop) is beautiful. Please help keep it a secret so everyone doesn't move here and drive the price of everything up. ;)

<comment><USER4> You're joking, I know, but just to point out: Chicago is gigantic. Bring it on, Google and Facebook and Apple. We've got more than enough space. :)

<comment><USER5> The bay area has more than enough space too. It spreads over 100 kilometers south of San Francisco. It covers more than the surface area of NYC in total. The real issue is that the bay area refuses to grow. The population is only about 5 millions IIRC. The density is really low.

IMO, in order to accomodate more people, and deal with the insane rents, the bay area needs to start growing vertically. Every other urban area I've been to has towers, apartment complexes. Here everything is flat. Most apartment buildings are only two floors high, rarely more than three.

I won't get into the politics of all of this, but politics are the real problem. Many of the suburbanites around here want their suburbs to remain suburbs. The law of offer and demand should mean that apartment towers are getting built and rents go down as competition increase, but the regulations in place prevent this. Many swanky new condos are being built, but these are still flat buildings, not making efficient use of the available space.

<comment><USER4> Chicago has a dense transit infrastructure that spreads across the whole city, and pretty decent transit throughout the whole metro area.

Obviously, San Francisco is hemmed in by geography, but even if you compare the metro areas, Chicago is better suited to hosting large-scale companies than SFBA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I read an interesting study a while back about architecture in London, taken with a sample of professional architects and a sample of general population, all based in London. All the architects in the study hated the old Edwardian terraces, and pitied people who lived in them. All the non-architects loved the old Edwardian terraces, and hated the majority of the buildings the architects loved.

You could easily make an argument from the point of view of the architects in that study that a row of Edwardian terraces are dull and boring, but most Londoners would love to live in them.

With that in mind, I'm a bit wary of this - there are certainly plenty of horrible buildings around - 60's brutalist concrete would be an example of a style I particularly dislike - but how do we decide what's bland and what's attractive?

<comment><USER7> Architects are in the same bind that the craftsmen whose work they now despise were.

With modern materials, the scut work and routine labor that master masons and carpenters cut their teeth on is gone -- they mostly assemble. So there's no skilled tradesmen at the level that you could find 100 years ago. When my local cathedral did a rehab, they shipped in Italian stonemasons and paid them $150/hr.

Enter the architect. With prefabrication and computerization, tens of thousands of man-hours of architect time has been vaporized. So at the low end, they pay the bills with cheap templated crap that wins bids and looks bland. At the high end, they produce stuff that is "unique" and often completely non-functional and/or visually offensive. (But looks good in the portfolio)

In the meantime, most lay people are attracted to more classic architecture that has been perfected over centuries.

<comment><USER8> My hypothesis is that increasingly complex building codes makes it increasingly economic to rebuild the same stock of housing multiple times.

It's a bit unusual, what could have increased the workload of architects as design requirements became more complex instead lead to their downfall.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I really enjoyed the book 'A Pattern Language' by Christopher Alexander. It looks at architecture from the level of the ordinary person and has some brilliant insight into what makes a building pleasant to live in. I applied some ideas from the book when I renovated my house and it has been a huge success.

<comment><USER10> What specific ideas did you apply?

One that I got from that book and have found to be rock solid is that a room feels more alive when it has a window on more than one side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is something I have thought about often, living in Norway. Seemed like there must have been some period in the 50s-60s when building the most mind- crushing office buildings / hospitals / apartment blocks was the goal. Maybe the psychological effect of buildings vary over years? I.e. in the 50s-60s boring, 'efficient' buildings were seen as modern and progressive, and thus, gave a morale boost?

Exhibit A: [http://borghoytrykk.no/wp- content/uploads/2012/07/Vaskhøyblo...](http://borghoytrykk.no/wp- content/uploads/2012/07/VaskhøyblokkOslo1.jpg)

<comment><USER12> There was a period of modernist architecture up through maybe the mid-70s-- including but not limited to Brutalism--that has aged particularly badly for the most part. Even examples that were presumably designed to stand out, like Boston City Hall and the Boston Public Library addition (to the original beautiful Beaux Arts structure) look simply awful today.

<comment><USER13> Boston City Hall is quite possibly the ugliest building I've ever seen. The soot-belching, ash-caked, grease-grimed, wood-burning power plant that I worked in summers in college was more beautiful.

<comment><USER14> It really is hideous. I grew up in the Boston area, and even as a little kid I distinctly remember thinking, "This has got to be the ugliest building in the world". Then when I got older I thought, "Well, the world is a big place and I haven't seen much of it, so I don't have much of a frame of reference. I'm sure there are uglier buildings somewhere." And then when I got a little older still, it was kind of satisfying to see multiple articles and polls saying that no, it is indeed one of the ugliest buildings in the entire world.

It's not even that I think Brutalism is inherently bad. I think there are some really nice examples, like the AT&T building in NYC: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street#/media/File:A...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street#/media/File:AT%26T_Long_Lines_building.jpg). But Boston City Hall is Brutalism at its absolute worst.

<comment><USER12> I once read a humorous column that described it as an attempt to give any visiting Soviets an inferiority complex by out Soviet-ing Soviet architecture.

There are some decent brutalist buildings on the MIT campus including the MIT Student Center--which has a lot of interesting funky angles and is a rather useful space--and a number of IM Pei buildings (at least I think the latter are considered brutalist). There's also the Christian Science Plaza that I'd go so far as to call quite attractive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> While there's room for improvement, I don't think the building looks bad. All the glass makes it seem airy and full of light. The windows probably make it a nice place to be inside as well. Its only problem is being too big, so that it becomes monotonous. But how would you fix that? Design parts of the building in different styles?

<comment> guard-of-terra Expose something nice in those windows instead of making them blind mirrors.

<comment><USER15> There's too much sunlight coming in. Your options are to cook/blind everyone inside, put something opaque (and visible to the street) inside the windows while blocking the view, or dim the windows and let the occupants see the street.

<comment> guard-of-terra You can put something interesting behind the window, then erect a wall, then your regular space goes. Some stores do that.

<comment><USER15> Is this different from the second option I mentioned? The wall would still block the view of the people inside, right?

<comment> guard-of-terra You can make inner wall translucent perhaps?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As an example of how even the most pedestrian industrial function can be in a beautiful building, here is a waste incineration plant in Vienna: [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:M%C3%BCllverbren...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:M%C3%BCllverbrennungsanlage_Spittelau?uselang=de#/media/File:M%C3%BCllverbrennungsanlage_Spittelau.jpg)

<comment><USER17> The problem with "beautiful" is that it is very subjective. This picture is my definition of ugly. Unless you were sarcastic.

<comment><USER18> Seconded.

There are these avant-gardes who wouldn't think twice about turning any public building project they could lay their hands into massive brutist absurdist sea of concrete gray from their dreams [1], if given a chance.

Add to that a couple of behemoth art pieces [2] strewn somewhere on the premises that will no doubt one day pulverize some poor souls.

Alas, the tyranny of the stroppy and vengeful minority.

[1]

[https://lebbeuswoods.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/fic-2.jpg](https://lebbeuswoods.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/fic-2.jpg)

[http://www.artspace.com/filip_dujardin/untitled_2007_boxes](http://www.artspace.com/filip_dujardin/untitled_2007_boxes)

[2]

[http://art-nerd.com/sanfrancisco/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/...](http://art- nerd.com/sanfrancisco/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2013/12/Richard-Serra- Ballast-1.jpg)

[http://art-nerd.com/sanfrancisco/ballast-by-richard-serra/](http://art- nerd.com/sanfrancisco/ballast-by-richard-serra/)

<comment> squeaky-clean I actually really love the look of your first link. Though I think it only works as a piece of art, the Escher-esque impossible shape as well as the empty naturalness of the surroundings. You'd never see such a dense building all by itself in isolation.

I was interested in a print until I found out it was $3,500 for an Inkjet print.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> FEMA's Brooke Road Facility (BRF - "the barf") is quite the eye sore [1]. Luckily it's not in a super visible/residential area, but I always found it depressing that people actually work there.

The outside is bad enough, but the inside is even worse. They're all stuffed into cubicles, no windows that I recall, dirty/decrepit bathroom, just a depressing place overall, hard to explain.

[1] [https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-78.1524764,3a,75y,1...](https://email@example.com,-78.1524764,3a,75y,111.34h,87.31t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sq-4pH3muktEMb0sl1J7dwg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1)

<comment><USER20> It looks like someone welded some shipping containers together in a car park.

<comment> david-given That's doing shipping containers a disservice --- you can make some quite interesting structures by welding shipping containers together: [http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02210/CONTAINERC...](http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02210/CONTAINERCITY_2210000b.jpg)

Making something as awful as the Brooke Road Facility takes real skill and a lot of work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I live in a newly constructed apartment building in a neighborhood in queens that's mostly houses.

I typically guide the taxi driver to it by saying "it's the big, ugly building on the corner"

</comment><comment><USER22> These boring buildings are a micro aggression against my highly evolved and sensitive sense of aesthetics.</comment>


In Defense of Marketing, Hacking, and Programming - <AUTHOR> http://emilydelmont.svbtle.com/in-defense-of-marketing-hacking-and-programming

<comment><USER2> What a confusing way to ostensibly relieve confusion! Every usage of the term "growth hacker" that I've encountered doesn't seem to imply that it means anything other than someone who uses quick and dirty tactics to spur rapid growth.

This seems more defensive than anything. I've noticed quite a few articles lately from non-technical workers in the tech industry along the same vein. I've worked as a non-technical worker at a startup before, so I understand the need to justify one's role.

</comment><comment><USER3> That article took way to long to say, "Don't call me a hacker because words can only mean one thing".

Edit: Also, this totally happened

>"No, I'm not. I don't think scale, hiring and leadership coaching is something one can hack into. Neither do I think that market entry, customer engagement and creative storytelling is solved by an algorithm. Growth is too vague. We all work in it. Adding the word 'hacking' does a disservice not to just itself, but to marketing and software development, too."

>We both grinned and laughed. He responded in agreement, "Fair points. I'm a programmer. I agree, it's a shitty title. Definitely not indicative of the work."

<comment><USER4> Words can have multiple meanings, but when a word can describe any situation, it carries no more information than the word "thing".

<comment><USER3> But it's bound to happen. Waging war against common usage is so futile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Hacking" just sounds cool, even though it has little to no place at a tech startup. It's just a way to apply cachet to something less appealing on it's own. One of the earliest and biggest culprits is a book I once read because it used the word "Hacker" to purport it was a very different kind of book than it turned out to be.

<comment><USER6> Sounds like you got hacked by a bookhacker using a classic titlehack which hacked your decisionhacking process. Even though you didn't like the book, you still got acquihacked as a customer thanks to the author's brilliant title optimization strategy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good marketing and "growth hacks" aren't the same. Growth hacks can complement good marketing, though, by helping the marketing reach an audience. The problem is that "growth hacker" has become an annoyingly ambiguous term used by anyone who wants to try and bolt hacker onto their title without actually hacking anything. Growth hacks, however, are still pretty useful.

<comment><USER8> Agreed. I don't think the author ever said hacking was an inferior or unreasonable tactic -- she never said clever kitchen extensions were _bad_. She just wanted people to be able to separate and properly judge what is a clever kitchen extension and what is proper house foundation, and know when to use each.

However, I don't agree that hacks are inherently short-term only. It's possible, although very difficult, to come across a quick, easy decision that will improve your long-term as well as your short-term.

Like what Twitter did at SXSW 2007. They set up 2 huge 60 inch plasma TVs in conference hallways -- that one small, quick, dirty easy decision caused them to explode in popularity.

<comment><USER4> It seems like she said that growth hacking wasn't a thing that exists. I suspect that if asked, she would with you that it does exist as an action but that as a title it is nonsensical. A startup's marketing can't be made of hacks for the same reason that if a programmer spends all of her time hacking, she'll end up with an incoherent mess of spaghetti instead of a solid foundation to build more of a business on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> svbtle really needs to buy a vowel.</comment>


Zero-downtime database migrations - <AUTHOR> https://blog.rainforestqa.com/2014-06-27-zero-downtime-database-migrations/ <comment><USER2> > We also use Postgres which doesn't create the obstacles that some other > database systems have, for example with locking tables on schema changes.

Actually schema changes still require exclusive table locks, they're just held very briefly since Postgres doesn't need to rewrite each tuple. (With some exceptions, like adding a NOT NULL column, or reducing the size of a VARCHAR.)

I don't mean to be pedantic, it can be important because the exclusive lock can be blocked by other long-running queries. Then Postgres will try to grant the alter table's exclusive lock before other conflicting locks, so normal reads and writes will be locked out until the long query completes or one of the queries is killed.

<comment><USER3> "Downtime" is a under-defined in this context. The author seems to use the definition "won't cause errors or disconnections" while you are also considering the response time.

Everyone cares about the former, while the latter is of more interest to heavily-loaded sites.

The case you mention of a long-running query is important, so everyone needs to have some idea of their workload at the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> pt-online-schema-change, part of the Percona Toolkit, is my go-to tool for making production changes in MySQL.

Improvely and W3Counter both have tons of multi-gigabyte tables. A regular ALTER TABLE statement could take hours to run, and would lock the table the entire time, essentially taking down the service.

Percona's tool makes a copy of the table, runs the ALTER TABLE statements on the copy, then sets up triggers on the original to temporarily mirror data- altering queries to the copy. It then intelligently batches the data migration from the old table to the new one to avoid overloading the server, while printing progress and ETA on the console. When the copying's done, the old table is dropped and the modified one renamed in a single transaction.

It takes just one command and has always worked flawlessly.

[http://www.percona.com/doc/percona-toolkit/2.2/pt-online- sch...](http://www.percona.com/doc/percona-toolkit/2.2/pt-online-schema- change.html)

<comment><USER5> For ActiveRecord (or other Ruby-based) migrations with MySQL, I've had good luck with Large Hadron Migrator[1]. It's worked flawlessly for some of our own tables with several hundred million rows (and no downtime).

[1] [https://github.com/soundcloud/lhm](https://github.com/soundcloud/lhm)

<comment><USER6> This looks interesting. Do you know how it actually works? The readme simply says, "The basic idea is to perform the migration online while the system is live, without locking the table. In contrast to OAK and the facebook tool, we only use a copy table and triggers." What's the technique used to achieve that?

<comment><USER5> From what I understand, it creates a new table with the same structure as the existing table, runs your migrations on it, adds triggers to bring live changes in from the original table while copying (in batches) the records in the old table. Once everything is copied and updated with triggers, it swaps out the old table for the new one in an atomic operation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The column change phase 2 has a sneaky bug in it.

In the order presented:

1) Run migration

2) Apply trigger

There will be a point in time where the migration has been done and the trigger hasn't been applied.

Even sneakier, if the trigger is applied in code and not in the database, there will be period in time where some of the code is running the trigger and some isn't.

The trigger needs to be in production and executing prior to the backfill running.

I'm also loathe to rely on "triggers" in application model logic. I've seen too many platforms where the operations engineers interact directly with the database, resulting in required logic not executing.

<comment><USER3> Great point.

When tricky concurrency is involved, using the built-in tools offered by the database is the safest approach.

Often, it's also the easiest and most performant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good idea for the fake delete column. I've always seen non rollback-able column removal migrations as something we just have to do with, this totally solves the problem.

As for when is the good time to actually remove the column, I think this can merge pretty well with my current thinking about migrations.

A new developer joined my company (we use rails as well). When setting things up, he tried to run `rake db:migrate` (my fault, I mentioned it in my doc instead of `rake db:schema:load`, I wrote doc as I was setting up the very first lines of the project). There was several years of migrations, some of them not working anymore since they used code that does not exist anymore (like `#add_hstore_index` from activerecord-postgres-hstore, which has been replaced by native postgres support).

This made me thinks that there is no need to maintain migrations in repository if we can't use them anymore. And thus, from time to time, migrations should be flushed. This flush should be the perfect time to actually delete columns (well, this should be done just before). That way, we ensure our migrations can constantly be rolled back, without breaking anything.

Edit : refining on that, we probably don't want to flush all migrations, but only the older ones. So, how do we insert the migration to actually remove data ? We can't just put it between old migrations and the ones we'll keep, since it would be considered already migrated. We can't remove it directly in sql console either, or we would have to do it on every machine and this would caused desync among developers machines.

I think the best way to do it would be to append a new non-reversible (but that does not break on reverse) migration, that uses `table_exists?` and `column_exists?` to ensure it is only ran on databases that contains the deprecated columns / tables. Something like :

        class RemoveDeprecated < ActiveRecord::Migration
          def up
            remove_column :foos, :bar_deprecated if column_exists? :foos, :bar_deprecated
          end

          def down
          end
        end

<comment><USER9> I never flushed migrations, maybe I should! Thanks for the comment. Food for thoughts :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> JP, author of the post here - let me know if you have any additions / questions!

<comment><USER10> This is great. I've been wondering how to do this, and this is exactly what I had come up with. I'm glad to have confirmation that it's the normal way people do zero-downtime migrations.

I might add one change. You say add a column migration, ship it, then add the feature that uses the column and ship again. I was planning on shipping the code at the same time (or even before) the migration, but having the feature disabled with a feature-flipper until the migration is done.

<comment><USER9> Depending on your framework and ORM and how its column cache is working, it sounds like a good solution too!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> When I saw this, I first thought it was an extension of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5326159](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5326159) ;)

<comment><USER12> If I'm understanding correctly, you take all frontends out of HAProxy's config, so that HAProxy basically queues requests in-memory until you put a frontend back into circulation? That seems like a much simpler solution for when you have migrations that do not take very long (and enough memory for HAProxy to spool those requests).

Would you be willing to add a minimal example HAProxy config to your blog post that demonstrates your setup? I've been meaning to try out HAProxy but the documentation is so dense I've had trouble getting started. Your use case sounds like a really good reason to give it another go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> For .NET developers I can recommend Fluent Migrator. Works brilliantly with Octopus Deploy.

</comment><comment><USER14> I prefer our approach:

 _> Case #1: I want to add a new column_

Issue an ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN on the production database. Try not to make it NOT NULL.

 _> Case #2: I want to change a column type_

Add another column (see Case #1) of the same name, with a suffix like "_2" or "_NUM" so you can tell them apart.

 _> Case #3: I want to rename a column_

Don't risk it. Keep using the original column name. Very few of the column names reflect the reality of that they contain anyway. It's little bits of insider knowledge like this ("Product name is actually stored in ITEMNAME_LONG, ITEMNAME is only a CHAR(15) so we keep UPC in there") that contribute to our fast-paced, agile work environment.</comment>


Google: Yes, Sponsored Post Campaign Was Ours But Not What We Signed-Up For - <AUTHOR> http://searchengineland.com/google-yes-sponsored-post-campaign-was-ours-but-not-what-we-signed-up-for-106457

<comment><USER2> While much of the anger makes sense, why do folks keep harping on Google for using 3rd parties for their marketing? I know of no media or marketing company of any reasonable size that doesn't outsource some part of their marketing to another agency or marketing services company. Yes, even agencies outsource some of the work to promote themselves... to an agency.

Should Google have more oversight into what they are paying for? Sure, just like everyone who hires a 3rd party to do stuff under their name and aegis. But just because Google have built the technology to run video ads, do we naturally believe that they also have the creative, marketing ops, and other pieces/talent/staff necessary to build, manage, measure, and improve the campaign? Perhaps, but from a resource and efficiency POV, they may find it cheaper to just outsource that to an agency and keep fewer resource in-house for marketing vs., say, engineering.

It's ok for companies to purchase services from other companies. Not keeping a close eye on what you've bought, however, is another matter.

<comment><USER3> I think the big issue that's bothering people is the potential for hypocrisy. This event clearly proves that shit happens and if google doesn't either ban it's own chrome from search results or loosen up on it's rules for bans and appeals then they are being fully hypocritical.

<comment><USER4> Well, they've penalized the Google Chrome page according to this update: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3421468>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow, I can't believe they wrung _that_ much text out of such a small issue - tempest in a teapot indeed.

Maybe the top 1/4 of the post is actually useful. Google apparently caught "sponsoring" blog posts to promote Chrome. Google denies knowledge, marketing firm admits to doing it without Google approval.

The website then spent the next 3/4 of the article trying to invent a conspiracy theory around it, with the author throwing in some choice weasel words to make it seem like outsourced marketing is suspicious behavior.

Then more words are spent trying to spin this very common, very simple mistake into a conspiracy theory. Couldn't we have found a better link for this?

<comment><USER6> This very common, very simple mistake was done by the company with the biggest video ad network in the world, which advises others on how to do video advertising.

This very common, very simple mistake was also don by the company which over the past year has tossed hundreds of sites into oblivion from its search engines, because they had content that was deemed too "thin" and warned others not to do the same.

This very common, very simple mistake was also done by the same company that has banned or penalized other companies over purchasing links through sponsored posts, even if those companies protested that they didn't know better and that a middleman was involved.

So how did I wring that much out of this "small" issue. Simple. It's not a small issue.

<comment><USER5> Again, tempest in a teapot. Apparent bad behavior is uncovered, immediate denial is issued. Followup investigation reveals that a third party contractor acted out of line, has admitted guilt, and remedial action taken.

A minor scandal by all measures. Embarrassing maybe, and probably worth a good look over how Google chooses its third party contractors, nothing more.

> _"by the company which over the past year has tossed hundreds of sites into > oblivion from its search engines, because they had content that was deemed > too "thin""_

This would be scandalous if Google actually _did_ participate in a blog-payola situation, which they didn't.

> _"done by the company with the biggest video ad network in the world, which > advises others on how to do video advertising"_

Have you _worked_ in a big company before? The fact that you expect the Chrome team to be "advising others on how to do video advertising" is pretty far out. Breaking: corporate communications in giant companies is substantially less than perfect. Film at 11.

> _"Simple. It's not a small issue."_

The _only_ way this could be construed as a major issue is if Google's lying about the rogue contractor and _did_ in fact knowingly engage the bloggers. Do you have evidence of this?

I honestly cannot see how this is nefarious. Google screwed up and picked a crappy contractor for this work. Everyone goes home with egg on their faces. To generalize and extrapolate this to see malice _really_ demands some substantiating evidence that Google did this on purpose.

<comment><USER6> Yes, when JC Penney was discovered to have purchased links through the actions of a third-party, and said hey, it was the contractors fault, Google immediately say "Oh, that's OK, no reason to penalize you."

Oh, wait. They didn't. They slapped a ranking penalty on the company, because ultimately it was JC Penney's responsibility.

Google did participate in a blog for payola situation. The fact that it employed third parties that got it involved in that doesn't magically excuse it from potential penalties.

This wasn't some "rogue" contractor that just did whatever it wanted. This was an agency Google hired, which in turn worked with another agency, that ran this campaign. These companies were engaged by Google.

Did Google expect this type of mess? No. Should Google have been watching for it? Absolutely. Either no one at Google bothered to fully examine the final and promised work product or they did and were dumb enough to let this go forward. Neither speaks well about this case.

And to date, I still haven't gotten Google or the agency to provide more specifics about what was expected or promised. That generally isn't a positive sign.

I think someone at Google got a pitch about doing some viral blogging thing to promote Chrome. They probably decided cool, go for it. They probably didn't examine exactly what was going to happen. They almost certainly didn't plan to buy links or have garbage content be produced. There almost certainly wasn't some evil plot to do all this.

But that's not the point. The point is that this did happen, by a company that when others do this, passes out penalties against them, regardless of the excuses. That's why it's an important story, and I'm sorry that's lost on you. It's not lost on many other people.

Including Google, by the way. That's why Google's own spam team has penalized Google Chrome's page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What would Google's response be if Microsoft or another product developer had done this? Would they have pages banned?

</comment><comment><USER8> "In this case, Google were subjected to this activity through media that encouraged bloggers to create what appeared to be paid posts, were often of poor quality and out of line with Google standards. We apologize to Google who clearly didn't authorize this."

"Google were subjected to this activity through media that encouraged bloggers"

Wow, if someone could parse that, I'd be grateful.

<comment><USER9> It's a blame-evading way of saying something like "Google has had to suffer the consequences of our decision to reach out to bloggers and encourage them…"

(I think the most confusing word in the original is "media" — that's essentially PR-speak for "communication.")

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sullivan keeps saying some form of this:

 _There's no reason to talk about payment based on Google PageRank unless you expressly care about link juice. It is Google's own measure of the ability for a page to pass along link juice._

That's not strictly true. PageRank is equally an indication of net _inlink_ significance. Also, both in its original incarnation and via all the black-box tweaks since (like weighting by actual clickstream data), it is highly correlated with overall visits/'eyeballs'.

So you could rationally be interested in a site's PageRank even if you were just doing a branding/reach-the-most-readers campaign, and truly were ambivalent about outlinks/link-juice. It's a strong proxy for total viewership.

</comment><comment><USER10> Plausible, but would Google accept the same excuse from another company facing enforcement action for buying outlinks?

</comment><comment><USER11> Google is bad. Most intelligent adults agree.</comment>


Where Is Kim Jong Un? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/asia/100000007099211/kim-jong-un-surveillance-intelligence.html <comment><USER2> Probably taking a well-deserved holiday.

Why the panic about not seeing some celebrity or other for several weeks?

[https://www.newsweek.com/putins-disappearance-what-was- all-a...](https://www.newsweek.com/putins-disappearance-what-was-all- about-315443)

</comment><comment><USER3> I watched the video. It's basically 8 minutes of "we do not know".

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a video. I didn't watch it; I'd expected something to read.

</comment><comment><USER5> TLDR: There are three primary tools for harvesting clues about NK leaders, at least among NK-watchers outside of the NSA, CIA and other intelligence services:

1\. satellite imagery - can observe large public events that NK leaders sometimes attend, or where their absence is conspicuous; govt motorcades; facility guard reinforcements & troop movements; etc.

2\. state media - typically when a problem arises with Kim family member, state media will run long pieces on the virtues of Kim leadership to reinforce public support. Other clues from other sources may corroborate this conclusion.

3\. flight tracking - unusual air traffic into and out of NK sometimes provides clues about NK leadership intentions, like sanctions violations and similar.

HUMINT is severely limited and effectively zero, NK govt regime too tightly controlled.

</comment><comment><USER6> he dead, otherwise they would have waltz him around by now.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you open the comments first or the URL? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> It depends on the headline - if it is a generic headline about a topic of interest, I'll read the comments, as the discussion usually covers the topic well. If it is a blog post or article, then I read the article first, so I get my own unbiased view of it before diving in. The one outlier is links to results from a medical study, I rarely read those comments, because they are typically just skeptical negation of the study, so I just draw my own conclusions with my own dose of skepticism.

</comment><comment><USER3> I click comments, it usually loads faster than the target url (on my crappy internet speed) and I can gauge if it's worth loading.

</comment><comment><USER4> Usually comments. I read them like cliff notes for the article.

</comment><comment><USER5> If it's an article that seems to have an agenda (political, technical, entertainment, religion etc) I read the comments first. If it's an article about new tech, new science etc, things that are unlikely to have an existing constituency, then I read the article first.

</comment><comment><USER6> It all depends on what the topic is, and where the URL is pointing. If it's going to Medium, for instance, I don't bother opening the link because I won't be able to read the article.

</comment><comment><USER7> Usually the comments first. Unless the article title is too catchy :P

</comment><comment><USER8> Usually the URL. Sometimes the comments first. Factors can be the number of existing comments, importance of the article vs perceived importance of comments.

</comment><comment><USER9> 75% URL, then I go to the comments if there's something I didn't understand, or if the subject tickled me and I want further immersion.

</comment><comment><USER10> Comments first when I believe people here will add value. If not, link. Anyhow, I usually open both.

</comment><comment><USER11> Usually the comments first (unless it's from a site I know) to get more context.

</comment><comment><USER12> Comments. And they are often more insightful.

</comment><comment><USER13> Comments first

</comment><comment><USER14> Most times I open the comments first and hope to find a "tl;dr" section in the first comment.</comment>


Emotiv Hacker starts Gotham Eyewear – Augmented Reality Glasses - <AUTHOR> http://gothameyewear.com/

<comment><USER2> How would you compare this product to the consumer-grade stuff Vuzix[1] makes?

[1] <http://www.vuzix.com/consumer/>

<comment><USER3> So the most comparable product of theirs is the Wrap 920AR. There are a differences in terms of specs: 1) higher resolution displays (800x600 rather than 640x480), 2) higher resolution cameras (hopefully hitting 1024x768 with the initial CMOS sensors, but that one's up in the air; mostly just a matter of figuring out which one will be the best cost-wise in production), 3) visual processing happens on the glasses rather than on the PC.

However, these differences pale in comparison to the difference in underlying technology. Rather than having displays in front of your eyes that are fed data from the cameras as with Vuzix' tech, we're using Eyetap technology. What this does is feed natural light straight into your eye after it's gone through a beamsplitter to be sent into the camera. On the other side of the beamsplitter is a display showing you overlays. This means that there's no "reality lag", and that you can do far nicer overlays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So... there's no product yet?

<comment><USER3> No, it's still very early. My intention was not to submit it until we had a prototype to show off, however it was submitted as a comment earlier and received a lot of good responses, so I figured it couldn't hurt.

Hopefully we'll have some demo photos and videos up over the next couple of months.</comment></comment>


Aurelia – could it be solid gold? - <AUTHOR> https://javascriptkicks.com/articles/3877

<comment><USER2> Hopefully the folks viewing on mobile devices now have a better experience with the article on its own page. Would be grateful for any feedback!</comment>


U.S. Treasury Yield Curve Inverts for First Time Since 2007 - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-22/u-s-treasury-yield-curve-inverts-for-first-time-since-2007 <comment><USER3> Here's a simple example for explaining what this means. Imagine I'm the government, and I sell bonds where I promise I'll pay you back $100 in 5 years or 10 years. Because I'm the government, and I can print money to repay any debt, these bonds are considered very low risk - sometimes they're even called risk free.

The market bids on these bonds, and the market price is public information. Let's say that people are paying $90 for a 5 year bond, meaning they pay $90 today and get $100 in 5 years. Knowing this, we can work out that this is equivalent to a yearly interest rate of 2.13%.

Now we expect that the computed interest rate for the 10 year bond should be higher than the 5 year bond. People want to be compensated for locking up their money for longer. So let's also say people are paying $80 for a 10 year bond, which works out to an interest rate of 2.26%.

These numbers fluctuate up and down every day, and they generally rise and fall with the prevailing interest rates. Here's the key question - <USER2> happens if the 10 year interest rate falls below the 5 year rate?

There are a lot of possible reasons, but this often indicates that investors think a recession is around the corner. The reason is that investors are betting that the prevailing interest rates will drop. If interest rates drop, then future bond purchases may have much lower interest rates than those bought today. It turns out you might like the idea of getting 2% interest for 10 years rather than 2.13% for 5 years and then 0.5% for the next 5 years.

<comment><USER4> > sometimes they're even called risk free

They may be called that, but they aren't. There are at least two risks associated with U.S. government bonds:

1\. Inflation can exceed the interest rate on the bond and cause it to lose value when measured in actual purchasing power

2\. Political dysfunction could cause the U.S. government to default notwithstanding its ability to print money

(To be fair, #1 is a risk associated with any bond. #2 is peculiar to U.S. government bonds.)

<comment><USER5> >2\. Political dysfunction could cause the U.S. government to default notwithstanding its ability to print money

This risk is likely also going to be true for the Dollar, so bonds don't carry any more risk than USD in this regard.

<comment><USER6> > >2\. Political dysfunction could cause the U.S. government to default > notwithstanding its ability to print money

> This risk is likely also going to be true for the Dollar

It can't be, because it doesn't apply to the currency, which while it is structurally created by creation of debt is not a debt the government is obligated to pay and on which it can fail and default.

> so bonds don't carry any more risk than USD in this regard

Even if there was a default risk in the dollar, bonds necessarily have more risk since they are fully exposed to every risk to the currency they are denominated in _and also_ their own default risk, which even if the currency had such a risk would sit on top of it.

<comment><USER7> Except that if/when political dysfunction does cause a default on the bonds, the currency gets its legs chopped out from under it.

<comment><USER8> Which makes it exceptionally unlikely to happen..

Although Brexit happened, so never say never I guess

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > While the 3-month to 10-year spread "has a relatively decent track record of > predicting recessions, it suffers from a timing problem," said TD Securities > U.S. rates strategist Gennadiy Goldberg. "Its inversion can suggest a > recession occurred six months ago or will occur two years from now."

Not just "relatively decent," but perfect over the last seven recessions at least. When the 3-month treasury yields more than the 10-year treasury, the economy has been in recession within two years 7/7 times.

[https://seekingalpha.com/article/4250287-fully-inverted- yiel...](https://seekingalpha.com/article/4250287-fully-inverted-yield-curve- consequently-recession-coming-doorstep-soon)

There are a lot of leading economic indicators, but this one beats them all in terms of reliability.

There's one complicating factor that I don't see getting the attention it deserves. Unlike previous cycles, the Fed has been actively manipulating long- term yields for over a decade. That used to be taboo, but not anymore. The Fed holds trillions of dollars of long-term treasuries, accumulated under its QE/X programs.

The ownership of that debt by the Fed puts downward pressure on long-term yields. Recently, the Fed started allowing its long bonds to mature through its "quantitative tightening" (QT) program. That pressure (which really ramped up a few months ago) may have temporarily pumped up yields, and in so doing delayed a yield curve inversion signal. The status going forward of QT and the Fed's gargantuan balance sheet is anybody's guess. My bet is the Fed is done with QT until at least after the 2020 election. If things really start going south, watch for the Fed to begin buying stocks directly like the Bank of Japan has been doing for years. That and negative-yielding treasuries.

Either way, this is unprecedented territory. Signals could be quite confounded for the foreseeable future - which means policy makers are winging it. They almost certainly will make the wrong decisions.

<comment><USER10> As an investor, I find this rather a good thing. If I have to constantly afraid of recession then I would tend to just wait and sit on cash. If Fed is doing all these interventions including directly buying stock with their trillion dollar war chest + printing press then may be recession can be avoided or at least softened out. I also worry that recession may happen just because people are expecting it to happen even though economy is pretty sound. In that case, Fed intervention can avoid things falling fast just for short time and collective fear can be subsided back to sanity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Most of the commentary on the signaling of an inverted yield curve is all parroted by everyone else as "ominous". Catherine Wood is the only person I've seen to go against the grain on this one [0].

Essentially, she notes that the yield curve has been inverted roughly 50% of the time in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Furthermore, during the times it was inverted, it marked periods of strong growth!

It's an interesting take as everyone else conveniently (more like lazy) are not doing the research and going back as far back as late 18th century. Her point of view is contrarian and refreshingly unique!

[0] [https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/04/the-economy-will-surprise- to...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/04/the-economy-will-surprise-to-the-high- next-year-arks-catherine-wood.html)

<comment><USER6> > Essentially, she notes that the yield curve has been inverted roughly 50% of > the time in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

Actually, she says specifically 1800-1929, which is an interesting choice because AFAICT the "3-month" security (the 13-week T-bill) referenced when discussing the 3m/10y inversion (the one discussed here as a key indicator) was first regularly issued in 1929. [0]

The behavior of the markets when either or both of the instruments in the analysis were not regularly issued is obviously not comparable. (Further, when they aren't both regularly issued, assessing how much of the time an inversion was in effect is, at best, creative extrapolation, and more likely outright fiction.)

> It's an interesting take as everyone else conveniently (more like lazy) are > not doing the research and going back as far back as late 18th century.

So lazy of everyone else to only study a measure as far back as the basic premises of using the measure are valid and the components that make it up actually exist.

[0] [https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/research/history/histmk...](https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/research/history/histmkt/histmkt_bills.htm)

<comment><USER12> wouldn't the motion of the yield curve in that era be very different given that the dollar was long-term noninflationary?

if you expect the dollar to deflate in the long term, you might be OK accepting a lower long term yield.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A lot of the people in Finance are surprisingly superstitious. I had a boss once who would not conduct trades if he saw a totally unrelated bad omen.

The treasury yield curve is a measure of expectations. It's a market marker that is the result of traders and reflects the overall view of the economy.

Having said that, it's also taken on a mythical status where now that it has inverted, people will start planning for a recession which may in turn lead to happening much sooner/if at all. It's a self fulfilling prophecy in a way where the expectation of a recession leads you act in a way that leads to that outcome.

<comment><USER14> Is it that surprising though? For a group of people that believes they can predict the future?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> notably, the 2 & 10 year has not yet inverted

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10Y2Y](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10Y2Y)

<comment><USER16> In December it was the 3 and 5 year which inverted, and today it was the 3 month and 10 year. Typically I've understood the biggest one to watch is the 2 and 10 year though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm not sure that the yield curve isn't us being fooled by randomness. Everyone is looking at every metric for predictive ability. The odds that one of them went 7/7 have to approach 1.

<comment><USER18> Yield curve inversion is something like like 15/7, actually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I am surprised this is not happening more frequently. An inversion between the 1 and 5 year bonds just means that the expected average yield for each of the next 5 years is less than the yield for next year. Statistically that should be the case 50% of the time. Treasure bonds are liquid, so buying a 5 year one does not mean that you have to hold it to maturity.

Somebody tell me where I'm wrong.

<comment><USER20> There are a few factors that cause one to expect a monotonically increasing, concave yield curve [0].

Firstly, one must consider the term premium [1]. In short, you expect to be compensated more for lending money for a longer period of time. Consider lending money for two years. You could lend your money in two single year-long increments, in which case you would compound your gains from the first year when you lend out the second year. If you lend in a single, two year-long commitment, you rationally expect, all else being equal, to earn as much as you would have by lending as described previously. This drives the general upwards slope (or contango) of the yield curve.

Next, consider a credit component. When you lend someone money, how likely is it that you are paid back? If you expect there is default risk, you factor that into the interest rate you demand. As the tenor of the bond increases, the risk of default increases. However, the extra interest you demand for credit risk also decreases as time goes out. Why? What are the chances that someone defaults on a loan between 5 and 10 years? Probably greater than the risk that the party defaults between 10 and 15 years. This drives the concavity of the yield curve.

Finally, the movement in the curve is driven by expectations of future interest rates, as determined by Federal Reserve policy. Fed typically acts at the short end of the curve. In its tool chest, fed can manipulate rates like the fed funds rate, IOER, and ON REPO. As the economy improves, fed will raise rates. When economic outlook declines, fed will lower rates. If you expect that rates will be higher in the future, you will demand higher yields for longer dated bonds, since your invested money will earn less of a premium to interest rates in the future relative to where you invested today. On the flip side, if you expect interest rates to decline, you will want to lock in your money now, so you purchase longer dated bonds, since you do not expect to be able to get as high a yield in the future. This action at the long end of the curve, coupled with fed policy at the short end, ultimately drives yield curve fluctuations.

[0] [https://obliviousinvestor.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/07/yie...](https://obliviousinvestor.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/07/yieldcurves.png)

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-30/what- s-a-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-30/what-s-a-term- premium-and-where-did-mine-go-quicktake-q-a)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Hmm for some reason I thought this was already the case actually.

I was looking at Ally CD rates a few weeks ago, and I saw an inversion there and I just chalked that up to the CD rates being dependent on the yield curve.

Does it?

<comment><USER22> There was a less extreme yield curve inversion a few months ago, which is likely what you're referring to. But it wasn't so far reaching as the current inversion, which puts the 1 year Treasury over the 10 year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> What would it cost to make this happen?

</comment><comment><USER24> Can someone explain what kind of impact this has?

<comment><USER25> Apparently it has predicted the last seven recessions. People are using the expression "self-fulfilling prophecy."

<comment><USER26> It may have predicted ten out of the last seven recessions. That is, sometimes the yield curve inverts and the recession doesn't happen. So it's not quite a self-fulfilling prophesy - though it still may be a sometimes-self-fulfilling prophesy...

<comment><USER27> correct. we can't determine the usefulness of this statistic without a false positive rate.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are the best product launches you have seen? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Tesla Unveils Model 3: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4VGQPk2Dl8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4VGQPk2Dl8)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> iPod, iPhone and most recently Spectacles comes to my mind.</comment>


Bored Lonely Angry Stupid - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/2/18510958/social-media-addiction-boredom-loneliness-society-technology-smart-phones <comment><USER2> My theory is that social media, the internet, and these manufactured communities trick our brains into feeling like we belong to _actual_ communities -- when in reality, we do not. I work remotely and I'm no stranger to being "alone" \-- and as an experiment, I did a "social media" detox for about 6 months -- I deleted all social media off my phone (FB, IG, dating apps), I blocked all "social" forums on my computer (HN, reddit, etc.) and even though throughout my entire adult life I've considered myself an introvert (which I probably am), I randomly started to interact with people around me. This was actually pretty surprising.

I've _never_ been a "good morning, Joe!" bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed kind of person, but that's exactly what I became. I started getting better at conversations, more interested in people around me, and just generally in more of a "social vibe." I've always been terrible at remembering names, and instead of brushing it off (after all, who cares about remembering random old guy #7 from coffee shop #4?), I started keeping notes of names and appearance in my phone, so I don't forget who's who. It's actually kind of mind-blowing that my personality underwent such a palpable change.

I've since sworn off dating apps and attempting to limit my social media as much as possible. HN and reddit are probably going to get blocked again soon, too.

<comment><USER3> > My theory is that social media, the internet, and these manufactured > communities trick our brains into feeling like we belong to actual > communities -- when in reality, we do not.

I was having a discussion with my daughter about this just last night, where I made a similar point.

I was pointing out how celebrities (particularly, but not solely, movie stars) are always playing a role, even in interviews, etc. When they make a public appearance that isn't overtly as a character, the role they're playing is their "movie star" persona. Unless you are an actual friend of theirs, you don't really know what their true authentic selves are.

Social media, it seems to me, has caused everyone to do the same thing. In social media, people tend to be playing a role -- that role being what they view as the best version of themselves. But it's not their true authentic selves any more than with the celebrities.

I think this has caused a serious degradation in the social fabric. Before social media, the most common interactions you had were with friends and family, and you were mostly interacting with their authentic selves. After all, nobody really knows you until they've seen you at your worst.

Interactions in social media are not like that. You're interactive with people playing parts, and that interaction is no longer genuine human contact. It just has the window-dressing of that.

Loneliness and isolation is the logical result of that. It's a bit like replacing most of your food with "dietary fiber" that is made to look and taste like food. It will fill you up and taste good, but in the end you'll still starve to death.

<comment><USER4> Maybe that's how it was for "normal" people. For weirdos, life before social media _was_ loneliness and isolation.

Today, no matter how esoteric your passion is, you can find 1000 other people with the same interest on the internet and talk to them 24/7\. This is the _golden age_ of the oddball with the unusual interest.

That's not to say your points are wrong or that things are perfect. But let's not pretend there aren't _both_ pros and cons!

<comment><USER5> As someone who grew up with modems and BBSes in the 80s, I can say that the ability to connect with other weirdos has existed long before modern 'social media'. If you were a nerd, you had HAM radio even before BBSes.

<comment><USER6> Cheap, ubiquitous access is a game changer, especially in the 3rd world.

<comment><USER7> Don't you ever think ubiquitous lowers the quality as much as it raises the possibility ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I just got back a month-long trip by myself. It was interesting to note that a ton of people I talked to before going, friends, family, acquaintances, were all shocked I would travel alone. The overwhelming response was, "aren't you going to get lonely?" I think it's important to be alone and enjoy your own company.

Working remotely too, I get a very similar question. "Don't you miss working with people?" I work with people all the time, but I think that being alone magnifies the effect of spending quality time with people, rather than just spending time together for the sake of being together.

<comment><USER9> A lot of people don't understand that being by yourself is no the same thing as being "lonely". "Lonely" implies that you are missing interaction with others. When I'm alone, I generally breathe a sigh of relief because a lot of the time socialization is work for me, and it's work I'm not very good at.

I'm almost never lonely when I'm alone, I'm too involved in whatever I'm doing. Even if I'm bored, I'm generally not lonely. I get more lonely when I'm in a group of people I don't really know well than I ever do when I'm alone in my own house. Mostly because I wish I knew them better than I do and wouldn't feel so left out.

<comment><USER10> Donald Hall wrote beautifully about this: [https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/double- solitu...](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/double-solitude)

<comment><USER11> Oh yes: "Now and then, especially at night, solitude loses its soft power and loneliness takes over. I am grateful when solitude returns."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've definitely noticed this trend in my own thinking - hyper-individualism, along with a healthy dose of woe-is-me. It's especially bad on sites like Tumblr, where people list out their mental health problems along with other ways they define themselves in the header of their blog.

On the one hand, I think it's good that people are discussing things like depression, anxiety, etc. more openly. But as someone who has struggled with depression and feeling suicidal at various points, I think there's a healthier way to frame your thinking, so that you're not acting like depression, or loneliness, or sadness are inevitable, and like you have zero control over your mood or feelings.

I had this epiphany after going through a break up, where I could feel myself heading towards a depressive spiral. I was obsessing over how sad I was, replaying happy moments and unfulfilled fantasies about the future in my head...and then I realized I was actually making myself feel worse, and that I could actually make myself stop wallowing in my own sadness by thinking about other things.

I think the most important thing to do is to get away from staying in your own head and overthinking things. Interact with other people in real life (not on social media), do physical exercise, practice mindfulness meditation, and try observing your feelings and separating your sense of self from those feelings.

<comment><USER13> The only thing that has been working for me was following traditional Catholic teachings to a "t". I know religion is taboo in scientific circles, and educated people think of it as just another psychological tool, but it's actually the other way around. Catholicism encompasses everything about psychology, but while remaining grounded in the philosophical truths and principles that make up objective existence.

Without that, we have no anchor, and so psychological principles change regularly as the leaders of the field "learn more" about how they were previously mistaken (and then wipe their hands clean of the damage done to innocent people by their incorrect teachings, as they cover it up and move on). Saint Frances de Sales and Saint John Bosco were called masters of human psychology, and secular psychology is only now catching up to them in agreement.

Before we can get rid of negative problems in ourselves or others, we must first understand the nature of ourselves, and of the problems, because if we misunderstand these true natures, we're going to be remedying it the wrong way. And thinking of life or the mind as merely effects of the material world is already starting off on a bad principle, and leads to things like over medication, presuming that the mind can be fixed by changing things in the physical brain, which is really only a telephone by which the soul interacts with the physical world.

I know enlightened minds will scoff at these ideas, assuming religion to be for the ignorant, and maybe I am an ignorant fool, but anyone who agrees that there are absolute and objective truths will see clearly that the world is going insane. Parents proudly teaching their children that they can choose their gender, encouraging safe spaces where intellectual growth is supposed to be sought by mature young adults, grown men and women spending all their free time chasing every physical and mental pleasure as slaves of their passions without ever accomplishing anything of value, left wondering why they feel unfulfilled at the end of each wasted day.

Anyone who recognizes these truths and is frustrated by the world going in the wrong direction, especially with how it has been addressing (or rather enabling and encouraging) mental health issues, should not scoff at the ideas, principles, values, and beliefs that produced men and women who were willing to give up every good pleasure on earth for the honorable and noble goal of selflessly doing good for others in this life, that they may reap rewards for themselves and others in the next life. The Catholic Church has produced so many saints like Saint Benedict, Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint John Paul II, Saint Mother Theresa of Calcutta, and so many more that you'd do well to look further into what biases and inaccurate beliefs you have against its objective, intellectual, noble truths.

<comment><USER14> The Catholic Church also held orgies in its sacred halls, enabled and hid a variety of pedophiles, and led a variety of violent conflicts for selfish gains. That doesn't mean Catholicism is bad, or even "the church". but citing a few saints as evidence that something is good is some pretty serious cherry picking.

Religious structure is good. People do better when they have a compelling framework and a strong social community. The issue with specific religions is it holds specific beliefs as a pre requisite, so it's hard to just jump in amidst large bodies of diverse opinions and conflicting scientific evidence. Most people would benefit from joining any well intentioned religious group. And most of the moral arguments for any specific one tend to be compatible with the rest. So yeah, religion is generally a good thing for people; no, it's not fair to claim it's unilaterally good; and in general, mixing emotional arguments with world views on the nature of existence is likely to annoy others.

<comment><USER13> > The Catholic Church also held orgies in its sacred halls

You were lied to, my friend.

> enabled and hid a variety of pedophiles

Individuals did that, and that's very sad and damaging.

> and led a variety of violent conflicts for selfish gains

Read up on the Crusades (and Spanish Inquisition) from a Catholic perspective. It's not as cut and dry as people make it.

> The issue with specific religions is it holds specific beliefs as a pre > requisite,

That's fine, as long as the beliefs are true.

> so it's hard to just jump in amidst large bodies of diverse opinions

Look into any religion hard enough and you will find all categories of them to be logically and historically unsustainable except Catholicism. That's why I'm here. It is the only belief system fully compatible with intellectual integrity. Saint Thomas Aquinas said the same thing when he said that anyone who actually looked into Islam would see clearly that it is utterly absurd and full of contradictions.

> and conflicting scientific evidence.

There is none.

<comment><USER15> > Look into any religion hard enough and you will find all categories of them > to be logically and historically unsustainable except Catholicism. That's > why I'm here. It is the only belief system fully compatible with > intellectual integrity. Saint Thomas Aquinas said the same thing when he > said that anyone who actually looked into Islam would see clearly that it is > utterly absurd and full of contradictions.

Roman Catholicism says that communion will turn wine and bread into literal flesh and blood. How on earth is that "compatible with intellectual integrity"? Or believing in a literal virgin birth? Another thing I can't intellectually justify is insisting on priest celibacy and keeping women out of the priesthood.

I'm not going to debate in favor of Islam, but it seems that mainstream protestant beliefs (or at least those which I'm familiar with, the beliefs of United Methodism) are just as capable of claiming the good parts of Christian philosophy, without insisting on the parts which clearly just exist due to the the Roman Catholic penchant for power wrangling and hierarchies.

<comment><USER13> > Roman Catholicism says that communion will turn wine and bread into literal > flesh and blood. How on earth is that "compatible with intellectual > integrity"?

That is called Transubstantiation and it is a daily recurring miracle. Miracles, by definition, are God bending the rules of physics, which He created and continually sustains, and is thus allowed to bend. This is philosophical but logically consistent.

> Or believing in a literal virgin birth?

Another miracle.

> insisting on priest celibacy

That's a rule, and put there for a very good reason. The less divided your heart is by worldly cares, the more you can care only for the people God put in your care.

> keeping women out of the priesthood

Just as much as men are kept out of giving birth. Consider this quote from G. K. Chesterton: "How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No. A woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute."

> are just as capable of claiming the good parts of Christian philosophy, > without insisting on the parts which clearly just exist due to the the Roman > Catholic penchant for power wrangling and hierarchies.

They say "you are saved by faith alone" and "the Bible is the sole authority on religion" and yet the Bible literally says "you are not saved by faith alone". That's plenty enough to disregard all their remaining arguments in my opinion.

After using the process of elimination, only the Catholic Church's doctrines remain intact.

<comment><USER15> So for #1 and #2, you just hand-wave your doctrine as "miracles" that defy all otherwise known and consistent laws of the universe. Doesn't seem like intellectual integrity to me.

And #3 and #4 are directly at odds. You say Priests are not allowed to have children, which is why they are celibate (fair enough) but we all know children can't be born without both a Father and Mother involved. So when men choose not to have children for the priesthood, it's seen as noble. But Women aren't given that same choice in your view (Except they are, because nuns exist, yet Nuns cannot ever actually lead the Church).

Why don't you admit that the reason the Catholic church does not allow women priests is not because "a women's function is laborious" (a function not all women naturally can even do, otherwise why can't barren women be priests?), but rather because you take the words of Paul literally and do not allow a woman to hold authority over a man? That's the real reason and you know it.

Also, the "faith alone" thing is a bit misunderstood to be honest, mostly caused by how protestants overload that word. They basically mean that you cannot be saved by works alone under any circumstance, and that if you are unable to produce any works but have faith, you can still be saved (the example here is the penitent thief on the cross). After that, they consider works to be a natural outcome of legitimate faith, and that if you have the chance to do works and don't you'll lose your justification by faith.

There's a sermon by Wesley on that here: [http://wesley.nnu.edu/john- wesley/the-sermons-of-john-wesley...](http://wesley.nnu.edu/john-wesley/the- sermons-of-john-wesley-1872-edition/sermon-43-the-scripture-way-of-salvation/)

<comment><USER16> > So for #1 and #2, you just hand-wave your doctrine as "miracles" that defy > all otherwise known and consistent laws of the universe. Doesn't seem like > intellectual integrity to me.

It is not intellectually dishonest to believe that God, who governs the universe and it's laws is able to suspend them if he so chooses.

> Why don't you admit that the reason the Catholic church does not allow women > priests is not because "a women's function is laborious" (a function not all > women naturally can even do, otherwise why can't barren women be priests?), > but rather because you take the words of Paul literally and do not allow a > woman to hold authority over a man? That's the real reason and you know it.

No, that is not the real reason. The idea that men and women are complementary is rooted in Christian teaching since the beginning. My understanding is that the reason women are not allowed to be priests is partly because during mass the priest stands in for Christ ( in persona Christi ) and Christ was born a man. Women hold authority over men all the time in the Catholic church, many doctors of the Church are women.

> Also, the "faith alone" thing is a bit misunderstood to be honest, mostly > caused by how protestants overload that word. They basically mean that you > cannot be saved by works alone under any circumstance, and that if you are > unable to produce any works but have faith, you can still be saved (the > example here is the penitent thief on the cross). After that, they consider > works to be a natural outcome of legitimate faith, and that if you have the > chance to do works and don't you'll lose your justification by faith.

This is just a long winded way of saying you are not saved by faith alone.

<comment><USER13> Doctor of the Church means a teacher whose teachings are universally applicable to everyone in the Catholic Church. It has nothing to do with authority. Many nuns were traditionally teachers of children, too. And each of the female doctors of the church, as far as I know, where nuns who submitted all their teachings to their superiors and confessors, who then examined and verified her writings for orthodoxy (1 Timothy 2:14) before recommending them for others or permitting them to be published (cf. Imprimi Potest).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I find this concept of the "history of emotions" unconvincing on so many levels. Between the mind-body problem and our coarse understanding of the brain, it's hard enough to talk sensibly about emotions in the present. That language changes and new words are invented is hardly evidence that the spectrum of human emotions (and where we lie on it) has undergone a fundamental shift. The problem space here is complex, mysterious, and rife with opportunities to conflate the map and the territory. The authors are exploiting this confusion to sell a pre-determined narrative about social media which, while great for Vox articles and Ted talks, doesn't actually offer any new knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER18> The assertion that "for most of human history boredom and loneliness have been the norm" is idiotic. The 19th and 20th centuries in america are not "most of human history". For the actual vast majority of human history, we were hunter- gatherers. We operated in tight social circles, and, and I'm just assuming here, we were rarely alone. I don't know how bored you would be as a hunter gatherer, either, but I suspect not terribly.

<comment><USER19> I've been hunting, when I was much younger.

So I can attest the hunting part of "hunter-gatherer" can be exceedingly lonely and boring. It's mostly being very still and quiet, waiting for a prey animal to wander by.

<comment><USER20> _It 's mostly being very still and quiet, waiting for a prey animal to wander by._

Yep.

In his teens, my dad used to make money by killing foxes for the bounty on their head when one was raiding some farmer's chicken coop. If you could do it in one night, it was good money. The more nights it took you, the lower the de facto hourly pay.

He would lay perfectly still for several hours in the dark by himself with a cocked gun waiting for the fox, often with bugs crawling over him that he didn't swat at because that would involve moving. He usually got it the first night.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Over the course of the 19th century and 20th centuries, these older senses > of vanity, of the vain futility of life, fell away. And as a result, what we > see today is that when people post on social media, there's no sense of > their own limitations as humans. There's often little modesty, or little > fear that one could be going too far in self-promotion.

Apparently I was raised with outdated values, since I am pretty much always aware of the vain futility of life and the serious limitations of my humanity. I don't understand the current culture of constant self-promotion and especially the public advertising of what used to be considered moral failings.

I lived over half my life without the internet, though, so it's not hard for me to imagine a world without smartphones and the online world. I spent a lot of time in the mid-90s online, then was mostly offline for over five years, then connected again around 2003 or so. For the past few months I have been seriously considering going completely offline again, and my current work situation makes that possible except for a handful of administrative tasks that would take maybe ten minutes a week. If I completely disappear from here, I've followed through on the thought.

I think the point of TFA might be that the damage to our culture due to always being connected outweighs the benefits. It sure seems that way to me.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think this is right. At least the lonesomeness and monotony. That's how I remember my childhood and I grew up in Alaska in a tiny fishing town in the 70s-80s (...) so that put a lot of my experiences back a bit, but the flip- over of the internet in the 90s and then, you know, phones, just changed everything. The way that extra time can be absorbed now, entirely without friction, is a step change on the pace of how a person experiences the world. Long idle times are more painful now, though they were always a little painful. That acute discomfort drives us back into "action" and we've built a world around ourselves that is one big dopamine feedback loop and . . . that's fine.

Like it's not better or worse but it's just how we live and it's extremely different than how we lived 30 years ago (and so on down the pike) and these huge step changes happen more and more often the richer and better at communicating we get. Which is totally, totally fine.

Sometimes you gotta marvel at those fast changes. Glad to see people studying/documenting this. Amazing to think how this suite of emotions will be coded in another 20 years.

</comment><comment> tom-thistime Maybe. But I was already bored, lonely, angry and stupid before devices and social media were even invented.

<comment><USER23> Though not TV and the telephone. The interviewee isn't really blaming the Internet, but rather many of the trappings of modernity. The Internet and the smartphone may exacerbate it, but the overall thesis is that we've spent about a century becoming more and more connected, and more and more continually entertained.

I'm not entirely sure I buy the notion: Shakespeare describes characters who troll for entertainment(Don John, Iago), and Jane Austen's characters often grapple with boredom. Our expectations do seem to ratchet up with our technological ability to fulfill them, but I feel like it's more of a hedonic treadmill. Boredom and loneliness may be, on some scale, roughly constant.

I do believe that social media has allowed us to ratchet up the effects of the "angry" and "stupid" part, possibly to unmanageable levels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I love the Verizon phone ads on there, "Be the first to Real Time!" They really make the point.

</comment><comment><USER25> My experience with being online, is that: if you're in a messy online environment, you can comment or raise your voice, but it's nessesary NOT to follow your comment's responses. Our brain unfortunately accept everything that we don't want to put in our brain. And it hurts.

</comment><comment><USER26> Bored and lonely? I blame my military deployment.

</comment><comment><USER27> The other BLAS.

</comment><comment><USER28> I think this article might be the final trigger to convince me to switch to a dumb phone

<comment><USER29> You'll get lost. Many gas stations don't have maps anymore.

And what will you do at concerts? Listen to the music?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> it's a historical plateau. if you were born in 1899 you may have lived as: baby (vaccinated), child (student), farmer (subject), citizen (worker), ally (soldier), employee (consumer), retiree (investor).

if you were born in 1999 i am hard pressed to imagine over the next 100 years you will see this much of a sea-change. in the most hyper-optimistic development: baby (ivf), child (self-educated), teenager (self-starter), adult (colonist), neural map (biomachine), rebirth (clone).

far more likely you see space stagnation after a manned mars mission in the 2060s, and various forms of "new" movements arising arguing for ethics around engineered reproduction both for humans and animals to be reworked around a global utility model due to various food and water shocks, a type of one- child-world policy.

it could very well be that a dominant monarchy reappears, since empires with long lived monarchs provide at least 50 years of stability if managed correctly, and we are approaching various global inflection points in the 21st century which could cause a large and unnecessary loss of human life due to poor long term planning (family management in the developing world, too many abortions/immigration in the first world causing genetic displacement and social revolutionary movements, extreme weather events stretching global insurance/banking/money markets and the typical decline of the concept of civil liberties for an new enforced set of social civilities with fragmentary groups echoing radical ideas in secrecy - which historically leads to insurrection and civil war).

people don't really change as quickly as their technology does, so it's very dangerous to hear all thoughts without also having some type of pan-humanist framework in which to put them and try to form relative links between superficially disparate ideas. it's much easier to jump to contrast and division, and then force the issue, the radicalization of at risk youth into violent murder in public spaces is especially concerning, the school shooter phenomenon is mutating into a church shooter or a mall shooter, a park shooter, a club shooter. half a dozen coordinated shooters could shut down an entire city, at which point every city will need check points and will have to become gun free, a sort of TSA for metropolitan and then suburban areas. i wonder if at some certain point life would be safer in a prison than outside one. technology will advance towards safety and must necessarily lead to schemes with voluntary basis of total monitoring, eg food credits if you allow permanent personal surveillance. the cheesy 80s dystopia now creeping over the horizon. the hug and squeeze technique of totalitarianism, where you're crushed between abundance and fear is a model that is being exported globally and seems quite profitable and certainly preferable to war, famine and disease.</comment>


Copycat Kings: Three Brothers Are Cloning the Web and Are Making Billions - <AUTHOR> http://thehustle.co/rocket-internet-oliver-samwer <comment><USER2> Rocket internet doesn't do 0 to 1 it only does 1 to N

(didn't get it, read "Zero to One" Peter Thiel)</comment>


Ask HN: Need App ideas for ice cream product - <AUTHOR>

I'm working on a campaign for an ice cream product and need to develop some ideas to promote this product via an app or social media concept.
Now, I'm not too experienced in developing apps, so I figured the HN is very helpful and would love to contribute ideas since that's what its all about!
I came up with: app shows you local store locations app that let's you check-in showing your friends which flavor your enjoying
All help is appreciated. Thank you. <comment><USER2> Ask them if you can make an app for the brand as a whole instead of just one type of ice pop. You might have a shot with a game people run their own ice cream truck business, or build their own boardwalk/amusement park.

If you make a fun social game then you can passively advertise the brand as a whole, and ideally have a longer lasting impact on consumers. If I love playing "Popsicle Challenge" and Popsicle brand ice pops are integral to my success in the game, I'm certainly more likely to buy a Popsicle brand ice pop.

</comment><comment><USER3> How about something fun that people can share? Make a free app that lets people make their own ice cream cones by picking flavors for scoops and adding toppings. Or let them make ridiculous banana splits. Let people share them with friends and show them off and get the name out there in the process.

<comment><AUTHOR> Its a premiere brand, and its on a stick. Also comes prepackaged, so I have to see if the flavors thing will work

<comment><USER3> How about a photo app that lets them put half-eaten sticks of ice cream into pictures? Or one that lets them use ice cream on a stick to scribble melty graffiti onto pictures?

I know I'm stretching here, but...!</comment></comment></comment>


Larry Smith on finding technology opportunities - <AUTHOR> http://economics.uwaterloo.ca/smithdat/techno.html

<comment><USER2> Lots of possible quotes out of this one.

"You and your goal are part of the future. Without its specification you can never know the future. And the more you know yourself and your goal, the more you know the future."

"Only when you have found an entire array of vacant fields will you be able to find the one worthy of your potential."

Seems like his message is be very, very thorough...

With a bit of typesetting might make a good series of articles.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you liked that, you should see his lectures very informative, controversial and funny [http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3136634457413762837&...](http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3136634457413762837&ei=WLWdSOrnBaLu- gG16a0n&q=larry+smith)</comment></comment>


React Templates - <AUTHOR> http://wix.github.io/react-templates/

<comment><USER2> People who want to use a template system for React are seriously missing the point.

When you use strings that converts into javascript, e.g.

      onChange="()=>this.toggleChecked(todoIndex)

then you lose out on all the static analysis tools that work on javascript, the language. Are there any existing tools that are going to tell you that

      this.toggleChecked

is undefined? I doubt it.

Please embrace javascript, not crippled DSLs.</comment>


The 100 Best Business Books of All Time  - <AUTHOR> http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/004262.php

<comment><USER2> Also check out a couple supplements to The 100 Best:

1\. A bonus chapter about industry books that weren't included - <http://100bestbiz.com/100Best-IndustryChapter.pdf>

2\. There is also a website where you can submit your favorite business book - <http://www.myfavoritebizbook.com></comment>