Are Ivy League schools overrated? - <AUTHOR> http://andrewgelman.com/2014/09/30/23581/ <comment><USER2> If you're committed to going to _a_ college and you get admitted an Ivy, you should absolutely go. Nowadays most of their financial aid plans are fantastic, the professors are amazing, you're surrounded by brilliant people and the reputation is a great perk when finding a job.

Princeton, for example, has financial aid for 60% of its students and the average grant covers 96% of tuition for undergraduates. 75% of students graduate debt free. It's hard to compare other deals to that. Source: [http://www.princeton.edu/admission/financialaid/](http://www.princeton.edu/admission/financialaid/)

And of course, many top tier non-Ivy schools are similarly awesome by these criterias and should be grouped together with them in this discussion.

That said, the concept of "going to a good school" is absolutely overrated by employers, as is the concept of needing to go to through a four year liberal arts education. I know many hackers with a high school education who could run rings around some of my ex-classmates when doing honest-to-god software engineering.

However, what college education lacks in practicality, it makes up for it in the experience. Having four years to learn what you want and having fun with brilliant young people? Sounds awesome, sign me up again.

<comment><USER3> Princeton has Brian Kernighan as an academic advisor [http://www.cs.princeton.edu/ugrad/becoming-cs- major](http://www.cs.princeton.edu/ugrad/becoming-cs-major) and their undergrad CS theory courses look incredible compared to the univ I went to, and I paid only $10k/yr less in tuition than a Princeton student.

<comment><USER4> Many low income students don't apply to the ivies because they believe they can't afford them. It often turns out that they would have gotten such good financial support that they end up paying more for a local state school.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not a new or controversial idea here, I'm 41 and this was the prevailing wisdom back when I was in high school and wasn't a new idea then either.

Going to an Ivy League school is and always has been mostly about having more "elite" networking opportunities and having an early social proof that you can get into an "elite" club.

The value of the actual education received (especially at the undergrad level where access to more exotic lab equipment and such is less of an issue for most majors) is highly variable in terms of the school, the student, and the overlap between the two, just like in any other college setting.

</comment><comment><USER6> _This fits in with something I've noticed. I know this sounds harsh, but when I run across someone who is at the top of their profession and yet seems woefully underwhelming, they often have Ivy League BAs in non-demanding majors (For example, Jeff Zucker, Harvard, History. John Tierney, Yale, American Studies). My working hypothesis is that, while everyone who graduates from an elite school has an advantage in terms of reputation and networks, the actual difficulty of completing certain degrees isn't that high relative to non-elite schools. Thus a history degree from Harvard isn't worth that much more than a history degree from a Cal State school._

This has been my experience. I used to hold Harvard, Yale and Princeton in very high esteem. Then I met a dumb as rocks Princeton history major. In his defense, he was in a Sales job, and admitted that Lacrosse helped him get in.

It isn't like history majors in large public schools have any higher of a mean competence.

I reached the opposite conclusion as the article, though. If you're going to major in something soft and what to go anywhere, you have to go somewhere good. You can have a good career with a CS degree from either Yale or Ohio State. If you want to have a good career with a Journalism or History degree, you really need to go to Yale.

<comment><USER7> " _and admitted that Lacrosse helped him get in_ "

Indeed. Once you factor in the athletes and worse, legacy admits, Ivies have real trouble building an all around good class by the metrics most in this discussion are using (by their metrics, they're education the future leaders of the US and world, so...).

MIT and no doubt CalTech have a great advantage in that the first calculation in admissions is "can they do the work?"; that, which is a rather high bar, plus tremendous self-selection in applicants, results in a somewhat different student body. Or at least compared to nearby Harvard by my observations.

<comment><USER6> CalTech is the tops in my book on this. I don't have a huge sample size, but they are all rock stars. I've met a few less than impressive MITers.

What surprises me is that the Ivies can still have such high average test scores and GPAs despite all the legacies and athletes.

What surprised me about Princeton was that it was Lacrosse. Lacrosse. It convinced me that I want to send my kids to fencing lessons after their math circles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Steven Pinker offers a very convincing dissection of the referenced Deresiewicz article [1].

[1] [http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119321/harvard-ivy- league...](http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119321/harvard-ivy-league- should-judge-students-standardized-tests)

TL;DR:

\- Deresiewicz is willfully ignorant/misleading in his pursuit of being controversial.

\- Ivy league students are smart, but there are smart students everywhere.

\- Admissions to Ivy league schools is not as objective as it should be. There is too much focus on fluff and not ability/potential (e.g., meaningless "volunteer work").

\- College isn't for everyone, but if you're going to go, an Ivy tends to be the best place because they have the most resources (and therefore are often counter-intuitively the least expensive).

<comment><USER9> That is a great read. It has been posted several times but didn't get much traction, unfortunately.

> Admissions to Ivy league schools is not as objective as it should be. There > is too much focus on fluff and not ability/potential (e.g., meaningless > "volunteer work").

To expand on this a little bit: he describes the current admissions systems as "eye-of-newt-wing-of-bat mysticism that jerks teenagers and their moms around and conceals unknown mischief" and he laments that "test-based selection used to be the enlightened policy among liberals and progressives, since it can level a hereditary caste system by favoring the Jenny Cavilleris (poor and smart) over the Oliver Barretts (rich and stupid)."

(aside: I don't understand why the parent story was modded into oblivion over the course of 10 minutes)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd kill for some of the connections I've seen elite school graduates get. For instance If you go to Harvard Business and get your MBA the connections you get may very well lead to riches. The fact that you made it into a such an elite institution leads people to believe, rightly so, that you are _capable_ of great things. So it's easier to get backing or get people to talk to you.

I'm not a graduate of any college but the two guys I work directly with have advanced degrees from MIT and Harvard so I can see first hand how that experience has already helped them.

<comment><USER11> I go to one of these elite schools and the primary benefit is in the connections you make. However, the worthwhile connections are generally only available to those who would have been successful regardless. For example, when I look at my friends who've landed the best jobs/internships they overwhelmingly got their interviews due to who they knew at the company already, which mainly came back to either who their parents knew (largely related to how wealthy their parents were) or what social club they were in (again, largely correlated with wealth).

So yes, the connections at elite schools are great, but they primarily serve to reinforce the same social structure that already exists. That said, there are certainly exceptions and it is possible to make these connections if you come from a less privileged background, but the odds are against you since you 1) don't know where to look to make these connections and 2) aren't like the people who you want to make connections with and so you're less likely to connect in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> With improved access to high-quality online education, we may soon be asking "Are all colleges overrated?"

(Though I think the college experience plays an important part in a teenager's maturation process.)

<comment><USER13> It will take a generation for the mindset to change that a purely online degree or a collection of classes from something like EdX are equal to 'Degree from State U'.

<comment><USER12> For the masses, yes. But for those willing to take their future into their own hands, I think you'll see a shift away from traditional college education.

Really think that apprenticeship should make a comeback in America. I know I would have benefited from spending some time in industry after high school.

<comment><USER11> The problem is that the reason for getting a degree isn't to become "educated" it's to be come employable. And until employers start to look at an online degree or an apprenticeship as comparable in value to attending college for 4 years it won't make sense for any rational person to take that path.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Overrated based on what criteria? You don't go to an Ivy because you're going to learn more there.

<comment><USER15> You will probably learn more at Stanford or Caltech or MIT -- not that you won't get a great education at Princeton or Harvard, quite the opposite, but the real advantage of an Ivy League degree is the chance to network with the children of presidents and such.

<comment><USER11> Caltech or MIT, sure. I'm not as sure about Stanford though. Everyone I know at Stanford got in largely for legacy or athletics. While I have no doubt they'll be successful (based on their personalities and other intangibles) they're far from brilliant.

Additionally, as I wrote elsewhere on this thread, the networking benefits of an elite education primarily benefit those who had a good network in the first place. If you look at the type of student who lands a top finance or consulting job I'm sure you'll see the truth in this as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> YC/pg seems to be obsessed with Ivy league kids. When I went to startup school it was at Stanford and I met quite a few ivy league kids from the east coast. Plus a lot of YC companies I read about seem to be started by them.

<comment><USER17> That's not surprising because YC is the Ivy league of incubators.

<comment><USER18> looooool so you're mentioning this comment on your application? Edit: Yes we all know YC is a great accelerator, but the ass kissing ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> When I first moved east, I was enamored with MIT and Harvard and the whole east-coast-prep-school-thing. Then I worked with a bunch of grads from these schools and was underwhelmed. I was expecting that they'd be smarter and better at what we were doing. That's when I figure out that you go to Ivy League schools because of the doors they open via the people you meet and network with, not because you're going to learn more in the History 101 class or even your intro to Data Structures class.

<comment><USER20> to be fair, I would imagine that on balance, kids from MIT (especially in STEM degree tracks) are more intelligent than those at a small liberal arts school. Honestly, probably most schools outside the Ivys and known tech schools like Urbana-Champagne, Harvey-Mudd, Caltech, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I started my first year of college this semester at an Ivy. There are flaws, but overall the experience is pretty great, or at least, being around famous professors/thinkers is. I wish it could be extended to more people though. "Egalitarian" opportunities in education seem to go against the idea that some students will work harder and perform better than others though.

</comment><comment><USER22> Yes, you can compare, let's say, average income of graduates over a certain period and see that they're bigger for Ivy League graduates

But of course averages lie more often than not, and I suspect that, income curves are double peaked for the Ivy League graduates (meaning that'll have the "mere mortal" avg salary and the "exceptionals" forming another peak)

<comment><USER23> But are the type of people who go to Ivy League schools different from everyone else?

I mean: If you're talented enough to get into Harvard, maybe you don't need a Harvard education to succeed in life (for various definitions of "succeed").

I could have gone to an Ivy League school but chose not to. I really can't fathom having a better college & post-college experience than I did...

<comment><USER24> I could have gone to an Ivy League school and didn't, and I consider that to have been a very big mistake. The environment would have done me a lot of good.

Anyway, anecdotes are anecdotes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm an academic - have worked at a variety of institutions but never officially been at an ivy league school, so I can't strictly speaking claim ground truth. But my impressions are, sure, if your idea of the "education" part of college is to (sometimes) go to classes required for your degree and do exactly what the instructor tells you and that's it, probably it doesn't make a huge difference in terms of academics where you went to school. Everybody uses (almost) the same textbooks, after all. And academic jobs are scarce enough that two instructors of the same subject at very different institutions may actually have had similar undergraduate educations and approaches to undergraduate teaching.

What ivy league and other private research universities excel at academically is scholarly opportunities outside class assignments. If you want to reconstruct 17th century pipe organs or build robotic insects or experiment on extremophiles in Greenland or whatever, there might very well be someone who wants a student to help with something like that. Plus they probably have money to cover your expenses and pay you a stipend for it, and you don't have to compete with 500 other people for the chance. More generally, if there is a particular academic topic you as a student want to learn all about, a top university has a better chance than most places of having someone or something that can help you. But the student has to show up with the initiative and persistence to get that.

The hard part is admissions: what's the best way to find students who will of their own volition seek this kind of thing out? The simple answer would seem to be to look for kids who have a history of doing that and succeeding. But instead that produced this arms race of people seeking lots of extra academic experiences _purely for the sake of getting into college_ and then burning out and not wanting to continue once they got there.

<comment><USER6> _What ivy league and other private research universities excel at academically is scholarly opportunities outside class assignments._

This is actually true at any school. At large state schools, there are professors doing real research. The difference with the ivy leagues is very few students actually seek these experiences out. (I was one of four undergrads applying for a paid research position during my Big School CS undergrad. I got it as a sophomore because the competition was weak.) I still would have had a better experience at Stanford or MIT, but I think it's more a peer effect.

 _But instead that produced this arms race of people seeking lots of extra academic experiences purely for the sake of getting into college and then burning out and not wanting to continue once they got there._

This is very true. I was very surprised how many of my friends dropped their extracurriculars in college. The only friends who stayed in music were the ones (like me) who went to large state schools - in essence because we were doing it for it's own sake. Turning college admissions into an extracurricular quest (in addition to a "Don't dare get a B" risk aversion) seems very wrong.

My sense is that this gets sorted out in the end. After a few years of work, all the nonsense about school admissions is gone.

<comment><USER25> _What ivy league and other private research universities excel at academically is scholarly opportunities outside class assignments.

This is actually true at any school. At large state schools, there are professors doing real research. The difference with the ivy leagues is very few students actually seek these experiences out._

I completely agree (having been at a large state school) that there are many professors doing high quality research at state schools. I think the difference is (as you suggest) the funding and competition. Funding and even for-credit programs for undergraduate research were (I found) much more limited at state schools. You'd have 10 students, all with straight A's, applying for a single one-semester research assistantship that'd grant 1 course credit. At the same time I know of ivy school subject-specific fellowships of thousands of dollars for summer travel/study for which perhaps only 2 or 3 people would apply simply because there were so many other opportunities available. The net result is that if you're at an ivy, that kind of experience is much much easier to get.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> To be completely honest, I think that people diligent enough can get the same level of education at almost any college. The other thing is connections you may establish and job offers you may get. But other than that you can depend only on yourself. For example at [http://britishessaywriter.co.uk/](http://britishessaywriter.co.uk/) I've read that about 70% of knowledge you get through self-learning. Teachers and educators are there to merely guide you (yet of course it's better if they know their thing). All in all, I'd recommend trying all the options and choosing the one with the optimal conditions.

</comment><comment><USER27> The network you can make and the doors it opens are tremendous and without them you have to hustle in a completely different area than you otherwise would.

It's not that they give you a free win, but rather an advantage you can play later as needed. Getting a degree from a no name liberal arts school or a smaller state school is not going to mean the same thing for certain pursuits.

That said, an overachiever can do amazing things with limited opportunity. Advantage or disadvantage, it depends on how you use it.

</comment><comment><USER28> Taking a step back, doesn't it seem strange that there aren't more concrete answers to these questions - the debate devolves pretty quickly into anecdotes / commentators' perspectives, as opposed to hard data. Sample sizes should be big enough to at least answer the economic questions (the experience of those four years is of course subjective)!

</comment><comment><USER4> As someone who attended UC campuses for both undergrad and grad, I do have a strong innate sympathy for large public research institutions. I think that the methodology used by the very influential US News rankings rewards keeping the undergraduate student body small, with relatively few low income students, and penalizes universities for doing the opposite. Almost everything about staying small with lots of money (and fewer low income students) bumps up your numbers. Lower admissions rate, higher SAT scores, better graduation rates. It's all a positive, and there's no penalty for being small and affluent, so why not?

So taking a step back and looking at it as a student, it's an easy call - especially when these elite schools are offering lots of financial aid. If you're high income, tuition doesn't matter. If you're low income, you'll get great financial aid, often better than you would have gotten at a state school.

You'll also get more support. You're much less likely to get kicked out of an "impacted" major (these things don't really exist at elite schools, but people sure do get kicked out of their preferred major at state schools). You're more likely to graduate. Professors and staff aren't trying to accommodate a student body 5 times (or more) the size of a private, so the access is better, less harried. As a grad student at Cal, I heard a bit about Stanford "coddling", and I don't buy it. Supporting a promising student in her quest to major in engineering rather than kicking her out because she got a B- in physics and calculus her first semester in college isn't coddling, it's doing right by your students and is perfectly compatible with high standards. The opposite is, in my opinion, an outrageous waste of talent. Hey, I said I'm sympathetic to UCs but I don't like everything about them.

The only real downside I can see here is that you might not quite understand what's happening out there to higher education. At UCSD, I met a young woman who had to give up on college because her father was claiming her as a dependent, it was messing up her financial aid, and she just needed to work a while. I knew a guy who was trying to major in computer science while paying the rent with a part time job at Nordstrom. And that's at UCSD, a relatively well off and "elite" public! I wouldn't want our future leaders to be too insulated from this kind of thing. I actually do think the best leaders for the future probably should be coming from top public research universities rather than elite privates.

The washington monthly college rankings (and explanation of methodology) were really eye-opening. They asked "what have you done for us lately" \- the idea being that if universities are going to receive massive amounts of federal research support (privates get a ton of government support) and enjoy a tax- exempt status, we should be asking what they do for everyone, rather than only those who are able to attend them. I'd recommend reading it for yourself, but generally speaking, they looked at public service (including military service), research output especially in science and engineering, and contribution to social mobility (percentage of low income students). They didn't consider sheer scale, though I think they should - if you can do this for 25,000 undergrads rather than just 5,000 on the same budget, shouldn't that also be considered a positive quality?

By this standard, ivies (according to wash monthly) do appear to be overrated (though interestingly, Stanford still scores very high). They generally don't produce the same quantity and quality of research in science and engineering that you see out of elite publics, they don't enroll very many students, and they especially don't enroll very may low income students (though those they do enroll are treated very generously).

UCs and other elite state schools, on the other hand, rise dramatically to the top.

So are "ivies" overrated? Well, depends on whether you get to attend one. If you're outside the wall, asking what universities are contributing the most to the general welfare, UCLA is probably a lot more valuable than an ivy. But if you get in? Well, you might want to seriously consider going to that ivy.

</comment><comment><USER29> By parents and students? Absolutely not.

By the world? Yeah, obviously. The average IQ at a good state school is about 120. In the Ivies, it's about 125. The standard deviation at each is about 13 points, so the 95th-percentile state school student would be 89th-percentile at an Ivy. That's not a huge difference. It's a lot smaller than the difference in job opportunities.

Here's the biggest (and underdocumented) advantage of having an elite pedigree: when you're presumed smart, you can put 100% of your energies into social polish. You don't have to (a) prove your intelligence, _and_ (b) make the investor/patron feel important and just-slightly superior. You can focus on (b) alone, because (a) was taken care of. That's a huge advantage, because you're not serving two masters.

Within a couple hundred words of conversation, I can prove, to anyone intelligent, that I'm smarter than 90 to 99+% of the pedigreed (depending on how we define "pedigreed") people out raising seed rounds, but it's hard to do that without being a show-off and seeming like an arrogant prick.

It's like the decorative swords that noblemen used to wear. It was valuable to wear one, but unsheathing it and proving you knew how to use it was not always considered acceptable behavior.

<comment><USER11> Where are you getting that IQ data from? I go to one of the Ivies and have never had an IQ test nor have most of my peers I would imagine.

(That said I agree with your premise, my peers at school aren't significantly more intelligent than my high school classmates who went to good, but not great, private and state colleges).

<comment><USER29> I had an unhealthy obsession with IQ testing. A phase long ago. I remember reading that the average Harvard IQ tested at 130 and the other Ivies in the mid-120s. You can guess based on SAT figures, noting that extracurricular factors (paradoxically) decrease the IQ/SAT correlation (people who beat a top school's extracurricular game are more likely than average to have prepped for SATs and have scores that overstate their IQs). So a 1500 average SAT (out of 1600) ends up mapping to a group average IQ around 130, even though a typical individual with a 1500 SAT is probably around 140 IQ.

These numbers fluctuate and it's quite possible that the increasing usage of socioeconomic/extracurricular criteria has decreased the gap.

<comment><USER11> Ah interesting. Did you find any notable results? My understanding is that IQ (as a proxy for intelligence) matters up to a certain cutoff and beyond that its importance drops off (i.e. you might want the person who writes the software for the airplane you're riding to have a 130 IQ, but beyond that the quality of the work doesn't improve much).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


It's gotten harder to lose weight and not for the reasons you think - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/10/01/its-gotten-harder-to-lose-weight-and-not-for-the-reasons-you-think/ <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10309249](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10309249)

</comment><comment><USER3> The bias isn't against obese people, it is against morbidly obese people who don't want to accept it. There is a whole collection of groups that sprouted up to fight the "discrimination" against fat people, HAES (Health At Every Size) is the most know, but fat acceptance gets airtime simply because it is so much easier to get a message out.

Obesity is an issue, we simply have way too much opportunity to indulge and little reason to move to entertain ourselves. Go out and play seems to have fallen on deaf ears, why should kids do that when adults don't?

lastly, exercise is not they key to weight loss, proper eating is. if anything exercise contributes because it changes your lifestyle, you get out more or you spend less time eating and sitting

<comment><AUTHOR> > exercise is not they key to weight loss, proper eating is.

Anecdote here, but I've found that for me the key to weight loss has been exercise-first. I decided that I'd never be very good at reducing my dietary input (I really enjoy food) so I focused instead on increasing my energy output by incorporating progressively more physical activity into my lifestyle.

Over the past few years I have steadily and gradually ramped up my activity through walking, running, cycling, body-weight exercises, plyometrics, stand- up desk, and so on, and I've been progressively losing weight and feeling better physically, mentally and emotionally. As a result, other complementary aspects of health - sleeping, eating - have also tended to fall into healthier patterns in a positive feedback loop.

It's hard to believe that exercise isn't the key to weight loss when I burn 2,000 calories on my Saturday morning run.

<comment><USER4> My own Saturday morning run is about 4 miles and burns ~500 calories according to Runkeeper, so I estimate you're running about 16 miles every Saturday? Do you really expect an overweight, out-of-shape person to jump into a 16-mile run to burn 2000 calories a week? If they drink 2 sodas a day, they could switch them to water or even diet soda and remove even more calories for less effort.

<comment><USER5> They should still do some exercise though: while changing your calorie output/intake difference is key and diet changes are the easiest way to do that, there is more to exercise than just burning calories. It is possible to be the perfect weight but still unhealthily unfit.

One thing to remember to account for with massive people: the bigger you are the more you burn moving the same distance. It takes effort to move that mass from place to place. I burn a lot less doing a 5K or 10K run now I weight approximately 10 stone than I did back when I was around 16.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Weight management is actually much more complex than just 'energy in' versus 'energy out."

No, it's not. Maybe it's more difficult to _measure_ calories (that salad ranch dressing has more calories than that hamburger), but people should be encouraged to balance their calorie intake everyday. For what it's worth, here's why Americans are obese:

50 extra calories / day x 365 days / year x 1 lb / 3,500 calories = 5 lbs / year

Multiplied by 10 years, and you get 50 lbs over weight. In twenty years you are 100 lbs over weight.

Bottom line is that people are eating just a _little_ too much every day, and that adds up over time. My advice for losing and maintaining weight: Have 5 x 400 calorie meals each day and exercise for 30 minutes. The chore of finding 400 calorie meals is well worth the effort because you'll see just how many calories each item you consume contains.

<comment><USER7> It's not so simple. People are different. Some people won't need your plan because they stay at low weight no matter what they eat. Others won't be able to follow your plan because it would require superhuman willpower.

I'm an example of the first category. I'm 6'2'' and 160 lbs, and have been like this for years. At age 27 I spent a whole year working from home, eating at McDonalds 1-2 times every day, going to sleep at 5am, and not exercising at all. Resulting weight gain? About five pounds, which I promptly lost after joining a gym. More recently, at age 32, I took a two-week vacation and literally spent it all in bed, playing video games and eating large amounts of chocolate and pastries. Resulting weight gain? Zero (actually a slight loss). This happened last month.

Since I'm at one extreme end of the scale, it's very easy for me to believe that there are people at the other end, who won't be able to follow your plan at all. Restrict them to 2K calories/day, and they just won't fall asleep unless they get a snack. They need a different way.

The laws of thermodynamics are true as far as they go, but they don't have anything to say about genetics, metabolism, hunger, or willpower. These are the real important factors in weight loss. The sooner we move away from a virtue-based worldview, the sooner we can start actually solving it.

<comment><USER8> My favorite explanation I found on the issue is on "The Hacker's Diet" (free ebook).

[https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/](https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/)

The author's theory is that the issue is not on of metabolism, but that people overeating do not have a good "I'm full" mechanism.

Most people like you that "can eat all they want and not gain weight" in reality... don't. They balance out their intake naturally, if not in the scope of a meal, over a day or so.

For example the concept of leaving unfinished food on the plate it completely alien to me (or not going for seconds if available), while most normal people just stop when they feel they are ok.

In my very personal and anecdotal experience every time I started dieting counting calories and exercising I have always lost weight, consistently, while when I stopped I gained weight back (again, consistently and predictably).

Most other diets that have a scientific basis should be efficient as well, since what they all have in common is to enforce some sort of control on your intake.

Either way I agree that it's about genetics and willpower but, not having the possibility to change genetics, the mechanism to counter it exists and it's not a mystery, it's really a psychological issue, IMHO.

<comment><USER9> I am one of the "eat whatever shit in a big quantity and never gain weight" people, and I think you may have a point. After discussing it turns out if you add anything I don't eat that much.

First, I never eat in the morning. And I mean never, I can't eat after waking up, I always need a few hours before being able to eat without being disgusted, I know it's bad but I don't think it has an effect really (I don't do it since I'm like 12 or 13).

Second, I NEVER eat between meals. I don't do snacks, unless someone give one to me or whatever, but you get the point, I don't fucking eat some chocolate bar everyday at 4pm, or eat chips all day because I'm bored.

I often only eat good food, or what I think is good food at least. I never use the microwaves, always buy "fresh" meat, eat vegetables aswell (only recently, not when I was a teenagers).

So in the end, I may eat like a savage during the meal earning my reputation, but in the end I don't really eat a lot of shit.

Anyway since I watched Fed Up I understand while US kids are obese. Their public cafeteria in school literally are fast food. Not to mention the retards crying out for freedom when the gouvernement even think about taking action into kids diet.

I won't even start on the sugar and science thing because it sound very threatening but I don't know enough to judge how accurate it is, even though I have no doubt it's very likely given history (hello smoking industry).

<comment><USER10> > I am one of the "eat whatever shit in a big quantity and never gain weight" > people

I'm the same way.

> First, I never eat in the morning. And I mean never, I can't eat after > waking up, I always need a few hours before being able to eat without being > disgusted,

I'm the same way.

> I know it's bad

Why do you think it is bad? Because everyone has told you that you need a good breakfast? That it's the most important meal of the day? That's all recent and new ideology. [http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20243692](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20243692)

> I often only eat good food, or what I think is good food at least. I never > use the microwaves, always buy "fresh" meat, eat vegetables aswell (only > recently, not when I was a teenagers).

Here we are different. I eat good and "bad" food.

If I had to guess why I can eat anything and everything (including lots of sugary drinks) with little to no exercise and not gain weight it would be this: food passes through me. My digestive tract doesn't absorb food that well, a lot of calories just go through me. (TMI: Honestly, some foods can go through me in 2 hours.) That's what I think. (No, I don't care to go to the doctor to figure out if its true or to "fix" it because frankly, it doesn't negatively affect me as far as I'm concerned.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> TL/DR: It's gotten harder to lose weight, because people eat more crap: artificial sweeteners, steroids, pollutants, plastic packaging, pesticides, meat, antidepressants.

A positive read would be: if you want to be healthy, don't focus solely on energy intake, but also what chemicals you are subjecting your body to.

<comment><USER12> Plastic packaging makes people fat?

<comment><USER13> "Makes people fat" is a bit of a reach, but it has an effect on the holistic reasons why one becomes fat.

The links are dubious, but they are there. Plastic Packaging contains a high amount of BPA (Bisphenol A) which acts as a xenoestrogen - slightly unrelated: the generational drop in testosterone in males has been tied to this[0].

Back on topic, cells containing the metabolite of BPA, BPA-Glucoronide, have been found to accumulate more fat than untreated cells.[1] [2]

This is part of the reason why "BPA-Free" plastic products (think: Nalgene water bottles) use this tagline in sales.

[0] [http://www.livescience.com/29401-bpa-testosterone- levels.htm...](http://www.livescience.com/29401-bpa-testosterone-levels.html)

[1] [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bpa-may-prompt- mor...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bpa-may-prompt-more-fat-in- the-human-body/)

[2] [http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/777288](http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/777288)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> same story yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10309249](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10309249)

study relies on SELF REPORTING, need I say more?

<comment><USER15> What would we prefer, a study that relies on self-reporting but is a study nonetheless, or a bunch of theories based on entirely on anecdotes with a sample size of 1?

I get this study isn't perfect but it seems silly that so many commenters here are disregarding it entirely yet are perfectly happy to listen to completely untested theories from people with no expertise whatsoever in the field.

<comment><USER14> We do know that self reporting is flawed, just ask your chubby "dieting" friend about donuts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is such a bad study and this post is your usual garbage of the media just confusing people and making them think weight loss is impossible, all while giving them more excuses to do absolutely nothing. The idea that this "data" is in any way an accurate representation of how many calories the average person eats is just absurd. The average person cannot tell you how many calories they eat per day, they have no idea. The foods we have available today make it much more likely for a person to consume more calories than someone "thinks" they are.

You can sit around all day and blame it on leaky gut, artificial sweeteners, pesticides, gluten, carbs, fat, red meat or whatever the latest "fad villian" is, and you'll just keep failing to lose weight.

Plain and simple. Eat nutritious food that actually fills you up and satisfies you, track your calorie intake, and find a sustainable way to just eat less every day.

<comment><USER17> Completely agree that this is total crap and is only going to hurt the population more. They lost in the first paragraph when they stated they're using BMI. BMI is total bs and I'm pretty sure we all know it. I'm male, 24, 6', 195 lbs. I work out 5 days a week, run, play sports and eat healthy, but according to BMI I'm overweight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hormones act in blood concentrations of 1E-12 [1]. This is by design, they act as triggers.

When you consider hormones affect _everything_ , from how and where you put weight, to sexuality, to behavior it's incredible how little thought lay people give to them and the endocrine system. (The Intercept has a very interesting 3 part series about an endocrine disruptor that DuPont splashed all over WV and Ohio causing thousands of cancers [2])

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

[2] [https://theintercept.com/2015/08/11/dupont-chemistry- decepti...](https://theintercept.com/2015/08/11/dupont-chemistry-deception/)

</comment><comment><USER19> In my experience, losing weight is very hard if you follow fad diets. In the NY tech scene, nearly every tech event has free pizza and beer. I gained a ton of weight from 2008-2012 and have finally lost it. I'm weighing in at 165 pounds now.

In 2012, I was weighing in at 215 pounds. In May of that year, I started on Tim Ferriss' Four Hour Body Slow Carb diet. It worked for a while but I plateued at 195 pounds. I figured that was it for me - that I wasn't going to be able to lose any more weight.

I told my primary care doctor about this in January of 2015 and he recommended ditching the Slow Carb Diet and tracking my calorie consumption in the app My Fitness Pal. He said to continue using My Fitness Pal until I figured out the right balance of food and exercise I needed to eat to drive weight loss or maintain my weight.

 _Just by guessing calories of the food I was eating, I was able to lose 30 pounds_

This may seem like a pain in the ass, but it only added on 5 minutes to my daily routine.

I got a good scale (the WiThings WS-50). It not only tracks your weight, but it tracks your weight loss / weight gain trend over the last 30 days in its app.

In 2015 from CES to SXSW I dropped from 195 to 182 pounds.

From SXSW to June 1st I dropped from 182 to 169 pounds.

I stopped using the app in July and am now weighing 165 pounds.

I've put a few of my friends on to this, and they've also lost weight.

Hope this can help someone else who wants to cut through the noise of fad weight loss advice.

</comment><comment><USER20> As a Swede it's hard not to blush reading the name of the interviewee. Kuk means cock in Swedish (not the bird).

<comment><USER21> In Holland we have people called Dick de Cock. Anyhow, a cock is actually just a rooster, not?

<comment><USER20> No it's also a Johnson.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> In my case this is what matters most:

\- Watch what you DRINK, not so much what you eat. Drink water or _black_ coffee/cold-brew or tea most of the time, and turn other beverages into rare treats. Soda is perfectly fine once a week but buy the _smallest_ size and sip it without a straw so that you enjoy it a lot more. (I was shocked at how I could barely finish a tiny Coke by sipping it but somehow I could practically chug one 3x the size just by using a straw. _Don 't_ use straws; they increase consumption and keep you from even tasting most of the calories that you're consuming.)

\- Cook most of your meals, multiple meals at once. Yes, this takes time and it'll take awhile to become any good at it but it's worthwhile. Pick a day, spend 1-2 hours cooking your lunches for the rest of the week. You will tend to fill your shopping lists with more raw vegetables and meat that go a long way. This also keeps you from finding excuses to head to the nearest fast-food place at lunch time.

\- Do not _ever_ skip a meal, no matter what your weight is. Prefer breakfasts high in protein, like eggs and chicken sausage, with few carbs (not too much of cereal or muffins or similar).

\- Take _every_ excuse to walk. Find someplace to go a few times a week, like a coffee shop, and walk the entire way. Even when I drive somewhere, I'm never afraid to park the car and walk in (no drive-through, no spending 10 minutes to find that "good" parking spot; just walk from somewhere a bit further out). Same thing with stairs versus elevators; and if you take an escalator, walk up the escalator instead of riding it.

\- Make some effort to build muscle to get some "free" calorie consumption. You don't need a lot. The biggest muscles in your body are better at working off calories so if you have limited time, start with your legs. A gym isn't strictly required for a lot of good exercises; you just need to read up on a few things to do and be really consistent about doing sets a few times a week.

</comment><comment><USER21> Sorry, haven't RTFA, but what I know is that when people get heavier, the babies they get are biased to more weight. These kids, now adults, have a body that is trained or prepared for more weight, and it won't give up that easily.

I'm 5 kg overweight, and should lose another 10 kg to get the ideal weight. My goal is not to gain any weight, and I've kept it stable for about 10 years. I know when I overeat, and I feel really bad when I gain another kg. If that happens, it takes a week or so to lose it again.

</comment><comment><USER23> Click bait title

</comment><comment><USER24> The New England Journal of medicine did a study with "doubly labeled water" which made it possible to determine _exactly_ how many calories a person ate.

In a study of people who claimed to be "diet resistant" (some of whom were taking medication based on what they reported to their doctors) it had been determined that _each_ _and_ _every_ _one_ of them were underreporting their calorie intake and overreporting their exercise to the doctors.

Here's the study (PDF)

[http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJM199212313272701](http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJM199212313272701)

It's been duplicated again and again.

The last paragraph says:

"In conclusion, all the obese subjects we studied who had a history of self- reported diet resistance had appropriate energy expenditure, but they misreported their actual food intake and physical activity."

It's sounds shocking to me, but people would rather lie to their doctors, and get medication they don't need, than count calories accurately.</comment>


Show HN: Read without being disturbed ads&banners and share clean article links - <AUTHOR> http://readizer.com

<comment><USER2> It seems to blow up images. Maybe it should try to keep the original image size?

I tried this on [http://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/6.4.1/neutrino/getting_st...](http://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/6.4.1/neutrino/getting_started/s1_procs.html) just to see what it would do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks guys. I made this 2 years ago just for my usage. Last week, I updated css for responsive devices that's why this image problem happens. I fixed it by the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for the post! I like Readizer! Another good web tool that also removes adverts is noosfeer.com

Very easy user experience!</comment>


DHH Offended By RSpec, Says Test::Unit Is Just Great - <AUTHOR> http://www.rubyinside.com/dhh-offended-by-rspec-debate-4610.html <comment><USER2> I spent about 6 months working at a Rails shop.

The best thing about the Rails community is the speed at which great new tools appear.

The worst thing about the Rails community is the speed at which great new tools are abandoned.

</comment><comment><USER3> While DHH has remarkably good taste—and he has, in fact, helped make code more beautiful throughout our industry—his taste is not necessarily perfect.

Exhibit A: Rails fixtures.

When using fixtures, you end share a single set of objects between all your tests. And sooner or later, your tests will become tightly coupled via the fixtures: To add a new test, you must add some new records. But when you add those records, some other tests break.

If you instead use an object factory like machinist or factory_girl, you can create objects at the start of each test, and fill in random values for any fields you don't care about. This makes each test independent of the others, and it keeps the code and data in one place.

So if we admit that DHH's taste in testing is potentially imperfect, what does that mean for the Test::Unit versus RSpec debate? Not much.

Some people like Test::Unit. It's a fine library. I prefer RSpec, because it's a better match to how I think. And many of the testing libraries I want to use are actually work better with RSpec.

Oh, and if Cucumber is a bad match for your project, try Steak. It's easier to set up, and you write ordinary Ruby code.

</comment><comment><USER4> I get by just fine with Test::Unit too. RSpec smelled like gratuitous complexity from the get-go. Wasn't the whole point of Rails to get back to doing things simply?

<comment><USER2> I'm ambivalent about RSpec, but the concept of a structured requirements language (which is front-end of Cucumber) is a good one.

Cucumber grew out of testing; it'd be interesting to see the problem approached from the other end.

Suppose you were designing a language, _ab initio_ , for sharing requirements with end-users. What would it look like?

I've seen Steve McConnell mention "Planguage" by Tom Gilb, but online resources are scarce.

<comment><USER4> I have never, personally, worked with a client that was willing to work consistently at the level of detail that Cucumber provides. I suppose if I had such a client I might find it useful.

For communicating requirements _among_ developers I think plain Ruby is already readable enough.

<comment><USER2> What level of detail _do_ you use with clients?

<comment><USER4> Wireframes for UI, informally written use cases for features. I try to get working prototypes up on screen as quickly as possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> DHH noted that this gist comparing some Test::Unit tests to RSpec triggered his statements: <https://gist.github.com/893027>

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm an RSpec user, but do feel that Ruby is self-documenting enough that it can be used as is.

</comment><comment><USER7> Flagged for Twitter drama.

<comment><USER8> Downvoted for non-contributive noise.

For future reference:

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

 _Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did._</comment></comment>


Patrick McKenzie (patio11) Talks Working on Atlas at Stripe - <AUTHOR> https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2018/05/08/stripe-atlas-with-patrick-mckenzie/ <comment><AUTHOR> [the] activation energy required to start a business remains higher than necessary. It feels like standing up a web server in the 90s–lots of tedium and reinventing the wheel that has been done by people before you. This is the motivation behind Stripe Atlas, a project to simplify the process of starting an Internet business. Patrick explains how he works at Stripe Atlas to help startups incorporate.</comment>


Farewell Node.js - TJ Holowaychuk - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/code-adventures/farewell-node-js-4ba9e7f3e52b <comment><USER2> TJ Holowaychuk did wonders for the community. Just a small list of the packages he's responsible for:

\- ExpressJS (14,579 stars)

\- Jade (6,770 stars)

\- EJS (1,599 stars)

\- Mocha (4,778 stars

\- Commander.js (2,590 stars)

\- Should.js (1,701 starts)

I'm really curious as to see how this will effect the future of Node.

</comment><comment><USER3> Prior thread at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7987146](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7987146)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is bad news for the Node community.

</comment><comment><USER5> This guy is a genius, he'll probably help Go become more popular.

</comment><comment><USER6> The top contributors (based on graphs on github) for these projects in last six months is not TJ. So yes, some others are probably going to take over the different projects.

</comment><comment><USER7> This must be a joke.</comment>


Types of Basketball Stretching Exercises - <AUTHOR> http://basketballworkouts101.com/stretching-for-basketball/ Read why stretching exercises for basketball are important, why they can prevent injury, and the different types of basketball stretching exercises. <comment><USER2> Great stretching exercises, thanks for sharing this!</comment>


UK Government's Advice on Agile Delivery - <AUTHOR> https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/agile-delivery <comment><USER2> Despite the UK government being an absolute shambles right now, I do like their website. Very well designed and simple to use.

<comment><USER3> A lot of it goes back to Francis Maude's efforts to make government more efficient. I'm not a fan of the Tories but he was doing a pretty good job. He is the only politician I ever heard talking about software development practices.</comment></comment>


Human Retinas Grown in a Dish Reveal Origin of Color Vision - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/10/11/656560767/human-retinas-grown-in-a-dish-reveal-origin-of-color-vision <comment><USER2> I am color blind. I fail a bunch of dot tests and have had minor social embarrassment over the years talking about colors - I will be in a discussion about color and say something nobody relates to when I misidentify a color.

However, an aside, I am not red-green color blind. I have had several conversations with people who think red-green is the only type of color blindness, or that red-green color blindness and color blindness are the same thing.

Anyway, it sounds weird to me to "cure" color blindess. It causes no problem for me other than minor social embarrassment when talking about colors. I start to fear a world in which it's "corrected" \- are the things I have seen all my life "incorrect"? Would I find it weird to see some familiar objects "corrected"?

Based on my conversations with people I would also have to be suspicious that any "cure for color blindness" would focus 100% on red-green and not do someone like me any good.

<comment><USER3> > _Anyway, it sounds weird to me to "cure" color blindess. It causes no > problem for me other than minor social embarrassment when talking about > colors._

Sure, but wouldn't we all like to have better senses? We probably don't need more than black and white vision, and a narrow audio bandwidth centered on human voice, in order to functional completely normally in modern society.

<comment><USER2> Well, I wonder about memories and associations formed around colors. After reading the article I was passing a tree lined street, thinking of what _green_ has meant to me over more than 3 decades. What if it's not "real" green? What if it changed some day?

Also, I don't know, some people seem content with flawed senses. Eg. A lot of people with glasses seem to shrug it off and accept it. It doesn't cause them existential crisis. And that is a much more practically troubling problem than color blindness.

<comment><USER4> I personally think you should be not affraid, the time to get used to things is mostly not long. See it as an enrichment similar to "I am used to see VHS video and now I am looking at the rich details and colors of Blueray". The experiences stored inside you concerning your lack of vision will in part stay and some of it that is not important for the function of your system later on will be lost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Text-only version:

[https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=656560767](https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=656560767)

<comment><USER6> this should be the default when linking from npr

<comment><USER7> that should be the sane default for most of the web, actually

it is so readable it hurts

<comment><USER6> this is why I automatically go into reader mode if I don't need to interact with the site

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reminds me to Monet who had a cataract removal surgery and after that he was able to see ultraviolet wavelengths

<comment><USER9> This should be a scientifically studied endeavor. Imagine when you can go into a Lasik place and get the UV upgrade.

<comment><USER10> The lens of your eye is what filters out UV light. When the lens is removed because of the cataract, there is nothing to block the UV light, so you can see it.

<comment><USER11> what is the range of vision without the lens? Is it expanded just on the blue side or do we also start seeing infrared?

<comment><USER12> It'll probably only expand to the UV side of things, the lens doesn't really filter out IR at all and you can see some of it already without any changes to your eyes. But your eye isn't very sensitive to it, so you have to block out all other light to be able to see anything.

edit: quick way to do this [https://www.wikihow.com/Build-Near-Infrared- Goggles](https://www.wikihow.com/Build-Near-Infrared-Goggles)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This was posted yesterday... [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18204637](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18204637)</comment>


The entire MDN writers team was part of the layoffs - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1293264395603148802 <comment><AUTHOR> If this should be merged (or deleted) so be it. The other threads seem to have been focused on the (mis)management of Mozilla

MDN itself has been a treasure to me and I hate to see it neglected</comment>


Backer News: fresh crowdfunding projects - <AUTHOR> http://backernews.com/

<comment><USER2> Looks great, a few caveats though:

1\. When you get into triple digit upvotes your padding around the description image breaks.

2\. The design takes up so much vertical space. On my 13in macbook only 3 items are visible. I think it's much more comfortable to skim at 75% of it's current size.

3\. Ten items per page seems like a small number. Increasing the number of items per page would be nice. Either that or have it lazy load on scroll.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the feedback! I'll look into that. Lazy loading should be coming soon, as well as a more precise way of filtering (but still very straightforward)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting to watch HN get disaggregated; DesignerNews, GamerNews, Product Hunt and now this.

<comment><USER5> Do people actually go to those? I find myself sticking to Hackernews 99% of the time.

<comment><USER2> I go to Product News and Designer News. I find that the conversations are more focused there, whereas HN discussions can go any number of different ways. That variety is very valuable, but sometimes I'd rather just read about start strategy and positioning or the design of a site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice idea, but more Crowdfunding sites please.

</comment><comment><USER7> It would be interesting if it could provide news that kickstarter keeps private just for backers.

</comment><comment><USER8> needs tilt and tilt/open!</comment>


Seagate: If Flash Drives Get Too Cheap, We'll Use Patents To Make Them Expensive - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080319/105858584.shtml

<comment><USER2> Ah, the evils of software patents, even applied to hardware products.

I suspect, however, that the genie's out of the bottle, thankfully. They might be able to make things slightly more expensive, but lawsuits like that can take years. Moore's law is on the side of the SSD vendors, since it, unlike patent law, need not be adjudicated to apply.

</comment><comment><USER3> That article was published a year an a half ago and refers to declarations of a guy who's no longer the CEO of Seagate. I'm sure the "news" in news.ycombinator.com is not to be taken literally but come on!</comment>


Bill Gates urges U.S. to take the lead in nuclear power - <AUTHOR> https://www.geekwire.com/2018/china-option-fades-bill-gates-urges-u-s-take-lead-nuclear-power-good-planet/ <comment><USER2> I'm sort of half sold on the idea of nuclear. My problem is their past unfulfilled promises lead me to doubt anything is really going to happen.

For about two decades now I have been reading nuclear boosters talk about new advanced tech that would soon overcome all of nuclear's disadvantages. But nothing has ever become ready for real, mass adoption.

And so I am assuming that by the time in the future when something is finally ready, solar and wind will be doing so well there will be no point in putting any major effort into nuclear.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is an interesting call given the cost reduction curves of wind and solar over time. It's hard to see how nuclear has a chance unless it's some kind of 'backyard nuclear' like Westinghouse is promising but still it would be an uphill battle given where wind and solar will be in ten or fifteen years.

</comment><comment><USER4> What about all the nuclear waste that is already building up and has no where to go? All of it is sitting in water pools outside of the reactor because there is no where to put it so that it can decay safely. And there are all the issues with the companies who make the fuel rods. There was a incident where a employee thought it would be a cool picture if they put the rods next to each other. They were literally lucky that it didn't cause an uncontrolled reaction. Those companies have a long track record of lax policies and being behind schedule on making the fuel in the first place. It is a extremely deadly and long lived threat, and that is before we put people into the equation.

<comment><USER5> Read up on Yucca Mountain. It was a reasonable proposal for storage.

<comment><USER4> The project has been basically on hold since 1987. [https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/06/03/yucc...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/06/03/yucca- mountain-congress-works-revive-dormant-nuclear-waste-dump/664153002/)</comment></comment></comment>


So, Why Do We Call It Gotham Anyway? (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nypl.org/blog/2011/01/25/so-why-do-we-call-it-gotham-anyway

<comment><USER2> This is the very first topic covered in, well, Gotham. If you're interested in the history of New York City, it's a great book. I say that even though I'm still currently reading it, and probably will be for some time to come. It's about 1,400 pages in print and the ebook formats to about 3,500 on my iPad mini.

[http://www.amazon.com/Gotham-History-York- City-1898/dp/01951...](http://www.amazon.com/Gotham-History-York- City-1898/dp/0195140494)

Irving's Knickerbocker's History of New York is on Project Gutenberg.

[http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13042](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13042)

One interesting thing in this book is that it has a very early reference to Saint Nicholas as an explicitly Santa Claus-like figure:

> And the sage Oloffe dreamed a dream—and, lo! the good St. Nicholas came > riding over the tops of the trees, in that self-same wagon wherein he brings > his yearly presents to children. And he descended hard by where the heroes > of Communipaw had made their late repast. And he lit his pipe by the fire, > and sat himself down and smoked; and as he smoked the smoke from his pipe > ascended into the air, and spread like a cloud overhead. And Oloffe > bethought him, and he hastened and climbed up to the top of one of the > tallest trees, and saw that the smoke spread over a great extent of > country—and as he considered it more attentively he fancied that the great > volume of smoke assumed a variety of marvelous forms, where in dim obscurity > he saw shadowed out palaces and domes and lofty spires, all of which lasted > but a moment, and then faded away, until the whole rolled off, and nothing > but the green woods were left. And when St. Nicholas had smoked his pipe he > twisted it in his hatband, and laying his finger beside his nose, gave the > astonished Van Kortlandt a very significant look, then mounting his wagon, > he returned over the treetops and disappeared.

</comment><comment><USER3> I used to work just three miles from Gotham in Nottinghamshire, UK. It's comically unimposing.

Its Wikipedia page is here: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotham,_Nottinghamshire](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotham,_Nottinghamshire)

…and its location is here:

[https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Gotham,+Nottingham,+Nott...](https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Gotham,+Nottingham,+firstname.lastname@example.com,-1.2036349,15z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x4879e7fdc238d091:0x1c80d387bdf87dd5)

</comment><comment><USER4> I always thought it referred to the shape of gothic architecture that New York's skyline might evoke in past days. With a dark pallette it could very much be used in a batman cityscape.</comment>


Online Voting Comes Of Age (But Don't Expect To Use It Anytime Soon) - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/online_voting_comes_of_age_but_dont_expect_to_use.php

<comment><USER2> The problem with online voting in ensuring candidates can be confident that the votes that are counted are the same ones that were cast. It's not difficult to do this: publish the voting software source code, allow the candidates' teams to verify that the correct software is loaded onto the server, that it is correctly configured, etc. And yet this doesn't happen.</comment>


Bitbucket Embraces the Cloud IDE - <AUTHOR> https://blog.codeanywhere.com/bitbucket-embraces-the-cloud-ide/ <comment><USER2> It was a pain to find the list on their site, so here are the languages supported by the editor:

APL, Asterisk, C, C++, Cobol, Java, C#, Scala, Clojure, CoffeeScript, Common Lisp, CSS, D, diff, ECL, Erlang, Gas, GitHub Flavored Markdown, GO, Groovy, Haskell, Haxe, ASP.NET, Embedded Javascript, JavaServer Pages, HTML, HTTP, Jade, JavaScript, JSON, TypeScript, Jinja2, LESS, LiveScript, Lua, Markdown (GitHub-flavour), mIRC, Nginx, NTriples, OCaml, Pascal, Perl, PHP, PHP(HTML), Pig, Plain Text, Properties files, Python, Cython, R, reStructuredText, Ruby, Rust, Sass, Scheme, SCSS, Shell, Sieve, Smalltalk, Smarty, SmartyMixed, SPARQL, SQL, MariaDB, sTeX, LaTeX, Tcl, TiddlyWiki, Tiki wiki, VB.NET, VBScript, Velocity, Verilog, XML, XQuery, YAML, Z80

<comment><USER3> Looking at the list, it appears they don't support Java, but that's only because is not actually in alpha order, as it first appears to be. Java listed right at the start (between COBOL and C#).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been doing this with Cloud9 for quite some time now. Just link your Bitbucket account (or Github, for that matter), and you can work with it directly in the Cloud9 IDE. Haven't checked out CodeAnywhere in a while, though, so I'm going to see how it compares.

</comment><comment><USER5> It seems like the correct link would be [https://blog.bitbucket.org/2015/02/11/coding-in-the-cloud- wi...](https://blog.bitbucket.org/2015/02/11/coding-in-the-cloud-with- bitbucket/) since there are more IDEs than just codeanywhere

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes there is Codio that is alongside Codeanywhere in this Launch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been hoping for a while that github and similar would parse source files and allow me to hop through to definitions and other usage for tokens throughout a repo. I'm not yet convinced I need a cloud IDE, but this would be a nice step in the right direction.

</comment><comment><USER7> This seems pretty nifty. However, how does the IDE itself stack up against something like IntelliJ/PyCharm/Visual Studio/etc?

My current solution to needing to develop on multiple machines is to keep an external SSD with me that has a Linux VM development environment. It's inconvenient in certain ways, but I have a completely customized environment & toolchain that's reproducible and reliable anywhere VirtualBox is installed.

I would be interested in a cloud solution, but the JetBrains products are so amazing and so I would be hesitant to migrate even with how clean this solution looks compared to mine.

<comment><AUTHOR> I really does depend on how and what you use. We build Codeanywhere entirely and exclusively inside Codanywhere, and have teams that do the same, ranging from 5 people to 200 people. So all I can say is try it out and let us know how you feel it stacks up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Damn. It's always nice to see things i was working towards 15 years ago, now coming into fruition.

<comment><AUTHOR> :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's not IDE. It's just a code editor. Where're refactoring, navigation, find usages?

</comment><comment><USER10> I am not understanding the advantages of using a web based IDE for development.

<comment><USER11> Presumably, it shares the common advantages of any web-app, e.g.

* Always up-to-date * Always available on any machine (in theory) * Built-in accessibility (if designed properly) * Less of a security risk to local machine

Of course, that's not to say there are no disadvantages ...

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly

<comment><USER12> How does it compare to cloud9?

C9 felt rather clunky to use :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> now they just need to embrace 2-step auth ...

<comment><AUTHOR> That we will!

<comment><USER13> awesome news! that has been pending for some time in the issues section</comment></comment></comment>


Catching Killers by Matching Tiny Marks on Bullets - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/us/bullets-police-evidence-nibin.html <comment><USER2> _Once seen as crime scene detritus, bullets and ejected shell casings — which have unique sets of scratches, grooves and dents — are recognized these days as vital pieces of evidence._

I don't understand this. Checking guns for rifling marks has been a thing since rifling. Seriously, when has it _not_ been routine to do scientific analysis on crime scene shells and bullets?

<comment><USER3> It's a false narrative with the intention of forcing "microstamping" on bullets and brass by the firearm itself.</comment></comment>


Video demo of Sapphire-coated iPhone display leaves it unscratched by concrete - <AUTHOR> http://9to5mac.com/2014/02/05/video-demo-of-sapphire-coated-iphone-display-leaves-it-unscratched-by-concrete/

<comment><USER2> That's great, but I'd like to see it compared to the most recent version of Gorilla Glass.

The second video here doesn't compare scratch protection, [http://www.androidauthority.com/sapphire-glass- screen-342916...](http://www.androidauthority.com/sapphire-glass- screen-342916/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't believe that any entire can be made out of sapphire unless inorganic has come far along than I thought.

Plus, sapphire is also brittle. You have to find a balance between flexibility and hardness.</comment>


My vote for Best App of 2009 - Tonido - <AUTHOR> http://www.webchicklet.com/cool-web-sites/my-vote-for-best-app-of-2009-tonido/

<comment><USER2> It is only April 2009. There are 8 more months of app development!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats true. May be she is right you know :)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> let us vote for the application of the year 2009. probably too early. thats ok.

<comment><USER3> What's your involvement with Tonido?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Icey, i am part of the team</comment></comment></comment>


Coinbase Database leak - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/2b0Ub3ZG

<comment><USER2> How do we determine whether this is real, or a hoax? Can anyone suggest an experiment that doesn't involve paying 0.25 BTC?</comment>


Zencoder removed WITHOUT any notification their 20% discount on multiple outputs - k-i-m

I signed up at Zencoder about 3 years ago and I've used it occasionally for some side projects, everything always worked great.
About 2 years ago Zencoder added a 20% discount on multiple outputs ( http://blog.zencoder.com/2011/03/09/lower-price-for-multiple-outputs/ ) and as I encoded in various formats I was very happy.
During the last year (when they were acquired by Brightcove) I had to shutdown those projects because they weren't growing as expected.
Now I'm in the middle of another project that uses videos and so I went back to Zencoder to see what changed, and a part some new features I've also seen that they removed from their pricing page (and any other page) the reference to that 20% discount on multiple outputs.
I don't want to criticize that choice (although I think it was a great thing for Zencoder's customers), but what I criticize is that they haven't sent any notification about that change to any of the accounts I have with them. I've checked their blog and there is no post telling about this removal. I don't know if they notified by email just active-paying customers, but I don't think it's correct even with not paying customers, as when I was paying customer I payed them few hundreds dollars each month.
If you are a startup, or a big company, please, please, please stop pissing out your users with these changes, or at least send an email saying why you do such changes.. <comment><AUTHOR> I don't understand the problem, they removed a feature from free accounts? I'm sure they do it that way instead of giving a cutoff so that free accounts don't spend that entire time encoding their entire dvd collection or whatever.</comment>


A brief history of credit cards - <AUTHOR> http://a16z.com/2017/07/28/credit-cards-history-transaction-behind-scenes/ <comment><USER2> There is a great 99% Invisible episode on the early days of credit cards: [http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-fresno- drop/](http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-fresno-drop/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there anytime similar about the 1-2.5% fee merchants have to pay to utilize this service? I'd bet Visa, MasterCard, and AMEX are making a fortune off all these transactions.

<comment><USER4> > Is there anytime similar about the 1-2.5% fee merchants have to pay to > utilize this service? I'd bet Visa, MasterCard, and AMEX are making a > fortune off all these transactions.

My current primary credit card (Alliant's CashBack card) gives me 2.5% cashback on each credit card transaction (3% cashback in the first year).

I'd assume that Alliant makes money from customers who aren't paying the complete balance off each month, but with 2.5% cashback there's not a lot of room to make money from transaction fees.

<comment><USER5> This comment shows how little people really understand about the business model of credit card companies and their relationships with merchant banks.

> but with 2.5% cashback there's not a lot of room to make money from > transaction fees.

The cash back is not instantaneous. It does not happen in the cycle in which the consumer buys something; it is pushed out as a short-term liability by the banks, contingent upon Visa/MC doing all the math and allocating the pieces from the top-down.

In the short term, all these microaccounts of customers "cashback savings" are accumulated as points or whatever to the consumer, but they are real cash assets for the holders. Taken in aggregate they equal huge long-term cash assets (for Visa/MC). Just like everything else in the credit card world, it adds up quickly across hundreds of millions of customers.

That leverage is why Visa has been untouchable and why MC has virtually no incentive to make it compete. Merchant banks are already so fragmented (and in many instances actually competing with each other) that the lockin is something they just accept.

This is why the collusion to set fees at 2.9 percent (or whatever) among payments processors is so evil: Visa and MC ransom the full fees for the short term to make the banks/merchants beholden to their terms in perpetuity. Cash back rewards are not a necessary part of a credit transaction, but they're being baked in to hike the "commissions" of the middlemen.

This industry is just like the Realtor industry: full of corrupt and exploitative groups of individuals implicitly colluding with each other to maximize their collective rapaciousness.

<comment><USER6> you wrote: >> This comment shows how little people really understand about the business model of credit card companies and their relationships with merchant banks.

thanks for enlightening the world

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> American Express and Diner's Club still issue charge cards which have to be paid off in full at the end of each billing cycle.

American Express is often also the issuing bank for a lot of its cards which is why it charges more to merchants who accept its cards than Visa and MasterCard do.

<comment><USER8> And often it is the acquiring bank too - it has historically insisted that merchants send transactions directly to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> After watching the Video, What is the purpose of Chase in the example?

Me ( Clients ) > BoA ( Issuers ) > Visa > Chase ( Acquiring Bank ) > Merchant.

And how does Apply Pay / Samsung Pay / WePay / AliPay fits into this?

<comment><USER10> Most prosaically, Chase moves money to the merchant, so that BoA doesn't have to move money to someone who is not their customer and who they have no direct relationship with. They just pay Chase a mindbogglingly large amount of money every day and trust Chase to sort out the logistics. (Back in the day, this would be easy for Chase to do because the merchant banked at Chase, but this is very not guaranteed anymore.)

Chase (or a party related to Chase) also had the job of making sure this merchant got signed up to accept Visa cards. They had the boots-on-the-ground salesforce to make it happen.

Chase also performed underwriting of the burrito shop to determine whether they are creditworthy, because the purchaser is not the only person being extended credit here -- Chase has a more-than-notional exposure to the merchant's health as a business as well. Why? If you call BoA and say you didn't get your burrito, you will get your money back. BoA is willing to give you your money back, very quickly, because Chase is always good for it. Chase will generally attempt to recoup your money from the burrito shop, but in the case where you are dissatisfied with your burrito because you didn't receive it because the burrito shop went out of business, Chase (and not BoA or Visa, importantly) takes that loss on the chin.

(This is less relevant for burritos sold in person, because proprietors very rarely drop dead after swiping cards but before handing over the burrito, but is far more relevant for more complicated business models.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm 35. I felt old talking about floppies and cassettes a few days ago. But I'm still young enough to not have known swipe cards :)

<comment><USER12> I'm mildly curious as to where you live? I thought the UK was one of the first countries to get EMV/Chip and Pin. I'm 32 and I had a swipe before a Chip and Pin card. The earliest worldwide public trials and rollouts look to be ~ 2003, that would mean you didn't have a bank account with a card until you were ~21? Is that normal where you come from? I think I had my first swipe ~16, second swipe ~18, the bank switched me to Chip and Pin roughly a year later if my memory serves... which it often doesn't ;-)

<comment><USER13> Not OP, but I'm 32, French, and I never even saw my _parents_ use a swipe card. My earliest memories of credit cards are chip and pin (and I still remember their code). Apparently this started in 1992 here, though I guess it wasn't technically "credit cards" but the national debit cards system.

<comment><USER14> "though I guess it wasn't technically "credit cards" but the national debit cards system"

Well yeah sure, but we're talking _credit cards_ here. Either way, many parts of Europe used swipe-style debit cards (with pin) until a few years ago; I'm pretty sure I used them in France too, < 10 years ago (although I can't remember for sure).

<comment><USER11> I was not trying to talk other countries down. For what it's worth you can't survive in France without a checkbook: it's the only way to pay for some transactions. Sad.

Also the debit cards we're talking about do both credit and debit. Not sure they disqualify.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Credit cards are totally unnecessary in the age of online banking. Why does it not die already?

<comment><USER16> Perhaps part of it is because it's such a heavily regulated industry that change takes a while/is hard to initiate.

<comment><USER15> Correct me if I am wrong but I thought the US already had (creditcardless) internet banking. It seems credit card inertia is hard to overcome. What is more frustrating is "trends" from the US keep washing up on our shores like a bad dream and upset any advances we have made. Case in point: Netflix India does not accept anything else other than credit cards. A similar phenomena can be observed in the healthcare industry. India is already moving towards the way (IMO) the broken US healthcare system works. It gives me nightmares. I hope the Indian government clamps down heavily on this unscrupulousness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's really more about payment cards (debit, credit) in general, not credit per se.

Where exactly does Apple Pay fit in this chain? Do they replace the card issuer or are they a new link between the acquiring bank and the issuer?

<comment><USER2> Apple Pay operates using _network tokenization_ , which is part of the EMV standard. This works in two parts.

When you add a card to Apple Pay, your device checks if the bank can use Apple Pay, and gets a _device token_ from your bank, along with some cryptographic data. The original card number your typed in is discarded; it is replaced by the device token, which looks like a credit card number. All this data is stored in the device's Secure Enclave. It's important to note that Apple does not store card data, and doesn't even take part in the transaction flow.

When you pay with Apple Pay, your device generates a _network token_. In practice, this network token is your device token, which is sent along with a cryptographic signature, the _cryptogram_ (generated using the data previously stored into the Secure Enclave). This data fits into traditional card fields (name/number/expiration date/cvv), plus an additional field for the cryptogram. The token is transmitted through the merchant to their gateway/acquirer, which sends passes it to the payment network (Visa/Mastercard). The network checks the cryptogram, does a reverse lookup of the device token and associates it with the real card number. The transaction proceeds like a normal transaction using the real card number.

[https://www.emvco.com/wp- content/uploads/documents/EMVCo_Pay...](https://www.emvco.com/wp- content/uploads/documents/EMVCo_Payment_Tokenisation_Specification_Technical_Framework_v1.0.pdf) : The official tokenization specification. Page 71 has a good diagram of the flow (the Token Service Providers are usually the networks themselves).

[https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf](https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf) : The iOS Security Guide, which has interesting information in the Apple Pay section (page 34).

IIRC, Android Pay works using the same standard, with Google storing the device tokens in the cloud and generating network tokens on the behalf of the user (not all Android devices have secure elements). May be inaccurate, I haven't had the opportunity to implement it at the payment provider level (yet!).

<comment><USER17> From what you write and from the diagram in that pdf, it's the issuer bank that creates the device token, but then it's the network that does the reverse lookup. Do both the issuer bank and the network know the mapping between device tokens and cards?

<comment><USER2> Yes. The network needs of course to map tokens back to PANs (Primary Account Numbers). Tokens are included in authorization requests to issuing banks, in addition to the actual payment details.

Also, both issuers and networks need to be able to suspend and unlink tokens in case of fraud or if the end user loses their device, which implies that they know individual device tokens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have never been in favor of credits cards myself and I tell everyone to avoid getting one as much as I can. It's just a well that keeps going deeper and pull you into more debt.

<comment><USER19> Do you think your advice generalizes though? Do you really think most people who have a credit card go into debt because of it?

<comment><USER20> The whole idea of a credit card is that you buy something by borrowing money, because you don't have the money right now. If you do have the money, use a debit card.

However, I'm not completely against debt. I think debt can be managed and healthy under the right circumstances, and as long as it's used for stuff that you need and not stuff you want. If you truly need the stuff, the time and other purchases the debt gave you (such as a student loan to get a degree for your job, or a mortgage to live close your job) will pay for themselves.

<comment><USER21> That's patently untrue as a blanket statement. I NEVER use my debit cards for purchases, only my credit cards. I pay all of my bills in full every month. I use my credit cards because I'm not risking the security of my primary checking account in online transactions, and also because I've collected ~ $2000 in rewards in the first half of this year alone by using my credit cards ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There has to be a better way.</comment>