Hacker News Reader

mikenycon USGS estimates at least 45% of U.S. tap water contain forever chemicals

These guys claim their filters are good for this: https://www.hydroviv.com/blogs/water-smarts/duke-nc-state-pf.... I use these filters, but no idea about the validity of their marketing on this.

mikenycon Ask HN: Has anyone here turned around their life in their 40s?

Hey man - Have so many feelings and thoughts in reading this. First, I'm sorry you're suffering. As an obviously articulate and educated person who is in reality fairly young, I'm 100% confident you have so much more potential than you're giving yourself credit for. Also, as you can see from all these responses, there's more compassion and empathy out there than it might feel like. It's ok to reach out to people for help. It's great that you took this step. I hope all these replies can serve as positive motivation/momentum for you!

I completely understand how deeply you feel these things, but I hope it empowers you a bit to know that I for one am 100% certain you absolutely can find love, have kids and get a job in your 40s.

You mentioned wanting to move back to the US, which could be a great medium/long term goal. If that feels like what you want, I'd consider setting this as a goal on the horizon and then working backwards from there to put together a realistic plan for how to achieve this. Otherwise, set a different med/long term goal like moving to some other location you prefer or maybe getting a certain type of job. Setting a clear goal and then planning towards it can have a remarkable impact on getting shit done. It doesn't need to be perfect. You can adjust your goal and your plan as you go. Take baby steps, and celebrate the small wins along the way.

Finally, since you have an engineering educational background, with remote work and online resources these days, my sense is that it would be so much easier than you feel to brush up your skills and start working again. The world is big and filled with quite a few CRUD apps! I don't have enough context to know what fits for you, but there are so many tutorials and online courses that walk you through practical exercises to build real stuff. Once you set a goal and put together a sketch of a plan, consider if it feels right to pick some online courses/tutorials and build some stuff to refresh your skills and give you some recent work to point employers/clients to. Some that I just happen to have seen lately: Buildspace (fun weekend coding projects), Replit has coding tutorials. I always like Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial.

I hope some of this is helpful.

mikenycon Toxins in Chocolate

I previously posted the Consumer Reports article on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34016384

This present post is from the organization that discovered the issue and fought for the industry to recognize and study it. It includes a nice searchable database of test results on the bottom of the page.

mikenycon High blood pressure cases double in 30 years

Correct, for most people. The book I quoted is by Dr Robert Lustig who is a leading voice on that point of view. He would more or less say insulin resistance is the root problem. Chronic conditions like hypertension are symptoms. The whole book is an argument in favor of curing the underlying metabolic disease with diet adjustment.

mikenycon High blood pressure cases double in 30 years

https://www.amazon.com/Metabolical-Processed-Nutrition-Moder... p. 39-42

"the kidney is very adept at excreting excess sodium. But there’s one thing that inhibits sodium excretion by the kidney—insulin resistance. High insulin levels increase blood pressure, even with relatively low sodium intake. And many people are insulin resistant—and those people do need to lower their salt as a treatment of the disease."

mikenycon Ask HN: I built it, nobody came, now what?

What you need to do is called usability and value testing.

Startup Owner's Manual by Steve Blank will show you the way: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1119690684/

mikenycon U.S. Supreme Court endorses gay, transgender worker protections

Just for background, there's nearly always a lengthy opinion explaining the reasoning in great detail. And if there's a dissent, the dissenters' reasoning is typically laid out in great detail as well, and included along with the opinion. Here's the full opinion for those interested: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/17-1618_hfci.pdf

mikenycon SoftBank expects $24B in losses from Vision Fund, WeWork and OneWeb

An amazing story of the guy who took over the banana industry, starting by buying all the "ripes" that were previously considered trash: https://www.amazon.com/Fish-That-Ate-Whale-Americas/dp/12500...

mikenycon In Its First Funding in 14 Years, 1Password Raises $200M Series A

The concern, which is fair, is that 1password's cloud is a target. And those targeting it have only one intention, which is to steal people's passwords and other information stored in the 1password cloud. In contrast, of course using the dropbox sync approach with 1password does put your information in the cloud as well. But, it's in your personal dropbox account. That dropbox account could absolutely be hacked, but very unlikely by someone with such clear intent to steal your 1password vault. Basically, 1password's cloud is the ultimate target, and your 1password vault in your personal dropbox account is not.

mikenycon Consumer startups that said no to investor money

http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

mikenycon CEO Cost Amicus $500k

Startups are hard and early stages are always messy. If the piece was journalistically motivated I'd feel differently, but as a marketing post I don't love the vibe. Just my two cents.

mikenycon CEO Cost Amicus $500k

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payroll_tax#United_States

The article is just content marketing, sensationalizing a mistake made by an extremely small, early stage startup as a marketing ploy to lead you to the conclusion you should buy this company's software to avoid a similar fate. So not surprising it's light on details. For what it's worth, startups at that stage almost never have a CFO nor any admin/accounting staff. That said, obviously it was a mistake and they should have paid their payroll taxes. But the sentiment in this piece is crafted solely to lead the reader to the conclusion that they should pay for this company's software.

mikenycon DoorDash Valuation Nearly Triples to $4B in Six Months

There are definitely exceptions, but the classic scenario is that the founders get common stock, not preferred.

mikenycon Spectrum internet is getting kicked out of New York

I'm in Brooklyn. This thread prompted me to check the Spectrum rates. I was on Time Warner Cable pre-merger, and with Spectrum just called and got a 100MB upgrade that costs me $300 less per year than I was paying. Call was easy/fast with good service. No upgrade fees, etc. And they offered me a technician appointment with a one-hour window within 24 hours. Just one experience, but clearly for this NYC consumer, I seem to be benefitting from the merger.

From Spectrum's Brooklyn rate card (link below): Spectrum Internet 200/10 = $64.99 Spectrum Internet Ultra 400/20 = $89.99 Spectrum Internet Gig = $124.99

Looks like TWC had topped out at 300MB, and they charged about $110/mo

Spectrum Brooklyn rate card: https://www.spectrum.com/browse/content/ratecard.html

Time Warner Cable Brooklyn rate card pre-merger: https://www.spectrum.com/content/dam/spectrum/residential/en...

mikenycon 31% of likely voters think US civil war likely within 5 years

To me, the interesting thing about these survey results was not that they convinced me this was actually likely to happen, but rather to contemplate that 31% of Americans (and likely voters at that) could actually believe this is likely in the next 5 years.

What does that say about the state of America? As I noted in another comment, at least somewhat it probably says people aren't very conscious of the immensity of what a US civil war means. So that speaks to civics and educational issues, which are real and relevant.

But I would just say that in a society people's feelings matter, whether rational or irrational. Irrational feelings lead to real world outcomes all the time.

So even if you think that believing this outcome is likely in the next 5 years is extremely irrational, the fact that a significant proportion of the voting population could believe this has real-world implications.

mikenycon 31% of likely voters think US civil war likely within 5 years

I agree. There is some priming in the cadence of the questions.

It's also likely that given the state of civic knowledge and education in the country that respondents conflated something like "violence" or "minor fighting with a political tinge" to "civil war" without really understanding how immense of a thing a US civil war actually would be.

But still, to me, even the idea that a much smaller percentage of Americans (let's say 15%) could imagine a civil war happening in the next 5 years was shocking on its face, and worthy of awareness and discussion.

mikenycon Nestlé Takes Majority Stake in Blue Bottle

Mike from craftcoffee.com here. I love 3rd wave style coffee but that statement from the article is very misleading. This is a common trick that 3rd wave proponents pull all the time. They conflate "3rd wave" and "specialty", as Oliver did here, and then pretend that "specialty coffee" metrics are referring to only 3rd wave coffee. In actual fact, 3rd wave != specialty coffee. In reality, 3rd wave coffee is just a tiny fraction of specialty coffee. Specialty coffee includes Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, Peet's, and many others like that. All those companies sell "specialty grade" coffee, which is a technical term that more or less means the beans score above a certain level when evaluated for defects. So when people quote the size or growth of specialty coffee, that's the pool of companies they are actually talking about. And in fact, depending on the source it's often unclear if those numbers include things like frapuccinos. There's very little data on the niche because it's so small that it doesn't make the top 25 or 30 sources of revenue or consumption in industry reports, but 3rd wave coffee certainly accounts for less than 1% of coffee consumed in the US. Blue Bottle has 25 cafes, Starbucks has 24,000.[1] Starbucks is worth $80B today. In aggregate, Blue Bottle + Stumptown + Intelligentsia + [any other locals you can think of] are likely worth less than $1B. So yeah, 3rd wave coffee is delicious and fun, but unfortunately it simply does not account for that level of consumption.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starbucks

mikenycon Juice may taste good, but unlike the fruit, it’s not healthy

We've successfully convinced our two-year-old that unsweetened, carbonated water is "juice". She frequently goes to restaurants and is very excited to get "juice" from the bar, and considers it a special treat. Eventually this will surely fail when her friends can explain reality. But until then it's working great to avoid massive loads of sugar in her early years.

mikenycon Jet.com raises $500M from Fidelity at $1B pre

That was hurting their growth so they dropped the fee. http://fortune.com/2015/10/07/online-shopping-jet-com/

mikenycon The Decline of ‘Big Soda’

Sugar-wise, the can of coke is about 70% worse.

12-oz caramel macchiato = 23 grams of sugar http://www.starbucks.com/menu/drinks/espresso/caramel-macchi...

12-oz can of coke = 39 grams of sugar http://www.coca-colaproductfacts.com/en/coca-cola-products/c...

mikenycon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2015)

Brooklyn - Backend Engineer (Ruby/Rails), Frontend Engineer, Data Scientist

Craft Coffee (YC S14) is fundamentally rethinking the $71B coffee industry. Our radical notion is that technology has enabled a customer-centered approach to coffee that was never before possible. This is why we recently rebuilt our service around what we call the Coffee DNA Project (Food & Wine called it "Pandora for coffee").

Data, technology, product and user experience are at the core of the company we're building. No coffee company in the world is set up to operate this way. But we are. Since 2011 we've built what Fortune Magazine called "the internet coffee company." We've sold millions worth of coffee to customers all over the world.

The future of Craft Coffee is based on our unique past. But it's different than what you've seen from us so far.

Learn more:

BACKEND: http://craftcoffee.theresumator.com/apply/OGeIjM/Backend-Eng...

FRONTEND: http://craftcoffee.theresumator.com/apply/CqY29m/Frontend-De...

DATA SCIENTIST: http://craftcoffee.theresumator.com/apply/ABGUTL/Data-Scient...

mikenycon Craft Coffee’s Coffee DNA Project (YC S14)

Hey. Thanks for the feedback. We really appreciate it. I think you're right about the contact info. We just want to be able to tell people when we add their request. But it should be optional. Re: the coffee list, I'm sorry that felt alienating. We do include all the most popular coffee companies in the country, but also hundreds of independents and adding more weekly. We think the service works great for any coffee drinker -- you can customize by roast, price, quantity and frequency, and our coffees all come fresh-roasted from independent roasters. So we've got you covered pretty much any way you can imagine.

mikenycon Craft Coffee’s Coffee DNA Project (YC S14)

New tagline for Craft Coffee: Way less expensive than a plane ticket to Portland! :)

mikenycon Craft Coffee’s Coffee DNA Project (YC S14)

Thanks for the feedback. There's actually an opt-out on the survey itself. Although we strongly encourage you to take the brief survey because every coffee drinker really is different, and we can only match you with coffee you'll love if you tell us a bit about yourself.

mikenycon Craft Coffee’s Coffee DNA Project (YC S14)

We do blind evaluations so it's actually not a popularity contest. You can find more info for roasters here: http://www.craftcoffee.com/partner

mikenycon Craft Coffee’s Coffee DNA Project (YC S14)

Absolutely. That's an awesome project. Our thing is about helping consumers find coffee they love.

mikenycon Craft Coffee’s Coffee DNA Project (YC S14)

Yup. We love supporting new coffee roasters. roasters at craftcoffee dot com

mikenycon Craft Coffee’s Coffee DNA Project (YC S14)

Great to hear you tried us out! The new service is vastly more personalized so we can hook you up now. :)

mikenycon Craft Coffee’s Coffee DNA Project (YC S14)

Yes, that's a small part of it. If you're currently paying $5 for a bag of coffee, you don't want a $25 super high-end bag. And vice-versa. But that's just a small part. A lot of the magic is in understanding the characteristics of the beans you like and how that relates to other beans. A lot of real science and real tech went into that side and we'll continue to pour resources into it.

mikenycon Craft Coffee’s Coffee DNA Project (YC S14)

Thanks for the kind words. Means a lot.