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I'm not sure what part you found to be pseudoscience. This technique was prescribed to me by a healthcare professional and can be found in medical journals.

And, I fully agree -- light is important. Maybe I'll add an addendum on that.


Helpful but not really necessary. For most anyone who's suffered the level of sleep difficulties described here, them having knowledge of melatonin and its effects can reasonably be assumed.

For anyone like the "Pseudoscience!..." commenter saying that melaton knowledge is, in general, sufficient alone to end said sleep problems -- that's just plain dismissive nonsense!


Melatonin has a strong influence on the circadian rhythm regulation and is nowhere to be found in the article.

If you suffer insomnia this is where you should be starting with.

PS: I suffered insomnia, spent a lot of time working through it, and got medical advice.

Prefer residences and offices with natural light, or take a walk outside around noon (wear sunscreen). There you go...

Then, amount of papers doesn't necessarily translate into scientific rigor. Since research universities adopted a "publish or perish" policy there's a deluge of junk science.

update: corrected typo


Thanks for the feedback. I'll add that to the "common wisdom" invariants to clarify that's an assumed prerequisite.

FWIW, I live in California and spent four months on the beach prior to undergoing this regimen.


This algorithmic method is a useful addition to the insomniac's toolkit. Please don't berate methodologies based on logic and then describe anecdotes with poor english (wtf is "singlest"?).


Or placebo effect, we don't know. It's self experimentation, there's no control group, no accompanying data, etc.

The perceived improvement could be due to other reasons rather than the therapy itself.

Usually you establish a relationship between the therapy and results through something like statistical significance but this was not the case.

Then, it is important to be responsible when offering health related advice to people. If you are not a healthcare professional, start saying:

1) Follow this advice at your own risk

2) I am not a healthcare professional this is a casual exploration of my sleep cycle.

I think this is more responsible than implying this followed some sort of scientific approach.

PS: rather than the ad-hominem try to add value to the discussion staying on topic.


Definitely agree that people should be responsible when offering health advice - but if you’re striking down advice that:

1) ultimately came from a professional 2) was linked to a program with a bunch of literature

You risk your “Pseudoscience!” claim becoming unfalsifiable. What would it take to be, in your eyes, Not Pseudoscience? A direct link to a paper on this exact algorithm?


Placebo effect working for sleep disorders? Kind of reminds me of trying to rigorously test psychoactive drugs.


Me too. Great, unbiased reviews are going to be even harder to come by now.


How ever did we get reviews before Amazon affiliate programs?


The implication here was that we used to have good reviews before this. I disagree. I'd gladly dump all of cnet and engadget down the drain for half of The Wirecutter.

Their win was realizing that I don't give a shit about reading about the latest tech news on new product X. I just need an in-depth review for each product category that is done by an expert, exposes the best products I can get for each part of the tradeoff spectrum, and is kept up to date as time passes by. That's all I need. So many times I've done my own research for days and came up with the same 2-3 results that they have, so I don't even bother anymore. I'll be very sad if The Wirecutter dies.


We already had a publication for that called Consumer Reports. CR goes the extra mile of not running ads in the first place. Wirecutter simply tried to eat their cake and have it too, and that cake just got a lot slimmer.


Nope nope nope. Consumer reports just doesn't get it. They're great from the consumer advocacy perspective, but again they fill their site with stuff I don't care about.

The pleasure of the wirecutter is that the decisions are made. I look for their top choice of wifi routers, then I read about why. In the off chance I disagree, I read the other entries. It explains by what aspects each other product is better or worse than their pick. Perhaps I want a cheaper one? A specific brand? More range? Done in under ten minutes.

I realize everyone is different, but what I love about the Wirecutter is that I don't want to waste my free time reading expert product reviews and comparing specs, and CR encourages exactly that. Any minor benefit from having that information exposed really gets drowned out by my frustration.


I'd never heard of wirecutter before. Every 6-12 months I (or a family member) will want to make some kind of largeish purchase, and I go hunting for reviews and try to figure it out on my own. I think this site is going to save me a lot of time and headaches.


The UK has something like that as well, Which (which.co.uk). Costs about £10/mo and is entirely subscriber-funded.



Consumer Reports is really a different sweet spot though. I haven't subscribed for a long time and use them very little but I was always a lot less impressed with them for many types of consumer electronics than I was for large household appliances or cars.


CR is great but there are whole categories of products they do not address at all. Also, since they have no ads, it's a relatively expensive subscription.


News organizations and magazine publishers paid for them with advertising and subscription revenue.


Unbiased.

Only if the item is sold by Amazon (or a competitor with commission), otherwise the item won't be reviewed or discussed at all.


Well to be fair they also sell an immense amount of products, it's not like they are limited to in-house brands. You could spend many lifetimes reviewing just one product category on Amazon.


That's provably false since Wirecutter sometimes links to other sites with (AFAIK) no commission for the top product.


If it is provably false then prove it. I just looked at Wirecutter and all I see are commission based sites for top products, I am at ten pages and counting.



You know what? This dude has had like 40 laptops or something... he is probably the least qualified person to tell me what to buy. I don't want someone who hasn't had to deal with the computer for the long haul. I mean, shit... I can go to Bestbuy and set-up a camera and do the same shit review. I can form an opinion based on 10 minutes with the laptop, then copypasta the other reviews of that particular piece and move on to the next one.

Then 6 months from now after I've reviewed dozens of different laptops for the same amount of bullshit time, do it again with the old reviews... rinse, repeat. No day to day needed... just go over it once for a few hours, make some bullshit recommendation, then call it a day. Bullshit.


Both Apple and Dell are affiliate program links.


Not unbiased.

I have seen products which are not superior quality but are ranked as #1. Generally best are third or below ranked products.


You are right... these rankings are as manipulated as the S&P with HFT. The FBA'ers use clever marketing, pay per click and paid reviews to get ranked higher. Has ZERO to do with quality.


if by "ranked as #1" you mean on amazon's pages, then that is unrelated to this change. this change is for amazon affiliates (or using amazon's terminology, 'associates') who promote or review products on third-party websites.


Can I suggest you edit your title? I thought someone on our team had written this but, in this context, "lessons learned" is kind of misleading.


Could you share what your lessons learned were? That would be a very interesting perspective. Do you disagree with some of the points?


We did have many technical challenges (as would be expected, really) but that wasn't why it ultimately went away.


This is wildly wrong.


Baseless conjecture shot down immediately by someone intimately involved with the project is truly something beautiful to behold.

Are you at liberty to discuss the actual reasons and shed a bit more light on why things went down the way they did?

Side note, your product was unbelievably popular at my university. Parse made getting a functional DB up and running for courses and side projects completely painless and a no-brainer for tight deadlines and PoCs.


I just want to say thank you to the HN community. We learned a lot in engaging with folks here over the years.


Hi Ilya, You've really done a nice job with this transition, so rare to see people caring for their users until the end and keeping their word.

I am curious if you've ever looked at PostgREST, i think i've seen Tikhon among ppl who starred it on github. Any comment on it? Thanks


It just really depends on whether the scale/revenue of the acquired is immediately and clearly accretive to the acquirer. WhatsApp and Waze were pretty far along that path (and their prices reflected it!). Younger companies are more vulnerable.


lichess.org and the corresponding open source project[1] are really quite something. If you're at all interested in chess or code, I recommend following it -- their great execution will inspire you.

[1] https://github.com/ornicar/lila


This may sound naive, but what are the incentives and/or how are the developers of Lichess making a profit. The site is one of the best executed webapps I've ever used. What motivates the creators?


Thibault simply wants to deliver the best online chess experience. Period.

It's purely donation driven and he pulls a small salary from whatever's leftover after buying enough servers to keep the site up.



I'm supprised that they get $47 mn in donations. Rarely see the patron icon when I play.


$47k, not million. Amounts in that spreadsheet aren't in thousands.


Apologies, thanks for clarifying


mn?


Has the site been around for long? I've never heard of it but it looks like a large-ish community.


It was launched in 2016, with a much simpler interface (no accounts iirc), which evolved a lot to come to this day.

Its source code is also really interesting, it makes me want to learn Scala.


> It was launched in 2016

It's been around at least as far back as 2010. Here is a 6 year old HN submission about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1927188


Yeah, I borrowed some css for a chess board from it for a (never published) project I was working around 2010 or perhaps slightly earlier!


I should reread my posts before sending, this was a mixup between "6 years old" and the launch year. Thanks for the correction.


For those of you well versed in Ubiquiti, what's the recommended approach to connecting two switches that don't have wired backhaul between them? Right now I am using two consumer ASUS routers and one is in "wireless bridge" mode. I don't think the Ubiquiti access points support that model. So what's recommended? The distance between is fairly small but with many walls in between.


The Unifi access points are capable of wireless uplinks, but performance isn't going to be anywhere near as good as running some network cable. Otherwise as other people have commented you're looking at some of their ISP grade wireless network gear but that's probably overkill for the distances in question, its more designed to provide wireless ISP services across several kilometres than a bridge up the hallway.


Depends how much bandwidth you need and what the distance is. A pair of Unifi Nanostations (available in 2.4Ghz, 5Ghz, 900Mhz models), will give you 100Mbit, a pair of Nanobeams will give you up to 450Mbit.

I use a single Nanostation 5Ghz out on the front porch to bridge back to my Unifi Wifi node


I need as much bandwidth as I can get over a pretty short distance -- let's say 30 feet. I'm bridging two closets at opposite ends of a hallway. One closet has the WAN connection. The other closet has a bunch of hard wire gear (NAS, home theater, etc).


You could use a pair of airfiber stations to get over 1 Gbit/sec. But they are not cheap. You'd probably be better off finding a way to run fiber (or even cat5) to get 10 gigabit.


Well my current solution works fine. I have an AC87 in each closet. The one with the gear runs in "wireless bridge" mode. I'm attracted to the prosumer Unifi stuff but there doesn't seem to be a simple solution to bridging. The airFiber units in our hallway is a little too much. And there's no easy way to run cat5.


Its hard to get simpler or cheaper than a pair of $60 Nanobeams that will give you 400+ mbit of performance and the integrated 16dBi antennas will help reduce interference from other devices. Ubiquiti also has a Litebeam with a 23dBi antenna that's even cheaper - $49... I don't have any experience with those, but I assume they would work just as well (but proper aiming would be a little more critical with the higher gain antenna)

If your existing routers live in the closets, the Nanobeams can too, you just need to aim them at each other.


Maybe their mesh product line would be of help?


I've had bad experiences with other mesh products (Eero, namely) but perhaps.


Oh -- I'm curious. I just bought a set of Eeros. So far they've made a big improvement (old house, thick walls, etc.). What problems did you have with them?


I found them to be slower than my ASUS AC87 in good coverage areas. Improving areas with spotty coverage was nice but outweighed by the speed hit.


Do they hold the rights to recounting what happened play-by-play without using any images or media from the event? That seems more comparable here.


They certainly claim to. The NFL loudly proclaims that "Any other use of this telecast or of any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game without the NFL's consent, is prohibited."


I have a feeling that if they ever tried to prosecute the accounts part of warning they would lose miserable. Imagine them trying to argue that a person describing a game they'd seen to a friend required their consent. Maybe it would fly, IANAL, but that seems insane to me.


I can claim anything I want, it doesn't make it legally enforceable


I hereby prohibit you from commenting on Hacker News unless you send me $10 every time you access the front page.


No idea why you are being downvoted. Regardless of whether it's actually enforceable, this threat is definitely aired during every NFL game. MLB too: "This copyrighted telecast is presented by authority of the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball. It may not be reproduced or retransmitted in any form, and the accounts and descriptions of this game may not be disseminated without express written consent."


Sorry, I turned on my TV 1 minute after that was displayed.

This issue is called "contract formation", and any HN reader who's shipped licensed software or had a website with terms of service should be aware that showing something that a user may or may not have seen is the worst possible way to try to form a contract. That's why creating an account on almost all websites has a checkbox that the user has to check, with text that you're agreeing to certain terms.


I'd prefer to make a more forceful case that there are limits to contracts, and not to rely on the technicality of people saw the note, or if "a meeting of minds" actually happened.

What if the note is also in the actual contract that has my signature? Is the content of such contracts limited in any way?

I mean – it must be. I can easily get any number of people to sign contracts that include a right for me to their firstborn child.

Whatever legal doctrine courts would use to strike down such a provision should also apply to, for example, people waving their right to sue, to freely discuss the content of broadcasts, to rate the product/service being purchased etc.


Yup, I think you're looking for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscionability


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