regal

I'm surprised at the incivility this comment's provoked in several of the respondents here. My guess is that those who are responding with hackles up and swords raised are misinterpreting the terms "supertaster" and "nontaster" and feeling slighted / offended… which really does nothing but show they've missed the point.

This is not some kind of hierarchy. A "supertaster" (25% of the population; NOT a rarity, for people talking about "claims" as if I said I helmed one of the Fortune 50 or could see through walls) is not superior to someone with a normal amount and distribution of tastebuds in his mouth or someone with a lower than normal amount. He does not have an exquisite palate, and he doesn't have naturally better "taste" than others. In fact, it makes your "taste" far worse: coffee, vegetables, fruit, fish, and the majority of fine dining options are all but unpalatable.

As for people accusing me of liking Hershey's milk chocolate itself - I don't like Hershey's chocolate bars or kisses. Never did. We're talking about the difference between two kinds of Kit Kat bars here, not all of Hershey's vs. all of some other chocolate brand.

My comment was a counter example to the article. The author made a very subjective post - which is fine - but then went on to argue that Hershey is clearly engaged in some sort of conspiracy to deny people delicious Kit Kats, which is not fine unless everyone shares his opinion that the alternative to the Kit Kat Hershey makes is more delicious… and not everyone does. My response could go one of two ways:

1. I could be angry and emotional (as some of my respondents were here), and call the guy a clown and an incompetent, and argue that he's all wrong because Hershey's Kit Kat is fine just the way it is, or

2. I could sit and see if I could come up with a possible reason why two people, one who's "accustomed" to Kit Kat in the United States, and the other, who also grew up accustomed to eating Kit Kat in the United States, had such different reactions on consuming Kit Kat outside the United States. Based on the author's description of his experience eating Kit Kat, which focused entirely on mouthfeel, he seemed to be judging "taste" by texture, which is what taste is to a nontaster.

To those who resorted to insults because their feelings were hurt, next time, before you break out your pitchfork, sit down for a moment and see if you can reason out the (non-emotional) difference between you and an article or comment author, rather than turning to insults, which are entirely unproductive and make you look like someone crying in his milk.

Your argument is that because I don't realize that some other brand of chocolate is superior to Hershey's chocolate, I'm not a supertaster?

Please read the Wikipedia article, or any research on, what a supertaster is. It is not a "person with more distinguished tastes", since these are wholly subjective and cultural constructs. Just as you believe in your own superiority for preferring Swiss chocolate over American chocolate (might you have refined taste in wine as well? [1]), a Chinese citizen no doubt realizes how superior his tastes are to yours for preferring his largely sugar-free chocolate to your (in his eyes) sickeningly sweet, additive-laden, and clearly unrefined dessert of choice.

And if your argument is that Hershey must certainly be producing what it produces in order to "take advantage of lax standards", you've much to learn about the nature of big business. Visit Asia some time, and you'll notice quite quickly how American chain Pizza Hut, which has adapted to the tastes of the locals by changing its recipes and producing all manner of pizzas largely unappealing to Americans but very appealing to Asians, is rapidly outcompeting other American chain Papa John's, which has stuck with its original American recipe, remaining tasty to Americans... but not so tasty to most Asians. Branded food businesses win by serving the market, not by cranking out crappy tasting morsels that cost less to produce. Those that go the latter route fail in their respective markets.

If Hershey is producing what it's producing to "take advantage of lax standards" and not because it's what the market wants, then the American chocolate industry is wide open for someone more willing to produce in line with what Americans want - and with a market as large as the dessert market in a nation of obese individuals, that'd be a pretty tempting niche to fill (maybe Nestle could do the job?). Yet, unless you can point to tremendously high barriers to entry keeping new entrants from the market, or somehow forcing Americans to buy Hershey instead of some of Dove, Nestle, Ferrero Rocher, etc., your premise seems flawed; the far simpler solution is simply that Hershey is winning the chocolate race in America not because it's skirting the rules, but because it's producing what its (so obviously unrefined) customers all want.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-tas...

I agree, the Kit Kats outside of the U.S. are quite different from their U.S. counterparts. Although, to me, the taste of the Nestle-manufactured non-U.S. Kit Kat bars are far inferior to the Hershey-manufactured U.S. Kit Kat bars I grew up with. This might be down to the difference between those of us who are supertasters and are most focused on flavor, and those of us who are nontasters and are most focused on texture [1] . I notice that the author's points of contention revolve predominantly around texture, not flavor (chocolate heaven for him is "so rich, so smooth, so crunchy"), whereas when I think about the differences in the Kit Kats, my brain is entirely focused on taste and could care less about texture.

Being long-term situated outside the U.S., I frequently find myself wishing the Hershey-made Kit Kat bars were available to buy up and take to the movies here, but instead end up passing over the comparatively less appealing Nestle version and purchasing M&Ms, which mostly taste the same the world over (though I haven't had them in Hong Kong), instead.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supertaster

When you're trying to use Google Apps for business, for one, and you go to email.MyURL.com and get redirected to a standard Google login screen where you now have to click a button to not sign in as your personal account, then come back and sign in as a business account, plus also add the "@MyURL.com" at the end (didn't used to have to do this), and you're doing that with multiple different accounts, it gets pretty tricky pretty in a hurry.

Of course many Americans number in the 3.5 billion most poor people on earth.

Source?

The actual data on this appears likely to refute your claim:

Yes, that’s right: America’s poorest are, as a group, about as rich as India’s richest. [1]

That's at least the better part of a billion right there America's poor are wealthier than in India. According to the graph in the article, America's poorest are also wealthier than nearly all of China (1.3 billion officially, 1.5 billion unofficially), and 2/3 of Brazil. Not including the rest of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe.

[1] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-t...

Am I the only one who spends 16 hours in front of a computer (mostly) working 6 days a week, managing staff exclusively through email and oDesk, and loves it? Maybe it's because I view the entrepreneurship stage as the filling between two sides of the cookie sandwich, with tons of partying, debauchery, and socialization in the years before I got into it, and tons of it on the other side once the damn thing's finally making enough money to hire a real management team to watch the stables for a while, while I go out and take a years-in-the-making vacation to end all vacations... then come back and get to work until I don't feel like working on business anymore.

I also don't use Facebook, Twitter, or anything else along those lines... if you want to reach me, you can email me, and I'll respond when I check email once every few days, or if you're one of the very few people who has access to my phone, you can call or text me and we can chat or grab dinner. No cyberstalking or hours lost to staring at social media inanity wondering why I'm not a part of all the pretend-excitement people portray themselves as engaging in for me. Wonder if this vicarious living through people's puffed up social lives on social media isn't a big part of why the author feels so left out.

Facebook may be targeting more traditional big brand advertisers than it is small business advertisers (who need ads to convert to sales in a much tighter window). e.g., the Coca-Cola commercial you see on TV probably doesn't make a single person get up out of his chair, go grab his car keys, and drive to the store and buy a Coke. Yet, over time, get exposed to enough of those ads, and when it's time to buy, your hand instinctively goes for the one your brain is bombarded with ads for all day.

Then again, Facebook ads give advertisers much less of an "in your face, brainwashing you against your will" impact than TV commercials do.

This might just be a case of a revenue model that simply doesn't fit the platform. It may be that Facebook is going to have to figure out another way to justify its high P/E ratio.

I've been using Stripe for just over a year now to take payments for a 6-figure-a-year business. We've had no reversals whatsoever. The only time Stripe has removed payments have been in the case of the occasional chargeback, which we typically win; payments seem to get docked the moment you file your response to the dispute, and get credited back the moment you're notified the dispute has been won.

I was a little nervous when first setting up with Stripe too, so we enabled it for a few hours and let a few sales go through, then switched back to our old merchant account and payment gateway while we waited to make absolutely sure the sales went through with Stripe. 7 days later, the payments hit our bank account, and we switched everything over to them - been happy ever since. They have a great dashboard, and everything's far easier to deal with and manage than it was with our old merchant account. Only downside is the pay delay - merchant account deposited most funds in our accounts within 2 days; Stripe takes 7. But if you're doing pretty consistent numbers, this isn't too much of a burden to cash flow, since you've got the funds from a week ago coming in every day.

Part of the reason we’re at the top of the food chain is that we are chemically rewarded when we are industrious – it is evolutionarily advantageous to be productive.

And we’re slowly and deviously being trained to forget this.

Good article, yet the author seems to be making the same mistake so many make - to assume that our present generations are being eroded away and forgetting how to be productive because the masses are hypnotized by social media and news on demand.

If you stop for a minute and look at what's being spread via social media and TV/Internet news, you quickly realize it's the exact same things that hunter-gatherers probably spend 99% of their downtime gossiping about too: this person said that thing; this guy slept with that girl; this guy has so many resources and isn't that so unfair to the rest of us; the guys in charge of tribal society have secretly been spying on all of us, isn't that scary... social media and online news isn't changing anything more than the mediums we gossip through and making said gossip more permanent and apparent and less ephemeral and transitory than it's previously been. But just because it's still there doesn't mean people are spending much time obsessing over the gossips of yesterday; just like those in tribal societies, the news of yesterday is quickly forgotten, and soon supplanted by the urgent, pressing news of TODAY.

I'm pretty sure in Archimedes's or Newton's days most people weren't sitting around removed from society on their parents' farms inventing calculus, or holed up in towers devising calculating machines and giant ship incendiary weapons... rather, they were going to the county dance, swilling home-brewed beer with the neighbors, and gossiping about the same things we gossip about today: wasn't it scandalous how Ellyn was behaving with the men at the dance? Isn't it a crime how much the poor are taxed by the local lord, while he lives in luxury? How unfair it is that the law applies so unevenly between peasant and lord! Can you believe that Brom and Beatrix are fighting again?

Despite the very long period of leisure that medieval peasants had during wintertime, not a whole lot of scientific or technological progress came out of the peasantry. While I agree there's little more satisfying than building something yourself, I'd differ with the article in suggesting that the masses of people today are in fact no different than the masses of people of times past - a minority produces new things, while the majority handles the day-to-day of maintaining what we've already got, and spends its leisure time consuming the output of those producers who've successfully managed to produce things others want and/or things useful to those others.

The bigger outrage in smart phones is the fact that Android exists in the first place - thanks to a little industrial espionage on Apple's board. [1]

I know where my wallet voting's going.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/robenderle/2011/11/11/you-the-ju...

Much as I'd like to see some kind of "tidal wave of people doing this", purely in the interests of sending a message to somebody somewhere that data sniffing = not cool, I don't personally know anyone who's taken the time or energy to move all his data off of bugged U.S. servers onto bugged European or Asian ones or attempted to host it himself in less-efficient email clients, etc., nor plans to, nor do I hear very many people online talking about doing this, nor planning to, nor have I done this myself, nor do I plan to.

There's a lot of pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth going on right now in the blogosphere, but strikingly few people actually doing anything, and the actual movement looks more like a tiny ripple in an otherwise calm tide pool than it does a 100-story wave.

I suspect that until better, easier-to-use services come along than the ones being skewered in this post, most people are simply going to stay right where they are.

And once those services do come along, and attract a large enough user base, I'm pretty certain they will in turn attract agencies like the NSA (or whatever the local government equivalent may be, if not in the U.S.), showing up with hands out and secret court orders up.

If privacy was paramount to people, no one would be on Facebook (I'm certainly not, and haven't been for years). Yet, Facebook, much as everyone constantly complains about its blatant disregard for users' privacy, seems to be doing just fine, with its billion or so users and its $80 billion valuation.

The Internet is living, breathing, functioning proof that, at least to 99.9999% of human beings, utility > privacy. Unless the U.S. government starts skimming off the top of people's bank accounts, I don't think there's going to be much of a mass exodus any time soon - the motivation simply isn't there.

My guess is that these cases are dysfunctions with aspects of the growth / maturation process, rather than outright stoppage of aging. If you look up images of Nicky Freeman, the 40-year-old referenced in the article who "looks like a 10-year-old", he in fact looks more like a 40-year-old with the size and stature of a 10-year-old:

https://www.google.com/search?q="Nicky+Freeman"&um=1&ie=UTF-...

The site appears to have Google Analytics placed multiple times into its source code. This messes up tracking and artificially dramatically drops bounce rates.

In my experience working with content sites, the real bounce rate reduction you see in moving from shorter articles to longer ones is closer to 5% or so - from, say, 77% to 72%. Still dramatic, but not nearly as dramatic as the drop you'll get by double-inserting GA code.

Very often, the marriages where partners never considered nor discussed potential exit strategies should things not work out are the very same ones that, just like with the business partnerships where this is neglected, end up taking messy detours through the legal system on the way out.

I'll chime in here and say that reading this article sounded exactly like reading about my own 3 previous (failed) partnerships.

My sole successful venture has been solo all along (not including employees), and has outlasted the rises and falls of the other businesses (during the amateur entrepreneur "too many fingers in too many pies" phase). I don't think I'd do a partnership again. But maybe I just don't play well with others?

Anyway, can't speak for the OP, but when intelligent, ambitious friends around you see that you work your tail off and already have succeeded at building a profitable business from scratch, they suddenly get really excited about starting new businesses with you that often sound great. At least in my experience though, many of these people turn out to see themselves as "the visionary" who kinda sorta checks in from time to time and you as "the worker," which, if that isn't the role you're interested in, causes things to unravel rather fast.

Worth noting that teleportation also necessitates the destruction of your previous "you" along with creation of a duplicate "you." Even if it was workable without the massive amounts of time or energy stated in the article, there'd be some obvious ethical dilemmas - the process kills original you in the process of copying and recreating original you.

Interestingly, in the long run this probably doesn't "matter" for anyone else or even your role in the universe, because there's still a perfect copy of you doing exactly what you would have done, so it's like you didn't die. But you did still die... and dying is rather scary for most people.

She said: "While I'm pleased they're listening, it's taken Twitter a week to come up with this.

"Twitter's 'report abuse' button on the iPhone application goes through to the old reporting form. What we're looking for is an overhaul of the system which sits behind the button.

"The current process is lengthy, complicated and impossible to use if you're under sustained attack like I have been.

"Right now, all the emphasis is on the victim, often under intense pressure, to report rather than for Twitter to track down the perpetrator and stop them."

-----------------

Two thoughts:

One, the expectations here for the turnaround time for Twitter to add new functionality to its system seem to be somewhat unrealistic.

Two, perhaps Twitter wants users reporting abuse to fill out a form (perhaps they could make it shorter if it's overly lengthy) as a filter to make sure only real abuse cases are filed, as opposed to, say, a system where anyone who doesn't like a Tweet clicks an abuse button, and that Tweet is immediately censored, or one in which Twitter hires a team of 50 outsourcers to manually sort through tens of thousands of daily abuse claims.

Perhaps we should have a separate section or tab on here for political news if it's very important to some people.

I, for one, like HN because it doesn't have all the usual political news nonsense that mainstream news has. The privacy debate is great and all, but it doesn't substantially help my or anyone's lives on here. In 400 years, it's not going to matter whether the NSA read your emails or didn't read your emails. And realistically, reading another article about Edward Snowden impersonating Tom Hanks in a Russian airport terminal isn't going to push the meter toward or away greater privacy an ounce.

However, if you find informative, non-buried-under-political-stuff articles on HN that contribute to you building your business empire that changes the world for the better a little bit... that probably will still matter in 400 years.

You mean no one really objects to people drinking enough to make bad decisions with one another, then hating themselves for it so much that they... proceed to go out again and get drunk again and make bad decisions with one another again, and do it over and over and over again?

You might almost think people like sex and alcohol from all this insanity. Next thing you know, they'll be opening up establishments where men and women go to get drunk and pick each other for sloppy drunk scores. That'll be the day...

This one appears to have lived and died as a prototype. Any mention of it after this article has only referenced what original information and images are available on the prototyper's 2010 site. [1]

Fab@Home seems to be closer to digitally printing food, though it doesn't seem like any time soon: "Lipton thinks that fabricating a dish of steak and potatoes from scratch is still 15 to 20 years or more in the future." [2]

[1] http://www.cmarcelo.com/cornucopia/

[2] http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/2013/03/19/3d-printing-ta...

Lower prices (and hence, profits) don't just save on taxes monies - they also drive out the competition, expanding Amazon's footprint in the marketplace.

Growth first, money later.

Ever consider setting up a freelancing profile on oDesk or Guru or wherever, and getting paid to do interesting, challenging, different kinds of work of your own selection (more or less)?

I think the most important thing is transparency and correct expectations. If they set clear expectations, and they are transparent about how well they are meeting them, then it just comes down to delivery.

Agreed. So long as a customer knows what he/she's signing up for, and gets that, everything's fine. I might have misread what the "99.99% uptime guarantee" was supposed to be for and gotten too excited about it / taken it too seriously when I first signed up, or maybe this is for something else that's too complicated for a part-time tech guy like me to understand.

When I'd log in when the site was down, half the time CloudFlare would have the green arrow next to the site with a "Site Online" type indicator; other times it'd have the brown dot-dot-dot "Site Offline" indicator. I'd confirm numbers on this but apparently the service doesn't save this or makes it no longer available to you on account termination. Pingdom Tools would report the site as down, and when visiting the site, it wouldn't load, or would take 10+ seconds to load. There would also frequently be a "This website is offline; no cached version is available" page from CloudFlare when trying to load the site, even on the homepage, despite the guarantee to supposedly be saving and serving cached copies of the site in the event of downtime (and despite that being what I thought we were paying for, mainly) - sometimes those cached copies would show up too; though more often, there'd just be this page:

http://image2.romantika.name/2013/01/cloudflare-website-offl...

They very nicely informed our team that they just didn't seem to have enough work for all the contractors, and I was one of the contractors they just didn't seem to have enough work for, so I was off the project, one year + 7 or 8 months after I'd stopped doing any real work.

Lucky thing, too... my teammate on our initial assignment there is still on that same contract, 6 years later... getting annual raises and the odd promotion here and there.. still doing nothing. He still gets that panicky look in his eyes and starts rambling on nonsensically when you ask him what exactly he does there. He was a lot better at pretending to be busy than I was, and wasn't as gung-ho about wanting to be let go if they couldn't find anything useful or challenging for him to do than I was.

Took a year for my productivity levels to bounce back after leaving that project. Was just really hard to do any work for a while... 2 years of nothing makes you quite lethargic being used to napping and web-surfing all day. Took me all day to answer the 1 email or so I'd get in the morning. Most productive things I did then were read classic literature and hone my chess skills against the computer. I play a mean game of chess vs. computer these days because of my time with the DoD.

Had the opposite experience - no change in loading speeds when our ~600K visitor / month site switched to CloudFlare in March of this year, but we soon started experiencing long website downtimes where our server was running fine but CloudFlare was not serving our site, despite paying $200 a month for "always online", which the site clearly was not. All IPs were whitelisted with our host and everything else CloudFlare recommended; all CloudFlare would do was examine the site after it had come back online (following hours of downtime) and say, "Everything looks fine to us!"

We finally left, after months of this, and have had no problems with downtime since. I really wanted CloudFlare to work - I was really excited about it when I signed us up. But at least for a bigger site with heavier traffic that relies on being up as much as possible, I can't say I'd recommend it until it straightens out its downtime issues (especially when paying for "always online").

This reminds me of my two years working for the U.S. Defense Department as a contractor. For a few months I worked with one of the highest ranking individuals in the building, I did a great job and finished much faster than they expected... and then after that there was no work to do, no matter who I asked, and all I could do was come in late, leave early, lift weights in the building gym, and pretend to work. No one really knew what I did.

The only thing that doomed me was when I eventually found myself unable to keep from falling asleep and snoring in meetings. Tried everything I could think of... chewing gum, drinking water, screaming inside my head. No use; the dozing and snoring in plain view of everyone else continued. I think that clued them off that something was amiss, and I started being told I didn't need to come to meetings anymore... and was gone a few months after that.

Ernest Becker's 1974 Pulitzer Prize winner would agree with you [1]; in fact, the theory goes so far as to state that all of human culture is designed around avoidance of death, and even avoidance of the acceptance of the reality of true, complete death.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denial_of_Death

Agreed. I'm 30 years old and I can still visualize everything about my grade school schoolyard from a "bird's eye view" quite easily (can even do this with the apartment I moved out of and never saw again after 3.5 years old, and the grounds outside it) - never been accused of having photographic memory.

The author seems to be discussing more a "very good" memory mixed with a fixation on the past - e.g., feeling hurt that others don't remember what you remember means the past has some special importance for him/her. I recall plenty of things that happen that other people soon forget, but it never bothers me. I realized as a child I had to pretend to forget things, otherwise people would think it was bizarre I remembered so much about them that they'd forgotten ever telling me.

As I've gotten older and had less free time to think / worked crazier hours and ruminated on people and the past less, this tendency to remember lots of small details has receded (though still much stronger than other people's I meet). I'm pretty sure if I started thinking about the past often enough again though, it'd make a quick return to being as proficient at recalling numerous tiny details from the deep past as it was before.

I like how you say "tin-foil hat aside", then go on to state with what seems to be complete seriousness that 9/11 was carried out by the U.S. against the U.S. using drone-controlled passenger airplanes.

Bringing in a "good talker" with exciting-sounding business ideas and great-looking credentials, then trusting him to run the show - often in ways against my better judgment - killed one of my businesses and nearly killed another. I had to wrest back control of that one, spent a lot of money on a legal fight against this individual, and slowly rebuild what was lost to save it.

In fact, if you're going to bring anyone in, bring in someone who tells you he needs time to get to know your business and work with you closely before he tries to start making any big changes. The guy who wants to jump into action on Day 1 is often someone who's going to have you quit dancing with the date who brought you to the dance to start chasing after bright shiny objects - many of which end up only being fool's gold - instead.