Ruby Demystified: and vs. && - <AUTHOR> http://blog.tinfoilsecurity.com/ruby-demystified-and-vs

<comment><USER2> Not to start a language war, but this blog post demonstrates two things Python got right that Ruby got wrong.

First, in Python, there's only one way to express a boolean "and". The && operator is left out.

Second, this post demonstrates a danger of allowing assignment via '=' evaluate to an expression (granted with less weird precedence rules it wouldn't turn out as bad in this case).

<comment><USER3> Not to acknowledge we are at war, but allow me to react to your act of war.

This article demonstrates one thing that Ruby does awesomely, and python does not at all. Wether that makes Ruby better than Python.. well yes it does, no point in being diplomatic now, we're at war!

In Ruby there is only one way to express a boolean and, it goes: &&. Besides the boolean and there is also a binary operator with the name `and` which evaluates its left child, _and_ when it is true returns the value of its right child.

In this way it mimics the way we build sentences, that's smart. That's intuitive. That's Ruby.

<comment><USER4> "which evaluates its left child, _and_ when it is true returns the value of its right child"

I like the way you put that. I always stumble for a moment when asked to explain why using "and" and "&&" interchangeably is not a good idea because it can lead to subtle bugs in your program. Maybe a mnemonic would help to remember this more easily.

        left && right is true or false, but
        left and right is right when true

or something along those lines.

<comment><USER5> That seems more confusing, since they evaluate to the same thing.

        1.9.3p392 :001 > true && 1
         => 1
        1.9.3p392 :002 > true and 1
         => 1
        1.9.3p392 :003 > false && 1
         => false
        1.9.3p392 :004 > false and 1
         => false
        1.9.3p392 :005 > nil && 1
         => nil
        1.9.3p392 :006 > nil and 1
         => nil

Which is why explicitly checking for "true" or "false" in a conditional is unusual.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is basically the author finding out something in Ruby that was copied from Perl. E.g. it allows one to do:

      $fh = open() or die("File did not open")

Instead of:

      $fh = open()
      die("File did not open") unless $fh

<comment><USER7> What's wrong with

        $fh = open() || die("File did not open")

? The only difference is that the results of `die` are assigned to `$fh`, but I don't think `die` even returns. It still short-circuits.

<comment><USER8> Nothing is wrong with that. However the actual Perl _open()_ would be like this...

      open my $fh, '<', 'file.txt'  or die "file.txt not found";

      open(my $fh, '<', 'file.txt') || die 'file.txt not found';

Above two lines are equivalent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9>
      and and or are control-flow modifiers like if and unless.

<http://devblog.avdi.org/2010/08/02/using-and-and-or-in-ruby/>

</comment><comment><USER10> tldr: && has higher operator precedence than "and"

Significantly, "&&" > "=" > "and", which can lead to unintended results when refactoring "&&" --> "and"

<comment><USER11> I.E.: why you should _always_ use && instead of "and".

<comment><USER12> So why have both?

<comment><USER13> Read the article.

<comment><USER12> I did. And I still don't see why you'd have both.

It seems like a landmine for someone learning the language and a place for bugs to creep in to code.

Pick one and go with it. The extra expressiveness or whatever a ruby person would call it, that comes from the alternate forms just doesn't seem worth it.

<comment><USER13> > Pick one and go with it.

They did. It's `&&` and `||`.

I understand your point when it comes to it being a potential landmine, and honestly I never use them myself. But I've never seen any ruby guides or docs use `and` instead of `&&`, and I _have_ seen skilled rubyists make great (and correct) use of `and`.

<comment><USER12> > They did. It's `&&` and `||`.

I assume you mean idiomatically chosen, since clearly the decision wasn't made at the language level.

> I have seen skilled rubyists make great (and correct) use of `and`.

I'm obviously not a ruby programmer, so it doesn't matter much to me, but it seems odd to argue that having a largely disused second set of logical operators in a language that skilled people periodically trot out for some cases is anything but a design wart. Maybe it's a cultural thing in the ruby world.

And, honestly, I don't mean that to sound snide or slighting. It's just odd to me.

<comment><USER14> I never understood what Perl (and now Ruby) has against if statements.

      foo or do_something()

is exactly the same as

      if foo {
          do_something()
      }

Except the latter is WAY less likely to be accidentally misread.... and don't even get me started on

      do_something() unless foo

<comment><USER13> It's all just a matter of taste and preference. If you find yourself consistently misreading commonplace ruby, maybe ruby isn't for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Makes for an interesting blog post, I guess. But precedence for "&&" and "||" in Ruby are similar to precedence for "&&" and "||" in C, Java and others, and they are similar to precedence rules for "and" and "or" in Python. Precedence rules for "and" and "or" in Ruby are an anomaly not just in the Ruby world but in many (most?) mainstream languages.

<comment><USER16> "In many (most?) mainstream languages" doesn't really agree with "anomaly". If it's in most mainstream languages, then it's not an anomaly, it's the norm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think I may be the last person who still thinks "and/or" are just fine for boolean expressions in Ruby.

It is true that "and/or" are not equivalent to "&&/||". But I don't find any of the arguments that we should then avoid "and/or" in favor of "&&/||" convincing.

<comment><USER17> Yup. They're like any other tool. If you're not sure how to use and/or, then don't use them. Or, better yet, study up. Programming can benefit from nuance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Operator precedence (and && vs. and with different precedence) has been around since forever - this particular one since Perl was a fresh and novel thing at least. If it's a mystery that needs "demystifying" for somebody, it's time to hit the books.

</comment><comment><USER18> Seeing "and" or "or" in Ruby code now leaps out at me with danger signs. I've decided it's just not worth it.

<comment><USER19> I've never actually seen "and" or "or" in Ruby code. I very frequently see it in Perl code.

<comment><USER20> I see it fairly often in Rails controllers, e.g.

render :action => "some_action" and return

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > _When I first started learning Ruby, I was excited to discover that Ruby has > the keywords and and or as boolean operators. I quickly got into the habit > of writing all of my boolean statements with these, instead of the more > conventional && and ||, because my code became so much readable_

         pry(main)> a = true && false

         pry(main)> a = true and false

Hmm...I dunno, I don't think the latter is necessarily easier to read than the former. The use of the symbols helps, for me at least, to delineate between value/variables and operators. Those symbols aren't pretty but their ugliness can serve a purpose.

I don't mind using them in SQL, but only because SQL is case-insensitive and I can stick to the style of making all syntax uppercase.

<comment><USER3> This article isn't about replacing symbols with words, ruby isn't about replacing symbols with words either, and there is no place in the article where the author states that

        a = true and false

is prettier than

        a = true && false

And if you would actually have read the article and paid close attention you would have learned that the two lines you just said are not functionally equivalent.

No ruby programmer would ever have a line that says

        a = true and false

It just makes no sense.

Maybe a very experienced ninja ruby programmer would, but that programmer would know exactly what he was doing.

The beauty in ruby and in the 'and' keyword is that a ruby programmer intuitively knows when to use which. This article just clears up why exactly they work like you expect them to work.

edit: maybe a weird programmer would do something like this

      @message = "We failed :(" and false

at the end of a function that has conditionals with return statements in them.

<comment><USER21> Wow, I must have missed the point. Because I could've sworn the OP was talking about how he _thought_ that 'and' and 'or' could be stand-in's for && and ||, but he found out that they aren't quite equivalent. Because if they _were_ equivalent, he would substitute words for symbols because, as I quoted, "[his] code became so much readable."

I'm not evaluating what he discovered at the end of the post. I'm evaluating his original intent for using 'and' and 'or' in the first place, which was readability. I'm simply stating my opinion on that comparison.

And yes, "a = true and false" doesn't make sense. I just copy-pasted his sample code as a quick example. I didn't expect people to take it literally, as if I were showing off a best practice.

<comment><USER3> Hmm you're absolutely right. I guess I'm projecting, I just read that as using `and` and `or` in places that seemed logical to him, but the paragraph is quite clear in that he just replaced all instances of the symbols with the words.

Since that is the case, I fully agree with you and shouldn't have been so snarky. I apologize :(

<comment><USER21> Well, it's a Friday afternoon :) You were right I didn't read to the very end (I kind of guessed what the OP was going to conclude)...I was mostly interested in seeing of other people thought 'and' and 'or' were good Ruby idioms to use (ignoring the precedence confusion).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> tl;dr:

'&&' is a boolean and 'and' is for control flow

</comment><comment><USER23> Not that I want Ruby to be anything like PHP and Perl, but this is the same thing that happens in those languages due to the difference in precedence of and, &&.

<comment><USER24> It's no accident. Ruby is heavily influenced by Perl.

<comment><USER23> Oh I know... someone said ruby is two parts Perl, one part Python, and one part Smalltalk. I like to think it's a bit less Perl than that, but my judgement is clouded - I'm a bit of a Perl hater.

<comment><USER24> I think it's a little less Perl than that, and a little more Lisp than that.

I don't have enough Perl experience to have a strong opinion on it, but I know that Matz says he created Ruby because he wanted a language that was more powerful than Perl and more object-oriented than Python.

Ruby is a little bipolar in that sense. It's both highly functional and highly object-oriented, for an imperative language. Even more of a "Swiss-army chainsaw" than Perl.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't know why everyone thinks a race to the fewest lines of code is a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER25> It was an interesting experiment while it lasted, but I don't think they make sense.

</comment><comment><USER26> If this will help the brogrammers and fauxgrammers in the ruby world to take security and software engineering seriously, then it is a good thing.</comment>


35 People per Day Erroneously Declared Dead by Data Input Errors - <AUTHOR> http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23378093/

<comment><USER2> The NTIS sells this data (SSA death master record) as well... to folks inside and outside the US... 80 million plus records: <http://www.ntis.gov/products/pages/ssa-death-master.asp>

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure I would be upset if the federal government thought I was dead. It would certainly save me a lot on my taxes.

</comment><comment><USER4> Shouldn't updating a person's record to such a consequential state require double (or greater) data entry?

<comment><AUTHOR> One would think so. But what if the error was in the paperwork from the funeral home?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Social Security says an erroneous death record can be removed only when it is presented with proof that the original record was entered in error."

WTF does this mean?

Maybe Google needs to take this over, too.

<comment><USER5> It means you could walk into their office with ID and prove you aren't dead?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Multi-streamed video puzzle. How to? - <AUTHOR> http://ks3097767.kimsufi.com/wordpress/?p=8

<comment><AUTHOR> I received lots of comments privately. Basically there are two schools of thought: native desktop app and HTML5 browser-based app.

The former would be done using gstreamer for streaming and encoding/decoding <http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/> , and clutter for the UI / display, <http://www.clutter-project.org/> .

The HTML5 thing would be for sure inspired by the work of Alex Wolkov at <http://alexw.me/2010/05/html5-video-puzzle-proof-of-concept/> . It isn't still clear to me if I will need the help of the GPU, i.e. use WebGL (Alex doesn't).

BTW it has been noticed that streaming separately the blocks of the video puzzle might introduce sync issues, which is something I still have to figure out how to solve (if will see it as real issue in my prototype -- no premature optimization in my home!).</comment>


Ask HN: Should I form a Board of Advisers? - <AUTHOR>

I was wondering what the HN community thinks of having a board of advisers?<p>Do I need to offer the board a percentage of equity in the company? <comment><USER2> I was advised (heh) to get some "strategic" people on board as advisers, never got around doing it, and never had any regrets. YMMV, but I suspect you are overthinking the situation.

</comment><comment><USER3> It depends on your business. Can you go into more detail?

Typically advisors get around .5%.

<comment><AUTHOR> My business is a social network, but in the future it will rely heavily on crowd-funding elements to generate revenue.

I used to work for a financial firm directly under the CEO, so I established a great relationship with him. He was one of the smartest men I ever met and knew almost everything about SEC regulations, investment strategies, etc.

I was considering turning to him for expertise in the future.</comment></comment>


You're probably not ready for programming - <AUTHOR> http://rycole.com/2014/03/13/programming-isnt-for-you.html <comment><USER2> [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6DXHCsx...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6DXHCsxOH9YJ:rycole.com/2014/03/13/programming- isnt-for-you.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=in)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the mirror, although the content sadly isn't all that much more useful than the 404 page.

<comment><AUTHOR> You won't read that book again because the ending's just too hard to take.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://github.com/ryancole/ryancole.github.com/blob/bd36fcc...](https://github.com/ryancole/ryancole.github.com/blob/bd36fccff82afbc34ad0ec1f2c7296429176832a/_posts/2014-03-13-programming- isnt-for-you.md)

</comment><comment><USER5> Debugging. Hacking is stepping into a program's skin. It's spinning your laptop around to turn into an effect what someone just blurted out in conversation about what the app should do. Hacking is looking at 3D view in FF and saying "cool." Not "why?" Hacking is rewriting the same if statement knowing full well the profiler will tell you the story. Hacking is forever hoping the damn computer will do what you want, or feel, rather than what you tell it. Hacking is forever refactoring like a kid smacking piano keys until 4am because you know that daylight shit is just tedium and yet another lunch with essentially the same ingredients. It is living to the fullest extent of one's own stupidity, and thriving on the next crushing blow to your ego.

Hacking is ego death.

</comment><comment><USER6> "you won't make it very far unless you just like being told why what you wrote is bad every day."

This is what I try to explain to people, but I fail every time.

</comment><comment><USER3> >Please, explain to me why JS doesnt suck.

I have no idea why the author has meandered onto this tangent, but in any case: no, that's not how it works. You made the preposterously unlikely claim that JavaScript is "literally the worste programming language ever". Not just a bad language, not just hyperbolically "totally the worst", but _literally_ the worst language ever created.

Defending that position is on you.

<comment><USER7> Lucky that "literally" can also mean "hyperbolically".

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> _" Javascript is literally the worste [sic] programming language ever."_

The author clearly has a lack of historical perspective. I'm not a big fan of JavaScript, but I'd much rather program in JavaScript than BASIC or COBOL or FORTRAN IV.

<comment><USER6> In the context of the post (putting hello_world.js in perspective vs Actual Coding), it's clearly meant as hyperbole to make a point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Random person's random opinion. Not to be rude but almost none of these types of articles, whether positive or negative, should be taken all that seriously nor be given the time of day in form of discussion.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh give it a break. Be rude if you want to be. Not like anybody actually cares anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> 404 error. Is this some kind of level?

</comment><comment><USER11> For some reason, I enjoyed that read.</comment>


Boeing Backs Simulator Training for 737 Max Pilots in Reversal - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-07/boeing-reverses-itself-to-back-simulator-training-for-max-pilots <comment><USER2> "Southwest Airlines Co., the largest 737 Max customer, said in a statement before Boeing's announcement that it was confident that computer-based training would have been sufficient to supplement its existing training program."

Translation: Safety is not our highest priority. It's up there, but profitability is higher.

<comment><USER3> For any airline sim time is a finite resource. They have to choose what to focus on. They can't have every pilot experience every possible failure in the sim.

<comment><USER4> Can't tell if serious...

That's exactly what I would hope pilots experience.

<comment><USER3> Sure pilots experience failures in the sim. The point is they can't experience every possible failure scenario or they'd never get out of the sim.

Southwest has had three fatalities in 48 years of operation, and in only one of those was pilot error a contributing factor, so saying their pilot training prioritizes profits over safety is unfounded snark.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Will this test whether pilots have the upper-body strength necessary to manually turn the cockpit trim wheels considering the size and aerodynamic forces for this large an aircraft?

Unless there has been some change other than to MCAS, the manual trim wheels are still the only option to correct runaway horizontal stabilizers.

<comment><USER6> Surely it is possible to provide them with a mechanism that gives enough mechanical advantage.

I have a vision of... dissimilar sized gears, or something...

<comment><USER7> You mean an airplane of a different design that would need to be separately certified?

<comment><USER8> It wouldn't. The trim wheel would work exactly the same from the pilot's perspective. It would only work different internally.

<comment><USER9> The gear ratio would change. Also I can't imagine certification is only required for changes from a pilot's perspective, but from a functional perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "some failed to follow the company's checklists"

great. that's confidence inspiring.

</comment><comment><USER11> How much does it cost per pilot is it really that bad?

<comment><USER12> It's the time and pilot logistics more than the price. Pilots can't do this sort of stuff at their house, they need to fly somewhere and spend four hours or more in a simulator. Not only is it a pain for everybody involved, it means that you don't have that particular pilot for that entire day. And then furthermore you can only use that particular pilot to fly the MAX moving forward. The whole point of maintaining a type rating is that all of your pilots can fly all of those planes, regardless of the particular version of the model.

<comment><USER13> Rather the other way around - the MAX can only be flown by the subset of 737 pilots who have had the training. In practice that will mean for Southwest to maintain the efficiencies they achieve through standardization they'll need to ensure all of their pilots receive the additional training.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'd reverse my decision too, if you know I made a product that I knew could kill people due to some poor design in key systems and then it killed hundreds of people.

<comment><USER15> And then they tried to say "it's ok really, we'll just change the software" but were still grounded months later. It's taken a lot of prodding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> [https://outline.com/durb8c](https://outline.com/durb8c)

</comment><comment><USER17> What difference does it make when the actual hardware is still flawed? I still refuse to fly in 737 MAX and its variants. Boeing can convince AA and Southwest pilots to give them vote of confidence but consumers are not stupid.

<comment><USER18> If pilots and pilot unions are satisfied with the results, I'm satisfied with the results. There's no-one more safety conscious in the aviation industry than pilots, since they're responsible for the souls on board their aircraft, including their own.

<comment><USER19> They should be forced to add the 3-sensor config on the plane and have that supported by the MCAS for all planes.

A single sensor failing and causing unlimited automatic shifts in pitch is a nightmare I will not fly on.

<comment><USER11> It's no longer unlimited

<comment><USER20> Well, that's a relief.

<comment><USER21> So if that software fix relieves you, wouldnt you have to admit that it was the software the was the most direct reason for the crashes?

HN folks here seem hesitant to say this.

But without the dumb ability to do repeated activations it would've been a much less severe problem.

<comment><USER22> The software did exactly what it was told to do.

The error was in the specification.

<comment><USER21> Hah, wow

<comment><USER23> Let's suppose that the entire control logic for MCAS was now re-implemented with vacuum tubes. Would you now argue that the aircraft crashes indicate a hardware problem? Or would you agree that the real problem is in the system design, since any conforming implementation of it will produce the jeopardy?

<comment><USER21> If it was implemented with vacuum tubes, that would indicate a hardware problem as well as a system design problem.

So in this situation, the claim is that braindead contractors mechanically implemented something to spec by force of law? Sure, then whoever designed the logic is accountable.

In 99.9% other environments, the distinction is collapsed because the implementor typically has responsibility to design sub-component level logic correctly, to high-level requirements, but also to overall business need and in service to even higher level project goals, and the team that designed the logic is also implemented by the same team.

<comment><USER24> nope, all of the vacum tubes would be working as designed. not a hardware problem, a system design problem.

thus the invention of a discipline called 'systems engineering'..

i would say in 100% of engineering development, the design is done as a system, and specific requirements are allocated to design elements (like MCAS software). Each of these elements is tested against the requirements.

aeronautical engineering is a very specific skill. so is aircraft controls. so is airworthiness. a software engineer is an expert in software, not these other disciplines.

<comment><USER21> At the level of specification you've laid out here, the act of 'software development' is reduced to almost nothing, and you have re-categorized the entire effort as systems engineering.

<comment><USER25> Having a specification for how a system should behave in response to various input signals is not at all the same as actually having the functioning software for achieving that system.

In fact, achieving a functional and fully correct piece of software based on such a specification is not at all a trivial task, as experienced software engineers will well appreciate.

Because while the specification may describe a certain sequence of inputs that should result in a certain sequence of outputs, it probably does not prescribe the exact data structures, memory layout, logic flow, and computational steps required to guarantee the correct output is always produced from a given set of inputs.

And the people being paid to create the necessary data structures, algorithms, calculations and control logic in order to implement the design specification... those developers are specifically _not_ in a position to make systems design engineering changes to the underlying specification itself.

<comment><USER26> Software engineering as a field has accomplished so much in terms of quick iterations and low-friction paths to products that I think it has become lost that there are established ways to establish a safety case in a technical manner. Modern software engineers have achieve this speed, largely, by choosing not to apply the level of rigor in process that you describe. This is usually ok, because most software projects do not require that level of rigor (until the costs are too high not to, like AWS, which formally specified critical parts of their infra in TLA+ before software and IT people implemented it).

I think the parent post is an example of this problem taking on flesh. It has been so long since we realized the folly of over-specification in most projects that we have lost memory of there being cases where having a body of people engineering the system and specifications distinctly from the people who implement them actually does matter a great deal.

As a software engineer and not a systems engineer, I thank you for your comment. It has great clarity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Another attempt to put the genie back in the bottle..

</comment><comment><USER28> Toooooo...late!

<comment><USER29> Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Had Boeing done this six months ago the MAX might be in the air right now.

<comment><USER31> Had they done it even before that a lot of people might still be alive.</comment></comment>


MTV Building Interactive TV for iPad - Beavis & Butthead #1 - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/mtv-will-have-a-bevis-and-butt-head-ipad-app-and-much-more-2010-3

<comment><USER2> At least we know game AI techniques are up to the level required to simulate the main characters.</comment>


Google search redesign - Ads now very similar to regular results - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/BDK00Bu

<comment><USER2> I tried on my own then I noticed oh well, I have ad blocker</comment>


Automatic (YC S11) launches first 3G connected car adapter with no monthly fees - <AUTHOR> https://blog.automatic.com/introducing-automatic-pro-ed8b3ef6e9b0#.46abkf8f2 <comment><USER2> Nice! I have one of their devices in my car and it's excellent -- adding the 3G sounds like it will add a lot of cool possibilities in terms of possible features. Seems especially useful for those with kids.</comment>


Show HN: AvidTester, test your product before launch - <AUTHOR> https://avidtester.com <comment><USER2> Seems like a straightforward testing consultancy. I hope that's accurate. Good luck. Testing is critical and not always done well.</comment>


Backup and Compress a MySQL Database With One Command - <AUTHOR> http://longren.io/backup-and-compress-mysql-in-one-command/

<comment><USER2> Doing it that way will rape disk I/O on your server, much better use ZFS snapshot then just zfs send & pipe thru xz/bzip2 to send it remotely

Example:

       #!/bin/bash
       TS=$(date "+%Y%m%d-%H%M%S")
       SNAP=zpool/mysql@${TS}
       zfs snapshot $SNAP
       zfs send $SNAP | pv | xz -z | ssh somewhere "cat > /mnt/snapshots/mysql-${TS}.xz"
       zfs destroy -Rv $SNAP

Assumes that your /var/lib/mysql is zpool/mysql ofc

<comment><USER3> I would say that the biggest risk with mysqldump is restore time.

If a significant portion of the buffer pool is in memory, it may actually dump quite fast. MySQL 5.5 and above also have a modified LRU algorithm so that tablescans (i.e. mysqldump) can only evict up to 3/8ths of the cache contents.</comment></comment>


Harvard Quietly Amasses California Vineyards and the Water Underneath - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-quietly-amasses-california-vineyardsand-the-water-underneath-1544456396 <comment><USER2> The aquifer depletion was caused _by_ irrigated agriculture in the first place. It's pretty rich hearing vineyard owners like the Steinbecks complain about Harvard buying land to take the underlying water. Until very recently [1], profitable vineyards could deplete water under their neighbors' property without limits or compensation. Profitable vineyards could afford deeper wells and larger pumps; if it hurt shallower wells on nearby properties, tough luck. My grandparents' land neighboring vineyards owned by the Steinbecks and others underwent a distressed sale in 2013 because the groundwater had been badly depleted.

The Paso Robles groundwater crisis is just the end-stage symptom of an unsustainable process that has been going on for decades.

[https://waterinthewest.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/Case...](https://waterinthewest.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/Case%20Study%201.%20Paso%20Robles.pdf)

Irrigated agriculture came to dominate this region only in the last decades of the 20th century. Relatives on my father's side started dryland farming on a property near Paso Robles in the 1910s. That property enrolled in a well- monitoring program in the 1970s. The trend line was clear by the 1980s: water levels dropping over time. But irrigated crops like grapes were more profitable -- at least as long as growers didn't have anyone pricing or otherwise limiting groundwater withdrawal to sustainable levels. Now the same growers who fought water limits are alarmed that Harvard might take the water they counted on claiming. I hope that it's a wake-up call for growers to support truly sustainable water usage plans, lest they lose at their own game to even richer out-of-state entities.

[1] It appears that there are new limits on groundwater extraction for agricultural use in California, but if I read the article correctly they're not really enforced yet.

<comment><USER3> The "I drink your milkshake" approach to life.

<comment><USER4> While the scene from the movie was evocative, I prefer to use the original term, _parasitism_.

<comment><USER5> what was interesting to me was the "milkshake" phrase is quoted verbatim from something said by senator Albert B. Hall. He was jailed for accepting bribes to sell US-owned oil reserves for cheap.

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

<comment><USER6> _Sir, if you have a milkshake and I have a milkshake and my straw reaches across the room, I 'll end up drinking your milkshake._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_B%2E_Fall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_B%2E_Fall)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Financially, Harvard is a hedge fund that also happens to own a university

<comment><USER8> I honestly think I wouldn't have a problem with this if they zeroed out tuition for students. That is the glaring absurdity of the Ivy Leagues.

I was in a program that more or less guaranteed some portion of its graduates to be perpetually in debt because the skills imparted, while taught by some of the most brilliant practitioners in the world, did not translate into real world earnings. I hate the idea of college being purely an exchange of money for future earning potential, but programs like mine I think are unethical at cost even as they are virtuous in learning.

Our culture needs non-STEM genius, that keeps the republic alive. Forcing people into a cauldron of debt for it is reprehensible.

<comment><USER9> I think we need to rethink the concept of a university from first principles: How much does it actually cost to provide the best education in the world? A sizable library, an old building with empty rooms, and professors? I'd bet you could make instruction 5x better with 5x lower costs than we have today. The real problem isn't building/finding a campus, though, it's figuring out how to make the cheap version of Harvard more prestigious than Harvard itself. Universities run on prestige and people pay vast amounts of money for social signaling (to others and even themselves).

<comment><USER10> Ivy Leagues are clubs. People are not paying for education, but for the price of participating in the club.

<comment><USER11> Ivy League undergraduates are paying for participation in the club. Ivy League grad students are paying (in the case of masters) for access to research institutions with top PIs and vast resources, as well as connections in their field.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So if you have Harvard-type money now, you can buy land that will be disproportionately valuable in 20 years when water is a problem. An excellent and unusual example of wealth concentration... with a bit of a Dr. Evil / Lex Luthor vibe about it too!

<comment><USER13> This is the plot of Chinatown [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinatown_(1974_film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinatown_\(1974_film\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Somewhat related to California Water: There's a documentary about California water use in Central Valley by land owners used for pistachios, pomegranates, etc. being crowdfunded right now: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/7331688/pistachio- wars-...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/7331688/pistachio-wars-killing- california-for-a-snack-food)

The story originated in the 2013 essay "journey through oligarch valley": [https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/oligarch- valley/](https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/oligarch-valley/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Harvard's average real annual return is 10.2% (Piketty's book "Capital" p569) You need a team of very talented investors to get these types of returns y/y

<comment><USER16> Isn't that almost exactly what, say, the s&p 500 returns? [0] And you don't need a team of anyone to buy and hold that.

[0] [https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042415/what- average...](https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042415/what-average- annual-return-sp-500.asp)

<comment><USER17> the real test is how well Harvard's fund does in year where the s&p 500 is doing poorly.

<comment><USER18> No, the real test is sustained performance over time in the form of an average.

If the S&P 500 falls 10% in a given year, I can hold 100% cash, light 5% of it on fire, and outperform the S&P 500 - that doesn't make it a sound long term strategy.

<comment><USER19> Are we also omitting the fact that it's a nonprofit and therefore has grossly better tax treatment?

<comment><USER20> thats not how taxes work... I am not a lawyer/cpa but if I understand correctly, any investment income harvard receives would be taxed at the normal rate for that type of activity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> How much non-campus land does Harvard own? Their troubles with dealing with their overseas land made the news earlier ([https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-06/harvard-s...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-06/harvard- s-foreign-farmland-investment-mess)). Do other universities do this too?

<comment><USER22> By way of further example, and because quite a few universities also do this by "accident" of having land left over after either moving or redoing their campuses, the University of Washington owns approximately 10 acres in downtown Seattle, including (notably for various court cases about where the authority of the university, as a non-political arm of the State of Washington, and municipalities intersect) 4th Ave, a city-maintained street of public use.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Tract_(Seattle)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Tract_\(Seattle\))

<comment><USER23> Off-topic, but it's very normal for private entities to own public streets in the US. At the time when these areas were platted and lots conveyed, the streets were dedicated to the public use, but were not deeded to the municipalities.

As a general rule, in most US states the adjoining landowners are assumed to have fee simple ownership and reversionary rights to the land underlying the streets. As a public policy matter, courts are loathe to create situations where tiny little bits of land are separately owned and can't be put to productive use. (the strips and gores doctrine.)

For WA, Holmquist v. King discusses this in depth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> [https://outline.com/CwVvyu](https://outline.com/CwVvyu)

<comment><USER25> Thank you

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I thought I had seen this before:

[https://www.reuters.com/article/harvard-water/harvard- buys-u...](https://www.reuters.com/article/harvard-water/harvard-buys-up- water-rights-in-drought-hit-wine-country-idUSL1N0V02Z320150122)

</comment><comment><USER27> If anyone enjoys dystopian science fiction, "The Water Knife" plays out the groundwater/climate change scenario in gripping detail: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Water_Knife](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Water_Knife)

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm not sure how water rights work in California, but I think in many places on the west (coast) water rights are not transferable to avoid speculation over what--now more than ever--needs to be a public resource.

</comment><comment><USER29> Is there any way for common people to invest in water assets or rights?

</comment><comment><USER30> Freshwater speculation in the future is going to make a lot of people rich, given the current undervalued nature of fresh, clean, drinkable water. The kind that sustains life.

</comment><comment><USER31> If I was a climate-change denier, this would probably make me reconsider that.

</comment><comment><USER32> Another source, with a softer paywall:

[https://www.thestar.com/business/markets/2018/12/10/harvard-...](https://www.thestar.com/business/markets/2018/12/10/harvard- quietly-amasses-california-vineyardsand-the-water-underneath.html)

</comment><comment><USER33> Posting paywalled articles here is just advertisement for a subscription service. Anyone who already subscribed doesn't need discovery and anyone who doesn't can't read the article.

</comment><comment> time-domain0 HMC appears to be exploiting Tragedy of the Commons for profit: they'll have the most land and the deepest wells while homeowners run dry as they rush to suck everything they can out of the ground as fast as possible.</comment>


A new book critiques medicine - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-medicine-overrated/ <comment><USER2> I've always looked at western medicine as if it was the best car mechanic you can hire, just for your body. If your problem is mechanical, they can solve it. Surgical techniques are amazing. Breakdowns in known processes can be fixed.

But if the problem doesn't fit those known processes, isn't mechanical, and you are relying on doctor for real troubleshooting of problems, that is where it falls short. You can fall into the weird gap of talking to different specialists, trying to find someone who can pinpoint what is wrong. You try different treatments, you see what works. Sometimes you solve problems, sometimes you end up living your whole life managing symptoms.

And that isn't all bad - better to manage symptoms than to live in misery, or not to live. But the word 'over-rated' is quite accurate. It isn't useless, it just is over-rated.

<comment><USER3> 'Western' medicine though as opposed to what? Nostalgic prescientific systems such as Chinese, ayurvedic, etc don't do anything at all.

So yes, scientific medicine definitely has huge lacunae. Given the relative slowness of progress in understanding complex systems science has had in general, they'll be there for a long to come. But it's not as if there's some other candidate 'system' that has a better understanding.

<comment><USER4> > _' Western' medicine though as opposed to what? Nostalgic prescientific > systems such as Chinese, ayurvedic, etc don't do anything at all._

That's not really true. Their explanations can be hocus pocus, but their mechanics/drugs/techniques can be as effective as western versions, simply come around by tradition/trial and error/Lindy effect and so on for millennia.

<comment><USER5> You touched on something there that has been a pet peeve of mine for ages. People dismissing treatments like accupunture wholesale because there's no scientific evidence for Qi. So what? It's the effect we're interested in, not the explanation.

<comment><USER6> If acupuncture had an easily and consistently replicable effect it would have been incorporated into medicine, even if we didn't understand how or why it worked. (just like paracetamol and any number of other widely used drugs and treatments we don't really know how or why they work)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would like to make a personal statement to the tech community in view of this thread's comments:

A vast majority of you drastically overestimate the information processing and retrieval of the healthcare system.

We MDs can all see your superb AI/ML results in journals, and yes you can improve things with technology. What we can't see is how we're going to use it. In my day-to-day job, there are a myriad of new-super-devices-that- automatically-do-that-thing but NONE are integrated into my workplace. NONE make my job less painful. NONE make me gain time instead of losing it.

You want to help. Cool, then stop masturbating on the results of your unusable new oncology deep-learning thingy and push for WORKPLACE INTEGRATION of technology, damn it!

Maybe if the tech community comes to understand how it can really help clinicians, things will start to change the way you fancy and we can finally end the age of rote memorization and criminal overtime for MDs.

<comment><USER8> Yes! healthcare informatics is so much more than just dispensing magical vitamins, when MDs and patients need painkillers. We have had terms like PHR and EHR for thirty years now, we have HL7, together with FHIR, and we have PACS, but these terms are still not ubiquitous. There has been major developments in developing classifiers like SNOMED, AHCI and ICD, yet MDs mostly still type the diagnosis up, and consider themselves lucky if the HIS has some templating capability. And very few HISes are capable of getting the personal health records to the patient - i mean, it is more likely you get a xerox of your case than something in a portable format that other HISes can understand if you change your healtcare provider...

However, it is somewhat strange that personal health projects keep dying - google health discontinued in 2011, microsoft healthvault to be closed in 2019 - and these are by major players - maybe somebody has some insight why they fail?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> >The New York Times reported that in 2014 physicians wrote 83,000 prescriptions for antidepressants and almost 20,000 prescriptions for antipsychotic medications for infants two years old and younger

Wow... This seems very obviously inappropriate.

I listened to the EconoTalk interview referenced in TFA after hearing about it on another HN thread. Highly recommended.

I have to say that I have become skeptical of medicine after personally seeing the sheer amount of unscientific and potentially harmful practices that are advocated for by medical practicers. I think there's a lot of good, but wayyyyyy too much bad.

<comment><USER10> My brother-in-law, who has a mental disability, saw a gastroenterologist for abdominal pain. They found worms and prescribed him a drug to get rid of the worms.

The doctor said the worms _could_ cause abdominal pain, but then again in most cases they don't, so he also put him on a drug for irritable bowel syndrome.

After a couple of weeks, the stomach pain went away, but meanwhile my brother- in-law was having issues with mental coherence, drowsiness, and sleep disturbances. Other people who interacted with him were concerned about him, too. He has a mental disability and diabetes and other health issues, so our first thought was the usual suspects, not his IBS medication, but eventually I realized that neither my wife nor myself knew anything about it, so I looked it up.

It turned out the new medication was an antidepressant with a laundry list of side effect, including drowsiness and sleep disturbances. We weaned him off it, and he came back to normal pretty quickly. No stomach pain, either.

So, to sum up, the doctor saw a patient with worms and abdominal pain and decided to put him on an antidepressant for the rest of his life because the kind of worm infestation he had would only cause pain in a minority of cases.

<comment><USER9> I actually suspect a fairly large amount of those prescriptions were for off label use.

But... Seems like the sort of side effects these medicines have should give us a pause when using them on vulnerable populations. Especially when the benefits are not especially clear.

<comment><USER10> You're exactly right. IBS is a legit off-label use for the antidepressant my brother-in-law was prescribed. I suspect doctors hear about these off-label uses and don't weigh the psychoactive effects because they're writing the prescription for a physical problem.

<comment><USER11> How is that an acceptable side effect for approving an off label use?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Modern medicine has some aspects that are miraculously good and it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that those are representative for all of medicine. It's a kind of halo effect bias.

In my opinion the most amazing thing still is antibiotics (and vaccination). Treatmeant of war/vehicle/sports injuries taking the second place (including anesthetics). Both can take people from a path of sure death within hours or days to often complete recovery within weeks or months.

If that is the performance expectation of the general public for all of medicine, then it certainly is overrated.

<comment><USER13> As someone who has had some less-acute sports injuries, I'd also break the injuries down into "shit's really fucked up" and "you could conceivably walk it off" categories. The former, modern US medicine excels at. The latter, I'm not sure the doctors are even trained to treat something less acute and not requiring expensive surgery. In fact, I strongly suspect they often prescribe a surgery anyway, just to make a buck. I had to decline a surgery once.

</comment></comment><comment> 1e-9 Medications are a particular problem. It took decades of massive use for us to even realize that some of our most common over-the-counter drugs were being used in dangerous ways (e.g. aspirin can cause Reye's syndrome in children, Tylenol with alcohol can damage the liver). On top of that, I think drug interactions are a much larger problem than most people realize and that we have little idea of what we are doing to ourselves when we take multiple medications. A recent study [1] on just prescription drugs counted 220 million unique drug combinations experienced by a subset of the US population over intervals of about 3 years. How many of those combinations have been studied for safety? I'll make a wild guess that it's probably far less than 1%. I think it prudent to minimize one's medication exposure to the bare minimum that is absolutely necessary.

[1] [https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata2017167](https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata2017167)

</comment><comment><USER14> It's not over-rated - but it's complicated.

Even that short article covered a number of items that could all happily be spun out into full-blown essays.

"Over-medication" \- just as a term. Could be people taking medicines that: Aren't cost-effective (whatever your system, there's a finite resource at the core). Aren't quality of-life improving (doctors themselves tend to consume less life-extending stuff at the very end). They paid for (You've paid insurance, you're ill, you want to be given something).

</comment><comment><USER15> See also: Anatomy of an Epidemic [0], about when pharmaceuticals to treat mental health issues become problems in their own right; and, the chapters on medical intervention in Elephant in the Brain [1], which argue persuasively that much of the medical system functions to deliver social signaling of care, rather than improved health outcomes.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomy_of_an_Epidemic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomy_of_an_Epidemic)

[1] [http://elephantinthebrain.com/](http://elephantinthebrain.com/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Update: If trials by manufacturers are biased - then how about some framework that would push trials made by competition.

There are two things: One is bad science, and we have a lot of it ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis), [https://library.mpib- berlin.mpg.de/ft/gg/GG_Null_2004.pdf](https://library.mpib- berlin.mpg.de/ft/gg/GG_Null_2004.pdf)) - but it should be improving and most of it is probably harmless (I have some hopes on better statistics education and [https://www.google.com/search?q=causality+revolution](https://www.google.com/search?q=causality+revolution)). The other is bad application - and this is more complex. When I go to doctors (with my and my family issues) I, more often than not, have the feeling that they have no chance to give any good diagnosis as it would require too much time to test etc. (one simple case is when to use antibiotics and when the disease is virus based - but I have noticed that this is probably improving with strep and CPR tests) and they mostly just shoot first thing plausible, proscribe some medication and then in most cases the organism just cures itself - so the treatment is never tested. There is probably also 'medicine as signaling' (the theory by Richard Hanson: [http://www.overcomingbias.com/tag/medicine](http://www.overcomingbias.com/tag/medicine)), but my intuition is that it is not verly important, and other stuff.

</comment><comment><USER17> The article starts with "Given medicine's poor record, physicians should prescribe and patients consume far fewer medications, a new book argues." : on the contrary, I think the current state of medicine is outstanding, regarding what is was only two centuries ago. Thousands of illnesses have a cure, and for many others, we know what we can do to minimize their effects, infant mortality is very low in most of the western world, etc. And paradoxically, although most of the "alternative medicines" zealots criticize conventional medicine for insufficient results and/or side effects, none of them keep track of some indicators such as the cure rate. ANd this is one of the only relevant metric that can assess the efficiency of a cure.

I'm not saying that the conventional medicine is far from any criticism, but one has first to understand the difference between the current knowledge available, and the way it is used : some drugs/treatments are promoted by some countries, while not in others. I'm also convinced he drugs prices (which are going crazy) should be regulated for the benefit of everyone. And of course, modern medicine should be used wisely. People should not take drugs each time they have a cold.

That being said, of course, there are still room for improvement, there are a load of illnesses that cannot be cured by modern medicine, and yes, some doctors think themselves as Gods. But this should not question the many successes of conventional medicine.

</comment><comment><USER18> There are legitimate concerns about some drugs being overprescribed and others being underprescribed. But this article doesn't really she'd much light on it.

Are some medicines probably overprescribed? Sure. Are some medicines underprescribed? Definitely.

For most medicines are there people who could benefit from taking it and aren't while simultaneously there are people who would benefit from stopping the medicine? Almost assuredly.

And medical research is what we do to try to answer these questions in ways that are helpful.

</comment><comment><USER19> I've long believed that once startups and tech companies get their hands on medical data (patient outcomes, medication treatment outcomes, mal practice rates, surgery outcomes) that a reckoning will take place on the medical industry. The level of legitimacy and respect that doctors and hospitals currently have is far too high, and hinges on branding and the exclusivity of becoming a doctor. Once all of this data becomes available, it will be obvious how worthless and expensive most medical treatments really are. Most prescription drugs do nothing, and the ones that do something are more so just covering the symptoms.

HIPAA laws are hiding patient outcomes and holding this whole sham afloat.

<comment><USER20> "The level of legitimacy and respect that doctors and hospitals currently have is far too high, and hinges on branding and the exclusivity of becoming a doctor. Once all of this data becomes available, it will be obvious how worthless and expensive most medical treatments really are."

I'm the spouse/partner of a recently-trained doctor, and I'm a programmer and startup founder with 2 decades of experience. With all respect, you have no friggen clue what you're talking about.

<comment><USER21> > I'm the spouse/partner of a recently-trained doctor, and I'm a programmer > and startup founder with 2 decades of experience. With all respect, you have > no friggen clue what you're talking about.

Then you should know very well that the entire MD education pipeline optimizes for rote memorization and regurgitation of facts (from undergrad pre-med all the way through post-residency fellowships). Any patient with even the slightest deviation from what the physician searched on WebMD is given generic advice similar to how fortune tellers recite generic phrases. If you have a non-standard question or health problem, go to 3 doctors (or even specialists) and you'll get 3 different answers.

I work closely with clinicians at Tier 1 urban medical institutions daily, both at the in-patient and outpatient settings. Most doctors are dumb as a rock.

Note: Physicians with a MD/PhD are much better at critical thinking and make more of an effort to solve your problem.

<comment><USER7> What you don't perceive is why medical education has to be that way in the current state of affairs. Yes, has to.

You may be brilliant at other things, but your analysis of this particular problem is no better than the doctors you describe.

<comment><USER21> > What you don't perceive is why medical education has to be that way in the > current state of affairs. Yes, has to.

No, medical education does not have to be this way. It is purely gatekeeping.

It's similar to how "You need a PhD" to land top AI/ML jobs. That's gatekeeping as well, though it is slowly changing.

Not many doctors or AI researchers will openly state this gatekeeping because they benefit, at the expense of those not in their field.

<comment><USER7> Nope, not gatekeeping. I know I won't convince you, but just think about that:

Most parts of the country are approximately medical deserts. So once you're educated, you are dispatched to said desert. Your hospital has standard pathways where nursing teams operate. Problem is, everything that escapes the standard pathway comes your way with no one to help you.

"Yeah, but there's UpToDate, MEDLINE, etc.". Well, no. NO! You simply don't have the time. Your job is to operate as a well-oiled machine to handle all the impromptu shit 70+ hours/week. That's why you did all this rote memorization.

A doctor is not an engineer. He is trained for a hostile environment where you have no time to think or search. As long as automation can't help (and it currently can't), docs are bound to memorization training.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "Spending too much on medicine" isn't like spending too much on clothes or nice houses. If the consumer goods you buy are crummy and don't improve your life you can do without them, but we're essentially unable to decide we can do without _health_. Demand for cures for our diseases is different than demand for other things, and that shows up both in the sorry economic structure of our (U.S.) health system, and here.

If we had more medical treatments that worked, and a lab-to-hospital pipeline with a better track record, I suspect better scientific standards would follow naturally. But for now, raising the standards of evidence would essentially block off the invention of new treatments altogether, which simply isn't an option even on a psychological level.

<comment><USER23> > "raising the standards of evidence would essentially block off the invention > of new treatments altogether"

Citation needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> If you are intrigued by the thesis of the book, _EconTalk_ has an episode with the author.

[https://www.econtalk.org/jacob-stegenga-on-medical- nihilism/](https://www.econtalk.org/jacob-stegenga-on-medical-nihilism/)

</comment><comment><USER25> Modern medicine is great when you get in a car crash, and it's horrific if you have type 2 diabetes.

Doctors get very little training in diet and lifestyle, because those are low- status and left to non-MD specialists, and many of them dogmatically cling to 1960s-era science.

<comment><USER7> You really think endocrinologists have no training in diet and lifestyle?

Well, what can I say. No?

<comment><USER25> > On average, U.S. medical schools offer only 19.6 hours of nutrition > education across four years of medical school

[https://health.usnews.com/wellness/food/articles/2016-12-07/...](https://health.usnews.com/wellness/food/articles/2016-12-07/how- much-do-doctors-learn-about-nutrition)

<comment><USER7> That's for basic med school education. Happily, medical education doesn't stop at the end of med school. It is more like, beginning just at that moment. Otherwise many more patients would die.

So yes, on paper you're right. In practice, there are even clinical nutrition specialists and those are MDs.

<comment><USER25> In practice, nutritional interventions are much less favored over drug interventions.

For example, a simple ketogenic diet intervention can be a very effective treatment for type 2 diabetes. But most doctors still favor the 1960s-era, discredited science saying dietary fat causes heart disease.

So diabetics are given metformin and whatever fancy new insulin came out recently. And then in 20 years, those people will likely lose their feet and eyes.

<comment><USER7> Diet and lifestyle changes are first line as per current guidelines.

Drugs are initially optional, unless I am mistaken. However, you seem very optimistic regarding the ability of people to follow diets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's quite odd to dismiss better sanitation and nutrition as not medicine, isn't it?

I think the problem is that we take for granted the things that have been discovered, because they were found a long time ago. Washing surgeons' hands in carbolic acid help puerperal fever rates. Cholera has something to do with water. Vaccination works. All those things happened way before any living person remembers.

From what I hear among pharma friends, the problem is also that the low hanging fruit has been picked. A lot of lines of inquiry are variations of the same thing, and over time we've found what is there to be found.

If you think about it, it makes sense that it's like that. Something really powerful like vaccination is going to pop out of the stats immediately. Subtler effects require more trials to detect.

In any case, it's a greater danger that there are people who don't believe in evidence based inquiry at all pretending to be medical professionals. Look at anti-vaxxers, or the Goop type quackery.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm surprised that even antibiotics are considered one of two "magic bullets" (the other being insulin, which does seem close to a perfect solution).

I encourage those interested in the pernicious aspegts of humanity's overuse of antibiotics to read this interview with Stephen Buhner [0]

[0] [https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/468/living- medicine](https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/468/living-medicine)

<comment><USER28> Overuse happens precisely because they are so good at what they do. Moreover, at a first approximation, overuse results simply in a return to a previous state of no good defense against newly-resistant bugs. So in the worst case scenario, antibiotics bought us a century of better health; that's pretty magical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Let me extend the query, is "modern medicine" overrated. Modern technology + western like urban lifestyle changed how we live.. and how much medicine we think we need.

Walking in the woods is probably as effective as the average anti depressant. Good physical activity too.

But we sell that modern life is great and that ailments are normal and that thanks to the medical field we have all these solutions.. that we probably didn't need in the first place.

<comment><USER30> Regular exercise, good diet and quality sleep prevent/solve most health problems.

If exercise were in pill form, it'd be the most valuable pill.

<comment><USER31> That leSs down the dangerous road that many who are against universal healthcare go down (not saying you were implying it). That most health problems are caused by poor decisions.

These are the top 10 causes of death.

[https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of- death.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm)

How many of those could be prevented by good diet, quality sleep and exercise?

<comment><USER32> You can't prevent death, only prolong life.

Most of those causes are accelerated by poor diet, poor sleep and lack of exercise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Dr. Jacob Stegenga - Medical Nihilism: Assessing Medical Evidence in a Neo-Liberal Age

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgX4BKCxTI4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgX4BKCxTI4)

</comment><comment><USER34> So why do the drug companies charge so much for the medicines then? I just finished watching the Valeant episode of Dirty Money and combined with this book, it all kind of makes no sense.

</comment><comment><USER35> Note that the author is a "science journalist" with a degree in journalism, not medicine or even STEM.

<comment><USER36> I'm not sure what the quotes are for. Journalists have beats. Conflict journalists, for example, do not generally have military backgrounds. White House correspondants have not generally run for public office.

<comment><USER35> They're scare quotes. Some subjects can be reported on by generalists. But I think some require special expertise to put into context. I wouldn't want to read an article from a "tech journalist" criticizing the approaches Netflix uses to scale its systems to be able to stream terabytes of data per day. Likewise, I don't think someone without medical training is qualified to write articles about whether medicines are effective or not.

<comment><USER36> Really? That's an interesting example to choose, since John Carreyrou didn't have any medical training and almost singlehandedly brought Theranos to its abrupt end.

 _Later, because it was bugging me_

There's also distinctions to be made between a "generalist" and a "practitioner". Beat reporters are specialists, not generalists. They've cultivated sources and, over their careers, expertise. Roger Ebert wasn't a filmmaker, but he sure as hell knew more about films and their language and idiom than a WSJ business reporter (who in turn knows more about collateralized debt than Ebert). Extending the analogy further: I'm capable of critiquing cryptosystems and finding/exploiting vulnerabilities in them, but I'm not a cryptographer and am not qualified to build them myself.

Do you need an example of a non-programmer tech reporter worth reading? Happy to provide one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> _Stegenga calls these latter two "magic bullets," a phrase coined by physician /chemist Paul Ehrlich to describe treatments that target the cause of a disease without disrupting the body's healthy functions._

 _Researchers have labored mightily to find more magic bullets, but they remain rare. For example, imatinib, brand name Gleevec, is "an especially effective treatment" for one type of leukemia, Stegenga says. But Gleevec has "severe adverse effects, including nausea, headaches, severe cardiac failure and delayed growth in children."_

Most would prefer these symptoms over death.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

</comment><comment><USER38> Yes,it is, as it's about profit so always about cure, never prevention

</comment><comment><USER39> Anyone receiving or delivering healthcare is aware of these problems. These kind of critiques suffer from the same basic problem - they treat Medicine as a monolithic entity which is not intimately linked with society, culture, the economy and government. This conceit is necessary to write a book about it, and is a luxury available only to those who don't need to actually deliver or administer healthcare. It is also not the same thing as 'trying to make things better', despite what the author may claim. In truth the author is actually critiquing what they have decided falls under the umbrella of medicine, which they define at a particular point in time.

The problem is incentives, not sure why this guy wrote a whole book without realising this, but it is an easy mistake to make if you are thinking about the problem from your writing desk. People will minimise effort and cost, given a choice, and maximise profit subject to constraints. This behaviour exists even in highly trained health professionals already making many hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Example - why do primary care doctors prescribe minimally effective drugs for depression? Is it because they can't understand a meta-analysis, can't remember all the patients the drugs didn't work for in their own practice, or because they are lazy or stupid? It is because a patient has come in looking for help and is sitting there in tears, and there is only 10 minutes to see them, and the history from the other doctor this person has been seeing for the last 5 years isn't available. And although everyone would be better off if the doctor spent an hour finding out in detail what is going on, carefully talking over the options, the side effects of various treatments and reaching a consensus management plan which starts with non-pharmacological therapies, and activates a government program which allows the patient to take extra time off work to attend therapy sessions with childcare facilities included. But it is easier for everyone to prescribe Prozac. This is the reality. Perverse incentives explain many of the problems in Medicine and healthcare systems. Nobody gets paid for delivering good care, nobody saves money by accepting good care. As shocking as it may be, delivering good care or exceptional care is a choice a health care team makes despite everything else. Similarly, accepting proven health care interventions is a choice a patient makes. Usually everything doesn't line up, and that is modern medicine.

The cited example of Gleevec also makes no sense to me. It revolutionised the treatment of 2 conditions which were almost completely untreatable beforehand (Chronic Myeloid Leukaemia and Gastrointestinal Stromal Tumour). The alternatives to taking Gleevec for these patients were A) Toxic minimally effective chemotherapy followed by death or B) Just death. All of this context is extremely important in discussing the side-effects which can be severe. This is what the patient and the doctor work out together. Some throwaway line about how toxic it is just makes no sense in isolation.

</comment><comment><USER40> I think the article (and presumably the book) bring up a lot of great points about systemic issues with medicine, but I also think there is another much more macro level argument.

The Ancient Greeks were, in terms of medicine, almost completely ignorant. They had no idea about germs; instead focusing their medical theory around the 4 humors - blood, phlegm, yellow/black bile and miasma theory. What's good drinking water? Water that tastes clean. Vaccines? That'd come about 3,000 years later. And they engaged in hygiene habits we might find a wee bit dodgy. For instance at the public toilets there obviously were no toilet paper dispensers. Instead they'd use sponges - butt brushes. After one fellow finished his business you'd give it a swish around in some water or, for the fancier toilets - vinegar, and take your turn.

But the thing is is that they (and I am referring to the upper class here) had life expectancies that were not what you'd think. This [1] great article from the BBC has quite a lot of interesting data. For instance of some 298 recorded individuals of ancient Greece/Rome, the median life expectancy was 72 years. Some random famous names: Pythagorus - 75, Hippocrates - 90, Plato - 80, etc.

There is of course some selection bias in that sample, but you can also see evidence of longevity in other ways. For instance in Ancient Rome one could not hold the office of Consul until reaching the age of 43, first office was not available until age 30. The article also goes on to analyze numerous other sources than tend to paint a recurring picture: there was high infant and youth mortality, but people who made it to adulthood tended to have a life expectancy not all that different than we do today. It seems to suggest that a large part of our increased life expectancy is not from the trillions of dollars we've spent on trying to find a [profit making] pill for everything, but instead from very simple things like access to clean water and food.

\---

Finally there is a little 'paradox' that should always be brought up in medicine and in particular efforts to try to squeeze out every slimmer gains. Imagine you have a test that is 99.9% accurate for some illness. And 1 in a million people have this illness. If somebody tests positive, what are the chances that this is a false positive? 99.9%! In a million people our 99.9% accurate test will give 1,000 hits - yet only 1 person will actually have the illness. You'd probably end up seeing a negative return on life expectancy here just because of how many people you'd be scaring witless after informing them they need to come back in for follow up testing. Seriously, just take a few days off their lives and you've already gotten rid of the gains in expectancy for the 1 in 1000 guy.

[1] - [http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181002-how-long-did- ancien...](http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181002-how-long-did-ancient- people-live-life-span-versus-longevity)

</comment><comment><USER41> Has anyone mentioned this already?

> Medical errors are the third-leading cause of death after heart disease and > cancer.

[https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/22/medical-errors-third- leading...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/22/medical-errors-third-leading- cause-of-death-in-america.html)

I agree with Stegenga:

> There is no place I would rather be after a serious accident than in an > intensive care unit. For a headache, aspirin; for many infections, > antibiotics; for some diabetics, insulin—there are a handful of truly > amazing medical intervention, many discovered between seventy and ninety > years ago. However, by most measures of medical consumption—number of > patients, number of dollars, number of prescriptions—the most commonly > employed interventions, especially those introduced in recent decades, > provide compelling warrant for medical nihilism.

\- - - -

I was just reading about "The China Study", [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study)

> The China Study is a book by T. Colin Campbell and his son, Thomas M. > Campbell II. It was first published in the United States in January 2005 and > had sold over one million copies as of October 2013, making it one of > America's best-selling books about nutrition.[1][2][3]

> The China Study examines the link between the consumption of animal products > (including dairy) and chronic illnesses such as coronary heart disease, > diabetes, breast cancer, prostate cancer, and bowel cancer.[4] The authors > conclude that people who eat a predominantly whole-food, plant-based > diet—avoiding animal products as a main source of nutrition, including beef, > pork, poultry, fish, eggs, cheese, and milk, and reducing their intake of > processed foods and refined carbohydrates—will escape, reduce, or reverse > the development of numerous diseases.

Now I'm a pretty "fringe" kind of guy, and there's some stuff in there that even I have trouble with (animal protein is highly carcinogenic? Eh what?) But the basic idea of nutrition affecting health, or more accurately being the foundation of health, seems sound to me, and my attempts to eat a "whole-food, plant-based diet" have been very positive. Although I did send my digestion for a loop by "cutting over" too fast once. It takes about three days for your guts (microbiome and own) to adjust to a big change in diet, FWIW.

In any event it's batshit insane that convention medicine treats nutrition as an afterthought.

(There's a wonderful confluence between eating a whole-food, plant-based diet and the ecological repair of our food systems.)

\- - - -

Now let me push the boundaries. I burned the tip of my thumb the other day taking a pan out of the oven, 450°F. I was careless and didn't quite hold the potholder correctly, burn reflex overridden so I wouldn't drop the pan, it melted the fingerprint whorls. After I finished hopping up and down, pissed off at my own carelessness, I took a few moments to "beam" Reiki to my thumb, while concentrating on communicating with my healing and immune responses telling them to "get in there and clean things up". The pain went away and didn't come back. A very modest blister formed under the melted skin. The spot was tender, and it stung a bit if I let hot water touch it the first day, but after that there was no tenderness. Two days later the blister was gone. The skin is slightly rough, but it's not peeling, nor is it a scab. Day three I woke up and forgot that I had burned myself. The flesh apparently reconstituted itself. I'm not sure it will even leave a scar. The skin still hasn't peeled.

In sum, a minor second-degree burn, apply ten seconds of Reiki, result: no pain and accelerated healing.

"The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet."

</comment><comment><USER42> These comments just reek of the silicon valley tech-bro myth that because you're good with computers you must know better than the millions of brilliant smart people in $INDUSTRY. The absolute arrogance.

<comment><USER6> Welcome to HackerNews! Threads about Medicine and Economics are some of the worst - everyone here is apparently a Nobel grade expert.

<comment><USER43> > _Threads about Medicine and Economics are some of the worst_

Compared to what? What you'd have on a forum of economists or doctors? Maybe. What you would be reading otherwise? Not quite.

> _everyone here is apparently a Nobel grade expert._

Maybe not Nobel-grade, but there's plenty of actual doctors on HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Scientific American is getting very non scientific.

A couple of days ago we got the: "Fat Is Not the Problem—Fat Stigma Is", now this article. What follows, "Aliens may have built the Pyramids after all"?

<comment><USER23> Can you quote what you think is non scientific in the article "Is medicine overrated" ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> The anti-vaxxers think it is.

We need to be careful how we say this, because then you get generalities like the title and people who shun the basic of medicines such as neccessary vacinations.

<comment><USER46> Many "anti-vaxxers" are simply concerned parents.

Considering that vaccines (in general) have been deemed "unavoidably unsafe" at the Supreme Court level, they are not completely unjustified in their fears. [0]

Vaccine manufactures cannot be held liable.

Thus there is a "National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program" put in place to compensate those that have been damaged by vaccinations.

To date, over $4 billion dollars has been paid out in damages. [1]

Just as mentioned in this article, side effects are major deterrents of any medication. And significant efforts need to be made in order to ensure that side effects do not occlude positives effects.

[0]: [https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/09-152.pdf](https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/09-152.pdf)

[1]: [https://www.hrsa.gov/sites/default/files/hrsa/vaccine- compen...](https://www.hrsa.gov/sites/default/files/hrsa/vaccine- compensation/data/monthly-stats-july-2019.pdf)

<comment><USER18> I think you're misreading the supreme court ruling because you're misinterpreting the term unavoidably unsafe.

"In short, "unavoidably unsafe" is simply a legal term that means the manufacture is not liable because they cannot do anything to make the product safer. It does not mean that the product is dangerous and should be avoided."

This could apply to peanut butter because of peanut butter allergies. The manufacture is not liable for someone who dies of a peanut butter allergy when they eat peanut butter because this is not due to manufacturing defects but is due to the inherent nature of peanut butter being "unavoidable unsafe".

This does't mean peanut butter or vaccines are dangerous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> > decades of massive use for us to even realize that some of our most common > over-the-counter drugs were being used in dangerous ways (e.g. aspirin can > cause Reye's syndrome in children, Tylenol with alcohol can damage the > liver)

Agreed, but then to some degree could this same argument not be made about vaccines?

<comment><USER41> No. It's pretty clear, _even_ if the anti-vaxxer lunatics were not wrong (which they are, they are wrong, they are perniciously wrong, in the face of all evidence they are wrong), that vaccines would be a net benefit.

In other words, even if vaccines _did_ cause autism (which they do not) it would still be imperative to use them. The alternative to widespread vaccination is _much worse_.

<comment><USER47> > No. It's pretty clear, even if the anti-vaxxer lunatics were not wrong > (which they are, they are wrong, they are perniciously wrong, in the face of > all evidence they are wrong), _that vaccines would be a net benefit_.

Are the "anti-vaxxer lunatics" arguing that vaccines are not a net benefit? When you refer to "anti-vaxxer lunatics", who is it, _exactly_ , are you referring to? Are you referring to specific people ( _everyone_ within the "anti-vaxx" "community"), or are you referring to an abstract mental model, of questionable accuracy, held in your own mind?

> even if vaccines did cause autism (which they do not)

These sorts of comment lack epistemic humility/awareness. We do not _know_ that vaccines do not cause autism. Science _does not say this_.

However, this isn't to say that science says vaccines _do_ cause autism.

What causes autism _is unknown_. The final knowledge of an association between vaccines and autism is _unknown_.

 _To some degree_ , the "pro-vaxx" message is based on propaganda (here I am referring to the lesser pejorative meaning of the word). Many within the "anti-vaxx" community can see this, and it is used in various ways as leverage. Which is, of course, also propaganda (the more pejorative kind - typically, _but not always_ ).

This approach has been sound in the past, but there are increasing signs that it is becoming less effective. Time will tell if that trend continues.

<comment><USER48> >> _even if vaccines did cause autism (which they do not)_

> _These sorts of comment lack epistemic humility /awareness. We do not know > that vaccines do not cause autism. Science does not say this._

This is technically correct, but it's very difficult to discuss against FUD. Let's try another example:

Do vaccines cause earthquakes? Nah.

Is it 100% scientifically proved that vaccines don't cause earthquakes? It looks very difficult to prove, perhaps you can pick some areas in an earthquake prone country and only give vaccines in some areas and placebos in other areas, and see if the earthquake ratio change. I guess you will never get an approval for an study like this.

So the conclusion is that scientist say that perhaps vaccines cause earthquakes? [What is a good answer here?]

\---

It may sound weird that someone think that vaccines cause earthquakes, but some people believe[d?] that playing an instrument in the wrong season can cause big frost. From [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erke](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erke)

> _Traditionally but not commonly, only adult men play the erke, and it is > considered profane to play the erke outside of a ritual context. The erke is > commonly played during winter, as it is believed that playing it in spring > or summer can bring snow._

The English Wikipedia says "snow" but the Spanish Wikipedia says "frost" or "ground frost" like the ones that can destroy crops.

I know the story because part of my family is of a nearby area, but I guess that most cultures have similar stories.

<comment><USER47> > So the conclusion is that scientist say that perhaps vaccines cause > earthquakes? [What is a good answer here?]

Is this a similar comparison to what I've said (or implied), in the slightest? Might your imagination have added a bit of extra color to your reading of the actual words I wrote?

It may be enjoyable to mock lesser intelligent people, but if the intent of pro-vaxxers was _purely_ concern about the prevalence and risk of vaccine misunderstanding throughout society, I would expect more willingness to understand what is really happening within the community you're worried about, and less (apparent) glee at simply telling people they're stupid.

At the end of the day, you will reap what you sow.

<comment><USER48> We can't prove that vaccines don't cause autism. We can't prove that vaccines don't cause earthquakes. So they are similar. In both cases we only can show that the correlation is so small that we can't reject the null hypothesis. So the correct answer is an informal "Nah" instead of a formal "No".

> _It may be enjoyable to mock lesser intelligent people,_

No. But if you want to discuss epistemology, let's start with an easy example were we all agree that is false in spite there is no hard evidence. Sorry if it looked as a mock, but it was not my intention.

There are zealots and ridiculous claims in both sides, but at the end of the day smallpox is eradicated, polio is cornered (I hope to see the eradication day), meleases is reduced to very small levels (eradication looks more difficult). All of them used to kill a lot of people.

<comment><USER47> > In both cases we only can show that the correlation is so small that we > can't reject the null hypothesis.

And by what means has any correlation been studied? What _specific_ data is used?

Has a machine learning approach that examines _all_ vaccination records and compares it to _all_ subsequent patient medical issues, _of all kinds_ , not just autism? Does the necessary data for this even exist? I wonder if that fact could even be determined from reading any official websites on vaccine safety.

> let's start with an easy example where _we all agree that is false_ in spite > there is no hard evidence.

a) I wonder how unanimous the agreement really is. I have a feeling expressing dissent in the slightest would be about as good for a doctor's career as it is for one's karma on social media sites.

b) Have there ever been cases in the medical field where "all people agreeing" turned out to be less impressive than it sounds?

[https://www.nature.com/articles/437801a](https://www.nature.com/articles/437801a)

"Marshall and Warren went on to show that patients with ulcers can be treated with antibiotics. Unlike patients given acid-suppressing drugs, their ulcers do not return."

"But gastroenterologists resisted the idea. Francis Mégraud, a bacteriologist at the Victor Segalen University in Bordeaux, France, remembers attending the 1988 meeting of the American Gastroenterological Association in New Orleans and hearing _outraged physicians_. "They seemed insulted, saying, 'we are being asked to treat stomach ulcers with antibiotics, as if it were gonorrhoea!'" he says. "It was hard for them to accept that the disease could be a simple infection.""

> There are zealots and ridiculous claims in both sides, but at the end of the > day smallpox is eradicated, polio is cornered (I hope to see the eradication > day), meleases is reduced to very small levels (eradication looks more > difficult). All of them used to kill a lot of people.

True, however:

a) were vaccines the only factor involved in this improvement

b) relative (net aggregate) vaccine safety and absolute safety are related, but distinct subjects. If I'm taking my children for vaccinations, I am interested in absolute safety, not net aggregate safety.

<comment><USER48> a) Yes

b) Absolute safety is imposible. Let's make some calculation: There are 1.3E8 newborn per year, each one get vaccine in about 10 occasion (sometimes multiple shots), let's assume that the round trip to the hospital is 5 miles and the accident rate of cars is 1.25E-8, and in a car there are 2 persons (a child and an adult). So there are

1.3E8 x 10 x 5 x 1.25E-8 / 2 ~= 40

death of children going or returning to the hospital to get the vaccines per year. (Not everyone get to the hospital by car, but even walking has risks.) If we eliminate vaccination we can save 40 children per year.

<comment><USER47> >>> at the end of the day smallpox is eradicated, polio is cornered (I hope to see the eradication day), meleases is reduced to very small levels (eradication looks more difficult). All of them used to kill a lot of people.

>> a) were vaccines the only factor involved in this improvement

> a) Yes

 _Once again_ , a confident binary answer to an _extremely_ complex problem.

How did you form this conclusion? Do you have anything you could show to substantiate it? Something like some charts demonstrating that incidents of all of these illnesses were essentially constant, and then _only_ upon introduction of vaccines they began to decline? I've done some reading _on this specific topic_ , I am interested to know if you have. (I happen to have great philosophical interest in the actual vs self-perceived basis of knowledge among zealous advocates on any matter.)

> b) Absolute safety is imposible.

I notice you kind of jump between two conversational styles, the first style ("a) Yes" above) is confident proclamation of a specific truth with no substance to back it up, and then now more of a highly rhetorical, subtle changing of the subject style. And to make it even more interesting, you then include a mathematical formula to give an impression of certainty, but in the process you've completely removed the actual point of contention (harm due to vaccines) from the discussion. Things like this are what I am looking for in these conversations: _how do pro-vaxxers come to believe ( "know")the things they believe._

Even if absolute safety isn't possible (something you have no way of knowing), safety isn't a binary, it's a continuum.

Have we done everything we can to study vaccine safety? Are there any flaws in the current system? Have you even done any reading on what the system actually consists of?

I will offer you a second chance to demonstrate how much you know about this, by reminding you of a question in my earlier comment that you seem to have accidentally missed:

>> In both cases we only can show that the correlation is so small that we can't reject the null hypothesis.

> And by what means has any correlation been studied? What specific data is > used?

> Has a machine learning approach that examines all vaccination records and > compares it to all subsequent patient medical issues, of all kinds, not just > autism, ever been performed? Does the necessary data for this even exist? I > wonder if that fact could even be determined from reading any official > websites on vaccine safety.

I'm interested to know your answer to this - perhaps you are aware of something I am not, and I can learn something new. (Also, please do not accidentally overlook the questions earlier in my comment, and if I happen to have failed to answer any of your questions, please point that out that failing as well and I will rectify it.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Can You Hear Me Now? Spotty Reception in the Heart of Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/30/us/spotty-cell-reception-in-the-heart-of-silicon-valley.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=mini-moth&region=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below&_r=0 <comment><USER2> Nyt should try using a cell phone in Manhattan. It is pretty bad there too.

Any other industry would be threatening to leave but SV is such a circle jerk it would dry up and blow away.</comment>


The Beale ciphers - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beale_ciphers <comment><USER2> Had to double take at reading _Robert Morriss_ (surely no relation..surely)

> _Beale entrusted a box containing the encrypted messages to a local > innkeeper named Robert Morriss_

If it's just an unknown one time pad we're looking for, this is pretty damning:

> _If the Declaration of Independence is used as a key for the first cipher, > it yields alphabetical sequences such as abfdefghiijklmmnohpp and others_

<comment><USER3> OTOH, there's nothing to stop a separate cipher key for the first text, and the author making sure that the key words chosen (there's always a choice, since only the first letters are used) map (roughly) to an interesting sequence in the Declaration of Independence - as a gotcha.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's a blog entry describing some small investigations into the Beale ciphers, which revealed a few surprises (for me at least): [http://nibot- lab.livejournal.com/72614.html](http://nibot-lab.livejournal.com/72614.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> I grew up in Roanoke county, neighboring Bedford. We had books that mentioned this treasure, and I've always harbored a dream of deciphering the text then casually buying the property where the treasure is. If it's not a hoax maybe I can spin up some AWS instances and get cracking :)

<comment><USER6> The treasure is supposed to be buried in iron pots. A 2-box metal detector should be able to find those to a depth of several feet.

I happen to have several maps of that area from the 1820s through the 1920s.

If you ever get serious about it, give me a call :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Also: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ciphertexts](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ciphertexts)

</comment><comment><USER7> I learned about the Beale ciphers in the 80s and wrote a simple program to try deciphering ciphers one and three using a given key text. I think it's probably a hoax, but the codes are fun to play around with.

</comment><comment><USER8> Skeptoid has an interesting article which lays out a convincing case that they're fakes:

[http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4301](http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4301)

</comment><comment><USER9> I remember reading about these in a book when I was a kid... _Alvin's Secret Code_ was the book I think? Always fascinated me!</comment>


AngularJS Cheat Sheet - <AUTHOR> http://www.cheatography.com/proloser/cheat-sheets/angularjs/ <comment><USER2> Great to have stuff like this! If Dean is reading, one suggestion might be to add the version(s) of AngularJS it is describing at the top rather than just the last modified date at the bottom of the doc.

<comment><USER3> It's describing whatever version was out when I last worked on it because cheatography sucks and I am lazy. If you're on OSX: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dash-docs- snippets/id4580348...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dash-docs- snippets/id458034879?mt=12) is a much better resource. I have also been trying to relocate my old Tips-N-Tricks article to <https://github.com/angular/angular.js/wiki/FAQ> after I decided AngularUI should probably not schism the docs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I use this on a regular basis, its great. It's not full documentation, it's a quick reference "cheat sheet" and perfect for it. (I have no affiliation with ProLoser)

I'd love to hear what BrianPetro is talking about beyond a fly-by cheap shot and group advert.

</comment><comment><USER5> This cheat sheet has been around a while and did not make the quality cut to be posted here => <http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Angular-Developers-4896676>

<comment><USER6> What do you mean?

<comment><USER5> That probably is not the most constructive comment on my behalf. I have posted AngularJS resources, which I have deemed more useful than the cheat sheet, at the above link.

<comment><USER7> something tells me your sense of "useful" is a bit skewed away from beginners if you don't consider a cheat sheet like this useful.

also, the aprox 127 upvotes for OP shows maybe you should reconsider

<comment><USER5> I can't argue with that. Now posted in the said group => [http://www.linkedin.com/groups/AngularJS-Cheat- Sheet-4896676...](http://www.linkedin.com/groups/AngularJS-Cheat- Sheet-4896676.S.242247004)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is incredibly useful. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER9> Thanks! Very useful.

</comment><comment><USER10> Awesome work dude ! thanks. and yes adding the version at the top would be usefull.</comment>


Windows Exploitation Tricks: Abusing the User-Mode Debugger - <AUTHOR> https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2019/04/windows-exploitation-tricks-abusing.html <comment><USER2> > _Windows Exploitation Tricks: Abusing the User-Mode Debugger_

...and...

> _Nothing I've described here is a security vulnerability, but the behavior > is interesting and it's worth looking out for cases where it could be used._

Maybe I'm misunderstanding this newfangled internets but isn't exploitation generally synonymous with security vulnerability?

JFYI, for anyone who's interested, the equivalent debugging API methods in .NET could be found in ClrMd[0] but it's as unyielding a beast as the native methods.

[0] - [https://github.com/microsoft/clrmd](https://github.com/microsoft/clrmd)

<comment><USER3> A vulnerability is "this function will write 8 bytes of arbitrary data out of bounds in an edge case". Exploitation is the process of using that vulnerability to, typically, cause the process to execute attacker-controlled code.

Something can make exploitation easier without being a vulnerability. For example, disabling exploit mitigations like ASLR does this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> User mode debugging is an area that any present or future OS designer should be concerned about getting right in terms of debugging features vs. security implications...

</comment><comment><USER5> Why is project zero hosted on blogspot?

<comment><USER6> Google owns it.

<comment><USER5> They don't host their 'cloud' blog on blogspot: [https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google- cloud/an-...](https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/an- update-on-sundays-service-disruption)

So why project zero?

<comment><USER7> It was probably the easiest route. Instead of setting up a special website for it, they just made a blog with a couple of clicks. Project zero goes back to 2014. Perhaps the infrastructure wasn't there, or it started as a small pilot project.</comment></comment></comment></comment>