New pill can deliver insulin - <AUTHOR> http://news.mit.edu/2019/pill-deliver-insulin-orally-0207 <comment><USER2> > Once ingested, water dissolves a disk of sugar, using a spring to release a > tiny needle made up almost entirely of freeze-dried insulin. The needle is > injected into the stomach — which the patient can't feel, owing to a lack of > pain receptors in the stomach. Once the injection has occurred, the needle > can break down in the digestive tract.

That's some pretty impressive ingenuity. Also sounds kinda terrifying if the 1.0 has any kind of edge case that involves tearing holes in your stomach lining.

I'm not diabetic, but I still have vivid memories of sitting with my grandmother while she constantly pricked her finger to test blood sugar and jabbing insulin pens into her abdomen. It's always stuck with me as a particularly unpleasant lifestyle to have to endure. Even still, if I were a diabetic I think I'd still be waiting a year or two after the release of something like this to make sure all the kinks have been ironed out ;)

<comment><USER3> What doctors and researchers get wrong about diabetes is that pin-pricks and injections are not even remotely bad. I don't know a single diabetic who cares about injections and blood sugar tests. You get used to that within the first week of diagnosis.

No, the unpleasant part of being diabetic is having to live every second of your life as an act of weighing how what you're currently doing is going to affect your blood sugar levels an hour for now:

\- Have I been sitting in this chair too long? \- Have I not been sitting down enough this morning? \- Have I been drinking enough water? \- Did I just drink too much water? \- I haven't been to the bathroom in two hours; does this mean I'm screwed? \- If I eat a piece of toast after dinner, will I be able to have sex with my wife without going hypoglycemic? \- I'd like to go hiking, but it's hot outside and my insulin might spoil, so maybe I'll walk around the block instead. \- I just plan on going to the grocery store for 20 minutes; do I need to bring insulin in case there's a traffic jam on the way home?

Etc., etc. Pharmaceutical companies can't solve the real lifestyle problems associated with diabetes short of inventing an actual cure.

<comment><USER4> > I don't know a single diabetic who cares about injections and blood sugar > tests.

I'm diabetic and the sole reason I don't check my blood sugar (unless I think something is drastically out of whack) is that it takes me upwards of 30 minutes to do a finger prick for testing. My anxiety skyrockets and nothing I do can tell me that it's not going to be excruciating. Most of the time I end up having my wife do it, which isn't a fun process for either of us.

It's not the worst thing, but it's deeply, deeply unpleasant for me. Come at me with a 10ga needle, I won't flinch; come at me with a 30ga lancet and I'll be a mess. I'm going to be switching to a CGM purely for this reason.

<comment><USER5> I was on a CGM (Dexcom) for about 3 months until my new insurance would not cover it. Even though it's convenient, it comes with its own set of problems - having to restock every month (with copays) got tiring and somewhat expensive compared to strips. I also had false low reads a number of times. And the amount of wasted plastic (the applicator gun) is concerning if you are environmentally conscious.

As for lancets, you might want to try the AccuCheck fastclix. It's a pen shape device with a cartridge that holds 6 lancets. One cartridge can last me a couple months as I tend to use the same lancet 10 or more times (I know, probably not recommended). It's also the most painless lancet I've ever used and it's easy to carry around.

<comment><USER6> I had one of those for a while, and it does say you should only use each lancet once. Realistically, I don't know if there are any real risks to reusing them though?

<comment><USER5> I reuse them until it becomes mildly discomforting at which time I know the lancet has dulled. Of course AccuChek prefers that you use it once;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Type I diabetic here.

The injections are really not a significant problem for me. A lot of people may recoil at the thought of injecting themselves often, as though it's painful. It's either not painful or maybe a little, but I just don't care much.

Much worse things about being diabetic are:

* Danger of low blood sugar

* Trying to get the right dose

* Timing the dose so it is effective at the right time

* Carrying around a bunch of stuff that I need or may need, like insulin and glucose tablets

* Trying to keep the insulin cold enough or fresh enough that it retains its potency

* Keeping my phone on and charged all the time, which has my blood sugar readings, and checking it at times where it might seem like I'm rude. I'd rather use a watch or special device, but the special devices are strangely bulky and don't hold a charge, and watches apparently can't receive blood sugar readings yet (without a phone also present).

None of those things are very terrible. Treatment is much better now. But they are all way worse than the tiny insulin needle injections.

<comment><USER8> Hey - I assume you're using a CGM - Dexcom?

Check out XDrip. Its an opensource community built collector for CGM data. They have a version that runs on Google Wear so your android watch can act as a collector. You can also still use your phone to collect and just have the data appear on your watch.

Nightscout is another good related resource

[https://github.com/jamorham/xDrip- plus/blob/master/Documenta...](https://github.com/jamorham/xDrip- plus/blob/master/Documentation/WatchGuide.md)

<comment><USER9> xDrip is such a great piece of software that few people know about.

If you're want to see the future of medical care using smart devices, start there.

<comment><USER10> Can you give a bit more detail on how you use it? Is extra hardware required?

<comment><USER9> No extra hardware needed. Only your phone and a CGM if you wish to use one.

xDrip allows you to configure various care settings and then will provide real time blood sugar feedback and dosing suggestions.

There's (almost) nothing else like it in this space.

<comment><USER10> I'm confused as to what parakeet does. I have a Medtronic 670g with CGM, and xdrip supports it. Apparently Medtronic already has an app, but xdrip uses data from it. Also not really clear where nighscout fits in. Is that just the service in the cloud to store it, and xdrip is the display?

<comment><USER8> We have a Dexcom G5 and use Xdrip to read the data directly from the CGM. It has a number of benefits over the OEM provided readers: -no forced replacement times for sensors. -No forced delayed starts on new sensor insertions -predictive algorithms and treatment recommendations. -more integrations into third party systems (like IFTTT) -Opensource community project that keeps evolving much faster than the OEMs

Nightscout is a cloud service to store data reading and treatments. Again its community developed opensource solution which gives you complete ownership over your data. Some of its earlier game changing features are now common in the OEM solutions, but I still like the idea of owning this and it being opensource. Nightscout is a really big help for us managing our son (whos 6) since it makes it really easy to give real time access to his CGM and treatments to anyone anywhere.

Nightscout is also the unofficial hub for the Opensource development in diabetes. They've contributed so much that is now being used by OEMs. Im a big supporter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I just watched a lecture on diabetes by Dr John McDougall last night. He described type 2 diabetes as the body's natural way to limit weight gain. He points out that morbidly obese people are often not diabetic: lack of insulin resistance is what enabled them to keep growing. Viewed this way, diabetes is a sign that a person has reached maximum weight. Giving a person additional insulin at this point is like trying to override the body's defense mechanism and forcing it to gain even more weight.

McDougall has lots of other interesting insights in the lecture and discusses how he treats diabetics. He goes into some detail about how he decides how to adjust medications and why he recommends his diet.

I'm posting this here because it may be of use to people who may not have heard this information from their own doctors.

The lecture is found here: [https://youtu.be/UgE2IdL6tMw?t=1103](https://youtu.be/UgE2IdL6tMw?t=1103)

The link starts the video at the point where McDougall starts discussing type 2 diabetes specifically. Before this he talks about insulin and type 1 diabetes.

<comment><USER12> I know several Type 2 diabetics who are not (and have never been) obese. While obesity is definitely a cause for the disease, it is not the only cause there is.

<comment><USER11> I googled "diabetes in thin people" and found the term "skinny fat", slim but with a high percentage of body fat. These are people who may appear to their body to have enough fat stored to survive a tough winter. (This was how McDougall describes the onset of diabetes.) Can people with low body fat get diabetes?

<comment><USER5> Did you mean, can a person with low body fat get Type 2 diabetes?

<comment><USER11> yes

<comment><USER5> Dominique Wilkins has type 2 diabetes. I would imagine his body fat is pretty low.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Study by Novo Nordisk. one of the fine companies responsible for raising insulin prices by thousands of percent.

<comment><USER14> Read up on the matter. The culprits are pharmacy benefits managers who push producers to increase list prices while demanding obscene rebates that are never passed on to the consumers. Most producers don't disclaim the rebates, but Lars Fruegaard (Novos CEO) is on record saying that it increased from 64% to 67% last year. So pharmacy benefits managers are pushing up the list price but less and less is getting through to the producers. The American system is rigged by the middlemen who approach consumers with ownership of "cheap drugs" because of the rebates, while they approach the producers with ownership of the consumers. As an alternative to that system Novo Nordisk is releasing cheaper insulin through a partnership with Walmart where it goes directly to the consumers.

Openness around rebates will be a great first step to help lower prices, but the PBMs have gotten the industry into a reverse price war where everyone is overbidding each other on price in order to provide the larges rebate to PBMs. Something big has to change to revert that cause.

Disclaimer: I work for Novo Nordisk.

<comment><USER15> >Read up on the matter.

Slightly off-topic, but could you talk about what pharmacy benefits managers are supposed to do and actually do, for insulin especially, and their effect on the market?

I Googled this term but can't make of sense of your comment based on what I've read. (The definitions of pharmacy benefits managers that I found have nothing to do with what you wrote.)

<comment><USER16> There is a paragraph in the wikipedia article on PBM[0] full of sources on this.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmacy_benefit_management#Co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmacy_benefit_management#Controversies_and_Litigation)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If this is at all attractive to people, it's going to make insulin so damned expensive.

The price of insulin is already rising: there aren't all that many generic manufacturers of it, leaving them in a competition-free market. If this takes off it's going to suck up a good chunk of the marketplace, and probably leave us with maybe one or two generic manufacturers - enough to have an effective monopoly. Insulin prices will spike the same way epi pens did.

Good tech. But sad re. what it's going to do to patients for a while.

<comment><USER18> Manufacturing insulin isn't under patent or a trade secret is it? If the price of insulin rises, then manufacturing insulin becomes more economically viable, so new players will enter the arena, thus driving the price down.

Is there any reason this wouldn't be subject to the normal laws of supply and demand?

<comment><USER19> [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-drug-companies-keep- insulin...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-drug-companies-keep-insulin- prices-high/)

Looks like a patent issue (every new improvement in production methods has its own patent, so the insulins for which patents have expired are lower-quality in one way or another) plus shipping costs (refrigerated bottled liquids with a shelf life <6 months).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Breakthrough like this needs to be designed so that people can afford it. It just becomes burdensome (and depressing) for people who may need it and find the cost out of reach.

On the other hand, given that treating diabetes is more costly to the society in general (although more profitable for the pharma companies), shouldn't there be more research to ensure people don't get into the trap of becoming diabetic? One reason people become Type 2 diabetic is that they are completely unaware that their lifestyle and food they are eating are slowly creeping in to make them suffer with this disease. Healthy people only know about them becoming diabetic because the cycle to get your blood sugar measured (A1C Hemoglobin) is too far in between (annual checkups). If a person is more aware of his/her blood sugar levels at shorter intervals, then a proactive approach can be made so that the person can do changes that will help prevent diabetes.

<comment><USER21> BigPharma is a business and has no incentive to prevent or cure disease but to make sure the patient remains a customer

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> What's the point of having this be an internal device? Why not use the same technology to make external injection devices easier to use? It seems to me like having the device be internal just increases the number of possible failure modes and makes failures harder to spot/recover from.

</comment><comment><USER23> Depending on what I eat, I need different ammounts of insulin, and adjust the dose acordingly using my insulin pen and needle.

How does one adjust the dose in a pill? Do I take more or fewer pills?

They mention the insulin is "freeze dried". What does this mean in practice? Do I need to carry around a climate controlled box with my insulin in?

<comment><USER24> "freeze dried"

"Freeze drying is a water removal process typically used to preserve perishable materials, to extend shelf life or make the material more convenient for transport. Freeze drying works by freezing the material, then reducing the pressure and adding heat to allow the frozen water in the material to sublimate."

You freeze it or shock freeze it and then "distill" the water of in vacuum. The ice goes into the vapor phase, skipping the liquid phase. This process is called sublimation and part of each first year high school chemistry curriculum.

The substance, insulin or other peptides, will be stable after this at room temperature for some time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I know we're a little ways off, but this seems like a great platform to combine with automatic blood sugar measurement. Imagine taking one pill in the morning that measures your blood sugar and internally administers insulin as necessary. There are already externally attached pumps that do both (my father, a type 1 diabetic, uses one) but having an electronic device permanently attached to your stomach is a bit of a hassle.

</comment><comment><USER26> I can see why they're targeting type 2's, as they may need more of a fixed insulin boost than full insulin replacement that I and other type 1's need. Part of the fun being type 1 is figuring out proper adjustments to your insulin dosages based on food, activity level, stress and other factors. It's a clever design, though, and may help some people stay more compliant with their treatment.

</comment><comment><USER27> I view this is interesting research about medicine that has nearly zero usefulness for actually treating diabetes in humans. Since this is a technical audience, if you're diabetic I can't speak highly enough of the opensource efforts combining a cgms (like a dexcom) with a pump and then software running on android or iphon or raspberry pi to create a "feedback loop" to slowly but usefully bring blood sugar back to desired range. For more see: For an overview [https://diyps.org/2017/08/09/what-you-should-know-about- clos...](https://diyps.org/2017/08/09/what-you-should-know-about-closed- looping-diy-like-openaps-or-otherwise/) iPhone version call Loop [https://loopkit.github.io/loopdocs/](https://loopkit.github.io/loopdocs/) raspberry pi [https://openaps.org/](https://openaps.org/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Inhalable insulin was a total failure, even though it worked. I don't expect this to succeed where inhalable insulin failed.

<comment><USER28> Mannkind is still around, though not growing much. Why do you think it was a total failure?

<comment><USER3> Oh, really? I thought I read an article about how the product had been discontinued. I stand corrected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I would be scared the needle hits hard food or something else and doesn't inject the insulin with me not knowing it.

</comment><comment><USER30> Hope the price per pill is more reasonable that current prices on insulin which are skyrocketed over 20 years.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm hoping Apple will pull out a miracle and able to measure blood sugar with the Apple Watch. With that data, people can make apps to do really cool things to help that person out.

<comment><USER32> Apple's focus is on "average" people, not people with diabetes.

Also it saddens me to hear "I hope that company X will solve Y" instead of "I hope some university develops a method to solve Y".

<comment><USER33> Diabetes is becoming more and more common, especially in the US. It also could be used for monitoring healthy people so they don't fall into T2 diabetes. The problem is, at the current technology level it might not be possible. Johnson&Johnson tried to do that for decades and failed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Is diabetes curable with gene therapy? I'm surprised we can cure hemophilia with gene therapy but not diabetes. Is it impossible to get your pancreas to create insulin naturally because it's missing something vital?

[1] [https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/gene- th...](https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/gene-therapy-used- treat-hemophilia)

<comment><USER13> type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease where your immune system kills the beta cells that live on the pancreas. you can get donar beta cells that will work but your immune system will just kill them off again. This only works with immunosuppresents which will cause 10x more issues than just taking insulin.

<comment><USER34> Interesting, I never knew type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease. I just thought the body just stopped creating insulin because the pancreas is messed up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> A potential huge impact of this advance is inspiring further research into peptide-based drugs; this is a whole new paradigm with the potential to be comparable or better than the small-molecule drugs we currently focus on, but the poor marketability of injections has kept most pharmaceutical companies from being very interested in them.

</comment><comment><USER36> Doesn't this have to work 100% of the time if you rely on it? I mean if it works 99% of the time your odds are low you'll make it thru a year. It seems like a cool idea, but the mechanism does seem like it would work not _every_ time.

</comment><comment><USER37> Can anyone shed some light on why this can only help type 2 and not type 1 diabetics?

</comment><comment><USER38> Is it not bad to have tiny needles traveling through your intestines?

<comment><USER39> There is no metal needle anywhere in the product. The needles are made of freeze-dried insulin. It is injected into the stomach wall where it dissolves into the bloodstream.

<comment><USER38> Oh I didn't get that on the first read through.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This still seems dangerous to the stomach lining over time. Why not suppositories?

</comment><comment><USER41> What's it going to cost, though? A big problem with insulin now is the cost...

</comment><comment><USER42> And what happens if it gets stuck in your esophagus?

</comment><comment><USER43> So it's a roughly gömböc-shaped capsule, then?

</comment><comment><USER44> This seems like a solution looking for a problem.

</comment><comment><USER45> As a TYPE 1 Diabetic. All I can say is AMEN!

</comment><comment><USER46> URL should probably be the source press release: [http://news.mit.edu/2019/pill-deliver-insulin- orally-0207](http://news.mit.edu/2019/pill-deliver-insulin-orally-0207), since techcrunch is just a less detailed summary of that

<comment><USER47> Thanks! We've updated it from [https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/07/mits-insulin- pill-could-re...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/07/mits-insulin-pill-could- replace-injections-for-people-with-type-2-diabetes/).

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Plant based diet can reverse diabetes ( I and II ). For type I milk products need to be stopped. Take 1% of your bodyweight as fruits. Take 1 % of your body weight as Raw ( uncooked ) vegetables. Take 10% of that vegetable quota as green leafy vegetables. Based on China Study by Colin Campbell.

e.g. weight 150 pounds 1.5 pounds fruits before 1 pm 1.5 pounds raw vegetables for the day If you are still hungry you can eat cooked food after completing daily raw fruits vegetable quota. Avoid all animal,milk,processed packaged products and heated oils. Will reverse diabetes in 3 days for newly detected patients. Add 1 day for each year you have diabetes

[https://biswaroop.com/](https://biswaroop.com/) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgxvGu4fuGo&t=561s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgxvGu4fuGo&t=561s) lookup his youtube videos

<comment><USER49> T1 can't be reversed.

<comment><USER48> This diet with stopping milk products can. Milk protein with 17 rings similar to beta cells. Body in an attempt to kill milk protein which escapes into blood without breaking down the ring structure also kills beta cells [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4edofibXOiM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4edofibXOiM) watch at 48 mins

<comment><USER50> This part of the video makes no sense. (I didn't watch the rest.)

From the video:

> _If you observe milk protein (casein) under a microscope it will appears as > this - there are 17 links in it._

The video says "links", you say "rings". It's a small but important distinction. Proteins are made by linked aminoacids, so sing "link" is a good approximation, but most of them don't look like "rings".

I can't find where the "17" comes from. After a few google searches I found that casein has approximately 210 aminoacids, the number can vary, but it is not 17.

(Also, you can't see a single casein protein under a normal microscope, nor the parts of it. I guess it's only a metaphor, but it makes me suspicious.)

I don't find the part in the video that says that casein escapes to blood. (I didn't try too hard.)

Casein is split in the stomach by the enzymes IIRC they are the regular enzymes that also split the proteins in meat, and other food, not specialized enzymes.

(There is an specialized enzyme for lactose that is an special sugar in milk, but this is not what the video or you say. But if this were dangerous, we'd have a lot of babies with diabetes. Moreover, only some adults produce the enzyme to digest lactose, so it would be easy to test.)

I didn't find a source that says that beta cells have some proteins that are similar to casein. It is posible, but I doubt.

And IIRC most autoinmune diseases, where the body get confused and start to attack some part of it don't go away after you remove the initial agent that causes the reaction. So stopping drinking milk won't stop the reaction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> To all the type II diabetics here, I'd suggest looking in to iodine. I'm not diabetic, but I started taking it for other reasons and as a side effect I seemed to have better blood sugar regulation. There are also doctors out there that claim it reduces insulin dependence.

I'm not claiming a cure, or even an actual treatment. Just want to point some people to something that most people have never heard of.

</comment><comment><USER52> For the case of T2D, eating fewer carbs may be more effective than later reducing it with expensive insulin and fancy MIT pills.

I often hear good stuff about these guys: [https://www.virtahealth.com/](https://www.virtahealth.com/) (no affiliation)

edit: clarify that Virta is treating T2D primarily.

<comment><USER53> Eating fewer carbs is completely ineffective when your pancreas is not producing insulin in the first place.

<comment><USER52> I was talking about type 2 diabetes, not type 1. You're of course correct regarding type 1.

<comment><USER54> Speaking as a T1D, please always specify. It's a shame these two totally unrelated diseases have the same name.

<comment><USER55> They're not "completely unrelated" — they are an absolute and a relative deficiency of insulin production respectively. They do have significantly different aetiologies though, and the conflation is very unhelpful.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A16z data: How much startup executives make in salary and equity - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/a16z-data-startup-executives-salary-equity-bonus-pay-2018-9 <comment><USER2> Paywalled after a delay!

[https://outline.com/dbbuPu](https://outline.com/dbbuPu)

</comment><comment><USER3> If paywalled, hit `esc` key during page load. Kills JS.

</comment><comment><USER4> Paywalled.</comment>


A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/mysterious-case-man-who-can-read-letters-not-numbers-exposes-complex-roots <comment><USER2> The last paragraph surprised me even though it shouldn't have. It's shocking to have a clever scientific story suddenly grounded in the reality that this person is rapidly dying. In some sense he has donated his body to science even before he died.

<comment><USER3> It was pretty jarring. You're reading along, fascinated if you're me, then jarringly reminded of the fact that this was a human being, not a Petri dish. Empathy's gotta be one of the most important skills for an experimental social psychologist.

<comment><USER4> >Empathy's gotta be one of the most important skills for an experimental social psychologist.

Or maybe the exact opposite? I would find it very hard to do research and empathize with the subject of my research at the same time.

This has also just made me realized that this problem with empathizing with my research is actually highly problematic when it comes to the research I am actually doing at the moment.

<comment><USER5> An EMT friend described her take as, you need empathy in order to help people, but you need to be able to switch it off because sometimes what you're about to do is going to hurt them.

It's like any of our instinctual responses. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it's in the way.

<comment><USER6> It's not really switching it off as such, it's more that you have to "long- term empathize" with the person you're helping.

Setting a broken bone or popping a joint back in to place will hurt right now, but the consequences of _not_ doing it will hurt the person a lot more over time. So you do inflict pain on them right in the moment, which is certainly unpleasant to do, but in the hope that the overall pain and discomfort for them will be significantly lessened.

At least that's how a friend of mine (former firefighter) put it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As someone with really bad dyslexia and dyscalculia I can't say I'm particularly surprised. I've done a lot of research on what neurologic differences are present and they're fairly interesting:

[http://www.neuroanatomy.wisc.edu/selflearn/Dyslexia.htm](http://www.neuroanatomy.wisc.edu/selflearn/Dyslexia.htm)

[https://www.brainfacts.org/archives/2011/dyslexia-and-the- br...](https://www.brainfacts.org/archives/2011/dyslexia-and-the-brain-today)

<comment><USER8> Would you be interested in adding what you've learned to the discussion here: [https://www.kialo.com/our-perception-as-humans-is-not- necess...](https://www.kialo.com/our-perception-as-humans-is-not-necessarily- the-same-as-any-other-human-30317?path=30317.0~30317.1) ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Somehow this is not surprising for me, I have heard about experiments related to free-will wherein the brain already made a decision even before the conscious mind became aware of it. Thus putting doubts on our conscious experience of free-will.

Also, in terms of problem solving, there are experiments which show that the brain calculates the answers and "presents" the answers later on to the consciousness. It's not like the problems were solved within the scope of consciousness, which is of course contradictory to what we experience. We feel the contradictions because we experience everything through consciousness, i.e. we can't experience things which happen outside realm of consciousness. The brain scans prove in a sense that there is a disconnect (For instance in this article the brain scans showed signals related to seeing faces in the numbers, but the conscious experience was not seeing them).

The link between what the brain does, and what we experience (consciousness) is indeed the hard problem of consciousness.

<comment><USER10> All of the research you describe can be safely bundled into the same category as "dead salmon shows brain activity on an fMRI if you squint hard enough." It's phrenology for the 21st century, except with dyes and MRIs instead of head shaped calipers.

The second you say the words "conscious mind", you leave the realm of science. At best, "consciousness" is an abstraction used by psychiatrists and laypeople over much deeper, more complex, and less understood concepts in neuroscience. The field has yet to differentiate the roles neural plasticity plays between newborns, the average college student, and brain trauma victims - let alone grapple with the implication that our brains are the result of a billion years of evolution.

The nature of human intelligence is far wilder than you or I can imagine, Horatio, but publish-or-perish cannon fodder is clearly not the answer.

<comment><USER11> I'm struggling to come up with something more substantive to say in response, but this is a bad take and it needs to be said. Studies that demonstrate high level brain activity without the corresponding conscious experience are important in that they help to constrain where and how conscious experience is generated. Platitudes about human intelligence have no utility here.

<comment><USER12> > conscious experience is generated

Is there any evidence that it is generated?

<comment><USER11> It seems to come and go with life, wakefulness, blows to the head, etc. It can be modulated through stimulating brain cells or destructive damage. Yes, there's a lot of evidence that the brain generates consciousness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > In contrast, when shown numbers with embedded faces, the number's effect > apparently swamped that of the face: RFS reported seeing neither; everything > looked like spaghetti. Yet an EEG still showed the characteristic N170 spike > for registering faces. Somehow, his brain was still processing and > identifying a face—a fairly high-level skill—even though his conscious mind > was oblivious. This deficit shows high-level cognitive processing and > consciousness are distinct, Koch says. "You can get one without the other."

I think this misses another possibility besides "cognitive processing and consciousness are distinct".

Namely, "the part of them that is conscious of the cognitive processing is not well-connected to the part of them that is generating speech and controlling their motor systems."

<comment><USER14> Makes me think of this silliness I saw today: [https://mobile.twitter.com/BFriedmanDC/status/12892831187305...](https://mobile.twitter.com/BFriedmanDC/status/1289283118730534912)

I recommend first watching it with you eyes closed and after that seeing how you can manipulate your perception. It was easy to hear "brain needle" with my eyes closed.

<comment><USER15> Whichever word I repeated in my head as I heard it was what I heard even if looking at another. I could easily and reliably make it change between brainneedle, brainstorm, greenneedle and greenstorm using this method.

Edit: kind of think this is to do with the n at the start of needle being implicit as you already get the n sound at the end of green and brain. I think if you register another n the remaining sound sounds most like eedle and if you don't the remaining sound sounds most like storm... Or I may have listened to this too many times

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If he had simply lost the ability to recognize the glyphs for 2-9, he would have still seen their shapes, and he could have learned them again, just as he learned new glyphs for them.

What seems to be happening here is a sort of crosstalk or feedback. His brain is still recognizing the glyphs, but those neurons are sending unwanted signals elsewhere in his visual cortex which scramble the perceived image.

My interpretation of this case is that the image we perceive consciously is a combination of the raw visual data and various recognition modules, so that we don't just perceive "a curved line crossing back on itself in the lower right of the image" plus "the abstract notion of the number 8", but we see the number 8 localized where the line forming it is. Same with any other symbols, objects, faces etc.

Because of this, the neurons that represent the conscious perception of a certain section of the visual field must receive both "low-level" information (the curves forming the digit, their color, the color of the background), but also "mid-level" recognition output ("the digit 8"). So if the neuron(s) recognizing the 8 act up and send scrambled signals, they can scramble the whole conscious perception of the corresponding area of the visual field. The fact that it also disrupts his conscious perception of faces overlying the digit confirms this.

<comment><USER17> Interesting.

The way we can do captchas suggests you may be on to something there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have also seen this example, where a man blinded by strokes still avoids obstacles and recognizes emotions, without any conscious awareness[1]. Is this the same phenomenon?

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/health/23blin.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/health/23blin.html)

<comment><USER19> It is the phenomenon called blindsight, mentioned in this article. (Edit: but not explained, so your question is reasonable)

<comment><USER20> From what I recall in my neuroscience class, this is likely to be caused by damage to the visual cortex, which is used to consciously process visual information, but not the superior colliculi, which is used to unconsciously process peripheral vision. This is caused by damage to one of the visual processing regions but not others.

From the article, it appears something similar has happened. Corticobasal syndrome potentially killed off some brain cells but not others, leading to damage at some areas but not others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't understand how these experiments lead to the conclusion separates higher cognitive functions from consciousness. I fact I don't see anything that necessarily she'd any light into the roots of consciousness here. Can someone explain how the results of the experiment lead to that conclusion? This looks to me like, if it were a computer program, encoding/decoding of the symbols seems to be messed up for a largely contiguous block of symbols. Like you get jumbled up weird shapes when you feed the wrong encoding to a program.

<comment><USER22> That he could identity people, without being aware of it.

Basically, if there were faces inside a number, the EEG showed that his brain recognized the faces, but he did not know there were faces, instead he couldn't understand what he was seeing.

So the hypothesis conclusion from this is, recognizing someone's face happens separately from consciousness.

Basically, the experiment appears to show that your brain can recognize faces, without letting your conscience know about it. So you can't tell the face is there, but other part of your brain can.

<comment><USER23> But that seems fairly obvious, at least to me. Face recognition seems to be an extremely fundamental capability that has probably existed in some form almost as long as brains and image-forming eyes themselves. In RFS's case, his brain's "face module" spotted the faces, his damaged "number module" couldn't converge to anything useful, and the jumbled mess for whatever reason overrode the faces in higher-level perception fusion processes. Possibly because the faces were so small so were lost in the noise, so to speak. Would be interesting to know how RFS would have perceived a face with small numbers drawn on it.

In any case, it is pretty well understood that our conscious visual perception is almost entirely unlike the raw stream of nerve signals emitted by the retina. We're completely unaware of the huge amount of filtering, denoising, smoothing, stabilization, spatiotemporal fusion, extrapolation, interpolation, object detection/classification/conceptualization/contextualization/prioritization, and other processing that is done to create what we consciously perceive.

<comment><USER22> > But that seems fairly obvious, at least to me

There's many things that grow from prior knowledge as theories and hypothesis. So maybe from what we already know for the brain, you theorized that the conscious brain plays no role in recognizing faces, yet science needs to validate hypothesis with experimental proof. This is one such experimental data point that seem to validate that theory. I'm not sure we should start to dismiss the scientific process from what we consider obvious or not. Many prior "obvious" things were false, so obviousness isn't good enough in my opinion.

> In any case, it is pretty well understood that our conscious visual > perception is almost entirely unlike the raw stream of nerve signals emitted > by the retina

For me, the more interesting bit is more with regards to the limits of consciousness. In this case, it seems no amount of conscious effort trying to see and make sense of what you're seeing can actually unscramble what you're seeing. The experiment seem to indicate that the raw stream works as intended, demonstrated by being able to see the shape when rotated 90 degree, but that there is another part in the brain responsible for turning the raw shapes and colors into abstract cognitive information such as it being the number 8 or a face. And that this part is not controlled by consciousness.

Thus it shows that some high level cognitive tasks, like visual pattern recognition are seperate from consciousness. And this isn't something I would have necessarily assumed. Maybe I would have when it comes to really raw low level visual signals, like putting color labels to the wave length information of light, but when it comes to labeling an abstract concept, such as something being a number or a face, I'd have thought that some part of conscious thinking would be involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This has some implications for artificial general intelligence. If consciousness does not automatically emerge from some sufficient high cognitive processing skills, those sci-fi super-human AI may never arrive.

Anyway, I feel sorry for this patient. This must be a tough disease to die with.

<comment><USER25> It's increasingly looking like there are deep biological reasons for expressions like "gut instinct". There are a lot of neurons in the digestive system. A recent paper[2] appeared to show that the fundamental purpose of sleep is to regulate reactive molecules in the digestive system. Another item I saw in quanta, [or somewhere else][0], described how gut bacteria have a direct link to the vertebrate brain and immune system.

So my modest proposal is that if we want AGI, we need to figure out how to implement a digestive system in silico.

[0] [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/your-gut-directly- co...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/your-gut-directly-connected- your-brain-newly-discovered-neuron-circuit)

[1][https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-microbiomes-affect- fear-2...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-microbiomes-affect- fear-20191204/)

[2][https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-sleep-deprivation- kills-2...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-sleep-deprivation- kills-20200604/)

<comment><USER11> >So my modest proposal is that if we want AGI, we need to figure out how to implement a digestive system in silico.

The problem is that whatever function digestion provides to the mind must do so through modulating neural signals. That is, its influence is purely functional in nature. Thus we can replicate its influence without replicating digestion, e.g. simulate the dynamics of the vagus nerve. There is nothing _essential_ about digestion to consciousness.

<comment><USER25> The last sentence is a bit facetious.

<comment><USER11> With various embodied cognition or extended mind theses floating around, can't be too sure :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > Somehow, his brain was still processing and identifying a face—a fairly > high-level skill—even though his conscious mind was oblivious.

I'm maybe wrong about this, but isn't the ability to recognize faces a fairly low-level skill? Case is point being other social animals having it, like apes, monkeys, or even sheep [1] (who can even recognize human faces [2]).

So maybe they're here referring to the ability of seeing representations of faces (little faces on the letters). Or is this just a blunder of the person who wrote the sciencemag article?

[^1] [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1641463.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1641463.stm) [^2] [https://www.bbc.com/news/science- environment-41905652](https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-41905652)

<comment><USER27> There is a difference between "low level" and "human specific". Faces are highly complex geometrically, while numbers, such as 8, are simple. Animals sure can recognise simple shapes ([https://docsmith.co/2007/01/can-animals- recognize-shapes/](https://docsmith.co/2007/01/can-animals-recognize- shapes/)), but they cannot endow them with abstract meanings, such as "number 8". The person in the article lost the basic ability of recognising very simple shapes while still being able to recognise more complex shapes, like faces, and to operate with abstract concepts.

<comment><USER28> Babies can recognise faces so I would definitely class it as low-level. Anything you can do as a baby is low-level.

High-level are things like reading and writing that are learned rather than evolved.

<comment><USER26> Good point. So whoever wrote that got it wrong, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > That he could still interpret letters, Schubert says, lends support to the > idea that the brain has a specialized module for processing numbers.

This makes a lot of sense to me. I have almost no trouble at all remembering long strings of numbers, but I have the opposite problem with names. I cannot remember names to save my life unless I use them on a daily basis. I feel like this is a flip-flop from how most people process information. It seems to me that lots of people are very very good at remembering names and have a hard time remembering numbers. some people look at me offended when I forget their name as if the only reason I would ever forget their name was because I didn't like them. It's very embarrassing. When I show I can remember numbers or lines of code just by looking at them once, people are amazed but then move on.

<comment><USER30> I too. If a name is unfamiliar to me, even if it's no more than 5-6 letters long, I can't for the life of me recall it. But I can remember random sequences of numerals up to length 12. Why?

I wonder if there's some term for this malady, like 'literophasia' or 'numeraphilia'? I wonder too if it occurs equally as often in both genders. I would guess not.

<comment><USER29> To add some color to this, if it's a common name it's really hard to remember but if it's a foreign name to me or something I've never heard of, it's as if my brain thinks it's a random sequence of sounds and I'll remember it forever. Indian names, native Hawaiian names, no problem, but forget about it if your name is George. It's just the common names I'm used to that I have a hard time with.

<comment><USER31> Second that, i have that with organic chemicals.

Diazabicycloundecene, sure, used it once, will remember it forever.

Oh nice to meet you George, what was your name again?!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This reminds me of two mind-boggling discoveries I've had about the human mind.

The first is that the two halves of your brain act somewhat independently. And in rare cases, people's left and right halves are "split" apart, and they act _entirely_ independently - e.g. their left and their right hands will act separately, or even argue with each other. CGP Grey made a great video about this:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8)

The other is that most people have a "voice" inside their head - e.g. when they read, they hear their own voice inside their head reading; their thoughts are like sentences they "hear;" they could look in the mirror have a conversation with themselves. Some ~10% of people do not have this internal monologue.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22193451](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22193451)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11162927](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11162927)

</comment><comment> aaron-santos > eventually mastered an entirely new digit system (where ⌊ stood for 2, ⌈ for > 8, etc.)

Why invent a specialized number system? How difficult would it have been to teach him Chinese numerals for example.

Also very curious on his perception of Roman numerals.

<comment><USER26> Brilliant. Roman numerals are, after all, just letters. The "why haven't they used them?" becomes pretty jarring once you think about it.

<comment><USER23> Roman numerals are not a place-value system and you can't make a computer use Roman numerals just by switching to a custom font.

<comment><USER33> OpenType font shaping is shockingly powerful ([e.g.]([https://blog.janestreet.com/commas-in-big-numbers- everywhere...](https://blog.janestreet.com/commas-in-big-numbers- everywhere/\))), so I'd be surprised if someone hasn't made a Roman numeral font already.

<comment><USER23> Heh, I knew I should have said something about OpenType shenanigans :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Something that is (crucially) missing from the article but appears in the paper: his ability to read words describing numbers like "five" remains in tact, and so is his ability to read Roman numerals.

</comment><comment><USER35> [https://www.livescience.com/nueroscience-patient-who-can- not...](https://www.livescience.com/nueroscience-patient-who-can-not-see- numbers.html)

^ This article (reporting on the same research) seems to be a bit better.

<comment><USER36> Maybe so, but the ads were so annoying I couldn't keep reading. It was almost comical how they kept popping up every few seconds, like some kind of parody.

Fortunately, [https://outline.com/5nJgjL](https://outline.com/5nJgjL)

Curiously this article presents a different hypothesis about why he is able to read 0 and 1:

> It's also "surprising" that his brain doesn't have problems with "0" and > "1," McCloskey added. It's not clear why, but those two numbers might look > similar to letters like "O" or "lowercase l," he said. Or those two numbers > might be processed differently than other numbers in the brain, as "zero > wasn't invented for quite a long time after the other digits were," he said.

<comment><USER16> > Or those two numbers might be processed differently than other numbers in > the brain, as "zero wasn't invented for quite a long time after the other > digits were," he said.

Come on, that's just silly. What are they even suggesting here? Zero is encoded in a different area of RMS's brain because he learned it as an adult, after its invention under the Nixon administration?

Also from that page: "The group of researchers created new digits for RFS which they called "surrogate digits" so that he could use them in daily life."

That's just not some sort of new jargon, it's what the word surrogate means! How does someone end up writing for a living without learning how to use a dictionary?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> > 0 and 1 looked normal—perhaps because those digits resemble letters

Or perhaps this is proof that we live in a simulation that is written in binary.

</comment><comment><USER38> How is "cognition != consciousness" surprising, especially given the (now old) fMRI studies complicating (our experience of) free will?

Why would one assume awareness and processing abilities to be related, if there is no evidence for it?

</comment><comment><USER39> As a software developer I imagine the brain not as some separated layers but as a huge collection of routines/procedures, for this or that (including procedure for understanding numbers), interconnected with a spaghetti code of links. Many of these processes specialise in making decisions and calling other processes. One specialised procedure is called the consciousness, it is blind to the rest of the processes and it is tricked into believing that it does all the calculations while it merely reads the results from other processes.

Also, I highly recommend the book The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker.

<comment><USER40> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphenomenalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphenomenalism)

Read Patricia Churchland instead:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Reading is weird.

I've never had migraines, but a few years ago suddenly, and briefly, lost the ability to read and write. After a number of doctors and tests ruling out a TIA, best guess is one-time transient aphasia from a migraine aura.

<comment><USER42> Migraines in general are weird. It's rare[1], but I can occasionally tell when a severe migraine is about to occur because rooms feel too big. I walked into my bathroom a few days ago (which is about 2mx2m/6'x6'), and each wall seemed about 2 feet longer than it should, and the far corner looked about 3 feet too far away (it was more a feeling than a visual disturbance - it's hard to describe). I felt _small_, which is a really odd feeling when it comes on suddenly. About an hour later, I had a severe migraine.

I'm assuming it's a subtle form of Alice in Wonderland syndrome[2].

[1] I get regular migraines, but I can only remember this happening a few times, possibly because it's fairly subtle

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

<comment><USER43> I've never had a migraine but I've definitely had that feeling like the room was too big. I think it only happened once or twice as a kid from a fever or something.

<comment><USER44> I had that as a kid for a while; when it reached its peak, I ended up in hospital with meningitis. From that period, I distinctively remember feeling small and the room walls and ceiling receding somewhat, and also some weird stuff with colors - I could focus on the visual noise I saw (kind of like the noise you get in a digital camera in low-light condition), and focusing on that would trigger the feeling of the world expanding / me shrinking. All of this only happened at night.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Just to clarify a bit, it's possible he can't communicate thoughts about numbers. That's a different perspective than can't read them.

I say this because my father had a stroke ~3 years ago. It compromised him significantly. He definitely can communicate the way he used to. But one of the patterns we've seen is he can have a thought, but he can't communicate it. He tries but it doesn't come out. I haven't recognized it's specific like the man in the article. But I wanted to mention that processing and communication are two seperate steps.

</comment><comment><USER46> The original paper _Lack of awareness despite complex visual processing: Evidence from event-related potentials in a case of selective metamorphopsia_ [1] is not as Freudian as the article about "consciousness":

> How does the neural activity evoked by visual stimuli support visual > awareness? In this paper we report on an individual with a rare type of > neural degeneration as a window into the neural responses underlying visual > awareness. When presented with stimuli containing faces and target > words—regardless of whether the patient was aware of their presence—the > neuro-physiological responses were indistinguishable. These data support the > possibility that extensive visual processing, up to and including activation > of identity, can occur without resulting in visual awareness of the stimuli.

[1] [https://www.pnas.org/content/117/27/16055](https://www.pnas.org/content/117/27/16055)

</comment><comment><USER47> Silly question: how do they know he isn't lying?

<comment><USER48> I read the paper and they address that point by saying that they don't see any benefit he would gain from lying.

<comment><USER47> Attention or maybe out of some psychological trauma he started lying to himself about this particular issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I knew an older woman who had a hard time remembering freeways by their numbers but could remember them all by their names (e.g. "Santa Ana" freeway instead of "5"). That seemed odd because to me the number was the name, so why be any different?

<comment><USER50> They weren't always numbered. Up north, there are still people who refer to Highway 40 as Lincoln Highway.

I've heard a couple of LA natives say that's an explanation for SoCal's affinity for calling them "the 5": they switched from "the Santa Ana".

<comment><USER51> > there are still people who refer to Highway 40 as Lincoln Highway

This is interesting to me because here in Iowa, the Lincoln Highway is "old Highway 30". In the 60s they rerouted Hwy30 about a mile south of the existing Lincoln Way so they could make it 4 lane and avoid towns.

<comment><USER51> In case it wasn't obvious from my post above, the Lincoln Highway referred to in both my post and the parent post is the same highway [1].

The part I thought was interesting is I assumed it would have the same number designation across the entire nation, but that doesn't appear to be the case.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> When they gave him the foam 8 he didn't recognize it and they speculated it was because the brain prioritised sight over the sense of touch. Surely they tried the same experiment after asking him to close his eyes first?

<comment><USER3> Oh man, I wonder what he pictured in his head if he tried to picture an 8 instead of read one? Nothing? Squiggles? Headache?

Honestly, I could ask a billion more questions about this situation. So fascinating.

<comment><USER48> I would've asked him to _draw_ digits, potentially with his eyes closed, to see if he still has a representation of the shape of digits in his mind.

<comment><USER53> I believe that's the actual drawing next to the digit 8?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I think it was on this site that someone posted the very interesting perspectives on consciousness by Roger Penrose.[2] From that I found this video by Dr. Stuart Hameroff, M.D.: Microtubules & quantum consciousness.[1] Higly recommended.

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5DqX9vDcOM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5DqX9vDcOM)

[2]:[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXgqik6HXc0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXgqik6HXc0)

</comment><comment><USER55> A real life Flowers for Algernon :(.

</comment><comment><USER56> Letters are phonograms with strong clues about pronunciation. Numerals are pure ideograms with no clue about pronunciation. Modern English is a mix of phonograms and ideograms, with more of the former. Its very likely they trigger different subsystems of the brain. And in this case the ideogram subsystem was defective.

</comment><comment><USER57> The post only mentions recognizing letters and digits, but no mention of the subject actually writing them. Since the subject was an engineer, maybe writing numbers would be a sort of mechanical thing, that could bypass that limitation? That would've been a nice addition to this study.

</comment><comment><USER58> The SF novel Blindsight by Peter Watts explores the idea of aliens that are cognizant but not conscious. Fascinating book.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_\(Watts_novel\))

<comment><USER59> Blindsight was a well crafted book but it sort of underplayed the benefits that consciousness gives us. We're bombarded by a huge number of sensory impressions at any given time. The unconscious parts of our brain do a huge amount of work in processing it and figuring out which bits are important. But without consciousness to synchronize, serialize, and persist it then all that information will just fade away within a few seconds. To remember something, or talk about it, or engage in multi-step planning regarding it you need to be consciously and not subliminally aware of it.

<comment><USER53> Perhaps the coherently serialized stream of qualia isn't the only possible way to intelligence?

<comment><USER59> Oh clearly not, GPT-3 clearly produces fairly intelligent responses but by the mechanisms that in a human would be pure reflex. And your unconscious reflexes can produce responses that can be relatively intelligent at times. It's just that creates with brains that evolved on Earth need consciousness to remember anything more than a couple of seconds.

Also, who knows how qualia fit into this, if they exist they might very well exist for subliminal stimuli too. In the scientific study of consciousness qualia aren't a part of the paradigm really. And in philosophical investigations of consciousness don't have subliminal stimuli as part of _their_ paradigm.

<comment><USER53> And how do you call the stuff which gets filtered by consciousness so that it can remember more than a couple of seconds? That's what I meant by the qualia.

As an example what I mean and it was recently on HN, too: apparently the perception of "now" is a hack supported by delays so that input from various senses is perceived as synchronized even if it does not arrive synchronized to the brain, plus compensating the temporary blindness while doing saccades. Aliens could have different "hack" there, resulting in profoundly different perception of time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> If you're interested in learning more about how sensory impressions go on to become conscious awareness, at least so far as we knew 5 years ago, I'd highly recommend the book _Consciousness and the Brain_.

</comment><comment><USER60> Can you relate this with color blindless? Most of time I could swear I could see that green,orange and red different but somehow my brain refuses to identify them.

<comment><USER61> I might be wrong but my understanding was that the cause of color blindness is an abnormality in the retina, not a neurological condition.

<comment><USER11> There are definitely cases where color-blindness is caused by a neurological issues. Strokes can cause temporary or permanent colorblindness, for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> "Intelligence" is a 100 different little daemons running in tandem.

I'm surprised at how this analogy almost never comes up in a community of programmers.

</comment><comment><USER63> I hate to say this, but could he just be lying?

That's what I worry about when we try to learn a lot about human minds from a case.

</comment><comment><USER64> I call shenanigans. There is nothing inherently different about numbers and letters. They are all just abstract shapes. There is no possible way that evolution could have produced a mechanism that could distinguish between the two without training.

<comment><USER65> Couldn't the brain damage have essentially caused the state from the training process for those specific glyphs to fail with "garbage" associations? Thus he gets disoroentating confusion and reinforced revulsion when he tries to understand interfering with any occupational therapy to retrain it such that arbitrary glyphs lacking such associations didn't have those issues.

<comment><USER64> Yes, that's possible. (I actually missed the bit about the brain damage. I somehow got the impression that article said that he was born with this. I guess I skimmed too fast.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Like the Google Translate app that live translates from camera, there could be developed googles for him that translate everything that looks like 2..9 into his new representation of numbers.</comment>


Spooky Quantum Action Might Hold the Universe Together - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/05/spooky-quantum-action-might-hold-universe-together/?mbid=social_fb

<comment><USER2> "Tensor networks provide a mathematical tool capable of doing just that. In this view, space-time arises out of a series of interlinked nodes in a complex network, with individual morsels of quantum information fitted together like Legos. Entanglement is the glue that holds the network together. If we want to understand space-time, we must first think geometrically about entanglement, since that is how information is encoded between the immense number of interacting nodes in the system."

Wouldn't it be wild if this led to the realization that the universe is just a big blob of computronium and that we just happen to be some emergent behavior in it?

<comment><USER3> > _Wouldn 't it be wild if this led to the realization that the universe is > just a big blob of computronium and that we just happen to be some emergent > behavior in it?_

That's essentially what Max Tegmark keeps talking about. Of course, this is all very speculative at the moment, but folks at Tegmark's level are starting to say that our current understanding seems to point in that direction.

It's still quite possible that someone will come along and show that reality is quite different after all. Things feel (and are) quite unfinished at the moment; this is very different from 19th century physics, when we thought we had reached the end of science.

<comment><USER4> This seems like a depth first search in a tree. The deeper you go (the more you learn) more and more ways open up to investigate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Be sure to check out the original article at the excellent Quanta Magazine: "CHAPTER 2: NETWORK TAPESTRY How Quantum Pairs Stitch Space-Time" [https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150428-how-quantum-pairs- st...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150428-how-quantum-pairs-stitch-space- time/)

As well as the prior article: "CHAPTER 1: ENTANGLED WORMHOLES Wormholes Untangle a Black Hole Paradox" [https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150424-wormholes- entangleme...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150424-wormholes-entanglement- firewalls-er-epr/)

</comment><comment><USER6> "In 1997, Juan Maldacena found a concrete example of holography in action, demonstrating that a toy model describing a flat space without gravity is equivalent to a description of a saddle-shaped space with gravity."

Though not applicable for our spacetime, is still a compelling motivation for more research. We can now compute chess, go, deep learning. Next up tensor network modelling.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is Wired's CSS utterly broken for anyone else? On Ubuntu and Chrome 44, I get navigation elements hovering over the article text.

<comment><USER8> It was laggy as hell, and the advert that popped up brought the window to a crawl. The overlay was unexitable by clicking in the grey area, what should be considered a standard best practice by now.

Welcome to Web 3.0!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When I read about MERA the Psychohistory instantly came into mind from Asimov's "Foundation".

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_%28fictional%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_%28fictional%29)

</comment><comment><USER9> "Entanglement is the fabric of space-time,"

Could this also be rephrased as "separation is illusion" ?</comment>


Our model is customers first, investors never - <AUTHOR> https://sourcehut.org/blog/2019-10-23-srht-puts-users-first/ <comment><USER2> I agree that unsustainable and user-hostile growth is a problem caused by overzealous VC investments.

However, I don't see the direct connection between adding telemetry to drive product decisions (e.g. improving conversion flows, prioritizing features/bugs) and pressure from investors. I think it was just bad communication and hubris on GitLab's part.

It's easy to avoid tracking users when you've got a 20-feature SaaS with a few thousand users. Trying to manage a product with millions of users, thousands of features and open bugs/feature requests is another ballgame and I think telemetry is fine as long as it's first-party (or opt-in), anonymized and explained properly (see Mozilla).</comment>


2,433 Unread Emails, I feel your pain - <AUTHOR> http://www.blogmaverick.com/2008/03/24/2-433-unread-emails-i-feel-your-pain/ <comment><USER2> If you're getting 2433 emails a day, you should be in a position to hire an assistant to help you deal with it.

If you get 2433 phone calls a day, do you not do the same?

The problem with a fully automated solution to this is that the edge cases can contain critically important information which will undoubtedly be buried.

So Michael, Mark, etc, cough it up, and just hire someone who can effectively manage this for you. That is, until your desktop has a complete semantic understanding of context that works 100% of the time.</comment>


You can't trust the infra; Encrypt client side - <AUTHOR> https://jve.linuxwall.info/blog/index.php?post/2015/07/09/You-can-t-trust-the-infra%3B-Encrypt-client-side

<comment><USER2> Montasano has been vocal in the past about denouncing client side crypto implemented in javascript [1], but I think that their use cases fail to consider a system in which the server has no need to access the decrypted user data.

I helped implement a system for Stellar that does something very similar to what this article describes [2]. User data is encrypted into blobs using a key generated from credentials. The blob is fetched from the server using a hash of those credentials. Neither the server nor a MITM have sufficient information to decrypt your blob, so the security is deferred to each user's computer.

If you want a server to be able to access your data, you must acknowledge that there is a non-zero probability that it will become public. If you want truly private data you must encrypt it locally and take the appropriate measures to keep your local system secure.

[1] [https://www.nccgroup.trust/us/about-us/newsroom-and- events/b...](https://www.nccgroup.trust/us/about-us/newsroom-and- events/blog/2011/august/javascript-cryptography-considered-harmful/)

[2] [https://www.stellar.org/blog/wallet-server-version-two- the-e...](https://www.stellar.org/blog/wallet-server-version-two-the-electric- boogaloo-the-tech-details/)

<comment><USER3> If the server cannot be trusted, it will extract your encrypted data, since it serves up the code. The server, if compromised/subpoenaed, merely needs to serve you some JavaScript that sends home the encryption key, and your data is no longer just your data.

<comment><USER2> The redeeming quality is that compromised servers are usually detected and shutdown quickly. Traditional servers are dumped and the data is compromised. Encrypted blob storage makes the dump nearly impossible to decrpyt.

It's OK to improve security incrementally. Better security is the path to the best security.

<comment><USER3> Compromised servers are detected and shutdown quickly? [ Citation needed ]</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Joshfire does for connected things what Wordpress did for the web - <AUTHOR> http://factory.joshfire.com

<comment><USER2> A site for cross device apps where you can't access the navigation on a screen smaller than 1280.

Another example of a potentially great technology that loses credibility at a critical juncture due to execution details.

<comment><USER3> Because it is an authoring tool, the Joshfire Factory itself hasn't been designed to run on screens smaller than 1096px wide.

Generated apps are fully compatible with all screen sizes.

As for our landing page, you are right, we will work on adaptive versions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think I require further explanation. I played with this and all it seems is a quick and easy way to build a feed reader with a data source of your choice. It does look like you can put your own HTML and CSS to change the look but I don't see how to change or add functionality with code. I think that part needs to be explained more because otherwise it just appears to be a "Look at my feed!" app. I'm sure those have their uses but it's easy enough to make a page on our site that's a feed.

Plus, why is there a debugger if I'm not writing any code? That is what's making me think I'm missing something somewhere.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the feedback, we will try to clarify this in the future.

There are two ways to use the Joshfire Factory: \- no development, using the available applications templates. \- import your own application code

Most templates help you to generate content-based applications. Which means, adding existing online data into an application well designed for the object it will be deployed on. They may be "Look at my feed" apps, but there is a need from professionals for this kind of app today. They have online content, and they want to reach more devices.

If you import your own code via git, you are able to build any kind of application you want. You may want to use the debugger add-on to debug it on a built native application.

<comment><USER5> I had the same questions as the grandparent, but I whipped through to the end (just building a generic 'Twitter' app to get there, and then realized that I can download the source and (presumably) import it into Eclipse.

To me, this is the sweet spot that nobody else is doing, and that will likely have me using it, if only as a bootstrap for an application.

If I might suggest a (potentially premium) feature, make it so that I could store and upload my own 'skeleton' apps and use them with the GUI builder (to whatever degree of possibility that might be.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> more interesant:

[http://backstage.joshfire.com/2012/05/09/the-joshfire- factor...](http://backstage.joshfire.com/2012/05/09/the-joshfire-factory- simplifies-the-creation-of-cross-device-applications-and-anticipates- tomorrows-connected-things-era/)

</comment><comment><USER7> This + ifttt would = awesome.

Imagine being able to take my data sources and, in response to a particular piece of information on Twitter, get an alert on my phone. I push a button, and a news report is pushed to my TV, while accompanying text goes to my iPad. A monitor shows the stock price of the company involved in the story. Instantly, I'm informed! Then I close the report, marking the story as read and sending a message to another source to keep it on file. All without any programming.

To put it another way: mail-style rules for data and devices would make this killer.

</comment><comment><USER8> Side note - love their website page transitions (via the top menu bar).

</comment><comment><USER9> I testes this and I found the application to be very well wtitten and the ui is impressive. It didn't take long time to create an app, but I was a little disappointed that the end application didn't aggregate the data, but rather kept each data source in a separate tab.

<comment><USER3> Hi, thanks a lot for your feedback. Merging data sources is in our roadmap and is a feature often requested. We will implement it very soon.

The issue was to design a simple UI for this. We don't want to go in a too complex "node system" for data sources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't think its worth breaking horizontal scrolling for those fancy page transitions or whatever reason you have for discriminating small screens / split screen users. Not everyone surfs the web full screen on a large monitor.

<comment><USER3> You are right, we will work on this very soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "What Wordpress did for the web" is a dangerous comparison.

<comment><USER12> I think if you understand the dangers, you also understand the point they are trying to make.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Anyone get this to work?

The xcode project I downloaded not do anything but start a black screen even though I setup 3 data sources.

<comment><USER3> Hi, i'm the product manager of the Joshfire Factory.

In the Factory, is your application showing UI and data in the preview panel on the right? It would help us understand if it is an "xproj project" issue or more an application issue.

Thanks a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Tagline font looks pretty bad in Chrome/Win7:

<http://imgur.com/Kigfl>

<comment><USER3> Hi, I'm from joshfire. Thanks for the feedback, for this text, we are using the "Ubuntu" webfont from Google Fonts. I will investigate why it doesn't look nice.

<comment><USER14> Web fonts typically look crappy on Windows in general. I've Googled around to try and solve the problem as a user, but I think it's because browsers tend to use Windows' GDI rendering instead of DirectDraw (or vice-versa, I forget).

Now that I think about it, I might switch to Safari for Windows for just this reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I can't tell if you can access hardware features (camera, accelerometer, etc.) with Joshfire. Does anyone know?

<comment><USER3> Hi, I'm the product manager of the Joshfire Factory.

Most of the templates we provide do not use hardware features. However, because you can import your own application code in the Factory as a "private template", you can access hardware features in deploys that expose them. We are using the excellent Phonegap for our Android, iOS and Blackberry deploys. We automatically inject the Phonegap javascript API to the generated application.

So the answer is yes, in your own application you can call the Phonegap API v1.7 (<http://docs.phonegap.com/en/1.7.0/index.html>) when deploying natively for iOS and Android.

Additionally, some add-ons specific to a platform inject native code to your application. This is for example the case for SmartAdServer or ShareKit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Somehow I feel this is what Squarespace is already doing?

<comment><USER3> Well, not so much. The only similarity is that Squarespace generates websites.

The Joshfire Factory targets all the connected things: Mobiles, Tablets and desktops, but also connected TVs, kiosks... It also generates more than websites or webapps: you can build on Joshfire's servers a packaged applicatios that can be distributed on Apple's App Store, Google Play, or other marketplaces

<comment><USER16> Yeah I realized I totally missed the point

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> it would be interesting to see a screencast showing how you develop a website with this technology</comment>


Ask YC: is Paul Graham still doing office hours with YC companies? - <AUTHOR> A few days ago, I asked if PG was still doing YC interviews (the right answer is no).<p>When he handled YC over to Sam Altman (in 2012) he said he would still be holding office hours with YC companies. Is that stil the case? If so, how often? <comment><USER2> I don't know how often, but he's definitely being doing some.

<comment><AUTHOR> I imagine it must be hard to get a slot with him nowadays, right?

We just got accepted into YC. Wondering if we'll ever be able to meet him.

I feel like a teenage boy going to the backstage of a concert to meet my rockstar idol. I'll probably take selfies...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Small point, but the handoff was in early 2014, not 2012.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I was wrong, sorry, I guess it feels like it happened ages ago...</comment></comment>


Summer interns realized how crappy their code was - <AUTHOR> http://www.schibsted.pl/2015/09/summer-interns-realized-how-crappy-their-code-was/

<comment><USER2> I thought this is an Onion headline! Does this company seriously want people to come work for them after posting this?

I guess as a western company are in high praise and demand in Poland and can afford looking down at people like this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Looking down at people? What part of the article gives you that impression? That was certainly not the intention.</comment></comment>


Programming Without Variables - <AUTHOR> http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/programming-without-variables/240161204 <comment><USER2> Nice article. I don't really understand the final point, though. Here's a simple implementation of the collatz function that returns the entire list iterated through, using a simple data structure, and that is O(I) in the number of iterations I

        collatz_vec :: Int -> [Int]
        collatz_vec = reverse . go []
          where
    	go acc 1 = acc
    	go acc n = go (n:acc) (if even n
    		then div n 2
    		else 3 * n + 1)

You simply push new values to the _front_ of the list rather than the end, and then reverse the list all in one go at the end. Sure, you could use a fancier data type like an IntMap, but why bother when you already have linear complexity with a simple one?

Edit: In fact, here's an even simpler solution that doesn't need to reverse the final result

        collatz_vec :: Int -> [Int]
        collatz_vec = takeWhile (/= 1) . iterate step
          where
            step 1 = 1
            step n = if even n then div n 2 else 3 * n + 1

It's not tail recursive (because it uses `iterate`) but it's lazy -- so if the elements of the list are consumed as they are created, the whole computation can be done in constant space as well as being fast.

<comment><USER3> Or perhaps like this if you do not want to use `reverse` and want it to be tail recursive:

        collatz :: Int -> [Int]
        collatz x = go id x []
          where
            go :: ([Int] -> [Int]) -> Int -> [Int] -> [Int]
            go f 1 = f . (1:)
            go f n =
              if even n
                then go (f . (n:)) (n `div` 2)
                else go (f . (n:)) (3 * n + 1)

<comment><USER4> Why would you want to not use reverse? (tail-recursion is orthogonal, and I understand not really useful in haskell unless you force strict evaluation though I may be wrong)

<comment><USER5> It increases the constant time, as reverse is O(n).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Worth noting that the assumption that the Collatz function terminates ('while n != 1') is actually an open mathematical question. It's been checked for initial values up to the godzillions, but there is no proof yet that this function will always terminate for all inputs. Paul Erdos was reported to have said "Mathematics is not yet ready for such problems".

</comment><comment><USER7> Next week: linked lists?

Linked lists have performance problems on computers. You need contiguous memory arrays for performance, since Direct Memory Access engines, caches, and pipelining all achieve peak performance only when memory is strictly accessed in contiguous chunks. How do functional language implementations deal with that problem?

<comment><USER8> For one thing, you generate as few as possible by aggressively fusing away intermediate lists (at least if your language is pure).

Also, the garbage collector will often move lists into contiguous region(s) of memory.

More to the point, though, sometimes a list is the appropriate data structure for a problem (like returning all intermediate results from the Collatz call, where you don't know how many there will be). Sure, you could use an array and double its size every now and then, but you're doing an awful lot of violence to your program just to handle something the runtime could take care of for you :)

And yes, I know there will be a slight performance penalty under many circumstances.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It was like reading the Little Schemer in C++. If you want to see how far you can take this I suggest reading that book. It's fundamental and enlightening at the same time.

<comment><USER10> +1

also Land of Lisp and Realm of Racket (the sequel will be Solar System of Macros and Special forms

[http://realmofracket.com/](http://realmofracket.com/)

[http://landoflisp.com/](http://landoflisp.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The question I always ask is... why? You can come up with all kinds of crazy ways to program. You can probably even come up with all kinds of crazy rationalizations about "purity" or "math" or "logical" or "simple" or whatever other difficult to measure metric.

When it comes down to it, however, programming languages are neither for "simple expression of ideas" nor "execution by computers". They are for humans to write, read, and reason about the actions of computers. The biggest challenge most programmers face is not "how do I express this in an elegant, pure way that shows how smart I am?" but "how the heck does this giant existing code base work exactly?" and "how can I modify it in such a way that does not make it harder for other developers?"

A key goal of a language should be ease of reasoning. The conjecture that removing variable does this for most people is wholly unproven.

</comment><comment><USER12> > _Next week, we 'll look at what such a data structure might be._

        (8 . (4 . (2 . (1 . NIL))))

(There's a rage face to accompany this answer, the one for an overexcited noob who knew an answer, but rage faces don't belong on HN.)

(I'm unclear whether the array version should include the 1, since it is not "counted").

<comment><USER13> Actually you'd want to save it as (1 . (2 . (4 . (8 . NIL)))) since o/w you'd still get quadratic time complexity as you need to unpack your whole list when you add the next value.

<comment><USER12> True! I forgot that you only keep a pointer to the start.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'd rather like to see an article about the opposite - mutables in math, or better, programming in math. I know iterative algorithms and math do not have much in common, but it would be fascinating to explore some possibilties of opening up math to such kind of sequential calculation.

<comment><USER11> Math generally isn't even recursive. When it is, it is only so as a byproduct of its declarative nature. You don't usually deal with instances, but the set of all possible valid instances.

That said, I really don't see the point of making programming look more like math... the deep distaste most people have for the abstract symbol manipulations therein, and the clear favoring of instances and examples, seems to pretty effectively point towards the opposite direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> but he still have variables...

<comment><USER16> There is no place where he's assigning a value to an already-defined variable. Nothing is "varying." Perhaps the restriction can be put this way: you're only allowed to define variables by naming them as an argument to some function and then calling that function with some value.

<comment><USER17> Still, this isn't what I expected when I clicked the link; I was expecting something about point-free or combinatoric programming :)

<comment><USER16> Given that it started with some relatively messy C++, I don't think this article was aimed at folks who even know what those words mean.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I do not understand how this can be a recent article. Programming without variables was the hype in the early 90s with languages like graal ([http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F3-540-16442-1_6](http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F3-540-16442-1_6)). Now, the most relative hype is non mutable data structures (for example in scala).

<comment><USER18> Please, add comments to explain why you are moding me down so much.

I love when Gerald Jay Sussman explains the difference between recursion and iteration ([http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and- comput...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer- science/6-001-structure-and-interpretation-of-computer-programs- spring-2005/video-lectures/)), but I really feel this is history of computer science, not hot news.

<comment><USER16> Your comment is what has come to be called a "middlebrow dismissal," _cf._ [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693920](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693920).

<comment><USER18> Yes, I really think that the article "Programming Without Variables" does not deserve the first page of HN, but I do not have enough karma to mod it down. The title refers to an interesting subject, but the content is almost only about technicalities in converting a loop into a recursive, then into a tail recursive function. The level is so poor, it is really deceptive.

<comment><USER19> Many of the readers here are programmers; a well written article (or blog post, even) about coding in a way which lets your compiler use tail recursion optimizations is Pretty Interesting to many of us, even if we already know in our hearts that recursion can be efficient.

The fact that he's doing this in a non-lisp makes it more accessible to some, and just interesting to others. I think that's OK to have on the HN front page, even if it's not something you personally find interesting.

Try considering that HN is a resource to more than just you or just me. Consider that some programmers here might be more or less experienced than us, and that it's possible this might be the window into "oh, hey, recursion!" that some new programmer needed in order to discover a new avenue of learning.

In that light, this is a pretty worthy article on HN. I especially like that he goes into implementation detail, rather than just saying, "Duh, use tail recursion", and thus ends up explaining how to actually do it well (in case a reader didn't know).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>