Ask HN: What is the next bubble in your opinion? - <AUTHOR> It's been a while since financial systems in US and around the globe went through massive shock. We have massive supply of money and artificially boosted demand.
Murphy's law says that, "if everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something".
We had quite a dramatic elections in the US. Student debt is growing. Auto loans are growing. What concerns me more is that, there is significant wealth concentration under global organization such as Google, FB, Amazon, Pharma companies, Retail chains and more.
I am not american by birth, but I love to travel to rural areas and get to know people outside of tech. I can tell you that things don't look great. Hundreds and thousands are leaving the jobs and switching to contracting, driving for Uber/Lyft and/or taking similar jobs.
Since we have computer literate people, founders, risk takers, entrepreneurs, intelligent people on this site, I want to know what do you think is going  to be next bubble?
Of course, in finance (federation) based economy, we all may feel financial shocks, but what could cause these massive shocks? <comment><USER2> > We had quite a dramatic elections in the US.

> Since we have computer literate people, founders, risk takers, > entrepreneurs, intelligent people on this site, I want to know what do you > think is going to be next bubble?

I'd argue that "we" are pretty ignorant of what's really going on. (see the recent presidential election)

We live in a world of fast Internet, current-gen personal devices, and Instabizzes that make our life function. Our values (or what our Twitter feeds has told us our values should be) are apparently the new world order.

There's a LOT of people, both red and blue, whose lives need more than an emoji, hashtag, and a Ruby bootcamp to move the needle.

I think our bubble may be the one to pop.

<comment><USER3> >There's a LOT of people, both red and blue

There's a magnitude more of people who aren't either and wouldn't even understand the meaning of that phrase.

<comment><USER4> Honestly, I didn't get it at first - I thought it was some kind of matrix reference about the red and blue pill (in hindsight, not even for a particular reason), not about democrats and republicans... Even though I'm not american I feel stupid not having thought of that first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It might not be the _next_ bubble (rather next decade's bubble), and not as big as the mortgage securities bubble, but I have my eye on siloed social media in general and Facebook in particular.

I don't know exactly how or when the federated/web-of-trust alternative to Facebook will unfold, but people are definitely working on commoditizing this stuff, and doing so in an unassuming way that has the potential to catch major players by surprise when it finally crystallizes. I'm not convinced that any of XMPP, GNU Social/OStatus, diaspora*, or IRCv3 have all the pieces to solve the puzzle, but the direction they're pulling is not a big mystery, and I consider it a very real possibility that a successor to those efforts does to Facebook what HTML5 did to Flash.

<comment><USER6> I'd be pretty happy if this were the case. Likewise, I'd be pretty happy if the same thing happened to instant messaging.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The student loan bubble will burst putting colleges out of business or cutting back hard- and as before the public will bear the brunt. from 3 years ago and it is still growing with no slow down [http://ijr.com/2014/06/149516-mark- cuban-predicts-burst-stud...](http://ijr.com/2014/06/149516-mark-cuban- predicts-burst-student-loan-bubble/)

<comment><USER8> Could you explain this a little. I don't understand.

Usually a bubble is an asset where most of it's value is tied to future expected appreciation. And when price growth starts to fall this decreases future price, and then it crashes down to its fundamental value(or a little below).

I'm not quite sure how this can happen with student loans. Is the discounted future cash flow of student loans widely different from their price?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think there's a lot of bad auto loans out there. I just bought a new vehicle, and when applying for the loan I couldn't fill out half of the required information (I didn't have it readily at hand). The business office person just kept saying "that's OK, just skip that part." All in all they had barely enough information to let me prove I was who said I was, much less that I could repay the loan. This behavior reminded me a lot of what I heard up the mortgage bubble, where there was basically free money floating around.

<comment><USER10> It's personally weird to me that auto loans can be a serious bubble, since I would not feel comfortable buying a car unless I have 10x the sticker price in spare cash, or free cash flow that covers it. Seriously, since it's just a depreciating asset with maintenance liabilities.

<comment><USER2> I'm sure you know you are the exception. About 85% of all new vehicles are purchased on credit; the US is approaching $1T in auto loan debt.

<comment><USER11> 1.1 trillion, a number that actually surprised me. According to this article, auto loans are "the second-fastest growing consumer debt market" [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/allan-smith/the-us-auto- loan-d...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/allan-smith/the-us-auto-loan-debt- mar_b_11911206.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I suspect it will be non-healthcare jobs in healthcare. People are noticing that at the same time their premiums are doubling, tripling, quadrupling, doctors and hospitals seem to have larger and larger staffs of computer technicians, billing specialists, insurance negotiators or whatever the heck those people are doing. It used to be that a doctor could be self-employed, with just one nurse who doubled as a receptionist. Now fewer people are going into medicine, at the same time millions of people are going to be trained to work in the healthcare industry.

I think a lot of the resentment against "Obamacare" is that people can see this non-value-added waste ( _muda_ ) and they saw government making a deal with the insurance industry to add even more bureaucracy to an already wasteful system. If there is going to be any compromise betwen left and right on healthcare, it may be that we keep the mandate (pleasing the left) but cut the regulation and bureaucracy that creates all the waste (pleasing the right).

That would be good for doctors and patients, of course, but very bad for insurance companies and other parts of the healthcare-industrial complex.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think advertising may be the next bubble. I mean, there have been lots of comments online about how large a percentage of ad clicks are fraud, so it's likely most sites shouldn't be making anywhere near as much cash from their ads once that's figured out.

Add the increasing usage of adblockers, fears of privacy regarding tracking and ads plus a stupidly high amount of competition, and I can see ads not being able to fund the sites they need to soon. Complete with various news sites, social networks and platforms simply being unable to pay their bills without finding a new payment model.

</comment><comment><USER14> Actual university education. When public it transforms in debt (Europa) else private in student loans (USA).

The debt of the countries are growing up.

The quality of research papers is a measure of quality of the teaching that is decreasing, since both reproducibility and relevance diminishes (Signal = ln(relevant / noise)).

The over qualification has not resulted in improvement of lower paid works or the raise of wages and it has put kids in situation of disarray whereas they would have survived otherwise hence the word "pro-net-arians". This generation that cannot save money is a generation barred from entrepreneurship, favouring conservative business models.

We are also seeing the first wave of homeless educated and competent coders. Education is also failing at protecting the educated one.

Education has also failed at achieving a fairer society and have resulted in the opposite leading worldwide to a ghettoisation of poor (public) vs rich (private that is often publicly funded).

[https://www.google.com/finance?cid=662984](https://www.google.com/finance?cid=662984)

The danger of education is that it is essentially present in public debts that by nature is hard to bankrupt; thus countries (like Europe) may bankrupt as a result of this bubble. Remember that right now debt are obligations that are the safest investment ... if obligations disappear, the market will be explosively volatile.

</comment><comment><USER15> College bubble will pop. Prices have been sustained longer than normal due to special laws for school debt. But even with the extra protection of wage garnishments and no bankruptcy option, it cannot keep going up. People are starting to get their money underground in a homeless lifestyle or leave the country. It's going to burst and hard.

</comment><comment><USER16> The bond market. We're all doing some crazy things with our government spending, at local and national levels, and it has to fall apart at some point.

</comment><comment><USER17> There won't be any big bubbles anytime soon. Only small bubbles. If silicon valley falls apart tomorrow for example, it would be considered a small bubble since it would be very contained (only VC money). In 2000 the entire world was injecting money in Silicon Valley. It was a complete different setup...

So talking about the next big bubble in 2017 does not make sense.

<comment><USER18> Do you know where some VC's money comes from? Wall street invests in VCs using pension funds, 401k money. So if SV falls apart, the effect will be more than outside SV. Follow the money.

<comment><USER17> You need to understand the difference between "VC" money and the economy. The first one is about extra cash that can be invested, the economy is about people's money. If a bank loses it's money invested in tech, it won't go bankrupt because the bank doesn't invest its capital into one single thing. It's more complex than you think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The Euro will collapse

</comment><comment><USER20> I am placing my bet on either the student loans, state pension systems, or the auto loans.

</comment><comment><USER21> The carbon bubble in the form of the market cap of carbon-extraction industries. Though it is possible there are non-burning uses for petroleum that will sustain the industry in the medium-term future.

</comment><comment><USER22> There has been a recession +/\- 2 years from the end of every decade for the past 170 years.

Boom and bust. Past pains fade and we get over-confident about our ability to act prudently.

</comment><comment><USER23> The last one for a while. The money bubble.

</comment><comment><USER24> > Hundreds and thousands are leaving the jobs and switching to contracting, > driving for Uber/Lyft and/or taking similar jobs.

Which is a very good thing...

</comment><comment><USER25> The question isn't: "What is the next bubble?" The question is: "Which of the existing bubbles will collapse first and cause the rest of them to implode?" Furthermore, the even bigger question is: "Is there creeping contagion forming behind the scenes in derivatives and shadow banking similar to 2007, out of sight of governments and regulators yet again?"

The central banks of the world have gone on a ridiculous 8 year binge to prop up global growth, this binge will have consequences. Probably for Donald Trump, who may buy another two years of bubble activity with his planned economic actions.

Most people are used to the 1999 bubble and the 2007 bubble. Those are just the ones that got really out of control Over the last decade, numerous smaller bubbles have come and gone, mostly deflated by government (foreign or otherwise) intervention and we are generally none the wiser. China has had bubbles in their real estate and stock market come and go (or be suppressed, for now) several times in the last couple years.

If you have seen what China is willing to do to their skies in terms of pollution, imagine what they are willing to do behind closed doors in their financial and real estate sectors. One can only imagine the toxic, over- leveraged stew that is likely lurking behind the scenes. People have been expecting China to implode for years, it hasn't happened.

In the United States there are multiple bubbles now. Students loans are clearly in a bubble. It was announced this week that the government admitted to falsifying data (they call it a "technical glitch," It is not a glitch, it was likely deliberate) around what % of sub-prime students were not repaying their debts.

The private tech stock bubble of worthless, unprofitable Silicon Valley unicorns who can never go public is alarming but seems contained for now and not of a large enough size to tank the stock market.

Sub-Prime Automotive is also a bubble, but so far the numbers are far lower than anything near what was experienced in 2007.

Real estate in the United States in some segments, notably high-end real estate in Miami and Manhattan were both in bubbles as well and seem to have deflated. There was also a significant housing bubble in Vancouver which seems to be deflating due to government action.

So there are numerous bubbles that we know about. But this isn't the real problem. The real problem is that credit, derivatives and shadow banking going on behind the scenes. While many regulations have been passed to ensure that the United States banking sector is more "solid," the financiers of the world always find a way to introduce more leverage.

My conclusion after digging into the various bubbles and their sizes is as follows:

Sub-Prime Automotive is a bubble but the size of it isn't so bad. The biggest problem is repercussions of such a bubble collapsing and becoming contagious.

Real Estate seems ok, nowhere near what happened in 2007 in terms of scale and corruption.

Student loans are a rather large bubble. Still nowhere near the size of the sub-prime mortgage nightmare.

Tech bubble, shouldn't be a big problem if it implodes by itself in the United States

China: I can't even speculate. Everyone has been screaming wolf about China for years and nothing has collapsed yet. China is rated #1 by the Economist as a risk of collapse which would take down the global economy.

I am going with: China or EuroZone banking melt-down that spreads and pops all the United States bubbles.

</comment><comment><USER26> Mary Jane.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you have a favorite GUI Git client for macOS? - <AUTHOR> I've been evaluating SourceTree and Tower lately after being an exclusive CLI Git guy. Both are really nice, but Tower has a pretty steep price at $80. Are there any other great free or paid apps around? <comment><USER2> I personally use GitKraken ([https://www.gitkraken.com/](https://www.gitkraken.com/)) and I love it. There's a great blend between a pleasant UI and extensive control over what it's doing. Plus it's cross-platform, which is nice.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really like GitX ([http://gitx.frim.nl/](http://gitx.frim.nl/)), which I use mostly for its commit browsing & search capability. It's free and licensed under GPL-2.

</comment><comment><USER4> Compared to the amount of time it takes to become proficient with the Git command line, $80 might or might not be a good investment.

I've used SourceTree under Windows and it seemed to be a good product. Now I mostly use the command line.

Good luck.</comment>


Preact build is 68% smaller than React with a two lines changes - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/algolia/instantsearch.js/pull/1224/commits/c78b7337b2a59e7f3e18df6f030a30a820b1f005 <comment><USER2> While I do appreciate preact, and have used it... it doesn't contain all the error detection and messaging that react proper does... that's where a lot of that much smaller initial load comes from. When you aren't having issues it's great... if you are, less so.

It really depends on your needs, you can get a very small app/module via preact, and I like it a lot. If you're building for a larger environment, or larger applications, you may be better off eating the extra 60-80k or so for React proper.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, what we do is use a React build in development mode and then compile with preact.

This is safe at least for us because it allows us to keep all the good React development environement while providing a build that is a lot lighter.</comment></comment>


Used vue.js with laravel and my site is not SEO friendly anymore - <AUTHOR> I implemented vue.js on my site for pagination and filter. Now I realize that the page loads with filters and the data is fetched via AJAX. Do a view source and AJAX content is not displayed. This affects the site indexing and ability to rank. I do not want to go for SSR. What could be my options here? Should I ditch vue.js? <comment><USER2> You use SPA and then are surprised that it negatively impacts your SEO? What did you think would happen?

If you want good SEO ditch SPA. If you want SPA and SEO you must have both - client-side rendering and server-side rendering.

</comment><comment><USER3> You can mix both! Depeneding on how you implemented vuejs, you can render the list on the server on a blade template and send it to the cliente. There, you let vue do the pagination/filters/etc.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> With all these discussion, my question to this group is that should I stick with vue.js ? I was using data tables and developer advocated vue.js being much better and flexible, which I agree but then these SEO challenges. If I am on laravel framework, what options do I have to implement pagination and filter conditions in SEO friendly manner. I have seen some sites using Ajax but they change the url by incrementing a variable in the url.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you want to keep your SEO ranks without SSR, ditch any client side rendering framework and go back to blade templates.

<comment><AUTHOR> How do I allow filtering to be done on client side? I am comparing with cargurs, aamozn wayfair, how to get that filter option on left and still keep content. I was think load content first and then load filter on left. This is what amazon does

<comment><USER4> Use javascript. Display all the data at the first load. Then make make ajax calls with the filter data to the server, filter and process the results there and replace the original content on the client side with innerHTML().

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > I do not want to go for SSR.

SSR and SPA aren't mutually exclusive. Vue.js supports the ability to server- side render and hydrate the HTML with your SPA once it has loaded. It's the best of both worlds.

[https://ssr.vuejs.org/](https://ssr.vuejs.org/)

</comment><comment><USER6> I think that google now uses a headless browser. Unless your page loads in too much time, nothing should change on the SEO side if you have the same content at the same place.

<comment><USER3> That is not true. As far as I know, google does execute js but does not wait for ajax calls.

<comment><AUTHOR> In google webmaster I saw the error when ran "fetch as google". It had issues with Ajax calls.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Do the routing through laravel and then in the blade template, just pass the data along in a vue component.

</comment><comment><USER8> SPA and SEO are not compatible. SPA is good for apps, backends, admins ...

<comment><USER9> A SPA supporting deep linking and an access model that provides unauthenticated access to public content should, in principle, be able to be made indistinguishable from a set of classic webpages with the public portion of the app content, from an SEO perspective, at least if one takes the JS rendering ability of the search bot(s) of concern into account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Perhaps setting up nuxt could work?</comment>


Vmforce is coming... but what is it? - <AUTHOR> http://www.vmforce.com/

<comment><USER2> It's Gabbo: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsnMGVJRE6g>

</comment><comment><USER3> Social virtual contact list sharing on the cloud!

</comment><comment><USER4> Salesforce running on VMware instances in the cloud, pre-configured?

</comment><comment><USER5> A virtual machine working only on html 5 ?

</comment><comment><USER6> vmware purchasing salesforce?</comment>


Data Science Toolkit as Virtual Machine - <AUTHOR> http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/ <comment><USER2> (excuse the shameless plug that follows)

Here's another API (available as a service) that would complement their Data Science Toolkit: Search Query to Structured Results List -- [http://screenslicer.com/](http://screenslicer.com/)

It would work quite nicely with "HTML to Story" \-- [http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/developerdocs#html2text](http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/developerdocs#html2text)

You could take the results list from ScreenSlicer and plug those into HTML to Story. I might bundle this all together myself as a service.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm looking for an appliance solution for the textbook example of users-books- genres recommendations. I've read articles and books that present this as a classic problem but haven't seen a packaged appliance that helps me put data in and get recommendations out. Is there such a thing? Is there a reason such a thing can't exist without putting the developer through a big learning curve?

I have an ebook site with around 100k registered users and 1M bookmarks (what they read). Every book is well categorized with one or more tags. I'm guessing I have enough data to feed the recommender but have put off trying as the learning curve seems like more than I have time for.

<comment><USER4> Disclaimer: I work for GraphLab Inc.

GraphLab Create aims to do what you're describing in terms of solving this problem without a big learning curve. I'm not sure what you are looking for in an appliance solution -- it's a Python package, but does not require a lot code to get good results, so hopefully this may qualify. With 5 lines of Python code to import your dataset and train an out-of-box model, you can get up and running with a basic recommender. Some data munging may be required to get things into the format our model expects, but I'd love to hear what format your data is in if some munging is necessary so we can make our API as easy to use as possible.

You can follow the tutorial [1] to create a basic recommender (if you want to try out GraphLab Create on your machine, just pip install graphlab-create and come to our website to get a product key [2]).

[1] [http://graphlab.com/learn/notebooks/basic_recommender_functi...](http://graphlab.com/learn/notebooks/basic_recommender_functionalities.html) [2] [http://graphlab.com/products/create/quick-start- guide.html](http://graphlab.com/products/create/quick-start-guide.html)

<comment><USER3> Thanks! I'll give this a try. My data is in mongodb using ruby/rails as a web front. Data structure shouldn't be too hard...its just books, users, bookmarks, and tags/genre. All have unique ids (mongo UUIDs for users, books, and basic integer ids for the tags) and simple associations so I guess it couldn't be too hard to import. I'm thinking an offline system would be fine for some experiments. Not sure I need some real-time recommender integrated...but I'm new to this, so I guess I'm still not sure what I need.

<comment><USER4> The simplest way to start out would be to import from CSV (assuming it's easy to dump users/books/tags from MongoDB to CSV), use that to train the model, then dump the recommendations from the model back to CSV (or using Python code, write them directly to MongoDB). That would give you an offline system with one-time recommendations. You could then run this in batch, on a schedule, to re-train as you get new tags/bookmarks and update the recommendations periodically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks to these guys for creating a VMWare-compatible image as well.</comment>


Anger in California's carpool lanes as  200,000 drivers are set to lose decals - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-ln-clean-air-car-decals-20180917-story.html <comment><USER2> This was just another tax on the poor who can't afford ZEV's. The new yuppies can eat the traffic they create with the rest of us. Remember, you aren't IN traffic, you ARE traffic.</comment>


Android issue #34880 still exists on S4 - <AUTHOR> http://developer.samsung.com/forum/board/thread/view.do?boardName=GeneralB&messageId=232748

<comment><USER2> Off topic: that has got to be the most annoying forum quote/threading I've ever come across.

</comment><comment><USER3>
        al@, Oct, 26, 2013 09:54
        This bug still exists in the 4.3 S4 firmware.
        Samsung; Your customers would like an update as to why you've not included a publicly available bug fix in your closed source firmware you're distributing to them.

It's especially disgraceful given that "publicly available bug fix[es]" just merge themselves into your repository automatically, no effort required on Samsung's behalf!!!

</comment><comment><USER4> Why this bug is particularly noteworthy? What's the context here? Bugs happen all the time, and it's not particularly surprising that fixes do not always trickle downstream correctly.</comment>


Lean Domain Search Acquired by Automattic - <AUTHOR> http://www.leandomainsearch.com/blog/45-lean-domain-search-acquired-by-automattic

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, I launched Lean Domain Search on HackerNews in January 2012 [1] and it's safe to say that without this community's support and encouragement it wouldn't be where it is today. I can't thank you all enough.

If you have any questions I'd be more than happy to answer them.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3470977](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3470977)

</comment><comment><USER2> Awesome news! Congratulations Matt!

</comment><comment><USER3> Congrats on the acquisition!</comment>


Meetings: Where Work Goes to Die - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/02/meetings-where-work-goes-to-die.html <comment><USER3> Fabulous post. I get tired of folks complaining about 'meetings' when they've never made the effort to hold a good/efficient one.

One additional point I would add is that there _really should_ be someone in the role of Chair (e.g if there are more then 3/4 people taking part). The Chair's only job is to make sure things stick to time and the important points get covered. It doesn't have to be the 'boss', even though people expect it to be.

I used to chair lots of meetings and while my style used to come across as a bit militant, after a few sessions people could be assured of the following. (1) Timing was followed (i.e start _and_ end on time). (2) If someone was specifically asked to be there, it was because their input was _needed_. (3) There was always an agenda and we'd _stick to it_.

Although I felt like a bully at first, people did seem to appreciate this style after a while. Folks would arrive (on time), discuss/decide stuff quickly and then get on with their lives.

Meetings are just something else you have to _learn about_ if you want to do them well.

<comment><USER4> That's all fine and dandy but after time, people tend to stop inviting you if you are assertive and only invite people who will blindly support their ideas.

<comment><USER3> I think you've missed my point. The assertiveness was valued and only had to be applied to time-keeping and focus.

Evidence that it was valued is that people started behaving differently, meetings ran efficiently and some folks would occasionally thank me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 6\. No chairs. People will soon learn to focus on what must be done and skip all the B.S. before they get tired.

7\. No cell phones or laptops. People must focus on the task at hand and nothing else.

8\. Lock the door at the start time and don't unlock it for anyone. People will soon learn to show up on time.

9\. Designate a referee to say "One at a time," "Take that off-line," or "So what?" Amazing how well kindergarten rules still work.

10\. Kill anyone who says any of these words or phrases: scope, mission, best practices, teaching moment, outside the box, domain, tangent, or <x> is the new <y>.

<comment><USER6> If the door to a meeting is ever locked, I would assume that they could get by without me and never show up for a meeting on that subject again.

Also when should the referee say 'so what'? Whenever somebody complains? Because in a company which needs these rules, that is the only thing that right will be used for.

<comment><USER7> > _If the door to a meeting is ever locked, I would assume that they could get > by without me and never show up for a meeting on that subject again._

Unless it was a meeting that you wanted, or needed, to be there for!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm going to venture and add one more that I find relevant for myself and the people I work with:

\- If the meeting involves creatives (coders, designers, graphics, etc), shove them all towards one day of the week, or one time of the day.

One of my pet peeves about my last job was that PMs and managers felt free to book meetings at any damn time of the day. If I have a half-hour gap between meeting A and meeting B, I won't get _anything_ done. It got so bad in "crunch time" (when everyone wanted updates on everything) that work practically stopped. My day was 4 hours of meetings interspersed with complete and utterly wasted time.

Creatives need significant stretches of time to actually get anything done. Book your meetings around these.

<comment><USER9> PG describes this very well: <http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What strikes me about this list is how it basically renames stuff that already exists. I'm about to sound like I'm about 60, but please, bear with me.

 _Every meeting should have a clearly defined mission statement ... I hesitate to recommend having an "agenda" and "agenda items" because the word agenda implies a giant, tedious bulleted list of things to cover._

Yet an agenda is the best tool for controlling meetings if the chair is any good. It says "this is what we will discuss and decide and _only_ this". A meeting should not be a free-form discussion -- leave that for chance encounters in the office kitchen. It's a transactional form of communication, a tool to make efficiently make collective decisions.

 _Do your homework before the meeting._

Which is why agenda are circulated -- and even more because:

 _Make it optional._

Yes! And as Tom DeMarco points out in (I believe) _The Deadline_ , meetings which don't stick to the agenda lead inevitably to everyone having to come to every single meeting _just in case something gets decided_. If the agenda is trustworthy, people will stay away who should stay away; only interested parties -- who will do the homework because it's relevant to them -- will turn up.

 _Summarize to-dos at the end of the meeting._

These are called "minutes". Properly written minutes are very useful and they don't have to be in legalese. The University Computer Club at the University of Western Australia, where I studied, have excellent minutes[1], written with a sense of humour.

Before I came to my senses, I used to be involved in student politics. And if that unpleasant experience taught me anything, it was the power of meeting mechanics. A well-run meeting is an extremely useful institution. Get in, discuss, decide, get out. Bam. No ambiguity, nothing left hanging.

As a chair there is one rule that counts: don't let the meeting get side- tracked. Stick to the agenda, work it. People quickly learn that they need to get their stuff onto the agenda in advance and the whole process begins to work better. Discussions become more focused, decisions can be made quickly and efficiently.

Those who are interested might like to join an organisation like Toastmasters or the Penguin Club to hone their skills, or get involved in committee work, or join a union, incorporated club or political branch. The skills of running an effective meeting are very useful. I applied them during my capstone unit at uni; my team delivered 92% of agreed functionality on-time with no significant defects. And part of that was running tight meetings.

[1] <http://www.ucc.asn.au/infobase/minutes/2011/>

<comment><USER11> Wait, 'minutes' are a record of what was said by who at the meeting. 'actions' (or 'actionable items' or etc) are "to dos". These need to be highlighted separately from the minutes.

I agree with you that well run meetings are crucial, and that traditional formats can be excellent. I offer gentle caution about bureaucracy - <USER2> people are great at setting agenda and forming committees and voting on chairs and so on, but lousy at actually getting any work done.

<comment><USER10> Meeting formats vary. The simplest things you need, though are:

1\. Metadata -- who was there, start time, end time.

2\. What was discussed. Regular reports are typical.

3\. What decisions were made.

4\. Who will carry out which decisions.

It's common to see 3&4 in one of two formats:

1\. Interpolated. "Motion: Jack to install new monitoring package. Moved Jill, Seconded Wei Li. Passed."

2\. Appended. A list at the bottom of "action items". The UCC minutes I linked above take this approach, which has the readability advantage.

 _I offer gentle caution about bureaucracy - some people are great at setting agenda and forming committees and voting on chairs and so on, but lousy at actually getting any work done._

Yes, absolutely. I saw meetings abused during my student politics days. Some really dramatic stuff.

<comment><USER3> Another, often overlooked point is _when_ things need to be done by.

Also, I got in the habit of putting a table of actions right at the front of the minutes (after the preamble of time/date/attendees etc). It was the first thing people would see on opening the doc.

<comment><USER10> That's a nifty idea. Mind if I pinch it in future?

<comment><USER3> I'm flattered. Below is an (anonymised) example of the last set of minutes I took. Hope you find it useful.

PDF: <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/486678/ExampleMinutes_2012-02-14.pdf>

DOC: <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/486678/ExampleMinutes_2012-02-14.doc>

Edit: I once toyed with the idea of trying to write an iPad app that can automagically structure a set of minutes for you. It would have been a way for me to learn iOS and do something useful for myself at the time.

<comment><USER10> Excellent example document.

I toyed with a similar idea for an application, but this was about a decade ago when my (most excellent) secretary grumbled about my nitpicking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One of the points nearly covered in the article is not going off track, as soon as people get comfortable and start discussing things off topic then the meeting is over as it is no longer productive.

The ethos of standing meetings is pretty good, nobody can get comfortable and decisions are made quickly. To this end meetings ARE useful in some situations, topic for discussion should be circulated prior and agreement made in the meeting. As you don't want to fall into the trap of long email threads between co-workers which could be solved with a few minutes of discussion.

</comment><comment><USER13> This article and the 37S "meetings are toxic" (<http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch07_Meetings_Are_Toxic.php>) argument really speaks to designers/developers who have worked at an agency. In my experience, many agency meetings attempt to get work done. Most of the thinking happens during the meeting resulting in poorly thought out, off the cuff suggestions. Sure preparation is important, but more specifically most of the thinking should happen before the meeting. The meeting itself should only be about sharing and reacting to that sharing.

Every time I need to communicate something, I stop and ask myself, what level of interruption does my message warrant? An email? IM? A meeting? It's very rare that it will save time to bypass email and IM for a meeting. Meetings because project managers want to spend less time in email and IM is unacceptable.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't mind a few scheduled meetings a week. I don't know about you, but I don't flat-out work the entire time I'm sitting at a desk, so not being there every so often isn't necessarily a productivity hit.

Obviously unfocused and overly general meetings are not good, but for reasonable ones, I find taking the headphones off and going to speak/listen to some human beings for a while to be rejuvenating.

<comment><USER15> As a counterpoint, I find myself thoroughly drained after any meeting that goes for an hour or more. Put me in a two hour meeting first thing in the morning and I'm not going to produce anything useful that day; I'll pretty much be zombified for the rest of the day.

I figure it comes down to extroverts (recharged by interacting with others) vs introverts (drained by interacting with others).

<comment><USER14> I think everyone should agree that marathon meetings suck. Perhaps 45m max, with people free to leave if it's no longer relevant to them, is what I'd advocate.

I thought my word choice might bring up the intro/extro-vert thing, but I think someone needs to be a pretty extreme case to be flustered by a (reasonable length) meeting with people they already know and hopefully like. I don't really buy it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My meeting rules are simple.

1\. I don't go to a meeting that doesn't have an agenda.

2\. After I get the agenda, I try and work out what I can over email and phone, if possible.

3\. If I can't get out of the meeting following step two, I let the meeting organizer know I'm available for 45 minutes at the maximum.

4\. I leave at 45 minutes regardless if the meeting is done or not.

These principles have served me well.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have found that meetings are where people who "can't" congregate in great numbers to tell those who "can" how to do stuff wrongly.

<comment><USER17> Hahaha, yeah. I've had managers call meetings before at a past place I worked, with the result already decided beforehand of course, just because they couldn't take ten minutes to read a code review thread or lookup the difference between two protocols online. It wasn't enough to program it right there, you had to program it and hide anything the manager couldn't understand and would get upset about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> In the last month, I attended fifty hours of meetings. Fifty. In the last week before I gave my notice, the week had seventeen hours of meetings.

It's not just where work goes to die, it's also a great way to drive individuals out of a company who just want to do good work. Meetings were exactly why we were missing deadlines and were forced to deliver assets that were lower quality because we didn't have the time (thanks to meetings) to do anything right. Meeting-itis is like dropping a nuclear bomb on the morale of some of your team members.

Moreover, I'm convinced the reason why projects might devolve into meeting- itis is because none of the attendees can agree on A) what is to be done B) or how to do it. In which, since no one's yet done the legwork to get all that sorted out, there should be no meetings until said A and B have been established and taken care of.

</comment><comment><USER19> I literally had no meetings yesterday and felt that the lack of constraints on the day led me to be even less productivy. Think there is a fine balance of meetings to break up the day and give direction (maybe just talking with co- workers) and utter freedom. The latter feels too much like a study hall.

</comment><comment><USER20> worse then meetings: Skype-Calls (or even Group-Skype-Calls)

there is no agenda, there is no reason (mission statement), nobody prepares for anything (they are googling it during the call), it is not optional (they just call you), everything is summarized in an email afterwards, the email does not differ in any way from the email you would have written without the skype call.

some clients prefer to meet me before i start working for them (not going to happen) - the next thing is they want a skype video chat (not going to happen, i work naked) - then audio (hey, i'm online with a mobile data stick, not going to happen) - then they want a skype chat session ... i'm yet looking for arguments against chat sessions.

i once uninstalled skype, but the argument "i don't have skype" didn't work....

<comment><USER21> IMO, Skype calls follow the same rules as phone calls. You're not required to answer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This list reads exactly like advice from business books from the 1970s or earlier. And I mean _exactly_. No deviation. Nothing new.

Clearly there's more to the meeting issue or people wouldn't be shouting the same advice into the wind 40+ years later.

</comment><comment><USER23> On the other hand, the London School of Economics and Harvard Business School are conducting a study about how executives use their time -- see <http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/executivetimeuse/> \-- and so far they have found CEOs spend around a third of their time in meetings!

Here's a good summary: [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020464260457721...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204642604577215013504567548.html)

<comment><USER24> That's because they're not "makers", as someone pointed in the thread, PG has an essay titled Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule :

<http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> While I certainly agree with many of the OPs points about how to make meetings work better, I sometimes suspect that the reason a lot of people dislike meetings is not just that they are ineffective, but rather that they feel unpleasant. Deciding something collectively with a group of three or more people really is much easier if the stakeholders are present, than over email or phone. But in a meeting you get all kinds of nasty conflicts between people, the consequent avoiding difficult but relevant issues, misunderstandings, conflicting mental models, boredom etc. Meetings don't feel nice for these reasons, but I would like to hear something that truly works better. Sure, if the proverbial Steve decides everything, then why have meetings (you only need to meet Steve once in a while), but is that really how you want things to be?

</comment><comment><USER26> Meetings are important - but they need to be correctly organized, led and moderated are very beneficial.

Not having meetings for things you should have a meeting is very dangerous - and making some stupid rules like no chairs or lock the doors is also dangerous. You see, you need these stupid things because people organizing meetings don't know how to organize, prepare, led and moderate a meeting: spend some time coaching younger employee to learn how to do that (ha coaching ... that is something we really forget to do because it is not writing code)

In other words, meetings are not bad: people organizing, preparing, leading, and moderating meetings are bad.

The hardest meeting to lead are "brainstorming meetings" and I was lucky that my EVP was master of them: many interesting and break-thru algorithm happend there.

</comment><comment><USER27> The main problem I notice with meetings is that it's hard to get a chance to talk, and so when people do get a chance to talk, they keep talking to avoid pausing long enough for someone else to step in. I also hate the war between people trying to start talking, involving two people talking over each other until one admits defeat and yields the floor.

This is ten times worse with video conferencing.

One thing that surprised me about Google is that we have meetings and they proceed in exactly the same way every single time. The end result is a bunch of angry engineers, not new ideas.

<comment><USER10> That's why many organisations adopt rules of order.

Silent air is a poor medium of transmission. In order to efficiently multiplex communication, you need a good protocol. That's what rules of order do: they impose a protocol between the participants that establishes who can speak when, and on what topic.

It's fusty and old fashioned, but it _works_. I've seen absolute screaming matches that nevertheless 1) reached conclusions and 2) were legally valid. The chair had to constantly shut down the screaming, had to evict several troublemakers from the meeting and to follow the rules with tyrannical strictness, _but it worked_.

That's almost the worst case possible for a meeting (the worst is descent into riot). Rules of order, like any technology, work well if properly applied.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> More tips:

      * Always stand-up while meeting.
      * Not everyone can lead a meeting. Ask someone how can to lead the meeting. This can even be someone without interest in the subject.

<comment><USER29> How are you supposed to take notes in a stand-up meeting?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I have a very simple rule for meetings.

I ask:"Am I needed" and if the answer is yes I ask: "For what?"

After that it's pretty easy to figure out whether I should go or not. The important part is to realize that YOU are the judge of whether your presence is needed, not your PM or any other.

I think I have dodged probably 80% of meetings that way and I know I have not missed out on a single thing ever.

I also make the habit of showing up when I need and leave again when I am not needed.

<comment><USER11> That's rational advice. In a perfect world there would be no problems with it.

How do you deal with irrational humans who attach a bunch of unintended meaning to your actions? For example, some people will think you are arrogant, or rude, or uncooperative. I know you're not, you know you're not, but how do you persuade them that you're just being efficient?

<comment><USER30> I don't care about it.

Why should I? If I work at a place where thats an issue I shouldn't work there anyway cause that means the place is going to be a place I want to leave sooner rather than later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Meetings bloody meetings:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWYnVt-umSA>

</comment><comment><USER32> In case anyone is interested I wrote a blog post about conducting 15-minute meetings. Ever since I've introduced them, they've been quite successful for us.

[http://www.techdisruptive.com/2011/05/10/the-15-minute- meeti...](http://www.techdisruptive.com/2011/05/10/the-15-minute-meeting/)

</comment><comment><USER33> >Every meeting should have a clearly defined mission statement.

People who use the term "mission statement" are usually people of the meeting holding variety. That and memorandum of understanding, vision etc.

</comment><comment><USER34> The anti-meeting attitude has pervaded my workplace to the point that we don't have meetings for things we really should. It's a strange feeling to wish for more meetings.

For a while, we had a scrum master contracting with us that ran meetings with an iron fist. She didn't take any bullshitting or digressing from the point. It was awesome. I miss her all the time.

</comment><comment><USER35> Every rule has an exception, and mine is the first rule - the one 'not to be broken under penalty of death'. At my workplace we have contractors that come and go, plus the in-house devs are frequently offsite. It's really difficult to get all the stakeholders together at once, and while long meetings aren't common, it definitely occurs that we have 60+ minute meetings that are full of content.

Also, rule 4 doesn't make sense for two reasons. The first is that the idea of a stand-up meeting is that it's mandatory: get everyone together to quickly thrash out what's blocking them. Just because you're not blocked doesn't mean you're not blocking someone else, plus it helps keep everyone on the same page. Secondly, the rule contradicts itself - meetings aren't mandatory, unless you _need_ to be there. So... you don't have to be there, unless you have to be there, in which case you have to be there?

</comment><comment><USER36> Being prepared for a meeting means the meeting should never take place at all.

If you know what you're going to say, put it in a damned email. If I have a question, I'll reply. Then you can craft a thoughtful and correct answer as time allows while consulting any necessary reference material, instead of talking out of your ass.

You also look cool by violating the laws of physics. People don't have to actually attend a "meeting" to be there, they just have to _gasp_ read their email! Amazing!

<comment><USER37> The goal of an efficient meeting is the rapid discussion of ideas to reach a consensus.

E-mail is dreadful for anything that tends to go off-course (needs to be chaired) or requires rapid discussion with evolving arguments.

<comment><USER38> I can only imagine the same people who are saying meetings are terrible are also the ones saying "why doesn't anyone respond to my emails quickly???"

<comment><USER36> Hardly. I'm the one constantly wondering why people didn't read the email I sent them _before_ interrupting me with redundant questions that were thoroughly answered in the email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> this is completely off topic here. I don't mind if you down vote, but every time I read "codinghorror.com" I remember Woody Allen's "Whatever Works" main character who wakes up in the middle of the night screaming at the top of his lungs: "the horror!! the horror!!"</comment>


Anandtech: Battle of the $125 SSDs - <AUTHOR> http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3773

<comment><USER2> Just installed an Intel budget ssd two days ago, fresh updated install of Ubuntu 9.10 had the boot time cut down by just over 10 seconds compared to the mechanical drive. Apps start very quickly GIMP, Blender, OO Writer et cetera are all under 2 seconds. 2-3 meg pngs opening in the GIMP take a fraction of a second. "sudo hdparm -tT /dev/sda1" nets ~1330MB/sec over many runs for cached reads on the Intel and on the two mechanical drives. Buffered disk reads on the Intel are in the 156MB/sec range, and 51 and 58MB/sec on the mechanical drives. 6 seconds or so to transfer half a gig of DV video from the mech to the ssd. It's also very quiet so you don't have that grinding on boot or opening a folder with pdf/image previews. Chrome and Firefox don't seem to have the stalls that they did earlier when transferring to disk. Installation plate to fit into the 3.5" bay was fiddly even with a removable hdd cage, so was plugging in the cables as it's such a tiny drive. Very pleased all up, 5/5 on value (remember it's only 40gig though).

</comment><comment><USER3> These 'cheap' SSDs really make me consider going the route of replacing my cd drive in my laptop with one as my boot drive. From what I understand, having your documents and media on a traditional magnetic drive doesn't really slow down the boost gained from having apps and the OS on an SSD. Anyone have experience doing this (specifically in a MacBook Pro)?

<comment><USER4> I have that setup on my desktop, and it's a considerable improvement over booting, starting applications, etc, off of the old Raptor 10k drive.

For a laptop it's more problematic since you can only fit one drive internally. When I upgrade my MBP (whenever the new ones come out), I'll probably put a larger SSD in it so there's some space for stuff you need to have on-drive.

<comment><USER5> You can get two hard drives on a MBP if you're willing to sacrifice your dvd drive:

<http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/>

<comment><USER6> I've done exactly this in my MBP and been very pleased. 80GB X25-M as the primary drive, and a larger disk as the secondary drive.

As an aside -- for whatever reason, I couldn't get my optical drive to work in the enclosure provided with the Optibay. I didn't investigate too much, since it just doesn't matter to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I have a $100 gift card burning a hole in my pocket so I'm planning to spring for an X25-V, but if you are considering the same, it might be worth noting that IMFT's new 25nm flash is coming in Q4 this year, promising double the capacity for roughly the same price. If you can wait that long that is.

</comment><comment><USER7> I just bought a Kingston 64GB SSD for about $149 at Fry's. I put it in my Sony Vaio as the only drive and did a fresh install of Ubuntu 9. It is really super fast now. Open Office spreadsheet opens in under 2 seconds. It boots in about 15 seconds. The install of the OS was considerably faster etc. I have only had 1 actual session on the new setup but it seemed to speed everything up the whole time. Loading web pages in google chrome seemed almost unreal.

<comment><USER8> Chrome shouldn't be any faster with a faster hard disk, AFAIK. Maybe some weird I/O flushes in the program were slowing it down...

<comment><USER9> Most likely the fresh install had something to do with that. AFAIK the browser lives in memory and only touches the hard disk for saving files/history.

<comment><USER7> yea could be. But chrome is so much faster than firefox especially the initial program load.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A chemical so hot it destroys nerve endings – in a good way - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/resiniferatoxin/ <comment><USER2> Naturally I wanted to know if anyone had tried cooking with or eating this super spicy compound. I found this [0]:

> "With a friend, we put one drop of a very dilute solution"—he pointed to the > tip of his tongue—"and then immediately rinsed it off. At the point where we > put it, I couldn't feel anything for a week."

To anyone with the same bad idea as me, the answer is no, we don't want to eat these.

[0] [https://www.cooksillustrated.com/science/783-articles/featur...](https://www.cooksillustrated.com/science/783-articles/feature/hurts- so-good)

<comment><USER3> For anyone else reading this, the link cited above contains a wealth of technical and practical information about peppers and related flavors, and it even delves into the psychological aspects of spiciness. It's a great read.

<comment><USER2> Seriously, I went looking for that one thing and almost forgot about it reading through the article! Fantastic read.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This sounds wonderful for chronic pain. Reportedly, only pain neurons are affected. And for joints and other relatively isolated sites, effects can be targeted. So yes, your knee doesn't hurt, and you could injure it worse without the pain feedback. But you'd have ~normal pain sensation elsewhere.

We already use capsaicin patches. So hey.

<comment><USER5> Definitely not without side effects. Loss of pain sensation in parts of the body (such as the knee) can be really scary and potentially lead to permanent damage if the pain feedback loop doesn't report that it's being twisted or stressed.

<comment><USER4> True. But this is for chronic pain. Especially for pain that's caused by damage that's not expected to heal. So if you have constant knee pain, so bad that you can't stand up, the risk of further knee damage is arguably not such a major issue.

However, I can see how this could be misused. People could put themselves at risk for serious injury, in order to get back to work sooner. It's rather the norm for professional athletes, sadly enough. And for many others who do manual labor.

So in such circumstances, it could be horrible. But for those with chronic pain, perhaps a blessing.

<comment><USER6> You could of course pair this with a knee brace to prevent doing _further_ damage to the area.

<comment><USER7> I don't think it'll be used for ligament injuries like MCL/ACL issues where a brace helps, but for chronic issues like osteoarthritis where the cartilage is low or gone. The bone on bone pain is constant and the only long term solution is knee replacement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My mother in law has been ridden with excrutiating phantom limb pains after being forced to amputate her left arm above her elbow due to injuries she suffered in a car accident a few years ago. Has tried everything from mirror boxes to cannabis as well as a myriad of different medicinal treatments, none having any appreciable effect.

TFA made me think of her, wonder if this also might work against phantom limb pains.

</comment><comment><USER9> My wife really needs this. Morton's neuroma, botched endometriosis surgery, and fibromyalgia. I don't know about the FM - that's so global I think it would be hard to target a specific nerve ending.

<comment><USER10> This truly sounds like it could be a fantastic tool for treating neuropathies.

Many patients with diseases such as CRPS (one of the worst pain wise) would be able to kill the pain signal allowing them to rehabilitate the affected area. Hopefully by the time the nerve function returns their body will have been able to battle the affected area into remission and avoid atrophy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This treatment kills only temperature sensors, so I'm guessing it would only help with a "burning sensation".

Killing nerve tissue can backfire when neurons higher up start compensating for the lack of signal from neurons below (1). The result can be more painful and harder to treat.

The randomized controlled experiment with dogs was for bone cancer and the treatment appears to increase days until euthanasia about 60% (2). That's a real benefit, but not related to runner's knee, which is often related to the ITB band. For possible treatments, see (3)

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

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

3\. [https://www.runnersworld.com/advanced/a20844564/treating- itb...](https://www.runnersworld.com/advanced/a20844564/treating-itbs/)

<comment><USER12> The TRPV1 receptor is present on sensory nerves, so although it does primarily detect high temperature[1], regulating it can result in pain relief in general, not just a reduction in "burning sensations." Also, the article simplifies the rather complicated molecular biology, much of which is still being worked out. Importantly the article does not discuss killing nerves, just their nerve endings.

[1]TRPV1 also detects high acidity and the endocannabinoid anandamide.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRPV1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRPV1)

PS: Your links [1] and [2] are identical... mistake?

<comment><USER11> Thanks! Both for the clarification and noting the mistake. Here's the original article: (2) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4431903/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4431903/)

<comment><USER12> Interesting... so it looks like RTX can cause cell death. Perhaps this shouldn't be surprising. Glad you updated that link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Time to retire the Scoville index. Anything with that range is next to useless as a real measure.

<comment><USER14> You gotta understand how it works though - basically, it works by diluting a pepper seed concentrate as many times as necessary until every member of a panel of 5 testers can no longer taste a hint of spiciness.

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

the problem is that we don't have a physiological basis for "spiciness" in order to create a more objective scale. Instead, we rely on subjective taste tests to get those numbers, and mitigate the subjectivity by having multiple taste testers.

I'm actually thinking about applying a similar process to a few image analysis problems at work that are (currently) necessarily subjective, in order to produce better data for the eventual ML algorithms.

<comment><USER13> What's the error bar on that I wonder.

<comment><USER15> In secondary link in the top comments they say that it can now be measured mechanically (they mention only capsaicin though, so I'm not sure if it works for the other types).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nerve damage or loss leads to muscle atrophy. Also, nerve regeneration is still unresolved.

<comment><USER4> That's about motor nerves. This is about pain nerves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Capsaicin works topically, so I would presume this does too. Have any individuals actually tried this?

</comment><comment><USER18> Is this permanent?

Somehow, I do not see this ending well. As attractive as eliminating pain may be, the fact is we need a sense of pain.

A knee that cannot communicate pain lacks the feedback needed to prevent further damage.

<comment><USER19> Pain feedback equating to null would be a win for me. I prefer life requiring heightened awareness than constant pain. Some people don't realize that consistent psychological or physical pain is like living with a cold for your whole life. Every day you think of how ungrateful you were when you could breathe freely. Also if this dramatically decreased life expectancy by the increased danger from lack of feedback.. it still seems like a win with how shit life is when in pain till you die.

<comment><USER18> Totally fair.

What I wonder about is choice. You've expressed yours, and it's solid. Others may well make other choices.

Will they be able to, or are we headed toward a new paradigm, where it's "just fixed, you can go" as opposed to management, options?

Then again, perhaps most people don't care.

I had skimmed this, found it thought provoking. Missed where there is nerve recovery. I do know, from some personal experiences, nerve regrowth, if it happens and it doesn't always happen, is sloooow.

Looks like there is recovery, meaning it's not permanent. I feel a whole lot better about that.

<comment><USER20> It seems like we both agree that people should be free to make their own choice.

Where I struggle to understand your perspective is here:

> _Will they be able to, or are we headed toward a new paradigm, where it 's > "just fixed, you can go" as opposed to management, options?_

As a society right now we are _way_ tipped on the scale toward not giving choice by denying access as opposed to forcing access, so the concern that we'd be forced into relief seems the opposite of my concern (that we will be denied relief).

Doctors are getting really stingy with many medications (because of DEA threats (and in some cases actions) to throw them in prison if their patient does something wrong with them, or even if they are just statistically writing more than other doctors). Try going to get some Xanax, or Adderall, or Percocet. Good luck! If you've had it before it's easier, but new patients you can basically forget about it without a hard diagnosis (which they will happily take tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and still not provide, because again doctors are terrified of mis-diagnosis and getting sued or treated as a criminal, so they will only do it if there is hard indisputable evidence, which is infrequently the case).

<comment><USER18> Yeah, exactly. Your last paragraph is my concern. "Let's just burn the pain out of them" = no issues.

When there are always potential issues.

The US perspective on this stuff is terrible. Frankly, the state of health care, markets, all the BS?

Wish I were not living here. No joke. I've already had take serious financial hits --twice, for people I love.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> That's an interesting apporoach. Maybe next time I have lower-back pain, I'd wrap habanero peppers around my back.

<comment><USER22> My mother has been eating large amounts of of hot fresh chillies with every meal for the last decade and has noted a huge improvement in her arthritis pain, to the point where if she travels and forgets to take chillies with her, the pain seems to return swiftly.

It may be psychosomatic, but the benefits to her seem to have been huge, for an incredibly low cost and risk.

<comment><USER23> What is a large amount?

Is it the quantity of chilli peppers that are eaten that is important on the heat of the pepper? So 4 weak chillis is the same as eating one very spicy pepper?

<comment><USER24> Bit anecdotal, but if I eat a tablespoon of Pepper X with other food, I do feel a general numbing of pain for a while after.

<comment><USER25> Very spicy foods cause you to release endorphins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> For how often front-end development is shat on you'd think something as trivial as adding the ability for a user to close a registration dialog would be child's work.

<comment><USER27> works on my machine™

</comment></comment><comment><USER28>
      Inject RTX, as it's known, into an aching joint, and
      it'll actually destroy the nerve endings that signal
      pain. Which means medicine could soon get a new tool
      to help free us from the grasp of opioids.

You know, I appreciate that someone out there is trying to address an addiction crisis more deadly than HIV, particularly because HIV can also compound the crisis through injection use, but...

Using a toxic capsaicin analog to destroy nerve endings sounds like an option (when taking to the inevitable extremes we are all dreading here), which could actually be worse than simply locking someone in a room so that they don't harm themselves or others with a different substance.

Reading this sounds like something out of a Shadowrun supplement, describing an intentionally horrifying prerequisite to some kind of cybernetic augmentation that renders your character a partially comatose brain in a vat.

<comment><USER29> RTFA. The nerves eventually recover. They've tried it with dogs with joint problems and after about 5 months they need to be re-injected.</comment></comment>


Meet the Hardest Working Man in Porn - <AUTHOR> http://www.details.com/story/shimiken-japanese-porn-star-interviewhttp://www.details.com/story/shimiken-japanese-porn-star-interview <comment><USER2> The URL is repeated for some reason. Correct URL is: [http://www.details.com/story/shimiken-japanese-porn-star- int...](http://www.details.com/story/shimiken-japanese-porn-star-interview)</comment>


Directory tags for lazy programmers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/joowani/dtags <comment><USER2> I'm wary of such productivity tools because they won't be available on the systems I'm connecting to. The few keystrokes saved are not worth the mental drag in my experience.</comment>


Google's Eric Schmidt Teaches Apple iPhone Users How To Switch To Android - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/11/25/googles-eric-schmidt-teaches-apple-iphone-users-how-to-switch-to-android/ <comment><USER2> This is barely news... We all have jobs to do. His job is to make Google's Android base grow. He's doing his job.

</comment><comment><USER3> 1\. resign your board seat...</comment>


Simplifying Payments with Facebook Pay - <AUTHOR> https://about.fb.com/news/2019/11/simplifying-payments-with-facebook-pay/ <comment><USER2> I hope none will use it</comment>


Popular Game Civilization Comes To Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2009/10/22/civilization-facebook/

<comment><USER2> _sigh_ The last thing I need is another place where Civ can tempt me to waste my time ;) They already have me on PC & console. I've avoided iPhone thus far, but might not hold out forever.

<comment><USER3> I'm going to pretend you never said Civilization is available on the iPhone, because I enjoy doing schoolwork and not being expelled.

<comment><USER4> Civ on the iPhone sucked away two weeks of my life. It's a great port and reminds me more of Civ2 than the newer ones. I'd recommend the download on your winter break ;)

<comment><USER5> In my opinion it's not terribly good - the are you can see it far too small to move units in an efficient way, now I have to scroll around all the time. Or have I missed how to zoom out?

[edit: I just started the game, and sure enough it's possible to zoom. _slaps forehead for not trying it before_ ]

<comment><USER4> Don't beat yourself too much about that. I had the _exact_ same problem. Took me a few days to realize that zooming was even possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good. The biggest problem with most Facebook games is that there is little to no actual gameplay. Has anyone here actually played Mafia Wars? It's not a game.

<comment><USER7> Finally someone who agrees with me. I forced myself to play mafia wars for about an entire month, simply to find out what was there in the darned game and still I couldn't get myself to think of it as a game.

However, I don't think Civ would be a major success on Facebook. Most people on facebook like playing games that are simple and do not require you to think too much (ex: farmville). However, I'm still rooting for civ, simply because I'm also developng a turn based strategy game for facebook and it would be nice to see this category of games become popular on facebook.

<comment><USER6> I've been considering applying for a job at Zynga so I've also been playing Mafia Wars and Farmville. The latter is a little better. Both epitomize the idea of click/reward perfected by the Diablo series, but the end game of Mafia Wars is laughably boring, it's no different than the early and mid game. Actual PVP for domination of control points seems like a straightforward addition but I guess they don't need to mess with something so popular right now.

I believe Zynga has publicly acknowledged that in the long run their games will need to have more actual game play.

<comment><USER8> Country Story is more like Farmville would be if it had actual depth... but then it becomes blatently obvious that the idea is simply a rip-off of "Harvest Moon".

That's not to say Farmville isn't fun, it is, but I find Country Story a little deeper.

<comment><USER7> Most Zynga games appear to be rip-offs. Farmville was ripped from Farm Town, and he recent Cafe world is almost a frame by frame copy of Playfish's Restaurant City (in terms of general gameplay and graphics). Mafia Wars came from SGN and Pirates and the Space Genre games both share the same backend as Mafia Wars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So, that's humanity finished then. And to think the 2012-ers were so very close, just 2 years out from 'all human productivity ceasing and mankind dying from starvation within 3 weeks'.

</comment><comment><USER9> Crap, I might have to finally give in and sign up.</comment>


Videogrep searches through dialog in video files and makes supercuts - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/antiboredom/videogrep

<comment><AUTHOR> Via: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9159115](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9159115)

Note that videogrep at the moment just uses subtitle files, while audiogrep uses speech recognition.</comment>


Apple's domains - <AUTHOR> http://ipod.com/init

<comment><USER2> In case it goes away, here's a copy: <http://pastebin.com/yZxWJD9n>

<comment><USER3> It's gone away. Thanks for sharing this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I may be a novice but shouldn't that document not be in a webroot or shouldn't the webserver not render it? I mean, It's not giving any terribly sensitive information but I'd assume that it shouldn't be just dumping like that?

<comment><USER5> Correct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Such a shame they don't own aapl.com, mac.org & macintosh.{com,org}...

Off topic: I've noticed that recently, Google's first result for 'Mac' has (mysteriously) changed from "apple.com/mac" to "maccosmetics.com"!

<comment><USER7> That's very interesting. Seems like an unfeasible task to outrank Apple using that keyword.

<comment><USER8> My search for Mac has a local cosmetics salon ranked first.

<comment><USER9> I also did a search and I can confirm that www.maccosmetics.com is indeed first. Interesting.

<comment><USER10> Well my beautiful wife will buy six Mac Cosmetics products some months, outnumbering the total amount of Apple products purchased by our household ever (a total which includes 0 Macs). So it makes some sense to me that _more_ people searching "mac" are looking for the cosmetics, which they research, review, and buy regularly, especially if a portion of Apple searchers are also using more specific terms like "macbook" or "air".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My favorite is <http://mammals.org>.

<comment><USER12> it seems like it was part of an old project: [http://www.quora.com/Why-did- Apple-purchase-Mammals-org-and-...](http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Apple- purchase-Mammals-org-and-why-does-it-redirect-to-Apple-com)

<comment><USER13> It's been a long time (obviously), but I _think_ I recall mammals.org being registered right around the same time they were starting to use names like Darwin and Carbon.

<comment><USER12> Imagine if you will being in the meeting when Jobs shot down the idea "damn it mammals are just too whimpy! i want fierce creatures like big angry cats!!!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> That list shows a huge amount of earnt knowledge.

Notice the www.applesmartcovers.com domains? That sort of stuff, while obvious in hindsight, probably nets them hundreds of $K alone.

<comment><USER15> Sorry, could you expand on that? It sounds interesting, but I don't understand the logic.

<comment><USER16> I'm not too sure either, but my guess is in implied value, where without an apple and iPad and smart cover, the domain is worth $5/mo but with it, it's obvious prime Internet real estate and worth a lot more. As for how much money apple actually makes from this domain, I'm pretty confident nothing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is only a subset of Apple's less important domains. For example, iwork.com, apple.ca, itunes.com, etc. are not here.

<comment><USER18> However, each redirecting domain has this file viewable, so most are publicly viewable. For example, <http://itunes.com/init>.

<comment><USER19> Weird, half the time that redirects to [http://search.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZContentLink.woa/...](http://search.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZContentLink.woa/wa/link?path=init)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Just out of curiosity, what is the last line for?

        1;

<comment><USER21> Causes the file to evaluate to 'true' when loaded as a Perl library, which is good form to indicate no error.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> airport.com - what a domain.

<comment><USER23> Wow! And Airport products weren't even released until 1999. I'm not sure how they did that. Probably something to do with liquid cash assets ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What really scares me is that somewhere, some code that looks like "%matrix = (); do 'init'; ..." exists. That's one way to implement config files, I guess...

<comment><USER24> Ask someone to show you i2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /init on this server.

seems like we have hackers from apple visiting!

</comment><comment><USER26> Can find them using Reverse IP Lookups as well: e.g. <http://viewdns.info/reverseip/?host=ipod.com>

Try a few other of their domains and see what else is hosted on the same server.

</comment><comment><USER27> Can someone explain to me what this is (or was since it is no longer listed)?

</comment><comment><USER28> For a far more extensive list, see <http://www.aboutus.org/Apple.com#redirectory->

</comment><comment><USER29> Isn't a bit strange that www.apple.co.uk isn't in apple's huge list of domains?

<comment><USER30> It looks like Apple Illustration got there first in August 1996. I presume Apple Computer didn't have the foresight to go around registering with every ccTLD back then.

It must be worth a pretty penny now though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The perl here will give me nightmares.

%matrix = ( key => val, k2 => v2 );

is your friend :(

yes, i scare easily.

</comment><comment><USER32> I like the domain for "MacOS X Leon."

<comment><USER33> English:Lion::Español:León

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm curious on how many TLD extensions Apple owns for "apple" i.e. apple.com, apple.net, etc

</comment><comment><USER35> seems like icloud.org shouldn't be listed under .br

</comment><comment><USER36> Check out all the microsoft ones at the bottom...

<comment><USER37> Those just indicate redirects to Microsoft's website, Apple-owned domains.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> the perl script is broken in all other sites as well. E.g. <http://imac.com/init>

<comment><USER39> Same with <http://appl.com/init>, and in case it goes away: <http://pastebin.com/HSagC973>

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Why mammals.org?!

<comment><USER41> It have been replied on top by @michaelpinto : "it seems like it was part of an old project: <http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Apple-purchase-Mammals-org- and-...>

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Ok, what was the guy who fount this looking for in the first place?</comment>


AR superhuman ability: displaying object trajectory - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Alientrap/status/1033773312982351872?s=19 <comment><USER2> I find this rather distracting than helpful. At least in terms of enhancing my abilities. Because my brain does this pretty good already without images "in the way" to catching objects.

But it might indeed be helpful for tracing the path of objects to analyze afterwards.</comment>


Bill Nye collapses during speech at USC - <AUTHOR> http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/11/bill-nye-the-science-guy-usc.html

<comment><USER2> _"Nobody went to his aid at the very beginning when he first collapsed -- that just perplexed me beyond reason,"_

Why didn't she? Perhaps she was in the middle of a row. But often the reason that no one helps is that everyone is expecting someone else to do it -- someone more official or someone better located.

If a person needs help, don't look around for who else is moving. Go help.

\--

A story, while we're on the subject: I'm eating at this sushi place with a girl when I hear a chair hit the floor. I look up, and there's this big fellow a few tables over who appears to be choking. He's with a date, but it's clear she's shocked and doesn't know what to do. As I'm sliding out of the booth to get to my feet, a guy blows past me. He must have noticed the poor fellow choking sooner, because he came flying from the bar at the other side of the restaurant. He just seemed to appear out of nowhere.

He gives the big fellow the Heimlich Maneuver. The guy starts coughing after two or three hard thrusts. The rescuer makes sure the guy is OK, then disappears out the front door and into the night.

The total time from him blowing past me to breezing out the front door was no more than 30 seconds. It was a terribly efficient rescue.

I've always imagined he wanted out of there quickly and anonymously because of liability concerns.

<comment><USER3> Superfreakonmics[2] talks about this in chapter 3 about the Kitty Genovese[1] murder when no one went to her aid, in effect everyone thinking that someone else would go. They do expand on it further and blow apart some of the urban myths surrounding all the events (I can't remember the specifics now unfortunately). Definitely worth reading.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kitty_Genovese> [2] [http://freakonomicsbook.com/superfreakonomics/chapter- excerp...](http://freakonomicsbook.com/superfreakonomics/chapter- excerpts/chapter-3/)

<comment><USER4> Interestingly, while the bystander effect is a real thing -- the Kitty Genovese story doesn't really support it. As wikipedia points out in its understated way, the story that prompted all this research has "been criticized as inaccurate." There were actually very few witnesses who could have seen her murder and it's entirely possible that at least one of them did call the police.

<comment><USER3> From memory I think there were a number of calls, but the police didn't prioritise them highly enough. I think in the end it was a neighbour who ID'ed the murderer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This happened to my dad. TIA was suspected but there was no lasting damage nor other stroke symptoms. It was ruled exhaustion. My dad regularly works 70-80 hour weeks and does at least one all-nighter a month. What I learned is that this is not uncommon in his field (medicine.) Four of his colleagues have had the same experience, they just don't let anyone know and really try to hide it out of personal and professional pride.

I was still trying to be a startup hacker in my 30s, working all nighters, living on pizza and coffee. After one all nighter I could not remember the combination to my lock at the gym (I often showered at the gym by work instead of going home) nor could I remember my PIN number at the ATM. My hands were shaking it felt like my heart was going to explode . I checked into the ER and they said I was fine but that I was experiencing acute exhaustion and dehydration.

Since then I've tried to tone things down a bit, but unfortunately most tech companies tend towards insane work hours, no matter how much they claim to follow a "normal" work week. I recently left a job because it was expected to work about 70 hours a week and I knew I'd end up falling apart like my dad (or Bill Nye) if I kept it up.

When I lives in SF, it was not uncommon for my fellow engineers to binge drink on weekends (or wednesdays), have super unhealthy foodie-fests like "bacon parties" or try to outdo each other with the craziest 4-espresso-shot coffee concoction. I've seen too many halfways-healthy looking programmers turn into high-blood-pressure overweight blobs over the course of 18 months, and I fear for their long term health. Nobody wants to admit it, but the culture of stress and overwork at startups (and other fields) has real physical effects. Maybe not today, but somewhere down the road.

</comment><comment><USER6> A few weeks ago I spent a few hours volunteering next to him at the Planetary Society's booth at the National Science & Engineering Fair. He's doing a great service for the Society by drawing big crowds. I must say, though, that it looked absolutely exhausting. Hours of signing autographs and small talk with eager fans. He went well past his allotted time and he was likely starving by the end.

</comment><comment><USER7> People underestimate dehydration. The symptoms are extremely subtle. Combined with any other form of physical exhaustion, dehydration can trigger extreme responses in the body. The US military has had to deal with 20 year olds collapsing from what is sometimes called heat stroke, but heat stroke often has a large degree of dehydration attached to it.

If you get older and start developing the slightest bit of elevated glucose and/or glucose resistance (which can start years prior to developing diabetes) then even mild dehydration can lead to the body mishandling blood sugar levels.

</comment><comment><USER8> Shit, I hope he's okay; he's one of the best faces this country has for the popularization of science.

I just saw him recently at a talk on exoplanet discovery. He was there as one of the introductory speakers in his role as Executive Director of the Planetary Society.

</comment><comment><USER9> How should one help someone who unexpectedly collapses? I have no idea what I would do. I can only envision myself going up and dumbly asking "Are you OK?" which I am not sure is the best way to help.

<comment><USER10> _How should one help someone who unexpectedly collapses?_

Exactly what you said. Walk up to the person and loudly ask "Are you OK?". If you get a response, then you can ask further questions and provide help. If you get no response, your next move is to use first aid skills and call emergency services. If you are trained in CPR, proceed. Your loud voice might also catch the attention of someone with the appropriate training, or someone who can call emergency services while you administer CPR.

... But this wasn't someone collapsing at a mall, on the street or somewhere else where they might not be noticed. This was someone collapsing on stage. Standing up, rushing the stage and attempting to help could just as easily have caused a riot of well meaning folks and could have gotten in the way of staff who should be trained to deal with this sort of circumstance. I'm not accosting staff for not being prepared, I'm just defending those in the audience who didn't rush to help. As a child, I did a lot of community theater (the sort where you pay $5 to participate and your mother may need to sew your costume), and there was always someone with the appropriate training to handle a circumstance like this (usually our lone director, or a member of tech). Thankfully, we never had an incident, but this makes me wonder ... would they have responded within 15 seconds or waited to see if I tripped and could ad- lib my way back into character? I really don't know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What is this world coming to? How can a notoriously animated prankster dramatically collapse during a presentation about gravity and go _5 whole seconds_ before standing back up? Why wasn't every student racing toward the stage with their defibrillator paddles already charged?

Kids these days with their twitters and their facebooks. Why back in my day, we _never_ socialized. Not under any circumstances! As was made terribly clear today, socializing just takes your attention away from the people around you who could collapse at any moment!

Everybody is terrible and deficient except me!

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm not sure if this is the right time/place for it, but I've always wanted to trot out this factoid:

Archie Comics 'parodied' Bill Nye in one of their comics as "Phil MacPherson, The Science Person".

</comment><comment><USER13> Everyone should read the comments on this article. There's posts from other in attendance that gives a different take on the events. It's very easy in events like this for people to get their details mixed up.

On the side, I hope he's well. "The earth is tilted tilted tilted" has been burned into my head so well. I will never forget what causes the seasons.

</comment><comment><USER14> During my rescue diver training there was a fair amount of time spent on crowd control during an emergency. For instance an incident on a boat, on shore or in the water. How do you handle spectators? Who is responsible for what? On a boat, for example, you might specifically ask one or two people to keep eyes on a distressed swimmer. When diving, there is a hierarchy based on experience and when diving you know the experience level of your fellow divers. More or less, everyone knows their roles.

In a situation like this someone needs to step up and assist. Contrast this to Patraeus fainting, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtZSkGvARCg>, during testimony to congress. One of his aides was assisting him within 8 seconds. I imagine his aides are military and consequently trained responders. Nevertheless, assisting could be as simple as getting someone a chair and/or keeping them from smashing their head on the floor. The most important thing is to specifically assign someone the role of calling 911.

</comment><comment><USER15> Why are there so many posts about the bystander effect instead of asking WTF may be wrong with Bill Nye's health?!

</comment><comment><USER16> I've even seen this happen to people in good shape. The combination of no sleep, low blood sugar, heat, stress from speaking, and then standing for a period of time can all add up. Especially if you "lock" you legs while standing, which can lower the blood pressure to the upper body (head).

Still, it is wise to visit a doctor ASAP to have your ticker checked.

I hope Bill is okay - what an awesome individual!

</comment><comment><USER17> "Nobody went to his aid at the very beginning when he first collapsed -- that just perplexed me beyond reason," USC senior Alastair Fairbanks said. "Instead, I saw students texting and updating their Twitter statuses. It was just all a very bizarre evening."

I fear for the future.

<comment><USER18> Indeed, the whole description was very unnerving. It appears the fellow was having a stroke and nobody was inclined to do anything about it. Scary.

<comment><USER19> This is actually a well known phenomenon (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect>). It's why, in a crisis, you should always single people out to do tasks instead of saying "someone do this". Otherwise everyone will just assume that someone else will do it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I hope he's ok.

I had lunch with him at a conference. Nice guy -- very driven and focused.

</comment><comment><USER21> Nye's current status: "feeling much better". I had feared a stroke, but he's saying that he had just been pushing himself too hard. Whew.

Dug up a story here: [http://content.usatoday.com/communities/entertainment/post/2...](http://content.usatoday.com/communities/entertainment/post/2010/11/bill- nye-feeling-much-better-today-after-collapsing-at-usc/1)

<comment><USER22> That still sounds way too much like a stroke for me to fully believe it wasn't. Maybe it's because I'm a fan of college football, but I don't believe injury reports.</comment></comment>