Apollo 11 in Real Time - <AUTHOR> https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/ <comment><USER2> I was six years old during Apollo 11 and have just fragmentary memories of it. One is of my grandfather tearing up at the lunar landing and saying "when I grew up I used to carry flint and steel to start a fire" ... which would have been in the 1890s. If he grasped what he was seeing I think he'd be about as future shocked by the internet as exemplified by this link.

<comment><USER3> My dad even talks about that - he's in his late sixties and has been pretty blue collar careered his whole life.

How he simply couldn't even begin to fathom something like the internet being a _thing_ when he was in his 20s.

Makes me wonder what I can't imagine now that I might see in my lifetime.

<comment><USER4> Probably over a million JS frameworks. I could never fathom such a language in my youth, let alone so many solutions to the same problem.

<comment> 52-6F-62 The future is now, my friend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks for the share. I'm the author of the site and am happy to answer any questions.

<comment><USER6> Truly incredible work. The multitrack visualization is a really great UI, and it does wonders communicating just how much teamwork went into managing these missions. I had no idea all the mission control workstations were recorded, and how active they all were even when the crew was doing an unrelated task.

Some small thoughts: when a desk is selected it would be great to deselect it by clicking it again to go back to the master audio. And it would also be great to have the selected button highlight when signal is/isn't present - perhaps a lighter blue color? That way a user can build an intuition about what a lit button/region that they're _not_ listening to means.

Oh, and it would be fascinating to see a statistical comparison of channel activity in Apollo 11 vs. 13 :)

Honestly this is mind blowing. Your site deserves national attention, display on major news networks, millions reliving the behind-the-scenes teamwork that led to IMO the greatest human accomplishment in history. Huge kudos.

<comment><USER5> Holy moly, thanks for the kudos and great suggestions, too. I'll work on the two-tone selected button tomorrow.

I have almost all of the Apollo 13 mission control audio as well. That's the next project (but I want to take a breather for at least a day!)

<comment><USER7> I know that "me-to" type comments are generally frowned upon here on HN but really do feel the need to pile on in this case: this is wicked cool.

<comment><USER8> Enthusiasm should not be dampened! So I say: Mee too!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Bravo to you! Thank you for doing this!

This is what the Internet was supposed to be! What we get 99.9999999999 percent of the time is ad-promoted garbage that is as bad IMO as watching mindless tv.

Your site is that 0.0000000001 percent that truly transcends and brings back hope that we can take the Internet back and make it something truly great.

<comment><USER5> Thanks so much. It's been suggested to me countless times that I put promotions on the site or (gasp) enable monetization on the YouTube video portion of the site. Nope. Like you, I dream of the Internet being a better place--the place it was in 1997 but with modern technology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> My god this is truly an incredible accomplishment.

What a great experience for the enthusiast and a great aid to education.

Do you have any sort of donation link? I'd love for other missions to be archived in a similar manner.

</comment><comment><USER11> If you'd like a deep dive into Apollo 11 I can recommend the podcast "13 Minutes to the Moon". It's 5 episodes in so far and gripping my attention.

</comment><comment><USER12> Extraordinary, it's true.

Note to others: On mobile it's interesting but only has audio. I had to look at the desktop version to understand why everyone was so amazed about the site.

<comment><USER5> I couldn't think of another way to make mobile work at all. It's asking a lot of the browser

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Amazing website.

I've been listening to the audio and a few seconds after the 171:04:22 mark, on the CAPCOM channel we can hear the voice of a woman that seems completely out of place. She seems to be saying "Howdy". Anybody knows where this voice comes from?

<comment><USER5> Sounds like someone's secretary. All phone calls from console were recorded. This is one of those.

<comment><USER5> BTW, you can generate links to any channel at any time by clicking the little link button when the mission control audio console is open. Here's the moment in question: [https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/?t=171:04:09&ch=14](https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/?t=171:04:09&ch=14)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Thanks for this, it's extraordinary. Brings back such exciting memories from that time.

I hope I live to see a crewed launch with Mars as the destination.

</comment><comment><USER15> See also [https://www.firstmenonthemoon.com](https://www.firstmenonthemoon.com)

</comment><comment><USER16> This is one of the coolest things I saw on the internet! Really amazing!

</comment><comment><USER17> This is so cool! I've just been sitting here listening for a while now.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is so great! Thank you. Just a little confused by the real time counter being set a month in advance.

<comment><USER5> When it's not during the anniversary 9-day period, it pick the closest time it can and uses today's time of day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The individual console and telemetry feeds redefines how to appreciate the technical effort involved with this mission.

This definitely belongs in the Smithsonian on display with it's own interactive kiosk.

</comment><comment><USER20> For some reason my dad can't get in. The cursor is just a (/) when you mouse over the join now button. Is the site overloaded? Is something wrong on his end?

<comment><USER5> Tell him to turn off ad block or antivirus. If he's unable to load in the mission data files through ajax the site will just hang on the splash screen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If you enjoyed this, [http://apollo13realtime.org](http://apollo13realtime.org) might be of interest to you as well.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm just leaving this on in the background on the home theater PC, and switching back to it from the Roku to check in on things. Truly amazing.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is of course especially designed for this multi track set, but it is a pretty good way to navigate multiple audio sources.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is an impressive, immersive experience. Any plans to write about the software or share parts of it?

<comment><USER5> It's a bit of a messy bedroom. Ideally, I'd get some real software devs involved to rewrite it using a modern framework. This is just a pile of JS and some JQuery.

One thing of note is that there's no server-side services in this architecture. The browser does all of the work itself. Kind of remarkable when you think about it.

<comment><USER4> Whoa. The fist thing I thought was "damn, if this is what React can do I want a piece of that action and need to start learning it ASAP."

<comment><USER25> Isnt it great , you can accomplish all this, without react, just old J Query. Hats of to creator of the site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> See also; this twitter account is tweeting Apollo missions as they happened in real time, 50 years ago:

[https://twitter.com/apollo_50th](https://twitter.com/apollo_50th)

</comment><comment><USER27> But where is the telemetry data? Oh it got all erased. Every single tape. Whoops.

<comment><USER28> According to NASA there was a magnetic tape shortage. What, you've never taped over a VHS before? xD

[https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/Apollo_11_TV_Tapes_Report.p...](https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/Apollo_11_TV_Tapes_Report.pdf)

<comment><USER29> > What, you've never taped over a VHS before?

Well, actually…

I think I have only one or two VHS tapes, being the equivalent of /tmp. yes "have"; I still have all the tapes I recorded neatly organized and mothballed in boxes, and except for that two particular tapes I can not recall of overwriting any other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Fantastic work, this is very enjoyable and was instantly bookmarked!

</comment><comment><USER31> One of the most impressive website I've seen. Bravo <3

</comment><comment><USER32> My 16gb 3.2 GHz MacBook Pro is on fire reproducing this. 50 years ago they went to the moon and back with far less resources.

<comment><USER5> It definitely pushes the browser to its limit. Suggest cleaning your head sink though, it's not that bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Any chance of opensourcing the code?

<comment><USER34> The source code for the Apollo guidance Computer is available on GitHub.

[https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11](https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11)</comment></comment>


"How to Make an Ask" - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/lessons-learned/20cce60db545 Lessons learned from not making asks when I should have, and watching other entrepreneurs do the same. <comment><USER2> Gary Vee is great at this. Noah Kagan has some good blog posts on this too. Has anyone read Gary Vee's book and would they recommend it?</comment>


Ask HN: What should I do for the summer? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a graduating software engineer from a Canadian university. My term will be over in April, and I'm pretty set on doing grad school. I'm in the middle of the process right now.
However, that still leaves the four months in between (May to August) free. I'm not sure what I should try and do for it. Work? Internship? Travel? Open source project? Start grad school early?
What are some thoughts from the experienced HN community? <comment><USER2> If you have the ability, travel and experience new things and new people. You will be working your whole life. You've already been in school basically your whole life. Enjoy some free time, get ideas from people, learn from people outside your circle etc.

I have never regretted traveling and experiencing new things, but have regretted working to much or rushing to work on something thinking It would enable me to enjoy more time off later which never seems to materialize. So take advantage of the time while you can.</comment>


Individuals with social phobia have too much serotonin - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150617115327.htm <comment><USER2> Hmmm.. having been on an SSRI (at the time I was depressed) and suffering from a mild to middling social anxiety disorder (which stems from a chronic childhood one which lessened as I reached my mid 20's), for me SSRI's made me feel indestructible and fearless. But they also made me feel like I had no emotions at all and removed sexual desire and affected pleasure, so I stopped taking them and instead dealt with the causes of my depression. I still get bouts, but I have a mechanism in place to handle the symptoms and they mostly dissipate. That coupled with an ability to separate/compartmentalise personal and work life (as in, they just don't cross over in my mind), a lot of the stress I feel is only in the parts of my day when I am in the section of my life that I'm having issues with.

The human brain is wonderful.

So in short - I don't think I fully believe what they have found. I think the problem is that the extra Serotonin papers over the cracks well enough to work for most people. So, maybe my experience is just due to the fact it made me relax and that was the reason for my issues in the first place? Who know, I'm not a doctor. All I know is that more Serotonin felt better than less at the time.

<comment><USER3> > I still get bouts, but I have a mechanism in place to handle the symptoms > and they mostly dissipate.

Can you tell me about the mechanism that helps you?

<comment><USER4> Not OP, but the biggest thing my therapist recommended me was practicing mindfulness through meditation. The idea is that it makes it easier to fall back in that same mental state when suffering everyday anxiety.

Another thing she recommended which I just started doing was exercising regularly. I just started lifting a few weeks ago with a friend at the gym, and already its had a huge boost on my confidence levels.

Sorry if you've heard these before, but they do help a ton, trust me.

<comment><USER5> I started exercising and it gave me a huge confidence boost that further lead to being attracted by girls. After a year though I got used to lifting weights and I wasn't progressing as I wanted to be so that didn't help. But I am sure if you get shredded you will be cured.

<comment><USER6> Dude…getting shredded has always been the cure.

<comment><USER7> It's the natural cure

<comment><USER8> There are truly a lot of reasons why exercise contributes to good mental health. One of them is that it helps produce the correct balance of hormones in your system, which in turn also impact the correct balance of neurotransmitters. It's very easy, especially for us coders, to forget that we're sitting all day. Sitting all day is far from natural and has a tremendous amount of health impact. Exercise is extremely beneficial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In biology a single causation is almost always wrong, especially in correlation between such distant phenomena - neurotransmitter and conditioned behavior. Well, excess of serotonin could lead to "anxiety" and physical discomfort from a slightest external pressure, as it seems to be with Asperger's, but it is a mere correlation, if correct at all, not a causation. Socially conditioned behavior is way more subtle and complicated phenomena than mere neurochemistry.

<comment><USER10> Yes, the paper [1] is fairly careful to point out that this is studying a neurotransmitter pathway's association with social anxiety disorder, which _might_ be useful information in later establishing etiology, but doesn't do so on its own. Their causal hypothesis is actually (if I'm reading it correctly) the reverse of the direction people are assuming from the headline: [other physical features of] social anxiety disorder may cause excessive serotonin production, which may in turn produce additional symptoms, rather than excessive serotonin production being the root cause. That is, unusual upregulation of some pathways involving serotinin sits more towards the end of a causal chain than at its beginning. (Some of these causal chains are more like feedback loops, though, which makes it extra difficult to sort out what constitutes a root cause.)

From the paper:

> Although we cannot test causal effects in the present study, we speculate > that, because raphe nuclei serotonin 1A autoreceptors exert inhibitory > feedback on serotonin synthesis and firing, downregulation of inhibitory > raphe serotonin 1A autoreceptors previously reported in social anxiety and > panic disorder leads to increased serotonin synthesis, and augmented > reuptake may be a compensatory mechanism.

[1] [http://archpsyc.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=23197...](http://archpsyc.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2319711)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> >> Previous studies have led researchers to believe that individuals with social anxiety disorder or social phobia have too low levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin. A new study, however, shows that the situation is exactly the opposite.

It's stuff like this that is destroying the reputation of science in general. I know it's one thing to "lead to believe" and another to "show that", and perhaps that's what happened here. But every time the accepted explanation does a 180 science dies a little bit. I don't mean the big changes like relativity, but the blatant reversals. Fatty food is bad - no it's good. Carbs are great - no they're not. Drugs pulled from the market that had been "tested".

I think a lot of cases are not really reversals, but misunderstandings or incorrect interpretations of results that later get clarified. Not sure what the answer is.

<comment><USER12> It's a good thing that science can change. This is what distinguishes science from dogma.

The problem is not these supposed 'reversals', but rather how this information is being reported. Pop-science media reports modest studies as absolute truths to catch eyeballs. When one study merely suggests research in one direction, it's emblazoned as fact on the tabloids.

In the example you identified: "Fatty food is bad - no it's good" the issue is not the studies flip-flopping. Rather, it's a problem of regular people taking what are likely modest reports way too far and massively integrating them into their daily lives, without ever reading the study and understanding the context or scope of it. A study indicating that, say, there may be health problems associated with consuming excess saturated fat seems to compel people to follow no-fat diets. So I'd argue that the bigger problem is people reading oversimplified reports of scientific information

I mean, I'm not terribly familiar with this field, but the study itself indicates that whether high or low serotonin levels were contributory was "a matter of debate" and that "only a few studies have used molecular neuroimaging to examine serotonin dysfunction in SAD directly."[1] So this doesn't appear to be a reversal at all, but rather a study which helps clarify the role of serotonin in SAD.

[1] [http://archpsyc.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=23197...](http://archpsyc.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2319711#yoi150011r5)

<comment><USER13> > So I'd argue that the bigger problem is people reading oversimplified > reports of scientific information.

And what about the AHA[1] and other policy makers and shapers? What leads them to make recommendations based on weakly established conclusions?

I think the pressure to deliver, and the lack of generalist knowledge are somehow involved here. In the case of food and drugs, I would also blame elitism.

[1] [http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/GettingHealthy/NutritionCenter...](http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/GettingHealthy/NutritionCenter/HealthyEating/The- American-Heart-Associations-Diet-and-Lifestyle- Recommendations_UCM_305855_Article.jsp)

<comment><USER14> I know nothing of the AHA's methods or qualifications, but in my view bad policies purportedly based upon science usually come from lack of these, in addition to lack of scientific literacy. Alternatively, from a predefined goal, i.e. a political agenda.

I'm curious: in what way would you blame elitism in those cases?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I really think we're dealing with some very complicated biochemistry here. I have never seen a single psych drug, the PI sheet for which did not begin, "The exact mechanism of action is unknown" (or words to that effect). And that includes very old drugs like Lithium.

Obviously, these drugs can provide relief for people suffering from various kinds of mental disorders. Most of them target serotonin, norepinephrine, dopamine, and a laundry list of receptors. Yet it still amazes me that no one can seem to draw a clear line between these chemical interventions and relief from symptoms.

Given all that, every piece evidence becomes _potentially_ significant. But it also means a long, long slog through inferential statistics, patient self- reports, placebo effects, and targeted studies like this one that may fail to account for a thousand other factors.

I'm not a biochemist, but I think I would find this work both fascinating and very frustrating.

<comment><USER16> Note there are at least 14 known serotonin receptors:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-HT_receptor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-HT_receptor)

and this is responsible for the rich pharmacology of serotonin-affecting drugs such as the SSRIs, hallucinogens such as LSD, and MDMA which delivers an entirely different experience, atypical antipsychotics, antimigraine drugs, anti-emetic drugs such as Ondansetron, etc. It doesn't matter "how much" serotonin you have as where it is. Note that serotonogenic drugs have radically different modes of actions such as agonist, antagonist, partial agonist as well as the reuptake inhibitors, and that many serotonin receptors are actually autoreceptors on the other side of the junction which suppress the production of serotonin at the terminals.

Personally I think of the SSRI drugs as "antineurotics" and what they seem to do is help me keep compensated under stress. That is, rather than going to pieces, I stay rational under provocation. This might be why Scientology hates SSRIs so much, because it really does seem to make your "reactive mind" much weaker.

<comment><USER15> Right. I think that's why we get into the "let's try this" mode with doctors, which has been mentioned in this thread. That can be frustrating for patients, but "sertonergic drug" (or effect) is a hugely broad category, and we don't have any way to know in advance which part of what thing needs to be affected in what way -- or even if it's serotonin that's the problem!

I hear what you say about "reactive mind." I've never heard it put that way, but man does that capture depression/mania and a whole host of other brain cooties.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I find this hard to believe when considering raves and MDMA.

If anything people with too much serotonin and a social phobia probably do not have enough serotonin receptors, and the extra serotonin is the body compensating.

<comment><USER18> With most biological systems, it's a pretty safe bet that things are more complicated than that.

<comment><USER19> With the limited ways we're able to study brain disorders at the moment, it feels to me like we're trying to debug an user level application by looking at the signals that pass through the system bus.

<comment><USER20> I have often pondered the question of how much we'd know about biology today if biologists had the same tools we did. Can you imagine the progress we could make if we could freeze a cell, set watchpoints on any molecules we wanted, step forward and backward at any time increment we chose, run arbitrary queries, make arbitrary changes to the running cell in an arbitrary tree of possibilities, and do this on any cell we liked? A competent biochemist team could probably discover more in a week, and with greater confidence, then the they would in their entire lives the conventional way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> dont mess with hardware if you can fix it in software

that study is an example of a horribe broad brush approach that gets pursued because its a low hanging fruit. physcial quantities are easier to objectively measure and present and subsequently selling tanglible pills is more marketable and controllable

you can influence your neurotransmitters, endocrine system, and behaviour with thoughts and habits, for example: fantasize porn, your passion projects, see what people see when they see you, first person view in a roller coaster, check out youtube climbing scaling radio towers and skyscrapers, etc.. duh just about any engaging movie or book

manage your attention wisely

social phobia/anxiety arises from habitual limited perspective misinterpreting the environment. in some situations fear is appropriate healthy and helpful, the key solution is to notice the difference objectively

see yourself, your surroundings, other people, from an external reference/point of view, see through from outside the building, from the roof, maybe perched on top of a lamp post, birds eye view, whatever, use your illusion

</comment><comment><USER22> Being a person diagnosed with social phobia I thought that myself many years ago. All the SSRIs and SRNIs actually made whole thing worse.

<comment><USER23> honest question: is that phobia a real problem for you? or did somebody tell you it is?

<comment><USER22> Honest answer: Yes a serious problem. Two years ago I've had panic attack in the elevator and I was just technically unable to go into office where I worked (I've had a good job and I was content there). Doing ordinary things like groceries, etc. was terribly hard.

Went through brain CT, EMG and some other tests and after some months psychiatrist gave me F40.2 (social phobia) stamp.

Went through various medications that made things much worse (yeah, all these medications actually tried to retain serotonin in the brain). Rivotril and other drugs that actually "disable" the brain work, but they aren't the solution. Being extremely tired also works, but it is not very practical.

It's rather debilitating illness and my life went to hell.

<comment><USER23> thanks. crazy situation. don't get me wrong, i'm just naive, but would using headphones (listening to music), not looking at people and closing the eyes in the elevator work?

<comment><USER15> An actual panic attack is completely and totally devastating. The entire fight/flight system goes haywire, and people think they're about to die. It's even possible to start hallucinating. Lots of sufferers wind up in the ER absolutely convinced they're having a heart attack.

What's worse, this can lead to a whole range of phobias (I'm in the middle of this theater. What if I have an attack? Then you start having one. Now you're afraid of theaters and theater-like spaces).

It can take many, many years for people to learn how to "talk themselves down" out of this (or, more accurately, to endure the onset of one without letting it get full blown). It's not life threatening, but it's a very serious illness indeed.

<comment><USER22> Yes, the main deal is that the fight/flight system gets triggered too often, even in inappropriate situations. The result is devastating.

<comment><USER24> I feel for you so much. I've gone through this for the last 14 years. On and off. Mostly off since I've been on medication, but it's debilitating. When you don't go places or do things because you're afraid of simply being there for a panic attack. Always sitting on aisles (when you finally get to the point where you can go to a movie) so you have an easy escape.

And yeah, often you don't look at people, wear headphones or do other things like that. That's when you're doing "well" and not having panic attacks. When you've learned how to manage it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've spent lots of time studying neurotransmitters and their relationship with various mental illnesses and amino acids. It has been my understanding for a while now (from the book 'The Mood Cure' by Julia Ross) that too much of a neurotransmitter can have the same symptoms as too little. That book also seemed to indicate that dopamine and serotonin have an antagonistic relationship with each other, so too little (or too much?) serotonin can cause an excess of dopamine, which can lead to all kinds of anxiety, including potentially social phobia.

I've been considering buying books on endocrinology/neurobiology to further study these phenomena, if anyone with more knowledge/experience could enlighten me on this I'd really appreciate it.

<comment><USER26> One thing that has become increasingly clear is that the simplistic "too much x" or "too little y" theory of Mental illness as a "neurotransmitter imbalance" is flawed to the point of uselessness. Neurotransmitters certainly do mediate synapse growth and activity, but the brain is a complex adaptive organ, and it will adapt to modifications to neurotransmitter levels. This is why antidepressnts become less effective and require stronger doses, and why their sudden withdrawal leads to the massive exacerbation of symptoms. The problem isn't simply that patients "go off their meds". The problem is that meds stop working, and withdrawing them leaves the poor patient with a brain that was adapted to their presence suddenly unable to cope. The meds make the organic problem worse, but it dorsn't show until you withdraw them. We're still basically at the witch-doctor stage of "try it and see" with most if these drugs, with nothing like a proper pathology model or functional description of how the meds work to even do proper long-term studies.

<comment><USER26> Full disclosure: there is pretty good evidence that some of these drugs (like SNRIs) are effective for short-term mitigation of symptoms, although not a great deal above active placebo. Some other therapies are very promising, particularly Cognitive Therapy and a guided Mindfulness program (although study quality on the latter is suspect. DO NOT MODIFY YOUR MEDICATION WITHOUT THE ADVICE AND MONITORING OF A MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL FAMILIAR WITH YOUR CASE.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> That is not too surprising. On the one hand serotonine not only acts as a neurotransmitter, but has a mechanical function controlling blood-pressure and a multitude of other things as well. (See this comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9476594](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9476594))

Easier triggered bodily alertness in unpleasant situations probably creates a feedback-loop which shuts off rational thinking (frontal cortex) further -> anxiety.

On the other hand, I think a good metaphor for it's complex role as a neurotransmitter is "bandwidth". If your serotonine-levels are too low, some regions in your brain have trouble communicating with each other. Hence when your amygdala starts sending out signals of imminence, your rational prefrontal cortex might be able to think "No need to be afraid.", but it's not able to properly communicate that back. The other way around works too: the signals of imminence might not arrive clearly ("I didn't even realize I was afraid"), so you can't act properly.

If serotonine-levels are too high, this communication and loops might work TOO well. Imagine a "weak non-specific signal" from a confused (lack of a better word) amygdala that starts off a thought, which in turn throws the amygdala into a feedback-loop that you can't get out off. In that situation it would have been easier if the weak signal would have been dismissed in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER23> social phobia = psychiatric disorder, in case i can't speak in public? do i have to speak in public? i'd be very careful with that kind of judgement. in general, having experience with how "modern medicine" and society in general handle such proclaimed "problems", psychology is a great deal of bullshit.

i myself don't like masses of people. i embrace this preference. and i love it. most amassment of people aren't even useful.

to everybody who's eating chemicals because some say you don't fit in: STOP IT. tell _them_ to fit in. don't sell yourself and everybody like you to pharmaceuticals and others.

btw: did they actually disable copying of text (on iOS) on this site?

<comment><USER28> No, an important aspect of mental diagnosis is that the patient is actively troubled by the problem but is unable to change on his own; otherwise it is more of personality. If you just hate socializing, you don't have social phobia. If you sincerely believe that washing your hands every ten minutes make you cleaner and do so, you don't have OCD.

Psychologists are not as eager to judge as you might imagine.

<comment><USER29> I'll bet a lot of people take these drugs not because they have to but want to. They want to look the part for work, or talk to the hot chick in the bar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > Based on previous studies, it was believed that individuals with social > phobia had too little serotonin and that SSRIs increased the amount of > available serotonin. In a new study published in the scientific journal JAMA > Psychiatry, researchers from the Department of Psychology at Uppsala > University show that individuals with social phobia make too much serotonin.

Hold on a sec. What exactly did this study do differently? If the previous studies showed one thing, why should we suddenly believe this study that says it's all false?

</comment><comment><USER31> I don't usually have any problems with social events- I just don't sleep the night before, so I am exhausted on the day.

Does anybody have any tips/ suggestions how to deal with this?

<comment><USER32> Cognitive Behaviour Therapy - a short course of between 6 to 14 hours (one hour per week). Find a reputable therapist (in England you'd look for BACP).

Or meditation and mindfulness would probably help.

You may find sleep hygiene helps, but if you're not having trouble the rest of the time it might not.

[http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Insomnia/Pages/Treatment.aspx](http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Insomnia/Pages/Treatment.aspx)

For rare events, not trying to cure insomnia, consider zopiclone (or any of the Z drugs). You'd take one before the event; you'd get a good night sleep; you avoid the addiction problems that are risked if you take it every night.

(Obviously I'm not a doctor and this isn't medical advice).

<comment><USER33> I have had exactly the same issue, and have used a meditative technique that I learned in Nepal to help with sleeping:

Count from 27 to 1 with each inhalation. If you miss a number, ie between 15 and 14 you lost your focus and thought about something else, and missed the count, start over.

My experience is that generally I will fall asleep before I get to 1, and on extreme cases it will take going from 27 to 1 more than once, but it always ends with sleep.

The only difficulty I have now is being disciplined enough to not think "I got this" and try to sleep without the technique. Often what happens when I think that is I toss and turn for 3 hours before I just give in to the technique and finally fall asleep.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> That's very interesting, especially combined with data showing that SSRIs in fact decrease brain serotonin over the long term [1]. We truly do not understand the mechanism of action for these drugs.

[1] [https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mad-in- america/201011/n...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mad-in- america/201011/new-rat-study-ssris-markedly-deplete-brain-serotonin)

<comment><USER14> Isn't it more that we don't understand _why_ it works (i.e. what kind of connection serotonin has with these mental illnesses) rather than the mechanism of action itself, which is believed to be serotonin staying longer in the synaptic cleft by way of inhibiting reuptake, leading to repeated stimulation of the post-synaptic receptors?

I was under the impression that SSRI's were specifically designed to target the serotonin system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Is low serotonin the cause of social phobia? or is social phobia the cause of low serotonin?. The evident power of mind over body is an uncomfortable truth for a few industries.

So we need some sort of cause & effect algebra so that fallacious and faulty reasoning doesn't get smuggled in the name of science, otherwise science is just some form of social control exploiting the power - highjacked from religion - of an alleged ownership over the truth.

</comment><comment><USER36> Almost 10 years ago I read a study that attributed (not too much or too little serotonin), but sending the wrong serotonin allele types for various social situations. This correlated to genetic predispositions to both social anxiety and certain forms of autism. It seems odd these later studies seem to be focusing on a far more general use case of whether more or less serotonin in general is a cause.

</comment><comment><USER29> Everyone is different and there is no single elixir to solve all problems, but meditation helped me greatly.

</comment><comment><USER37> ssri's have done more harm than good for me. I simply feel numbed out...have little emotion and a poor memory. It basically kills the emotion -> memory feedback loop that you need to learn and grow. In my experience I felt more stuck on the drug than off them.

</comment><comment><USER38> They don't even know what serotonin does. Every antidepressants action mechanism is just a shot in the dark, trial and error and it's questionable whether any of them work at all. Yes Tom Cruise is right on this one.

</comment><comment><USER39> The paradox being that SSRIs have been shown to be beneficial for social phobia ...

<comment><USER40> What if those with social phobia are creating those serotonins to counter-act other social-phobia-causing stuff?

IMHO, this article really shouldn't say serotonin causes social phobia based on 'social-phobiacs have lots of serotonin'

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> excitement and anxiety are the same state just differing perception.

it is more about imagined outcomes

this is exciting and will work out well I feel safe

this is exciting and i may come to emotional or physical harm

the excitement is the same

so long as you don't fear fear itself, that is a feedback loop.

<comment><USER42> Definitely not, it's not the same mental state, one is pleasant the other one not.

<comment><USER41> There is no disagreement, that is what I said.

Mental state is perception, and this can change from one moment to the next but the excitement/ fear being a hormonal state takes time to subside.

<comment><USER43> You can use excitement as a broad category that includes good and bad, but there are definitely different hormonal mixes, some that are pleasant and some that are painful, and the difference is not perception.

<comment><USER41> I agree and I am certain that everyone's experiences vary.

For instance some people enjoy things they consider frightening - others hate it.

My suggestion is that there is not a direct causal link between a higher or lower level of seratonin and a mental state called anxiety.

The same bodily state can enjoin one to flight or fight. Attitude, history, personality, self-belief and training can alter ones attitude to the same hormonal situation.

Changing the way one thinks about things can be very effective. I do not mean to trivialise such a change, this can require professional help, such as congitive behavioral therapy.

I posit there is not a one-to-one correlation between seratonin level and a mental state ( fright or excite ) but that other factors confound it.

Perhaps this is why these studies have come to seemingly contradictory ideas about seratonin levels and mental states ?

Links between the chemistry of the brain and distinct mental states seems less well established than proponents of the 'chemical-imbalance' school of therapy maintain.

<comment><USER43> I understand you when you say there isn't a direct link between serotonin and anxiety.

I don't understand how that bears any relation to whether anxiety and positive-excitement are the same thing.

Also, when I'm excited in a happy way, I don't feel the compounding negative effects of stress hormones. You think that's all perception?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> This is a good study, but it's important to understand that the study results [1] don't really contradict much of our current understanding of serotonin- related antidepressant activity. If you read through the actual study, you'll see that the authors aren't disagreeing with SSRI activity but rather attempting to gather more insight into the accepted anxiolytic activity of SSRIs.

Neurotransmitter reductionism is one of the more difficult pop-neuropsychiatry concepts to shake, because it's so tempting to think of neurotransmitters like serotonin in the same way we've come to think of more basic biomarkers like cholesterol levels or other hormone levels. Neurotransmitter function is several orders of magnitude more complex, and can't simply be summarized as "too much" or "too little."

For example, neurotransmitter signaling is often divided in to two components: Tonic and phasic release. Tonic signaling is lower frequency (think closer to DC current for a very crude analogy), while phasic release is higher frequency (think more along the lines of AC current). The balance of tonic vs phasic signaling often has a massive influence on the actual outcome of the signaling. SSRIs are frequently (and wrongly) thought of as generically "increasing serotonin levels" when what they're really doing is altering serotonin dynamics in the synaptic cleft. Inhibiting the serotonin reuptake pump causes the serotonin to stick around longer in the synaptic cleft, which (again, roughly speaking) slows the serotonin dynamics down a bit and moves toward tonic, rather than phasic, signaling. It's not difficult to find studies showing relationships between serotonin tonic and phasic signaling, SSRIs, and stress adaptation differences. See [2] for the first example I found in a quick search.

Another very important component of serotonin signaling are 5-HT1A autoreceptors located on presynaptic terminals. These are part of the feedback loop regulating serotonin release. Briefly, 5-HT1A autoreceptors bind serotonin in the synaptic cleft and apply negative feedback to serotonin release. More serotonin in the synaptic cleft results in more 5-HT1A autoreceptor activation, which will in turn slow serotonin release. SSRIs will increase extracellular serotonin area under the curve, which will result in additional 5-HT1A activation and altered serotonin release dynamics. This system will ultimately re-regulate to some other set-point after several weeks, which is theorized to be part of the reason for the therapeutic lag in SSRI treatment, and also thought to explain why SSRIs often initially cause more anxiety by acutely increasing serotonin levels before the system re- regulates. 5-HT1A autoreceptor modulation is also the theorized mechanism of action of anti-anxiety medications like Buspirone, and 5-HT1A modulation is a property of two of the most recent anti-depressant medications Vortioxetine and Vilazadone.

This is another good study to have, but it's important to not be too quick to think that this contradicts our current understandings.

[1] [http://archpsyc.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=23197...](http://archpsyc.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2319711)

[2] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22791197](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22791197)

</comment><comment> anti-shill and once again medical science thinks it knows all, and the healthcare industry will of course prescribe powerful medications for a price that will undoubtedly cure us of our ills.

Fool me once...

</comment><comment><USER45> Taking half a litre blood from somebody suffering hypertension obviously solves that problem ...

... so great - now we have the solution to social phobia!

</irony></comment>


Personal Data About Small-Donor Democrats Is All over the Internet - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/18/opinion/democrats-donor-data.html <comment><USER2> Good thing for them that no one loses his job for supporting Democrat-approved causes.</comment>


Ask HN: How important is it for a project to be a legal entity, early on? - <AUTHOR>

I've been working on a potential startup idea in my spare time, and I think I'll eventually want to run with it.
The thing is, I don't know yet how "big" it's going to be. It may end up only being a hobby site I keep up for a few months, I may monetize it and keep it as a secondary income stream, or it may go viral and I might want to look for an exit.
Do I need to set up a legal company before I launch the site and/or start taking people's money? Or is it ok to launch, use Paypal while my volume is low, and only worry about setting up a company and a real payment service when and if the concept proves sound? <comment><USER2> It depends on the level of risk you want to take on. A lawyer will tell you to incorporate ASAP. Personally, I feel comfortable going without incorporating right up until I start taking people's money. Just my own comfort level though. It's not particularly hard to incorporate, so there's no real reason not to do it sooner rather than later. It's nice to do it before you take any money because then you can open a checking account in the company's name and your finances will all be in order from day one. That's probably the biggest reason to incorporate early. The chances of being sued when you only have 10 visitors/day is extremely close to zero. IANAL though...

</comment><comment><USER3> usual disclaimer of speak to a lawyer, and also, this depends on your jurisdiction: generally the most important things are:

\- make sure anything you create is clearly yours (i.e. not owned by your employer if you have one, not worked on during work time or on work equipment etc)

\- if you have anyone else creating intellectual property, make sure you have legal documentation of ownership of it.

in many cases, if you have these areas taken care of, you can create a corporation later if/when appropriate. (i'm assuming by take people's money you mean customers rather than investors)

hope this helps,

</comment><comment><USER4> I am not affiliated with this website at all but recently got very helpful answers on a very similar topic from several lawyers.

www.lawpivot.com

<comment><USER2> Wow, that looks interesting. I haven't seen that before. Thanks for the link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've try a bunch of little micro business experiments like making iphone apps etc. I wouldn't bother with any legal framework until the $$ starts rolling in. Keep it real.</comment>


Cargo's next few years - <AUTHOR> https://www.ncameron.org/blog/cargos-next-few-years/ <comment><USER2> Very happy to see mainstream support for cross-compile at the top of the list.

<comment><USER3> I've been diving headfirst into C for a project at work with no previous experience, while being quite comfortable in Rust. I couldn't agree more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cargo is great and keeps getting better. However, in the embedded space I find the whole area of "features" very confusing. Just the fact that doing a web search for "rust features" will not usually get you what you want because we use the word "features" for everything! But in the embedded rust world, having a good understanding about how features affect the build is critical to successfully building something with no standard library. Thankfully the rust community really shines here and you find stack overflow questions answered at record speeds!

</comment><comment><USER5> There's a lot of hype around rust which may or may not pan out, but cargo should really be the gold standard for package management/build systems going forward, it's incredibly well designed. Everything is painless and integrated: builds, tests, benchmarks, publishing, installing dependencies, downloading cli binaries.

When you eventually have to go back to all the other hacked together Frankenstein alternatives out there it's a painful, frustrating experience.

</comment><comment><USER6> Discussion here:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/amat47/cargos_next_fe...](https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/amat47/cargos_next_few_years/)

[https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/cargos-next-few- years/9321...](https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/cargos-next-few-years/9321/6)

</comment><comment><USER7> I assume the title is meant to be "Cargo's next few years"?

<comment><USER8> Thanks, we've removed the leading "(Rust) ".

<comment><USER9> What about the "next" instead of "new"?

<comment><USER8> Good heavens! Yes, thanks. Lexer error on my part.

<comment><USER7> Ha! I should've been more explicit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > it lowers barriers to contribution

Arguably this is a bad thing. Lowering the bar is not necessarily a good thing. How could it be?

EDIT: Please if you down-vote, could you also provide a reason as to why lowering barriers to contribution is inherently a good thing, and why even considering the idea that it may not be, is something utterly horrible that requires a down-vote? Sure, you don't have to, just trying...

<comment><USER11> Dealing with unnecessary build and packaging complications, often dictated by legacy constraints, is a distraction for a systems programmer and does nothing for the quality of the software itself.

<comment><USER10> OK, but that means that people who are more motivated and knowledgeable (depends) will be the ones contributing, or will make up the majority of contributors. Does it not? I can see how it could be beneficial to a project.

<comment><USER11> But they will be knowledgeable in something that is only tangentially related to systems programming.

You are potentially missing out on a lot of talented systems programmers who are not willing or able to put up with terrible build and packaging infra and therefore stick to another domain.

As for motivation, you are also missing out on anyone who has a small contribution to make but isn't willing to dedicate hours trawling through Makefiles. That doesn't seem good either?

<comment><USER10> I didn't say it was without downsides, I realized that there's a huge potential of losing lots of talented people who merely just don't have the patience to [...].

I don't have anything valuable to add, hopefully someone else might.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How SimpleGeo Built a Scalable Geospatial Database with Apache Cassandra - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J61pPG9j90&hd=1

<comment><USER2> This blows my mind in d dimensions.</comment>


Making It Easier to Upgrade to Windows 10 - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2015/10/29/making-it-easier-to-upgrade-to-windows-10/ <comment><USER2> I'm annoyed that I had to spend quite some time tracking down and removing gwx.exe as well as reconfiguring the registry and Windows Update of our Windows 7 PCs so we wouldn't be surprised by Windows 10 or multiple 3 GB dents in our capped broadband.

I downloaded the Windows 10 ISO from Microsoft and tried it in a virtual machine. Meh. It's not so bad that I would rip it out of a new computer but it's not so good that I feel any urge at all to upgrade.

</comment><comment><USER3> Now setting Windows Update to "Check for updates but let me choose whether to download and install them" on all my systems.

I strongly resent having this jammed down my throat. It took quite a bit of effort already to stop the background download of 3GB of W10. I simply can't believe that the user pressure on them to do this is very high or even exists at all.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think their "aren't we great for doing you this favor?" attitude about the 31 day downgrade is really weird. Last I checked, disks don't have an expiration date that is shorter than milk, and most people appear to have more space than they know what to do with. Why, then, is there _any_ period after which an archived OS should be forcibly removed? It should stay there as long as you want it to.

The older OS is paid for. It represents a big investment. And, there is no way that every possible problem will be magically found and resolved within 31 days. What if it takes you 2 months to boot up a game that is apparently broken on Windows 10, for example.</comment>


Anonymous Hackers Track Saboteur, Find and Punish the Wrong Guy - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/01/anonymous-hac-1.html

<comment><USER2> Scientology hackers? What the heck is a Scientology hack?</comment>


United States Manufacturing Sector Will Be More Competitive Than China by 2020 - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2016/03/31/united-states-manufacturing-china/ <comment><USER2> Most interesting statement: China has lost more manufacturing jobs than the US in the last 20 years.</comment>


Ask HN: Responsive design for TVs? - <AUTHOR>

I have a regular desktop computer attached to the flat screen TV in my living room. I have made some adjustments (mostly larger font sizes) to make the experience better but I have concluded that until some larger "revolution" takes place, it is going to be a sub-optimum experience.
There are some design standard type documents out there like https://developers.google.com/tv/web/docs/design_for_tv. Following these standards, I could certainly optimize my site for TV viewing but the question is how to "turn it on?" Responsive design "responds" to browser or OS type (in addition to screen size) but in my specific case, I am using a  desktop browser on a 1080p TV. I don't see anything obvious to respond to.
How might you see this "problem" being solved? Could browsers start to support "TV mode" as a setting? That would be a nice option, I could just set once on this computer and never consider it again. Other devices like Apple TV could also have this setting in place and developers could just look for this and respond accordingly. But even if that happened, I'm sure it wouldn't be for a long time.
What could we do now? Any UX/UI people have ideas? Some sort of button on my site that says "TV Mode"?
This is something I think about quite often and I thought I'd ask you fine folks what you thought.
Thanks. <comment><USER2> PPK wrote about this awhile back in the context of Smart TVs as well:

[http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/tv/index.html](http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/tv/index.html)

The big thing missing is a way to query expected viewing distance so you could distinguish between a 1080 laptop screen 14 inches from the user and a TV 10 feet away.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that seems to be one of the open questions currently. I also wonder how you deal with the fact that there are so many sizes and distances that TV's are viewed from? That actually might not be very different than mobile or any other situation. There are lots of phone screen sizes and desktop monitor sizes and resolutions. I guess if you are comfortable watching TV then you are most likely at a similar size/distance ratio to most people who are comfortable.</comment></comment>


Valve confirm Half-Life: Alyx, a VR game being revealed on Thursday - <AUTHOR> https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/11/19/valve-confirm-half-life-alyx-a-vr-game-being-revealed-on-thursday/ <comment><USER2> A thought: the Half-Life games have always essentially been explorations of the possibilities behind new technologies.

• HL1 was an exploration of the possibility-space of having objects interact through emitted "energy" (i.e. by broadcasting messages that get attenuated by distance.)

• HL2 was an exploration of the possibility-space of putting a dynamics simulation engine in a game (and also spawned Gary's Mod to continue said exploration.)

• The major offshoots of the series, Portal and its sequel, were explorations of the possibility-space created by combining "beams" of matter or energy (lasers, hitscan gunfire, tractor beams, paint), gravity, and wormholes.

In other words, each major new entry in the Half-Life universe was essentially a narrative wrapped around the results of playing around with implementing some journal paper (or reimplementing some prototype) of a novel type of realtime physical simulation, that had obvious game-mechanical implications.

I'm not surprised that we never got an HL3, because for the past 10-odd years, there hasn't really been a big new obvious realtime physical-simulation tech to turn into game mechanics.

I'm also not surprised that Valve would return to making games under the Half- Life brand in order to explore the implications of a new technology (even if it's not a new _realtime physical-simulation_ technology. Or maybe they've got one of those up their sleeves as well...)

<comment><USER3> In the cases of Brave and Moana at Pixar and Disney Animation respectively, the story definitely came before the tech was developed. I was an intern at Pixar during the production of Brave, and I worked on Moana, and I can say that in both cases, there was a mad scramble to develop the tech to catch up with the story. We didn't really have the water on Moana working completely correctly until like 6 months before the movie came out.

<comment><USER4> That's so interesting! I think the fact that they nail the tech so well makes it intuitively surprising that it didn't come first. Not pixar but similarly, when I saw the siggraph talk where Disney Animation showed off how they do snow rendering in Frozen I wondered whether the tech came first

<comment><USER3> That's also a case where the tech came a while after the story. Our early snow tests on Frozen looked pretty terrible until the MPM simulator [1] came online later.

[1] [https://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/innovations/matte...](https://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/innovations/matterhorn)

<comment><USER5> Did the MPM simulator get used in practice for Frozen? I talked to a few sim TDs (or whatever the equivalent Disney title is) and they said it was too slow at the start for practical use!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's been over 12 years since the last entry in this franchise. Outside the memes, I wonder if the name has enough weight to be a system-seller for Valve Index the way Half-Life 2 brought Steam into the mainstream (as much as people disliked it at the time, you can't argue they were unsuccessful).

<comment><USER7> Convincing people to install software that doesn't cost any money is quite a bit easier than convincing them to invest in an expensive piece of hardware and the even more expensive computer needed to work with it. Not to mention overcoming all the other issues people have with current VR tech, like the space requirements.

<comment><USER8> But that's precisely why their first big AAA VR Experience is based on Half Life. It's probably one of the few franchises that (could) force people to jump into buying a VR rig. Yes, it's not exactly cheap, and it has some requirements like space, but being able to experience a new Half Life game after 12 years, is quite exactly the thing that will get people seriously interested.

(This is all coming from someone who's probably going to jump back into PC/VR gaming for this experience, depending on the reveal and pre-release coverage...)

<comment><USER9> The space thing is what kills it for me. Even if the VR and computer were free, I just don't have the space to use it. I'm not going to rearrange furniture or lock my dogs outside just to play a video game.

<comment><USER8> Given the previous history of the Half Life franchise, we're most likely in for a FPS Shooter with lots of environmental physics manipulation through a new VR control scheme, utilizing the Valve Index (and other VR controllers).

Given what other people in this thread have mentioned, you will not be moving within a virtual space via VR inputs with full body mapping to in-game movement, as that's a recipe for getting sick.

Given my experience with VR and playing games that required a fair amount of movement, Superhot VR and BeatSaber, the space needed was just enough to stand up, and move my arms around. I am really unsure of why this space requirement issue keeps popping up. Unless you're doing full room mapping, which I highly doubt this game will utilize, I cannot imagine that most people with an entertainment center or with a desk dedicated to their PC, don't have enough room to stand up and move their arms around...

<comment><USER9> The space requirement issue keeps coming up because not everyone lives in the same sized house. Just because you have ample space to stand in your room waving your arms around with a headset on doesn't mean everyone else does.

<comment><USER10> I'm having a hard time imagining a living situation where you don't have enough space to stand up and move your arms. Could you describe one? At worst it could only be a tiny number of people, maybe people living in their cars, and definitely not the target audience of electronic entertainment.

<comment><USER11> Standing up and moving your arms has much lower space requirements than standing up and moving your arms while blindfolded and under a barrage of industry-leading illusions engineered for maximum distraction.

<comment><USER12> There's boundaries that the VR will put a red wall on screen if you approach. Setting them up is part of the installation of VR. I helped a friend setup Rift Oculus a while ago in a very small living room. Like bedroom sized living room. I've also played VR while sitting on a couch. Room is not an issue unless you play in a closet.

<comment> squeaky-clean In a typical users playspace you're always near enough to the boundaries that they're visible. And speaking from experience, you do not want your VR setup within several feet of anything nice, like your television or hanging wall art, even if they're outside the boundary. As a good game of Gorn is guaranteed to make you run past that boundary and punch a nearby object.

Yes you can play some VR on a couch, but not Superhot, not Gorn, not Space Pirate Trainer. Very likely not Half Life Alyx.

I've used my VR setup from within cramped confines, but it's not something a non-enthusiast will do.

Edit: Also were forgetting a very important point mentioned above

"I'm not going to [...] lock my dogs outside just to play a video game."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not calling it Half Life: 3 seems like a great way to temper expectations a bit. Curious how much focus is put on the knuckles/Index versus generic headsets.

<comment><USER14> I hope it remains generically SteamVR compatible and doesn't require Index or shut out the Rift or original Vive.

<comment><USER15> I think that would be missing the point. With Half-Life 2, you could buy the game as a disc but it still required Steam to play. They leveraged their legendary IP to bring users into a system that is way more profitable for them than selling copies of any particular game, even a Half-Life game. They've been sitting on that IP for a while now, not tarnishing their repuation from the release of a title that could potentially not live up to expectations. Now they're launching a new platform, and they're leveraging the IP to get people to buy into the platform. If they can own the best VR platform and get enough people to buy in on it, the game sales that come after that will overshadow whatever return they make on a new Half-Life game. Supporting other platforms would hurt them, if I'm correct about their intentions. Years ago a friend suggested to me that Valve might do a combined HL3/in-house-VR launch, and I've been expecting it ever since; it makes too much sense as a business strategy, and fits in with their prior method of operations.

<comment><USER14> It just hasn't been their strategy so far. That's Facebook's strategy. Valve has wanted to be the "good guys", if your device supports Steam VR you can play.

<comment><USER15> Platform lock-in to encourage adoptance was a strategy they used in HL2's release, as I noted above.

<comment> squeaky-clean Yes but that was 15 years ago, and they are referring to Valve's VR strategy. Valve has made an effort to have SDKs available to anyone and have developed a generic VR input system that allows you to play any SteamVR game with any brand of device, Oculus, Microsoft, Valve, whatever. They've also stated in response to the Oculus store offering hardware exclusive titles that they would never create or publish a VR game specific to one platform.

Going back on those claims would ruin so much goodwill towards Valve among the VR community.

<comment><USER15> > They've also stated in response to the Oculus store offering hardware > exclusive titles that they would never create or publish a VR game specific > to one platform.

Sauce? I tried googling, didn't find anything immediately relevant. I'd be curious as to their exact wording of that claim.

<comment><USER16> Valves games are tied to OpenVR (which they created), an/the only implementation of which is SteamVR. They are trying to do what Google did with Android - create an open platform/ecosystem which OEMs jump into in order to push consumer adoption.

<comment><USER15> Seems I was wrong: [https://half-life.com/en/alyx](https://half- life.com/en/alyx)

> Play on any SteamVR system

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> According to [https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey](https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey), just over 1% of Steam users have VR headsets, and that is trending downward.

Anecdotally it feels like VR never really took off? From casual perusals of the steam store at [https://store.steampowered.com/vr/](https://store.steampowered.com/vr/), there are very few VR games and the ones that do exist are fairly mediocre looking - things you've never heard of from indie developers self-publishing to steam.

Seems like an odd move from Valve - I don't suspect that this on its own will be enough of a draw to lure people to purchase a VR headset for. Especially since this started out as an "exploration of VR" ... I am left wondering if this is basically going to end up being some glorified DLC or mod that adds a couple of levels with a few neat little VR-specific touches/gimmicks rather than a full-blown installment in the HL franchise?

They may well prove me wrong and trigger a renaissance in the VR gaming industry and wow us with a huge and well-executed sequel to HL2 that will lure people in, but I remain skeptical for now.

<comment><USER16> "Seems like an odd move from Valve"

This is exactly the move many of us in the VR community have been expecting. It may seem like a tiny percentage (because it is) but the VR numbers themselves have been growing massively since launch of Vive/Rift.

The community is alive and vibrant, not what you'd expect of dead technology.

<comment><USER18> You don't provide any data for your claims. He's saying less than 1% of Steam users have a headset and declining, and you're claiming that it's growing and vibrant.

There may be some awesome VR experiences out there and a handful of people that enjoy them, but sales numbers don't lie - VR is not currently succeeding. If you compare VR sales to Kinect sales, it makes the Kinect look like a roaring success - and Microsoft abandoned it due to lack of consumer interest.

I can find dedicated communities to restoring antiquated decades old computers - a niche does not make a growing vibrant market. Anecdotally (and I welcome people to provide real data instead) everybody I know that used to work on VR for a living has moved on with their careers, including several engineers who got acquired by Facebook.

<comment><USER16> 1% of Steam users is still a lot of users. Considering that Steam itself is still seeing massive growth, VR hovering at 1% is evidence of said growth.

There's many sites which report the proper number of headsets and their absolute growth. Headsets are still doubling every year, even if it's a small number.

People also tended to hate the Kinect, which only made sales due to marketing bundles. I've never met a single person who's tried VR that doesn't like the tech bar it's rough edges (display quality, PC requirements and long term comfort) but these problems can be solved.

<comment><USER18> > I've never met a single person who's tried VR that doesn't like the tech bar > it's rough edges

The fact that you've never met someone that tried VR that didn't like the tech shows your overwhelming bias. Most people I've met didn't enjoy it - many were literally too nauseous to use it. It's extremely well studied that a lot of people get sick from VR and yet you are claiming everyone that tried it loves it. One of my friends at Facebook left because he didn't think they'd ever get it so VR wasn't nauseous for too many people. Even Palmer Luckey, the poster boy for VR, moved on years ago (not to mention Iribe and Mitchell).

<comment><USER16> Was this mobile VR? Because that is horrible and nauseating and likely won't ever be a thing in the next decade.

As long as you're using solid VR game design principles, the biggest being: don't move the player using artificial locomotion, people do not feel sick. The hardware is ready in that regard - motion sickness is a solved problem.

Many games ignore that and have you moving with a joystick - you can get used to it, but it should always be optional imo.

My bias is simply from people I've showed my own hardware to, family and friends, not tech people who have a vested interest. The excitement is there, just not as a mass-market consumer product yet.

I admit the hardware is immature in every other respect: comfort, weight, audio, cables and display quality.

<comment><USER18> > Was this mobile VR? Because that is horrible and nauseating and likely won't > ever be a thing in the next decade.

It wasn't mobile VR - it was a dedicated space with external sensors and (usually) a complete Oculus headset.

Your experience differs from mine. As someone who used to love VR and considered moving across the country at one point to work on it, I've since fallen out of love. Ultimately I look at sales as my grounding data, and I don't think VR is going to take off for years.

Of course as I type this, Valve is announcing Half Life for VR - which is huge news. So maybe I'm wrong?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Supposedly it's being designed around Valve's index controller, letting you grip and manipulate objects in the game. Ars describes a set of Magnet Gloves which can pull stuff toward you from across the room and adjust/use it.

I've enjoyed quite a few VR games over the last few years, but part of why I'm excited about this one is that they are able to design the hardware and the software in conjunction.

Hopefully this will lead to something which can really take advantage of that co-development, like we sometimes see when Nintendo or Apple are able to do both.

</comment><comment><USER20> Daily Half-Life 3 Update: Day 742 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJijEFKpKik](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJijEFKpKik)

<comment><USER21> wtf is this channel? did he really make a video every day about half life 3?

<comment><USER22> It's pretty self explanatory. In fact you answered your own question.

<comment><USER23> They just narrated the response I think we all had.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Despite once being my favorite game series and developer and I stopped caring about Half-Life and Valve sometime around when they made it obvious they only care about milking their vapid Dota franchise and they have no interest in developing any of their core IPs. I can't force myself get excited about this even if someone paid me to. The ship has sailed a long time ago.

<comment><USER25> the real tragedy is we could have had like 10 portal sequels by now

<comment><USER26> However, we'd be moaning about them rehashing the same IP over and over if they had done that.

<comment><USER23> You would?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It has to be the 10/10 best game ever to justfiy buying a dedicated hardware piece for at least ~$400 or so depending on the model

I'm from Europe and it's especially bad in that sense cause for example HP and Lenovo has a generic budget headset with controllers for $150 but that's US only. You won't find anything that close in price here

<comment><USER28> This is actually a really hard part for me. I immediately began looking at VR hardware I could buy and I wasn't sure what to look at. Can I use non-Valve hardware? I assume with the headset, but I don't know about the controllers. What about the sensors that Valve sells? Do I need them?

The controllers worry me the most since I don't know if they're required or if they need certain buttons I can map things to.

So yeah, right there with you. I hope it's worth trying to buy it all, but it's a big hurdle in a lot of ways so the game has to be amazing.

Lastly, since my life has changed a lot in the last twelve years, I no longer even have a real gaming PC (I assume I'm not the only one who lost that as they aged). So that's one more cost I have to factor unless maybe they release it on PS and I can buy that and it's VR rigging.

<comment><USER29> If the game is SteamVR-compatible, most VR headsets will work but generally the most common options are some variation of Vive/Rift/Index.

That said, we don't actually know the requirements yet - as far as we know it'll require full finger tracking or be straight up Index-only (as unlikely as I personally think that is, it's still possible). Definitely don't pull the trigger on anything until the full announcement on Thursday.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I've been wondering lately whether Steam will be able to hold onto its large commission and market share, given the rise of competition like the Epic Games Store with a much more competitive commission rate. I can imagine these stores will have to increasingly differentiate themselves as technology platforms going forward (e.g. VR on Steam, or Unreal Engine licensing on EGS). In this way VR exclusive games make a lot of sense for Valve, to encourage people to buy into their platform.

<comment><USER7> Ultimately it matters a lot less what developers prefer, it matters where the audience is. Right now Epic is handling that by simply giving developers a guaranteed amount of money so they don't have to worry about actually selling any copies. That strategy will probably not hold out for very long though.

<comment><USER30> > it matters where the audience is.

I don't think that strictly applies here; the stores don't play a predominant role in marketing the games (at least for popular titles), so they don't have exclusivity over an audience.

I think the relevant question is the extent customers decide not to purchase a game because it's exclusive to an alternative store.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The episode 3 plot summary by former Valve writer Marc Laidlaw that this article links to is a great read for those that want to see where the story was headed.

[http://www.marclaidlaw.com/epistle-3/](http://www.marclaidlaw.com/epistle-3/)

</comment><comment><USER32> Back when I used to work as a VR developer "Half Life 2 quality cinematics and plot but in VR" was my go to example of how powerful of an experience VR could be if done right. I really hope they don't botch this. If they do this right you'll feel like you were there.

Due to some of the technical limitations with people (motion sickness does not make a popular game) I don't think this is not going to be an open spaces and free-movement heavy game like HL2. Not having some really good expansive panorama scenes would be a disservice to the VR tech but don't expect to be able to drive a go-kart around in them. I'm expecting a lot of semi stationary scenes where the player is free around a small space as the environment smoothly and steadily around them (like all the various freight elevator and rail car scenes in HL1). I expect that in typical Half-Life fashion there will be lots of object manipulation and head crab batting practice while the player remains nearly stationary.

<comment><USER33> Yep, I've been itching for a good example of this kind of long form immersive VR game.

Budget Cuts and Apex Construct give a taste of it, but I find myself really wanting to just be able to play some version of Portal 2 that was somehow suited for VR and wouldn't make you instantly throw up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> When I saw the news yesterday I thought I was dreaming. Never expected to see this, despite the many rumors of a HLVR.

I'm excited to see what the release brings, but I'm expecting revolutionary VR mechanics. I hope it'll be as big of a leap forward as Half Life 1 and Half Life 2 were.

</comment><comment><USER35> It will sell like hot cakes for the first week then plummet. Then a non VR version will be made.

<comment><USER36> > Then a non VR version will be made.

That's what I'm hoping for.

<comment><USER37> All great VR games are made specifically for VR from the beginning. Taking a flat game and do a VR version of it is almost never good (I cant think of a single example where they have pulled that off, outside of simulators perhaps).

The reverse is also true.

<comment><USER36> I've never played a VR game that I would call great. There are many that make for a great demo of the technology, but ultimatealy having to wear something on my face is kind of a deal breaker.

<comment><USER37> Lone Echo is a great VR game. Makes having something on your face 100% worth it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> When are they going to replace SteamVR with OpenXR runtime? Valve are one of the major backers of OpenXR, yet their SteamVR still uses their pre OpenXR, so called "OpenVR" API.

</comment><comment><USER39> More like Half-Life 1/3 confirmed.

</comment><comment><USER40> Yes, I knew I died this morning!

</comment><comment><USER41> Announcement of an announcement

<comment><USER42> The news of the announcement leaked, so Valve make an official announcement announcement to take control of the message, and prove it was real.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I guess this is slightly better than it being a mobile app...

</comment><comment><USER44> This week it occurred to me that what is going on in Hongkong is the same as the story of Half-Life 2.

This was what I always liked about HL2. It is a game but also a kind of protest against oppression.

</comment><comment><USER45> Announcing a new Half Life game the same week as Stadia's launch. Huge move.

</comment><comment><USER46> I remember half-life 2 being delayed like for 5 years. Maybe even longer.

</comment><comment><USER47> Now _this_ is going to sell some headsets.

<comment><USER48> Initially, at least.

Valve isn't the same company they were back when they developed things like HL2. They've basically been sitting back and sucking up money for a long time. They're good at that, but there's no indication they're good at anything else at this point.

I'll go out on a limb and say this game is going to suck, and after the initial hype people are going to hate that Valve did this.

<comment><USER49> > but there's no indication they're good at anything else at this point

You mean apart from creating and still consistently updating CS:GO and DotA 2, which are both some of the most played games in the world?

Their "The Lab" VR demo, which is a collection of mini games, is also one of the most enjoyable VR experiences, so I'm very optimistic they can make something great again if they put their mind to it.

<comment><USER48> >CS:GO and DotA 2, which are both some of the most played games in the world?

Yes, I mean exactly those games, which are neither new nor ground breaking, and which were originally authored by outside firms/contractors, not valve. Since then, most of Valve's additions to the games are in the form of monetization.

If you didn't notice the news articles, they even laid off almost all the people responsible for HL2 and its episodes, including the writer.

<comment><USER50> It's a stretch to say DOTA 2 or CS:GO were initially made by outside firms. Sure they're based on community mods, but so is PUBG, TF2, all the autochess games. Outside of Half-Life and L4D (which was originally a Turtlerock game) all of Valve's games are polished commercial versions of mods or student games (Portal series), but with the exception of Counterstrike all of the originals were good ideas with fatal execution flaws.

Valve has also released DOTA Underlords and Artifact in the two years. With HLA and Underlords Valve is actually releasing two games this year.

<comment><USER29> CS:GO was literally made by an outside dev (Hidden Path). It's definitely unfair to say Valve's only additions have been monetization though, it seems Valve took over development pretty soon after the initial release and there have been a lot of major updates since then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> But it's not HL3 is it?

<comment><USER52> It's HL√3 (i.e. between 1 and 2 in terms of the story, as I understand it)

<comment><USER15> That's a much better title.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> We're living half life 3

</comment><comment><USER54> I am not gonna buy a VR setup....

What work is has been done for taking VR only games and using not VR controls/interfaces? Even if it's not optimal.

<comment><USER55> It's not just "not optimal", it's a completely different thing. It's like reading a book and reading the script of the movie of the same story: you can certainly reuse some of the material but the way you convey things is designed from the ground up for the medium you are using. In VR-native content many things are just behaving in intuitive ways that can't be replicated if you need to go through a screen and keyboard/mouse.

<comment><USER54> I dont mind that.</comment></comment></comment>


Bike Over Traffic: World's Longest Elevated Cycling Path Opens in China - <AUTHOR> http://weburbanist.com/2017/02/11/bike-over-traffic-worlds-longest-elevated-cycling-path-opens-in-china/ <comment><USER2> Biking? +100

Breathing that air? -1000

No thanks.

<comment><USER3> 1) I don't know if Xiamen has the same pollution problem as other cities in China.

2) More biking = less cars + exhaust on the roads.

3) Maybe the city is more progressive than others in reducing air pollution (this bike path is one example) so there is less problem with air pollution.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Looking for an interesting project(s) to eat up some spare time - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for interesting ideas/problems that I could spend my spare time programming solutions for. Having been severely burnt out from a couple of start-up ventures that ate up 5 years of my time, I'm really just looking for something I can enjoy coding in the background of my life at a leisurely pace.
The ideal project would see me spending more time programming on the back-end rather than wasting a day fiddling with CSS, and having to spend lots time considering complex issues rather than doing lots of 'grunt work' coding, and ideally have no time pressures, as it's something I'd do for enjoyment, rather than trying to seek a monetary gain at the end.
Any ideas people care to share? Some interesting things I've thought of are:
   - A TCP/IP scripting language: Basically an interpreter that enabled a user to work at the packet level quickly and easily using simple logical statements depending on what the receiver sends back.

   - Apache syslog: An Apache module that sends access logs over syslog (I know there are ways to do this already, but you need to use a pipe to logger and that just seems like crud to me).

   - Binary watermarker: Something that watermarks executables that makes discovery and tampering extremely difficult (may not be possible, but worth a shot)

   - Subversion plug-in to automatically perform static code analysis (may exist, haven't looked very hard).

   - Web-based tool for getting yourself or your website/network vulnerability scanned over the Internet.
 <comment><USER2> Totally off-topic, but re your binary watermarker I'm looking for a data watermarker. E.g I have an ascii data set (.csv) with say millions of rows and 10 columns. I want to either a) insert occasional "easter egg" records or b) adjust a handful of existing records such that the data is still good, but invisibly, yet provably, marked in some way.

</comment><comment><USER3> -TCP/IP scripting language - Both ruby and python support working with low-level socket objects, so that's probably a good place to start. If you're looking for something lower-level, scapy ( <http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/> \- python) might be a worth a look.

-Binary watermarker - You might look into SELinux to see if it will do what you want.

-Subversion plug-in - A pre-commit hook that runs pylint/reek against your code and spits back FAILED is pretty cool.

-Website scanner - There's a list of a few existing scanners on google's webmaster forum ([http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=...](http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=728027f66f941c6d&hl=en) ). And there is also an obvious route to monetization.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Web-based tool for getting yourself or your website/network vulnerability scanned over the Internet."

For malware/website qualys does it for free: <http://www.qualys.com/products/qg_suite/malware_detection/>

For network in general hard to compete with QualysGuard but I guess you could use nessus/OpenVAS

</comment><comment><USER5> What's your passion? Are you a fan of cryptography, fishing or religious fanatic? If you're looking for an interesting problem to attempt to fix in your spare time, make it something you care about! There's unlimited problems in the world and countless solutions.

(I'll be the "fiddly CSS guy" if you end up doing something fun that could use a little UI design).

</comment><comment><USER6> I wrote about a few ideas on my blog - <http://www.nilkanth.com/2010/05/21/6-ideas-off-my-chest/>

Have a read and see if something interests you.</comment>


Can science writing be automated? - <AUTHOR> http://news.mit.edu/2019/can-science-writing-be-automated-ai-0418 <comment><USER2> Reminds me of this earlier work from students also at MIT, called SCIGen [1]. You can type in author names and it'll generate some seemingly coherent text for you as a "research paper". They even submitted it to a conference.

[1] [https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/](https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Can deep learning paper writing be automated? :P

These neural network hype articles are barely one step down from Buzzfeed listicles in what they project versus what they claim versus what they have actually done. Scan from a list of really ambitious goals, scan among list of available datasets (God forbid, no scientist should have to actually collect and clean new data pertaining to the problem!), throw a bunch of neural networks architectures at it leveraging cloud compute, and publish a paper based on whatever sticks. The process isn't complete without a title involving the word "deep" and a PR announcement generated by a neural network trained on Buzzfeed articles.

Maybe I'm slightly too harsh. The actual paper in this case is not making crazy grandiose claims, but this article is certainly doing no favors. If this is the quality of research reporting, then it might as well be automated.

<comment><USER4> But this is not neutral research reporting. It's an MIT press release about MIT research. It's PR, of course.

<comment><USER5> Considering that the vast majority of 'research reporting' involves rephrasing press releases, this is a difference without a distinction.

While the article is about generating abstracts rather than press releases, I don't see why the same approach wouldn't work for both problems. I'm sure a neural net could be trained to write in press release style instead of abstract style.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe it's because I've seen too much of the masses of automatically generated "articles" that pollute my search results, but I really hope stuff like this doesn't proliferate, because I think it'll just lead to even more of that spam --- and be even harder to separate from the useful stuff.

In general, I have the same opinion of this as I do things like automatically generated comments in code: "If it can be generated by a tool, it's not worth reading."

<comment><USER7> If it is much smaller than the source text, summarization can definitely be a useful tool. Being able to TLDR a wall of text would be awesome, doing it with a journalistic pyramid would be even better [1].

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Could this very article have been written simply by applying some model to the paper text? I doubt it. Look at it, it's full of quotes from the authors, full of commentary and explaining the context to a lay audience (with a healthy dose of self-promotion from the side of the university).

Although research papers do contain some context (on a more specialized level, and with many references to other papers instead of repeating the idea), they are more about the technical approach, which is less useful for direct use in the popular article.

One goal of popular science writing is to inspire people, to tell us why we should be excited about a topic, to see what's going on in fields distant from ours etc. This is far from "research paper in -> pop sci article out".

TL;DR: _Summarizing_ a research paper is not the same as writing an interesting pop sci article about a research project.

</comment><comment><USER8> It would be interesting if authors used a tool like this, to see if the automated summary matches the point they are trying to make. If the tool gets it wrong, maybe your paper needs improving.

<comment><USER6> _If the tool gets it wrong, maybe your paper needs improving._

Or maybe it's the tool that needs improving...

<comment><USER7> Symbiotic coevolution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Summarizing scientific articles and writing them are not the same thing. I think this is very interesting work (although I have not read the paper and my knowledge of AI and NLP is very superficial), but the headline really puts me back.

</comment><comment><USER10> Every scientific paper already contains a summary. It's called the abstract.

</comment><comment><USER11> That( there) leaves "science writing" ill defined and as such this( here) might seem to yield a problem which consists NOT of well posedness.

Anyway. Here, a very, very much related conference paper from 2017 which I found last night:

[https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3107452](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3107452) "Discovering Inconsistencies in PubMed Abstracts through Ontology-Based Information Extraction"

Found via the Google Scholar profile of Nisansa de Silva:

[https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=OgPD66oAAAAJ](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=OgPD66oAAAAJ)

Whose works I looked into after finding this:

[https://cs.uoregon.edu/area-exam/sensing-puns-its-own- reword...](https://cs.uoregon.edu/area-exam/sensing-puns-its-own-reword- automatic-detection-paronomasia)

Because I suspect multilingual Paronomasia, Polysemy & Syllepsis can serve to decrease the minimum description length of highly complex topics.

For example:

The German noun "Begier" ('Desire', but with an element of greed, i.e. 'greed' with the prefix be-, so, literally, "begreed" or possibly "bygreed") sounds almost equal to a a word easily constructible in English, from the stem "beg" (as in "to beg") and the suffix -ia (as in, "Paronomasia"): Beg-ia, or perhaps Beggia. Such phonetic similarity can serve as a powerful mnemonic, something widely exploited in the Torah, and I'll leave explaining that to a Brazilian statistics professor:

[https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11841-017-0592-y](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11841-017-0592-y)

(Open Access. Read the PDF version if you want to actually stand a chance of visually parsing the Hebrew/Aramaic characters.)

Note however that some scholars might find the claim given in that paper controversial - mostly because one can't find the proposedly alluding elision (as opposed to repetition) in this list of types/kinds of paronomasia & polysemy from Noegel's Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language & Linguistics:

For Paronomasia:

* Homoeoprophoron

* Homoioteleuton

* Epanastrophe

* Parasonance

* Homonymic paronomasia

* Bilingual paronomasia

* Anagramic paronomasia

* Hendiadic paronomasia

* Rhyme

* Farrago

* Geminate parallelism and clustering

For Polysemy:

* Contronymic Polysemy

* Double entendres

* Antanaclasis

* Unidirectional polysemy

* Janus parallelism (pivotal polysemy)

* Double polysemy

* Bilingual polysemy

* Polysemy clustering

* Numerical polysemy

* Gematria

* Notarikon

* Acronymy

* Acrostics [abacedarius] (also Telestichs and Menostichs)

* Atbash

* Amphiboly (Amphibology)

Edit #1:

Ugh, accidentally hit the submit button before finishing the comment. I'll edit the rest in.

Edit #2:

Still editing stuff in.

Edit #3: OK, there.</comment>


A demo which runs in the JavaScript console - <AUTHOR> http://sandbox.photonstorm.com/console.log/

<comment><USER2> Does the constant console clearing make this unwatchable for anyone else? I get 2 fps, one of which is the white console and the other is the next printed frame.

<comment><USER3> To me it worked fine, I started with the 1000ms one first to avoid crashing chrome but then i lowered it and it worked fine. Pretty impressive! really nice!

<comment><USER2> Ah, they do mention "possibly Windows-only", and I'm on Linux.

<comment><USER4> Does the same on Windows (7) for me though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Demo fails if you unselect music.

</comment><comment><USER6> Take me back to 1988. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkznItCgnJ4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkznItCgnJ4)

</comment><comment><USER7> init(60) works fairly well for me, MBP 13" \- I do have a crapload of tabs open however.</comment>