Why Anti-Authoritarians are Diagnosed as Mentally Ill - <AUTHOR> http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/02/why-anti-authoritarians-are-diagnosed-as-mentally-ill/ <comment><USER3> The whole concept of authority fascinates me. I've had a lot of troubles with this, although I'm not disobedient at all. In fact I'm kind of a goody-two- shoes, am eager to please, and often wish I were bolder and more concerned with my own agenda.

Yet I've been told multiple times in the past five years that I'm undermining authority. By both management and peers. (Sometimes admiringly, by colleagues who think I'm the only person who isn't subject to the leader's reality distortion field.) I've asked what I can do to not be as "disruptive" and nobody can quite produce anything concrete.

I think there's something about my attitude that people can detect -- I do believe that authority needs to be earned with results. And even though when I have defended the current authority, again this is not good enough, because I'll do it in terms of "we need to be unified", "we don't know everything X knows", "X has taken on this leadership role and it costs him a lot, no one should question X's dedication", etc.

The one thing I'm not saying is that we should all bow down to X just because "he's the man". There is something about this atavistic concept of authority which demands a posture of submission, often literally. You don't look the other person in the eye any more, you allow yourself to be swept up in his obsessions, his sense of humor leaks into yours, and you treat his ideas as automatically superior. You're supposed to be happy even if he snatches a slice of cake right off your plate. I just don't have it in me.

<comment><USER4> The ways in which an anti-authoritarian outlook manifest can vary widely. I mean, we stereotype it as a "smash the system, direct action now" thing, but creativity, intellectual curiosity, and a sincere desire to reorganize the system(even through completely legal, above-board means like electoral politics and entrepreneurship) can all get demonized as viewpoints that challenge the establishment. Once collective views are in place, the discussion in most people's minds is over; it takes a strong individual effort to work your way back to truth.

An great example of an authoritarian stereotype controlling the debate is in our discourse about anarchy. In any mainstream forum of the USA, the mere mention of the term is an impossibility - the assumption of anarchy equating to chaos dominates the discussion. Instead, many of the concepts from anarchic literature are now shared, in a modified form, via the less besmirched term of "libertarianism." We don't equate the Tea Party movement with anarchy, yet the connection is all over Wikipedia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like where this article is going a lot, but let's be clear on terms.

"Anti-authoritarians" are people who question and/or reject authority aggressively.

"Assholes" are people who have emotional and/or maturity issues that cause them to irritate others.

Neither of these are diseases, and you can be both, but don't confuse one with the other. I'm a fairly asocial person, but I've learned to be more diplomatic at times. On the other hand, the world is full of angry immature people who just want to "tear it all down!" without actually at heart being for or against anything. They're just a bundle of emotions looking for a place to vent.

But the underlying thesis here, that the professionals diagnosing people as mentally ill carry lot of bias with them that even themselves are unaware of? Spot on. Psychiatry has always been about introducing conformity (both in a good way and in a bad way) to society. Of course, that doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of really mentally ill people who need help, just that when you have a hammer, the world is your nail. :)

ADD: I would just be very careful about working this problem backwards, from effect to cause. That is, simply because somebody or another supports a cause you believe in doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't emotionally ill. My personal opinion is that there are a lot of emotionally-struggling people who choose politics as a socially acceptable way to vent on the world.

<comment><USER6> I propose that many of the "assholes" and "tear it all down" types are anti- authoritarians who fell through the cracks in the authoritarian system. They have all the anger, anxiety, and hate for the authority that surrounds them but they never found a way to obtain the higher knowledge about what is really going on. Maybe the "smart ones" just have a higher capacity to modify their world to fit them, maybe they had a better environment, or maybe they weren't as anti-authoritarian.

<comment><USER7> More likely they are better at _avoiding_ the authorities. That is what I usually try to do.

<comment><USER8> Here I think you are getting at a distinguishable difference between those who are pushing against authorities and those who are hacking the system and flying under the radar. I think that anti-authoritarianism is more a directed attitude of questioning, while avoiding them/it is something different entirely; less trying to change the system, more accepting or ignoring it altogether. That is not to say that one cant do both things; in fact it might be a necessary way to live outside of the norm of blind obedience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Good reading to become a mature (ie not just childish) anti-authoritarian: "Prometheus Rising" by Robert Anton Wilson and "No more Mr Nice Guy" by Robert Glover. I would also throw in "King, Warrior, Magician, Lover" by Robert Moore, and maybe an occasional dose of LessWrong.com (helps to know of cognitive bias pitfalls if one wants to dance to one's own tune). Rand, Aurelius, Thoreau, Emerson and Nietzsche might be cool too, for the philosophically inclined (what they all have in common is the belief in defining your own values, not just following others blindly).

Of course, the way I see it, being anti-authoritarian is just a corollary effect of being a mature, competent, self-validated man who is following his own purpose in life. _Of course_ such a man is going to have trouble with those who want to foist their value-systems on him through threats, psychological manipulation, or subterfuge.

<comment><USER10> I think as a corollary to your comment, the following is also true: Someone who defines his/her own values is extremely unlikely to list "holding power over others" as a primary goal.

Yet many seemingly self-actualized people do end up in positions of authority. Why? I'd argue that power over others is, like some drugs, highly addictive and often corrupting. Mature, self-actualized people rarely feel a void that makes holding this power desirable, since they vastly prefer to be respected than to simply be obeyed.

Yes there are some authority figures who are just and who inspire trust and motivation in others, but many others who appear this way at first and then disappoint -- I wonder how all the young Obama supporters feel now that he's expanded the drone program and continued all of Bush's most controversial and horrible policies.

<comment><USER11> As one of those younger Obama supporters, I feel betrayed. Look to the Occupy movement to see how many of us are moving on and looking elsewhere for hope.

<comment><USER9> Maybe you should just stop looking elsewhere for hope period.

<comment><USER11> That's pretty much what participation is OWS is... The realization that we don't have a political system that can deliver and that it's time to take back control.

<comment><USER9> Are you the type of person who should be in power?

If not, work on that first.

And if you are, you don't need trendy SWPL causes-du-jour.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is basically the premise of the book "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest". The major question of the book was: "Who was really crazy, the inmates or the System?"

It's kind of frightening that views haven't changed in the 40+ years since the book was written. I guess the difference is that they will simply overmedicate rather than lobotomize.

<comment><USER13> Firstly, things have changed _massively_ since one flew over the cuccoos nest was written. It wasn't even representative at the time. As I understand, it's more an allegory for the wider society and about institutions. A modern psychiatric hospital is utterly unlike the place in that book in every respect. They still use electroshock therapy, because it has been proven to work. Now they do it under general anaesthetic and it's an altogether less messy affair. Watch this moving TED talk if you don't believe me: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEZrAGdZ1i8>

Secondly, closely related to this is the famous Rosenhan experiment.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment>

The really relevant bit is this paragraph:

 _For example, one nurse labeled the note-taking of one pseudopatient as "writing behavior" and considered it pathological. The patients' normal biographies were recast in hospital records along the lines of what was expected of schizophrenics by the then-dominant theories of its etiology._

I also remember that one participant had their habit of standing around outside the cafeteria waiting for it to open for lunch noted down by a nurse as "neurotic behaviour around eating and food" and again framed as part of their disorder and used as a reason to keep them there.

Remember though that this was in america in the 70s, and things have changed a lot since then. Partly as a direct result of that study, which made a huge impact on the profession and caused a lot of soul searching. Someone repeated it, I think in the 90s, and they were all just put on pills rather than being committed. The crucial difference being that one can choose not to take pills.

<comment><USER14> Isn't this the "all politicians are untrustworthy" problem. Politicians are not any more untrustworthy or criminal than the general populace, they are just _more closely watched_.

And the same is obviously true of those 'under observation' - <USER2> disorders or not.

I am not sure just how many of my strange habits would be diagnosed under the DSM - but enough to worry me :-)

<comment><USER13> _> I am not sure just how many of my strange habits would be diagnosed under the DSM - but enough to worry me_

That is exactly why doctors don't diagnose _just_ using the DSM checklists. Obviously if they did, we'd all be mad as hatters. There are a whole load of other criteria which must be met, for example, the behaviours have to be detrimental to your life or to the lives of others around you. They also must be abnormal within your culture, which is why religious people aren't all immediately locked up and sedated.

I _really_ wish I could remember/find the name of this other set of assessments that doctors make but alas I cannot. Also my knowledge is based on the UK system, where incidentally they use the ICD-10, which is like the european version of the DSM. Things may very well be different in the states or elsewhere.

<comment><USER15> Our culture would benefit greatly if religious people were immediately locked up and sedated. They ARE crazy and harmful to those around them, and humoring them is bad for society.

<comment> anti-atheist yeah, it would be much better if instead of 'thou shalt not kill' we taught our children 'do unto others before they do unto you'. Don't conflate the failings of a minority with the actual religion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> That was a really good analysis on why people are diagnosed, but I would like to take a guess at why people _want_ to diagnose their fellow man as such.

First, I'm no psychologist or historian, so feel free to disregard everything that follows...this is just a hypothesis.

I've noticed (but I'm probably far from the first) that every seemingly "modern" human behavior can be traced back to a handful of primitive instincts or tribal behaviors (fear, greed, prejudice, etc.). So my guess would be that diagnosing someone as mentally ill because they act anti-authoritarian comes from the tribal instinct that allowed, or even required, all humans to work together without questioning their orders. It was necessary to hunting, protecting the tribe, etc. that everyone act as one. Not acting as one would cause the hunt to fail or the tribe to lose a battle, either way they would die. It's the same way that packs of animals like wolves behave. Shun the outlier because he could put all our lives at stake.

So expanding on this theory, maybe the reason we as humans act this way is because our cousin species died out because they _didn't_ act as one. Perhaps those other semi-human species that died out were more independently-minded, but for the first few hundred thousand years that was a negative thing that led to natural selection filtering them out?

I guess I get this idea from Seth Godin's talk about "Quieting the lizard brain." Pretty interesting, if anyone is interested: <http://vimeo.com/5895898>

<comment><USER17> The assumption there is that not blindly following orders is bad for the group. That's clearly false when the orders are bad for the group.

<comment><USER18> Not so clearly after all. The harm caused by the orders may well be less than the harm caused to the social structures in the group by one or two people disobeying - or by everyone disobeying, and the group needing to somehow select a new authoritarian figure (which usually gets nasty).

<comment><USER19> Also known as war. Which one could argue is not good for the species statically speaking.

Nicholas Wade also addressed part of this issue in The Faith Instinct. He postulated that religion as a whole was the translation of our hereditary pack instinct following consciousnesses evolution and that conformity was rewarded over time with a bigger stronger more aligned pack and more babies or more DNA in the pool.

It could be argued that the non-conformist is rewarded in the opposite, through persecution by the pack and a smaller group of mates.

But, of course great change requires great sacrifice and cost.

<comment><USER16> Thanks for the info on The Faith Instinct. I knew I couldn't have been the first to suggest this idea.

Another idea I might add to my original thought would be people's fear of change. I would guess that goes back to before the days of agriculture, where you had to move with your food source. Any change could be dire to you tribe's survival. Change in food source means learning new land, hunting techniques, poisonous plants, etc.

So I think that anyone challenging authority is also challenging the status quo and is seen as one that wants to bring about change. The primitive (lizard) brain cares about two things: survival and reproduction. Change threatened survival in the past, and that fear is still with us, causing us to condemn the changers. People who are in a position to prevent social change (like, say, a psychologist) will do anything in their power to feed that fear of change because they _like_ the way things are. "Things right now are the way they are supposed to be," their lizard brain tells them. And so they close the minds of individuals who might have otherwise had a great impact on society.

What gets me is how people never learn. Socrates was condemned and executed for questioning religious and governmental authority. Soon after the Greeks regretted it and erected statues in his honor, yet that same mistake of casting out the independent minds is made every generation. Sad, really.

<comment><USER20> Humans don't learn because of our short lifespans. If humans from ancient Greece were still alive, we might have learned something.

But our short lifespan is also a boon in many other ways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> _"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."_

<comment><USER22> I enjoy thought provoking arguments as much as the next guy, but too many people seem like they just want something to be unreasonable about. And they act like children, in that they only scrutinize the process when their not getting their way. They just want to be a malcontent, and it appears pathetic to me. I'll be first in line when there's a revolution that isn't full of drum circles and free-loaders.

<comment><USER23> When else would you analyze a process than when it's causing you a problem? Do you routinely attempt to fix things that aren't broken?

<comment><USER24> Imagine that you find an ATM machine that's spitting out free money. It's certainly not causing you a problem, but that doesn't mean that it's not broken.

It's easy to see that the system is broken when you're getting less than you deserve. It takes a degree of maturity to admit that the system is broken when you receive more than you deserve.

<comment><USER23> Uh, it's also not my job to go over to the ATM and find out why it's broken. On the contrary, trying to do so would probably get me arrested.

I have no reason to fix or even analyze a process until it is somehow relevant to me. Calling me immature because I decline to go hunting for problems I otherwise wouldn't even know about is bizarre at best.

<comment><USER25> That is a reasonable position. But only if you wouldn't stuff your pockets full of money should you pass one by while at the same time complaining about all the free-loaders on welfare. I know some people who would do both things without having any cognitive dissonance induced discomfort at all.

<comment><USER23> But that has nothing at all to do with anti-authoritarianism, and doesn't seem to resemble what Mansyn was talking about in any way.

I can't stop thinking, while reading his and rprospero's comments, of the stereotypical parent screaming at a fussy eater, "Don't you know there are starving children in Africa?!".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _Please_ try and remember that while there may be many problematic practices and practitioners in the world of psychiatry, the majority are just trying to heal the sick like all other doctors. There is a big difference between putting someone on pills to stop them from presenting a problem in school or at work, and putting someone on pills to stop them cutting out their own eyes, or to help them regain their desire to breathe in and out.

A large number of mental disorders are extremely debilitating and often fatal to the patient. When successfully healed, sufferers are usually extremely grateful to their psychiatrist, feeling that they owe them their life.

You only hear in the media and online about the times when it all goes wrong, because it makes a good story. Who wants to hear blog posts about how someone was sick, and then they got well? Especially when talking about your experience with mental illness is seen as an admission of weakness or personal failure by society, which it is.

This is not to discount the fact that there _is_ a huge amount of malpractice, abuse, and just plain poor quality thinking out there in the world of psychiatry. Most of it is connected to big pharma and their big dollars, as you might expect.

You also can't absolve the patient of all responsibility. Go to any psychiatrist, particularly here in the UK with our NHS where doctors don't sit around _hoping_ for more ill people, and they will tell you that they are sick and tired of the parade of perfectly healthy middle class idiots shuffling before them with non-problems, or worse, dragging children with non-problems.

You can't really just turn these people away, it's unethical (illegal?) to just deny someone treatment. Unless you can invoke something like Münchausen syndrome, you have to treat these people or their charges in some way if they are in distress. Doctors are reduced to giving them some pills and complaining to each other behind closed doors about the endless stream of "worried well" affecting their ability to help those with the actual problems discussed at the start of this now overly-long comment. Actually, increasingly they send them off to a homeopathy clinic or something like that. That in my eyes is the one good use for alternative medicine, it keeps little jemima off the hard stuff when her dangerously irrational mother decides she needs to be fixed.

The DSM and it's ilk make this worse by giving the public cosmo-style checklists they can run against themselves, without all the other contextual understanding that a diagnostician has. It is then made worse again with the DSM published on the internet.

<comment><USER26> I had to log in just to upvote this. Yes, diagnosing mental illness is less clear-cut than the problems we typically enjoy as programmers. Yes, mistakes are made. But for every mistake there are 9, or 99, or 999 successes (EDIT: I have no statistical reference for this assertion, please take with large grain of salt) who, as you say, feel that they owe their life to the professional(s) who helped them. I know, because I am one, and regardless of society's opinion that is no less an admission of weakness than admitting that I had chicken pox one time, and occasionally come down with the flu.

<comment><USER27> "But for every mistake there are 9, or 99, or 999 successes who, as you say, feel that they owe their life to the professional(s) who helped them."

The problem is that isn't true. The amount of people helped is generally lower than the amount of people harmed, at least with longterm use of many of the major psychopharmaceutical drugs. The book the blog is promoting explains this quite well.

Just this morning there were a flurry of articles on a new study showing that the most commonly prescribed sleeping pills raise your all cause mortality 3x - 5x, and that's over only 2.5 years. One can only imagine what the all-cause mortality over 10+ years is.

<comment><USER26> You're right, I have no source to back that up and was making a flimsy emotional assertion. (I've edited my comment to reflect that.) I stand by the (desired) sentiment of my comment, though: psychiatry and the related sciences are important and there should be no related stigma.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I believe "Anti-Authoritarian" is a misnomer. People labeled as "Anti- Authoritarian", myself included, are more likely "Auto-Authoritarian"; they trust their own authority first, rather than blindly believe the asserted authority of others.

<comment><USER29> I think your point is quite a good one. Taking control of the language used to describe the situation/subject under discussion is important to avoid the negative implications.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Hence the propensity of authoritarian governments to declare opponents mentally ill.

Beware political positions quick to write off differing views as clinical insanity. When they start committing people, that's a sign the line has been crossed.

</comment><comment><USER31> > After he did enter college, one professor told Einstein, "You have one > fault; one can't tell you anything." The very characteristics of Einstein > that upset authorities so much were exactly the ones that allowed him to > excel.

I find it an amusing corollary that later in life, no one was able to convince Einstein of the truth--or at least the usefulness--of quantum mechanics. A failing of the anti-authoritarian mindset is that if you have an opposed opinion to an authority on an issue--and that authority happens to be _right_ \--you'll never figure this out until you work it out for yourself.

<comment><USER32> _I find it an amusing corollary that later in life, no one was able to convince Einstein of the truth--or at least the usefulness--of quantum mechanics._

Einstein never disputed the usefulness of QM. He merely disputed the idea that theories based on configuration space were fundamentally correct.

He even attempted to disprove them by showing that QM predicts the EPR paradox, which most people agree is pretty weird. He then spent the rest of his life trying to come up with theories that didn't predict nonlocal effects.

It turns out that the EPR paradox and other nonlocal effects are observed in real life (so any such theory he might have concocted would have been wrong), but the experiments were only done after Einstein died.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Any 'anti-authoritarian' diagnosis is bunk. This is one aspect of the DSM (of many actually) that seriously bothers me. Since there is no objective scale for delineating behaviors that are acceptable to "authorities", how can one claim this is a valid diagnosis ? THIS is why we can't have nice things.

</comment><comment><USER34> During reading I always thought about Sheldon, from The Big Bang Theory, in one of the first series when he was sacked from his job. And when he comes to apologize with his mother, he says "I've called you an idiot during our first meeting. I'm sorry... for pointing that out.".

I suppose it's the same with many doctors who stamp "mentally ill" diagnoses on people. "If you disagree with me, then you should be treated."

<comment><USER35> What's the same? Not trying to be rude, but what point were you trying to make?

<comment><USER34> Many powerful social positions in our society are occupied by not qualified enough people, who only have it through connections or inheritance or just conforming to overcomplicated modern social rules. Basically unquestioning conforming to any relevant authority until a person grows higher in power than it. In Sheldon case it was his new boss, who fired him for a reason than Sheldon did not bow to him (meaning that he should not ever question qualification of a more powerful person). In the essay, this behavior was shown on the example of a psychologist or psychiatrist, who also can develop a tendency to negatively evaluate anti-authoritarian people because they themselves have an opposite character type and are in a more powerful position. This especially concerns me because there are evidence of such abuse of power in cases of children, who can be put on medication just to be kept in the boarding school indefinitely (not sure if this a right name in English).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> There was a seemingly related hacker news page on the top page along side with this one <http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html> , about the 64 bit OS LoseThos and the mental insanity of its author. It was a very interesting read and I wanted to see the comments, but now it appears gone. Was this flagged and if so why?

<comment><USER37> I think there were concerns the LoseThos guy might be worse off by seeing it, and the OP removed it. Really interesting to read about him though, and see his extraordinary work. I hope he is around people who can help and that he'll be ok.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I've grown up diagnosed as ADD (and ADHD), ODD, and Bipolar. The bipolar was because I was not mature yet, and had trouble communicating effectively. I get angered when I hear people talk as if these aren't real. My ADD makes it to where I have a tough time evaluating priorities to the point where my impulsiveness can cause me to 'not' do thing. I just can't. Like I recently tried doing a bit of homework on paper (first time to write on paper this semester) and my mind raced faster than I could write (I just saw the answer), but most importantly I had trouble just writing. I just couldn't force myself to do it. The hyperactive portion of ADHD is just because I'm either 150% going all out, or I'm asleep. (This makes 60 hour work weeks a breeze because I just keep going and going and going, as long as I have someone around that can help keep my focus, or if my attention isn't needed (like large compiles for programs, somehow I can focus better in the spurts between compiles). The ODD part comes in because I love to challenge people, especially authority, but only when I feel like they are incorrect or misguided. Interestingly though, I find that, for example, I can't bring myself to do the dishes when at my Parents house, but at anyone else's house I'm the first to clean the table up after dinner.

<comment><USER35> Maybe the problem isn't with you, but with the things you're being required to do. Maybe ideally it would be better for you to focus on doing the things you're especially good at and enjoy doing, rather than following arbitrary and impersonal directives on what you should do.

That's up to you to decide, but currently you're required to meet expectations in your life that maybe you're just not personally suited for, not out of any disability, but because your strengths are elsewhere, or maybe you're just not interested and would rather learn or focus on something else at that time.

The problem comes in thinking something is wrong with somebody just because they don't conform to expectations or are caused angst and turmoil through their nonconformity. It doesn't matter if it's the sufferer or the society that seeks it out. It is still misguided.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I can't help but notice we are all discussing the opinions of one guy, who is not a psychiatrist, regarding what he has seen in his practice. And this one guy, if you look at his "about the author stuff" is basically an activist left wing hates-the-system damn-the-capitalists kind of guy.

This is not science, it's opinion untethered from the constraints of evidence. If we want to have a long conversation about this, it would behoove us to start from science so that actual facts might be involved.

<comment><USER35> I don't see why a mental health worker's critique on the culture and practices of other professionals in the field wouldn't be valid cause for discussion. If someone observes corruption in the field they are working in, is it not valid to raise the issue for discussion before performing a formal survey on how widespread that corruption might be?

What type of evidence exactly would satisfy your requirement?

<comment><USER39> I did not intend to suggest he should not raise his voice. Rather I suggest that a Hacker News discussion is not well-served by starting from his post due to the lack of factual (in the scientific sense) content.

Raising an issue that needs study is just plain Good Science. But it's a starter for science, not us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Authority (and people in power) are currently seen as "once accepted, never question", and that has served humanity well for thousands (even millions) of years because it's effective - you have a leader, you acknowledged he's at least good enough and you start working on common goals under their supervision.

But that doesn't work as well anymore because there's so many of us, so much stuff to do and so much information. That's why we've been moving towards increasingly democratic societies and organizations for the past several hundred years, and the trend will only accelerate.

Questioning authority usually stopped the whole organization, and people couldn't move forward unless they found a consensus. Today it's easier to question/review/change authority without having to stop everything - it's like it's a separate module instead of a core piece, but obviously, that doesn't sit well for those whose authority is questioned, hence the struggle against anti-authoritarians...

</comment><comment><USER41> This is mostly inaccurate. He starts by cherry picking his definition of ODD describing it as "a pattern of negativistic, hostile, and defiant behavior without the more serious violations of the basic rights of others that are seen in conduct disorder" and "often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rule". This is ridiculous, and leaves out a half a dozen or so other symptoms including

"Have temper tantrums Be argumentative with adults Refuse to comply with adult requests or rules Annoy other people deliberately Blames others for mistakes or misbehavior Acts touchy and is easily annoyed Feel anger and resentment Be spiteful or vindictive Act aggressively toward peers Have difficulty maintaining friendships Have academic problems Feel a lack of self-esteem"

Those aren't authority problems, those are major social issues that must persist for greater than 6 months and make the home or school environment hostile. Also, he acts like all psychologists and psychiatrists do is prescribe medicine. This is silly, most psychiatrists and all psychologists would advocate combined therapy or behavioral therapy to help them with parent child interaction and problem solving skills. These authoritarian behavioral treatments include things like "Recognize and praise your child's positive behaviors, offer acceptable choices to your child, giving him or her a certain amount of control." ODD should NEVER get a drug prescription except in the case of comorbitity. Read more here: [http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/oppositional-defiant- disord...](http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/oppositional-defiant-disorder/)

ADD and ADHD are over-diagnosed and ODD might also be, but there are people who legitimately suffer from major crushing behavioral deficits which can make properly learning difficult. Sloppy historical analogy with 'famous people would totally be ADD' is a terrible marginalization of this disorder and it's sufferers.

Also, lots of people are mentioning the Rosenhan experiment and claiming that psychology hasn't changed at all since then. This is largely inaccurate. I would direct them to this askscience thread [http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/orf88/how_has_ps...](http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/orf88/how_has_psychiatry_changed_since_the_rosenhan) about changes that have occurred including the rise of counseling and patient bill of rights.

</comment><comment><USER42> I'm no psychologist but I hope to see those in that profession read this article. I've noticed that many are quick to label a patient mentally ill and prescribe medication. The brain is one of the most misunderstood organs in the human body. While the drugs help some, the profession is far from ready to alter brain chemistry.

</comment><comment><USER43> Non-conformance, and non-compliance against authority runs the risk of being separated out from the pack, and being treated differently... Does this have any relevance to the debate over ADHD - i.e. there are some that believe a 'good old-fashioned spanking' would set things right.

</comment><comment><USER44> Prussian schooling is the most counterproductive and expensive ritual ever foisted on innocent kids.

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm not sure if too many people nowadays take Psychiatry and Psychology seriously. Most problems they label as illnesses are legitimate issues people have that need resolution not pills.

I had severe allergic reaction to shrimp. Ended up at the ER where I was treated with Epinephrine, Prednisone and Diphenhydramine (Benadryl administered directly to bloodstream though).

Guess what, I had serious panick attacks for another2 days. When the following day I showed up at the ER, I was told by a Doctor who originally treated me day before that I clearly have mental issues because this reaction shouldn't last so long. Psychiatrist didn't even ask questions and prescribed me anti- depressants. Obciously, anxiety diminished on its own next day. FDA.GOV confirms that all 3 medications I was given may cause anxiety (severe) and panick attacks. Including benadryl that does cause anxiety in me. This was widely studied and is believed to be caused by liver enzymes. So, all in all I had never had mentall issues before, never had issues after. But had 3 days of panick attacks and severe anxeity causeb clearly by medication. Hey, but I'm considered depressive, anxious now. It is in my medical records. Just amazing how fast they are to label you and how difficult it is to clear the record. All result of ignorance, but what can I do? Recently I went through cholestycomy procedure outside my insurance, just because I didn't want to be treated by medical stuff with suspicion.

I don't believe psychiatrists now at all. I mean this is some type of witchcraft, not science for sure.

<comment><USER46> Please note that Psychiatry and Psychology are very different fields, despite the common associations between them. In most countries, psychologists may not prescribe drugs, while psychiatrists, as medical doctors are allowed to do so.

Incidentally, I highly recommend reading the DSM (diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders) and figuring out which disorder you show the most signs of. Myself, I meet all the criteria for ADHD, and if I had been born some years later or in a different place, could easily have been diagnosed with it.

<comment><USER47> Self-diagnosing psychological disorders is a VERY bad idea.

<comment><USER46> I'm not really suggesting that people self diagnose, I just thought it might be interesting for non-professionals to read the diagnostic criteria to get a sense of how easy it is to be diagnosed on these bases. Unfortunately, due to the way the american insurance system works, I can't see DSM ever being rolled back to a semblance of sanity (with pun intended)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> The true test of whether someone's really anti-authoritarian is how they behave when they're in authority. 99% of people who use "question authority" as an excuse for what is really anti- _social_ behavior fail this test.

<comment><USER49> anti-social means that a person does not conform with what authority says.

"authority" has an opinion on religion, good manners, social interaction, biodiversity, climate change, whales hunting, and every possible topic on earth.

People can choose to fight the authority at any level they want on any topic they want.

Two people can fight authority on different topics, both of them see each other as anti-social; but both of them are anti-authority.

"Choose your weapons, your enemy has been chosen long ago, even before you realized." -- anonymous

<comment><USER48> "anti-social means that a person does not conform with what authority says."

Simply incorrect, both etymologically and logically. Authority is hierarchical; society is peer to peer. Authority is hard power; society is soft. When you're anti-authoritarian you're defying hierarchy and force. When you're anti-social you're just being a jerk to your neighbors. Not the same thing _at all_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> The reality is that political dissenters are often diagnosed with schizophrenia if they, for example, accuse their government of crimes. Of course governments do commit crimes, but one can only acknowledge the crimes of someone else's government, or crimes that occurred long ago.

Even in the United States, the automatic reply to any significant claim of criminal behavior against the US government is "bat-shit crazy conspiracy theorist".

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_i...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_in_the_Soviet_Union)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry>

<http://thejcl.com/pdfs/munro.pdf> The Ankang: China's Special Psychiatric Hospitals

Governments, including the United States, project through their propaganda and education, a false reality in which the most important state actions are always moral and justified.

There is a type of mass pathology going on in which almost everyone ignores facts that contradict the official reality presented by authority.

I think this is unfortunately a normal aspect of group behavior because I have observed it even in a small technical group where the manager decided that Windows Communication Foundation worked differently than it actually did and everyone went along with it even though the documentation clearly stated otherwise.

<comment><USER35> Your anecdotal evidence isn't very strong support. If someone had instead stood up in the group and told the manager he was wrong, would you believe the opposite, that not blindly following leadership was the norm?

<comment><USER50> I explained to the manager and the group how they were wrong about that and got fired.

The business about it being a normal group behavior is really a side issue though, and I'm not trying to make a scientific case.

The bigger issue is government suppression of dissent by the misuse of psychiatry or just by suggesting theories involving criminal activities of the government are signs of insanity.</comment></comment></comment>


Video: ITIL Invented DevOps; the Unknown History You Can Leverage Now (2013) - josh-wrale http://vimeo.com/76138745

<comment> josh-wrale I'm posting this here because I'm interested to know what HN thinks about it. I'm involved in an ITIL vs. DevOps correspondence right now, and I found this rather odd (IMHO) video via the obligatory Google search.

I don't feel like he makes a clear argument, although I am leaning toward agreeing with several of his conclusions (e.g. see the last slide).

Edit: I just now found this interesting post-script which says that the presentation was a hit. Take a look. Is this just CA being CA'ish? :)

[http://blogs.ca.com/2013/10/07/itil-invented-devops-get- over...](http://blogs.ca.com/2013/10/07/itil-invented-devops-get-over-it/)</comment>


Show HN: I launched a side project for my studio to solve common design issues - <AUTHOR> https://www.service-o-rama.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I've run a couple of studios and with my latest one (AVA) I wanted to do things a little differently, so we launched Service-O-Rama today to offer transparently priced packages to product owners and founders. Hopefully it helps take some of the mystery out of world class product service... or if not, someone has fun with the website. I designed and built it in around 9 days from idea to live. I used Webflow as I totally suck with code, if we get some traction, we'll rebuild it in something fancier if needs be. Any feedback welcome, first time launching a product.</comment>


Mark Cuban Changes His Mind - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-america-divided/mark-cuban/ <comment><USER2> Thank god, Cuban is a smart guy and it would be unfortunate to see him support such blatant ignorance.</comment>


Windows 10 telemetry: Time for a level playing field - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-telemetry-time-for-level-playing-field/ <comment><USER2> Please do not editorialize the titles of stories you submit to HN.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

(Submitted title was "Are bad statistical practices ruining OS/browser development?")

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that.</comment></comment>


Deprecating XML - <AUTHOR> http://norman.walsh.name/2010/11/17/deprecatingXML <comment><USER2> After three years working in Big Freaking Java Web Applications which needed to frequently talk to other Big Freaking Legacy Applications, which is pretty XML's core use case, I struggle to think of a concrete example of a time where XML was a clear win over JSON. I spent a lot more time fighting XML (and, more importantly, libraries built on libraries built on libraries which parsed XML which failed to interact with libraries built on libraries built on libraries which parsed XML in a subtly different and incompatible way) than I spent enjoying the richness of my namespaced mixed content.

We were once, no lie, forced into JSON-over-XML because of technical and organizational imperatives that had to be reconciled with the need to ship functional code sometime this year. ("The web services parser is breaking again!? Screw it. We only need three fields. JSON grab bag, serialize as string, read string and interpret as JSON on other side.")

<comment><USER3> Try saving a marked up document as JSON.

<comment><USER4> You make a good point yet outside of XHTML and perhaps XSLT, I've never seen a document marked up as XML. I have, however, worked on hundreds of projects that used XML as a structured data exchange format, for remote procedure calls, or for configuration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "XML deals remarkably well with the full richness of unstructured data."

What? No, it doesn't. XML has even more structure than JSON does. Unless you're using it improperly, and the you're negating all the advantages that XML was supposed to bring.

It wasn't for 'mixed content'. It was for system interoperability.

The advantage that XML brings over JSON is that you can have an external document that you can use to validate any XML you're sending or receiving. You can guarantee it's formatted correctly. JSON provides no such guarantee.

Not that that's necessarily a bad thing.

<comment><USER6> It only provides that guarantee because the parsers have agreed to do so (and not all do, nor do they do so identically). It's a guarantee by communal agreement, nothing more.

There's no reason a JSON format can't do the exact same thing. JSON-RPC, for instance, defines its own rules on top of JSON which anything using it must conform to. How hard would it be to make a set of JSON interchange rules which specify external schema documents?

edit: answer:

      {json_strict_version:1, schema:{external:[url,url], internal:[{schema},{schema}]}}

<comment><USER7> If I'm reading you right, you're saying that XML only provides a guarantee because of an abstract agreement between parsers? Nonsense. XML has a specification for what constitutes a well-formed document and an XML Schema defines rules that assure validity. XML may be verbose and the libraries may be a pain to work with (though there are some well-written ones out there) and there may be other flaws you want to bring up, but this is not a defensible point.

<comment><USER6> XML spec: <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-conformance>

> _Conforming XML processors fall into two classes: validating and non- > validating._

Yup, that's a guarantee alright. A guarantee consisting of the people who wrote the parser agreeing to write DTD-parsing code. Or not. Depends on your parser.

It has a specification for validation _because a specification for validating it has been written_ , based on agreement of the specification _and implementation by the parsers_ , not because XML has some inherent, magical validatability quality.

edit: this is all on top of that a spec is just a spec until someone implements it. Plenty of specs have been chucked because others did something else, or have attributes which nobody implements (how many email forms accept the full RFC-compliant email set?). A spec _is_ an abstract agreement.

<comment><USER8> I have never seen anything that implements validating XML parser as intended by specification and is actually used in production code. Half of XML consumers I've seen in production implement namespaces in various broken ways (like depend on exact values of prefixes)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> God, but I hate XML, and sad to say, for the same reason a lot of people hate PHP.

I hate XML because it is so mis-used. People try to use it for EVERYTHING and you get these monstrous XML trees with legions of attributes, when what you're trying to send could comfortably expressed in "{success: true, message: 'Record deleted.'}".

I admit my ignorance, at least. I'm sure that were I properly shown well-used XML and these wonderful and vast tools that the competent XML worker has at their disposal, I'd be as happy to work with XML as I am to work with PHP.

That said, you won't ever catch me trying to write a 3D FPS in PHP, and I hope that if you ever DID catch me doing so, you'd give me the exact same fish- slapping that XML abusers deserve.

<comment><USER10> At the game studio I work at, they use XML for all scripting tasks: gameplay scripts and UI scripts.

As in, XML nodes are "game script commands" which are executed sequentially.

<comment><USER11> That's kind of like XSLT, a language with an XML syntax. I can see how that is an appealing use of XML since it basically is a nice representation of a high- level syntax tree.

I believe you have come up with a rare example where XML is decidedly better suited than JSON!

However, the majority of XML use cases are for document-interchanging applications and the way those are being handled requires massively bloated toolchains of poorly inter-operating software.

<comment><USER12> If you want a language with a JSON-like syntax, consider using JavaScript. (If you want a language with a uniform syntax, that's easy to parse, choose some form of Scheme or Forth.)

<comment><USER11> I believe though the point was that I kept wondering what it is specifically that XML does better than JSON, since the article didn't specify. And so it occurred to me that one way to make use of XML's inherent complexity is indeed to represent an instruction tree. But the question here is not what language is best, or even that JSON can used for the same purpose, it was merely the "discovery" of an inherent XML feature that would make reasonable developers prefer it for a certain task. The whole point is moot, however, since XML is actually intended for structured information interchange, regardless of any recent efforts to portray it otherwise, and that's a task which has been thoroughly taken over by JSON in the last few years.

> _If you want a language with a JSON-like syntax, consider using JavaScript._

You're probably right in making this joke though, since JSON is based on JavaScript it certainly owes its popularity mostly to the browser environment.

<comment><USER13> "it certainly owes its popularity mostly to the browser environment"

I don't think that's a given. JSON is useful because it provides a clear, compact syntax for the most commonly useful data structures - lists, dicts, strings, numbers and booleans. That's certainly why I switched to it over XML (and serialised PHP objects).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> These XML vs JSON talks are tiring. They solve entirely different problem domains. XML is for documents and JSON is for data. It is not the fault of the XML spec that programmers go nutso on its usage outside of its problem domain.

<comment><USER15> I don't understand your point. Documents _are_ data, are they not?

<comment><USER16> Documents are semi-structured data, that is they are a mix of text and structured data elements put into a structured hierarchy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> XML's bad, JSON is better.

But Protocol Buffers are best. Like JSON, the data model for Protocol Buffers maps nicely onto simple data structures (unlike DOM). But with Protocol Buffers you also get a schema for free, a wicked efficient binary format _if you want it_ , default values, etc.

 _And_ you can use JSON as a text format. In other words, you could take your JSON that you have sitting around, whip up a Protocol Buffers .proto file for it, and get nice generated C++ classes for it with full schema validation. Your JSON file:

        {field1="foo", field2=5}

...could be accessed from a C++ object as:

        my_obj.field1();

The only bummer about protocol buffers is that its support for high-level languages (PHP, Perl, Ruby, etc) is not very good. I've been working on a separate implementation of Protocol Buffers in C to address this (by making it easy to write bindings for) but this project has unfortunately been stalled as I've been busy with work and life. :(

<comment><USER18> The protobuf encoding carries a ton of redundant crap around (if not as much as text formats). You can do a lot better by paying more attention to the schema and omitting facts that aren't allowed to change, like tags on self- delimiting required fields and arrays (ASN.1 PER does this well).

The protobuf tradeoffs only make any sense if you think you can somehow do something useful with messages that are somewhat but not entirely corrupted, because you still have to solve the problem of finding intact field boundaries without being given any HDLC-style framing.

<comment><USER17> > The protobuf encoding carries a ton of redundant crap around (if not as much > as text formats).

[citation needed]

One of the features of protocol buffers is that they're backwards and forwards compatible. You can add and remove fields, change "required" to "optional" and back again, and still make sense of what comes to you on the wire. I don't think there's much of anything that can be eliminated from the protobuf binary format.

Eliminating tags for a field (even if _you_ consider it required) wouldn't be backward compatible with a previous version of the protocol that considered it optional.

A message from a previous version of the schema is not "corrupted." Being able to make wire-compatible changes to the protocol is an extremely important feature.

<comment><USER18> You can't add or remove required fields, because outdated recipients will be dangerously wrong about whether they understand the intent of a message in the revised format. At some point meeting new requirements and keeping interoperability calls for deprecating and replacing the old format, because treating everything as optional (which some Googlers apparently do, avoiding "required" completely) is almost as bad as having 2^n mostly-untested formats.

<comment><USER17> This is the kind of over-engineering analysis that leads to overly complicated systems like XML schema.

Just because a field says "optional" doesn't mean it's logically optional. You don't have to make your schema formalism complex enough that it can describe every last rule of what it takes for a message to be valid. In fact you definitely don't want to do that, because it's a horrible amount of complexity in the schema for little gain.

Yes, it's true that some Googlers use "optional" instead of "required" everywhere in their .proto files. That doesn't mean that you can omit any field and expect your message to be processed by your peer without error. It just means that you won't get an error _at the schema validation level._ But the application could still throw an error. More complex rules about what fields must be specified or what values they must have can be described in comments, and enforced with custom validation if necessary.

Also, since protobufs support default values, you can define what value will be returned for scalar fields if no value is explicitly sent. This can often be used to define useful default behavior for the case where a field is omitted.

<comment><USER18> It comes down to different design choices. Any constraints that are missing from the schema have to be recreated separately in each implementation, and I see them as unlikely to do that consistently enough to interoperate well. So I prefer not to pay at runtime for expressing many variations of the protocol, when I don't expect them to work anyway. Like HTML vs. XHTML—I shudder to think how much work was wasted trying to handle the worst tag soup imaginable, simply for lack of a well-formedness (or DTD validity) requirement.

<comment><USER17> > Any constraints that are missing from the schema have to be recreated > separately in each implementation

Not true at all. The server can implement them -- once -- and any client who makes an invalid request to the server will get an error message. These constraints can be expressed in comments in the interface (.proto) file.

> Like HTML vs. XHTML—I shudder to think how much work was wasted trying to > handle the worst tag soup imaginable, simply for lack of a well-formedness > (or DTD validity) requirement.

HTML and XHTML is a completely different ball of wax. Insisting on even well- formedness is simply unreasonable in practice, because it is so difficult to ensure, and it is the user who pays the price when the software isn't perfect.

If you're still convinced that the world would have been better if strict XHTML had won, you should read: [http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/01/14/thought_experime...](http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/01/14/thought_experiment)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The lack of a standard for handling namespaces is a fatal flaw in JSON for many applications. Some of the healthcare data exchange formats we deal with require mixing multiple XML namespaces together; it's complex, but it works. Trying to do the same in JSON would be a huge mess. <http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/the_limitations_of_json>

</comment><comment><USER20> IMO the biggest advantage of JSON on the web is a simple one: fewer bytes on the wire.

EDIT: also the concise yet all-encompassing nature of its home at <http://www.json.org>

<comment><USER21> Is this really true? It seems like they would be remarkably close in number of bytes on the wire, accept in cases where you generate really poor XML. In fact, in some basic examples I quickly looked at, I think XML actually puts fewer bytes on the wire.

I do have to agree with the author though. This feels like a really "meh" discussions.

<comment><USER22> If the actual data is small compared to the tag names, then XML will be significantly larger.

<comment><USER20> Also if the data scheme is very simple and only for consumption by the person who designed it, one can eschew tag names altogether and just have an array and rely of the order of elements to define meaning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> And I'm looking forward to a real world example of 'width' where JSON fails and XML shines.

</comment><comment><USER24> I have the same reaction as the author, although for perhaps a slightly different reason. XML has far less syntax than JSON, and strings are the default input. So XML is better when you have large chunks of text want to add structure and meaning to abstract subcomponents, and want it to be human- readable. JSON is better when you need to organize lots of little pieces of data.

Unfortunately, neither use case is typical. Usually it's a mix of both, and it's not worth using both formats so you have to pick just one.

</comment><comment><USER25> I spend all my time doing front-end development and I'm not sure what the author means by "I look forward to seeing what the JSON folks do when they are asked to develop richer APIs". The only deliberately unstructured XML I've worked with is document formats. Where are these rich unstructured APIs that wouldn't otherwise be classified as lazy?

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm no expert on these things...

But generally what I want out of a data stream is a set of name/value pairs. That's it. I really don't understand why, but trying to get those name/value pairs from an xml based api is always an adventure. Well - I know why. It's because everyone structures their data differently when they create xml. Sometimes the name I'm after will be a node name. Sometimes it will be a value of a text node. Sometime the value that properly maps to that name will be a textnode 3 layers deep, sometimes it will be an attribute value.

I'm still a newb but I've worked with about 8 different apis now. For the json apis I wrote one recursive function that worked on all of them to get the data I wanted... It was about 8 lines of code. For the XML apis, I STILL haven't figured out how to write a recursive function which works for ONE of them, let alone all of them. (while relying on python minidom to do the actual parsing for me).

</comment><comment><USER4> I remember when XML was still young and I was introduced to XML-RPC. It was truly beautiful protocol -- straight forward, human readable, human writable, and easy to implement. I wrote desktop apps that connected to web services written in different languages on different platforms and it all worked.

Then SOAP happened. The same philosophy as XML-RPC gone horribly wrong: a human readable format no longer readable by humans, insanely complex, and hard to implement properly (even with the libraries). Frustrating all around.

Although JSON is much simpler than XML, there's no reason why someone couldn't invent something as horrible as SOAP (or XSLT) on top of it. I can only hope that JSON implementers see the value of keeping things simple. Perhaps the existence of XML as an "enterprise" technology will help differentiate JSON in that way.

<comment><USER27> I used xmlrpc for this exact purpose (desktop to 'web service' - now there's a buzzword I haven;t heard in 5 years!) early this year, it was awesome. On the server side I had PHP's simple xml api, which also made pretty much all of the pain of parsing xml go away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> JSON falls flat when trying to define data types and serialize objects.

      var foo1 = new Foo1();
      foo1.bar1 = new Bar1();
      var foo2 = new Foo2();
      foo2.bar2 = new Bar2();

If you were to serialize that data using XML you might do this:

      <Foo1 name="foo1">
        <Bar1 name="bar1"/>
      </Foo1>
      <Foo2 name="foo2">
        <Bar2 name="bar2"/>
      </Foo2>

But now what if you use JSON? You'll probably end up with something like this:

      {
        "foo1" : {
          "class" : "Foo1",
           "@bar1" : {"class":"Bar1"}
         },
        "foo2" : {
          "class" : "Foo2",
          "@bar2" : {"class":"Bar2"}
        }
      }

Generally it makes sense to use XML for imperative data structures, and use JSON for functional data structures.

<comment><USER15> I don't see what you're getting at. First of all, how is example 1 better than example 2? And how does that prove that JSON is better for functional data while XML is better for imperative data?

<comment><USER28> It boils down to JSON being schemaless. In XML the data type is implicitly defined by the tag, whereas in JSON you need to arbitrarily encode the datatype as a property and somehow differentiate between properties and child elements/objects.

<comment><USER29> How about this?

        <Foo1 name="foo1">
            <Bar1 name="bar1"/>
        </Foo1>
        <Foo2 name="foo2">
            <Bar2 name="bar2"/>
        </Foo2>

        [["Foo1", {"name" : "foo1"}, [
            ["Bar1", {"name" : "bar1" }]
         ],
         ["Foo2", {"name" : "foo2"}, [
            ["Bar2", {"name" : "bar2" }]
         ]]

I personally wouldn't do this, but the arbitrary encodings between the two samples are now equivalent.

<comment><USER28> No, I think you proved my point.

<comment><USER29> I still don't understand. What makes the XML version better than the JSON version? Why is creating XML like that a good solution, while creating JSON like that is not?

<comment><USER28> The XML is better because when the data types directly relate to tag names it is simple to understand, read, and write, process, and there are tons of XML libraries in every language that do object-xml serialization automatically. With JSON, since there are no types, you must manually write your own data- object serialization and embed the type system right into the data structure itself.

<comment><USER15> It sounds like that might be better for a statically-typed language where you might need specific types in the data file. But I would argue that not only is it overkill in a dynamically-typed language, it's bad. We're talking about data here. There's no reason to couple it to data types in your code.

Plus, serialization to JSON in a dynamically-typed language is pretty much automagic compared to what you have to do with XML.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> In various conversations on the internet, starting with comp.text.sgml where XML was born in the 1990s, I have seen many signs that someone hopes or expects some of the immense richness in meaning that humans assign to words and other symbols to be carried along by the XML.

In other words, I've seen many special cases of the mistaken belief that programmers of today can do things that only researchers of the future wielding human-level AI will be able to do -- and that just _has_ to cause grief if those hopes and expectations inform IT decisions.

</comment><comment><USER31> I am a huge JSON fan, but I have still managed to find a few cases where I can make use of XML - the mixed-mode situations the author describes.

To generalize my viewpoint: XML is a good way to mix data and data processing, or mash up multiple DSLs in polyglot fashion. When stream-parsed, one can imagine great use-cases of XML, where an early node adds context, references and functionality for other data later in the document. But it sucks for plain old standalone-structured data, which is the kind of data we usually like to _store_.

</comment><comment><USER32> I think they shouldn't be mixed. JSON has its strong attributes as also does XML. I started working with XML on 1999 and started doing AJAX style web applications on that time using XML/XSL and Internet Explorer XMLHttpRequest. So now we have JSON, good, excellent addition. Is fast and simple to implement.

But to deprecate XML, I don't think so. Imagine just an EDIFACT document in JSON?

</comment><comment><USER33> I find XML to be too heavy and complicated for an interchange format.

Quote: "any damn fool could write a better data interchange format than XML"

<comment><USER18> There are hilariously terrible protocol designers out there, and too often nobody with taste manages to stop them. The EDI standards are often cited as examples of how much worse than XML it could get.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDIFACT#Example>

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> an example would be useful

</comment><comment><USER35> one good property of xml is that it's also a database. it can be queried once inside, say, postgresql's xml type.

json lacks that level of support from mainstream relational databases, which makes it a waste of time for certain use-cases.

<comment><USER13> <http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/JSON_datatype_GSoC_2010>

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> XML just gives me a headache.

I just like to point out that there was a time before XML. Fixed width formats are still very common when working with mainframe systems. Surprisingly, they aren't actually that bad to work with.

</comment><comment><USER37> I agree XML has it's uses, but I would go for JSON first, XML somewhere after JSON. Any day.

I still love JSON, <http://ilovejson.com> for it's readability and simplicity.

</comment><comment><USER38> I remember a while ago I read a submission on HN (or reddit?) talking that a founder of jabber protocol is ditching XML for something new. Anyone remember?

</comment><comment> b-man How about SXML?

<http://okmij.org/ftp/Scheme/SXML.html>

</comment><comment><USER39> FWIW, if you change "unstructured" to "semi-structured" then Norm's argument works much better.</comment>


No alcohol safe to drink, global study confirms - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/health-45283401 <comment><USER2> > "Given the pleasure presumably associated with moderate drinking, claiming > there is no 'safe' level does not seem an argument for abstention," he said.

> "There is no safe level of driving, but the government does not recommend > that people avoid driving."

> "Come to think of it, there is no safe level of living, but nobody would > recommend abstention."

Sounds like a smart man. Just because it isn't safe doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. Just do it with caution.</comment>


The World Famous staff on Chromebook: No deal - <AUTHOR> http://www.scroogled.com/chromebook <comment><USER2> What the _fuck_ is wrong with Microsoft's marketing departments?

I'm to understand that Pawn Shops won't exchange the used Chromebook you bought for your mom but then decided to, what, _steal back_ so you could put it in hock in order to scrape together enough cash to get a bus to Hollywood where you'll wait tables for six years whilst failing audition after audition before finally being shat out the butt end of the porn industry?

I bet the Chromebook doesn't even make people dance in board meetings like the Surface apparently does.

<comment><USER3> The ad says she got it "as a gift _from_ my mom", but your point still stands.

<comment><USER2> Ah. She kind of swallowed the "from." Thought she said "for my mom."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products." Steve Jobs

<comment><USER5> I wouldn't quote Jobs in scenarios like this, given that he pulled a pretty similar thing with the whole Flash thing: a misinformation campaing with the sole purpose of attacking the competition with fallacies and sketchy arguments.

<comment><USER6> He was right about Flash--Adobe never did get it running well on mobile devices, despite trying very hard to do so on Android.

<comment><USER7> Flash runs reasonably well on Android considering development for it stopped at v11.1.

The bigger problem for Flash on Android is the vast amount of content that expects mouse interactions. Small click areas and hover events are nearly impossible to interact with on a phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Has there ever been such a low ball PR campaign by such a large company? It's seriously hard to think of any major company that's come out with such sleazy tactics as this against a direct competitor. Can you ever imagine Google or Apple running direct to consumer ads referring to Microsoft as "Microshaft" or some other slogan? Even on Reddit, things such as "M$" usually result in a torrent of down votes.

It's a fascinating strategy, and I'm kind of scared what it will mean if it works: can you imagine an all out war with every company doing this? I hope Google has the self control and patience not to return fire.

<comment><USER9> Apple had a whole TV campaign with Justin Long mocking Microsoft. It was pretty successful I recall.

<comment><USER10> I tend to agree with you, but there are some differences:

A) Most of the "Mac vs PC" ads focused on showcasing ways Apple products were superior to Microsoft ones [1]. This isn't universally true though [2]. Regardless, that strategy is better than showing people break dance with your tablets.

B) The "Scroogled" campaign has a different, more aggressive tone to it. The whimsical background music in the Apple ads don't come across as forcefully as the term "Scroogled" does. I suspect this tone is more off-putting.

[1] See some of the ads here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5z0Ia5jDt4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5z0Ia5jDt4) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DWLyrljLDk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DWLyrljLDk)

<comment><USER11> What about the "Internet Exploder"(that term is true). Microsoft has taken it's fare share of insulting and I don't believe calling things "Scroogled" made by Google are far from the truth. It is funny because it is true, they are using some great coding, marketing and anything else under the sun to screw us or at least the competition (we as consumers will pay soon enough). We all know this. They have great products, but that is NOT a typical laptop, it is a glorified Search Engine. I personally have insulted Microsoft products a lot in my time, but you have to admit, they are getting scroogled by many of these hyped up minimalist products, that do not offer half of what a PC, MAC or *nix (Ubuntu/Mint) can give you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> [http://www.scroogled.com/Home](http://www.scroogled.com/Home) says "stop Google reading your email". The same page links to [http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-live/microsoft- se...](http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-live/microsoft-services- agreement), which says, in part:

 _we may occasionally use automated means to isolate information from email, chats, or photos in order to help detect and protect against spam and malware, or to improve the services with new features that makes them easier to use. When processing your content, Microsoft takes steps to help preserve your privacy._

That document links to [http://privacy.microsoft.com/en- us/default.mspx](http://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/default.mspx), which says:

 _We use the information we collect to provide the services you request. Our services may include the display of personalized content and advertising._

Pot. Kettle. Black.

<comment><USER13> > Pot. Kettle. Black.

My favorite variation of that is, "Pot, meet Kettle."

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm pretty sure the Scroogled campaign is really just brilliant marketing orchestrated by Google to make Microsoft look bad.

<comment><USER4> No, in that case scroogled.com would require a Google+ account.

<comment><USER14> ha, good one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> They just don't Get It. I'm typing this on a Chromebook right now - the 14" HP one. It's cheap, it's light, it's pleasant to use. That's the value prop. Microsoft claims you can get the same with Windows, so the very first thing I did was check the specs and reviews for the models they tout. Are they really that comparable?

* Approximately same price, same screen size and resolution, same processor and memory.

* Four pounds vs. three. Oops, not so light any more.

* Battery life (according to reviews) is around _three hours_ , vs. this Chromebook going all day.

* Typical Windows suspend/resume times, vs. true instant-on for the Chromebook. It's actually disconcerting to have everything _right there_ before I've even sat back on the sofa.

* Typical Windows upgrade/maintenance cycle (and malware), vs. no worries on the Chromebook.

I have other laptops that I use when I need to do more serious work. One of them even runs Windows, though mostly as a host for a Linux VM. But _at this price point_ there's nothing running Windows that can match the overall Chromebook experience. Until there is, sleazy marketing stunts like this only make it obvious that they're desperate.

<comment><USER16> > (and malware)

Has this really been a problem since XP SP2? Maybe I haven't been using my windows machine enough, but I honestly can't remember having any malware issues in quite a few years.

<comment><USER17> That really depends on what version of windows was out when you grew out of your early teens. It is still around, absolutely, but I feel like the typical hn reader browses wisely enough to never encounter it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Just a heads up:

Google is basically subsidizing Chromebooks at this point. An Acer C720 costs as much as a _Kindle_ and is very close to some sort of price floor ($199), yet it comes with $120 worth of Drive storage (100GB @ $5 x 24 months) and some other stuff.

You can blow away ChromeOS and use these as a regular PC laptop. 1/5 the price of an 11" Macbook Air yet comparable in many ways. I feel like they are giving them away to buy market share.

<comment><USER19> > 1/5 the price of an 11" Macbook Air yet comparable in many ways.

Comparable in some ways, yeah, but from the specs, it looks to me like there are more differences than similarities: the C270 is a bit thicker and heavier, the CPU is way slower, you get 16GB of storage instead of 128GB, 2GB of RAM instead of 4GB, the display is lackluster (according to reviews), the camera is lower resolution, there's no keyboard backlight... and so on.

That said, it's still an incredible value for the money.

<comment><USER20> > the display is lackluster

This is putting it _very_ nicely. It has low contrast, and really poor viewing angles in terms of legibility and color. It's plenty bright enough though. Now if only I could get f.lux on it...

<comment><USER21> Have you starred this issue? [https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=217173](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=217173)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> As a marketing person this makes me cringe for my industry, expecially in the tech world where we are not always the most popular department. Microsoft should be able to attract great marketing talent so I don't understand why they keep putting out this quality of advertising.

Clearly the ad budget is there to have options and talented people work on their briefs. Having a dig at competitors is fine now and again. I once did very cheap video that poked fun at Google that went a little viral/popular but it was done in fun, as much mocking ourself, not like this. And I cant believe one marketing team in MS has produced this steady stream of flops over the years. It makes me wonder what environment they have that creates this output.

A year or so ago I considered writing to them looking for work as I feel they are in a great position to stop being the bad guys and let other companies take that mantle. The need to be brave and approach the market in an open honest format. On top of which they often have good tech that doesn't get explained correctly and falls by the wayside. But doing marketing like this, they'd be better doing nothing.

</comment><comment><USER23> Pawn Broker: Moral Bankruptcy

Reality TV Star: Moral Bankruptcy

Microsoft Shill: Moral Bankruptcy

In hockey, that's called a hat trick.

</comment><comment><USER24> I got to Scroogled.com and thought it was some anti-google site cobbled together by a cranky blogger out looking for some corporate interest representing 'the man' to pick on. I can't believe it was assembled by the marketing department of one of the most recognizable brands in the world.

I think the actual ad is at least a bit clever, but this 'scroogled!' catchword and in particular this absurd website they came up with just makes the whole thing nauseating.

<comment><USER25> > I got to Scroogled.com and thought it was some anti-google site cobbled > together by a cranky blogger out looking for some corporate interest > representing 'the man' to pick on.

Funny you should say that ... There used to be a site called scroogle.org which was kind of like that, allowing "anonymous" searches by scraping Google while advertising gold and libertarianism on the side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Whoever greenlighted this needs to be made to jump around yelling 'developers!' for an hour as punishment. It's woeful and tacky.

</comment><comment><USER27> One of their "Chromebook Can'ts" is called Document Incompatibility [1]. It's definitely Google's fault that Microsoft uses a proprietary format to lock-out everyone else.

[1]: [http://www.scroogled.com/chromebook/OSCants](http://www.scroogled.com/chromebook/OSCants)

<comment><USER28> OpenXML is a proprietary format?

That seems like a stretch to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I guess Microsoft hired one of the folks who wrote Sarah Palin's talking points. 'Not a real PC' ? What is a 'real' PC?

Most of those 'negative' things could be said of an iPad.

Screw... pled?

and a majority of those things would be true for the Microsoft Surface RT device as well.

Screwcrowsoft.

<comment><USER30> Scrapple your iPad and buy a Surface at these now Microsoft-ic prices.

<comment><USER29> Good idea, except I don't have an iPad.

:-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This reminds me of last year when Microsoft tried to get #DroidRage trending on Twitter, and large part of the community responded with #WindowsRage[1]. I hope offensive advertising campaigns like this one continue to work against them in some way.

I have no issues with Microsoft products - it is purely this kind of advertising is that makes me anti-Microsoft. The whole Scroogled campaign is an embarrassment.

[1][http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/6/3734852/twitter- droidrage-...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/6/3734852/twitter-droidrage- windowsrage-windows-phone-microsoft)

</comment><comment><USER32> Microsoft are doing great work elsewhere, why tarnish it with this campaign?

</comment><comment><USER33> That's almost as bad as the political attack ads I see these days...

I'm surprised they didn't mention Larry Page's former friends or love interests.

That is absolutely disgusting, Microsoft.

I gladly typed this on my arch linux laptop.

</comment><comment><USER34> Christ, that is sad. It's just sad.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is going to backfire.

All it will take is one Kickstarter campaign to fund an anti-Microsoft ad (and isn't _that_ a tempting target), and a site to aggregate all the entries. The media will do the rest..

I'd _bet_ they would get professional entries from major advertising houses, just because of the media exposure it would be bound to get.

</comment><comment> chestnut-tree This is a terrible campaign as many have pointed out and makes Microsoft come across as a little hysterical and rabid (not to mention a tad hypocritical).

Just to be clear, I have no love for either Microsoft or Google. But the irony is that many of the points that Microsoft are trying to put across about ChromeOS are actually legitimate concerns for many users.

For example, you cannot print in ChromeOS when offline and only a limited number of printers are available through Google's cloud print service.

Offline mode is important to many users who may have patchy or non-existent internet access at times.

Apps that run in the browser are still limited compared to their desktop equivalents. This isn't an issue for everyone, but what Microsoft fails to persuade in its copy is how much more capable desktop apps are. And maybe for some users they would be happier with the desktop equivalent rather than the limited web version. (They could have demonstrated this easily by showing some simple but attractive documents or tasks that are impossible to recreate in Google's web apps).

And then, of course, there are the privacy implications of signing into ChromeOS to do anything. Just what does Google track and record? Do they record every print job you send through it's cloud printing service? Do they track your activity in their web apps? I know many users simply don't care, but for me the privacy implications are horrendous. If you're always signed into ChromeOS, Google knows how often you're online, where you browse, how often you use certain apps - basically everything you do on the Chromebook.

Of course, Microsoft are no better on the privacy front, but they don't have the online reach of Google. Windows 8.1 requires signing into the OS with an email address (but it can be bypassed quite easily), and when you're using a desktop app you're not generally being tracked. In other words, you can have pretty good privacy on a desktop system. Can the same be said for ChromeOS?

</comment><comment><USER35> I make my living on MS products and while they are better at things lately, this is just an embarrassment.

<comment><USER36> "lately" ? They've been around for what, 30 years ? Do you know what kind of shame it is to only "lately" get better at things ? They should be prosecuted for fraud for selling an OS that just gets rooted, 10 years strong, by a few lines of malformed javascript.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is quite common in markets where there are only two or three competitors: instead of focusing on showing why your product is good, you simply bash the competition.

Pepsi vs Coca-Cola is a great example. Elections in countries with only two parties is another perfect example of this.

It's been happening for a while and it will continue, since it yields results:

The ones educated enough limit themselves to a "sigh. seriously?" and keep on using what they know it's best for them.

Then there's the target market: the ignorant masses, who will fall to these strategies, prove them useful and validate them as good marketing strategies.

The funny thing here is that there's a similiar thread every 24 hours and people always react like this is something new, and like the company in turn is super evil for doing it.

</comment><comment><USER37> I've had a chromebook (the Samsung model) for the past 4 months I've been travelling around the world. It has proved to be a practical, light (1 kg) and powerful little computer. Using crouton, I've installed lubuntu so that I can have Linux and ChromeOS running at the same time. I've been able to work coding Clojure, installed GIMP and Inkscape, watched movies and I could have installed Open Office but I didn't really seem to need it. Maybe the chromebook hasn't found a market yet, but I think it's the most practical computer I've owned. I think I would prefer a Macbook Air but the price is 4+ times the one for a Chromebook, which might well be worth it but I don't have the money for now :P.

</comment><comment><USER38> Cringeworthy, and about a year and a half too late to even seize on pop- culture relevance.

</comment><comment><USER39> I am generally positive towards Microsoft, but this scroogled crap just makes me cringe.

</comment><comment><USER40> I find it interesting that Microsoft claims in this clip that a laptop isn't a laptop if it doesn't run Apple iTunes.

Personally, I can't stand iTunes on Windows, but hey, clearly Microsoft knows what consumers want.

</comment><comment><USER41> -1 for the Pawn Stars folks. That's a real bummer.

<comment><USER42> Best I can do is -.75. I'm not trying to beat you up I think it's a really fair deal. In recent years the market has taken a major hit and -.75 is really the best I can do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Can't help chuckling as I happily read this on an HP Chromebook 11 because I'm taking a break after the Windows machine died during Windows update.

At least I have a machine to work on while I spend the next six hours reinstalling and patching Windows.

</comment><comment><USER44> Serious question - do you need a google+ account for a chromebook?

</comment><comment><USER45> Perhaps they can use the money to buy acting lessons

</comment><comment><USER46> They are very tacky, the same way I felt about Apples "Im a PC" ads.

</comment><comment><USER47> how is this getting upvoted? A stupid ad, made to look like it's not an ad, WTF? This needs to get off HN and find its home on Fark or something.

</comment><comment><USER48> Hello Microsoft... From Acer C710 Chromebook....

</comment><comment><USER49> But can it play Battletoads?

</comment><comment><USER50> Tacky, much?</comment>


Five Years of Building Instagram - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/backchannel/war-stories-3696d00207ff <comment><USER2> > Given that neither of us had deep infrastructure experience, we had to soak > up as much knowledge as we could.

Learning by doing. This is why I love the time in which we live. If you decide or need to learn something new, you can get started on the path to picking it up quickly. No trips to the library; just plug in your query to your favorite search engine and you're on your way.</comment>


Show HN: Use image hosts for general file hosting - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/notuncivil/host-as-image

<comment><USER2> I don't understand the need for this. Hosting 10 GB costs $1 per month on Rackspace Cloud Files and even less on Amazon S3.

Secondly, if you use a paid service you don't need to run your files through scripts to upload them, and you don't risk the files being taken down by the image host admins.

Also, while hosting non-image files on image file hosts technically might not be illegal, it still essentially is abusing a free service. Do you really want to be that guy?

<comment><USER3> >I don't understand the need for this.

The killer app for this would likely be data leaks and piracy.

>while hosting non-image files on image file hosts technically might not be illegal, it still essentially is abusing a free service

Those _are_ image files, just not ones meant to be directly viewed by humans. I wonder how many image hosts explicitly forbid such images from being hosted in their ToS. If the idea behind this spreads I would expect many of them to do so.

Edit: IANAL, but I wonder if it would be hard to define legally what exactly those images are. If you say they're images not meant for human viewing, well, what about a photograph of a printed QR code? It need not _only_ show a QR code; it can be an otherwise aesthetically pleasing picture that also features a QR code somewhere. Same with this encoding technology: what happens if instead of dedicating the whole picture to the encoded binary data you embed it in a larger artistic image?

<comment><USER4> You're thinking of _steganography_ [1], hiding the _existence_ of information in an image (or other medium).

I'm aware of at least one case where Russian spies were known to have actually passed messages this way: "they embedded coded texts in ordinary-looking images posted on the Internet," according to the NYT [2].

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography>

[2] [http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects...](http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/r/russian_spy_ring_2010/index.html)

<comment><USER3> >You're thinking of steganography

Not quite. Having a QR code featured in a photograph isn't steganography since the existence of information is hardly hidden at all. Rather than hiding the information's existence what I'm considering here is how you could make it legally difficult to unequivocally prohibit spreading information that's in plain sight (think "Free Speech Flag" [1]).

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Free-speech-flag.svg>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is utterly trivial.

The s2png program can be written in about 5 minutes by anyone with a good image library in any language. You didn't even write the program yourself, you linked to a Sourceforge project, labeled version 0.01, that hasn't been touched in seven years.

And I don't understand: What exactly is the value-add of your Github project? It 7zips the files and handles splitting and merging of large files?

And wait...you actually had to use Wine for this? Try apt-cache search libgd and you'll find the (single!) dependency is already packaged (at least on Linux Mint 14, which I presume means these packages also exist on most Ubuntu- or Debian-like systems):

        sudo apt-get install libgd2-xpm-dev libgd2-xpm

<comment><AUTHOR> >It 7zips the files and handles splitting and merging of large files?

Yes. It also handles the uploading and the downloading.

>Try apt-cache search libgd and you'll find the (single!) dependency is already packaged

If you actually try to compile and run s2png you'll see that it segfaults when you compile it in Ubuntu 12.10 (so also in Linux Mint 14) and 12.04, probably because it was written with libgd1 in mind. I had a few people try it and it only compiled to a usable binary in Fedora.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I peeked at the code behind s2png, and this doesn't do what you might think from the title. It just copies the data byte-for-byte into the pixels of a PNG image, and when you want the original file back, you need to use the same utility to decode the image.

Still a fun little project though.

</comment><comment><USER6> Wont it cause an error for being an invalid image? Have you tested this?

<comment><USER7> I think the method behind s2png is converting binary data to RGB(A) pixel data, so the result should be a perfectly valid (albeit weird-looking) image. As a bonus, you automatically gain Zlib compression of your data through this method.</comment></comment>


FDA approves breakthrough medical device to treat ADHD in children - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fda-approves-breakthrough-adhd-medical-device-to-treat-children/ <comment><USER2> > The device is about the size of a cellphone and has a wire that attaches to > a patch. You place that patch on the child's forehead and they wear it > overnight...it seems to be on par with non stimulant medications

First, no way I'm getting my kid to put a patch on her head and keep it there overnight.

Second, non stimulant medications just don't work that well for me and I doubt they'd work well with my kids. (I have ADHD too.)</comment>