Help Me HN: I am getting overwhelmed - <AUTHOR> I am 19, student and javascript developer, I am currently the only one working on a small developer tool that has become quite popular but I am getting overwhelmed and having hard time managing everything. All the bug reports, support tickets, continuing my bachelors, managing sales and all has become a chore, I am currently not sure about solid business strategy and I am only earning around 4-5K per month so I can not hire anyone to work with me. Any advice would be helpful.<p>Sorry for my terrible english. <comment><USER2> 4-5k a month is more than enough to make a hire. Think of it this way:

What is your time worth to you?

Would you rather work your ass off and make 5k, or have a sane workload, make 2k for a while, which then rises as you have adequate internal infrastructure to support growing sales and users?

It sounds like you have a good thing going, and I'd strongly recommend at looking to get another pair of hands involved - or close it down.

<comment><USER3> As he apologised for his English (which as an aside is perfectly acceptable) I'd assume that figure isn't in dollars or pound sterling. Possibly euros but that again would seem to be enough to get someone else involved in the project.

<comment><USER4> As we know there not just 3 currencies in the world. It could be Yen, Rupee or Ugandan shilling or any one of the 180 currencies.

<comment><USER2> Sure, but why provide the information if it's in Triganic Pu - I think it's fair to assume he meant USD, unless otherwise indicated, otherwise it's just an utterly contextless number.

<comment><USER5> Why would that be safe to assume? Most of us don't use use usd, just a small, vocal minority.

<comment><USER2> Look, dickbrain, I don't use USD either, but this isn't a political argument, it's just that when people give an amount without a currency they typically mean USD.

The OP could clarify this but has chosen not to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think you have a problem most people your age would love to have. That being said, I get it. It's easy to get burnt out - especially when you're trying to continue your education at the same time. If I were in your position, I would definitely look to my fellow classmates or any friends I had that would be a good fit. I'd probably bring on one more person (maybe two, depending on what they could help me with) and split everything evenly between the two of us. If the tool you've created is that popular, everyone working on it will be in a great position down the road. You'll either be able to turn it into a full- time business, or leverage the crap out of it when you go out looking for a full-time position elsewhere (companies will love hearing about it). Either way, you've been hit with a blessing - I wouldn't give up on it just because it got too popular for you to handle. That's a great thing. Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER7> You have two effective options unless you can make school & the project management more efficient.

1) Put the project on hold until you're done with school

2) Put school on hold until you're done with the project or can afford to hire people to deal with it while you're in school.

Unfortunately, there's only so much time in a day and you need to sleep some. Priorities suck.

</comment><comment><USER8> What a great problem to have.

I can't tell you much about managing the coding part, but I've got experience getting solid support systems up and running for developer-type products. Feel free to drop me an email if you'd like to bounce ideas back and forth on what you're doing and what might help make the load more manageable. I may be able to help with some of it too for cheap/free time permitting. Good luck either way!

</comment><comment><USER9> Have you talked to your school about what you are doing? They may be able to 1) give you credit for what you are doing and /or 2) assign other students to help you for class credit.

Also count your blessings, there are a lot of people your age who would love to have your problem.

<comment><USER10> or, sadly, with some schools 3) decide they own the copyright on your work while you are a student

best wish and good luck

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> focus on getting your bachelors, continue that for sure.

If 4-5k per month is in dollars I would look in to hiring a part time person to help out with bug reports/support tickets to free up some of your time. Finding someone good might be tough, but look first in your circle of friends. I expect a fellow student would be looking for some extra spending money. Test out a few of your friends for the position.

Other than that it sounds like you've built a great tool that's making good revenue.

[http://startupsfortherestofus.com](http://startupsfortherestofus.com) has some great information that can help you I would start listening to those especially the ones relating to the problems you're going through right now.

Last thought is maybe relaxing some, setup an autoresponder to bug reports and tickets that you have received their bug/request and allow yourself some time on the non-critical ones.

Good luck, sounds like you're on the right track.

</comment><comment><USER12> Going to disagree with a lot of people, but drop out of school for a semester. I did that and I don't regret it in the least. School was a large waste of time and it took me a long time to see that. YMMV.

<comment><USER13> Most hiring managers I have worked with completely ignore schoolwork. It often ends up being a poor predictor of actual working ability.

<comment><USER14> I can't imagine why any hiring person would look at schoolwork. But, the value of a college diploma is not to have schoolwork to show potential employers.

The value of a diploma is that it shows potential employers that that you can put your mind to something and see it through to completion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I agree with some of the other commenters that a hire sounds like the way to go. Unless something is lost in translation, such as the currency, 4-5K is plenty. If not a developer, then someone in sales, which can potentially be a commission based system.

Also, think about switching to ramen for a few months. Thats the part of startup life that you tend to not see in the movies and magazines. Pre-seed tends to involve ramen. Lots and lots of ramen.

<comment><USER16> _think about switching to ramen_

Though it's temporary, and somewhat romanticized (I still eat ramen), that's a terrible suggestion health-wise :-) I think dry beans + crock pot + rice is a better, low cost diet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Across the board, you need to prioritize.

Do you need to "manage sales", if your current userbase is already overhwelming? Or can you find someone to to that work for you, and be paid on commission only?

Can you outsource at least the intial response to support tickets, so you only need to worry about 2nd tier responses?

Are you prioritizing new coding toward reducing support tickets?

Is there any automation that can be done to streamline your daily tasks, either for school or for this work?

Frankly, can you slack off on your schoolwork a bit? Unless you plan on grad school, your final GPA at college is not really all that important. (Within reason -- drop from a 3.5 to a 3.0 is OK, but from a 3.5 to a 2.0 might be a mistake.)

Can you reduce your monthly personal expenses, to help afford to hire someone? Are these other ways to simplify your personal life?

In general, you need to performance tune your life. Fix all the small stuff before worrying about major changes.

</comment><comment><USER18> Bring in a partner. If you find the right partner and give them 25-50% of the business (or earn-in over time/vesting) then your pie can grow. I have free time if it's valuable, a lot of other people would love to work 5-10 hours/week for 1-3k/month, especially if they knew it could grow!

</comment><comment><USER19> Recruit someone, on a contracting basis, for $15 / hour, to do support responses. Pay that person 70 or 80 hours per month. Adjust the hourly as desirable to get the kind of person you need.

Have that person also build a very comprehensive FAQ, if one does not exist. They can also process any time consuming sales routines for you (refunds, billing questions, whatever). If they're any good at basic sales, you can give them a commission for selling which might get their income up to near full- time after a while.

Begin slightly restricting what kind of support tickets you'll handle (specifically begin to make it abundantly clear to users that if their question is in the FAQ, all you're going to get is pointed to the FAQ; ratchet that up to whatever degree is necessary).

<comment><USER20> I usually charge £400-£450 per day but I could work for you at a lower rate for a short time, £15-£20/hour for 2-3 weeks while I am waiting for my next contract to start.

<comment><USER21> So market is slow for everyone ha? =)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Could you find a friend that would be willing to split time with you? Not an employee but a partner. Sure, you will lose half the profit (make sure you put it in writing that the situation is temporary), but it is better than being completely overwhelmed.

</comment><comment><USER23> Small add here, but if you do decide to recruit some help, I might consider starting with your users. By "developer tool", I presume you mean a tool for developers. That means that you have a talented user base. Might not be a bad idea to post a message to your forum, or post a notification to your app, or email your users. I wouldn't phrase it as "I'm overwhelmed", but saying something like "This is a powerful tool supported by a single CS student, and I'd love to bring in some help to advance development and/or respond to user needs. Does anyone want to contribute to the project?"

Keep in mind that if this is your first time managing others, it will require some up-front investment of time. Managing people is difficult, but not impossible to become very good at. My advice for you at the outset is to be really clear and consistent about your goals, and to be open and honest with your community about the experiment you're undergoing. They'll give you a lot of credit for doing this as a student, and I think you'll find they have more patience than you think.

If stress becomes a problem, consider speaking with a professional about that (e.g., through your University), or practicing meditation and mindfulness. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER24> Have you ever considered providing someone a stake at your product / service? That way, people whom you would get will have in their mind that the success of your product / service will ultimately be good for their bottom line. Be transparent that you would not be able to provide a decent salary. But be sure that once the business model is thriving and growing, reward those people who've helped you and stuck with you during the the trying times.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER25> Take a year out of studying, work on business. If it goes well, great, if not, go back to studies.

Ask yourself, why are you studying? what's it for? A good job?. Why do you want a good job/career? for money? Well here you have an opportunity to skip the qualification step and get straight to the end goal.

I say go for it. You'll learn more about yourself and your worth in one year of business then you ever will studying.

</comment><comment><USER26> Do you have a forum for the users? The amount of help your users can provide to each other is massive.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I have a forum but can't reply often because I am busy working on coding part.

<comment><USER26> Do you direct users there for troubleshooting etc?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What I would do is make an investment in future time by spending time now: write the code to automate as much as possible. For example, why are you actually managing sales?

Prioritize until things calm down. Are you accepting feature requests? Stop doing that until you nail down a stable release.

Don't have a heart attack. Stress can seriously kill you. If it becomes too much start considering exit strategies (yes, that means selling it). 4-5K a month isn't much, but it's impressive as I'm guessing you aren't even marketing it - you could make a nice bit of cash by making it someone else's problem.

Your happiness and health comes first.

</comment><comment><USER28> 4-5 K is more than enough to hire someone to help with support part-time, via something like oDesk. As a bonus, you could probably hire someone who speaks English as their native language.

</comment><comment><USER29> You need to clarify the 4-5K per month, its being assumed it's US Dollars.

If it were Rupees or Yen then I'd get your point and suggest you sell the revenue source. But do it in a way that works as a double win. Find a development shop that will take you on part time and buy the tool. You'll get a lump sum and a steady job, they'll get a proven money maker and motivated employee.

This is one of those nice problems to have.

In the mean time, get community member(s) to be a bug triager and forum voice. Communicate through them.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's USD.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> 4K is enough to hire someone. So you're a student and you're working on this side project. There are many others like you who don't want to work full time but have some time left while studying. Maybe you should get another student or basically any person who fits your needs and wants to work 15-20h a week? You you don't have to pay them as much and you get more time for the core programming and studying.

By the way: What tool are you working on?

</comment><comment><USER31> Can you hire a VA to handle your most basic support/ reply? bug capture, reproducing, basic troubleshooting, email etc?

Episode 196- how to use a va in your startup [http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-196](http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-196)

</comment><comment><USER32> That's a solid position to be in. I can understand it can become overwhelming. I don't think dropping school is a very good option, unless you think you've learned as much as you can. I'd love to figure out how to help out. Contact me (email is in my profile) and maybe I can help in some way.

</comment><comment><USER33> Gauge your level of passion in the product. If you really care about it and find it rewarding, by all means leave school and hire a 2nd. If not, possibly hire a second anyway and leave the day-to-day to them while you focus on school or turn the project over to one of your users--sell it.

</comment><comment><USER34> Not sure how the pricing of your service works, but try increasing the price. If you do it carefully you might reduce the number of customers (and therefore bug reports) and not change your take home.

</comment><comment><USER35> OP, if you are serious about needing help, I'd love to offer my services for free. I am the same age as you and would love to take this project on to explore and develop myself in this aspect.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot everyone for your suggestions, I feel great being part of this great community. I apologize of not disclosing the currency upfront (you know my english ). It's USD. Thanks again.

</comment><comment><USER36> Don't hire anyone, find a partner and share responsibilities. That's how business grows. You should be happy, you have a very good income, especially considering your age.

</comment><comment><USER37> Why not list the name of the tool here. Maybe someone will offer to help you out for free, or in exchange for equity if the product has the potential to generate revenue.

</comment><comment><USER38> What's the tool/project? If it's popular and you're struggling, a lot of folks may not know about it and may step up to help out.

</comment><comment><USER39> 1\. Put the studies on suspend for a while

2\. Try to get a developer who can support you, should not be to hard

3\. Try to scale your business

Where are you based?

</comment><comment><USER40> im interested in assisting with a project like this, currently studying as a CS major as well, I just also need an excuse to quit my job and focus on studying/working on projects that interest me more. PM me if you are interested!

</comment><comment><USER41> Hire remote assistent in India or Philipines, offer good pay. Quit school for semester.

</comment><comment><USER42> Figure out your schedule. Tons of students have full time jobs. Prioritize your time.

</comment><comment><USER43> You could get a fulltime dev from Europe at 2k/mo if the workload is too much.

</comment><comment><USER44> Go to the thefoundation.com or hire a co-founder on assembly.com. Hope that helps.

</comment><comment><USER45> Hey, I can help on the communication part and managing the forum. Rest assured, I won't charge anything. Let me know your email, I will get in touch.

</comment><comment><USER46> What tool is this???

And your English is fine!

</comment><comment><USER47> Asking for help is a good way to start. HN can sometimes be very harsh or critical, so I hope that you are happy with your responses.

If you are 19 then you are probably worried about disappointing users, parents, and other people. You need to understand something important, which I will give to you in a story. Think like you're a professional chef, and your kitchen gets overwhelmed: I will tell you, your customers will wait an hour for their food to come out, if that food is good. Obviously you don't want to make them wait an hour, obviously they will be impatiently staring at their watches, but all of that will be forgiven if what they're waiting for is good. Similarly, a good product will be much easier to sell, when you have time for it. So: if you start thinking of yourself as an adult and a professional, do not be afraid of making your clients wait. You have professional courtesy: they want your product, and they will wait, within reason.

If you want, universities make it very easy to take a year away from your studies: it's called a "leave of absence" in English. You can thus spend a year focusing on your tool without abandoning your studies, if you want.

If you really want to hire another developer, you may be able to borrow money, especially since you've proven that you're making money. Check out what banks will offer you in terms of loans.

You can do both at once, but you must be single-minded. If you want some inspiration, read the Water Book of the Book of Five Rings by Musashi -- it's freely available as public domain online. Pay attention to what he says about _striking_ ( _cutting_ , in many translations): "When you wield your sword, your intent must be to strike the enemy. As you strike him your grip must remain, your hands must not flinch. Even if you parry the enemy's sword, only change your thumb and forefinger a little. Most importantly, you must hold the sword intent on striking the enemy. Your grip is the same in theory and practice: grip the sword as if you want to kill a man... Striking and slashing are two different things. However you strike, the act is decisive and resolute in your heart. Slashing is just touching the enemy. Even when slashing with vigor, even when the enemy dies, it is merely slashing. When you strike, your heart is resolved: you must learn to appreciate the difference. If you do slash the enemy's hands or legs, follow it up with a powerful strike. Slashing at heart is no different from touching with a sword. One who understands cannot tell the difference."

Similarly, if you want to make a dent in your work, you have to put your whole heart into the strike. You have to have the intent to destroy some bug, to get rid of some task, to finish some homework. It is very different from just investigative coding and meandering: it is singleminded and heartfelt. It comes with a certain joy/euphoria when it is over and you have made the change -- and this is addictive.

If you approach both your studies and your tool with singleminded intensity, you can do both at once. If you do not approach them this way, then work will pile up on one of them until you are overwhelmed by numbers.

If you already _are_ overwhelmed by the amount of work, do not fear. Most people, especially teenagers, underestimate how much power patience and persistence have. A tiny river over time erodes a canyon; a sink will still drain, no matter the water flowing into it, if you can free up whatever is clogging it. Actually, this is the deep truth about how magic works: You say "how could that magician have known I would randomly draw the four of clubs," not letting yourself think that he or she might have simply taken 50 decks of cards, pulled out the four of clubs from all of them, and put them together into one deck, so that you had no choice. If someone can't see your patient actions, the results will be indistinguishable from magic.

</comment><comment><USER48> have you considered hiring an intern?

</comment><comment><USER49> Humblebrag, sorry.</comment>


Trapped in his body for 12 years, a man breaks free (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/09/376084137/trapped-in-his-body-for-12-years-a-man-breaks-free <comment><USER2> While it's not really comparable to this case I spent months in a coma. My wife tells me she was there 24/7 for the first week then hours after work every day. I'm told my family visited everyday as they had worked out a schedule. Every one them interacted with me or read to me or whatever. I remember nothing of it. I feel it did nothing for my recovery but who can say.

I remember only a very long nightmare I couldn't wake from. One bad dream after another. Normally I can wake myself from those types of dreams but this was permanent. Later I had to go to therapy to try to rid myself from those memories or at least learn to live with them. The therapist told me there was no way to tell if I had that experience during coma or during the time the - just short of od doses - drugs were withdrawn.

My waking experience was like swimming up to the surface of a clear blue ocean from very deep below. I remember hearing a tiny voice asking me to squeeze a finger and made a very small movement and remember a lot of shouting and stuff. Wife tells me everyone who visited me did the same thing every day but this one day I moved when she went through the ritual. When I became fully awake after all the drugs had worn off I realized I could barely speak and couldn't move my arms or legs. Months of rehab to follow. I still rage at movies and TV where a coma victim wakes and it's like nothing ever happened.

This was 10 years ago and as you can see it still effects me deeply.

<comment><USER3> I'm extremely curious: after you woke up from the coma, did the frequency/"intensity" of the dreams change at all?

<comment><USER2> For the first week or 10 days I really couldn't tell the difference between awake or asleep. My wife tells me I frequently asked her why she had abandoned me in Alaska. I figure that was because it was pretty cold in the room. During that time all the dreams I remember concerned not being able to move. After that period I guess my body had flushed out all the drugs and a normal sleep / dream cycle returned and the nightmares pretty much went away.

Two things seem to be permanent though. I used to be very heat sensitive, preferring the winter to summer etc. Now it's the opposite. The other thing is I developed blood flow problems to both of my hips which the doctors tell me is probably due to the massive amounts of testosterone I was administered while in the coma. I think it's a fair trade off for a second chance.

<comment><USER4> Out of curiosity, why were you given testosterone?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I listened to the whole podcast about Martin.

His family never gave up on him.

He was non-responsive for more than 11 years.

For most of that time, he could hear and understand.

Because he couldn't communicate, his life was a joyless experience.

Sometimes his carers were careless with him, hurting him. He couldn't respond. One nurse abused him. He couldn't respond.

After many years, his mother told him she wished he would die.

He learned how to disengage from his thoughts. Just go to black. He became good at that. It was joyless. "A very dark place to find yourself because in a sense you are allowing yourself to vanish."

After years in this very dark place, one day he decided he'd had enough.

He began to re-engage with his thoughts. Over months, he learned to tell the time by tracking the angle of the sun's rays in the room over the day.

Still, he couldn't move his body.

They'd sit him in front of the TV to watch Barney. He hated Barney.

One day he heard Whitney Houston on the radio, singing The Greatest Love of All. When she sang "No matter what they take from me, they can't take away my dig-ni-ty" he thought to himself, "Wanna bet?"

He embraced darkness and endured his own thoughts, moving through them, gaining self-understanding.

Then, after a while, something changed and he could blink his eyes. I don't know how long that took, or what the moment was like when he first made contact again. The podcast doesn't detail that moment. It just skips to when he could squeeze hands.

His mother bought him a joystick. It took him a year to learn how to use it.

He asked for coffee and forged ahead. Within two years he got a job with the government. A nurse told him she had a problem with her computer. He fixed the computer. Soon, he quit his job and started a web design company. He met a woman over Skype. They hit it off and got married when he was 32 years old.

His face hurts from smiling so much.

<comment><USER6> My grandfather was on life support for less than a year, and they were talking about unplugging him.

Then he recovered and lived another ~10 years.

<comment><USER7> Was it in the US, what year and cost?

<comment><USER6> It was in the U.S., less than 20 but more than 10 years ago.

I don't know anything about the cost.

<comment><USER8> It's possible the previous commenter's "coAst" got autocorrected to "cost".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is an interesting story, but unfortunately the article is a lengthy advertisement for a larger program that does not appear to be available in text form:

> To hear how Martin returned to life, listen to Invisibilia, NPR's newest > program. The program debuts this weekend on many public radio stations, and > the podcast is available for download at NPR.org and on iTunes.

Edit, because this is still floating near the top: It's an _older_ article, and has been released in text transcript form after all:

[https://www.npr.org/2015/01/09/375928581/locked- man](https://www.npr.org/2015/01/09/375928581/locked-man)

<comment><USER10> I think the story is told better by Pistorius himself - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WD1IX1AFRZg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WD1IX1AFRZg)

<comment><USER11> Thank you very much for pointing this out.

This video is one of those things you could watch every year for a number of different reasons -- all of them important ones.

<comment><USER10> I have a list of inspirational videos that I rewatch periodically - here's another one I watch every year or two: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24493750](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24493750)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> That line about the fathers routine really got to me. I find it a constant challenge to do the daily routine with my completely healthy children. This father got up at 5am, did the morning routine, then did the evening routine, and it seemed to imply that he would also wake up every two hours during the night to turn Martin. He did this for years despite being told that he was really just waiting for his son to die. The amount of love and compassion this guy showed for his kid is something I strive for every day with my own children, but not sure I always achieve.

<comment><USER13> That you worry about it means you are a great parent.

I wish my father had put an ounce of thought into whether he was a good father.

<comment><USER14> The world is full of care and kindness: it's about being open to it. When we're disappointed by people close to us, it's important to remember that love is something than originates within, not without.

<comment><USER15> Is this from [http://wisdomofchopra.com/](http://wisdomofchopra.com/)? /s

But seriously, can you explain what you mean by this?

<comment><USER16> My guess would be that if someone doesn't love you even if you wish very much they would, then thinking about that person is just prolonging your suffering. Just stop. There are seven billion other people on this planet, pretty sure many of them are nice.

But why would any of those many strangers love specifically you? One possible reason is that people reciprocate love. So your best strategy is to become a loving person yourself. And then, one of the people you meet, will return your feelings.

And in the meanwhile, being a loving person already feels better than being focused on your own misery, so this is a bonus. Actually, it would probably be better to simply focus on being a loving person and not worry too much about when people start to return your love. Just make sure you meet many people; and if the strategy doesn't work for a while, change your environment.

With so many good people out there, don't waste your time trying to squeeze some love out of the bad ones. The worst thing you can do to yourself is to remain in a bubble with the bad people, because then it seems like the entire universe is bad. (Oh, and if someone says "I may seem like a bad person to you, but trust me that the others are even worse", they are lying; don't argue with them, but go outside and try for yourself.)

<comment><USER17> > But why would any of those many strangers love specifically you? One > possible reason is that people reciprocate love. So your best strategy is to > become a loving person yourself. And then, one of the people you meet, will > return your feelings.

Is the purpose of love to be reciprocated? Is it worth loving if it isn't?

Genuinely curious about your thoughts, and not trolling, but this prompted some interesting questions in my head and I was curious what you think.

<comment><USER16> Humans have needs, and ignoring them probably wouldn't work well in long run, no matter how noble it might sound in abstract. If your needs are constantly frustrated, you will likely lose the motivation to do the noble things anyway.

Then again, there are differences among people with regards to their needs. Like, an introverted person would probably be satisfied with a smaller number of friends; but would probably still want more than zero.

To me it seems like it is important that some people reciprocate your feelings, and then it is not important that others don't. Like, if you love 20 people and 3 of them love you back, it's okay, but if you love 20 people and nobody loves you back, it's not okay. Of course the numbers are made up, may be different for different people, and it also matters a lot who loves you back and who doesn't, how specifically that love manifests, etc.

I would make an analogy that if you are a cook, and you prepare meals for hundreds of people, and then you eat one meal yourself, that can make you fully satisfied. If you cannot eat, you will starve, and it doesn't make it any different for you whether you have prepared meals for other people or you didn't. So while we can make a true argument that feeding hundreds of other people is a great thing, that one meal that goes back to the cook is also important.

Shortly, unreciprocated love can also make you happy, assuming that it is not all that you have. Feeling secure about being loved gives you the privilege that you can now be generous about the love you give, because you don't need anything more in return, and if something comes anyway, it's a nice bonus. Telling people who are currently not loved about how "loving others is better than being loved" is a bit like telling starving people to stop focusing on their hunger so much... the main message it delivers is that you actually don't give a fuck about their sufering.

(Then, there are also people who never feel loved enough, because their mental problems prevent them from having healthy relationships, and trying to give them more love doesn't improve things at all, it just all vanishes in a black hole... It's complicated.)

OK, now I am curious about your thoughts.

<comment><USER17> Sorry for the delayed response--not out of unwillingness, but busy-ness.

Your original response made me think of a few questions, but I think in the end it boiled down to asking what is the goal or purpose of love? Does it dovetail with a goal of maximizing happiness? (It seems to me no--that love can sometimes work towards our personal happiness and other times against it.)

We often use the word love in a multi-faceted way that would be better served by multiple words. The ancient Greeks had (at least?) four words for love that were roughly differentiated by familial love, friendship love, erotic love, and an unconditional love. They varied, I suppose, in goal, expectation, depth or quality of feeling, et c.

It seems like this last love was the sort that the father shows to his son. There is no real hope of reciprocation, nor yet a sort of surface-level happiness—indeed, it would be a very unhappy business for the most part. And yes, I think to your point there is probably some sustaining relationships there, too. At the same time, I expect there was pressure against him: remove life support, your kid's a vegetable, no hope here, et c. This isn't a love- nurturing environment exactly.

I guess what I'd say is that at least in some cases love seems to work against our personal best interest, not for it, and that our happiness sometimes realigns along different boundaries. I.e., that happiness is perhaps more flexible than we might assume at first, and love perhaps a little less flexible?

Again, just some ponderables. Thanks for the comment.

<comment><USER16> > We often use the word love in a multi-faceted way that would be better > served by multiple words.

It would be nice if we just stopped using "love" as an emphasis for "enjoy". ("I love hamburgers" = I enjoy the taste of hamburgers.)

Getting this one out of the way, it seems to me that the common component in other forms of love is something like "your well-being makes me happy".

Mixing these two creates the greatest confusion, when "I love you" can mean "I wish that you be well" or "I enjoy being with you". Especially because these two do NOT have to be mutually exclusive: you can wish someone to be well AND enjoy their presence and interaction with you at the same time. But you can also enjoy interaction with someone, without caring about their well-being at all. This gives us three combinations of what one could mean by "loving" someone.

And the confusion goes like this: First, it takes some maturity to notice that some people enjoy the presence of other people (because they can get fun or sex or services or resources from them), but don't actually care about those people's well-being at all. (In other words, they "love" other people in exactly the same way they "love" their hamburgers.)

Then, the person who noticed this often over-reacts, and decides that if those two things are not exactly the same, then they certainly must be the exact opposites! It cannot be real love, if you derive any benefit whatsoever from the other person. If you are sexually attracted to them, it cannot be the true love! If you like it when they do something for you, or if they make you laugh and you enjoy that, it cannot be true love either! And even if you do something for them completely with no thought of reward, and you really get nothing in return, but then you suddenly notice that thinking about their happiness makes YOU happy... maybe deep down you were a horrible selfish monster all the time; you only pretended to love other people, but actually did this all only to give YOURSELF the happy feeling. Shame on you!

I wish this was a strawman, but see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism_(ethics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism_\(ethics\)) \-- a few famous philosophers actually supported this pathological, poisonous idea. It can seriously hurt emotionally fragile people when you expose them to this insanity pretending to be deep wisdom.

"Wishing other people to be well" is a thing; "enjoying interaction with other people" is another thing; and when those two things happen to go together, there is nothing wrong with that. Nothing prevents you from genuinely loving people whose presence also makes you happy in other ways. It's actually easier than way, because one kind of positive emotion prepares the way for other kinds.

> four words for love that were roughly differentiated by familial love, > friendship love, erotic love, and an unconditional love.

I'd say the last one is the unreciprocated love, and the first three include some kind of expectation (different kinds). Yes, even a father loving his son expects something in return; at the very least, that the son will not knowingly try to hurt him. But usually there is also some expectation of politeness, of possible cooperation in future when the son grows up, maybe of care for the father when he gets old.

Enough theory. I guess the practical advice is to love others, love yourself, and don't feel confused or guilty when the love is reciprocated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is anybody else reminded of the character from the song "One"[1] by Metallica, and the movie/novel "Johnny Got His Gun"[2]? Granted, that was different in that the situation resulted from a traumatic injury and the man lost his limbs. But the idea of being "trapped in your body" \- unable to communicate, aware of your own existence, but basically nothing else - seems similar.

        Darkness imprisoning me
        All that I see
        Absolute horror
        I cannot live
        I cannot die
        Trapped in myself
        Body my holding cell

I remember being terrified of this idea the first time I saw the video all those years ago. I guess I still am. I just had no idea - until now - that a situation like this could result from much of anything _other_ than a major traumatic injury.

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM8bTdBs- cw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM8bTdBs-cw)

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

<comment> V-2 I also recall a science fiction take on the theme. It was a short story by Stanisław Lem. There's this mad scientist named Decantor, who killed / immortalized his wife by copying her mind onto an indestructible crystal.

The consciousness persists and the mind keeps on thinking, and it can't die - it's virtually immortal. That's the extra twist here. So, it's capable of surviving for millions of years, likely outliving all life on the planet etc., but at the same time deprived of all senses and cut off from the external world. Even an escape into insanity is impossible (since, I assume, there's no biochemistry that could get out of balance).

The horrified narrator considers it as the worst torment imaginable, whereas Decantor can't see it, as immortality - he points out - has always been humanity's most profound longing.

<comment><USER19> Stephen King also wrote the short scifi story The Jaunt which is similar.

Basically a scientist makes a stargate type of device. Nonliving things that go through end up fine but living things like mice would either immediately just die or go absolute insane after exiting.

Long story short, the trip is instantaneous. But because they're traveling outside of our normal space time is perceived differently by conciousnes minds. So what seems like a split second to us on the outside things seem almost endless on the inside. Like anywhere from millions of years to the age of the universe. Endless time with nothing but their own thoughts. No body and just white light. Humans they test it out on either also die or end up going all Event Horizon when they exit.

They figured out a work around by knocking people out before putting then through.

<comment><USER20> Iirc ot's easy to find online and pretty short. The ending is pretty haunting, so I recommend everyone read it if it sounds interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If curious, see HN discussion from the time of publication:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8864791](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8864791)

From a comment at the top of that thread:

 _Here 's a link to the full transcript: [http://www.npr.org/2015/01/09/375928124/dark- thoughts](http://www.npr.org/2015/01/09/375928124/dark-thoughts) and [http://www.npr.org/2015/01/09/375928581/locked-in- man](http://www.npr.org/2015/01/09/375928581/locked-in-man)_

and,

 _There is video on YouTube where he is interviewed, he still can 't speak though but other than that he appears fine. Well, maybe not great he is in a wheelchair too. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBFntsxK- vc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBFntsxK-vc)_

<comment><USER22> Many people can be great in wheelchairs, too :) [https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27554754](https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27554754)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I clicked this link and was redirect to the 'NPR Choice page'.

The options I had were:

      1. agree to some lenghty tracking and ad terms, or;
      2. decline and visit the plain text site.

I'm happy with option 2, so I decline, but I'm redirect to the home page.

There's no way to visit this article by substituting 'www.' for 'text.' in the URL, instead you get:

        > NPR.org Text-Only (go to NPR.org graphical version)
        > We're sorry, the page you requested is unavailable. Please go to our Contact page for more information.

So if you had this problem too, see the archive.org version of this article below:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20200914175634/https://www.npr.o...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200914175634/https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2015/01/09/376084137/trapped-in-his-body-for-12-years-a-man-breaks-free)

<comment><USER24> The URL scheme on text.npr.org is different from www. Text.npr.org just uses an "sId" to identify stories but not the headline text like the www site. You can find the sId in the www url immediately after the date.

[https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=376084137](https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=376084137)

[https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2015/01/09/3760841...](https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2015/01/09/376084137/trapped-in-his-body-for-12-years-a-man-breaks-free)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> On a side note, I really like the theory behing NPR's plain text option, but it's only occasionally that it directs me to a plain text version of the actual story. Often, as with this, it redirects me to the homepage. Does anyone know the reason for this? Does the author have to explicitly publish a text-only version?

<comment><USER26> I have javascript disabled, and the regular page loads immediately for me with all of the story shown.

<comment><USER27> The only question, how do you have the energy to browse the web without javascript, when every site uses it for something.

<comment><USER28> I imagine he either enables once in a while using NoScript, or just bails out. I do not block Javascript for the time being, but nowadays I bail out much more often, because most of what I see on the web, including on HN, is trash or sightly higher then that, but still inconsequential.

Try sometimes to use links -g and you'll see how web can feel like browsing local resources, if you have a decent connection. Some sites will not work, but it kinda works as quality filter. If only links would support tabbed browsing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > Joan vividly remembers looking at Martin one day and saying: " 'I hope you > die.' I know that's a horrible thing to say," she says now. "I just wanted > some sort of relief."

> And she didn't think her son was there to hear it.

> But he was.

Daaaaamn.

</comment><comment><USER30> This story is so encouraging & human compared to rest of the news we read/hear everyday. Thanks for sharing!

<comment><USER31> I guess I'm a glass-half-full type of person after all, then! This story is horrifying to me. Apparently it's possible to be indefinitely kept in what I can only imagine must be sheer hell, with no way out, and fully aware you're probably looking at decades of suffering. This man lucked out. How many others are supposedly vegetative but actually aware right now?

I suppose the odds are it's not a large number, but still. Time to find out what kind of paperwork I need to file to stop this happening to me.

<comment><USER32> Hmm, glass half empty you mean? I mean yes, it sounds absolutely horrible. On the other hand, he recovered, married, has a child and is living "the dream" (independent consultant doing web/etc). He's also probably _really_ good at meditation. :)

<comment><USER30> I said this story is encouraging. For all of us who go through daily chores could feel better knowing there is worst that could happen to us and we are lucky to live through with our basic necessities fulfilled. This kind of stories should make us empathetic/(more human) to others knowing what we have.

<comment><USER33> I don't know if I agree with that outlook but I can understand the people that like the it could be worse mentality to keep them going. I don't think I'm any less empathetic for not having your outlook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It feels weird that no one realized they could hook him up to one of those EEG devices that would allow him to control a computer with his brain activity. That way he could have a very narrow, but nevertheless a channel through which to communicate with the outside world.

<comment><USER35> In 1991 - 1994? The technology _might_ have existed in some cutting-edge research labs, but certainly not in a day care center in South Africa.

<comment><USER34> Sure, not then, but by 2005 that technology must've already been available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> > "I cannot even express to you how much I hated Barney," Martin says.

> Since all the world thought Martin was a vegetable, at the special care > center where he spent his days he was often in front of the TV watching > reruns of the children's cartoon hour after hour, day after day.

For a young adult with an intact mind... this sounds like hell on Earth.

</comment><comment><USER37> I love NPR's "visit plain text" option and I wish more news sites would do that

<comment><USER38> It's a very nice feature indeed! Only problem is that it redirects you back to the homepage, and it's been like this since the day I first found out about it. So I guess it's on purpose, to make some fewer people use that feature.

<comment><USER37> Weird, it works fine for me (it redirects me to the article)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> There is evidence that psychedelics put people in higher forms of consciousness. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6475593/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6475593/) Here is a few stories about Ambien, a sleeping pill with psychedelic qualities by those who took it. [https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9215-sleeping- pill-ma...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9215-sleeping-pill-may- rouse-coma-patients/) [https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/magazine/can-ambien- wake-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/magazine/can-ambien-wake- minimally-conscious.html) They also found music helps those with dementia.

</comment><comment><USER40> Over the last decade there's been progress in communicating with people who are in a vegetative state by getting them to think of distinct things like swimming or playing tennis to provide a Yes/No response.

[https://montilab.psych.ucla.edu/wp- content/uploads/sites/49/...](https://montilab.psych.ucla.edu/wp- content/uploads/sites/49/2015/11/Naci_etal_2012_BCI_DOC.pdf)

> "Scott, are you in any pain? Do any of your body parts hurt right now? > Please imagine playing tennis if the answer is no."

[https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/sep/05/how-science- fou...](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/sep/05/how-science-found-a-way- to-help-coma-patients-communicate)

</comment><comment><USER41> That podcast episode explains something from the 11:20 minutes mark to 11:45 that I did not get from TFA. Namely, who is this Barney that he hated? In the featured article they only wrote:

> But occasionally there were things that elicited thoughts he could not > ignore.

> Like Barney.

> "I cannot even express to you how much I hated Barney," Martin says.

> Since all the world thought Martin was a vegetable, at the special care > center where he spent his days he was often in front of the TV watching > reruns of the children's cartoon hour after hour, day after day.

But in the podcast they use the melody from the Barney & Friends kids TV show and now it makes sense. Before listening to to the podcast, after reading the article I was like "but who is Barney?"

<comment><USER42> Oh. My. God. I am _OLD_.

Hating Barney was like a rite of passage for our generation. He coagulated out of the primordial sludge about the time our kids were getting old enough to want to see a purple dinosaur sing "I Love You".

Over

and over

and over again.

I liked the Barney mod for Doom though: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsvdMzfFNdQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsvdMzfFNdQ)

<comment><USER17> > I liked the Barney mod for Doom though: > [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsvdMzfFNdQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsvdMzfFNdQ)

Barney Splat[1] was a door game for BBSs back in the day.

[1] [https://www.mobygames.com/game/barneysplat](https://www.mobygames.com/game/barneysplat)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> This story hit me hard. I read his book today, its a deeply emotional and worthwhile story.

Some stray phrases in the book led me to search some details of South African history that I didn't have a strong grasp on.

Somehow the various internet wide analytics decided this meant I should see this video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guLmA6dWKes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guLmA6dWKes)

It probably requires some context (/research) to understand the context on this. (I certainly did). But I found the implications of this video utterly fascinating. There are a really quite large number of layers to analyze in this.

</comment><comment><USER44> A similar story I saw a few months back on reddit is of Jacob Hendel, who also suffered from locked-in syndrome due to Acute Toxic Progressive Stage 4 Leukoencephalopathy.

He's got a website www.jhaendelrecovery.com and youtube [https://www.youtube.com/c/JacobHaendelRecoveryChannel/](https://www.youtube.com/c/JacobHaendelRecoveryChannel/).

It's super inspiring and he regularly provides updates on youtube on his recovery progress.

</comment><comment><USER45> The most poignant and human part of his retelling, was the stranger's smile while he was waiting in the car. That is what made him start moving away from the darkness.

It's such a seemingly banal action, but so fundamentally human, in which we acknowledge one-another's humanity, and show appreciation for it and ours.

Smile folks. It doesn't cost anything, and it just might be the spark needed to light someone's life.

</comment><comment><USER46> Interesting that I don't know of this story. For those that want some quick gratification: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SbK6oDBeco](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SbK6oDBeco).

As far as I know, this story is not as well known in South Africa as one would perhaps expect.

</comment><comment><USER47> Yeah, I'm still going to sign a DNR order so that if I'm in this situation, that I can have an escape. It's not worth 12 years of being locked in to your body to have a tiny chance of escape. I am so afraid of a situation like this happening to me.

<comment><USER48> Quite telling that some people see this as a triumph of humanity and your reaction and some others is to make sure you can you end your life if in a similar situation. Martin of course never had that choice to make.

But I think the real point of his story is his message about how important it is to communicate with others, how the depth and content of that communication with others is who we really are. I think a man who was alone with his thoughts for 15 years is very qualified to give us that advice.

<comment><USER49> This story would have motivated me to make sure the proper people have the proper documents to ensure my plug gets pulled after a couple days. But I already took care of that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Reading this makes me feel really uncomfortable. I can't imagine being him. This is literally nightmare fuel, except it is real. I hope human technology can soon evolve to a point where things like this won't happen.

</comment><comment><USER51> Imagine the day we get to have head transplant and people will be able to leave their disabled body? (I know, this case is the opposite). An Italian doctor wants to try it, but many others are criticizing the procedure.

<comment><USER39> Can you tell me more please? I think they're thinking of doing that with stem cell body creation

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Tedx talks of him giving talk [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WD1IX1AFRZg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WD1IX1AFRZg)

</comment><comment><USER53> What's with the 'a sentence a paragraph' style, though? It was a BBC thing before, but I think even they didn't put three words in a separate paragraph.

</comment><comment><USER54> They don't write stories about the people who don't wake up. Americans prefer sentimentality and inspiration I guess.

<comment><USER28> Are there more cultures that don't prefer them?

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I read the his book "Ghost Boy" many years ago. It's a great read; a heavy and hard one, but I recommend it.

</comment><comment><USER56> Bonafide divine miracle, if you ask me.

<comment><USER57> Just because we can't explain fully the phenomenon doesn't mean it's "magics". This guy's case needs to be studied in order to try to find out what made him get better and see if the same conditions would be applicable to other patients suffering from the same ills. Our bodies and our minds are resilient in many ways, we need to find how to enable or accelerate that process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> (2015)

This got a lot of attention on release. If it sounds familiar, you probably already read it.

<comment><USER59> Thanks for that. I was reading it and feeling a really weird "No this did actually happen" deja vu until you pointed out the date.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Wow. Never gave up!

</comment><comment><USER61> This condition could be a great use case for Neural Link. To allow the patient to send text messages and control devices.

<comment><USER62> Ah, yet another Elon Musk invention. Will it work as well as the SpeceX rockets or cave submarine and the promised level 5 self-driving..

<comment><USER63> I don't know if you noticed, but the SpaceX rockets work extremely well.

<comment><USER64> But the cave submarine and the self driving do not. GP forgot to add a question mark.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Amiga Graphics Archive - <AUTHOR> http://amiga.lychesis.net/ <comment><USER2> That was a nice trip down memory lane...

I had to save for a whole year to get my Amiga 500, I bought it for 1 reason and one reason only - Falcon. I loved that game, and soon got into Stealth Fighter F-19. I still have fond memories of me and my best friend playing F-19 together - one pilot, one navigator. I swear to god, mission planning was more fun than actually flying the mission.

I kind of miss the days when you needed a keyboard overlay to play a game, ( [http://oagd.net/file/8358c6a052c1734431c0f16cb4fa8efd41daf37...](http://oagd.net/file/8358c6a052c1734431c0f16cb4fa8efd41daf37d/Keyboard_overlay.png) )- and the later Falcon games had one of the biggest manuals I've ever seen.

Makes me think I should take a look at the current state of combat flight sims.

Any good recommendations that would work on a linux system? (it's a decent laptop, 16GB RAM and Nvidia card with 2GB)

<comment><USER3> Even before that, F/A-18 Interceptor!

<comment><USER4> Loved that game. Flying under the Golden Gate bridge! F-19 was great as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Jay Miner[1] built some pretty awesome chipsets. I learned about computers on the Atari 400 and lusted after the Amiga. About the time I could afford it, he was gone and Commodore lasted not much longer.

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

</comment><comment><USER6> What - no Ulitma IV screenshots? After moving over from the C64 version, I loved the Amiga graphics - plus who doesn't love a "Please Insert Thy Play Disk" prompt.

[https://youtu.be/wxxo-G-WnIU?t=250](https://youtu.be/wxxo-G-WnIU?t=250)

<comment><USER7> That video is not representative of anything - it's played in an emulator with some weird scaling going on (maybe hq2x).

And the prettiest ultima iv was of course on the fm towns: [http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/u5lazarus/images/d/d8/Ul...](http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/u5lazarus/images/d/d8/UltimaIV- FM-TOWNS%281%29.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20091207205923)

<comment><USER6> Thanks - I knew it looked better. I was afraid my memory was failing me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ah Deluxe Paint, still the pixel art app that I judge all others by.

<comment><USER9> When I needed to create some pixel art for my last game, Antigen, I used DPaint 4 running on an emulator. I still hit DPaint keyboard shortcuts by accident in Photoshop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can anyone recommend a good Amiga emulator? I would love to play Faery Tale Adventure again.

<comment><AUTHOR> For Mac/Linux: FS-UAE [http://fs-uae.net/](http://fs-uae.net/)

For Windows: WinUAE [http://www.winuae.net/](http://www.winuae.net/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Love it, i played so many of these games :) Also once made a ball bounce around the screen using amiga basic. Guess that was my first attempt at programming :D Thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER12> Ah, that AMOS screenshot brings back memories.

<comment><USER13> And Blitz Basic was a blast. It supported embedded assembler, which was hugely fun and educational to mess around with.

<comment><USER9> I loved Blitz Basic. It was great how it gave you access to the whole Amiga. You could use the built-in commands, write inline assembly, and easily use operating system functions/structures. Modern "game BASICs", even the latest iterations of Blitz are limited sandboxes in comparison.

Mainstream Amiga programming in C or assembly language was very expensive compared to today. As a teen I couldn't afford Devpac, or the Hardware Reference Manual, but Blitz gave me what I needed to make real progress as a programmer. One of my friends even got texture-mapped 3d going, although it wasn't quick!

<comment><USER14> I've recently got back into messing around with Amigas and Blitz is still fun, though a little weird for someone used to C#.

It's amazing how much more accessible all the documentation and tools are now. HTML versions of the RKMs are available on the web and for C there's a cross- compiling toolchain available on github ([https://github.com/cahirwpz/amigaos- cross-toolchain](https://github.com/cahirwpz/amigaos-cross-toolchain))</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Wind Rises:Miyazaki's take on Jet Design & Experimental Painting - <AUTHOR> http://iwatchstuff.com/2013/08/english-subbed-the-wind-rises-trailer-mi.php spoiler: Jiro Horikoshi's life during the war has some parallels with another famous weapon developer. <comment><AUTHOR> [spoiler alert] Jiro Horikoshi's life has certain parallels with that of the other (more famous) (weapon) developer, Feynman.</comment>


Want to know the difference between a CTO and a VP Engineering? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/04/19/want-to-know-the-difference-between-a-cto-and-a-vp-engineering/

<comment><USER2> It's more of a personality trait that a "role". A typical CTO in a small organization is less of a people person and more of a technologist, the VPE is more of a business process person (it needs to ship on tuesday, don't forget the customer). As organizations upside into big entities that role separation still exists, where the VPE is very much management (performance reviews, schedules, budgets) and the CTO is now more front facing but still more focused on the technologies/industry than the process.

<comment><USER3> I agree that it is a personality trait, for sure. But those traits mean that over time the "roles" become separate. I'm defining role as the person's job function.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems to me that a good CTO can cross disciplines and understand technology really well, but also understand the user of the product really well regardless of the domain.

For example, if I make medical software, I should understand all of the technology I can use to build the software, but I should really have a solid understanding of how doctors operate and how my software can do something for them at a practical level. The CTO also acts as an interface between wildly different parts of an organization. Again on this example, I may have a doctor on staff who tests our software and helps set requirements, but is not part of engineering. The CTO should be able to capture those needs and build them into the final product vision the VPE will then set about building.

A VPE on the other hand should understand technology really well, but also understand all of the management considerations necessary to actually "build" the thing. They may not know about being a doctor, but they can build a smart work schedule that will make sure I get my product out the door on time and within budget.

The third role he had there, PM, should know how to administer the plan the VPE setup and keep all the ducks in a row. In a large organization, several PMs will report status of various projects to the VPE and make sure that the plan set forth by the VPE is operating.

</comment><comment><USER5> In my experience in a startup people have no labels/titles associated to them. They are the directors and they have to take out the trash too. Tthe author claims he has much experience in the "startup organization domain" but he misses the point of hard, smart work on turning an idea into business regardless of the labels each member has.

<comment><USER3> You couldn't be further off base. I've built two companies from scratch and I did all of the "cleaning the trash" work as did all my team members.

Nevertheless, it takes different skill types to build a technology organization. Some will be super technical while some will be more process driven. Some will be inspired to work on all of the latest technologies but hate doing garden-variety feature coding or bug fixing while some people are great utility players.

My post was silent on the issue of whether people with "titles" should do grunt work. And to imply that I said otherwise is a misrepresentation of the post.

<comment><USER6> I'll add that titles are useful in terms of making sure every essential function is covered. No reason early on that one person can't have more than one title, and as noted everyone should also have the title of "janitor", I've always put is as "No one should be too proud to sweep the floor".

<comment><USER3> I'm with ya.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Demystifying Adventures of the Amazing Randi - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfweekly.com/2009-08-26/news/the-demystifying-adventures-of-the-amazing-randi/

<comment><USER2> "Randi, of course, has offered to test Geller and to give him $1 million if he can prove his claims. But Geller has always declined, saying anything that would quiet skeptics — and by extension make him less controversial — would hurt his career. "If someone wants to stay in the business of being a psychic," he says, "they should simply ignore the skeptics.""

That's got to be the most obnoxious bullshit I ever read. _Ever_.

<comment><USER3> This is actually the best quote I've heard from Geller, he speaks very frankly that the publicity has, in the long run, helped more than hurt him. Normally he just pretends to be serious about being a psychic and, true to his statement here, ignores skeptics. It looked like Randi had shut down his career for a while but I understand he's recently had quite a healthy resurgence in popularity.

The maddening thing is, the way that the MSM covers these types of things, I really used to believe all of this stuff as a kid. I really thought that Geller had people bending spoons all over the UK when I was like 11. Randi sometimes comes across as harsh and I don't necessarily buy the rosy picture that is painted of him by his fans, but I think his work and that of others like him is incredibly important. I'm sorry to hear of his cancer, he will be missed when he passes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow, I hadn't heard that Randi has cancer. I can't seem to find any more detail than is in the article, but this is obviously very bad news.

<comment><USER4> The reddit comments for this article pointed to a letter Randi wrote regarding his cancer. It's light on details, but hopeful. [http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/jref- news/663-announceme...](http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/jref- news/663-announcement-about-upcoming-meetings.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I saw this amazing mentalist on 60 Minutes. Marc Paul is a UK-based mentalist who does not claim to be a mind reader or psychic, and he can do extraordinary things with his people-reading skills.

In his book, he said from a very early age he was able to correctly intuit if and _where_ his family was going to go on vacation.

"However, there is one spectator left who he can't quite read..

The performer then claims that he suspected something like this would happen, and out of a pocket he removes a sealed envelope that he opens and reads."

"There was nothing too difficult to do from a sleight point of view in his lecture notes, however to sell the effects as well as he does is a real art and it was fascinating to watch him at work.

I have outlined the effects he demonstrated below, but for me it wasn't the actual effects that was important last night, it was watching his presentation skills. His performance skills. In short it was watching his skills as one of the best mentalists."

<http://www.talkmagic.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=2903>

</comment><comment><USER6> Geller's probably right about the promotional aspect of skeptics.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure that he is. How many times are psychics booked on shows to prove that they are psychic? Instead, they appear on shows like Montel Williams to tell parents of missing children what has happened to their child. They get a lot of publicity without skeptics; skeptics appearing on such shows does convince a few people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm too ignorant to be skeptical.</comment>


Abolish cash? You'd be losing a crucial part of free society - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/11835603/Abolish-cash-Youd-be-losing-a-crucial-part-of-free-society.html

<comment><USER2> Freedom? It will be part of the past, if they don't erase the past.</comment>


HEIST: HTTP Encrypted Information Can Be Stolen Through TCP-Windows [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-16/materials/us-16-VanGoethem-HEIST-HTTP-Encrypted-Information-Can-Be-Stolen-Through-TCP-Windows-wp.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Seems to me same-site cookies would solve this problem.

[https://www.owasp.org/index.php/SameSite](https://www.owasp.org/index.php/SameSite)</comment>


Google: ustream.tv contains malware - <AUTHOR>

In Chrome, trying to visit ustream.tv gives a malware warning, saying "ustream.tv contains malware" <comment><USER2> Not for me. Better run a virus scan.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not alone, check out this search on Twitter: <https://twitter.com/#!/search/ustream%20malware>

Edit:

Better yet, this tweet from UStream on Twitter: <https://twitter.com/Ustream/status/212198100301918210>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Did you get there from a reddit livestream for wwdc? If so, it might be that specific link.</comment>


Tech's Next Gen: The Best and Brightest - <AUTHOR> http://images.businessweek.com/ss/07/03/0326_tech_entrepreneurs/index_01.htm?chan=home+page+slideshows <comment><AUTHOR> Check out who made #9.

Here's the full article: <http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2007/tc20070326_934874.htm></comment>


Bill Gates: We need global 'energy miracles' - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/02/12/bill.gates.clean.energy/index.html?hpt=Sbin

<comment><USER2> We don't need "miracles". We simply need steady investment and development. If you are going to depend upon the private sector for this, then you need a marketplace that has some predictability and consistency, so that investors can make some reasonable predictions (reasonable, not guaranteed) about risk and return.

I make the argument in such circumstances that THIS is what effective regulation is about, as much if not more than "fairness" for its own sake and adhering to existing laws. It creates enough stability and security for private investment to function. As some economists have noted, regulation is most effective not in micromanagement but in drawing the boundaries of the "box" within which private investors are free to compete -- on a "level playing field" -- to the best of their ability.

One reason that countries with greater energy taxes and/or subsidies are surpassing us in developing renewable energy technologies and marketplaces. The companies operating in those environments have enough predictability to build a working business model.

The U.S. has continued to benefit from a legacy of unparalleled innovation. How much longer will that continue in the U.S. without the economic support of a broader marketplace both to fund it and to drive the educational development of future generations? (Pure research rests on top of a lot of supporting social and economic infrastructure. The former is not sustainable without the latter.)</comment>


Was iOS 7 created in Microsoft Word? - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZp7BvQJnU8 here you can download the .docx file (you need Word 2013 to open it): http://www.upir.org/ <comment><USER2> Duplicate here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6588825](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6588825)</comment>


GitHub widget: show off your repos, with decriptions, in star order - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jawj/github-widget

<comment><AUTHOR> I made this little widget for use on my home page, where you can see it in action: <http://mackerron.com/webdev/></comment>


Percent of Facebook users could be fake - <AUTHOR> https://mashable.com/article/report-claims-half-facebook-maus-fake <comment><USER2> 50%? I've seen 2 copies of my account and my name is unique.

That would make it more like 66%</comment>


Why You Should Want to Pay for Software - <AUTHOR> http://bokardo.com/archives/why-you-should-want-to-pay-for-software-instagram-edition/ <comment><USER2> Except the mentioned are not software but services. I think that it is a bit more complicated than that. Consumers need some legal protection and the current EULA and TOS with - no rights for you sir, any, at all - should be sent into oblivion and declared void. Then we can talk about money.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't particularly want to pay for software, but I'm willing to (really, happy to) if it makes my service better, more reliable, etc.

I really don't care if instagram publishes all my photos for money as long as I can too.</comment>


GE's Culture Challenge After Welch and Immelt - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2015/01/ges-culture-challenge-after-welch-and-immelt

<comment><USER2> > _" At GE, we have stayed competitive for more than 130 years because of our > relentless quest for progress on all fronts, including culture."_

Does it count as a submarine [1] if it is obvious?

[1] [http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)</comment>


Were the Japanese Engineers Who Built Fukushima Incompetent? - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/07/24/987836/-Were-the-Japanese-Engineers-Who-Built-Fukushima-Incompetent?showAll=yes&via=blog_658234

<comment><USER2> To the best of my very limited knowledge of nuclear plant design - no. Insufficiently paranoid and not gifted with perfect knowledge of the future - maybe.

The facility was fairly hardened versus geology as it was. It's just that geology is as big as the planet while anything you can possibly build is taken from scraps laying around on a tiny surface layer. It can and will punch you in the face despite your best efforts to plan for it.

It was also built starting in 1967, so we are talking fairly old designs. Three mile island was 1968 and related to bad interface design. Chernobyl was 1970 and related to it being designed and built in the USSR. Modern designs are light-years ahead of these, there's just too much paranoia and FUD to get money to implement them.</comment>


Why Is So Much Reported Science Wrong, and What Can Fix That? - <AUTHOR> http://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/winter-2015-breaking-news/giving-credence-why-so-much-reported-science-wrong-and <comment><USER2> It seems to me that the problems with science as it is done today are open secrets, and can essentially be summarized as:

1: Publication pressure. There is too much emphasis on creating publications. The end result is that people rush out unfinished work, or end up diluting their findings by unnecessarily spreading them across several papers. People are also discouraged from undertaking projects that may take a long time to "pay off" with a publication.

2: Scientific networking. In scientific fields, people get to know each other, and those relationships still heavily influence the process. Fame and reputation matter when getting published, not to mention friendships with publishers or reviewers.

3: Bias towards excitement/positive results. This, I believe, is not entirely the fault of the scientific community. If left to their own devices, I think there would be plenty of scientists willing to double check old findings, or publish negative results. However, it's hard to convince people to pay you or employ you if your work is perceived as "boring," "negative," or as some sort of failure.

There are a handful of smaller issues (e.g. excessive emphasis on "impact factor") but I suspect that they are mostly symptoms of the above issues.

I've always believed that the whole "publication model of science" is due for review. It seems to be a product of the 18th century rather than something we'd decide was a good idea today. If we do it right, I feel like the positive results bias would immediately go away.

I don't think we can "fix" issue #2 in any really meaningful way. Even if you were to take people's names off of publications, they would still chat with each other at meetings or through collaborations. I think the best thing to do is not try to prevent people from influencing each other, but simply to make the whole process more transparent.

<comment><USER3> The problem is not the publication model, it is the incentive structure that encourages scientists to rush out publications without checking their data in enough detail, or in putting them under so much pressure to generate "exciting" results that they falsify the results.

I will share an anecdote about a paper I was involved in. The work was done in collaboration with another lab within my school. One of the results suggested that one of the instrument was out of alignment and possibly giving false results. I raised this with the head of the other lab and after speaking with his post doc he said that everything was fine. I asked to see the calibration data (there was none), but I was assured that everything was fine and they were going to submit it as it was. At that point I went thermonuclear and said if this paper was submitted without the dubious values being checked I would write to the journal asking for it to be withdrawn. This caused a huge ruckus within the school including visits from the head of school and the dean telling me I was being "unreasonable". I stood my ground and the post doc eventually ran the calibration experiments which showed the instrument was out of alignment and the results were wrong.

Of course this burned a lot of bridges for me and it would have been better for me to just shut up and let the paper go out wrong.

<comment><USER4> I'm glad you stood your ground. But what I don't get is the mindset of everyone who wanted to publish the potentially-faulty data. The moment anyone tries to build on the result, its faultiness will be known. Is that not more embarrassing?

<comment><USER3> The reason is pressure to get the papers out as fast as possible or else you won't get any more grants. It should be embarrassing to publish garbage, but for lots of people who have succeeded in the current system it appears not to be.

Everyone involved was rather sheepish afterwards except the post doc. He had felt much the same as me, but didn't feel he could raise the issue with his boss. Privately he was very grateful I had stood up to his boss, as he didn't feel he could do the same and was under enormous pressure to pump out the data. All round not good.

<comment><USER4> Sometimes I wonder if I'm in a bubble. My PI thanked me when I told him I had discovered that out our data was systematically biased and it would take weeks to correct the issue.

<comment><USER3> Yes most PI's are happy to avoid the embarrassment and only want to publish good data.

The problem is not that most scientists are not trying to do the right thing, but that they are under enormous pressure to pump out the results. It only takes a few falling to this pressure to destroy the public's faith in science - the consequence of this are catastrophic.

We must solve this problem or we will not have science.

<comment><USER5> I know very little about academia. But, in the context of today's world of information and collaboration, it always seems to me that it should be a better time than any to (A) have a better than publication and (B) put a lot more into reproducing results independently. I mean what is the whole publication, review, reproduction system if not an early system of crowdsourcing.

To take a simplistic example: a publication norm which includes instructions for reproduction, ideally requiring as little resources as possible.

<comment><USER4> Instructions for reproduction are mandatory already. That said, you probably can't pick up any paper and reproduce the experiments exactly without asking the authors a question or two, at least in biology.

Systems are getting increasingly complex as well. In my lab, it literally takes several weeks for people to learn how to do our assay, and that's with constant feedback from an experienced user. Every step is published but that still doesn't help when things don't go according to plan. Also, not every lab has the same equipment. Even if we provided free training, a lab would still need to drop $300k to get all the machines required, which are not common.

Not every result is worth reproducing either. If someone publishes a paper that shows several lines of evidence for the same thing and they've done all reasonable controls, and it doesn't disagree with any existing models, why would you reproduce that? Outside of deliberate fraud, it's a pretty solid bet that it's true, and you can save enormous amounts of time and money by proceeding to build off of it instead of reproducing it first. And that's really what it comes down to: no one's paying you to do this kind of work. Governments would have to fund it, because you're fundamentally asking for twice as much work to be done, which will cost twice as much money (and time).

But take heart: when someone DOES make an outrageous claim, it's very common for labs to try to reproduce it (or really, disprove it). See [1] and [2] for recent examples.

[1] "STAP stem cell controversy ends in suicide for Japanese scientist" [http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-stap- ste...](http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-stap-stem-cell- suicide-20140805-story.html) [2] "Water bears' genetic borrowing questioned" [https://www.sciencenews.org/article/water- bears%E2%80%99-gen...](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/water- bears%E2%80%99-genetic-borrowing-questioned)

<comment><USER3> If I was a fraud this is exactly what I would do. Take an existing paper and just make up the results that confirm the work with a slight twist to make it publishable. Rinse and repeat and nobody will ever catch you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes." \- Goodhart's Law

Awarding scientists for publishing works -- whether or not they've passed rigor -- is the mistake.

The monetary system for awarding grants is completely broken. Nobody wants to admit they have their hand in the cookie jar for fear of having the lid slammed down on their hand. Universities take a cut of the grant money to subsidize their staff payroll. Professors gain notoriety and a significant increase in income when their published work leads to being awarded a grant. Industry/NGOs have their own financial incentives to 'influence' scientific reporting that favors their own bias'. Nobody calls attention to the corruption because... Woohoo! Free money!

I find it _very_ difficult to trust any of the scientific reporting related to current affairs and/or politics. The incentives for 'bad actors' who commit intellectual dishonesty are too high.

</comment><comment><USER3> As with everything to do with smart people it is all about incentives. If you create a system where accuracy of results don't matter and where you must publish or die then don't be surprised if what you get are lots of crap publications with dubious or false results. Hoping for a different outcome without changing the incentives is fantasy thinking.

The positive is there is lots we could do to change the incentives, but there are some powerful forces benefiting from the current structure.

Edit. I should actual say what we could do. We need to focus on the incentives rather than the problem. Fix the incentives and the problem goes away on its own, focus on the problem and you just end up shifting it to somewhere else - the "squeezing on the balloon" effect.

The best solution in my opinion is to move from our crude "most publications = funding" model to a hurdle + lottery model. With this you have to publish enough to prove that you are capable of doing good research (the hurdle) and once you have done this you go into a lottery from which we pull out grant winners until we have used up all the funding available.

The reason this idea is not popular is it would not work in favour of the current grant winners.

<comment><USER7> Are you aware of any implementations of that lottery model in the wild?

<comment><USER3> No I am not. It gets brought up every so often as the most rational approach, but those who have climbed the greasy pole of the current system, and hence control it, are none to keen to change.

The usual argument against a lottery is it does not reward the best scientists and will give grants to third rate hacks. This is true, but it can be solved by having different lotteries with different thresholds. Publish one paper in the Journal of Useless & Pointless Results and you go into Pool A where you might have a 0.1% of getting a grant. Publish 20 articles in Nature and Science and you go into Pool H where you have a 75% chance. We would just need to be careful that we are not recreating the same perverse incentives that the current system encourages, but this is not insurmountable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am more cynical after seeing people I agree with cite tenuous studies as facts. All of social science is sketchy, especially studies with results that make you feel good. For example, my friend and I read an Economist article that said 10% of American doctors are Muslim. We could not verify the source, but people are going to believe it's true because it was in the Economist.

<comment><USER9> > All of social science is sketchy... We could not verify the source, but > people are going to believe it's true because it was in the Economist.

It seems like your real beef here is with _journalism_ (even the higher-than- average quality journalism that normally appears in the Economist). The fact that some news magazine doesn't include citations for claims in an article[1] has nothing to do with the sketchiness (or non-sketchiness) of "social science."

It is too bad though that the Economist doesn't provide citations for claims like this. Did they pull "10%" out of thin air? Are 10% of new medical doctorates currently earned by Muslims? Did they include all kinds of doctorates (PhD, etc) in the calculation? A simple link to the source for this number would clear that all up...

[1] [http://www.economist.com/news/united- states/21679823-despite...](http://www.economist.com/news/united- states/21679823-despite-attack-san-bernardino-americas-defences-against- jihadism-are-high)

<comment><USER8> Both.

Paper: "We put three women and three men in a room for 10 minutes and they brainstormed 1.3 extra ideas than a room of 6 men."

Article: "Study proves gender balance leads to better meetings!"

<comment><USER9> Amusing, but I don't quite agree with this characterization of "all of social science."

But here's something interesting: I've tracked down _a_ source for the 10% claim, and it's absolutely bonkers:

* An editorial[1] in the Detroit Free Press makes the following claim:

| "an analysis of statistics provided by the American Medical Association indicates that 10% of all American physicians are Muslims"

That certainly makes it sound like the AMA thinks that 10% of American physicians are Muslims.

* The source provided for this claim, "Muslim Doctors Abundant, But Muslim Hospitals Non-Existent"[2] is a 2008 post on a site called The Muslim Link.

Here's how that post arrived at the 10% claim:

* 113,585 Physicians in the US (2006)

* 7,000 current and retired physicians are members of the Association of Physicians of _Pakistani Descent_ of North America

* 5.9% of African Americans are Muslim; 3.5% of physicians are African American; therefore there are 2000 African American Muslim physicians

* 7000 + 2000 = 9000; 9000 is just about 10% of 113,585

I shit you not, that's the most straightforward reading of the analysis at [2]. Now it's in the Economist. I seriously hope _they_ got that number somewhere else.

[1] [http://www.freep.com/article/20140128/OPINION05/301280121/da...](http://www.freep.com/article/20140128/OPINION05/301280121/dave- agema-racism-gay-remarks-muslim-republican-gop-michigan)

[2] [http://www.muslimlinkpaper.com/myjumla/index.php?option=com_...](http://www.muslimlinkpaper.com/myjumla/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1440)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Scientists are seen by lots of people as secular priests or shamans. In this respect science is a victim of its own success. It now commands the attention of a lot of people who expect it to perform some of the social functions that religion used to play. "Science" is more likely to be hijacked by charlatans because of this totemic value.

<comment><USER11> That's very interesting. I think people need answers from the "answer authority", and once that authority is established, it is treated reverently and pressed to provide answers. As the "priests" are humans, too, there's no reason to believe they themselves are immune to this effect, even when they know how the sausage is made.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Science and journalism seem to be uniquely incompatible: Where journalism > favors neat story arcs, science progresses jerkily, with false starts and > misdirections in a long, uneven path to the truth—or at least to scientific > consensus. The types of stories that reporters choose to pursue can also be > a problem, says Peter Aldhous, a teacher of investigative reporting at UC > Santa Cruz's Science Communication Program, lecturer at Berkeley's Graduate > School of Journalism, and science reporter for BuzzFeed.

Seeing that someone from Buzz Feed has this kind of sober non-delusional perspective on journalism restores my faith in the idea that the internet might not have ruined reporting.

I used to avoid Buzz Feed like a disease, a cess pool of listicles and ADD style click bait but it seems they have a real goal of producing quality content.

Respect.

<comment><USER13> One intelligent mind in the combine that is BuzzFeed, doesn't account for the horde of mindless drones who write a huge majority of click-bait material.

I don't see where do you see the support for the idea that their goal is quality articles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Speaking to scientists I know, quite a lot of the problem is university press offices. The bullshit articles start as bullshit press releases, bearing little resemblance to any actual facts in the original paper (or arXiv preprint). Not sure of a way around this one.

<comment><USER3> The solution is requiring the scientist to approve the press release before it goes out and having the power to force errors to be corrected.

<comment><USER14> Well yes, but this ignores all power relations and incentives involved. The press offices aren't sending out BS press releases for the sake of it, they're sending them out to get the university's name positive press; and the university has all the power over the scientists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Most journalists post email addresses. I drop them a note when I clearly see a need to improve. But most of the time they dont apply the suggestion. Therefore in any publication I sometime prejudge an article by the history of the author.

</comment><comment><USER16> Bias against negative results are a problem. Frequentist "p values" are another, especially when samples are small and biased ("20 undergraduate students") and 0.05 is considered "significant."

Now, the system is still designed to correct itself for errors over time, and reinforcing this design is the most important meta-thing we can do. So it's not all doom and gloom. It's just that "over time" is a longer and messier horizon than we would like!

</comment><comment><USER17> Easy to fix for a lot of comp sci papers. Require that to be accepted into a conference the papers must have a working, open source implementation that confirms the results, preferably in the form of a Docker container(s) or a VM image(s). Publish papers with reproducible results alongside.

</comment><comment><USER18> Beautiful irony: the only part of the site that doesn't work well on my old android browser is the popup telling me my browser is out of date.

</comment><comment><USER19> 1\. To many scientists treating correlation for causality

2\. Pressure to publish (requirement of funded projects or because of organisations target objectives)

3\. Too many scientist

</comment><comment><USER20> "Why Is So Much Reported Science Incorrect,"

There's my contribution. This is from an illustrious institution like Berkeley?

</comment><comment><USER21> if science is wrong then science moves is not that the goal of science?

</comment><comment><USER22> Because journalists and audiences are incompetent. Journalists only get a press release from Big Corporation which is worded to give the best impression possible. The journalists then need to dumb it down for the masses. Then when Adam tells Bob he only repeats what he remembers and understands. In a massive game of Chinese whispers it is no wonder that "So Much Reported Science Wrong".</comment>


I am just a developer and I know nothing about business. What should I do? - <AUTHOR>

I had this idea for a website which I have passionately implemented. I really believe in this idea. But now I just don't know what to do next. Do I need to find a co-founder who is experienced in promoting a website/startup? But how do I trust him (and find him in a first place...)? I really like just to write code, nothing else and it just kills me that I just have no idea how to get any users. I've written to couple of popular blogs, but no one replied, because, as you can see, I am not really great with words... Any ideas, suggestions etc would be very appreciated. <comment><USER2> you can try to pitch your website at popular start-up events. For example: [http://techcrunch.com/events/disrupt-sf- hackathon-2013/event...](http://techcrunch.com/events/disrupt-sf- hackathon-2013/event-info/). Or attend some of these events and see if you can get people on board.</comment>


There's More Hair, Feces, and Toenails in Your Pork Than You Realize - <AUTHOR> http://munchies.vice.com/articles/theres-more-poop-in-your-pork-than-you-realize?utm_source=vicefb <comment><USER2> There's more unpleasant stuff in all your food than you realize, and always has been. It's impossible to eliminate grubs from blackberries, no matter how many times you wash them. All you can do is rinse them in salt water so they stop climbing out from the crevices. There are insect parts in every jar of jam, trace amounts of rat droppings in every jar of peanut butter (or entire rats), and if you eat enough fresh fish, you'll quickly discover how often it has worms (fortunately, most fish for sale was frozen at some point, rendering the worms dead and nearly undetectable). Processed or organic, plant or animal, all food is contaminated. Even salt -- ever think about what's in sea salt besides NaCl? Hint: nothing you'd want to eat. And table salt has it too, only less of it.

Fortunately, if you follow proper food-handling practices, none of this is unsafe. But if you think you don't eat a few hundred parts-per-million each day of hidden disgusting things, you're deceiving yourself.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the heads up, I'll keep deceiving myself.

<comment><USER2> Me too, even hot dogs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is it just me, or does the paleo diet seem like it should include all of the above in order to be accurate?

</comment><comment><USER5> While it might be true, there's a potential for bias in that it's based on reports by inspectors, most of whom would expect to lose their jobs if this program is expanded.

<comment><USER6> I doubt that their potential for bias outweighs the food producers' incentive to hire people who are content to just approve everything that whizzes past them on the line, without any sort of whistleblowing protections against employer retaliation. The inspection program should of course be subject to double-blind testing to determine its effectiveness compared to a control...but that sort of testing takes money, which has to be approved by Congress. I would imagine that the meat producers are a stronger lobby on Capital Hill than food safety advocates.

<comment><USER7> There are FDA-employeed folks at meat producers doing inspections. It's not entirely left up to the companies.

<comment><USER8> The affidavits[1] referred to in TFA describe just how useless this relationship has become. The inspectors receive little support from the USDA and are now tasked with, essentially, the management of poorly-trained company "inspectors" who are themselves under pressure from company management, on pain of termination, to keep the line moving (at a higher than ever rate). The authority of the USDA inspectors, under this "let them eat salmonella" program, seems to be in terminal decline.

[1] [http://www.foodwhistleblower.org/campaign/hormel- hogs/#affid...](http://www.foodwhistleblower.org/campaign/hormel- hogs/#affidavits)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's utterly evil; that is why major religions like Christianlity, Islam etc. prohibited its consumption. I really dislike even tasting it!

</comment><comment><USER10> Thanks, _______ Administration!

</comment><comment><USER11> soylent green is people</comment>