Tolkien Expressed a "Heartfelt Loathing" for Walt Disney - <AUTHOR> http://www.openculture.com/2018/05/j-r-r-tolkien-expressed-a-heartfelt-loathing-for-walt-disney.html <comment><USER2> The worldview of Tolkien and Lewis was deeply inspired by their academic understanding of medieval cosmology. Dwarves and other fantasy creatures were not strictly "made up", but were types meant to reveal the reality of invisible spiritual and celestial creatures within the model of the universe. Disney's treatment of said creatures was barbaric in their minds as it completely missed the theological and philosophical significance they were supposed to communicate.

<comment> Trill-I-Am What was the theological and philosophical significance they were supposed to communicate?

<comment><USER3> I've been (slowly) reading the Silmarillion, so I can try to answer (although I never read Lord of the Rings).

From what I can surmise the elves represent preindustrial humans. The Maiar are elemental forces (fire, water, etc). Not sure what the Valar are exactly, lesser gods of mythology I guess.

Within that landscape play out all manner of basic lessons, the importance of different crafts, the danger of vengeance, etc.

I guess "bippity boppity boo" and the patron saint of class mobility didn't do it for Tolkien.

<comment><USER4> One of the central themes of Tolkien's world is 'decay': The world was perfect at the very start, then Melkor ruined it. The Third Age is merely a faint shadow of the Elder Days, the future is even fainter still, etc. Elves are understood as old beings, part of nature as it were. Abandoning middle-earth, fitting in that pattern of decay, of 'now is a shadow of the past'. Analogy with modern history is, according to Tolkien himself, "completely foreign to my thought".

Also, Valar and Maiar are greater and lesser Ainur, primordial spirits. Angels might be the closest thing, not elemental forces.

<comment><USER5> > Analogy with modern history is, according to Tolkien himself, "completely > foreign to my thought".

Which, of course, strikes everyone except Tolkien as hilarious, seeing that he wrote LotR in the 1940s.

<comment><USER6> Tolkien was more influenced by World War 1 than WW2.

<comment><USER7> WWII was basically an extension of WWI. WWI was remarkable in that it was the first really mechanized war, and for the time, a really huge war unlike wars before it, which is why it was called "the Great War" before WWII happened. It was a real turning point for western society.

I think you can see a big parallel in LOTR here, with the Elves/Hobbits/etc. basically being pre-industrial peoples, while the "evil" forces were industrial societies: they felled trees, burned forests, causing widespread destruction to build their society.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I know the feeling. As a very young boy I saw an anime adaptation of The Little Mermaid that was a faithful adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson's version and thought it was incredibly moving.

A few years later the Disney version came out, and the production value was incredible while the story and all meaning was just lost.

And the messages Disney sends to young girls, in particular, are horrible.

<comment><USER9> The messages that old Disney movies send to girls were a product of their time. I think the more modern Disney movies send excellent messages to girls.

<comment><USER10> Certainly better for girls than almost anything anime.

<comment><USER11> Oh man, you have got to watch some Studio Ghibli. Try Spirited Away or Howl's Moving Castle.

(edit: based on another of your comments you seem to be fully aware that there is great non-sexist non-objectifying anime out there, so your "almost any" comment is confusing. I don't know much about anime, but I've been watching some of the highest-recommended and rated films and they've all been great about this in my opinion.)

<comment><USER12> The OP said "almost anything anime" \- _almost_. The majority of anime are not Studio Ghibli. We could be discussing anime (and manga) tropes for a very, very long time but there's a clear trend of a very disturbing portrayal of women (actually, "girls") in anime. "Oversexualised" only begins to scratch the surface.

While there are certainly mature, grown-up anime with characters that make sense (try Your Name for something newer than Ghibli) a great big chunk of anime are just childish.

<comment><USER11> Two different measures on the same set can put "almost all" their probability in different places. I guess it depends how you are discovering anime. Speaking as someone who started at zero and just started watching the most popular and highly-rated films, I encountered very little that's childish and oversexualized -- quite the opposite as compared to classic Disney. So via my discovery process, almost anything anime is great and compares well to Disney for kids. So from my limited experience, I think dismissing the genre like that with a negative stereotype is misleading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The Atlas Obscura article linked at the end has some other interesting quotes, including another one from Tolkien Scholar, Trish Lambert, that "Here you have a brash, American entrepreneur who had the audacity to go in and make money off of fairy tales."

[https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/tolkien-cs-lewis- disne...](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/tolkien-cs-lewis-disney-snow- white-narnia-hobbit-dwarves)

<comment><USER13> Why should he not make money off fairy tales? By making money he built a company which has brought joy to millions of people over a near century, employed thousands and created value all without doing any real damage to the fairy tales which inspired him. It's a classic win-win.

<comment><USER14> _> all without doing any real damage to the fairy tales which inspired him_

I agree with the rest of that sentence, but this really isn't true. Disney's bowdlerized versions actually do harm and even displace the source material in public consciousness.

<comment><USER15> For the non-Disney versions, try:

[https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Grimms-Fairy- Tales/dp/039470...](https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Grimms-Fairy- Tales/dp/0394709306)

Spoiler & trigger alert - the princess discovers the true nature of the Frog Prince not with a kiss, but by flinging him against a wall. Many of the other stories are equally blunt, forceful, or realistic for the times they came from.

Of note is the modern excision of the last phrase from the closing formula: "And they all lived happily ever after until they died."

<comment><USER16> > Of note is the modern excision of the last phrase from the closing formula: > "And they all lived happily ever after until they died."

I think this is true of English speakers. In German everyone knows the standard phrase "und wenn sie nicht gestorben sind, dann leben sie noch heute" ("And if they have not died then they are still alive today.")

It's a sufficiently well known meme that people use it regularly in jokes.

Edit: added quote for clarity

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think that this really sums up Tolkien's attitude best:

Tolkien did not think fairy tales were children's stories, and Disney treated them as if they were.

<comment><USER11> I have been trying to put my finger on the source of Tolkien's complaints, and I think I agree with you here. Tolkien has a section about this in the essay linked from the article.

[http://brainstorm-services.com/wcu-2004/fairystories- tolkien...](http://brainstorm-services.com/wcu-2004/fairystories-tolkien.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Too bad The Lord of the Rings movie got a Disney make over with the happy ending where the Shire was never destroyed. This is so Non-Tolkienish that he must have turned in his grave.

<comment><USER19> To be fair the Shire was on the _brink_ of destruction in the books, but in the end got saved and restored to its old glory (with some additional elven magic to boot).

If you wanted to, you could read it as a fantasy of a pre-industrialized country getting threatened by industrialization but rejecting it and continuing in their old ways (allegory, ha!).

So personally, I'd say the Shire plot has a happy ending in the book. I'd see Frodo's fate and the general decline of the world as a bittersweet ending, but those elements have been kept in the movies relatively unchanged.

<comment><USER18> > So personally, I'd say the Shire plot has a happy ending in the book.

No, because there were consequences of Frodo not staying in the Shire. That was the whole point: you can't have your cake and eat it.

<comment><USER19> Yes, but that happened in the movie as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This makes a lot of sense, when you think about the difference in their storytelling aesthetics. High fantasy =/= kids' cartoons.

<comment><USER21> No it doesn't make any sense that you'd loathe someone because they have a different artistic style to yourself!

<comment><USER22> You can loathe another artist style though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Tolkien and Lewis should have taken a chill pill.

I enjoy Tolkien over Disney any day because I don't even view them in the same league.

Disney took ancient mythology and did with it what could be compared to the simplified version of Hawkings book "A Briefer History of Time".

In the case of dwarves I feel that it doesn't change anything if you bastardize something that is already based on mythology.

If anything this to me new revelation about Tolkien is a negative rather than a positive. Not that I care enough to make it that but I just don't think they should have had such strong opinions on Disney's work when they were themselves fully capable of creating amazing works of fiction.

This truly does seem like Oxford dons thumbing their noses at an American.

</comment><comment><USER24> Title makes it sound like he didn't like the person, article says he loathed the media he produced, a pretty big difference.

<comment><USER25> > But he also called Disney a "poor boob" and lamented "What might not have > come of it if this man had been educated—or even brought up in a decent > society?"

<comment><USER26> The article's writing isn't clear but I think CS Lewis wrote that.

Either way, that's not the same as _loathing_. It's more dismissive and pitying. Loathing suggests at least a strong dislike of the person.

<comment><AUTHOR> The headline conflates 'Disney studios' with Walt Disney, which Tolkien himself might be accused of also doing. The quote from Tolkien's letter is "by the Disney studios (for all whose works I have a heartfelt loathing)."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What Tolkien was really inspired by was Norse, Gaelic and Germanic mythos. Not to forget Middle and Old English Poems.

Norse:

\- The Poetic Edda

\- Prose Edda

\- Beowulf

\- Volsung Saga

Middle English:

\- Pearle, (The concept of The Ring being "My Precious")

Welsh:

\- Culhwch and Olwen, inspired Beren and Luthien (Silmarillion)

\- Red Book of Herghest (Welsh Vellum) directly inspired Red Book of Westmarch

Finnish:

\- Kalevala (Story of Kullervo) inspired Children of Hurin (Silmarillion)

German:

\- Nibelungen and later work Der Ring Des Nibelung, inspired The One Ring and the myth of Broken Sword reforged.

Norse:

\- The names of Gandalf and the 12 dwarves are directly taken from Prose and Poetic Edda

\- High Elves / Gray Elves are inspired by Norse Calaquendi / Moriquendi

\- Balrog and the Bridge of Khazad-Dum are direct allegory to norse fire giant Surtur and the Birfrost (recently depicted in Thor: Ragnarok)

Celtic:

\- The Elves of Middle Earth (exiles) are based on Celtic fae gods, the Tuatha-de-Danan

References:

\- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien%27s_influence...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien%27s_influences)

<comment><USER28> For some reason people seem to gloss over one of the strongest influences on Tolkien: Christian mythology. It is like it is hidden in plain view.

<comment><USER29> Yes. Even though I am not Christian, I can recognise that. Faith permeates everywhere. It's not hidden. People know their history.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I like both, in different ways.

<comment><USER31> You possess an important key to happiness, then. The ability to appreciate both a perfectly prepared scallop risotto and a 7-11 steak taquito.

<comment><USER32> I have seen so many people made miserable by an inability to do this. Especially once they earn a bit of money, and experience the 'good life'.

I _really_ love fine craft beer. But can still sit down happily in a cheap pub and drink a jug of Victoria Bitter. It helps greatly to have entirely distinct mental categories in such cases.

<comment><USER33> +1 for bringing aus beer culture into this. I lived in China for 3 months and once I came back, VB tasted as good as any craft beer - a luxury. My friends thought I was crazy, but it taught me just how relative our experiences can be.

<comment><USER34> I think living in a totally foreign culture is essential to recognizing the actual values (and fundamental issues) of your own society. It also gives you perspective on what's human, what's culture and how to relate with any other human regardless of th latter. Was quite the eye opener for me. I hope more people can and want to do it in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I highly recommend the three-part John Batchelor interview[0] of the Zaleskis on their book about the Inklings (including Tolkien and Lewis):

[0] [https://audioboom.com/posts/4420047-the-fellowship-the- liter...](https://audioboom.com/posts/4420047-the-fellowship-the-literary- lives-of-the-inklings-j-r-r-tolkien-c-s-lewis-philip-carol_zaleski-1-of-3)

</comment><comment><USER35> On the one hand I see where they are coming from. On the other I sure do enjoy the genius of production of those old animations, particularly Fantasia. On the one hand I understand the criticism that Spielberg torpedoed indie cinema, on the other hand Empire of the Sun was a masterpiece. Two things can exist, in their own right, meriting praise, yet opposed and unresolved.

</comment><comment><USER36> Tolkein may also have talked with trees, so a bit of a quirky fellow, for which we can all be grateful.

<comment><USER2> There was a fascinating podcast on RadioLab about the intelligence of trees and one of our writers wrote about it (this is a Christian publication about weird stuff): [https://gospel.vision/discovering-the-mystical- intelligence-...](https://gospel.vision/discovering-the-mystical-intelligence- of-the-trees/)

I've started talking to trees since discovering this.

<comment><USER36> I hope I can one day work up the courage to talk with trees. I am talking to birds to work up to it ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> "...he also called Disney a 'poor boob'"

[chef's kiss]</comment>


QuickCheck: A Lightweight Tool for Random Testing of Haskell Programs (2000) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/john-hughes/quick.pdf <comment><USER2> A fun riff on QuickCheck is QuickSpec[1], a tool that automatically generates laws (invariants) for an API and tests them with QuickCheck. The example in the documentation is pretty good:

Given reverse, ++ (list concatenation) and [], it finds six laws:

        xs ++ [] == xs
        [] ++ xs == xs
        (xs ++ ys) ++ zs == xs ++ (ys ++ zs)
        reverse [] == []
        reverse (reverse xs) == xs
        reverse xs ++ reverse ys == reverse (ys ++ xs)

It's not perfect—it's limited to reasonably small equational laws on a small set of provided functions—but I think it's a really cool example of what's possible and even practical starting from a simple and elegant tool like QuickCheck.

[1]: [https://hackage.haskell.org/package/quickspec](https://hackage.haskell.org/package/quickspec)

<comment><USER3> If only my bugs were as simple as the methods reverse, concat, and index...

Granted, to an extent, my bugs probably were as simple as that. But it was as likely an emergent simplicity. Not to mention that one of my laws will be performance.

This is like showing how awesome a language is with a to-do app. Neat. Possibly educational. Mostly an exercise in how well the author knew how to write a to-do app.

<comment><USER4> If only your core logic had some straightforward invariants...

QuickCheck can work effectively with complex data structures.

For an example of a simple invariant that can still uncover subtle and important bugs:

encode(decode(X)) = X

Where encode and decode are some domain specific blobs of protocol logic. It's pretty useful to have the computer verify that isomorphism with a huge number of generated inputs.

(There's also SmallCheck which is like QuickCheck but checking all possible values within some depth limit, instead of random values.)

And there's no reason you couldn't use QuickCheck to verify a performance law, by the way.

<comment><USER5> > And there's no reason you couldn't use QuickCheck to verify a performance > law, by the way.

In fact, I've done something similar to this.

<comment><USER3> I'd be interested in seeing how you did this.

<comment><USER5> More precisely what I did was minimization on an unusually slow example input, but I don't think I can share the code. The approach generalizes, though:

To verify performance, you would set it up to benchmark the code in question (in Haskell, this would probably mean using Criterion) and then assert that it was "fast enough" (probably _relative to the size of the input_ ).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This library does more than "random" testing: when it finds a failure, it will try to reduce the input (called "shrinking") to report a minimal example. Here are some similar tools for other languages: [http://hypothesis.works/articles/quickcheck-in-every- languag...](http://hypothesis.works/articles/quickcheck-in-every-language/)

<comment><USER7> Go also has a version of this in the stdlib [https://golang.org/pkg/testing/quick/](https://golang.org/pkg/testing/quick/)

<comment><USER8> Yes, but the Go tool doesn't do shrinking, which is troublesome once you start building big models.

(disclosure: I have some pretty large Erlang QuickCheck models on Github)

<comment><USER9> Gopter for Go can shrink examples: [https://github.com/leanovate/gopter](https://github.com/leanovate/gopter).

<comment><USER10> This looks amazingly useful. I've been looking for a clojure-esque spec package for Go!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Since several people have posted links to quickcheck implementations in other languages, here is a comparison of implementations in many different languages: [http://hypothesis.works/articles/quickcheck-in-every- languag...](http://hypothesis.works/articles/quickcheck-in-every-language/).

</comment><comment><USER12> In case anyone is interested, TestCheck.js [0] is a JavaScript implementation of QuickCheck. When I had last checked it out I vaguely remember thinking it was still too young to pick up. But looking over the APIs right now, it looks like its been steadily improving.

I think my first introduction to property based testing was this video [1] from F# for fun and profit. The speaker does a great job at presenting the topic in a way that's clear and approachable. Ff you prefer text over video, on the same post there's links to other blog posts which cover the same material.

[0] [https://github.com/leebyron/testcheck- js](https://github.com/leebyron/testcheck-js)

[1] [https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/pbt/](https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/pbt/)

</comment><comment><USER13> I'd recommend watching this [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi0rHwfiX1Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi0rHwfiX1Q) to see how powerful this can be.

I've just discovered generative testing due to clojure.spec. Describing specs for your data works not only to help validate data structures but can be plugged in as properties for generative testing.

After the "aha" moment it was followed by a feeling that I've wasted so much time writing specs just to validate data structures and writing specs just to see if my functions are working as they should.

This is one of the things I wish was obvious in my learning track right after vim/emacs will help you code faster.

</comment><comment><USER14> QuickCheck is awesome and indispensable in the Haskell world. Instead of writing a single unit test with a hard coded example case, QuickCheck allows you to describe that unit test generically and it can randomly generate unit tests of the type described, focusing on extrema etc. Very powerful.

</comment><comment><USER15> I really like Crockford's JS version, JSCheck [0].

[0] [https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSCheck](https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSCheck)

<comment><USER5> At a skim, it doesn't look like it does minimization on failure? That's a big part of the value of QuickCheck.

(As I said, it was a skim - I'd love to be wrong!)

<comment><USER15> Not sure what you mean by minimization on failure, but there's a 'classifier' and 'on_fail' method that be might interwoven into the capability you're speaking of.

<comment><USER16> QuickCheck et al do a random walk to find a value that fails the tests. Typically the value is large, complicated and unwieldy - particularly if the test involves nested structures. It might by 10s of KBytes in size, and most of the value is irrelevant.

Minimization is the process of starting from that known value and simplifying it as much as possible while still failing the test. For example QuickCheck discovers a 1235 element list, that fails. The problem happens to be a 0 in the last element. Minimisation might simplify that list to [1, 0]. So finding the cause is quite a bit easier.

<comment><USER17> The idea of Smallcheck is to start with minimal values. If we're going to shrink big values to small ones, why not just start with small values in the first place. Smallcheck tests the small values exhaustively rather than randomly.

To be fair though, QuickCheck is not completely random. It has a "size" parameter that starts small and grows, thus allowing small values to be tested first.

<comment><USER5> > If we're going to shrink big values to small ones, why not just start with > small values in the first place.

Because you want to test things in the order that will most quickly find you a small error. This winds up being a trade-off, and as you say QuickCheck doesn't start with arbitrarily large inputs. But just testing all small inputs in order is often not the best choice.

For example, if your function takes an unsigned 32 bit integer, and you've tested inputs 0 through 15161, do you expect you're more likely to find an error next testing 15162, or 4294967295?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Don't write tests. Generate them."

</comment><comment><USER18> I love the Erlang portage of QC. Really saved my life multiple times.

<comment><USER19> Which Erlang library are you referring to? Isn't there more than one property- based testing library for Erlang?

<comment><USER18> The QuviQ implementation =)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does a coverage-guided QuickCheck exists, à la AFL? AFL is really good at finding deeper code path that the randomness only approach might not find.

<comment><USER21> I looked into this while making RamFuzz[1], but parameter generation (QuickCheck) is quite different from input-blob evolution (AFL). It wasn't clear to me how best to leverage a parameter mutation that happens to increase coverage. Ultimately, I decided that random generation (without guidance by coverage) coupled with AI classification of test outcomes is the most interesting approach.

[1] [https://github.com/dekimir/RamFuzz](https://github.com/dekimir/RamFuzz)</comment></comment>


Y Combinator, will you marry me? - <AUTHOR> http://mottis.posterous.com/y-combinator-will-you-marry-me

<comment><USER2> "Gone are the days when applying to Y Combinator was about filing an application form."

This made me smile ruefully as I plow through reading applications.

Actually very little has changed about the application process or what we look for.

<comment><USER3> This is good to hear. At least if we get rejected we'll know that the goalpost is still in the same general location, even if the competition makes it harder to reach.

How do you weigh references when reviewing an application?

Has there ever been an application that was accepted on the basis of a clever stunt or some other cunning?

<comment><USER2> Actually competition hasn't made it harder. We still accept about the same proportion of applicants as we always have.

References count for a lot if they're unequivocal and from people we respect, and hardly at all otherwise.

People try lots of stunts, but I don't think we've ever had our opinion influenced positively by one. Negatively, yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What´s next? Chalkdrawing on Pioneer Way? Airplane Banners? Telegrams? Microcopters flying into the Y Combinator offices? Big band? Self-invitation? Roses?

I´m curious for the next ideas. It might be just natural that a platform made by hackers for hackers shows examples of how people try to hack the system. The recent examples might not be the myth creators but the YC partners know better about funny application stories. They might just be afraid to share too many stories as they will create new "expectations of expectations" on side of the applicants.

Beyond the recommendation system and some metrics, I´m convinced that Y Combinator is always reaching out for new circles and creatives. Just because 6 degrees of separation (recommendation) can bite into your neck too.

(Read Levi Strauss on hot+cold societies and the meaning of artefacts and cultural institutions. This might sound farfetched but I think it´s worth reading in this context. )

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This post wasn't intended to be a PR stunt, though I see how the last paragraph could make it seem like it was. I was merely making an observation and have just rephrased the last bit to make it clearer. That's what happens when you write something quickly and go back to your code...</comment>


ActivityPub could be the future - <AUTHOR> https://blog.digitalscofflaw.com/articles/activitypub-could-be-the-future/ <comment><USER2> I like Mastodon and ActivityPub, and I like that they're seeing relatively broad adoption. That said, I'm not hopeful for the future. If it ever actually sees broad adoption beyond the tech community, all Facebook or whatever comes next has to do is incorporate ActivityPub posts into Facebook, perhaps even send back Facebook comments to those posts, but not publish Facebook- originated content. At that point, you can either be on Facebook and follow all your Facebook __and __ActivityPub friends, or use Mastodon or whatever and only follow your ActivityPub friends.

And even if Facebook does not do that, if a particular ActivityPub client becomes wildly popular, it could do the same, much like how Google Talk started out as interoperable with XMPP, only to ditch it when Google Talk was popular.

<comment><USER3> I think that most instances would block Facebook if they tried to do something like that. They'd have nothing to gain and everything to lose by allowing FB to get away with it.

As for your other point, it's also possible it will go the way of GMail, which is still compatible with other email providers. I think a large part of it depends on how big ActivityPub gets before a GMastodon appears.

Email is pervasive and decently well diversified on the web, with multiple email providers, and many businesses and users not being on GMail, partially due to inertia (they already had an email before GMail became big). Maybe GMail could afford to cut off emails from external providers, but it would be a big risk, and it would definitely break a large part of the web.

If ActivityPub does the same, with websites integrating it into their user experience, and news organizations and businesses self-hosting or joining various instances, I expect it would gain the same kind of resilience as email for when a GMastodon shows up.

So I'm not too pessimistic about this. The more pressing concern is increasing adoption, IMO.

<comment><USER4> GMail is starting to close off compatibility with other email providers, in small ways. AMP for email[0], and GMail's Confidential Mode[1].

[0]: [https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/13/amp-for-email-is-a- terribl...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/13/amp-for-email-is-a-terrible- idea/) [1]: [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/07/between-you-me-and- goo...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/07/between-you-me-and-google- problems-gmails-confidential-mode)

<comment><USER5> Also its virtually impossible to be smaller than a few hundred mails to gmail a day as a server and not have your mails instantly spamboxed. Yes, i have gone through the laundry lists of things it could be, and stuff i should set up.

It does not help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> ActivityPub really needs some decoupling of identity from server. If a server I'm using starts acting up, the answer is to move servers, right?

But, wait, my 50K followers from Server A won't be following me on Server B. Essentially, you only get to pick your original server once, without having to rebuild your network. So choose wisely!

This obviously isn't an easy problem to solve. You'd need to separate identity from hosting, and have some way to look up "identity A is on server D" so peope following identity A know where to get the content.

I truly believe it's essential to the success of the protocol, though.

<comment><USER7> This is what the whole IndieWeb movement is about -- being distributed rather than merely federated. I'm mildly concerned that the two camps seem to be building their own protocols rather than working together (excepting the existence of Bridgy Fed, perhaps).

<comment><USER8> Good point -- it would actually be simple to combine IndieWeb + Mastadon and solve this problem.

IndieWeb's solution is to own your own domain: [https://indieweb.org/personal- domain](https://indieweb.org/personal-domain). If you control your DNS, you can move your data to a different back-end provider and just update your DNS entries.

To combine this with Mastadon, just make your own domain, like [https://chipotle.coyote](https://chipotle.coyote), and point it at Mastadon- Server-A. Then if you want to move everything to Mastadon-Server-B, just copy the data and update DNS.

<comment><USER9> There is an open github issue with some discussion on this [https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/2668](https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/2668)

<comment><USER8> Good find! Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > XMPP spoke XML in an age of JSON

Damn, let's ditch all the XML protocols then, XHTML first :D

What does "age of JSON" means exactly? Those are two different technologies for different purposes.

Even if XMPP tried to move to JSON, how can you do namespaces in JSON for example?

You want ActivityPub in XMPP ? Just take Pubsub and put Atom in it, those are two stable and proven technologies, they fits perfectly (it's just one namespace in another) and with many many benefits.

Here is a news feed built on top of XMPP Pubsub [https://nl.movim.eu/?node/pubsub.movim.eu/Movim](https://nl.movim.eu/?node/pubsub.movim.eu/Movim), and yes there's also an Atom 1.0 feed generated from it, because it's easy to just extract the (validated) Atom content from Pubsub and put it back to a proper HTTP page.

<comment><USER11> > how can you do namespaces in JSON for example?

For what is this neccessary?

<comment><USER12> Nsmespaces allow XML file formats flexible and extensible in interesting ways: each namespace is tied to an independent schema, allowing for a very natural nesting of validatable XML in arbitrary formats. The namespaces avoid name collision between XML tags from different schemas. The grandparent gave a good example of this kind of nesting.

JSON is incapable of the same kind of nesting because there are no explicit namespace to identify nested data formats and to avoid name collisions.

<comment><USER13> XML namespaces do offer some nice possibilities. But the lack of official JSON namespaces doesn't prevent you from doing something like:

        {
            "built_in": "value",
            "org.example.my_extension": "value"
        }

If you want to validate it, you might need to jump through some JSON schema hoops, of course.

<comment><USER14> It seems that would make JSON likely more verbose than XML.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> We need a logo/badge for ActivityPub, just like the RSS icon, for awareness.

<comment><USER16> [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ActivityPub-logo- sym...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ActivityPub-logo-symbol.svg)

From: [https://activitypub.rocks/](https://activitypub.rocks/) And: [https://gitlab.com/dustyweb/activitypub.rocks/blob/master/st...](https://gitlab.com/dustyweb/activitypub.rocks/blob/master/static/images/ActivityPub- logo-symbol.svg)

<comment><USER17> That logo is excellent!

Tangent: I hate the use of "rocks" as a generic "is great" trend in our langage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I didn't get a clear understanding of what ActivityPub is from your article.

<comment><USER15> universal API for realtime feeds.

<comment><USER19> Where the feeds are bidirectional, no?

<comment><USER20> Not necessarily. With the right controls implemented, you can decide how much you want your instance to interact with other instances, but it depends on the implementation. I don't know if masotodon is able to control this, and it might not make sense for them to do it.

In Peertube at least, you need to manually specify which other peertube instances you want to 'follow'. Other instances can also unilaterally follow your instance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't know. It feels like SOAP - or XML-RPC. These protocols that are just layered on top of HTTP keep coming, but they never seem to gain adoption. In part because - what are static websites supposed to do to participate?

This was the beauty of RSS. I didn't love RSS, because it eliminated all the styling from blog posts - but it did achieve real widespread usage.

<comment><USER4> You _can_ syndicate static websites with ActivityPub, pretty much the same way as you do with RSS, except you're generating JSON-LD (ugh) rather than XML (ugh). I've seen a proof-by-example, but I don't have the URL where I can easily find it. The downside is that Mastodon, the most used AP server, doesn't provide a way of subscribing to a static AP feed (it might work if you also had a simple webfinger script to point to it).

I actually like the 'eliminate all the styling' feature of RSS. It's kind of a pleasure to read blog posts and news articles in my mobile feed reader (tt-rss for android).

<comment><USER19> Except for when the content wasn't included. That was the problem with RSS. It could never decide whether it was supposed to be distributing the content or distributing notifications of the content.

That decision was made by the drive for "pageviews" both by ad-driven pages and others that just wanted to know how many people were reading.

<comment><USER22> It was also made because quite a few services used RSS feeds for uses like auto posting bots and what not, where they got information from a blog/news site and posted about on their forums/social media service. In those cases, you didn't want it to post the full article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I saw the article and thought I'd add ActivityPub support to my site, but it looks like static sites can't really do ActivityPub, is that right? I'd need a server to do the posting/receiving.

<comment><USER24> While that's true of ActivityPub, the data format it uses (ActivityStreams, which a form of JSON) could be hosted on a static site separate from the HTML version people are reading, which would at least make the content reference- able on the ActivityPub federated network.

<comment><USER25> Good. Can you please point me at working implementation examples?

<comment><USER26> I also couldn't find a good tutorial, but another commenter here pointed to this blog post: [https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/06/how-to-implement-a- bas...](https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/06/how-to-implement-a-basic- activitypub-server/)

Maybe it's a good starting point?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wonder what is the best practice for building a search engine or mining data around ActivityPub. Centralization comes naturally when a search engine or analytics is needed.

I imagine a good search engine can be open sourced and data be available to anyone to analyze but the eyeballs and ads will end up in a search engine like Google.

<comment><USER28> Search - or more importantly, discovery of content - in a decentralized/federated ecosystem is where google should experiment on a bit more. This is where there is a gap in the decentralized/federated arena. (I acknowledge this even though I am a proud supporter of decentralization!) If google can bring value in this arena, then they can pivot their G+ product and offer it as an underlying platform to provide ActivityPub clients, etc. It could be used to undercut facebook, etc., and make G+ less of a ghost town. For example, people use GSuite to use the gmail email front-end, but leverage their own domain name. What if google pivots G+ to be an activityPub server, allowing paying customers to leverage their own domain name (on google's infrastructure) to interact with the fediverse? And for those users who don;t know/care about decentralization, they think they're getting their own "instance of a social network maintained by google". I think there is a market for this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can somebody explain how blogging platforms are benefitted by activity pub and why there isn't a Wordpress plugin?

<comment><USER29> I think some WP Plugins are in the works.

The short version would be that AP would mean you could get the benefits of both having an RSS Feed and a Comment Section without having to run either as a seperate plugin.

If WP had an AP Plugin, people could follow your blog from their Mastodon Account or Plume or any other platform that allows following. They can share and like your blog and that gets federated back, you get those directly to your blog.

People can respond to your blog and it would show up as comments and they could discuss it off and on your blog.

Though I don#t think AP is panacea, I do think it could enable a lot of interop between previously disconnected platforms.

<comment><USER30> > _I think some WP Plugins are in the works._

There's some info here:

[https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg/2016-06-06-minutes#AS2_impl...](https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg/2016-06-06-minutes#AS2_implementation_- _WordPress_plugin)

[https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitystream- extension/#desc...](https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitystream- extension/#description)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Mastodon reports ~110k weekly active users and 121M "toots" across its 2+-year lifetime. That's impressive for a federated social network but, for comparison, 121M new tweets are generated on Twitter about every six hours.

Some more basic Mastodon stats that I recently collected: [https://davepeck.org/2018/05/03/mastodon- stats/](https://davepeck.org/2018/05/03/mastodon-stats/)

<comment><USER32> How many tweets were generated when Twitter was about two years in? Early growth curves on social networks are exponential, there's plenty of time for Mastodon or an as-yet-to-be-created network to eclipse Twitter as it starts to decline.

EDIT: According to [https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2011/numbers.html](https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2011/numbers.html) it took about three years and two months for Twitter to hit a billion tweets. That's well within what Mastodon could hit with "exponential growth", though I'm guessing Mastodon will fall a bit short of that rate.

<comment><USER31> It's a good question and one I didn't address because I wasn't able to find super reliable numbers. That's a good link, though. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I started using mastodon after realising that SDF had set up an instance, and I only had to activate my SDF account.

So far, so good. Social stuff is neat again, I don't get my bandwidth wasted for ads and I can trust my provider.

Hopefully this becomes the norm!

This makes me realize that I got my SDF account in 2008 when I was 16, no questions asked, and I was unemployed. Now I've got a job and I can finally sign-up for a recurring payment/support account.

</comment><comment><USER34> HATEOAS could have been the future too - many people wanted it to be.

With all these standards, the successful ones need to find some magic moment to take off - like HTTP did.

Too early to tell if ActivityPub (which I like as a protocol very much) will be an HTTP or an XML.

<comment><USER35> The reason behind HATEOAS was that REST was in practice being watered down from how it was originally envisioned, so proponents of the original vision needed a new term.

I don't think that your origin story being "well we needed a way to tell all the practitioners they were consistently doing it wrong" is a good indicator of potential success.

<comment><USER34> Ok, perhaps I picked a poor example - but still, the success of a standard depends on some magic formula that isn't easy to repeat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Off topic, but whatever happened to app.net? That was supposed to be the next new thing.

<comment><USER37> _On January 12, 2017, the founders announced that the platform App.net would be shut down on March 15, 2017.[13] However, due to a significant number of user data export failures that deadline was extended until March 16, 2017. App.net finally ceased to operate as a social network at 2017-03-17-06:45UTC. The source code for App.net was made available on their Github Page._

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> use this tool to check JSON-LD data. [https://jsonformatter.org](https://jsonformatter.org)

</comment><comment><USER39> Just signed up on mastodon social. First impressions:

\- The web app is very well made, although the space utilization could be a bit better

\- There doesn't seem to be any concept of friends, but there is something called "follows".

\- Almost every post in my timeline was in a language I couldn't understand.

All in all, nice experience but looks identical to twitter. Not really sure of any benefits over twitter.

</comment><comment><USER40> How is a site like mastodon.social different from a site like Twitter? There is no guarantee that the site will continue to operate or continue to provide API access.

I have the feeling that people confuse 'federated' (aka provides API access) with 'distributed' (aka does not rely on specific nodes).

<comment><USER41> From the customer standpoint, I think the only real difference is that you could host your own instance and take part in the network yet still "own" your posts. I say "own" pretty loosely since they get broadcast across the network.

But in this case, even if mastododon.social went down, your posts would still be available on the network and through your own (and other) mastodon instances.

In terms of the API, this is a open source project and it needs to communicate with other nodes in the network; I believe this puts real limits on how much they can change the API.

<comment><USER40> But is running your own instance worth anything? People use social media mainly to gather followers and likes. So there needs to be a reputation at play provided by the service provider to make sure those are real. Having a gazillion followers and a trillion likes on your own instance will not make you a celebrity.

<comment><USER4> Social media doesn't have to be about celebrity, or about promoting a personal brand. The big silos have promoted this use case because it aligns with their advertising incentives. But connecting with people with similar interests is another use case, as is keeping up with your friends and family.

I also think you misunderstand how following works on the Fediverse. My main account is on a small server with about 400 users, about 50 of which are active daily, I guess. But I have around 1000 followers, almost all of whom are on other instances (probably 20 or so are on my instance).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


MySQL schema changes and pt-online-schema-change - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3174-taking-the-pain-out-of-mysql-schema-changes

<comment><USER2> I've been using pt-online-schema-change for a few months ago. It is a godsend, you have to make sure however that your server can handle the load of copying all the data, IO and memory. Specifically that you have enough buffers to handle duplicating the table.

It's great for rebuilding / reindexing tables.

</comment><comment><USER3> Or, switch to PostgreSQL for new projects and stop throwing good money in after the bad.

<comment><USER4> So you're saying that PostgreSQL doesn't lock the table when changing the schema?</comment></comment>


A Nerd's Way to Walk Up the Stairs (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.tanyakhovanova.com/2011/06/a-nerds-way-to-walk-up-the-stairs/ <comment><USER2> " _'You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear. For example, you have frequently seen the steps which lead up from the hall to this room.'_

 _'Frequently.'_

 _'How often?'_

 _'Well, some hundreds of times.'_

 _'Then how many are there?'_

 _'How many! I don't know.'_

 _'Quite so. You have not observed. And yet you have seen. That is just my point. Now, I know that there are seventeen steps, because I have both seen and observed.'_ "

Sherlock Holmes & Dr. Watson, _A Scandal In Bohemia_ , 1891

<comment><USER3> While good fiction, this is pretty dumb. Did Sherlock count the number of tiles on the wall as well? What about the colour of the carpet or the number of cracks in the ceiling?

Knowing how many steps there are is useless information and wasteful to retain.

<comment><USER4> The essence of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock stories (and what makes them clever and recommended reading) is that the answer lies in plain sight.

Holmes does not succeed because he is superhuman (although the stories are not without their action bits), but because he applies himself more fully than others, and prepares and experiments more thoroughly.

Is the number of steps important?

Well, it would be if one were attempting to decide between two suspects, one on crutches and one a runner, and the time of path traversal was known.

But by then, others (notably the ever-mystified Scotland Yard) would have already dismissed stair count as unimportant.

Seemingly insignificant facts in aggregate, my dear albertgoeswoof, a case do build.

<comment><USER5> Yes, but Sherlock Holmes also always magically knows which trivia is important, because he's written that way. He doesn't bother with the count of stairs on every staircase he's ever walked on. And he lives in a world where the trivia he notices always reflects accurately on hidden truths, instead of being simply useless details that reveal nothing of consequence.

<comment><USER6> For example in one story Sherlock deduces that the person sending a ransom note is an educated man attempting to appear stupid, because although the note is grammatically incorrect the newspaper the letters are cut out from was The Times. And only educated men read The Times.

Except....what if that's just coincidence? I mean The Times costs the same amount at a news stand as any paper right? So what if the kidnapper, who is so barely literate he doesn't read any daily paper at all, went to a news stand to buy something to cut the letters from and happened to pick The Times?

<comment><USER7> George Macdonald Fraser did a funny sendup of this in Flashman and the Tiger, where Holmes creates a completely wrong narrative of Flashman using true facts he observed about him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 13 is the standard amount of steps in stairs in houses (in the UK at least). So statistically, you should just go with 13 instead of counting them and you will get it right almost all of the time.

<comment><USER9> Fascinating! Why is that the standard?

<comment><USER10> I guess if you divide the standard ceiling height with a comfortable step size you get 13

<comment><USER11> The ceiling height is not the same as the floor height of the next storey up.

<comment><USER12> Generally it's pretty close, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Yes, but do you start at 0 or 1? Also, is the last step you take onto the floor/landing counted?

And when going down, do you use negative numbers?

So many questions left unanswered. I feel you aren't a true stair counting nerd afterall.

:-)

<comment><USER14> I know you're joking, but the number of steps is well defined and doesn't vary as it's essentially a difference. The difference between two numbers is always the same regardless of whether you're using a 0-indexed or a 1-indexed base system. E.g. regardless of whether you call an element in an array [1] or [2], it's still two elements away from whatever is [3] or [4] -- the number of stairs climbed is the same.

So you're free to use either top-stepian or bottom-stepian notation when counting stairs and you'll get to the same answer either way. So it's just an implementation detail that's left undefined in the spec.

<comment><USER15> 0-indexing steps is clearly the only reasonable choice. Who in their right mind would call the ground the "first step"?

<comment><USER16> Ground is never a step; zero or one; not. Because while we are on ground; we are on same level, stairs have not started yet. As soon as we put our foot on upper level than the other foot, stairs have started & that upper foot marks the / lands on "first" step.

<comment><USER17> Following the principle that array indexes are "between" the elements, the bottom of the first step is 0, and the top of the first step is 1. Then the ground, which is equal in elevation to the bottom of the first step, is at 0, and the floor after the last step is N, one past the index of the last valid step, N-1.

Half open zero based ranges are quite satisfying :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Bonus points for doing this while going down. Taking public transportation as part of my daily commute involves a lot of stair climbing and descending. I always find it fascinating to watch the people who rush from bus to train platform and watch them descend 2 stairs at a time (basically always doing long long long) the whole way down. I've never been brave enough to try this method of descending though.

<comment><USER19> Honest question, why are you afraid of trying skipping steps on the way down? I ask because I've always done this, and when I'm with company they comment incredulously how quickly I descend the stairs. It never even occurred to me it was difficult or special before.

<comment><USER20> Perhaps because the penalty for failure rapidly escalates to twisting an ankle and goes up to death, with more likely results of bruises or broken bones?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> [https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=tanyakhovanova.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=tanyakhovanova.com)

Do you just post this every 3 months?

<comment><USER22> Sixth time's the charm!

Looks like they're running an experiment to see the effect of timing.

<comment><USER23> interesting. That gives a good idea for some HN popular thread-related data mining and analysis!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Busted. I count the number of stairs of buildings I visit, but know the number of stairs per flight (not always the same) in the buildings I frequent.

At one place, it's (4-7-8-7-7-4-7-5-12) to get to the top. It's useful if you don't want to turn on the light and wake people up.

Most of the time, when the number of stairs is odd, I'll go one, then two-two- two-two. When it's even, it'll be either two-two-two, or one-two-two-one..

I might be having a conversation with someone while going up or down the stairs, but the process in my head with the count and the fun I'm having is nice.

<comment><USER25> The info also comes in handy when carrying large loads that obscure vision or being the backward carrier in a tandem load. I do it when walking across flat surfaces, too, but have found no usable value besides logging distances walked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm the type of person who quantifies a lot of information from my everyday life, but it has never occurred to me to count the number of steps on flights of stairs that I climb. Quantification isn't a costless activity, and knowing numbers of steps just doesn't seem useful. I'm content to remain ignorant of these data.

<comment><USER27> As a musician (i.e., someone who frequently carries large objects up and down stairs), knowing the count is extremely useful to me. A significant portion of the time, I cannot see the ground. Instead of getting close and then feeling around with my foot one step at a time, I can just count to 14 (or whatever it is) and know I'm on the floor.

Even in a new building, it's common to walk the stairs at least once before hauling heavy equipment (to see where it's going to go), so I almost always have a count before I start.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I just used this method in my house with great success!

Turns out i have zero stairs.

</comment><comment><USER29> I don't count them. But from long experience I know the most staircase have an odd number of stairs.

My first step is "short" and whenever possible all following "long". That usually works.

But to the current day I don't know whether there is a real reason to this observation. Maybe it's pure coincidence. Or maybe something typical to may country. Or after all it has indeed some real (maybe even wired) reason.

</comment><comment><USER30> Also, a nerd's way to walk on the plane is to ignore sidewalk or other markings and cut a straight of a line to the destination as possible.

Depending on jurisdictions and "no cops, no stops," ignore traffic signals while focusing on actual traffic. Waiting for a crosswalk signal is like waiting for Godot... giving autonomy over to a machine and a waste of life.

<comment><USER31> Heh, there are plenty of places in my area that require crossing a street to get to a sidewalk. I usually end up walking down the wrong side of the street until traffic clears enough for me to cross. Efficiency!

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> My nerds way is to run upstairs. I skip a step. I don't care what other people think. It's just faster.

</comment><comment><USER33> Funny, I've been a bit obsessed with counting the number of steps on stairs at home, at work, and all subway stations I pass through. Haven't thought of this before. Will have to try, but I'm afraid it'll look really weird.

</comment><comment><USER34> _he reminded me that a nerd's goal in climbing the steps is to establish the number of steps at the end of the flight._

I thought I was the only one who did this. I'll definitely be trying this method next time I find a novel flight of stairs.

</comment><comment><USER35> 17 steps at home[0] and 17 each for two flights per floor at work, since commercial buildings have taller ceilings.

[0] This applies both in North Carolina and the apartment in Texas, which had two flights of stairs (3-story townhouse)

<comment><USER36> Mine is 16 each for two flights per floor at work, 19 floors. I do it 5 days a week, only for going up, so far. I've yet to do the same for when going down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I visually count backwards in sets of four, and take an initial step of 1-4 so that I can subsequently take only 4's to the next landing. The momentum seems to make this climb more efficient.

</comment><comment><USER38> A nerd mom's lesson to her toddler on how to take the stairs: Scoot down the stairs on your butt, little one. It's easier and safer at your size.

And this is why I found him at the bottom of the stairwell eyeing the fascinating cornfield next door the day he got tall enough to open the front door, instead of in a bloody heap with a cracked skull on the first landing.

</comment><comment><USER39> I have counted steps. Knowing the numbers is extremely useful when walking stairs in the dark.

</comment><comment><USER40> Was holding off on the Fibonacci connection. Its kind of simple, obvious and by now cliche, but can hold my breath for only so long.

Was asked this in a phone interview, I had no clue that Fibonacci would so delightfully turn up on the staircase.

</comment><comment><USER41> > Thus, you will cover five stairs in one short-long-long cycle. In addition, > you should always start the first cycle on the same foot. Suppose you start > on the left foot, then after two cycles you are back on the left foot, > having covered ten stairs. While you are walking the stairs in this way, it > is clear where you are in the cycle. By the end of the staircase, you will > know the number of stairs modulo ten

Yet another example why decimal is not an ideal base for counting.</comment>


Airbnb: Is it a fad, or will it revolutionize how you travel? - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2300300/ <comment><USER2> Great question! I've just added the question on the following link to find out what people say.

[http://flipter.com/flip/is-airbnb-a-fad-or-will-it- revolutio...](http://flipter.com/flip/is-airbnb-a-fad-or-will-it- revolutionize-the-way-y/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I hope it forces the accommodations industry to get a bit more creative than all the cookie-cutter hotels that exist today. This is a good start: <http://www.hotelaka.com/></comment>


Would love feedback on my new landing page - <AUTHOR> http://www.crowdsourcia.com <comment><USER2> First, can you prepend your title with 'Ask HN:', that's pretty standard when asking for this kind of help.

You have some big content on the main page, pretty clear you want to get email addresses. Strange that you're asking for advice here when your first selling point is ' our experts will perfect your web content', but... ok.

The spacing across most of your site is off. You've got good whitespace and then text and boxes squished together. Mostly your vertical space needs lots of work (I'm not a designer, so I can't tell you exactly what is wrong, but everything feels off).

Your tagline "Group Collaboration..." is wrong. I don't want "group collaboration" with your team. Just focus on the problem you are helping me solve, which is the rest of your statement. "Our experts help you perfect your web content, investor pitch deck, video script, presentations, and more."

The 'learn more' text and arrow are way to hidden. I completely missed it and thought all you had was an email box.

The 3 steps is ok.

If you're going to use an image where you've blurred all the content, don't use an image. Ideally, you should really just create a mock project that people can see, or have a public project. Or get rid of the screenshot. Oh, and get rid of the weird underline and title 'screenshot' if people can't figure out that is a screenshot....

Why are the colors on your homepage (the orange) so different from the color of your screenshot? You should be thinking of branding (I can't believe I have to explain this to somebody who is creating a site offering help to others...but...)

You're crazy using that image of the night sky. The text on that page is a mess, horrible spacing, very difficult to read with that background.

Your site is also completely unresponsive, I'd suggest you fix that as it looks horrible on mobile.

</comment><comment><USER3> just my 2 cents, you need to make the website responsive and second it looks pretty bad by 2015, soon 2016 standards. It would get a nice responsive theme from Theme Forest (not affiliated, just saying) and have a nice looking website. Good job, keep us posted on the progress ;)</comment>


Ask HN: What other sites do you regular? - <AUTHOR>

I regularly visit Reddit and MetaFilter, in addition to scouring the pages of HackerNews.<p>What sites other than HackerNews do you frequent?  These can be blogs, media aggregators, or anything really. <comment><USER2> I'm actually really digging Quora lately. I'm starting to follow/find some really intelligent people and insights, even in non-tech topics I like (e.g. restaurants and baseball).

</comment><comment><USER3> Not tech related, but about new urbanism, economics and the environment: <http://kunstler.com>

Check out Howard Kunstler's podcast as well: <http://kunstlercast.com>

</comment><comment><USER4> Used to be lots, but I'm aggregating more and more into Google Reader. Why waste time hunting when I can have it packaged and delivered? Fixing things like that is what computers are for.

</comment><comment><USER5> I like canvas and tumblr. Not usually sources of deep insight, but they're fun.

</comment><comment><USER6> quora, livejournal, stackexchange

</comment><comment><USER7> quora, wilmott forums

</comment><comment><USER8> I make it a habit to visit the following sites everyday: Reddit, DaringFireball, Techmeme, Engadget, Ars, Scriptingnews, thenextweb and ofcourse HackerNews.</comment>


Cold War Monitoring of Soviet Radars via the Lunar Surface - <AUTHOR> https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol11no2/pdf/v11i2a05p.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> Earth-Moon-Earth Communication (EME), or Moonbouncing, is today enjoyed by Amateur Radio enthusiasts all over the world. I just thought this was really interesting in it's exploitation by the CIA during the Cold War.</comment>


IBM joins the OpenJDK community, will help unify open source Java efforts - <AUTHOR> http://www.sutor.com/c/2010/10/ibm-joins-the-openjdk-community/

<comment><USER2> Earlier <http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=1780836>

</comment><comment><USER3> Just the other day someone was saying this wasn't the time to fork Java because there was no group to lead it.

I wonder what kind of bird they're having for dinner tonight?</comment>


Treatment of childhood schizophrenia with LSD and Psilocybin - <AUTHOR> http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://omploader.org/vNDFzdw

<comment><USER2> I wonder what things we do today will seem totally ridiculous in 50 years' time?

</comment><comment><USER3> As troubled as I am about giving children LSD, those are some fascinating accounts and the treatment seems to be effective.

<comment><USER4> Have not read the paper yet, but, ironically, according to some scientists, initially LSD was thought to be psychosis inducing drug, useful for teaching medical students about inner world of mentally ill people.</comment></comment>


Robots evolve altruism - <AUTHOR> http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/05/even-robots-can-be-heroes.html

<comment><USER2> "From Charles Darwin on, evolutionary biologists have struggled to explain self-sacrificing behavior."

I had trouble reading beyond that line, since it's simply false. A quick reading of "The Selfish Gene" by Dawkins would correct that impression.

<comment><USER3> It's not false at all. _Origin of Species_ was published in 1859. _The Selfish Gene_ was published in 1976. So even if everyone immediately accepted Dawkins' synthesis upon reading it (which they didn't), that sentence is still an accurate history of biologists' opinions over the years.

<comment><USER4> It if were past tense ("From Charles Darwin on, evolutionary biologists struggled"), that would be fair, but the sentence reads as present tense ("From Charles Darwin on, evolutionary biologists _have_ struggled"). As worded, the sentence implies that biologists as a whole are _still_ struggling to explain it, that it's some mystery the field has yet to grasp.

Imagine if a sentence in a news story read, "For centuries, doctors have struggled to determine whether diseases are caused by an imbalance of the body's humours or by germs and genetics."

Would you defend that by saying, "It's not false at all. Germ theory didn't gain much currency until the mid-1800s, and we didn't understand genetics until a century later. So even if everyone immediately accepted germ theory upon reading it (which they didn't), that sentence is still an accurate history of doctors' opinions over the years"?

<comment><USER5> Slight nitpick: The sentence is in present perfect not in present tense.

<comment><USER4> I actually did know that, but it wouldn't mean anything to most people, and the actual time frame attached to the present perfect tense depends a lot on context. If you say, "I have done things I'm not proud of," that implies a vastly different time period than "I have hated him since he walked out on me." So I thought it was simplest just to point out that it was _not_ the past tense and that it reads most naturally as something that has been true up to the present.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think I would rewrite the headline as "Scientist recreate altruism when looking for it."

</comment><comment><USER7> This is a bizarre sort of study. What can you do with robots that you can't do much more cheaply inside a simulation, apart from eat up a whole bunch of research funding with an excuse to build tiny little robots?

<comment><USER8> They did use a simulation. They only built the robots to use as a guide in creating the simulation:

       The researchers then created virtual representations of
       these robots on a computer so that they could observe the
       robots' evolution over time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Feeling a synthetic kind of love,

Dreaming a sympathetic wish,

As the lights blink faster and brighter...</comment>


When Children with Autism Grow Up - <AUTHOR> http://www.buzzfeed.com/bplanten/when-children-with-autism-grow-up <comment><USER2> I couldn't get through the whole article... Partially because I am working and partially because the issue of Autism is difficult for me to read about.

My daughter was diagnosed at 16 months. She is now 20 months, so this is all very new to us.

The one thing I have learned is that if you have met one person with Autism then you have met one person with Autism. It's important to realize that Autism is a spectrum and therefore the needs of an individual can be very different and varied.

The other thing I would like people who are fortunate enough to not have encountered Autism is that early and intense therapy is ABSOLUTELY crucial. If you are a parent and suspect something, DO NOT hesitate. If you see legislation that adds support for young children then support it. In the long run society will save a lot more money and lives if we address this early rather than later.

<comment><USER3> Just wanted to encourage you that autists can still have very meaningful and fulfilling lives... i am proof of that.

[http://john.do/autism/](http://john.do/autism/)

i mean... shit... even this autistic adult got on the front page of hacker news! fuck yeah.

[http://john.do/fp-hn/](http://john.do/fp-hn/)

and i did it twice in the same week...

:)

<comment><USER4> I just read your post, and though it may be hard sometimes just remember we are all unique and you shouldn't use autism to define you as a person. A lot of intelligent people experience these symptoms and psychs are always looking for your weaknesses to put labels on and prescribe pills for (I've been diagnosed differently 3 times, once with Aspergers). You are a smart individual, you don't need Aspergers to tell you that. Good read nonetheless, thank you for sharing.

EDIT: changed some wording

<comment><USER5> I know some people who consider it an important part of their identity - because, as exch says upthread, "All the weird and inexplicable things I saw in my past, suddenly fit. Like a giant puzzle you've been trying to solve for 30 years and in a matter of weeks, every piece just falls into place."

I also know plenty of people who're diagnosed and consider it one fact among many and not worth much mention.

So I'm not sure "shouldn't" is quite accurate.

Maybe "even if autism is, to you, an important part of your identity, remember that a diagnosis is meant to enable you instead of restrict you" better expresses the meaning I -think- the rest of what you're saying implies you were aiming for?

<comment><USER6> On a related note, here is an essay written by a high-functioning autistic person which I read once and found illuminating on the identity issue:

[https://www.fysh.org/~zefram/allism/allism_intro.txt](https://www.fysh.org/~zefram/allism/allism_intro.txt)

<comment><USER5> Can recommend. He and I have worked together on many open source projects, and drunk beer together.

He was one of the people I was thinking of as "part of identity".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's a problem in England where adults with autism are living at home with their family. And then something happens - a parent needs a hospital stay or the family need some kind of break - so the person gets sent to an inpatient setting for a "short time". While there no-one knows how to deal with that person and everything is different and so they start to exhibit "challenging behaviour" and then they become trapped in a kafkesque system. They need to be released so their behaviour will return to normal, they can't be released because their behaviour is not normal.

Winterborne view shows what happens in some abusive care homes. (Some people have gone to prison because they were so abusive.) [https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/winterbourne- view...](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/winterbourne-view- hospital-department-of-health-review-and-response)

This should be changing. Government has said that people should be released wherever possible and that support should be provided in the community rather than in hospital settings.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is something that I think about frequently. I have 2 children with autism. One is fairly high functioning, the other is not. The reality of his future weighs upon me. He is still young, only 6, and I love him dearly (both of them). He is a happy child, affectionate (a rarity for autistics), loving. I dread the day we cannot properly care for him. The reality of his situation, of what his life will be once he gets older haunts me. I fear that life will eventually take that happiness from him, and he will not understand why. He stims, and recently it has started to cause bruising. Not much, and not frequently, but enough that I worry.

I don't know what will happen when he grows up. I just hope that he will keep smiling, keep being happy. If I can help him keep that, that's all that will matter.

<comment><USER9> You sound like me 10+ years ago. I also have 2 children with autism, one high functioning and the other not. My lower functioning child, also happy, smiling and in his way affectionate, is now 18, 6'3 and about 240lbs. We went through some rough times when he first hit puberty, and he can still have some pretty scary tantrums, but mostly he's a giant gentle loveable boy. So far life has not taken his happiness and I don't see that changing anytime soon. Can't say it will work out the same for you, but I just wanted to say that it can happen.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for this. I know every child is different, but it's still good to hear these stories. I'd do anything to ensure his life is a happy life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My wife is a teacher's aide at a school for kids with autism and various learning/developmental disabilities, and this weighs on her often. It's always in the back of her mind that in a few years the kids will age-out of the school, which often means it's off to a group home (an especially depressing thought for the kids without much money or family).

I think that along with the below-living-wage salary, the seeming futility of her efforts make the job really difficult for her. She has to remind herself that improving her students' quality of life and giving them love/connection in the moment is worthwhile, even if there's no way to "protect" them from the realities of life after ~20.

<comment><USER2> This is an excellent and sad documentary about just that.

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer- sheet/wp/2013/06/...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer- sheet/wp/2013/06/20/best-kept-secret-how-a-teacher-helps-autistic-students/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> My daughter has autism, she's now 14. Her mom passed away in Dec 2011. It's pretty scary to think of the future for her when I'm not around. I make sure she spends a lot of time getting to know all of the people in our family, especially the younger kids. It's likely that someday one of them will be taking care of her.

</comment><comment><USER12>
        Though the data we have is under constant scrutiny for
        its accuracy, methodology, and usefulness, the Centers
        for Disease Control reports that the current rate of
        autism diagnosis in the United States is 1 in 68. This
        is a continuation of a trend identified by the
        Environmental Protection Agency that started between
        1988 and 1992, when the worldwide diagnosis of autism
        spiked from 6 in 10,000 kids to 24 in 10,000.

The main problem with this data is that the definition of autism has expanded over time. The category of "aspergers", a relatively limited form, was eliminated and folded into "autism", making historical numbers hard to work with.

This article is mostly talking about the most low-functioning forms of autism, for which the numbers are far far lower than 1 in 68.

<comment><USER13> >The main problem with this data is that the definition of autism has expanded over time.

How do we know this is the case and not that it was under-diagnosed in the past? I also see this logic with ADHD. Yet in the past, a lot of these children would be shoved off to group homes or labeled 'slow' and such. At least with diagnosis they have a chance for recovery. I don't think past diagnosis stats are unquestionable. We actually don't know what the real rate should be. At least not yet.

<comment><USER12> Some cases are ambiguous, as fuzzy definitions change over time. In this case, however, a name that once applied only to relatively severe cases has been intentionally expanded:

        The term "Asperger's disorder" will not appear in the
        DSM-5, the latest revision of the manual, and instead
        its symptoms will come under the newly added "autism
        spectrum disorder", which is already used widely. That
        umbrella diagnosis will include children with severe
        autism, who often do not talk or interact, as well as
        those with milder forms.

[http://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/dec/02/aspergers- syn...](http://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/dec/02/aspergers-syndrome- dropped-psychiatric-dsm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm 32, and I have a younger brother who is 27 who has autism, and a pretty severe learning disability(not sure if they go hand-in-hand, but he's had it his whole life). My mother passed away a long time ago sometime after my 17th birthday, and my father and I have raised him as best we can since then. He graduated from high school quite some time back and has had a few jobs, but we haven't been able to find him any real work. We fear for the day that my father passes away and I'm not around to help take care of him :(

<comment><USER15> I cannot remember where I saw the story but there is a firm in the US that is fully using autism people in some IT tasks..fulltime jobs..it may have been listed on Slashdot 2 months ago..

Sorry that I cannot remember the firm name

<comment><USER14> That kind of gives me some hope, honestly. He's sorta adept at using computers; he can navigate the web fairly easily, though reading is a bit of trouble for him(it takes him 5x as long as a normal person), he's been doing fairly well with online typing tutor sites as well as basic math courses in Khan Academy. I'll have to look around and see what I can find.

<comment><USER16> I have worked with someone employed through a similar program during an internship at SAP.[1] Maybe there are opportunities available for your brother.

[1][http://ca.specialisterne.com/about-specialisterne/sap- partne...](http://ca.specialisterne.com/about-specialisterne/sap-partnership/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What's the latest science on the cause(s) of autism? Google just gives me the anti vaccination sites.

<comment><USER18> That's a huge problem and imo Google should act. This fuels the anti-vaxxers more than it needs to. Education is a key to fight this problem.

<comment><USER19> Interesting, wonder if Google's algorithm is even prepared to rank "there is no good answer" as a good result. I mean it's optimized to provide good answers, if there is no good answer perhaps the algorithm just breaks apart completely.

<comment><USER20> "is even prepared to rank "there is no good answer" as a good result"

Try an experiment, look at this this:

No results found for "cow thiophenol romanesque establishment".

The search result without the quotes seems to just be noise, any random page about cows or romanesque architecture or thiophenols.

<comment><USER21> Not to detract from your observation, but just as an aside, I wanted to mention that less than an hour after your comment, googling for "cow thiophenol romanesque establishment" (with or without quotes) lists this very page as the first result. Google must be indexing certain sites (like HN) very frequently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> One of the school kids that is in the same grade as my daughter is autistic (and also absolutely brilliant on the asperger spectrum). He's had a social worker with him every day, in class, attending to him every day of his public schooling. (This is one reason why private schools do so well and cost less. Imagine spending $60K+ on one student per year.)

His social skills are still not great, with an inability to focus on someone when they are talking, as well as biting and hitting others.

He's incredibly smart though, with an ability to replay any piece of music that he just heard, and replay it on the piano. He's never taken a piano class or was taught piano in his life.

Can his trajectory still change at the age of 11? It seems like the school is doing quite a bit, but he doesn't seem to progress and still stuck in the same behaviors as he was in the second grade (first time he was in the same classroom as my daughter).

<comment><USER23> Though it sounds like he's getting all the help he needs, whether he will outgrow the biting and hitting really depends upon his own individual slice of the autistic spectrum.

My 35-year-old brother is also autistic with some incredible savant skills. During his teen years, he spent all of his free time reading maps; at one time he held much of the world's roadmap in his head. (I never use GPS; I just call him when I need directions.) However, he also struggles with severe anxiety and occasionally gets violent.

With age, he has become more aware of his shortcomings. He can control himself to a limited extent—mostly by recognizing when he's about to melt down and then removing himself to a private place where it's safe for him to explode. But he still explodes. I always wonder how improved his life might be today if he had the benefit of the early childhood therapies that are more common these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Early intervention is crucial, the early the better.

Silicon Valley has the largest group of Autism kids, while the cause is unclear, I believe it has something to do with IT-engineer-or-STEM-brain _statistically_.

<comment><USER25> Can you provide links. Silicon Valley have state of the art health care in the tech community that allows early screening.

But yeah ... there is engineering brain from what I see.

<comment><USER20> "But yeah ... there is engineering brain from what I see."

I saw Temple Grandin speak at a state fair some years back, she's interesting, and I'm paraphrasing and probably misquoting but what I heard was something along the lines of if the species had to rely completely on neurotypicals, we'd still be living in caves and wearing hides, with a side dish of if a brain gets stuck or trapped on something like mathematical analysis of animal behavior as relates to architecture then we end up with her PHD dissertation revolutionizing livestock facility design, but much more likely if the brain gets stuck on lining up thomas the tank engine action figures, then the long term outcome is not so good. Also she had some opinions about discipline that were not the current mantras. No one at the event seems to like medication other than people with a financial interest in medication, I was surprised at that uniform consensus.

<comment><USER26> "if the species had to rely completely on neurotypicals, we'd still be living in caves and wearing hides"

That's incredibly rude and condescending, and patently untrue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> A meaningful life is necessary for existence of a human being. Such problems raise questions on where the line is drawn. All of the support systems and therapy don't do much to address the problem. The only hope is that medical research will make sufficient progress to be able to treat this condition in the future.

<comment><USER28> Did you perhaps mean "purpose" instead of meaningful. Having purpose makes life meaningful. And yet, purpose is not dependent on physical or mental attributes.

For example, my wife's 20 year old cousin with who has cerebral palsy(motor skills mostly ok, intelligence level of a 10 year old) is a curler in the Special Olympics and recently won the provincial cup. She has purpose in life but if I understand your position correctly its not meaningful because of her disability.

Another example. I coach tykes football. I like having the younger kids and watching them learn and develop over a few years of ball. Every year we get new kids and every year we get one or two with varying degrees of ASD(obviously mild) or ADHD. And the one thing we agree on as coaches is to treat them all the same. Its amazing how much gaining a little confidence coupled with strong, steady reinforcement from a non-relative can go a long way in helping a child.

I guess my point is that everyone can be given purpose in life. People shouldn't be shuffled away somewhere out of sight because they make us uncomfortable by reminding us how we won the life lottery and they didn't.

<comment><USER29> I agree with you, and think that it would be downright dehumanizing to think that your wife's cousin doesn't have a purposeful/meaningful life.

My worry is that someone in Scooter's position has already been shuffled away. We don't know how Scooter perceives his situation, but we should be worried that he feels trapped, futile or meaningless.

<comment><USER28> Based on my experience with kids, scooter most likely feels trapped for various reasons: 1 - lack of internal coping mechanism (never taught that its ok to feel a certain way) 2 - the realization that he IS different without the accompanying external validation that it's ok to be different. 3 - a mostly aimless daily routine were one just waits out their days 4 - poor or no support network

This is not much different than kids put into the Children's Aid system. Now that's another shit show that needs fixing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Hah! I've been thinking about this a lot lately ever since watching a documentary on a pretty internet-famous guy with autism (I'm not going to name him, but you probably know who I'm talking about if you've spent any time around the trollier parts of the internet).

I was thinking about what the ideal solution is for a guy like that. I actually thought he should be moved to a group home, for both his sake and the sake of others. Jail is a really horrible place for well-adjusted adults, let alone those who aren't.

> Can this be changed?

I dunno. How would you change it? I think group homes are the right idea, though maybe not the right implementation. Unfortunately it's not straightforward unless you're interested in proffering platitudes that never seem to really go anywhere: E.g. "We should spend more on mental health." Many of us agree with that, but when it comes time to pull out our checkbook most of us show how much of a priority it really is.

And that's not just because we're all dicks - there's just a shitload of terrible things going on in the world, and maybe mental health is priority #5 for us behind third-world poverty, or cancer research, or maybe we're just scraping to get by ourselves.

Typically we count on family to be the support system for people like Scooter, and that works if the family's capable of that level of care. But sometimes it ends up that either the parents can't care for them and admit it, or more frustrating, can't care for them and don't admit it. Group homes are probably the best option for adults with special needs that fall into those two categories.

Alternatively you could have a caregiver who acts like a family support system (checks in regularly, schedules appts, etc.) but that could be even more isolating - finding a peer group can be really hard even for more "well- adjusted" adults, and maybe a caregiver who treats you like family is actually really inappropriate if said caregiver has no intention of sticking around for the long-term.

If the solution is "let's all just be accepting and mindful of people with different wants and needs than our own", well shit, yeah, let me know when that happens. History is pretty much summed up as the antithesis of that statement.

Anyway, rambling over. It's a weird issue. I'm glad we moved away from sanitariums but I think we all agree we haven't come close to anything even good yet.

<comment><USER31> red tshirt guy?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> What a great article. My son was diagnosed when he was 2, now he's 10. He doesn't talk, but he can read, do simple math, write a little. There is a lot in common with his behavior and Scooter's - outbreaks of aggression, biting, hitting. It's extremely difficult to expose him to the external world. There is a lot of great support from our school district though, and other kids at school seem to acknowledge the ASD and get along with them. I think society will get there, with proper school district support. At some point we won't be able to support our son (when he'll be teenager and then adult), and external help is extremely important in situations like ours.

</comment><comment><USER33> This reads like the upper end of the spectrum. How many of those diagnosed is actually up there?

I keep having this suspicion that many that gets diagnosed function "fine" when left to their own devices, but burn out during (long) sessions of social interaction.

And they come to the fore now as more and more of life become highly oriented around "face time".

<comment><USER34> Those classified as on the 'upper end' of the spectrum may be less apt to seek an official diagnosis due to the potential for stigma. Parents of low- functioning children want an autism diagnosis as it allows for services in schools and some insurance coverage for therapies outside school.

The parent of a high-functioning child may only want a diagnosis when the child nears adulthood, in order to get adult services.

Many of those diagnosed are indeed 'fine', and some might be almost unrecognizable as autistic to an untrained eye. Once you've been around children with autism for a long time, you understand which traits reveal their condition.

Long sessions of social interaction aren't likely to happen unless they are forced. Kids in classes are given several breaks a day, and might start at periods of 1-2 minutes without a break and build to 10-15 minutes without a break.

<comment><USER33> Heh, i may have flipped the scale on that one. Sorry about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The title of the article is poor. Children are called adults when they have grown up and that's what the subject of the article is, an adult.

I'm not on some political correctness bender. Thinking about adults with autism as "grown up children" is at best neutral. Most likely it just feeds the misconception that adults with autism have the minds of children. At worst it suggests that children with autism growing up is problematic - and this is an idea that has long currency as the predominate attitude among western cultures.

Nobody is writing articles the "When Children with Dyslexia Grow Up" or "When Gifted Children Grow Up" because we implicitly accept that people with these identifying traits are adults when they have grown up. Why not just call the article "Adults with Autism"?

Because the article is largely about how bad being around an an adult with autism made the author feel. There's more about how hard it was to go into work than about his antagonist's suffering childhood sexual abuse - and in narrative form the autistic adult is the author's antagonist no two ways about it. The arc is of the author disconnecting himself from the relationship.

Now don't get me wrong, the freeing is a rational choice. But this is a story about the normal person and Scooter is always "the other." Casting him as "a child grown up" rather than an adult makes the ultimate "He aint my kid" decision palatable because it denies normal adult bonds - the author can't be held to the standards of an adult relationship: friendship and just plain good manners of saying goodbye because it is the right thing todo are off the table.

It's really fucking hard to sort through and classifying adults with autism as grown children doesn't make it easier to get it right.

<comment><USER36> "When Children with Dyslexia Grow Up" or "When Gifted Children Grow Up" make perfect sense as article titles. In fact, a quick Google search yields a book for the second: [http://www.amazon.com/Gifted-Lives-What-Happens- Children/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Gifted-Lives-What-Happens- Children/dp/0415470099)

I think the title structure would work for any domain where most reporting/writing focuses on the condition in children, rather than their later development as adults.

<comment><USER35> The "What happens" that precedes the "when gifted children grow up" is about what happens to the individuals who were gifted as children. The book doesn't appear to focus on some burden they impose on the rest of society as the result of growing up or how that growing up makes the author feel badly about theirself.

It is the stories of twenty gifted people, not our story about encountering them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The part about "Wilbarger Protocol" sounds like torture.

"When he was unable to regulate the information coming into his brain, I would perform a process called the Wilbarger Protocol. It was intimate. I would move a soft brush on Scooter's arms, legs, neck, and back. Then he would put his hand in mine and I would grab his fingers one at a time, compressing the joints in toward his palm. Firm but gentle, confident but caring. I would watch his face, look for some tension to drop from it and then linger there, count to 10 in my head, and then move on to the next one."

<comment><USER38> Funny, it sounds very calming to me. Intimacy and physical contact from a trusted individual, done in a predictable and caring manner.

<comment><USER39> I'm not sure the people in the story were trusted by Scooter; it seems he had no real choice but to interact with them in rather banal ways. They seemed to regularly deceive or outright lie to him on at least several occasions throughout the story.

<comment><USER38> > They seemed to regularly deceive or outright lie to him

This would matter more if this wasn't how society runs in general. White (and not so white) lies are the lubrication of social interaction: when a random someone asks how your day is going, they don't really want to know. They want to hear something positive or perhaps a mildly amusing quip. Anything else and the social interaction breaks down uncomfortable silence.

Took me awhile to learn that one.

Scooter may have ended up interacting with society better, or worse, had he always been told the truth, but human interactions are never so clean. I have trouble faulting the narrator of this story for being human in such a difficult and uncomfortable situation.

<comment><USER40> I often hear this take, but I think it's overly simplified. It's completely acceptable to respond in a negative fashion to 'how was your day'. People just don't want details.

So, "Stressful" or "Annoying" is fine. But "I had this one customer who…" is not.

The only real lie is optional and it's mostly about how you want people to think of you. If 10% of the time you're slightly unhappy that's considered reasonable, but if your unhappy 90% of the time people don't generally want to be around you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Can anyone explain to me why I should give a site like buzzfeed the time of day when discussing a serious topic?

I don't even care if they're right. Buzzfeed has never, ever been a credible source for information of any kind.

<comment><AUTHOR> They've actually done some good journalistic stuff in the last year or so. They're trying to expand to cover the whole range of "shitty clickbait" to intellectual journalism. Similar to the magazine Vice creating Vice News.</comment></comment>