Graph2Plan: Learning Floorplan Generation from Layout Graphs - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.13204 <comment><USER2> Good, now teach it Pattern Language.

Christopher Alexander FTW!

[https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/bln- exp.htm](https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/bln-exp.htm)

<comment><USER3> OMG! This exists! I have been thinking about doing something similar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reminds me of similar work done with genetic algorithms: [https://www.joelsimon.net/evo_floorplans.html](https://www.joelsimon.net/evo_floorplans.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> Also reminds me of Joris Dorman's cyclic dungeon work for the game Unexplored: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wvkTT-6P3Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wvkTT-6P3Q)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A similar model is #HouseGAN done by researchers Nelson Nauata & Chin-Yi Cheng at Autodesk Research in 2019.

Post → [https://nono.ma/housegan](https://nono.ma/housegan) Paper → [https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.06988](https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.06988) GIF → [https://nono.imgix.net/img/u/post- housegan-200401.gif?ixlib=...](https://nono.imgix.net/img/u/post- housegan-200401.gif?ixlib=php-3.1.0)

</comment><comment><USER6> Could be cool to expand this to electoral map building. Then you don't even need to manually draw the lines. Publish the loose constraints & the source data & everyone can regenerate their own electoral map to confirm no funny business.</comment>


Ask YC: Canadian, Set up US Office? - <AUTHOR>

Anyone know how a foreign company, Canadian in my case, goes about setting up a US based company?  My purpose is to be able to use all the great services out there (YPN for instance) that are only available to "US Citizens or Companies". <comment><USER2> Accounting aside, just wanted to mention that most of these barriers are whether you have a US-residence credit card, or bank account, not so much about where you or the company _actually_ live.

Not sure it's worth incorporating a company (which may involve foreign ownership accounting hassles) to handle it.

You might want to try to get a bank account or CC in the states, and fund it personally, and just not get the business deduction for it. I did that with Amazon's services, before they accepted credit cards.

Hope that helps and good luck with it.

<comment><AUTHOR> "You might want to try to get a bank account or CC in the states, and fund it personally, and just not get the business deduction for it. I did that with Amazon's services, before they accepted credit cards."

How did you manage to do this?!?!? A friend in the US?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> YPN?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yahoo Publisher Network. Adsense from yahoo. Their contextual ads are supposedly not as good as goog's but the eCPMs are reported to be much better.</comment></comment>


Google: We're Not Creepy Enough to Recognize Your Face - <AUTHOR> http://techland.time.com/2011/05/19/google-we%E2%80%99re-not-creepy-enough-to-recognize-your-face/

<comment><USER2> Except that they already do with Picasa Web Albums.

<comment><USER3> That was what I was thinking. Doesn't Picasa do this?</comment></comment>


Large-scale social media analysis with Hadoop (Python) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jhofman/icwsm2010_tutorial

<comment><USER2> Here's a question. What companies are actually doing this to generate profit? This example is a technical exercise, fair enough, but all this mass interpretation of social network data rarely seems to yield anything...

Analyse Twitter stream --> ???? --> Profit</comment>


Bats in Portuguese Libraries (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/these-portuguese-libraries-are-infested-batsand-they-it-way-180969276/ <comment><USER2> The library at Coimbra is well worth a visit, I didn't even know about the bats!

<comment><USER3> Coimbra in general is worth a visit. :-) And so is the surrounding countryside and towns.

My oldest kid pointed out that the university literally has an ivory tower on a hill :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a library worker myself, I keep noticing and continue to find HN's fascination with libraries interesting. What do you think that's about?

<comment><USER5> Perhaps as a library worker, you are more prone to notice articles on HN that have anything to do with libraries.

<comment><USER6> Librarians are the original data scientists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some of the libraries featured here inspired JK Rowling for Hogwarts. You can kind of see the resemblance. Especially when you see the college students wear black robes :)

</comment><comment><USER8> This was interesting enough that I subscribed to Smithsonian Magazine. Thanks for the recommendation!

</comment><comment><USER9> In a large library bats are probably quite harmless but they can and do occasionally transmit rabies:

 _" Bats are responsible for roughly 7 in 10 rabies deaths among people who are infected with the rabies virus in the United States, [..]"_

[https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2019/p0611-bats- rabies.ht...](https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2019/p0611-bats-rabies.html)

<comment><USER10> Rabies is very rare in Europe nowadays.

<comment><USER11> That's because the main vector was the fox. The vaccination campaign that was started in the 1980s was extremely successful.

<comment><USER12> Oooh, I did not know this and love to read more about it! Do you have a good source/expository article?

<comment><USER11> Here's a pretty thorough report from the European Union: [https://ec.europa.eu/food/sites/food/files/safety/docs/sci-c...](https://ec.europa.eu/food/sites/food/files/safety/docs/sci- com_scah_out80_en.pdf)

The NY Times had something about the first trials in Switzerland: [https://www.nytimes.com/1982/07/08/us/use-of-a-live- vaccine-...](https://www.nytimes.com/1982/07/08/us/use-of-a-live-vaccine-in- bait-stems-rabies-in-a-swiss-area.html)

<comment><USER12> These are great, thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are your favourite history books? - <AUTHOR> Please feel free to include biographies of historical figures. <comment><USER2> Hey,

It depends a little bit on what you mean historical.

I am a great fan of Dan Carlin, who has a vibrant way to narrate history. His podcasts are the best but he also has books. I loved this one : [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49947205-the-end-is- alwa...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49947205-the-end-is-always-near)

I try to read a book about all major powers from a few centuries back. The last one I read was about Hamilton ([https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16130.Alexander_Hamilton](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16130.Alexander_Hamilton)), which for non-americans is maybe less known than say lincoln. Napoleon ([https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25637528-napoleon](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25637528-napoleon)) or Churchill are other nice examples, because those are usually much more complex than history remembers them for :).

I'd love you to answer your own thread if you have suggestions, I'm searching for new ideas as well!

</comment><comment><USER3> I found The Histories by Herodotus [0] to be an amazing read. While it's not 100% accurate as we know today, the time and effort spent compiling this when it was written is definitely impressive. This one is a reasonably lengthy read, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Additionally, though it is somewhat biased in favour of the author, The Conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar [1] was a great look into the campaigns throughout Gaul. And a relatively short read when compared to The Histories.

[0] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1362.The_Histories](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1362.The_Histories)

[1] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/592167.The_Conquest_of_G...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/592167.The_Conquest_of_Gaul)

</comment><comment><USER4> Robert Caro's Lyndon Johnson biography (multiple volumes) (idolised by Conan O'Brien see [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/style/conan-obrien- robert...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/style/conan-obrien-robert-caro- interview.html) \- "I'm a fan to a disturbing level.")

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan

Paris 1919 and The War that Ended Peace - Margaret McMillan

Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard

Origins of Political Order: Francis Fukuyama - how politics + the state developed. Interesting contrast of Asia/China vs Europe/UK.

How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World's Most Dynamic Region Book by Joe Studwel - fascinating history of the tactics east Asian countries adopted to grow post wwII

</comment><comment><USER5> any history book by Ben MacIntyre is a terrific read. He has written sseveral about WWII: I've read Agent Zig-Zag and Operation Mincemeat. He also wrote a good book about the spy Kim Phiulby, A Spy Among Friends. Another great book about WWII is Citizens of London by Lynne Olson. One of the best books I've read recently is Peter Frankopan's The Silk Roads that fills in the gaps of history for Westerners. Jaw-dropping details on almost every page--such as the real meaning of the Italian greeting ciao ("I am your slave") because Italian ports were the ceneter of the Roaman slave trade--they had to import 450,000-500,000 per year to keep the empire humming...and the origin of the word slave from the Slavs who were captured by the red-haired Vikings as they moved south...knowns as the Russes, who became known as the Russians..

some others-- The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt The Food Explorer by Daniel Stone anything by Erik Larson but especially Isaac's Storm (about the Galveston hurricane of 1900) and In the Garden of Beasts (about the American ambassort to 1930s Nazi Germany) Travels with Herodotus and Shah of Shas by Ryszard Kapuscinski The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum Parisians by Graham Robb

</comment><comment><USER6> If you like to get to know history of computers then check The Innovators by Isaacson Walter

</comment><comment><USER7> One of my all time favourite books is Titan: The life of John D. Rockefeller by Ron Chernow.

While it gives an excellent account of Rockefeller's life, the most enjoyable for me is the incredible setting of the Industrial Revolution in America.

As a non American it was also fascinating to read about the mixture of religion and capitalism.

I highly recommend it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Any Anthony Beevor books really - Stalingrad, Berlin, D-Day. Max Hastings can be good too - but harder to read

On a history topic im liking Dan Snows podcast, and Al Murrays We have ways of making you talk podcast</comment>


Adding search and autocomplete to a Rails app with Elasticsearch - <AUTHOR> https://shellycloud.com/blog/2013/10/adding-search-and-autocomplete-to-a-rails-app-with-elasticsearch?utm_source=hn&utm_medium=free&utm_campaign=Adding+Search+Blog+Post

<comment><USER2> Hey there,

Great post. 10 days ago, I've posted a link ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6476003](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6476003)) demonstrating how I was able to crawl, index and plug auto-complete on HN posts in less than 2 hours using Algolia Search as a Service API (rails + JS client). The main differences between ES and Algolia for this use-case are about the way prefix matching is handled and the way highlighting is done.

To provide auto-completion (prefix matching), whereas ES use ngrams and tokenization tricks to index all word prefixes, Algolia's data structures have a built-in feature enabling to match the prefixes of a word without doing such recipe at indexing time. As a consequence, your indexes will be smaller and your service faster :) Moreover, with Algolia, using such prefix matching algorithm provide outstanding highlighting capability. In fact, the index knows exactly which word matched (whereas ES knows that a specific "fake" ngram matched, but it's complex to highlight the original words with it), even handling typos.

We compared ES and Algolia for a basic "record/database search" use-case in our last blog post: blog.algolia.com/full-text-search-in-your-database- algolia-versus-elasticsearch/.

Feel free to contact me if you have any question.

Sylvain

</comment><comment><USER3> What are the benefits of searchkick over tire?

<comment><AUTHOR> Searchkick uses Tire under the hood, but provides a higher level api. Also, Tire is getting retired in favor of elasticsearch-ruby, so Searchkick could switch the backend and you wouldn't have to change your code.</comment></comment>


12 Tips That Will Get You Hired at a Startup [INFOGRAPHIC] - <AUTHOR> http://blog.startupcvs.com/2015/10/15/12-tips-that-will-get-you-hired-at-a-startup-infographic/?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=12tips15102015 <comment><USER2> Also helps if you're willing to work long hours and get underpaid. But hey, unlimited ping pong!

<comment><AUTHOR> Ping pong FTW!</comment></comment>


Don't sign that lease yet - <AUTHOR> http://www.inspiredstartup.com/dont-sign-that-lease-yet/

<comment><USER2> While I agree with most of this article, one consideration not mentioned is the time and trouble involved with an office search/build-out/move. Having been through this countless times, it _always_ seems to be a bigger than expected drain on the entire company.

Depending on the amount of space being leased and cost, sometimes it's just not worth spending weeks haggling or ending up in a short-term lease or sublease that means you're going to have to do it again in a year. Especially if that time and energy could be spent on improving your business instead.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good points, but I wonder how many early stage startups actually sign the long term class A office space leases that so irk the author.

<comment><AUTHOR> Every time we have looked at a class A lease, the leasing agent has pushed for a minimum term of 3 years. When we looked at executive offices the lease term was really short but the cost/sqft was really high.</comment></comment>


Oculus founder says no Mac is powerful enough to run the Rift - <AUTHOR> http://www.techspot.com/news/63993-macs-cant-power-oculus-rift.html?utm_content=bufferc09c7&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer <comment><USER2> The Mac Pro design was changed to a trashcan design that can't upgrade the video card any more. The old ATX Mac Pro design was better and allowed the video card to be upgraded.

[http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/the-new-mac-pro- is-a-...](http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/the-new-mac-pro-is-a-failure)

It was a decision by Tim Cook, and it made it so the Mac couldn't compete in gaming next to a PC, Tim Cook most likely made the decision to save money on the Mac Pro design.

In fact older Mac Pros had limits on what video cards were compatible: [https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201805](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT201805)

If Apple brings back the Mac Pro ATX Tower, it could have a gaming Mac again. Until then people are going to build a Hackintosh to game on OSX.

</comment><comment><USER3> "If they ever release a good computer, we will do it," he said. If they ever release a good computer. There must be an "enough" missing i believe.</comment>


Azure requires internet accessible ports to monitor your back end instances - <AUTHOR> https://chris408.com/post/microsoft-azure-application-gateway-exposes-your-backend-health-api-server/?HN <comment><USER2> Can anyone else comment here if HTTP (not HTTPS) can use PKI for authentication?

I'm not aware of anyway of this being possible?

The sensitivity of the data or threat risk of the host from these open ports is up for debate and probably should be reverse engineered in any which case.

Could these services be secured by another method that we've missed?

It's undoubtedly bad practice. But surely M$ haven't just left two non- standard HTTP ports open to the internet from all hosted Azure instances?

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, it seems strange that these ports are open, which is why I wrote this up. I spoke with Microsoft on the phone and they confirmed that the ports must be open for their SLA checks and monitoring to work properly.

To reconfirm this, I ran a quick test and saw these ports open by default after I configured an application gateway on my account.

<comment><USER2> Yeah... It's all quite odd.

<comment><AUTHOR> Apparently they don't have a mechanism to permit their own addresses because the probes come from dynamic addresses. It sounded like they were adding this as a predefined label in the future.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


This year in side projects - <AUTHOR> http://www.ianww.com/blog/2015/12/28/this-year-in-side-projects-2015/ <comment><USER2> great article! looking forward to the 2016 post already :)</comment>


Daydreamers might solve problems faster - <AUTHOR> http://news.theage.com.au/breaking-news-world/daydreamers-might-solve-problems-faster-20090513-b22z.html <comment><USER2> "People assume that when the mind wanders away it just gets turned off"

Who assumed this? It seems like a pretty stupid assumption from a cognitive standpoint. Daydreaming is basically an activity where the brain has to create a whole scenario without the benefit of any outside stimulus what so ever which sounds fairly hard to me.

I was a day dreamer when I was a kid and my Mom never assumed I was stupid. The only problem with daydreaming is when you do it instead of applying yourself to the task at hand which makes this study a bit irrelevant imho.

<comment><USER3> I think the question is whether your brain is working on problems that aren't part of your daydream. In other words, if I'm daydreaming about Isabella Rossellini dressed up as a starfish, am I also figuring out how to improve problematic code at the same time?

<comment><USER4> " ... f I'm daydreaming about Isabella Rossellini dressed up as a starfish, ..."

Have you seen the movie "Infected"? If not, you may find it, um, interesting.

:)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've always considered myself one of the biggest daydreamers I know. Most of my time in class is spent daydreaming, and it's definitely served as my biggest source of creativity. Many of the ideas I come up with are usually a product of my incessant daydreaming. Sure, a lot of the times it's me carving through the hills of Italy in my Aston Martin, but when it's not, daydreaming is my problem solving time. I start on an issue, ride down its tangent line, hop onto another node, etc., until I land on something of value. I'm not sure if imagination/creativity leads to more daydreaming, or whether more daydreaming leads to the development of imagination/creativity, but they definitely play off each other and allow the brain to wander and bend in amazing ways - ways people who are too focused never get to experience, I think.

It can get to an extreme, though. Often times I find myself daydreaming too much to where it borders laziness, and ultimately me not executing most of those ideas.

</comment><comment><USER6> My technique for designing software architecture is basically to daydream what it would be like to use the best possible API for the problem, then further daydream about what problems might result. It takes a bit of discipline, but with years of practice it turns out to work pretty well. You never get good enough to _never_ get blindsided by some requirement, but you can cut it down a lot.

Don't skip that problem step; all architectures have tradeoffs and if you can't name the bad things about your choices you don't understand the choices yet.

</comment><comment><USER7> Argh, another brain imaging study proving nothing.

What any of these fMRI studies measure is energy consumption of brain structures. Energy consumption != useful thinking. Their conclusion is exactly like saying: my screensaver causes my CPU to get warm, therefore it is doing useful computation.

<comment><USER8> While I enjoy hating on fMRI studies as much as the next guy, it's a little harsh to say that this study proves nothing. Brain activity _is_ proportional to blood flow/energy consumption. We can argue about the linearity of that relationship, the spatial and temporal resolution, the problems of averaging to increase signal-to-noise and other interpretational issues, but it is still a proxy for neuronal activity.

To use your analogy, I'd say it's more like looking at the spatial distribution of temperature in your CPU. Even if it's just driving the screensaver, at least now you know something about which registers are involved. Likewise, the authors in this study have implicated a couple of areas as being involved in the process of daydreaming.

Where I _would_ criticize this study, is the part where they conclude that there is a connection between daydreaming and problem solving on the basis that executive function areas are active during daydreaming. It's a suggestive link, but very tenuous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I hope research along these lines helps clarify the folk wisdom about subconscious cognition. Everybody "knows" that if you need to hoover up existing knowledge, you should focus intensely and block everything else out. To learn an existing system or API, set yourself up with a long, focused coding session. If you're stuck on a problem that needs to be solved or a false understanding that needs to be corrected, do something relaxing and unrelated.

It's not clear exactly what you should do to enable that subconscious process. This study suggests that daydreaming works. Is high-pressure, focused thinking okay if it doesn't have anything to do with the problem you need to solve? What about competitive sports? What about the mentally quiet yet highly attuned state achieved during endurance exercise? Does caffeine help or hurt? So many questions.

</comment><comment><USER9> Sometimes I worry that I don't daydream any more. Instead I just hit some websites, like this one.

<comment><USER10> I avoid listening to music and other things while I am traveling - I find that when I have plenty of time to think and daydream I come up with more ideas and solutions.

It's too bad that HN takes up some of my idea time, though thankfully I learn enough while here to make up for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Apparently, I'm working on something like a madman all day. Wish I knew what it was...

</comment><comment><USER12> whilst I am a daydreamer, I am not sure I could daydream when _stuck in an MRI scanner_

<comment><USER13> It's not as hard as you might think. Sure, it's loud and cramped, but it's _really freakin' dull_ in one of those things! I daydreamed just fine. I even know someone who fell asleep during an MRI.

<comment><USER12> I bow to experience... may I cheekily ask how you managed daydreaming with the _other_ probes attached/inserted? I find even whistling difficult. ;)

<comment><USER13> Heh, it was only my brain they were interested in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Apparently, that doesn't include the daydreaming one might be doing while teaching is going on though.</comment>


City hopes 'Baby Shark' song will drive homeless away - <AUTHOR> https://www.miamiherald.com/news/article232770632.html <comment><USER2> Oh yes, lets "drive them away" instead of helping solve the real problem.</comment>


Our relationship with teeth is uneven, messy and grim - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/prospero/2018/05/16/our-relationship-with-teeth-is-uneven-messy-and-grim <comment><USER2> I have had a long history of dental issues - I can blame so many things for how they got to this state; severe substance abuse two decades ago, homelessness, teeth grinding, GERD. The reality of it though, is that I let my teeth get really bad, and ultimately they were too sensitive to properly take care of - which caused so many more issues. I have spent so much money to attempt to save them over the years, and finally came to the conclusion that they were not worth saving due to the amount of neglect that I had caused them. For years I have mumbled when I spoke to not cause attention to them, and I rarely smiled for the same reasons.

Three days ago I had the remaining 12 teeth pulled and I am currently at home adjusting to dentures - and around the new year I will be looking in to All- on-4 implants. It's truly amazing how much better I already feel about myself for just a few hours of work - and I look forward to the quality of life improvements that I will have. Even with this relief though, there is definitely tons of regrets on how I could let it get this far.

Take care of your teeth - it's worth it.

<comment><USER3> Taking care of teeth is important, but I feel we are misinformed in a number of ways.

If you spend time reading the literature, you may reach the conclusion the pros of getting fluoride don't outweigh the potential damage done to other organs. Same goes for professional dental cleaning, it erodes enamel quickly, but advantages are not very clear to me.

I think keeping the oral microbiome healthy is a much more fundamental step towards true dental health. You want a healthy balance of bacteria, yeast and phages. And you want them to be generating healthy metabolites. That's why I emphasize a good toothbrush plus a good technique, pocket irrigation, calcium salts, and probiotics. And a good diet.

<comment><USER4> I've been lucky with my oral microbiome.

37 years old. No cavities. No fillings. Brush my teeth once a day in the morning most of my life. Use regular toothpaste. I prefer ultra soft brush, and usually soften them up more with hot water.

The color of my teeth depends on my diet, when I was doing keto or slow carb, it whitened them quite a bit.

<comment><USER5> You are very lucky like my girlfriend in that respect. She cleans her teeth twice a day and does minimal care and has one minor filling which was done a couple of years ago.

I have always spent a long time cleaning and flossing my teeth and have lots of minor repairs and fillings done over the years.

<comment><USER6> I have had some cavities filled in the past, but somehow nowadays I can brush twice a _week_ and haven't had any cavities for more than a decade. (I brush a bit more often than that to prevent bad breath.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fun fact. Stone-age level tech people or hunter gatherers have _perfect_ teeth. Their teeth meet perfectly, they have no wisdom teeth issues for example (in fact they just have more normal teeth than civilised people)

The reason is that our jaws are actually too small for our teeth. Their jaws are the right size because the jaw grows to its correct size in response to chewing when you are a baby. We dont chew enough as babies.

[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150204144653.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150204144653.htm)

<comment><USER8> Another major aspect of jaw development is tongue posture. Resting the tongue on the roof of the mouth and breathing through your nose results in increased jaw development, e.g. a broader palate, thanks to the bone's natural response to give and grow under pressure.

I've been playing with this myself, thanks to discovering recently that I grew up with an undiagnosed mild to moderate tongue tie. I've changed my tongue position, and even as an adult have noticeably expanded my palate such that there is more room in my arch than their was before (as determined by modest gaps developing between my mid-molars).

In short it's been a big discovery for me this year, and the results are manifest in my life. Sad that this is not well understood by orthodontists and such everywhere.

<comment><USER9> Can you point me to more on this? A technical name for it, etc

I have bruxism at night. Generally, my jaw grinds down too much. Hard to stop, because I'm asleep.

I tried pushing my tongue up to the roof of my mouth, and it feels like the opposite of grinding. I'd like to research and see if there's any link. (I'm really out of options for reducing bruxism)

Are you pressing the tongue or just resting it up top?

<comment><USER10> The practice is called orthotropics. I can vouch for this user's experience myself, have had difficulty breathing for many years which led to poor teeth and a narrow palate. Once I received a palatal expander i realized how important it was to keep tongue pressure flat on the roof of the mouth. I practice regularly now and have seem improvements to teeth, breathing, and facing structure. It's a shame this stuff isn't taught more. You can find more details in this video: [https://youtu.be/eh9OqEd5z1k](https://youtu.be/eh9OqEd5z1k)

<comment><USER11> Could you provide more resources that demonstrate the science, such a studies or journal articles? I was interested and didn't find anything.

Additionally I found this that seems to suggest skepticism: [https://www.nature.com/articles/sj.bdj.2014.711](https://www.nature.com/articles/sj.bdj.2014.711)

<comment><USER12> I understand your skepticism. But you should start with the orthotropics youtube channel. Obviously, not an unbiased source of information. But it's a start from which you can at least critically evaluate what they say.

Another thing to bear in mind is that scientific theories are obviously developed faster than they can be proven. And as long as what Orthotropics is not invasive you can try what they preach yourself and draw your own conclusions rather than wait for academic silos to try prove that the method works.

I am trying it on myself. The results are not magical, but I can feel them, I can breathe better. And at the end of the day that's what matters most

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Teeth is a favorite focal-point for anxious people. My very anxious friend, who took acutane when she was younger, is absolutely certain her teeth will fall out when she's 40 years old because her mother took acutane and all of her teeth fell out. The dentist apparently told her something about the roots drying up.

I have dreams in which my jaw widens to the point that it gets stuck-- and then keeps widening. I have dreams where all my teeth fall out and I have to perform an algorithm to put them back in the right order.

Probably because teeth are so exposed, so vulnerable, and are so critically important to social matters-- nevermind that I need them to eat.

I also can't look at pictures of teeth for more than 30 seconds without feeling disconcerted, even though I focus on people's mouths most during a conversation.

<comment><USER14> I've had similar dreams as well. They usually only happen when I'm extremely stressed. It's usually my teeth falling out, and oh is the sensation of loose teeth rolling around in my mouth both vivid and horrifying.

One time it was my tongue swelling up til I couldn't contain it in my mouth anymore, and another I was chewing bubblegum, but no matter how much gum I spit out, the gum kept growing until I was choking on it.

I also had a dream where my teeth fell out, I woke up, was relieved it was only a dream, and got up to go the bathroom. Everything was normal and exactly as it should have been. Even the bathroom light switch worked, which is usually one of those things people say is a dream-tell. Then my teeth started getting loose again, and I panicked and woke up a second time. I had been just been dreaming that I woke up the first time.

<comment><USER15> I also have a recurring nightmare of all my teeth rotting and falling out.

<comment><USER16> Dreaming of teeth falling out is a common dream. I've been told that it means you are afraid of growing old.

I had that dream a lot in the past.

<comment><USER17> seems like a reference to baby teeth coming out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> About a decade ago there was a tremendously promising discovery. A genetically modified variant of the caries bacteria that is the major cause of tooth decay was created which, instead of metabolizing glucose into acid, metabolized it into something inert which also happened to be poisonous to the caries bacteria that excrete acid. A 45 second rinse with a small amount of liquid doped with these bacteria would mean permanent lack of tooth decay.

This would, of course, eliminate 90% or so of the entire dental industry in a single blow. I don't know if that had anything to do with it or not, but the doctor researching it lost funding and the pursuit of turning it into a product or available treatment was abandoned.

<comment><USER19> From Wikipedia[0]:

Jeffrey Hillman from the University of Florida developed a genetically modified strain of Streptococcus mutans called BCS3-L1, that is incapable of producing lactic acid – the acid that dissolves tooth enamel – and aggressively replaces native flora. In laboratory tests, rats who were given BCS3-L1 were conferred with a lifetime of protection against S. mutans. BCS3-L1 colonizes the mouth and produces a small amount of a lantibiotic, called MU1140, which allows it to out-compete S. mutans. Hillman suggested that treatment with BCS3-L1 in humans could also provide a lifetime of protection, or, at worst, require occasional re-applications. He stated that the treatment would be available in dentists' offices and "will probably cost less than $100." The product was being developed by Oragenics, but was shelved in 2014, citing regulatory concerns and patent issues. In 2016, Oragenics received a 17-year patent for the product.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caries_vaccine#Attempts_using_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caries_vaccine#Attempts_using_replacement_therapy)

[1]: [https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1941-gm-bacteria- may-...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1941-gm-bacteria-may-banish- tooth-decay/amp/)

[2]: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/12369203/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/12369203/)

<comment><USER20> You left out the next paragraph which is may be one of the reasons it's not used:

> On rare occasions the native S. mutans strain escapes into the blood, > potentially causing dangerous heart infections. It is unclear how likely > BCS3-L1 is to do the same.

<comment><USER18> That would be a really weird reason. The natural bacteria has the exact same problem. The engineered one is uncertain to have the problem. Why would you opt for the one that definitely carries the risk and ALSO causes expensive tooth decay?

<comment><USER21> Because the engineered caries might behave differently and unexpectedly. Regular caries has a pretty hard time getting into the bloodstream and won't infect other regions. Can the immune recognize the new strain? Can the new strain infect other regions of the body? Does it permeate into the bloodstream more often? There are more questions to be answered, experimentally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Nonsense. We all know that teeth are unrelated to general health, or else they would be covered under the same insurance policy.

<comment><USER23> The idea behind insurance is that you pay a small amount consistently over time so that there is enough money in the mutual pot to cover it when rare expensive events occur.

Dental insurance is not included in standard insurance, and is in general a much worse deal, because all people tend to have dental issues in some form or another. So there is nothing rare about it to spread the risk / cost out.

<comment><USER24> And when you do have issues, the costs tend to be significantly higher than than the yearly limits.

The main benefit is that it makes the appointment costs reasonable enough that people will actually get them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Oral health care should be at the center of our health care strategy and tactics.

We keep learning more about how major, devastating, and very costly illnesses have origins -- contributory or principal -- in oral illness.

That we haven't already acted on this, speaks to the disfunction of our health care system. Here in the U.S., for me, but also in other countries whose "universal health care" excludes dental health.

Cosmetics may be another matter. But oral health? It needs to be covered. A primary factor in preventive care.

And also, the people who make (very good) livings shoveling sugar to kids -- especially, going around parents' controls and wishes -- need a good, hard looking at.

</comment><comment><USER26> Yay!

Another thread where everyone on HN can demonstrate that they think they know everything about health while being almost completely wrong.

<comment><USER27> One would say that anything that offsets the narrowness of perspective you usually see in discussions between healthcare professionals is worth it. Yeah, most advice here is harmful, but so are things in other fields where we have learned to swallow a _need_ for _diversity of perspective_ and _diversity of opinions_...

You can't really avoid hurtful misinformation so you could at least enjoy the _benefits_ that the more open climate engendering it offers... I really hope the coming wave of "garage bio-hacking" brings a more playful and research accelerating attitude to the biomedical fields (along with some little bit of unavoidable death and maiming that we can hopefully laugh off)...

<comment><USER26> The level of discussion here that veers from the scientific mainstream re: nutrition, diet, and exercise, is comparable to that found in your local hippie dippy whole foods co-operative or crossfit gym.

i.e., mostly useless, and possibly dangerous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I cannot let this topic go by without recommending this fantastic interview with an artist who created a model of David Bowie's early-career teeth: [http://w.dental- tribune.com/articles/news/europe/21686_inter...](http://w.dental- tribune.com/articles/news/europe/21686_interview_bowies_teeth_were_like_everything_else_about_him_different.html)

</comment><comment><USER29> Just my 2 cents. 13 years ago I used to always have cavities every time I went to the dentist. Then got told to leave toothpaste on my teeth instead of rinsing after brushing (I only brush once a day). Haven't had any issues since, so I'm guessing the floride has a local effect.

<comment><USER30> Wait, do you mean leaving it on for a minute and then rinsing, or not rinsing at all and just go about your day?

<comment><USER31> I was taught to not rinse, I just wash the outside of my lips & face to freshen you. I presume that lets it linger longer and also you'll swallow some so will be absorbed that way too.

<comment><USER32> Toothpaste is poisonous isn't it? Swallowing it wouldn't be something that makes me happy.

<comment><USER31> As far as I'm aware not in any dose you're ever likely to ingest. What are your sources?

<comment><USER32> Sadly this is from a paper I read when I was somewhere between 8 and 13 so it _is_ entirely possible I formed the wrong conclusions at the time.

Edit: Needless to say, I don't remember the title. Perhaps I should re- investigate it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I remember one of the very first David Letterman shows, he had his dentist as a guest, reviewing the recent Warren Beatty movie Reds from the point of view of dentistry. Apparently it wasn't a very realistic movie.

</comment><comment><USER34> New caries cures/vaccines invented appear in news every other year (the only thing that seem being invented more often are new super-duper batteries) yet none of them reach general availability.

The most recent discovery I can remember is about growing new dentine using an Alzheimer drug: [https://www.nature.com/articles/srep39654](https://www.nature.com/articles/srep39654)

Anyway, I actually find it shocking that in 21th century people are still walking around with a part of our bodies rotting and consider it normal.

</comment><comment><USER35> George Eastman, father of Kodak, was passionate about oral health --particularly for kids. It's why we have an Eastman Institute in Sweden. Not everybody knows it was funded by _the_ Eastman!</comment>


The worst salesman ever. - <AUTHOR> http://www.codercowboy.com/2012/08/01/the-worst-salesman-ever/

<comment><USER2> I went to a funeral via Skype this passed weekend, wasn't to bad, and I felt I could easily be a lot more honest with how I felt by being by myself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not a bad idea. My personal M.O. is to just skip the services bit.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to deal with hagglers w/ future opportunities? - <AUTHOR>

I've noticed almost every potential client, when they are considering buying our product or paying for some services, they always say things like, "This is our entry point." or "I see lots of potential later."  "I know lots of people in this industry."  They are trying to build excitement, but I've learned these claims almost never pan out.
Have you noticed this in your business?  Is this something all customers do -- like a negotiating strategy?  Is it a warning sign that I should walk away?  Any suggestions on how to deal with this type of haggling? <comment><USER2> Many customers will do this, and no, it is not a sign to walk away. But neither does is mean anything. Pretend that they are saying, "Hi, I had rice krispies for breakfast."

Smile and nod, and know in your heart that what they said has no bearing on your business.

</comment><comment><USER3> ignore it, unless you have a special relationship of some sort or are trying to (and can afford to) build one. the bottom line is what is on the table, in the contract today.

knowing someone who knows people won't buy you ramen.</comment>


Chris Anderson: Aware of All Statistical Traditions - <AUTHOR> http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/581.html

<comment><USER2> This is a nice, succinct condemnation of the same idiocy that motivates people to pick up a book on "agent-driven swarm learning systems" instead of understanding how to maximize a posteriori the probability of an observed data set and apply the results to an incoming stream like it.

(Example kiped from <http://www.autonlab.org/tutorials/mle.html> ; Andrew Moore is a hero)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wired (Conde Nast) is in the eyeball business: they sell eyeballs to advertisers. The real surprise is why anyone expects them to publish something other than SciFi hand waving which appeals to the "arithmetic mode" of consumers.

</comment><comment><USER4> This may not be the proper place to express this, but does anyone else find excessive linking in an article obnoxious? Can't they just quote and then cite at the end? Why do I need 9 tabs open to fully enjoy a short article?

</comment><comment><USER5> However, the human brain seems to do just fine without scientific theories.

<comment><USER6> Remember though that the human brain came to exist through the processes of random mutation and natural selection.

You _could_ make an airplane by taking a car, making random changes and selecting those that fly the best, but I doubt anyone would have the patience to be successful at this method. You'd probably be better off hiring some engineers.

<comment><USER7> Are you saying that the more complex the system, the better chance it has to be designed by an intelligent designer versus evolution? ;)

Edit: The whole point in evolution is that the process is automatic. As for why the human brain may just use Bayesian statistics, see <http://videolectures.net/icml07_tenenbaum_bmhi/>

<comment><USER2> _the human brain may just use Bayesian statistics_

The art in using Bayesian statistics is properly choosing and weighting priors, which might explain (assuming your theory is correct) why some people consistently make better decisions than others.

Note also that computers are good at doing stupid things fast, while people are better at doing complex things slowly. Use the right tool for the job.

<comment><USER7> _computers are good at doing stupid things fast, while people are better at doing complex things slowly_

It's a good rule of thumb, reflecting our current ability to use computers. I'm looking at the problem from scientific perspective, not trying to get things done.

 _why some people consistently make better decisions than others_

You don't have to look that deep to explain this. These people should just have better understanding of the domain. I don't think there are data saying some people are consistently better than others across domains. If such data exist ( _wink_ ), you could say they have better modeling of the world in general.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: YC's startup advice, organized and searchable - <AUTHOR> https://ycadvice.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN,

We are YC rejects (I made it to the interview once!) but have benefited greatly from everything YC has put out to help founders like us. Since YCombinator has shared so much helpful content over the years in all sorts of areas, we decided to put some order around it for everyone's benefit. The process looked like:

\- We collected everything YC has put out scattered across different channels (and developed a system to keep it updated)

\- Categorized it using a hybrid NLP-human approach to uncover key macro and micro categories along with identifying the people behind the advice. The goal was to 1. Aid exploration 2. Be able to quickly find the most relevant advice in any given situation.

\- Our company (Polymer Search) specializes in converting a spreadsheet (or any structured data set) into a search and insights engine automatically. That was a huge part of why we decided to tackle this. We used our own beta stack to create YCAdvice.com. The spreadsheet is linked from the site in case anyone wants access to the underlying data (free to use).

Would love any feedback and happy to answer any questions.

<comment><USER2> You should post about your underlying technology, when you're ready. It sounds like something HN would find interesting. Feel free to email us at firstname.lastname@example.com and we might be able to help with how you present your work to the community. This offer goes for anybody—just realize that sometimes there are long delays before we can get back to you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely - thanks Dang. We have some high level info in the FAQ: [http://polymersearch.com/beta/faq_ycadvice.html](http://polymersearch.com/beta/faq_ycadvice.html) and I'd love to go deeper into the process. We'll get in touch.

<comment><USER3> Cool - I've requested a beta invite. Nice work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Are you saying that all the YCAdvice data is sitting in a spreadsheet? Other than the effort to categorize all the content, aren't there many tools that let you use a spreadsheet as a database? What am I missing here?

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, sorry if my other comment didn't make sense. I was talking about both the data itself and also the YCAdvice discovery and search interaction layer on top of that data.

We did first construct the spreadsheet (where lot of categorization was automatic) but then the real value IMO is being able to understand and make use of that multi-dimensional data really easily. The goal being to explore efficiently and develop rapid intuition for anything. The actual spreadsheet is here so you can see the difference: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xTMF_t_EDG34IjnXo- ho...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xTMF_t_EDG34IjnXo- ho7hTuK6atI5Uu-LrPwT_IEOc/edit?usp=sharing)

We are improving stuff so that Polymer's stack can auto-convert spreadsheets with numerical data and do great visualization etc so it can improve human intelligence beyond just categorical data which is the case here.

Let me know if I can clarify anything. Thank you for checking it out.

<comment><USER4> So the visual/interaction layer is generated somehow based on the underlying spreadsheet? How are those interface decisions made and how does the UX/UI change from one spreadsheet to another?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmmm nice questions. So when I was at Google before, I saw a lot of different kinds of datasets. But I also saw commonalities in terms of not just data types, but also data abstractions or the kind of stuff people like to do with that data. The goal (a difficult one for sure) is that can we automate a lot of that for any dataset so it's still unique and powerful enough for that particular dataset but at the same time can be done by anyone without writing code or ton of manual customization ?

In summary, there is a fairly complex process towards making those decisions. Feel free to pm me at ash [at] polymersearch.com if you want to dig deeper.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the additional info.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great tool to generate slick wikis quickly. So, if I connect a sheet to polymer then what's the output? the whole website is generated by Polymer which is then connected to a custom domain? A video demo of your tool/dashboard would clear some doubts.

Also, in the no-code tools area, people use Airtable with integromat/zapier, Webflow to make websites. So, in case you do generate the website, then I think it would be make sense to market/target this as a no-code tool too, it would gather interest from the no-code community quickly .

</comment><comment><USER6> I didn't know YC had so many resources and topics in general. This looks like a pretty well laid out interface for that. If you don't mind, what did the categorization process look like?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah there is a lot of breadth in what YC puts out as we found out ourselves. Categorization for specific domains is hard since we don't have labelled data. It's a mix of unsupervised token extraction, clustering to detect significant concepts along with a human layer to tune false positives and also curate few topics manually since the process will never get everything right on its own.

We are in the process if scaling it further so we can help create many more resources for users and their own data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is dope! Slick design and tool! How many dimensions of data does it support? I visit the website with nothing particular in my mind and think it would be cool to have a sort by popularity type of thing to help me sort things through. This way I know which resource is most valuable to people and most liken by people and encourage me to check it out.

</comment><comment><USER8> Thanks! What a great tool. One talk about product market fit changed greatly what I prioritize in my start up.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are a lot of talks on product and fit in general by YC and they are very informative. What was surprising to me was how many talks/resources they had around this and that can lost. I hope you can find some more around that topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Whoa, this is great. Thanks for putting this together!

Could you do something similar to PG's and Sam Altmans essays?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

Paul Graham essays are included and can be found at: [https://ycadvice.com/?category=Paul%20Graham%20Essays](https://ycadvice.com/?category=Paul%20Graham%20Essays)

If you click on sub-topics after that, you can see all the sub-categories for his essays :)

For Sam Altman, we have all his startup resources at: [https://ycadvice.com/?people=Sam%20Altman](https://ycadvice.com/?people=Sam%20Altman)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Congrats on this launch -- very cool use of the Polymer tech to create something of value to the whole community. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER11> Really cool tool. Would be great if there can some kind of sorting based on time line. like more recent articles etc

<comment><AUTHOR> You can look at the Year tab and see resources by year. It's not the same as sorting but gets you half way there. Nice feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Design is slick and mobile friendly.

I specifically like that I can select topics and share that as a link.

</comment><comment><USER13> Looks great, would love to play with your technology for other data sources!

</comment><comment><USER14> Looks great. Would be helpful to filter The Who's hiring threads as well

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Currently, we have been focusing on all the official resources from YC and not so much on Hacker News threads. But if there's demand for better discovery for Hacker news itself, it'd be very interesting to look into.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Really easy to use and definitely a helpful resource. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER16> Really slick. Love the resulting UI. +1 for Polymer

</comment><comment><USER17> Looks good, what are you using for search?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's all custom for now. A mix of tries and graphs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Polymer is a game changer for big data.

</comment><comment><USER19> this is an incredible resource

</comment><comment><USER20> ...great job structuring data!

</comment><comment><USER21> This is super cool!</comment>


Retrieve and Store Gmail Emails Using PHP IMAP and RedBeanPHP - <AUTHOR> http://www.cubrid.org/wiki_apps/entry/retrieve-and-store-gmail-emails-using-php-imap-and-redbeanphp#.T8XbMwaIJsI.hackernews <comment><USER2> RedBean is a great ORM library. Dead simple and very close to SQL. I've had great experiences with it, and I've seen the main author post about it on Reddit. I'm not familiar with many PHP ORMs, but RedBean could not be easier to learn.</comment>


I thought I was designing for SpaceX, it may have been for the Silk Road - <AUTHOR> https://words.motel.is/i-thought-i-was-designing-for-spacex-i-was-actually-designing-for-the-silk-road-4b4b64834868#.9gelegsu1 <comment><USER2> This really is an interesting story, but I wish he'd taken it to a journalist instead of writing it himself. The narrative is choppy and has a lot of holes in it. I would have loved to see this done as a feature from someone with a lot of experience writing about technology. That might also have given some extra credibility and context to things.

<comment><USER3> Ha. I was going to write a very similar comment. It's a really interesting situation, but the story as told is incomplete and lacking in really obvious parts, such throwing out "30 FBI agents kicking down the door" but not giving anything concrete. Was he there at the time? Was he even still living there? If so, it seems to go directly against his lawyer's "[you will] never hear from the FBI".

<comment><USER4> Agree. Would have been a great story on NewYorker or Wired like this one [https://www.wired.com/2015/04/silk- road-1/](https://www.wired.com/2015/04/silk-road-1/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Edit: Turns out the headline is completely made up. This was in the comment section:

> So was "Sciview" actually some sort of analytics app for Silk Road, with the > "sensors" representing some other Silk Road metrics? Or was BB truly > freelancing for SpaceX while administering Silk Road?

> AUTHOR: Excellent question, I don't know.

So he has no idea if he was just a subcontractor or if he was doing work for Silk Road. If I had to bet on this, I'd guess the friend subcontracted a project to him for easy cash (or because he was in over his head) and the Silk Road stuff was completely unrelated.

What would Silk Road do with such an application anyway?

<comment><USER6> Don't recall if I ever met the author of this blog post personally, but his boss/roommate mentioned this particular application to me several times over several months. I was thousands of miles away from SF but it came up repeatedly in casual conversations and after leaving SpaceX he seemed to genuinely believe he had a shot of selling this product to SpaceX as an internal tool. He always juggled lots of projects and besides this SpaceX idea, I remember him telling me 2 weeks before the arrest about another unrelated project he was trying to get a team together for so he could apply to Y Combinator. Never once did I hear anything hinting at involvement with the Silk Road, but he always talked about a million ideas at once. Anyone who knew him for long knew that he traveled a lot for years and years (back in 2010 he was the first person I knew who jumped on Jet Blue's special offer of a month of unlimited travel for only $600), so the author would've realized that was routine if he knew him for long. I do find the author's story very plausible.

<comment><USER5> > his boss/roommate mentioned this particular application to me several times > over several months. . . it came up repeatedly in casual conversations and > after leaving SpaceX he seemed to genuinely believe he had a shot of selling > this product to SpaceX

> I do find the author's story very plausible.

Aren't these statements completely contradictory?

On the one hand, you say it _was_ a SpaceX project. But later, you say that the author is correct (meaning it was a Silk Road project).

So... which is it?

<comment><USER6> A little confusing, I know, and it doesn't help that the HN title is currently different from the blog post title. I find it plausible that the author was wondering what the project was really for, because it wasn't an official SpaceX project. It wasn't even contracted by SpaceX, but rather intended to be completed and then pitched to SpaceX and hopefully sold to SpaceX. But the author wouldn't have had any interaction with SpaceX and therefore is wondering to this day whether there was a real chance that SpaceX would have ever used this code.

Edit: That being said, I'm a little surprised the author thinks this code would've been used for anything related to Silk Road.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not doubting the story, but it doesn't seem to fit together much the way that it's told here. Exactly who was he really working for, and what was his "friend"s relationship to them?

All I can really say is maybe you should be extra skeptical when somebody talks about working for a "big name" company, like SpaceX, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. If you're never reading or writing emails from a company.com email address, going to company's actual public website, going for interviews or meetings at an actual company office, then maybe you should look really closely at who you're really working for.

<comment><USER8> He was working for "Defcon" or Blake Benthall (his roommate in the story). Defcon was running Silk Road 2.0 after the second "Dread Pirate Roberts" left.

Blake had been working for SpaceX, and left to work on Silk Road. This is his HN account: [https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=blakeeb](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=blakeeb)

<comment><USER9> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7277371](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7277371)

Prophetic.

<comment><USER10> Defcon was always much more hateable than DPR.

There's probably a reason no-one came to his defense the way they did with Ross.

And buying a Tesla with Bitcoin? He was begging to get caught. And he complains about greed.

He should have watched Breaking Bad and learned the basic lesson of not buying a flashy car when you're trying to keep a low profile.

<comment><USER9> I admit I haven't kept up with the whole Silk Road 2.0 story, but I don't see DPR as sympathetic considering the only reason he didn't have a hitman kill people was that he was too bumbling to hire a real one.

<comment><USER11> I don't see the potential victim as very sympathetic because they were trying to blackmail someone who they knew had no legal recourse.

You can make _anyone_ want to kill you (and attempt it) by threatening them appropriately.

<comment><USER9> Well, personally, I don't consider that a justification for homicide, but to each his own.

<comment><USER11> Wait until it happens to you. There are many crimes that don't actually hurt anyone which would still ruin your life if you were caught committing them. Blackmail pulls someone from the innocent-citizen category and puts them into just-another-gangster category in a way that smoking some pot does not.

But also, there's a big difference between giving someone an absolute 100% pass and simply being able to empathize.

<comment><USER9> But he wasn't just smoking pot (and it's hard to imagine anyone really caring about unsubstantiated allegations of some guy smoking pot), he was running a massive drug dealing enterprise.

<comment><USER11> Right, which existed to let people buy things they wanted, like pot. He didn't sell near schools, or fight turf wars, etc.

Our silly laws, and the greed of the blackmailer, created this situation. The person attempting to pull the trigger is nearly blameless.

<comment><USER9> > Our silly laws, and the greed of the blackmailer, created this situation. > The person attempting to pull the trigger is nearly blameless.

lmao. OK dude

<comment><USER11> If the laws were even slightly focused on harm reduction instead of stocking private prisons then maybe they wouldn't be ridiculous. And obviously the blackmailer, turning someone in for something that isn't an actual harm to society, is more of a harm than the "criminal" is.

Your whole argument is "law enforcement is good", with as much proof as you'd supply for the existence of Santa. That's a stupidly naive view to have. Yes, kidnapping is bad and stopping kidnappers is good. But very little of what law enforcement does is in our best interests, as individuals or as a society.

Clearly the rightness of evading law enforcement and shooting blackmailers depends on the rightness of the law the enforcers are enforcing. With bad law backing them up...

<comment><USER9> It's not that "law enforcement is good" or even "drug laws are good" but "hiring people to commit murder on your behalf is morally wrong."

> Clearly the rightness of evading law enforcement and shooting blackmailers > depends on the rightness of the law the enforcers are enforcing. With bad > law backing them up...

That's not exactly clear, no. In fact it's less than clear, to me, that hiring a hitman is anywhere near the same moral level as "evading law enforcement."

<comment><USER11> > "hiring people to commit murder on your behalf is morally wrong."

No, unjustifiably murdering people is wrong. Killing someone for the "right" reasons, either by yourself or by proxy, is morally right.

> > Clearly the rightness of evading law enforcement and shooting blackmailers > depends on the rightness of the law the enforcers are enforcing.

> That's not exactly clear, no.

Sure it is. You never taken a history class, or watched current events on TV, if you think all laws are equal and that all rulers have a right to be obeyed. Without recognizing a bad law you can't recognize good law.

> In fact it's less than clear, to me, that hiring a hitman is anywhere near > the same moral level as "evading law enforcement."

Soldiers are hit men. Sending them some places results in war crimes, sending them other places prevents war crimes. Overall, I'd rather have and use soldiers than not.

For a meaningful comparison with "law enforcement", first specify which legal system and which laws.

<comment><USER9> > Killing someone for the "right" reasons, either by yourself or by proxy, is > morally right.

Avoiding the consequences for running your large criminal enterprise, through which you are enriching yourself, doesn't strike me as a good case for justifiable homicide.

<comment><USER11> > through which you are enriching yourself

Red Herring.

> Avoiding the consequences

The invented consequences, yes. But the consequences of the crime itself (ie hitting someone while drunk driving) have to be bad in and of themselves for the concept of crime to be distinct from angering the king.

> doesn't strike me as a good case for justifiable homicide.

Being threatened with having your life ruined for actions that don't hurt anyone actually seems like the only reasonable justification for killing someone. Especially in the case of a blackmailer where they aren't attempting to right any (theoretical) wrongs.

<comment><USER9> I simply do not agree with you.

<comment><USER11> No, you refuse to put yourself in the shoes of someone breaking an unjust law and being persecuted for it. You may never agree with a drug dealer killing an informant, but the concept of killing your blackmailer is much broader.

The fact is that _our_ law. (You and me. We paid for it.) Doesn't help us, and was used to hurt (blackmail) someone. You might not think the hit was "Fair" or in proportion but it was a consequence of our useless law - making someone defend themselves. As long as we have bad law we'll have its unintended consequences.

Silk Road was the best public-safety advancement in drugs in the last millennium. It was impossible for someone to stumble into unaware, it wasn't near a school, church, rehab clinic, etc. And our useless laws treated it like he was shoving crack cocaine into a toddler's mouth, and denied him the protection of the police.

And useless isn't just a term of dislike, it's that our drug laws don't increase safety for anyone, dealers, users, or bystanders.

<comment><USER9> Hard to see a guy who made himself rich in the process as a martyr.

<comment><USER11> Your empathy is contingent on someone's wallet?

Not a martyr, that's a silly religious concept. He's just not served by the law and neither are we. He was denied protection despite not hurting people, and yet we are no safer because of the actions of law enforcement.

Anyways, as long as we create this class of people (criminals whose crimes don't hurt anyone) and deny them protection, they will protect themselves. That's not further criminality, it's humanity. You would defend yourself, and so do they. We can stick our heads in the sand and say "It's wrong, they're criminal" or we can stop with the ridiculous laws.

<comment><USER9> > Your empathy is contingent on someone's wallet?

No, that's a really imbecilic interpretation of what I said. If you're making yourself rich you can't turn around and plead that your act was selfless public service. Ulbricht was no different than any other violent drug lord and you won't convince me otherwise by repeating arguments about how drug laws should be reformed -- that's not a notion I disagree with but I think it has zero bearing on this case.

<comment><USER11> > If you're making yourself rich you can't turn around and plead that your act > was selfless public service.

If the public willingly partook of his services, by definition they _were_ a public service. Stores profit from me and yet I also profit from them.

But you're trying to twist out some strange moralistic meaning, as if he should run his business as a non-profit despite how you and I both expect to profit from our work. And even if he could just give his products away, you'd condemn him for that as well. Nobody needs to be selflessly service the public just to deserve protection (or the right to protect themselves).

> you won't convince me otherwise by repeating arguments about how drug laws > should be reformed

I'm not arguing that they should, but mainly because I think that's obvious. I'm arguing that because these are our laws, we created this situation. That as long as we have these laws, we create this exact scenario.

> I think it has zero bearing on this case.

Well, other than being 100% the cause of this case. Because you can't blackmail someone for something legal, and this is the very model of a consensual. Nobody was forced to shop Silk Road.

If we don't need to justify the law then we could just as well make abortion illegal and apply the same logic to escaped abortionists.

The law on its own is a worthless artifact, not justification.

> Ulbricht was no different than any other violent drug lord and

Wrong, considering his attempted violence was defensive in nature. But also, boring blame centric thinking.

Drug lords are no different than spice merchants; protecting their wares until they get to market. If you want safer streets, protect the merchants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you take a look at the code on Github you quickly realize it's complete bullshit, a bit of hardcoded data [1] and one file of backend code that looks like it was copied from somewhere [2].

[1] [https://github.com/tdrach/Sciview/blob/master/public/javascr...](https://github.com/tdrach/Sciview/blob/master/public/javascripts/services/Sources.js)

[2] [https://github.com/tdrach/Sciview/blob/master/routes/api/v1/...](https://github.com/tdrach/Sciview/blob/master/routes/api/v1/journey.js)

<comment><USER13> He doesn't claim it was a finished product

<comment><USER14> But he talks about an ongoing business relationship. He probably spend a lot of time that isn't obvious in the code (requirements, interface design, software design etc.), but we can only see code that anyone could have coded within one hour. That's substantially less than what I would have expected from the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The lawyer was correct. If you have reason to suspect the FBI is watching you, they already have what they need. The men-in-black routine is meant to alter your behavior, to cause you to do something rare like empty an account or contact a distant friend. This was federal investigation 101.

Walk past the car and photograph the driver. They really love that.

<comment><USER16> _Walk past the car and photograph the driver. They really love that._

I assume you're being sarcastic, but they might actually "love that" if their objective at that point of the investigation is to alarm you and see what you do. It's an acknowledgment that they have indeed alarmed you.

<comment><USER15> I can actually do them a favour. That agent doesnt like sitting there all day. He was assinged to intimidate. Mission acomplished. By photographing him you acknowledge the message and he can be assigned to sonething else. Moving the nonverbal conversation along might actually trigger them to make a formal, polite, approach.

A lone FBI agent wont be happy, but he wont break cover be reacting. He will just drive away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why did the silk road want a data visualization app?

The "live demo" in the linked github doesn't seem to be very "live", in that it seems to be totally static. The post talks about "drawing correlations" but all it does it make a graph. [http://sciview.herokuapp.com/#/data- sets/0](http://sciview.herokuapp.com/#/data-sets/0)

<comment><USER18> > Why did the silk road want a data visualization app?

Telemetry, analytics, data visualization, and things like AB testing would probably work just as well for a dark web market as they would for Amazon. It's all about the money.

As for why they felt they needed to create their own specific tool for this specifically, I'm not sure.

<comment><USER19> You want to believe it, because it would be a more exciting story. But if I wanted you to make me an analytic app for the Silk Road, I would tell you I want an analytic app for a _marketplace_. Which will be selling toys or whatever. Amazon 2.0. Not a fucking spaceship.

It wouldn't be very plausible even if this guy was a programmer, asked to make some generic analytics engine for a spaceship (because things rarely are truly completely generic). But this guy is a designer. You do not hire a designer, because drawing a picture for UI is some secret knowledge available only to them, but because it requires spending your time thinking about this specific problem and picking pretty colors. So if I wanted to make some app without telling designers about the real purpose of the app, I wouldn't really need a designer at all. I would hire a programmer and ask him to make me another Salesforce, with exactly the same GUI.

<comment><USER20> space x also wouldn't hire some random green designer to develop a solution to analyze space ship data. They will use well vetted commercial solutions. LOL this author is BSing for sure..

<comment><USER19> SpaceX didn't hire anyone. Did you read it at all? It was some guy (Blake Benthall aka "Defcon"), who previously worked at SpaceX, who allegedly hired this guy Thomas to make UI for some project of his own that he (Defcon) intended to sell to SpaceX later.

I'm not saying the whole story isn't BS, but at least it didn't claim what you assume it claimed.

<comment><USER20> I'm saying from the author's perspective, wouldn't he question why spacex need such paltry solution to visualize data from billion dollar projects? Either author is too dim to realize this obvious conflict, or he is just lying, and a poor lie at that.. Don't even say spacex. Just claim some CRUD start up instead

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think this is a great story to tell buddies when grabbing a drink, but not really good for posting online which will last forever.

Maybe if the project was actually functional and high quality, but it's just a half baked project that doesn't even work.

Furthermore, there's no proof that what he worked on was actually silk road. Even looking at the screenshots it says nothing about silkroad, looks actually like a spacex project.

Like others said, I think his main motivation is to post it for the record, so if one day he disappears, people know where to track him down.

</comment><comment><USER22> This story is completely unintelligible. I have no idea what this story is about, where does it say he was designing for Silk Road? Did he say he was talking with DPR or something?

<comment><USER23> It's a weird-ass story the writer likely concocted to save his ass.

<comment><USER24> This. If he is ever charged he will point back at this article as "proof" of accidentally complicity.

<comment><USER25> Trying to give an account of one's potential involvement in illegal activities without first consulting a lawyer is a far, far worse idea than just saying nothing at all.

<comment><USER23> In general: That's why we all love watching stupid criminals on TV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is a nice ShowHN with a cover story. I'm not questioning the validity, just finding this amusing.

<comment><USER14> The story is good, the app really isn't worth mentioning. It's little more than a slighlty nicer version of a paper prototype of the basic UI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I honestly have no clue how this is voted so high on HN right now, I assume it's just the title people are voting on. It makes no sense, jumps around and no flow. I had to re-read parts multiple times and I still have no clue what is going on.

<comment><USER28> As bad as the writing style is, I still found the story interesting. The bits of info about working with his friend are juicy, even if the title is overblown and there's not much meat to the post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> He hints at the end that 30 FBI agents kicked down his door, then says nothing more. Way to leave us hanging!

<comment><USER21> Wait for the next season of... Mr. Robot!

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> > This makes for an awkward cupcake ceremony where you're not sure whether to > smile or to laugh.

"I don't know whether to smile or laugh" isn't a very powerful expression.

<comment> nommm-nommm What does it mean?

<comment><USER30> A common idiom is "not know whether to laugh or cry", which usually means a situation is extremely bad. I don't really know how that applies to having a birthday party a week after you announce you're quitting, though.

<comment> nommm-nommm "Not know whether to laugh or cry" usually means (to me) a situation is both funny and sad. Like you wouldn't say "my entire family was killed in an automobile crash, I don't know whether to laugh or cry," there's no humorous component.

Like you said, birthday cake celebration of an outgoing employee is neither.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wtf? Why would spacex utilize a freelancer front end Dev / designer to develop a one off crappy custom soln for data analysis? When much more robust, performant, established solutions exist?

Also space x is not a green start up, why would they still lack the ability to visualize and analyze data?

The author obviously failed to ask himself this obvious questions.

</comment><comment><USER31> On the plus side, the OP had plausible deniability. I wonder whether he could've been considered an accomplice or liable in any way, or not knowing who he was working for completely exonerated him.

</comment><comment><USER32> The Silk Road reference--is he saying he was working for Chinese interests? Where was the sensor data coming from?

I understand it's probably a painful story to tell, but a lot of little details are missing here, and they'd probably help both the author's friends and new readers like me understand what happened.

<comment><USER33> He's talking about the Silk Road marketplace - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_\(marketplace\))

<comment><USER32> Thanks, so it sounds like the SpaceX pitch was just the client wanting to build up a really cool cover story while he worked on(?) Silk Road in secret. Right?

<comment><USER33> Presumably yes, and the datapoints being visualised would have presumably been transactions. The admin in question would have been Blake Benthall, not Ross Ulbricht who'd already been caught by then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Do a FOIA request and get your FBI file. Could be interesting confirmation

</comment><comment><USER35> The author's title seems misleading, since in the post's comments Thomas acknowledges how he's not sure if his design was being actually used for Silk Road or if his leaseholder really was freelancing for SpaceX.

</comment><comment><USER36> so, who do you have on your resume, SpaceX or Silk Road?

<comment><USER37> I wonder if SpaceX will recruit him after the publicity.</comment></comment>


Ownership Explained with Python - <AUTHOR> https://paulkernfeld.com/2018/09/16/ownership-explained-with-python.html <comment><USER2> Quoting:

        ... an important distinction that I did not
        know before writing this blog post: a value
        is a chunk of data in the computer's memory,
        whereas a variable, like squares, is a way
        to refer to that value from the code.

To one who grew up with machine code (in some cases not even assembler) and who looks to understand existing languages at both levels - the high level abstract and the low level implementation - this is always jarring. I know full well that many, perhaps most, modern programmers actually don't know much about how the languages they are using are implemented, but when someone doesn't really know or understand the difference between a value, a variable, and a reference, I find it rather disturbing.

It will pass - there will come a time when only true gurus will know how things actually work. To some extent I've been privileged to live in a time when I could work at (nearly) all levels of the system.</comment>


A college professor gives her students extra credit for going on dates - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/soloish/wp/2018/04/16/this-college-professor-gives-her-students-extra-credit-for-going-on-dates/ <comment><USER2> One of the things I didn't appreciate until leaving college was how much the world narrows. In college you're surrounded by people at similar life stages who are more open to new experiences and to meeting new people (or at least more so than after). It's a lot more difficult to form new friendships after college and that seems especially true now that phones and other entertainment occupy downtime attention. Texting has emerged as the dominant form of communication and it's easier than ever to flake on plans since all you need to do is send a text. People seem to be increasingly isolated, lonely, and unhappy.

And this is all very new having only really emerged around 2009 - 2010 or so.

<comment><USER3> You can find similar people, it just takes more work.

One good outlet is work. Usually you can find a few similar people there.

The other good outlet is hobbies. Love running? Join a running club. Lots of people who love running. Similar mindset + common interest = a good pool to meet people from.

Just surfing facebook won't find you people, no..

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Historically, women basically aimed to marry well. Men had careers. Women had husband's to provide for them.

A lot of those relationships weren't terribly emotionally intimate. I married my best friend. But a lot of marriages were never like that.

Now, women want careers. Juggling two careers is hard. Fewer women want children.

If you are both going to work and support yourself, then the primary thing you want from a "relationship" is sex.

I mean, I'm 52. I'm not the hookup type. I had a long marriage. I'm not easy to get next to.

But this idea that both people will have serious careers and also a deep, intimate relationship and also also kids...

There's only 24 hours in the day. That's not a very realistic expectation for most people.

In that context, hookup culture makes sense. All our fairy tale ending stories are posited on an old fashioned marriage where she's a full time wife and he provides for her. If that isn't your mental model, if you expect some other basis for your life, well, that has knock off effects that it's gauche to talk about because people don't like looking at marriage as a kind of financial contract. But that's what it is.

<comment><USER5> Is it really true that the primary thing we want from a relationship is sex? Yes we want sex but what about companionship, a fellow traveller, someone to love and be loved by? These maybe harder to achieve but I think these are things people are 'primarily' looking for in relationships. Cheap sex isn't that hard to find, and for most men at least, sex alone is not enough to justify the effort involved in a relationship. I suspect the same applies with at least equal force to women.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is consistent with my college experience but maximally inconsistent with post-college: because of online dating, many people can and do go on more coffee-only first-dates than previous generations ever did. Maybe that means they are being psychologically warped by perceived disposability, but they certainly aren't lacking in practice talking with strangers.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure if it's in the article or not, but the professor requires her students to ask people out in person. In my experience, both from dating and from talking to male and female friends, this is significantly less common now than in the past. And I've noticed that on planes and while waiting in lines people talk with strangers less than when I was a kid.

<comment><USER8> Not my mom. She talks to everyone anyway. Sometimes she even pinches their cheeks and hugs them. Crazy old bat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Flexing these types of social muscles can be an amazing experience. One of my biggest confidence boosters came from asking out a woman whom I'd just met, and then getting turned down.

We were at a pet store, and happened to chat briefly about our dogs. I asked if she'd like to grab coffee, and she said she had a boyfriend. We chatted a bit more about our dogs, and went our separate ways.

It was amazing to see that this type of experience doesn't need to be scary, and can feel extremely normal. I don't know many others who have experienced either side of that type of interaction, so it's encouraging to see this professor is encouraging it in her students.

<comment><USER10> I think a lot of people are afraid of this sort of scenario because they think it will be "awkward" or "weird."

One thing I've learned in life is a situation is only weird if you make it weird.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> From my anecdotal experience, being out of your comfort zone is the actual highway to relationships.

I used to live in a house in a foreign country to which people from my home country crashed to during their short, usually few week visits at the area. Surprisingly, the people who came there were exceptionally open (exceptional as in compared to a usual native). Most of them came either alone or with one friend/business partner. I think a lot of their openness attributed to the fact that they were in a temporary, new environment.

I also noticed that being open myself first helped to initiate deep conversations. But after returning to home and to college, despite continuing to prompt these discussions, I rarely get the same kind of reaction anymore.

My general observation is that my peers are happy to answer questions I have, but they lack the social skills to listen and ask leading questions. But then again, this might just be that they find me uninteresting as a person, but the difference is worryingly stark -- out of 30 people I've befriended on Facebook only a few have I had conversations deep enough I'd consider to meet up with them just to talk. The numbers were very much the opposite if you'd compare it to the experience in the foreign land.

Thus, I think it is silly to have fear of missing out on relationships or a partner during college. With the new brave world of remote working, I could as well make a living in the opposite end of the planet just a mere day after graduation, to which I am quite sure most of the peers won't (or wouldn't) follow me anyway.

</comment><comment><USER12> As someone in their 40's who dates girls in their 20's, I've definitely found this to be true. Many of the girls I got out with have never been on a traditional date. I get the impression that the experience of being picked up, taken to a nice restaurant, being conversed with, and not worrying about the bill is something out of the twilight zone for them.

Young guys, you're doing it wrong, but as an old fogey, I'm not complaining.

<comment><USER13> As someone in their 20's, going for traditional dates of coffee/dinner and conversation is all I do. I have been on about 30 dates in the last year and they were all traditional dates. I've also never tried for anything within the realm of casual dating ever.

I really don't think your claim would hold up to light in my experience dude. All of the women were readily aware that it was a date and none of the dates really went anywhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was expecting a metoo story. It was a refreshing read.

</comment><comment><USER15> For those who TLDR .... this is for dates with each other, not her

</comment><comment><USER16> Another way to measure people by attractiveness or agreeableness or some other attribute that doesn't matter for engineering. The goal is likely to give a certain demographic good grades, like almost all of K-12.

</comment><comment><USER17> Maybe because of age (I'm 35) or culture (I'm in Asian country), but I don't get it. To get laid, you need to go through the process of dating: Ask her out, lots of "bullshit" (a matter on perspective), spend time and money, and if you're lucky, you'll get laid.

Maybe what she meant is "in serious relationship"?

<comment><USER18> All that "bullshit" she puts you through is probably her way of trying to figure out if you're someone she could have a relationship with or just another dickhead trying to get laid.

<comment><USER19> Some guys end up putting their everything (money, reputation, efforts and huge time) and still don't get anything meaningful out of it.

<comment><USER20> _" Some guys end up putting their everything (money, reputation, efforts and huge time) and still don't get anything meaningful out of it."_

Relationships are not a one-way street or a vending machine. You can't expect to just pump in a bunch of time and money and for the product to automatically come popping out.

There has to be some chemistry between the two of you... the other person has to actually like you. That takes more than effort, money or time. It takes developing a genuine connection, which in turn usually requires an emotional investment, an opening up to the other person, having shared values, a shared view of the world, perhaps even a sense of humor that the other person finds funny, and so on.

Unless, of course, you're just looking to get laid.. in which case a sex worker might be a better use of your money.

<comment><USER19> "There has to be some chemistry between the two of you... the other person has to actually like you. That takes more than effort, money or time."

Every woman I pursued ended up costing me $1M. There was all chemistry at the start but soon it disappeared.

Disappearing love is correlated money transfer from me to them.

I've stopped looking for any love. I've accepted does not exist in real world.

<comment><USER20> There are definitely way too many people (men and women) who are just after money. One of the downsides of being rich is that those kind of people tend to sniff you out and come after whatever they can leech off of you.

Being poor, I don't have that problem. If someone likes me, I can be pretty sure they're not after my money.. because I don't have any.

That said, with or without money, relationships can start out good and turn sour for many reasons completely unrelated to money. When relationships start, we're often putting on our best face, and the people we're dating only see the positive side of us (and we of them). After a while, unless we have outstanding acting ability (and usually some kind of pathology which keeps us from being genuine with our loved ones), we start to show our true selves to each other.. and we (or they) might not like what we see.

That's when relationships can easily fall apart -- especially if both people aren't mature enough to recognize that most relationships require hard work to keep them going in the long run, and aren't committed to doing that work. Communication is especially important at this stage.

What am I doing wrong? How can I do better? What do I want out of this relationship? At a fundamental level, are we really compatible?

These are questions we have to ask ourselves and each other, but most people are really bad at communicating -- especially with people close to themselves, with people who they feel vulnerable to and who they don't want to hurt.... until they can't take it anymore and things blow up.. but by then it's usually too late to make amends.

So, yeah, if things are going wrong for you over and over, and if you or the people you're dating are falling in to recognizable patterns, you might want to start by asking yourself some tough questions.. perhaps with the help of a good therapist. Negative relationship patterns are one of the things a good therapist could really help you to break out of -- in more constructive ways than just giving up.

<comment><USER4> Unless you are literally homeless and eating at soup kitchens because you have zero income, then you have some money, even if you aren't rich.

There is always someone who can have less than you. I have seen plenty of homeless people used for their money by someone claiming romantic interest, usually women.

When I was a homeless woman, I knew a homeless guy who had fantasies I would provide for him in exchange for sex. Yeah, no.

I did the homemaker thing and supported my husband's career. It cost me a career. Time is money as they say. I'm divorced and I am still struggling to make ends meet.

I'm dirt poor and I very much agree with the GP. Love isn't real.

<comment><USER20> Well, I'm not after other people's money. It sounds like you and GP aren't after it either. We all want to make genuine connections and have meaningful relationships.

That makes three of us, and I have a feeling there are many more. We're just not connecting enough, and have been bitten so much that we stay home licking our wounds instead of risking getting hurt again.

But it's not because good people aren't out there. They're out there. We just have to find them somehow, and that takes trying instead of sitting at home.

<comment><USER4> Trying has taught me the exact same thing the GP has learned: People only ever take advantage of me. That's it.

I'm not rich, but it has cost me plenty to be kind and generous to people and I don't need some internet stranger trying to give me some pep talk like I just haven't tried hard enough.

<comment><USER20> Yes, we are strangers. I don't know you, and don't know what you have or haven't tried, or how hard you've tried. I don't know who you met and who you didn't meet, how they treated you or how you treated them.

I, like you, have my own experience of and view on the world, and I was just expressing it and trying to help -- help not just you but anyone who's reading this that might be going through something similar.

I've seen so many good people torpedo their own chances, so many people blame others when they actually had a role to play in the negative way the relationship went (I'm not saying you're doing this because, as you point out, I don't know you at all.. but some people certainly do exactly that), and so many people could do a lot better if they did try more and worked on their issues more to actually improve their own desirability and ability to cope with serious relationships.

But if you don't believe me, if you're not convinced or don't think what I say applies to you, and you prefer to give up, fine. Then what I say is not for you. Maybe it can encourage someone else who hasn't yet given up.

<comment><USER4> I have written and erased at least 5 replies here. As nicely as possible, the approach you are taking is not a good way to be encouraging to bitter people. It feels on the receiving end very dismissive and like a kick in the teeth.

I'm talented at making other people feel okay about themselves. I'm talented at taking care of other people and doing right by them, even under extremely challenging circumstances. The only people who have ever given back on par with what I gave them is my two sons.

Everyone else seems to essentially say "Thanks for the freebies! (chump! God, what a fool! Ha ha ha! I can't believe the bitch fell for that!)"

If I ever meet a guy who wants me and is not essentially a blood sucking vampire, great! But I'm just not holding my breath anymore.

<comment><USER20> _" As nicely as possible, the approach you are taking is not a good way to be encouraging to bitter people."_

Then what is a good way to be encouraging to bitter people?

I mean, something that is actually encouraging rather than discouraging, and not something I don't believe. Because I am hopeful about relationships, and don't believe in simply isolating oneself because the only people you're going to meet are going to be users and abusers. I just don't believe that's true, even if some people have been unlucky enough to only meet and be abused by such horrible people.

<comment><USER4> For starters, you can stop being judgey. You have described me as giving up and isolating myself. I haven't said any such thing.

For another, genuine empathy for a person's experiences is a good place to start.

My youngest son used to have the obnoxious habit of only ever saying "I love you" as a rebuttal when I was whining that "No one loves me!" until I finally handed him his head over what rotten behavior that was and told him if he really loved me, he could say it at times when it didn't amount to shooting me down gratuitously and kicking me while I was down.

The absolute worst time to tell people "Chin up, tally ho!" is when they are in a funk -- especially if that's the only interaction they have with you.

I understand where you are coming from precisely because I'm an excessively optmistic Pollyanna with a bad habit of doing exactly that. It's a habit I have tried hard to break because it basically never goes anywhere good.

I'm not in a good place today. I don't intend to continue this conversation. It doesn't really have anything to do with you.

<comment><USER20> _" You have described me as giving up and isolating myself. I haven't said any such thing."_

You're absolutely right. I saw you say _" Love isn't real"_ and _" Trying has taught me the exact same thing the GP has learned: People only ever take advantage of me. That's it,"_ and assumed that because of that you had given up. I shouldn't have made that assumption, and I apologize for that. I'll also try to ask myself if I'm in any way being judgmental before I post something in the future, because that's not my conscious intention -- quite the opposite.

 _" For another, genuine empathy for a person's experiences is a good place to start."_

Ok. I'll work on that. I admit that I was too dismissive of your experiences. I should have had more empathy.

 _" The absolute worst time to tell people "Chin up, tally ho!" is when they are in a funk -- especially if that's the only interaction they have with you."_

True. I know how that feels, and I hate it when people do that to me. But I'm really at a loss as to what to say that could be more genuinely encouraging to a bitter person. Maybe I shouldn't say anything except offer empathy.

 _" I understand where you are coming from precisely because I'm an excessively optmistic Pollyanna with a bad habit of doing exactly that."_

That's funny, because I'm usually really pessimistic. I think sometimes my pep talks are as much for myself as they are for other people.

 _" I'm not in a good place today. I don't intend to continue this conversation. It doesn't really have anything to do with you."_

I understand. Absolutely no hard feelings on my part. I'm sorry for being insensitive.

<comment><USER21> I just want to say, as a bystander, thanks for offering your perspective on this. It's reassuring that someone else feels the same way I do.

As you say, that makes at least four of us who aren't looking for someone with money. And I get that a lot of the world is like that. Not that I'm judging the rest of the world, you do you, whoever you are. It just gets frustrating for me personally sometimes when it feels like I'm the only one in my circle of friends who feels this way about dating.

So thanks again. I would like to discuss this further with you, if you're up for it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>