MentalHealthError: an exception occurred - cool-RR http://www.kennethreitz.org/essays/mentalhealtherror-an-exception-occurred <comment><USER4> This story struck a nerve because (in hindsight) I saw the same thing happening to my brother when he was about 19. He was suddenly interested in astrology, reiki, "tachyon energy disks", epiphanies, angels and demons, the vibrations of the universe.

At the time I thought it was a phase. My mother was always talking (tongue-in- cheek?) about her "parking angel" and burning incense, so I thought he had just picked up that part of her personality.

Turns out he had (and still has, many years later) schizophrenia so he was genuinely using his considerable intelligence to try and make sense of what he saw, heard and felt, drawing on any "truth" he could find.

It really put me off religion and spirituality for a very long time. If these concepts weren't out there and accepted by so many people, maybe he would have been diagnosed and treated sooner and be in a better place today. I don't know.

These days I do think some amount of religion/spirituality is positive, and I think in total it makes the world a better place, but if I ever felt that kind of epiphany personally I know I would head straight to the nearest mental hospital.

<comment><USER5> This is an interesting read on the difference of views between the Western and African views of 'mental illness' from an African (Witch) Doctor after visiting some western mental hospitals:

        http://www.wakingtimes.com/2014/08/22/shaman-sees-mental-hospital/

tl;dr: Most of what we view as mental illness they view as the birth or awakening of a 'healer' and should be treated that way for proper acceptance of the person into society and eventual recoverey.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I read that article a lot.

<comment><USER7> And what was your conclusion on it, now that you had an experience and came out of it safe and sound? I don't have any serious mental issues, but the thought of having any and the stigma around them honestly terrifies me. (And reading stories like yours does the opposite) And so while I'm not behind the woo woo of the article, I do like the gentler approach to treating the ill.

If you're mentally ill, "oh weird, that's happening to me" seems like a better state of mind to be in than to be terrified, ashamed and dealing with the petty indignities of being a patient at a clinic. Though I guess modern mental health clinics are much more human than they used to be. Thoughts?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A well written and brutally honest article - the author should be commended as this kind of honesty is what's needed in beginning to address mental health issues. I did feel the last throwaway point "don't date the crazy chick" let it down slightly - by his own hypothesis she too was suffering (bad) mental health issues and blithely shifting blame to her seems a little off.

<comment><USER9> I'm curious what kind of drugs were involved. Crazy chick, traveling the world, doing shamanistic rituals (which often use drugs), sleep depriving oneself until hallucinating, etc.

He doesn't say it outright but had he not taken part in these damaging things, he may not have had the psychotic episode and wouldn't know he was bipolar.

[http://www.elle.com/beauty/health- fitness/advice/a14193/ayah...](http://www.elle.com/beauty/health- fitness/advice/a14193/ayahuasca-drug/)

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2521132/DMT- spirit-m...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2521132/DMT-spirit- molecule-drug-used-Shamanic-ceremonies-sweeping-country.html)

<comment><USER10> I thought this too, I won't deny it. I suppose two counterpoints would be:

1) If you really can work days and days on end without feeling tired or feeling the need for sleep (as someone who works very, very excessive hours, I can safely say I spend most of that time _yearning_ for my bed), in all likelihood you are going to come crashing down at some point;

2) You can definitely start hallucinating purely from lack of sleep, after "only" a couple of days, without the assistance of any hallucinogenic drugs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Side note on the "mystic flavor" yoga (as oppose to plain "mindfullness meditation" and "yoga for back pains") and other "eastern" spirituality things: I think there's a reason why there are so many initiation ceremonies and tasks that one was/is traditionally put to do before going-off-the-deep- end, and why ancient hindus saw being a yogi as a path for one that was of a certain age and already had a family and proved itself capable of functioning in society - _to weed out anyone with preexisting mental health conditions._ You even see this pattern in the story of Buddha's life - he was a socially capable young prince born in a loving family and had no frustrations and most material needs fully satisfied. And also for the zen philosophy attitude of "but don't take these things too seriously" \- _to prevent people from actually "drowning" in these mystical visions and loosing any contact with reality._

Overall I think that _a lot_ of people would benefit from the occasional mystical perspective on life. It's awesome for creative problem solving! And most people have become a bit too secular and boring. But if they go on and apply the "work hard on it and take it seriously" pattern to spirituality they'll just go and OD on it.

The "westernly refined eastern spirituality" seems as close to the original thing as purified cocaine is to chewed coca leaves: very different concentrations, very different use scenarios. How can it _not_ go wrong for the more psychology sensitive individuals among us?

People should go and read/listen some of _Allan Watts '_ book/recordings. You can try starting with this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8130_-3d3PA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8130_-3d3PA) . He had some good ideas on how to use an occasional mystical perspective to enrich one's life, without taking it too seriously and completely loosing it. Mind it, I don't agree with most of his ideas, but they are still better than what others are selling.

<comment><USER12> Upvote as well. My personal mystical experiences have been very positive in my life. My friends and I call it "cleaning out the cobwebs" and do it a couple times a year. And yes this stuff is not good for people with mental illness, but let's not throw it away all together. Psychedelics have an incredible promise to heal, and have helped me substantially with my own trauma. However they should be used in chorus with a certified therapist. Beyond that I get a little agitated when people feel that none of it is of any substance and we already "know" reality. I think we are actually very far from understanding the nature of reality and these experiences may hold legitimate truths in them. Let's not be reductionists and keep an open mind

<comment><USER6> This was me, six months ago.

<comment><USER13> But unlike the parent commenter, didn't you have hypomanic episodes before going down that path? I think most who do that sort of thing don't end up in a hospital. At worst, they end up following Deepak Chopra.

Also, thank you for sharing your experience. It takes courage to talk about one's mental issues. And thank you for requests. It's crazy useful!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Almost the exact same thing happened to my wife recently. As somebody who experienced this from the "other side" it is truly frightening. It nearly tore my family apart.

Even now, months later, not everything is back to 100% normal. My wife still occasionally shows signs of her episode and is on medication (although we have transitioned to a low dosage of a more forgiving drug). The most obvious problem is a stubborn insistence that what is going on in her head right now is the only reasonable option and any discussion otherwise is an active attempt to undermine her (i.e. a conspiracy against her). This transcends normal disagreements. She also still has trouble sleeping.

At the time she had her breakdown she constructed an elaborate and paranoid fantasy inside her head that everybody was out to get her (including close family members and myself). This was tightly wound with inscrutable religious imagery and governmental conspiracy.

It was terrifying and I had her committed to the psychiatric unit (this is what nearly destroyed our relationship).

The most frightening aspect of the whole thing is that she was 100% convinced she was right at the time. Her logical reasoning facilities simply broke down. There was no reasoning with her. In fact, if anything, trying to talk to her using logic and reason aggravated the situation.

Even now, when she looks back, she can see how strange it must have been for everybody else, but she's still struggling because her brain is telling her she was "on the right side" of this problem the whole time.

This can happen to anybody, and it's nobody's fault. Sometimes, shit happens. Nobody should be ashamed of this. Take care of yourselves and others. Most of all, get a good night's sleep and eat well!

</comment><comment><USER15> > Sleep is _really_ important.

This cannot be overstated enough, I think, beyond just the effects of severe sleep deprivation. It's very true in my personal experience with major depression as well.

Also good to do: eat well, get exercise, get sunlight. Minds don't exist in isolation from the body, it's all the same sack of chemicals.

<comment><USER16> I wish we would stop praising or making light of sleep deprivation. We need to stop thinking that sleeping a lot is a sign of laziness.

<comment><USER17> Some universities (cough *MIT cough) have a habit of saying "sleep is for the weak" and that part of their culture needs to change.

<comment><USER18> Engineering schools still have the bones of being military academies. Selecting for people who don't need a lot of sleep is important to militaries.

MIT, unlike say, Texas A&M, was founded as a polytechnic and not as an explicit military academy but I'd bet there's still some of that orientation in its DNA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My main scientific interest is in how much of this kind of mental problem is genetic, and how much is not. In particular, I have felt for quite some time now that those who are raised very religiously are much more likely to have mental issues and have problems thinking fully rationally/logically.

I am a combat vet with mild ptsd, but I was very religious before the war. I am now not just an athiest, but I am antithiest, and during what I call my "descartes reset" I had to relearn many things I thought I "knew". I eventually realized that while in general I was fairly smart, there were entire areas of life that being raised religious effectively neutered any logical thinking. As a result, I feel like I am intellectualy a teenager, because so much of my early years were wasted with this religious indoctrination, and to me the key is that in many/most cases, forcing children into religion is very mich indoctrination. I recognize some of the techniques the military uses in theirs!

Of course the genetic angle is an important one that I hope cheaper and more broadly available sequencing can help with, because some people arenpredisposed to these kinds of mental breaks and can be told they are at higher risk if they do drugs, dont sleep, etc.

That being said, living in the bible belt, the connection between religion and mental health interests me just as much.

<comment><USER20> > "descartes reset"

I love that word. Especially because studying Descartes in high school has also shaped my world view very strongly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Sleep is really important.

so true. remember it's cumulative, too, so you can't miss a bunch of sleep, sleep 8hrs one night and then be alright.

>This can happen to anyone, even you.

not as concerned a/b this, but i s'p so.

>Don't date the crazy [person]!

totally date the person you feel a connection with, and don't worry a/b labeling them, yourself, or anyone else w/ such a gross, pejorative label as "crazy". do remain true to yourself under any & all circumstances. travel, in particular, can be tricky, depending on the time of year, especially.

> That is unlikely to happen again

this is a catch-22: it's as unlikely to happen as one is convinced that it could happen and remains vigilant.

thanks for Requests and stay safe!

<comment><USER6> I'm using the humorous/endearing form of crazy :)

<comment><USER21> i get that, and i'm probably oversensitive. there is some semi-açcurate analogy to be made w/ the use of racial epithets w/in and outside of racial groups here. playfulness can be fine (to a point) in polite company, but it's helpful to be a little more guarded w/ language in open forums.

idk, i just recently had an experience with overhearing a conversation that used not just "crazy" but specifically "bipolar" in a way that made me feel uncomfortable/marginalized. that's on me for being oversensitive, but it's totally on other ppl/society for not recognizing that "mentally ill" ppl do a lot of useful and producive things, that w/ proper care it's possible to do just a/b anything someone w/o a (diagnosed) condition can do, and for lumping an actually variegated an nonhomogeneous group of ppl together under a few easy labels.

uuugh, enough hn for a while, one way or another.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Im very happy to see this on the top of hn. I had a very similar experience but do not talk about it at all because the stigma is so strong.

A major problem with the conversation in mental health is that having thoughtful or well formed opinions about the subject can incriminate you. I have a tremendous respect for anyone that is willing to talk openly about it. I am no that brave.

<comment><USER23> Serious question: have you considered publishing it anonymously?

If you've run into issues with that idea (like being concerned about unintentionally revealing hints about your identity, or how/where to publish it, etc.), I'd happily try and help out - my e-mail is email@example.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> A courageous story. I felt the author captured the pace and psychotic features of a manic episode. Call me a terrible person, but I chuckled when I read about the "Dynamo algorithm to replicate life". I can imagine the author wandering around the hospital with the whitepaper in hand demanding that doctors read it.

</comment><comment><USER25> Eerily similar to this recent story from This American Life, which unfortunately has a less happy ending:

[http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/579/m...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/579/my-damn-mind)

TL;DL: Man goes into a manic state, checks himself into a hospital, and gets shot by police.

<comment><USER6> I was tased :(

<comment><USER26> How did that happen? And what if anything do you now think about the permissive attitude of some people toward tazing? E.g. did you find any lasting effects?

By the way, hi. I enjoyed your talk at PyConSG a little before this all happened.

<comment><USER6> It was extremely traumatizing. I felt electric shocks and tingles in my body for a week afterwards (that may have been unrelated), and had massive anxiety around electric-sounding noises, like cicadas.

It would probably be less traumatizing to a person in a normal state of mind, but I'm not certain. It was absolutely terrifying.

<comment><USER27> This is terrible. I'm sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I already hold Kenneth in great esteem because of his work on Requests and Clint, both of which I make use of and admire.

This post amplifies my respect for him as a human being.

I welcome posts like this (and there seem to have been quite a few recently) because I really want to be able to talk openly about mental health to gain clarity and understanding.

I am particularly interested in issues around arousal, focus and mania, since these affect our profession so profoundly. (I wonder how many of us in this forum owe our professional skill and aptitude to a predisposition towards hypomania and intense focus).

It feels like our society is moving in a positive direction here -- a move which I applaud and welcome.

The mind is powerful, wonderful and strange, and we need to treat it with respect and understanding -- something that can only come about by being open and honest.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is an excellent article and I applaud Kenneth for writing it because it will help someone who reads it. Coincidentally, after reading this I came across another article about bipolar illness and how it has wrecked the life of a once famous woman:

The best African American figure skater in history is now bankrupt and living in a trailer (Debi Thomas) [https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social- issues/the-myste...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/the- mystery-of-why-the-best-african-american-figure-skater-in-history-went- bankrupt-and-lives-in-a- trailer/2016/02/25/a191972c-ce99-11e5-abc9-ea152f0b9561_story.html)

</comment><comment><USER30> I am oddly disappointed. I thought the article would be about more "relatable" mental problems like depression or low self-esteem, rather than a full on psychotic break. Sometimes I wonder if programmers are afflicted with the above plus anxiety more than the average. It certainly has affected me as someone who grew up nerdy and bullied, but most of my coworkers seem pretty happy.

<comment><USER31> You probably also look 'pretty happy' to your coworkers. They experience you as you experience them: without any knowledge of what goes on in their minds. Conversation is required to probe deeper. There may be many that have, or at least understand, your problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Threee years ago I experienced a very similar manic episode with delusional thinking, but in my case, it was absolutely the best thing that ever happened to me. The creative energy and imaginative thought patterns I experienced then transformed my life in a positive way. I know this is an atypical experience and I was lucky to dodge many possible negative consequences of actions based on delusional belief systems. For me, the key was maintaining my social connections and using the perceptions and reactions of other people to keep myself connected to shared reality.

</comment><comment><USER33> A lot of people think that believing you're Jesus is some kind of grandiose delusion, but in the case of manic psychosis, it's simply the logical conclusion of all the super intense messages from the universe you're receiving.

Enlightenment is hell.

<comment><USER6> Exactly! It is the inevitable truth you are being constantly presented with. You are forced to accept it.

<comment><USER24> I love this, well said

I knew a bipolar patient who believed he was a shaman. In his last manic episode he was found wandering outside naked in minus twenty temperatures. He said he had transcended to a higher consciousness where the cold no longer affected him.

I interviewed him a few months later to see if he was taking his medicine. He was, but said he didn't like the medicines because they took away his special powers.

He had frost bite on his hands and feet from the incident by the way.

<comment><USER6> Hah! I did exactly this, but far less extreme. I would walk barefoot on the street, where the sun had been painfully heating the pavement, and adjusting my psyche so I could not feel the pain.

According to the books, an excellent meditative practice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I personally found out that coding before sleep is a horrible thing for you - your mind keeps working on problems long after you close your IDE.

<comment><USER35> I agree your mind doesn't stop, but sometimes I solve my problems in that moment before sleep, I think because I can direct all my energy to it (even eyes are closed, so no visual processing needed).

Though the tired mind is often very keen to simply recurse over thoughts you've already had opposed to think of new ones. If you find you can't stop yourself going over the day though, then 10-15 mins of meditation, where you force yourself to concentrate on clearing your mind, can stop these thoughts so you can sleep. Do this every night for a few weeks and it becomes second nature.

<comment><USER36> I've found that reading sci-fi/fantasy before going to sleep helps me transition to sleep mode. I think it's because sci-fi problems are really somebody else's problem, so my brain can let them drop when I put the book down.

<comment><USER23> I really couldn't agree with this more. Reading before you sleep is _so important_ to getting a good night's rest. Using a physical book or an e-ink screen, anything that doesn't emit light itself.

Seriously, invest $150 into getting a good e-reader, if you don't have one already. It's well worth the sleep benefits, potentially even more than a good mattress (for a programmer, anyway).

<comment><USER34> One thing I personally found useful was f.lux - an OS X app that changes the temperature of your screen when it gets dark outside. Sounds trivial but makes a huge difference.

<comment><USER20> I use red sunglasses for that (sometimes advertised as "UV protection"). The advantage is that it works on all devices, even analog ones. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> He is lucky. All of you without mental problems are quite lucky.

Kenneth, if you are reading this: I feel you man.

I had a similar experience to you. Similar fleeting views... without a crazy chick. I was the crazy one. What I did not say so far is that I too am lucky. My psychiatrist said that I was in the 1% of the 1% (I am not sure of the percentages). Those who recover among those who suffer from schizophrenia. Now, 4 years later, it seems that I made a full recovery. Yet I lost 2 years of my life to it. Two years of my life where I did not take medication. You are older than me, you accomplished so much more. I still have to get my C.S. degree. I am in my last semester. I now somewhat look up to you. Before reading this article, I had no idea of your existence. Now I found an inspiration I can relate to. Thank you for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER38> >A breakthrough occurred when I slipped the doctor a piece of paper containing the URL to this website. This gave him a really good idea of who I actually was, and was a very useful tool in helping him diagnose me.

Is it expecting too much of our health care professionals to assume that they should be I don't know, spending five minutes on google looking for this information themselves? What about interviewing family and friends? How do you expect to treat a mental health patient without a baseline in the first place? This tidbit did not instill any confidence in me whatsoever.

<comment><USER6> Trust me, where I live, less that 0.1% of the population has any form of web presence, other than a Facebook profile.

I live in a rural town in the country of Virginia. Lots of confederate flags and rednecks around these parts :)

The doctor did spent much time on the phone with my parents, however, and was well aware of their claims. Having tangible proof of the things I've normally been able to accomplish, however, takes that to a whole other level.

<comment><USER39> I dunno why but I always had the idea you lived either on SFO or Seattle. Well at least you can ski a lot as you're probably close to WV!

On a more related note, thanks a lot for your great posts, and for the simplicity and clarity of your code :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This brings to mind something I read by Ken Wilbur, about "Waking Up" vs. "Growing Up".

In a nutshell, as I understand it: Waking Up without Growing Up - <AUTHOR> spiritual bypass - can lead to delusion, psychosis, inflicting unconscious wounds on ourselves and the world... Advancement in Waking Up, which I suppose we need for ultimate fulfilment, doesn't by itself cause progress in Growing Up, which we need to function as part of our world...

I've seen friends who started earnestly seeking spirituality around the same time as me go deep into madness (with spiritual names), for example dealing with 'entities' they claim to be real, yet are not part of shared reality, and I suppose failing to see that their experience is actually mirroring their inner state.

My own brief touches with psychosis triggered by intense - and arguably premature - spiritual work have emphasised for me the importance of remaining grounded in the daily life of being human, doing that basic work first to become emotionally literate, calm, healthy and self-nurturing.

What concerns me is that people throw the baby out with the bathwater when they stifle or medicate their spiritual longings due to fear of (or experience with) mental illness. Mental health seems like it could be a prerequisite for facing the challenges of sincere growth, but not a reason to avoid spirituality.

I believe Ram Dass said _" You gotta be somebody before you can be nobody."_

<comment><USER27> > Mental health seems like it could be a prerequisite for facing the > challenges of sincere growth, but not a reason to avoid spirituality.

Going through a severe bipolar episode, basically forced me to rethink my entire life. I'm not saying it has been fun or easy, but I think when it is said and done, I will be stronger for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Could this have been prevented? Is there a reliable way to check on your mental health status?

<comment><USER42> Psychosis is pretty hard to hide I think. Basically any doctor should find out that "there's something going on" simply by having a conversation with you. The same is probably true with family (they may notice you're "acting weird/different" or something like that). If your friends are very spiritual they might think this is normal of course, so maybe stick with professionals/family.

I'm not sure about bipolar disorder and similar diseases, but I suspect they're much more difficult to diagnose (but also a lot less scary than psychosis).

<comment><USER43> I had psychosis several years ago and I was pretty good at hiding it until the point where I became hospitalized. The trick is you have to be acutely aware of whether you are sounding crazy to others, and how you're being perceived. You can think as many crazy thoughts as you want, as long as you don't express them.

<comment><USER42> I don't know much about psychosis other than what I've told you. I saw a therapist some time ago about anxiety/stress and that kind of thing and I mentioned that I've googled the hell out of it already (bad idea!) and a long list of really scary stuff came up (including psychosis). So I've mentioned that stuff starting the list with psychosis and he laughed and said he would have figured that out by now (and explained that I'd talk differently, etc.) I know that he also works with homeless people/drug addicts, so I assume he met 1 or 2 people who actually suffer from psychosis.

Having said that; if people manage to hide schizophrenia, hiding psychosis is probably also possible. But still, I think psychosis is not the kind of disease you should worry about having without realizing it (unlike e.g., depression or bipolar disorder).

\---

BTW: You mention you were aware that your thoughts would seem crazy to others. Were you also aware that they are crazy (or did they seem perfectly reasonable to you at the time)?

<comment><USER43> > BTW: You mention you were aware that your thoughts would seem crazy to > others. Were you also aware that they are crazy (or did they seem perfectly > reasonable to you at the time)?

They always seemed as "reasonable" as they've always been. Ideas like solipsism, being God, free will, etc. And many more stupider and embarrassing ones. They are often philosophical in nature and you can argue them in many directions without reaching firm conclusions, whether you are having psychosis or not.

The difference is that when I started to become manic and have psychosis, they became about 100x more interesting and I had a very strong desire to share them with people, which made a fool out of myself by doing so. When you have psychosis you also misjudge social interactions a lot which makes it even worse.

In the hospital when the psychosis was getting really bad, it's like reality itself begins to break. For example I have very vivid memories of another patient reading my thoughts and then saying them out loud. I'm still not sure what happened there.

At work I was pretty good at keeping it under wraps, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Interestingly the author states his symptoms started through a combination of lack of sleep and dating a disturbed individual [1].

Such a diagnosis is possibly offensive, ableist and unscientific, however there are many such anecdotal reports of people with (developing or fully developed) mental illness pairing up.

While there is little evidence of such pairing up being a _cause_ (i.e. some sort of "contagiousness", as explored in [2]), there _is_ some evidence that people suffering from mental illness (including personality disorders) can be attracted to one another [3].

[1] [http://www.kennethreitz.org/essays/purging-the-unexpected- ne...](http://www.kennethreitz.org/essays/purging-the-unexpected-negative-a- narcissistic-partner)

[2] [http://www.rawstory.com/2015/12/is-mental-illness- contagious...](http://www.rawstory.com/2015/12/is-mental-illness-contagious/)

[3] [http://www.medicaldaily.com/law-attraction-mental-illness- ma...](http://www.medicaldaily.com/law-attraction-mental-illness- marriage-375268)

</comment><comment><USER45> I had a roommate who also had very serious mental health issues following a heavy investigation into meditation. I never could piece out if there was any causality - did the issues cause him to seek help from meditation, or did the meditation cause the issues, or was it spurious? In the end it's a lot of brain chemistry.

I appreciate courageous writers like the OP who help take the stigma away from mental illness with their writing.

<comment><USER43> Doing things that challenge your sense of reality can cause a lot of mental health disturbances, especially when your brain isn't fully matured. So there is a lot of correlation between the two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> This is quite interesting. Recently I was told by a friend about "Kundalini Crisis". Basically Mentally unstable people doing kundalini and intense meditation will lead them to a psychotic episode.

<comment><USER12> Yea kundalini is known for this. Other forms of yoga and meditation are very safe and healthy

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Kudos to the author for this article; it takes real courage to write something like this, and it will undoubtedly help many in similar places.

I'm inclined towards Buddhism and other spiritual weirdness as well, but I recognize (and I hope that this article helps teach others) that this sort of fun wisdom often comes at the expense of _groundedness_. There is much to be said for being somewhat ungrounded- see every great leader and thinker that was criticized in his or her time for being an out-of-touch idealist, or their era's equivalent invective- but one can also find oneself losing many of the "common sense" reference points that are important for dealing with day-to-day existence. Human minds are messy things, and often generate absurd notions that we all, mostly subconsciously, squash simply because they violate our ideas about who we are and how the world works. Be "open" enough to take in radical new spiritual ideas, and you're also open enough to take in a great deal of fuzz.

This sort of openness doesn't need to take the form of metaphysical "woo" (see, for instance, conspiracy theorists), but the belief that we're animals living in a physical world is a useful one, since it lets us easily declare invalid a large range of potentially harmful beliefs. _Perhaps_ its untrue, but while our human urge to take nothing for granted is noble, it can easily land us in trouble.

The "hacker" crowd is, stereotypically, full of bright individuals who like to take nothing for granted, so I wouldn't be surprised if Reitz's story represents a fairly common narrative. There's an interesting parallel; for spiritual seekers, just like startup founders, its crucial to learn how to balance oversized ambitions with the necessities of mere human existence- and to rein themselves in, or even to give up the chase, when the latter becomes seriously threatened.

</comment><comment><USER48> Good sleep hygiene definitely contributes to better mental health. Not bi- polar, but struggle with depression. After my last crash a few years ago, I was left curled up on the floor just saying I wanted to die. It took me about a year to recover from that, and during most of that year I usually slept at least 10 hours a night. It was definitely part of my recovery.

These days I'm usually between 7.5 to 8.5 hours. Having had a history of insomnia I try and get on top of any sleeplessness issues pretty quickly. Usually just taking melatonin for a week if I have a couple of nights in a row with difficulty getting to sleep will fix it for me.

Also, if you suspect you might suffer from sleep apnoea then get it checked out. The quality as well as quantity of your sleep is important.

</comment><comment><USER6> I added a new paragraph to describe the type of hallucinations I was experiencing (since that's such an ambiguous word):

> The first time she left my apartment, I watched as a red/glowing infinitely- > detailed sacred geometry adorned my plain white door. These are the types of > hallucinations I would see upon occasion, especially after prolonged periods > of meditation or excitement. These experiences were interpreted to be of > deep spiritual significance. Most hallucinations were non-visual, however, > and involved subtle sensations best described in yogic terms as "feeling the > flow of pranic energy". The rest could be described as an explosion of > mental imagery with remarkable resolution/clarity.

</comment><comment><USER49> This guy had a similar episode and wrote a book about it:

[http://www.amazon.com/And-Then-Thought-Was-Fish- ebook/dp/B00...](http://www.amazon.com/And-Then-Thought-Was-Fish- ebook/dp/B008DZEWF8)

</comment><comment><USER50> A very excellent read, thank you for sharing. I've experienced a very similar thing about a year and a half ago, so it's always comforting to read about someone else's experience!

I still remember it vividly now, I took exhausting notes during the process - notes that I thought were full of pure spiritual brilliance - and which turned out to be mostly mad gibberish in the end.

Among other things there were a few days that I spent convinced that I was a character in a video game and I had to make sure that the game was "entertaining" or else the "player" would "switch it off".

Some things were downright Lovecraftian in nature. Reading his stuff now, I'm pretty sure that a lot of his stories were inspired by his own mental trips. ie, one of my favorites: [http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/hy.aspx](http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/hy.aspx)

But mostly it was full of that exhilarating rush of being connected to some hidden truth that no one else has access to. I can see why it's hard for people to just walk away from that when those visions feel so meaningful at the time.

Anyway, well done for recovering! I guess a lot of people don't, which is quite a disturbing thought - being stuck in that mental state forever - <USER2> that makes us quite lucky.

</comment><comment><USER27> You're not alone: [http://baus.net/im-bipolar](http://baus.net/im-bipolar)

It is interesting that meditation was one of your triggers. Meditation and mindful awareness is something I'm personally spending a lot of time on to reverse the effects of bipolar -- specifically to slow racing thoughts and dislocation from the moment. For me, I feel like it helps. Many things that cause me anxiety I'm able to work out through meditation. For me, one of the hard parts is just letting go.

</comment><comment><USER51> I am saddened that after reading stories like this one, people remain skeptical of fortifying water with Lithium. A study from the 90s [1] found that rates of violent crime and suicide was much lower in Texas counties with naturally occuring Lithium in their water, as opposed to demographically identical ones with less. Lithium is an element that is implicated in Bipolar Disorder and appears to affect critical brain functions. The public's experience with Flouride makes people deeply skeptical, despite the obvious objective proof [2] that it too contributes to superior quality of life. Fortifying water with Lithium would have an immense effect on the wellbeing of entire cities and cost relatively little. Huge impact potential.

[1]: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1699579](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1699579) [2]: [http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/tooth-decay-calgary- fl...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/tooth-decay-calgary-fluoride- water-1.3450616)

<comment><USER52> > I am saddened that after reading stories like this one, people remain > skeptical of fortifying water with Lithium.

You start with that, next thing you know you're crop-dusting Miranda with G-23 (and we all know how that went).

More seriously, lithium has significant side-effects, lithium toxicity can occur both acutely and chronically, and lithium toxicity isn't always much higher than therapeutic doses (especially as it's compounded by sodium depletion). And there's a significant risk of fetal toxicity.

Normalising medical lithium use sounds like a great idea (especially as part of a wider normalisation of treatment of mental distress and illness), but it doesn't sound like the best substance to spike water with.

<comment><USER51> I spent 20 minutes trying to find this reference and could not find anything convincingly close enough. It is a sci-fi reference or something that happened in our world? The only thing I could find was FireFly related. My concern in this case would be chronic toxicity, which does as you say occur in some cases at lower than pharmaceutical dosage levels. I would only be campaigning for raising Lithium in towns <25% percentile to a level found in towns in the 75% percentile. This would be relatively simple to communicate to people, and you could point to a road down the street from which people's Grandparents grew up and demonstrate that you would simply be replicating amounts found in that town naturally. I think what is more disturbing is the concept that most people have no idea what is in their water, not that we could arbitrage minerals between different towns and try to come to some kind of optimal mineral content. In the study I reference, the spread between "highest" and "lowest" Lithium content is between ~2000x and ~1000x less than is currently used in the pharmaceutical. So if <10% of Lithium patients have any signs of toxicity (real number, around 10%) and 1% have life threatening toxicity, we could (perhaps not perfect math) assume that only 0.001% of people would experience a similar issue in dosages of 1000x less. My thought is that dosages at that level are akin to living in an area with high Lithium naturally, or eating lots of seafood, and that people would at least consider it, if you could reduce the rate of suicide by 50%. I could be wrong though, lots of opposition to this thesis, including here, including among people who no doubt know far more science than I do.

<comment><USER52> > I spent 20 minutes trying to find this reference and could not find anything > convincingly close enough. It is a sci-fi reference or something that > happened in our world? The only thing I could find was FireFly related.

It is a scifi/firefly reference. Spoilers ahead for the Serenity movie.

Miranda is a planet on a far far "edge" of the Verse (the "known universe" in Firefly) and considered fictional before the events of Serenity as the Alliance had basically struck it from records (and it was deep in "Reaver space" where people of the Verse don't go without a serious death wish). An Alliance research program was tried there: G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate ("Pax") had been found to reduce aggression, and on Miranda it was tried on a large scale, spread throughout the planet via the air processors system.

The compound pacified 99.9% of the population so much they basically stopped all drive. They stopped working, talking, feeding, moving and ultimately leaving.

The remaining 0.1% blew a gasket and went the exact opposite becoming ultra- violent self-mutilating merciless and fearless animalistic — but not stupid — monsters: the reavers, which have plagued the Verse since.

<comment><USER51> Disturbingly relevant. It would be too easy to think we could just change the water and solve Bipolar, but the concept that a small percentage of people would rise up against it violently is not hard to imagine either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> This story is so raw and real that you'd naturally expect it to be anonymous. Pretty incredible that it is not, and you've just got to respect that. I think this is something many people can relate to, if not in their own lives, at least in others around them. The whole torrid affair sounds like a bit like a never-ending ketamine and LSD fueled-bender. Yikes...

</comment><comment><USER54> I wonder if a "sudden" interest in eastern religions/philosophy is a precursor to bi-polar diagnoses often. My aunt went through something very similar where she was just my normal aunt, then started going deep into buddhism, then had a bad mental break, wound up in the hospital, and was then diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

</comment><comment><USER55> Thanks to Kenneth for sharing, and good to hear he's back.

The title seems to be funny because it highlights that mental health mostly isn't about discrete erroneous events, but about the ability for a mind to cope within a world...

I was in love with a bipolar woman. We shared an apartment for a few months, not too long after she had emerged from a manic period.

Her mania came on when she was alone in a new foreign city, used psychedelics, and became close friends with several people who were... firmly distanced from the reality-based community, let's say. She slept little, hallucinated, had strong ideas that all kinds of random events were connected, centered around her own destiny, and all that stuff.

I'm also pretty weird. Like Kenneth, I could attribute much of my erratic productivity to periods of hypomania. Never had any real mania. I'm very interested in semi-esoteric stuff like Buddhist philosophy, Zen Masters, insight meditation, and other things you might guess at.

I had a period when I was trying to read kind of arcane philosophy like Deleuze & Guattari's _Anti-Oedipus_ and _A Thousand Plateaus_... I remember being in my dorm room drinking too much coffee, reading that book or David Foster Wallace's _Infinite Jest_ , or some pirate PDF about Spinoza, or whatever I could find...

The D&G books are subtitled "Capitalism and Schizophrenia" and one thing they do is kind of hijack the term "schizophrenia" and use it to designate something like the subconscious creative processes of the mind that seek to connect things, create these proliferating conceptual networks, build ideas atop ideas, change things, experiment, become different, etc...

I'm reminded of this because I'm thinking of the way hypomania can be a "positive" and "productive" state as long as you can maintain your health and groundedness... it seems related to how I sometimes feel like I need a slight bit of some kind of insanity or delusions of importance in order to have novel ideas.

Like, I'm thinking about a new kind of database, that I imagine is going to be really useful, beautiful, and novel. Sometimes I get what I jokingly call "too much coffee syndrome" and my rather simple idea starts to branch out into some impossibly grand project... like, I don't know, maybe to implement stored procedures, I need to make a new stack-based language with type inference... and content-addressed values... with a new kind of source control system... and a new kind of IDE that will be usable on mobile devices... and so on until I haven't eaten all day...

So in that whole sphere of my life, the idea-generating, novelty-demanding me who wants to reformulate basic parameters, invent totally new things, revolutionize everything, explain to everyone the new better way... etc... that's something I have to manage. My ideas aren't _insane_ , I could explain them patiently, and I realize I don't have time to implement them... but the restlessness of my thoughts can be painful.

So anyway, partly because of this restlessness and tendencies toward some mild mania, I've taken an interest in mind pacification, especially through meditation.

Meditation is attractive because it also comes with connections to all kinds of fascinating theories about the mind, reality, and who knows what, and cultural treasures like Buddhist sutras, Tibetan art, and all kinds of stuff...

Here's a pretty plausible scenario:

1\. You feel restless and anxious.

2\. You get into meditation.

3\. You hear about "Zen" and start studying.

4\. You learn that its founder taught the Lankavatara Sutra.

5\. You pick up Red Pine's translation from a local hippie store.

6\. You sit and read Mahamati's praise to the Buddha:

> Like a flower in the sky / the world neither ceases nor arises / in the > light of your wisdom and compassion / it neither is nor isn't

> Transcending mind and consciousness / all things are like illusions / in the > light of your wisdom and compassion / they neither are nor aren't

> The world is but a dream / neither permanent nor transient / in the light of > your wisdom and compassion / it neither is nor isn't

> There is no self in being or things / no barriers of passion or knowledge / > in the light of your wisdom and compassion / it neither is nor isn't

That's fascinating stuff! What does it mean? Clearly it is deeply important, since people say it's the whole basis for Zen, and Zen meditation is obviously deep and profound, since the whole industry of mindfulness tacitly reveres all of Buddhism...

This comment is probably a good demonstration of my mind when it's bordering on "too much coffee." I kind of forgot how I was going to tie all this stuff together, and now I'm really hungry.

In the relationship I mentioned, I took on a role of helping, which worked fairly well. We made sure to get enough sleep, to get out and be kind of healthy, to just ground ourselves in different ways. It was an educational period of my life, because it helped me realize I need to take care of myself, too.

</comment><comment><USER56> I wonder if I'm going through a bit of a manic state right now. I've just had surgery, had to take a relatively large amount of of oxycontene to deal with the severe pain, I may consider that I can change things in an organization going through turmoil (though I really can't), I'm trying to fix heaps of bugs in an important code base, but sleeping and having weird dreams like believing that Rolf Harris is my relative (bloody disturbing) and waking up feeling disturbed, but in pain.

Whatever it is, it's horrible. I'm sorry the author went through worse than this!

</comment><comment><USER57> Wait, I've never heard of hallucinations from bipolar disorder and these sounded super heavy duty? Was this something more?

But I am really glad they got help, even responsible enough to get help.

<comment><USER58> Well he also said he basically didn't sleep for 10 days. I think that would contribute a lot.

<comment><USER57> Again I'm confused because I've not heard of bipolar disorder allowing people to go weeks without sleep.

Just a wild guess but this sounds like something more and bipolar was an effect not the cause.

<comment><USER59> There's different severities of bipolar disorder and manic episodes can worsen to the point of hallucinations and psychosis when left untreated. I've read quite a few books on bipolar and lack of sleep for many days and hallucinations are more common than many people realize. Myself included until I read books on the subject.

<comment><USER57> Interesting, thanks for the enlightenment.

<comment><USER59> No problem, if you're interested in reading about this I highly recommend the book An Unquiet Mind. It's a true story about a psychologist who finds out later in life she is bipolar. It's interesting and goes in depth into her manic episodes. I strongly recommend it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Scrutinizing deductive and inductive logic can induce manic states too - <USER3> at Cantor, Godel, and Boltzmann.

</comment><comment><USER61> Hi everyone, One of my friends in college was recently diagnosed with Bipolar disorder. I don't personally know any other people with the disorder, but I wanted to learn more about it directly from the people (patients, friends, family, healthcare providers) who have experienced the gaps in treatment/management for the disorder. Hoping some of you out there might be willing to participate in this anonymous questionnaire. Thanks.

[http://goo.gl/forms/hzG1bPiorR](http://goo.gl/forms/hzG1bPiorR)

</comment><comment><USER62> Awake for 12+ days? Doesn't that mean he's broken the world record?

</comment><comment><USER63> I don't know where I stand on his conclusions but I went through a manic/psychotic episode once too and yes, it's really an impacting experience to think "I went literally crazy". So, in my case, before having a psychotic event I had already seen it before because my mother is diagnosed with Bipolar Affective Disorder too(not that this means I knew what was going on, just that I already had seen mental health issues), I was in my later adolescent years smoking lots of cannabis, had experimented LSD and Cocaine, too, besides the drinking. When I was high sometimes I'd had this very weird sensation of my mind going in loops sometimes which now I see as slowly getting more and more detached/unstable.. So I lived like this and I was also into Nietzsche and of course over time I was getting more into exoteric stuff etc and eventually I went crazy, I was never the best sleeper but never did streaks of being waken up like he mentioned, so, not really sleeping is really red alert and I'd say that the first time he was awaken for days he was probably already going down the cliff.

The thing with me that I'd like to express tho, and one that I'm skeptical is some of the conclusions, backfits and categorizations made. After going through that I was diagnosed as bipolar too and was prescribed Zyprexa and Trileptal... So, I took then but then eventually I stopped, I tried to be careful with it my way, like paying extra-atention to my thoughts and being rigorous in logic and rationality, my mother, of course would freak out about this, specially since she lives with it and takes heavy medications that from time to time need adjustments, I also offered to go to a psychologist regularly so my state would be checked. It's been about 9 years and I'm fine, I took this decision maybe out of skepticism that the event meant my brain was 'deffective'("Bipolar Disorder is something I've had for a while, and will have for the rest of my life"), that the event couldn't simply be a result of the drugs and the psychiatrist would dismiss that, and also because I was pretty sure some convulsions I had after the fact were linked to the medicine and the psychiatrist would dismiss that too, even though that could mean a life hazzard for me(I still have scars of convulsing in the middle of the street on my way back from work, gladly I didn't have a car then). So, yeah, I have a little bit of mistrust of pure psychiatry even though my mother lives with it and I have lived through this, and I think of myself as completely normal, I just think the brain isn't such a fragile software that's easily corrupted and then it's just glitched, this stuff evolved over millenia, right? It could be that I'm setting myself for tragedy... But I don't know, at least for the moment I still think the old ways of dealing with mental distress and how people used to think about it apply... e.g.: A person can be made to go crazy if you trap his mind/body, or that someone can make himself go crazy if he isn't able to handle stuff and this doesn't necessarily mean this is a chronic case(although, sure, if it's going out of control or if it won't be contained by other means, medicate it), that would be psychology, reflecting, thinking and also spirituality(maybe not the wacko one tho). I'm still into philosophy, "eastness", understanding religious/spiritual matters etc(definitely not in a mystic/supernatural way nowadays, though), and I still have my drinks and so on... I have a friend who's a psychologist and also takes this view of psyche(which I just checked that means "spirit") over medicine, and we joke that "well, at least you found the meaning of life once and that was it, if you're getting that every other month that's probably an issue"

So anyway, maybe it's irresponsible to talk about this at this stage(e.g.: 6 months after), but I think it should be said, maybe you're fine and the drugs and bad decisions(yeah, _DO_ sleep and if you can't go check yourself) and a fragile/immature mind sent you there. Maybe I'm wrong and I'm a ticking bomb for a manic episode and it's gonna be a hard lesson.. But I do feel like I have a very strong mind now and I really like it. So, yeah, that's my experience :)

</comment><comment><USER64> I recommend getting a sauna, definitely helps if used before bed-time. I love sleep.

I was serious. Not getting enough sleep is a precursor for many ills. A sauna will definitely help.

</comment><comment><USER65> Pyschosis is not an accident, and it is not caused by kundalini yoga (although in this case indirectly).

It is my belief that psychosis is the product of spiritual crisis. Humans are, fundamentally, mythological creatures - we have deeply-held beliefs and myths that guide our basic thinking, and we hold onto these firmly. When something challenges these fundamentals (usually some horrible trauma), we slip into spiritual crisis, our root becomes undone, and the mind attempts to reorganize.

During this period, the mythological root comes to the surface, is exposed, and explored and acted out through psychosis. This seems dangerous and alarming if we treat it as hallucination or nonsense, but is actually the mind seeking a healthier organization. A lot of the features of the psyche can be seen in the patterns of psychosis (the ego showing up as seeing yourself as Jesus/Metatron, etc.), which are quite regular if you read different people's experiences.

I don't know Kenneth, but I'll speculate on what happened here. Kenneth took a yoga class, met an amazing woman who took him on a magical journey of yoga, drugs and great sex. Poor robot Kenneth, who had been so sure he was a hard- edged science man, could not deal with this. My god, was there really something to the world of "woo-woo spirituality" that he had so derided? Could it really be a source of happiness and fulfillment?

This upended his belief system. Psychosis proceeded - the mind moved towards this new possibility, then away from it back to the familiar. No; Kenneth likes programming, and hates yoga, all is well.

Perhaps it had actually resolved by the time Kenneth started taking drugs; perhaps he has not resolved anything (I think neuroleptics prolong and interrupt this process, they certainly don't cure you).

This is an unconventional understanding of psychosis, but I believe this to be a better and more likely avenue for resolving crises than the "just shut up and take your pills" approach.

<comment><USER66> Bipolar disorder and schizophrenia (the main causes of psychosis) are genetic, not caused by "spiritual crisis". The spiritual stuff is a symptom of psychosis, not a cause. "Heritability for schizophrenia was 64% and for bipolar disorder 59%."

[http://europepmc.org/articles/pmc3879718](http://europepmc.org/articles/pmc3879718)

<comment><USER67> You don't know that.

<comment><USER66> The paper that I cited is just one of dozens if not hundreds of studies on the heritability of the diseases. The evidence is overwhelming. Anecdotally, almost everyone I know with serious mental illness has at least one family member who does too.

<comment><USER67> The statement that 'Bipolar disorder and schizophrenia (the main causes of psychosis) are genetic, not caused by "spiritual crisis"' is not backed by the results of the paper.

<comment><USER66> Yes it is. That's what heritable means. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability)

<comment><USER67> There are many things you don't know and don't know you don't know, that is complicated to explain. I, for sure, am ignorant of a lot too, but at least I know that estimating heritability on the occurrence of bipolar disorder doesn't prove that these disorders are "caused" (you used this word, while the article doesn't) by genetic factors.

<comment><USER66> They don't use that word because that's what heritability implies. The fact it has a genetic cause doesn't mean that everyone with those genes will have bipolar disorder.

Of course I don't know everything. I am however more inclined to believe things with a lot of evidence (such as the genetic basis for schizophrenia and bipolar) rather than those without evidence (that it's caused by spiritual crisis).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> I find the conclusion of 'this can happen to anyone' to be so delusional, bordering on sad.

A guy believes in a bunch of non-sense, spends a year reading up on it and taking it seriously, dates a quack with whom he screws with his mind by taking dangerous substances and doing 'spiritual practices' and finally goes off the rails...

His conclusion? Coulda happened to anyone! No Kenneth, it usually happens to people who lack self-awareness and believe in healing crystals.

<comment><USER6> This post mentions nothing of any substances.

And yes, it could happen to anyone. My solipsist philosophical interests were intellectually sound, and far from non-sense. Mania, however, started to slowly but drastically modify my mental model of the world, and a snowball effect occurred.

<comment><USER68> You're right, there was no direct mention of substances.

Can you with complete honesty say you did not engage in any substance use? The fact that you went with 'post did not mention' as opposed to 'I did not use substances' says it all doesn't it?

Furthermore:

"Around the same time, right after having gone to my first Kundalini Yoga class, I ended up meeting (and falling in love with) a mesmerizing crazy chick that guided me off-the-deep-end with this type of thinking: numerology, synchronicity, manifestation, the mayan calendar, tarot, crystals, &c."

Tarot and crystals. Intellectually sound?

Ok then...

I don't mean to be on the offensive but you don't seem to wish to be honest about the entire picture and end up concluding 'coulda been anyone', which's simply not true.

Claims about the nature of losing your grasp of reality to the extent that you have need to have some serious backing. You seem to be engaging in self- rationalization rather than owning up to having made some mistakes and being lucky for regaining your faculties.

This should be a cautionary tale - not a 'hey, cool story bro', I sincerely hope you can see that.

<comment><USER69> > don't mean to be on the offensive

You might want to try a bit harder.

Mental illness is not the result of dabbling in tarot or crystals. The causalilty probably runs the other way. There's not much correlation between tarot and mental illness.

<comment><USER68> There are people who are mentally ill through no fault of there own.

There are people out there who at the very least significantly exacerbated their condition via 'shamanic rituals' and 'kundalini practices' and then some.

Kenneth has chosen to remain quiet when asked about his substance use. I rest my case.

<comment><USER69> Feel free to try to provide any kind of citation for this.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Credit Karma glitch exposed users to other people's accounts - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/14/credit-karma-glitch-accounts/ <comment><USER2> Though not literally the same as loss of life, there has to come a point where software "glitches" that lead to this kind of release are treated in a way similar to a software "glitch" that leads to accidents with computer controlled machines. Boeing's majorly paying for this right now, but companies like this just get to say "Oops" and move on.

Again, it's not the same as people dying in a plane crash, but it's not in the, "The car I ordered wasn't the same shade of blue I thought I was getting" category either.

As a software engineers (if you are one), we at some point have obligations to our end users that top the obligations to the people who pay for our work. And if I worked for Boeing, it's not my personal obligation to safety that keeps that plane safe, it's Boeing's obligation, and their interest in a culture that manifests a mindset in developers of "There's a lot riding on your decisions."

<comment><USER3> The difference between those two "glitches", receiving an incorrect product and Credit Karma's exposure is: that toxic asset, your data.

We are eventually going to come around to the fact that business models which require keeping sensitive user data are highly risky — just like businesses that handle toxic chemicals.

<comment><USER4> Not unless there's legislation giving people some ownership of their data and companies some responsibility in its stewardship. Until then it'll be an externality, which means that hoarding data is essentially free money.

Just like businesses who use and discard into the environment toxic chemicals that there are no regulations covering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> it's time to factor in guaranteed exposure of data when considering pros/cons of consuming any online service.

questions i've been asking myself lately:

\- how embarrassing or worse would an HN data breach (plug in favorite $social_network) be to me when logs are exposed that link my activity in a way that can trivially deanonymize me? how much does this reduce the value of consuming the service in the first place?

\- how embarrassing or worse would a data breach at Uber/Lyft/other ride sharing be for me? consider exposure of geolocation + timestamps. how much does this reduce the value of consuming the service in the first place?

\- repeat for things like online dating or whatever else

these additional questions have helped me put risk vs. reward into perspective when consuming services, no matter where they live or how useful they seem prima facie.

<comment><USER6> My bigger question is why are people embarassed for their opinions even if they were expressed as trollish? There was a time when it was normal to disagree with people

<comment><USER7> It's not just a question of embarrassment. There are activists who specialize in identifying people who engage in wrongthink and contact their employer to get them fired from their job. Employers who don't comply face boycotts and social media attacks on their reputation.

<comment><USER8> Indeed. I was doxxed over a religious position I hold and underwent a 3 month investigation at work for it. It was absolutely horrible and very stressful. I have a family and small children. Some psycho who just couldn't handle that someone diaagrees with them spent the actual time to call my employer with the malicious intent to get me fired. That this type of behavior is tolerated by corporations is a gross injustice and it should be illegal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Heh, CK also alerts you when your data or password has been compromised in a breach. Must be real fun to have to list themselves!

<comment><USER10> > Must be real fun to have to list themselves!

Exactly, we need to be very serious about the security of the thousands of users at risk here and it's ironic how they list themselves in this security fault. This to me looks like clownish behavior here.

But come on! You have to give them credit for informing you about all the other security breaches out there and now including themselves. But hey, karma's a bitch isn't it? :)

<comment><USER9> Actually, I'm not even sure if they will go through and treat themselves like a normal breach. But it will be a jerk move if they don't, and funny/ironic if they do.

<comment><USER11> > Actually, I'm not even sure if they will go through and treat themselves > like a normal breach

They've explicitly claimed the "glitch" which exposed customer personal data to other customers was not a breach, so it's pretty clear they will not.

<comment><USER12> A botched deploy wasn't a breach...?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> FWIW: CK doesn't appear to show SSNs or account numbers which would limit the damage from this kind of error.

</comment><comment><USER14> Note that there are Twitter reports about this happening as early as 12 hours before Credit Karma's initial response.

It seems this was happening for a long time, but Credit Karma did not notice until their social media team came in at 9am PDT.

</comment><comment><USER15> Well, this makes me feel better about not signing up for CK because it gave me a vague skeezy feeling.

We need to make some big changes and I am not looking forward to living in the inevitable future where they haven't been made.

</comment><comment><USER16> At some point in the near future, a company with a data breech will update it's TOS post-breech to say that all data should be considered public & that the service is for entertainment purposes only.

</comment><comment><USER17> I have tried to have my account deleted a while ago but Credit Karma refused to do so.

Terrible company.

<comment><USER18> Very terrible.

Had a terrible experience with them when they started their tax service (first year of it). I let them know they had the wrong format for Hawaii tax IDs and they told me I was wrong and to go somewhere else because I didn't know what I was doing.

Turns out they had their shit wrong. Glad it happened so I realized how trash their company was. Thankfully I was able to make them delete my account.

<comment><USER19> Can you post the conversation with all personal information redacted, please? Very curious to see how this went down.

<comment><USER18> Sorry, I just looked and I don't have the chat transcript. Only thing I have is the support email response after I asked to cancel my account because of the service I received from the chat support. I wish I kept it though. They were extremely rude and I was thrown off by how bad it was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> How do you close the CK account and remove their authorizations to credit reports? I don't see any option in settings.

<comment><USER19> You would need to deal with the bureau(s) since they ultimately have control over your data. Good luck with that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I noticed something was odd... I've been trying to sign into their app the past couple of days and keep receiving "Invalid credentials" errors. The website worked fine for me.

</comment><comment><USER22> Caching issue.

<comment><USER23> Does this imply you're only potentially compromised if you were logged in during the time "the glitch" was live?

<comment><USER24> Yeah, that's generally how caching problems happen.

Caches are built and served to the wrong person so everyone who saw someone else's profile can probably be sure theirs was shown to someone else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "Denied there was a data breach".

Yet you could simply refresh the page as any logged in user and see a new random account. This is a data breach. You could build a scraper in ten minutes.

<comment><USER19> How useful is that data without a name attached?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Let me guess, 6 months of free credit monitoring to make up for it.

<comment><USER9> Future Not-The-Onion: "Most Americans have more free credit monitoring than their life expectancy".

<comment><USER27> Our children will fight for single-payer credit monitoring.

<comment><USER28> Our grandchildren will live in caves and eek out a living from the family farm. But at least they will have solar power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Chase had exactly the same issue a while back: [https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/02/chase-glitch-exposed- cus...](https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/02/chase-glitch-exposed-customer- accounts/)

</comment><comment><USER30> Does this apply to the UK version of CK too?

</comment><comment><USER31> that's it i'm canceling my account with them. Their scores are way off, they just use you as a way to sell more credit cards, and now they are giving out my info. They are worse than useless now.

<comment><USER32> >Their scores are way off

Is this true? Why? Where can I go to get a more accurate credit rating?

<comment><USER33> There are dozens of models that various companies use. When applying for a mortgage, there are different models used when applying for a car or an apartment. Credit Karma gets their scores from the credit bureaus with some particular model, which probably isn't the same one when you go try to get a car. It's not _wrong_ it's just different.

<comment><USER29> To be clear: credit karma shows VantageScore 3.0 whereas most credit cards, mortgages, and auto loans use a FICO score more often. That being said, there's a bunch of FICO versions in active use. For a rundown of them see here: [https://www.investopedia.com/articles/credit-loans- mortgages...](https://www.investopedia.com/articles/credit-loans- mortgages/081416/fico-5-vs-fico-8-what-are-differences.asp)

Some esoteric lenders might use VantageScore and, for the most part, if you have a good VantageScore 3.0 you'll most likely have good FICO scores.

<comment><USER34> There's a good 55 point gap between my FICO and my VantageScore, so if you're getting a mortgage or something, you'll definitely want to check the FICO value to at least know if that's the case for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I noticed that today and got very worried when I saw I had apparently taken a $300k home loan. I immediately assumed someone stole my identity.

I noticed that refreshing would give me other results and got less worried about identity theft... and more worried about what was happening at CK.

</comment><comment><USER36> How can Credit Karma say there was no breach? Just because their database wasn't exposed doesn't mean my personal information wasn't exposed.

They got a lot more explanation to do.

</comment><comment><USER37> "Bing Bam Boom - It's Done!"

"what?"

"Your data is exposed"

</comment><comment><USER38> I used to like credit karma, a few years ago... now my bank does the same thing without having to share my data with yet another company

</comment><comment><USER22> Caching issue. :(

</comment><comment><USER39> I bet they have the top security certifications up-to-date.

</comment><comment><USER40> Glitch or poorly written software by a startup?

<comment><USER41> Why is the "by a startup" relevant?

<comment><USER42> They have been owned by Equifax for a while now, not sure startup is even an accurate term for CK, let alone why that would matter.

Edit: Ok, they may not be owned by Equifax, but they are 10+ years old with 700 employees and over $500 million in revenue in 2016. I don't know what definition of 'startup' you use, but that doesn't meet my definition.

<comment><USER34> I don't think that's true.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Even if you delete your account, they probably still keep and sell your data to anyone who asks.

Is there any way to force a US company to scrub your data, including from logs and backups?

<comment><USER2> If you haven't read it, please read [https://www.creditkarma.com/about/privacy-20190404/](https://www.creditkarma.com/about/privacy-20190404/)

I haven't read it in detail, but they may cover your first sentence.

<comment><USER43> Read it - they don't delete your data.

<comment><USER2> I was specifically addressing the "sell your data to anyone who asks" part. Keeping it is one thing, suggesting they sell it to anyone who asks is another. My guess is, no - they don't do that.

<comment><USER18> Keeping your data and selling it anonymized is no better. They should not profit from your data when you leave.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Central Logging with Open Source Software - <AUTHOR> http://divisionbyzero.net/article/2012/06/17/central-logging-with-open-source-software.html I'm attempting to implement a Splunk-like setup with open source components.  This blog entry is the first in many to be a brain dump of how I'm using this setup, what I get from it, and why I've arrived at each of these components. <comment><USER2> Just get Splunk.

I'm a pretty experienced Solr developer, and I've played with Elastic Search etc, and I've been using Splunk for about a year.

The thing people miss about Splunk unless they know it is how good the search interface is. For example, the search language roughly comparable to Lucene/Solr/Elastic Search, but also includes the ability to parse input files, and present results graphically. No open source solution integrates all that.

If you want to compete with Splunk (something I've thought about a few times) then you need to match that. I'd estimate 2 developer for a year to build out those features on top of Solr or ES.

<comment><USER3> Yes, except Splunk gets very expensive, very quickly if you want more than the free tier gives you (features or indexing volume). 500mb/day is not all that much when you start shoving everything under the sun into it (and once you've used it, you'll want _everything_ available to it).

<comment><USER2> What do you class as _very_ expensive?

We put multiple orders of magnitude more data than the free tier into Splunk, and it's still a lot cheaper than 2 developer-years.

It is true, though, that if the licensing was cheaper we'd put even more data into it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This reminds me of something I've been wondering about since the Bitcoinica heist: how do people usually set up secure offline backups which can't be erased using the credentials on the backed-up server? I would probably do something with ssh authorized_keys if I had to make it from scratch, but are there obscure security/reliability risks, and tools which have already mitigated these risks for you?

<comment><USER5> The standard way used to be to use write-only media. For example, if you log to a server which writes the logs incrementally to a DVD writer, you can be fairly certain that the logs won't be erased...

<comment><USER6> That's only true if you have software that can mount arbitrary past sessions, which is rarely the case. When you put in a dvd, what gets mounted is the latest session -- which is supposed to also include all previous sessions, but doesn't have to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just a note - using TCP logging is dangerous. If the syslog server hangs, clients may block writing to the socket and your whole infrastructure will lock up.

See: [http://blog.bitbucket.org/2012/01/12/follow-up-on-our- downti...](http://blog.bitbucket.org/2012/01/12/follow-up-on-our-downtime- last-week/)

<comment><USER8> Hmm, shouldn't this be alleviated with RELP [1]? (which the author suggest you use).

Because, otherwise, since AFAIK rsyslog doesn't support DTLS it means unencrypted log transmission. (For RELP it also means running stunnel anyways, which supports DTLS, and may be a solution)

[1]: <http://www.librelp.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Shameless self promotion but I wrote a blog post about using Logstash, ElasticSearch, and Kibana in production for not only capturing syslog-ng messages but multi-lined Java stack trace errors via log4j.

[http://blog.tagged.com/2012/05/grabbing-full-java-stack- trac...](http://blog.tagged.com/2012/05/grabbing-full-java-stack-traces-from- syslog-ng-with-logstash/)

</comment><comment><USER10> This is a great blog entry on exactly the kind of system I am trying to build. When we went thru the evaluation for this stack - Elasticsearch came out as the choice for the datastore and querying part. Where we are still not decided is using Flume vs logstash. Have you compared the two? We will be building our own UI ...

</comment><comment><USER11> Is there anyone who has used splunk and logstash/graylog2 on a large scale and can compare the two?

<comment><AUTHOR> +1 - Kind of the reason I started this blog post.. Besides reporting (which I know my setup lacks), from a techie perspective, what would this setup lack that Splunk provides.

Follow-up, is it _honestly_ worth the licensing to get those features?

<comment><USER12> No on the license front. Splunk is way too pricey, IMO.

Thanks for posting this! I've been eyeballing logstash for a while but had not run across Kibana's UI. More fun reading ahead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A little bit of warning, to be fair: he mentions you should quit everything in favor of Graphite. As awesome as Graphite it is, it's not really production ready, and setting it up is an exercise in putting together semi-working software without any documentation.

<comment><USER3> Companies like Orbitz and Etsy that use the heck out of Graphite would be surprised to hear that it's "not really production ready"

<comment><USER14> Yes I was a senior software engineer on the Ops Arch team, and a coworker of Chris Davis when he was at Orbitz, and both my team and the prod sysadmin/netops folks were the first users of it, anywhere in the world, debutting roughly with the Austin project, which was a big rewrite of the Orbitz/Cheaptickets codebase to support i18n & white label functionality. I can assure everybody it was used in production for a huge travel website at least as far back as the 2008 timeframe. And it stood up very well back then. I'd be surprised if it hasn't gotten even better since.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Anyone doing this at scale using Scribe/Flume with HDFS and Hive/Pig/MapReduce?

<comment><USER16> Facebook.

<comment><USER8> Have a link?

<comment><USER16> [http://axonflux.com/how-facebook-uses-scribe-hadoop-and- hive...](http://axonflux.com/how-facebook-uses-scribe-hadoop-and-hive-for)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Has anyone looked at using ELSA?

[https://code.google.com/p/enterprise-log-search-and- archive/...](https://code.google.com/p/enterprise-log-search-and- archive/wiki/Documentation)

</comment><comment><USER18> _Man_ do I wish I had heard of Graylog2 or logstash before now. That would have eliminated days of hacking together my own two-bit implementation.

</comment><comment><USER8> I found this interesting. Do you have any benchmarking of the speed of ES vs everything else?

<comment><AUTHOR> We have a lot of in house expertise in ElasticSearch and choose it for a few reasons: 1) It's easier than Lucence/Sphinx to setup. 2) It's clustering support works out of the box and is so easy to configure it's not funny.

ES is basically a usability wrapper around Lucene. I've heard that Sphinx is better for a single node configuration, it's faster and uses less resources, but clustering with Sphinx is apparently tricky.

The other competitor, which I have no experience with is Solr, but this write- up [http://karussell.wordpress.com/2011/05/12/elasticsearch- vs-s...](http://karussell.wordpress.com/2011/05/12/elasticsearch-vs-solr- lucene/) gives an overview of the ES advantages over Solr.

I'm not a Full-Text Search expert, but a number of really smart people at my company evaluated a number of them for one of the most critical pieces of our production site and they chose ElasticSearch.

<comment><USER8> Ok. The one part I don't like in ES is being java and the trouble that usually goes with it (yeah, judging stuff like this is bad, I know :)

For logging searching is the major item at large sites IMO (talking terabytes at least), when you're looking for all occurrences of "item x" over..

"the past week", it may take 1H

"the past month", it may take 10-30H

"the past year", uh, no, you don't do that.

So you gotta use ranges, but it's often hard to guess and you end up missing many log entries just because you don't have the time to search through them.

(obviously loading gigabytes of indexed data takes a while "physically speaking" anyway. I'm guessing ES can distribute the load tho, much like a web search engine does)

<comment><USER2> The vast majority of open source "big-data" infrastructure is in Java (Hadoop, HBase, Cassandra, Solr, Elastic Search etc). It works pretty well.

I'm not sure what your question is, but I've experimented with loading netflow data in Solr and I'm averaging sub-2 second query times. That's on a laptop, with a couple of minutes of netflow (around 10Gb).

With proper indexing your search response time shouldn't increase lineally with your data size.

<comment><USER8> loading 10gb on a traditional hdd takes more than 2s (that's 5gb/s read speed. Nice hard drive.). your data is either in ram and you've a lot of ram, either, it's just not 2s, or its not a 10gb index.

And i'm talking 100gb+ indexes ;-)

Obviously 2min of netflow data ain't much. I would want to see the result over 200h (or more) of netflow data, for example

<comment><USER2> No, _querying_ the data takes less than 2 seconds. I can't remember the load time.

 _Obviously 2min of netflow data ain't much_

Depends where you work...

I just checked, and it was 2Gb of netflow I tested on. That seemed small, so I looked a bit deeper and indeed I was only using a small fraction of our total netflow for that period. Tt was adequate for what I was trying, though.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Australian ISPs Ordered to Block the Pirate Bay - <AUTHOR> http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-12-15/federal-court-orders-pirate-bay-blocked-in-australia/8116912 <comment><USER2> The pirate bay isn't a great site, it's a fallback I only use because they have absolutely everything.

Anyone know something as good as Kickass torrents was?

<comment><USER3> I just use qBitorrent's search functionality. It's a life-changer. I don't have to deal with the crap of any of those sites and I get to search all trackers at once... for Linux ditros, of course.</comment></comment>


Taking Money from the Poor and Giving to the Rich - <AUTHOR> https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/its-hard-to-describe-what-we-do-here-at-goldman-sachs-so-lets-just-say-we-take-money-from-the-poor-and-give-it-to-the-rich <comment><USER2> Meanwhile dentistry futures are on the rise

</comment><comment><USER3> Synopsis: An entertaining but somewhat sympathetic view of the essence of Goldman.

<comment><USER4> I have to disagree. I don't appreciate this guy white-washing what Goldman Sachs does.

/s</comment></comment>


Your favourite app isn't native - <AUTHOR> http://kennethormandy.com/journal/your-favourite-app-isnt-native <comment><USER2> It's amusing that an article pushing hybrid apps as a good way forward was inspired by a hybrid app breaking in a way a "pure" app wouldn't.

Beyond that thought the article seems a little, well, odd. Is the argument that "web programs are as real as native programs"? If so, isn't that a statement of the obvious? Most modern programs are abstractions upon abstractions - whether your layout engine is an embedded OS provided web browser or an OS provided XML resources parser, does it matter?

Or is this another one of those religious war argument things where programming in a scripting language isn't "real" programming? Obligatory XKCD: [http://xkcd.com/378/](http://xkcd.com/378/)

I probably missed the point of it, but it is Friday after all so I'm mostly waiting for the weekend to start.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right a better experience should have been provided there, but it could have still been done within a hybrid app. It's noteworthy because it confirms Instagram uses a web view, something they otherwise didn't ever make any indication of.

And yes, it kind of is one of those arguments! Thanks for feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wrong: Instagram is most definitely native - it uses a uitableview for those views (and it's obvious from the sticky headers with the users name / time / etc)

Basecamp does use some web views, but the resources are local (or they used to be last time I checked)

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, I only meant the the timeline is a web view. I probably didn't communicate that as well as I could have. Part of what's interesting about hybrid apps is that they can use this approach as much or as little as is appropriate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Basecamp's iPhone app is a PhoneGap-style web view. Uber's native app is a > web view. Facebook paid $1.1 billion for Instagram.

None of those are my favourite apps, so the argument crumbles on the first paragraph.

</comment><comment><USER5> Unless I'm mistaken, Basecamp's App is now a native app built with RubyMotion.

[http://www.rubymotion.com/apps/](http://www.rubymotion.com/apps/)</comment>