Your Code Sucks - <AUTHOR> http://www.girldeveloper.com/2010/07/your-code-sucks.html

<comment><USER2> Except for when it really does suck.

I was dealing with some CSS recently that was just odd. Everything (yes, every single block element) was a float resulting in a soup of fixes and workarounds because of the oddities they introduced earlier. In rewriting it, I managed to lose more than half of the CSS statements and make it be an almost pixel perfect match and be more browser compatible.

It was written by another contractor and I was contracting. Handling the politics delicately was the real problem.

<comment><USER3> This sounds like a trivial case.

But I've seen code that really does suck, too, and I still had to understand all of it to really know the code _is_ solving the wrong problem or alternatively not solving any problem at all.

<comment><USER2> Yes it was trivial. As I said, it's delicacy of handling the situation was the hard part.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If the code works and I haven't written the same exact thing myself, the most negative comment I am willing to make is "complicated." At my advanced age, it takes nothing short of a critical system requirement that a piece of code can't possibly meet to rewrite something that works.

The jwz-documented Netscape rewrite debacle is brought to mind by the original posting.

<comment><USER5> Couldn't agree more! Most of the time I've heard people say "this code sucks" it seems to mean that it's formatted "wrongly" or that the person is too lazy to understand it, or it's not written by them!

<comment><USER6> Oh, I don't know. When I've encountered code that I say sucks, it was for code that had single letters as variables in massive function, didn't believe in breaking logic into discrete functions (this was primarily in VB/ASP, so it wasn't for perf reasons ;-)), used copy and paste all the time for large amounts of code (and since they didn't use discrete functions, lost out on simple abstractions), etc...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> She makes a good point, but sometimes, code does suck.

Personally, my worst experiences have been inheriting software written by kids just out of school who have read a lot of books on design patterns. On the bright side, I've learned some really interesting things from these guys here and there, they are typically really, really bright and _extremely_ well read.

I've had instances where I rewrote core code from these type of guys and gotten it down to 30% of its former size, _much_ more understandable, much faster, and much more flexible. But if we went into a meeting to discuss which is the better way, they would likely blow me out of the water (despite public failure) because they are young, inexperienced, and _supremely_ confident.

I think maturity of attitude in software developers typically doesn't set in until 10+ years on the job. So many of the young people entering the field are all educated on the new "yet another revolution" practices (TDD, Agile, etc), and they are so confident, because they are smart and educated (which they are) that it makes interacting with them almost impossible. I've dealt with junior and intermediate developers that seem to think its impossible they could be wrong, they will cling to an idea even though you can easily give several examples where their theory breaks down.

I guess this is just the nature of our business, it is a bit too abstract, and education can be too easily mistaken for knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is why we put comments there. Personally, I put comments so future me will remember what the heck I was thinking when I wrote it.

That said, there's no doubt there's code that definitely sucks. Some of it is mine, too. If I wrote it last year, it sucks. If I wrote it yesterday, it's really great. You can really see how much I've learned in a year when you compare it with my previous sample. At least if I have to rewrite the old code, I'll know what traps and special scenarios I need to watch for if I properly commented it.

<comment><USER9> I believe it's a good thing when I see code I wrote 6 months ago and think it sucks. If I thought it was perfect then that would be a sign that I hadn't learned much since I wrote it.

<comment><USER10> A better question might whether you think the code you wrote 6 months ago sucks as much as the code you wrote a year ago

<comment><USER11> This could be a good metric to see if you are actually improving or if you are jumping the gun on labeling code sucky.

A lot of people think code sucks if they simply can't understand it at a glance. Of course you think yesterday's code is awesome, you just worked on it yesterday. But in 6 months, with the issue completely out of your mind, even if you haven't advanced, you might think it sucks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If I see a piece of code and I think "this code sucks", go back to rewrite it and then realize mid-way that there was a reason they did it that way, the code _does_ suck.

Good programmers leave comments saying "this is ugly because X".

<comment><USER13> Good programmers don't go rewriting code without understanding what and why it is doing what it is doing.

Bad programmers will always have a reason to call everyone else a bad programmer, because that's the easiest excuse for sucking.

<comment><USER14> I was working on updating a backup script, and it had the same function written ten times, with no arguments, entirely for the purpose of calling it. No closures, just pointless repetition.

Also, about half the lines of the script was other very similar blocks of code that had been commented out.

<comment><USER15> You see, when you say something like this, it would never occur to me that people can do this.

When I hear about bad code, I'm thinking about code that is not scalable or unmaintainable. Or, it doesn't follow a proper design pattern or maybe trying to be too clever coding. Or, maybe have resource leaking. Somethings just would never cross my mind.

I need to get out more.

<comment><USER16> Browse <http://thedailywtf.com/> occasionally. While most of their entries aren't particularly interesting, there are some that will really educate you about human stupidity. Another interesting site, but that doesn't update much is _Computer Stupidities_ , <http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/> , though they focus more on user denseness than developer screwups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Writing code is easy, reading and understanding someone elses code is hard. At least, initially.

'Your Code Sucks' can be shorthand for 'not-invented-here', 'I'm not able to grok your datastructure' or 'I don't have experience enough to take this all in but if I scrap it and rewrite it it will be on my level' as frequently (or even more frequently) than that it really means your code sucks.

I'll say 'my code sucks' easily (especially the morning after), but your code might need some incremental improvement until I understand it thoroughly enough to make a judgement call. And in the interest of diplomacy I'd probably give you a hand refactoring it instead of passing judgement. I might even learn something.

</comment><comment><USER18> But some code really _does_ suck! I mean, really.

I don't disagree that often I fail to understand why someone did something a certain way, on the first reading. But after I understand all the logic, and have run test cases etc., the fact that code is poorly structured, buggy, full of duplication, excess global variables, etc. is sometimes unavoidable. When that happens, I have to conclude that it does indeed suck.

</comment><comment><USER19> I had someone contact me about a project they felt was taking too long. They had hired a contractor to do a Rails app, and wanted a second opinion the code to see what the developer was up to.

I got a copy of the code, and it all looked like boilerplate Rails stuff, pretty much by-the-book generated stuff. A first thought was, well, how freakn' long could it take to produce this? But it occurred to me that when you look at code (good or bad), there's often no way to know how the author got there. How much code was scrapped? What ideas were explored? Even when you have the repo history there's still no way to know what might be missing.

It's hard to look at code and make any judgments about the developer, since there are often numerous details that informed the decisions made along the way.

</comment><comment><USER20> My favorite variant of this phenomenon is the time-honored tradition in consulting of the new guy throwing the old guy under the bus.

"I've had a chance to look through the existing codebase, and I'm sad to report that it's in pretty bad shape. I'm afraid we're going to need to rewrite a bunch of it before we can even move forward."

</comment><comment><USER21> Wait, some code really does suck. The difficulty here is that "sucks" is a "catch all" that can include a lot of types of flaws. These might be flexibility, error-proneness, security, performance or maintainability/confusion. In some cases the suckiness is an appreciated trade-off against time-taken and is bearable in maintenance. If this is the case we should try to be more diplomatic about the problems when assessing the code.

However, some code does suck. There is a certain type of easily preventable badness that slowly manifests itself in a project that isn't being effectively maintained. Case in point in my current world of "joy":

        public class MainForm
        {

            public static Form FormInstance;

            public MainForm()
            {
                FormInstance = this;
            }
        }

If you're wondering, there are over 200 references in the code to MainForm.FormInstance.

<comment><USER22> If your goal was to prove that some code unambiguously "sucks", then your example works against you. Because as I read this I see what may be a perfectly reasonable solution to common problem. (For future-proofing, the developer wanted to be sure most of the code shared a single INSTANCE rather than a CLASS with all-static methods. Then later, multiple instances could be used if needed. But since for now only one is used, she took the quickest and easiest approach to instantiating that single instance: no need for fancy factory classes when the instantiation will only be done once!)

<comment><USER23> This is a failed attempt at a singleton pattern. The main problem here (there are MANY) is that there is no check to see if a Singleton already exists, meaning that the "Singleton" can be scrapped and replaced with a new object (most likely by accident) at any time.

This code does in fact suck unambiguously.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Some code is plain old awful. Some such code I have left in place without rewriting because life is just too short.

And what exactly does "At this point I wasn't decimating things all together" mean? Should "decimating" be "denigrating"?

<comment><USER25> she was saying that at that point she was not ripping out huge swaths of code and rewriting them, 'decimate' actually makes plenty of sense in this context

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> There is a difference between code which disagrees with your preferred conventions, code which is ugly but right, code with serious architectural flaws but which is good enough for right now, and bad code which has bred until it is an inescapable tar pit of unnecessary complexity.

The ability to tell the difference comes with experience, as does the ability to abide the first three.

However, I have found that experience has changed my approach to the last away from "complaining" and toward "fire and brimstone sermon".

<comment><USER27> _I have found that experience has changed my approach to the last away from "complaining" and toward "fire and brimstone sermon"._

Oddly, I've found that experience has changed my approach in the exactly opposite way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> When I was younger and more naive I used to think almost every code I ever saw sucked, but especially if it had any of the following characteristics:

\- Indented in another way than I preferred to or the format was in some way not the way I do it (camelCaps, spaces around parenthesis.

\- The code was doing to much in a single line. Preventing readability, etc.

\- It had inline HTML or just anything less than 100% separation of code and presentation.

\- I didn't understand it

These days I almost never think anything sucks, even though it's written by some beginner right out of grad school. However there are exceptions and now the things that make my dislike some code might have something like:

\- Big huge functions that do too much without splitting it up into smaller chunks

\- Things done in many lines of code that can be done in a single line [in a simpler/faster way].

\- Obvious slowdowns, such as way too many SQL queries than needed, for loops that go through 10,000 cycles when you can get the same result in 15 cycles, etc.

I'm guessing in the future it will be something else entirely that I will look at and vomit. And it will most probably be my own code.

</comment><comment><USER29> IF the client comes back and says "We're dissatisfied with your product" - that's one thing.

But "I showed that code we paid you for to someone else and they said it sucked" is unprofessional and pointless.

The only response I can think of was "That's interesting - could you perhaps give me some feedback as to what ways you were dissatisfied with the app?"

<comment><USER30> It's a great marketing strategy for the second-opinion consultant, though. I actually have been in this exact position. I entered into an ill-concieved "startup" project with someone who I considered a friend. It was a specialized e-commerce app that involved interfacing with some proprietary mainframe systems I had never worked with before. He thought I was taking too long so he hired some random guy from the internet to review my code. The guy said my code sucked... then turned around and said he would fix it, for about triple what I was charging. This sort of ended the business relationship (and friendship) between myself and the other founder. My old partner ended up hiring the other guy and paying the 3x rate, and the guy didn't even work on the hard part, interfacing with the mainframe! It ended poorly for me, but I learned a lot about how to market yourself as a consultant from the other guy: charge a lot, say the working code sucks and needs to be rewritten, avoid doing anything with a large technical risk, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I rarely find myself thinking "this code sucks." Usually it's "this code is typical." Sometimes, it's "this code was designed to solve a problem we no longer have and gets in our way solving the new problem."

Either way, sometimes I do in fact see code ('not-invented-here') that clearly does not suck. It's concise, modular, comprehensive, and easy to trace and modify. There's a consistent and seemingly effortless balance abstract and domain-specific functions and logic. There might be jokes and humor in the code, but nothing that ever gets in the way of understanding. Nothing like "hmm I don't really know what to call this temporary variable so I'll make up a funny name for it"

</comment><comment><USER16> The whole world sorta sucks; I have seen very little that could not have been done better. Also, this is the reason professional writers have _someone else_ edit their writing or, where that isn't possible, set it aside for _at least a week_ , longer is better, before coming back and editing themselves. Coders are just arrogant if they think they should be able to write good code the first sitting. Of course, unrealistic schedules forced on them by management has a lot to do with that in many businesses.

</comment><comment><USER32> One should always hold back un-constructive jabs, but some patterns of suck (ex: c&p vs looping) can be detected and undone even without understanding the entire project.

That said, I sympathize with anyone who is doing iterative client work on an hourly basis, and is called out on re factoring. Explaining the cost and benefit of refactoring work to clients can be a hard upsell, and IMHO helps separate great clients from not-so-great.

</comment><comment><USER33> As a general rule of thumb my unease with a line of code is proportional to its distance from the left margin. There are exceptions, naturally, but that's generally how I judge myself: if I open a file and see 16 or 20 spaces on a line I'm probably Doing It Wrong™.

</comment><comment><USER34> I've seen some really bad code... it didn't even work properly! I think that should be the benchmark for sucking. Once it does work, I don't think it can 'suck.' It can be inefficient, it can be slow, it can be improved, but let's reserve suck for real bad code.

</comment><comment><USER35> It's much more difficult to read code than to write it. Even when using the same coding style and conventions, looking at a problem that some else solved will look confusing to you. It's easier to say that it sucks than to say you don't understand it.

</comment><comment><USER36> I get the premise of the article, but I think that you can quickly look at some code and determine if it passes the sniff test. I've been guilty of rewriting sections of code just b/c I didn't like the formatting and other minor annoyances, but then again, there is just general newbie or outsourced lazy, sloppy, spaghetti code. You can spot that in less than ten seconds and it truly does suck. Engineering is about integrating prior solutions to solve a problem. Many times that means the experience to know I can pull in a library and write 10 lines of code to solve a problem instead of hundreds....of bad lines.

</comment><comment><USER37> I once was asked to fix some javascript. I opened the js file and _every_ _single_ _line_ _of_ _code_ was wrapped in a try {} catch() {}

Some code really does suck.

</comment><comment><USER38> There is no such thing as code sucking, only code that works and code that does not. If someone said that to me, I'd ask the client how much they wanted to pay me to make it please who ever they paid to review it. A bill usually shuts down inane comments quite quickly. The folly of their opinion is revealed when they don't want to pay to "fix" it because there is no problem.

<comment><USER39> While I'll be the first to admit that many (perhaps most?) developers (present company included) have a tendency to quickly conclude that other people's code sucks (at least they do at some point in their careers), I have to disagree with the idea that there is _no_ such thing as code that genuinely sucks.

I've read a lot of code in my lifetime, and some of it genuinely sucks. There _is_ a such thing as a bad developer. There are people doing programming who really have no talent for it, or for some other reason are just _really_ bad at it. Sometimes it is due to lack of experience. Sometimes it is due to the person not caring at all. And I am sure there are plenty of other reasons. It doesn't mean that a person can't get better, often they can get _much_ better, but people _do_ write code that sucks.

Understand, I think I am now _much_ slower to be harsh toward other people's code than I used to be. In fact, I regularly give people the benefit of the doubt. Why? Because I've worked for that megalomaniac that wants done yesterday what can't possibly be done in a month's time. You know, the one that thinks that because his work consumes his entire life, and causes him to neglect his family and other responsibilities, so should yours. I've worked in multiple high-pressure situations, where no one cares what the code looks like, as long as it is done tomorrow. And you know what? Sometimes in situations like that people slap together whatever they can (as fast as they can) with duct tape and chewing gum, whatever it takes to get that unreasonable person (or people) off of their back. The results are often ugly, and you can argue whether the person could have done it better in the same (or even less) time. But I think it is worth cutting the other guy some slack. Thankfully, I no longer work for the megalomaniac (and haven't for many years) :-D

However, getting back to my original point, there is code that sucks. It may not be as prevalent as some think that it is, but believe me, it is out there (even after giving the other guy the benefit of the doubt).

Geez, what's up with me and the parenthetical kick today (perhaps I've been writing too much Scheme code recently). :-) <\- got one last one in there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> There is another reason code sucks though, besides being over complicated: Redundant logic and/or not abstracted enough. Sometimes the person was just getting things done and abstracting the logic for reusability wouldn't be necessary in the long run because it was a prototype etc... However, the vast majority of the time I find that taking out redundancy in my code speeds up development not only later on but for the initial release.

</comment><comment><USER41> I say "this code sucks" pretty often. Occasionally, I'm wrong in ways similar to those described in this article. Often, it's crappy outsourced code built by intern developers with no sense of right and wrong.

</comment><comment><USER42> Your blog theme sucks.

<comment><USER43> my problem with this blog is that she wants stress the fact that she is a girl developer like she should get some acclamation for that fact..

a developer is a developer! and she should be judged by her merit, and she's intentionally fooling us to read just ok content. (mainly guys in tech)

<comment><USER44> Personally I think it's smart. I'm sure she gets more page views because of it as well. First time reading the blog and I thought it was interesting enough.

I don't see how she's intentionally fooling you. The URL is girldeveloper, she has a picture plastered on the right (like a ton of other blogs I might add). I guess I'm confused by your reaction.

<comment><USER45> If all she wants to do is get page views, then she's succeeding.

By positioning herself as a "girl", I think of her as a girl first, and a developer second. What qualities do I associate with girls? Not the qualities I look for in a programming blogger. Is that prejudice? I guess so.

I clicked the link because it had a catchy title, not because it was from a site "girldeveloper". That I'm not even thinking about the content of the post anymore speaks volumes.

<comment><USER46> Speak for yourself.

Women are a significant minority in software development. This in itself means that a woman's experience of the field I work in every day must be different to mine. You're more likely to learn something new from someone looking at the same things you do from a different perspective than you are from someone who shares your POV and is more likely to just tell you things you already know.

The blog still has to be interesting, but "girldeveloper" is as good a hook as any.

<comment><USER45> "Speak for yourself."

I did: "I think" "I associate" "I look" "I clicked" "I'm not"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> GirlDeveloper, your CSS sucks.

<comment><USER48> Where is your blog? I mean common, I never see mean comments like these in hacker news posts. Attack her ideas, totally fine with me, but leave the petty comments at home.

<comment><USER47> She insults my code and I can't criticize her CSS?

<comment><USER49> Um, I am afraid that she doesn't do that.

Even if she did does it matter what some random person on the internet says? Really?

On the other hand if she did improve her text color a bit then it would be awesome. I loved her theme though. It's quite pretty in a girly girl sort of way.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dialoggs: Public Beta Now Open - <AUTHOR> http://theindustry.cc/2012/10/25/dialoggs-public-beta-now-open/

<comment><USER2> Signed in.

I hope this will displace both Twitter and email. Specially Twitter.

140 chars only work for little birds. And I don't trust Varys anymore.

</comment><comment><USER3> Please add support for HTTPS. I don't want to sign up or login without it.

<comment><USER4> we use HTTPS to talk to the API, even though the main site isn't. i know this isn't ideal, but we're aware of it, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Bro, I want to know more about when we can see and experience mpost!

</comment><comment><USER6> Exciting launch day!! Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER7> Good looking site. Nice.

</comment><comment><USER5> Ho dang! Congrats bro.

</comment><comment><USER8> Good luck!</comment>


Making Direct Messages Reliable and Fast - <AUTHOR> https://instagram-engineering.com/making-direct-messages-reliable-and-fast-a152bdfd697f <comment><USER2> If anybody else needs this kind of system, most GraphQL clients (at least in the JavaScript ecosystem) handle all of this out of the box or can be extended to work this way with minimal effort.

They have a client-side cache for the whole app that you can optimistically update, all network requests run through that, it handles rolling the updates back when responses come in, etc.

Examples in the JS ecosystem that I am familiar with include Apollo and Relay, and urql is working on this.

<comment><USER3> > If anybody else needs this kind of system, most GraphQL clients

Well, the client is probably the easiest and the most boring piece of the puzzle. What you do in the backend matters.

<comment><USER4> What's done in the backend matters slightly less in the thread of an article entirely concerned with the client.

[https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2400/1*ttu76ysGchnhH3CyT...](https://cdn- images-1.medium.com/max/2400/1*ttu76ysGchnhH3CyTv7IzQ.png)

<comment><USER3> "How do you handle DMs for a billion connected clients" is still a much harder and a more interesting story than "if you want something similar, throw a GraphQL at it".

<comment><USER4> That may be, yet it was story nobody in that thread was talking about save for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If the order of requests are retained, does it mean that if 'mark thread as read' request somehow fails on server side, all other requests will wait for it to be send until it gets success from server?

<comment><USER6> Yeah I wondered if instead of maintaining a global ordering of all requests, it wouldn't be better to just require timestamps in requests that will need to be ordered. Then you only need partial orderings, which you can resolve when marging the optimistic state, only among those requests that actually need to be ordered, and requests don't need to block each other.

Edit: although now I think about it, if you go that route you effectively have to do the same timestamp ordering resolution on the server too.. so probably more complicated than just keeping a global ordering!

<comment><USER7> timestamps are rarely the answer

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Even while being a part of the industry, it is amazing how much technology it takes for things to work seamlessly, and also how many gotchas there are in the way

<comment><USER9> It's also rough when building new applications. Instagram/Facebook level UX are the expectation from the layperson.

For instance, if you add photo upload to your app, people will complain if it doesn't support multi-photo upload, varying sizes, and client side photo filters.

The bar is set very high. It's taken me a whole year to build a website + app combo in my spare time that has all the expected bells and whistles on top of the app's regular functionality (social login, site tours, optimistic states, skeleton loading, push notifications, global type agnostic search, etc). MVP took two months but every time I showed to people, the reaction was always "why isn't it autosuggesting content? Where is the explore page? Why can't I login with my Facebook, why aren't you saving drafts while I create posts in case my computer crashes, etc).

It really is a ton of effort to turn a simple idea into reality

<comment><USER10> It's really hard to build consumer-facing products solo these days!

I recently "gave up" on building my own site and just pay for a Shopify site now (only an option if you're in e-commerce) and I've been blown away by how easy and high quality it is, and $30/month is honestly way cheaper than the time it'd take me to create and maintain a similar site. There are plenty of alternatives to Shopify that are competitive too I understand.

Perhaps it is worth your while to explore outsourcing so that your own time is not the limiting factor!

<comment><USER11> It possibly takes more effort than it should do to do many of these things, in a way the very difficulty of building these things serves to re-enforce the requirement to have large teams.

In a way the fractured nature of the web serves the big organizations with the resources to build things that are 'clean' experiences across every platform.

While I doubt it was by design it certainly benefits them now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This seems a lot like an eventually-consistent database. I think you could accomplish something similar with something like CouchDB or Firebase that provide conflict resolution between local and server state automatically. I'm wondering what the advantage is here?

<comment><USER13> My strong guess is that they have just reinvented a client component of an eventually consistent data store, and in this context the blogpost is actually embarrassing for them. I wonder if they will notice further problems and reinvent causal consistency and vector clocks next.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great write up! I have a few questions if anyone familiar with the development can share: 1\. How do you handle trust-buster issue: users see a message go through only to check back an hour later that it's not. 2\. For this to work, all components must adhere to this same pattern. How did you handle the migration plan? 3\. Seems like something that can work across platform. Any thoughts on c++ layer between android and iOS? Or Facebook tends to go at it platform-focused.

Thank you!

<comment><USER5> I guess it is handled by a state like 'sending'. So when you send a message, initial update before sending the request in UI is showing a 'sending icon'

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This looks a lot like the Flux pattern, it would be interesting to understand how they deal with conflicts and updates that keep failing, will the Mutation Manager cancel the optimistic state after a certain amount of failed requests to the server?

</comment><comment><USER16> Why is Instagram reinventing the wheel, instead of using WhatsApp backend?

I though Zuck announced they were merging everything into an unified system?</comment>


GitLab adds free hosting to Continuous Integration for development teams - <AUTHOR> http://sdtimes.com/gitlab-adds-free-hosting-continuous-integration-development-teams/ <comment><USER2> Also see [https://about.gitlab.com/2016/03/29/gitlab- runner-1-1-releas...](https://about.gitlab.com/2016/03/29/gitlab- runner-1-1-released/) and feel free to ask me anything.</comment>


A Hologram Suggests How Space Could Pop into Existence - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/75/story/a-hologram-shows-how-space-could-pop-into-existence <comment><USER2> So what predictions does this hypothesis generate? Anything?

 _" Science is prediction, not explanation"_ \- Fred Hoyle.

<comment><USER3> but a prediction is an explanation about what will happen in the future

<comment><USER4> That can include measurements of the past. If I predict that oil formed here, I can then drill to validate the prediction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > "The 3-D space we experience might be generated by a two-dimensional reality > or even a zero-dimensional system, one that cannot be thought of as residing > in space at all."

But isn't this effectively saying that the dimensions-based model for universe is incorrect? I'm trying to understand the comparison when it seems to be saying the benchmark is wrong.

<comment><USER6> I read it as saying our 3-d world can be encoded in ways other than a stream of x y z coordinates. Possibly a stream of 1-d "a" coordinates, which are translated to our reality by folding the "a" stream in different directions like a physical hologram.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Am I allowed to voice my opinion that this is one of worst written articles on an abstruse concept to have yet graced the Hacker News front page?

<comment><USER8> Thanks!

After reading the article and not understanding anything, I thought maybe someone at HN made more sense if it than me, so I checked the comments.

Glad to know I'm not the only one for whom this was incomprehensible!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe I'm just a practical, basic, person but I don't understand a single thing about that article. Then I read the HN comments hoping for clarity, and came out even more confused...

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm honestly tired of the personal anecdotes in scientific articles. I don't want to have to scan 3 paragraphs through before I get the gist of the article.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think the holographic principle and its, especially popular, interpretations are stretching things too far, way outside of the black hole as one can say. There is so far nothing to indicate that the specific conditions inside black hole giving rise to the observed "holographicity" of the entropy of the black hole are applicable outside of the black hole.

What we have - the space of possible states, i.e. entropy, inside a black hole has significantly reduced cardinality, i.e. it is equivalent to the cardinality of the black hole surface in this case. That means that either there is strong additional dependency/correlation arises between the states of the black hole components/particles (doesn't sound that unrealistic - we do have similar, using very wide notion of similarity of course :), process on the other side of the spectrum - Bose-Einstein condensate (and the similarity may be pretty high [https://arxiv.org/pdf/0807.0315.pdf)](https://arxiv.org/pdf/0807.0315.pdf\))), and which in effect is kind of equivalent to the loss of some degrees of freedom, or may be there is a loss of degrees of freedom due to the black hole spacetime distortion - gravity distorts the spacetime, and the black hole is the ultimate case of it with the local time basically disappearing for the external observer, and thus we have a perceived loss of degrees of freedom - as observed by external observer. I.e. it may as well be that the entropy inside, as would be perceived locally, may still be "normal 3D" in the local spacetime while it is basically frozen from the POV of external observer (and thus what we observe is the projection of the rest of that spacetime taken at the point where(when) a given dimension is "stuck"), and thus externally observed "2D" entropy is just stuck in time, ie. a projection of, the "normal" 3D entropy of the black hole insides. Drawing some parallel with light coming out of deep gravitational well - the lightwave is stretching like the time dimension is getting "slower" until it stops in the case of black hole. The stopped dimension and an absence of the dimension - not much difference math- and observation-wise.

</comment><comment><USER12> If we can just name zero dimension space as 'not space,' we could solve the problem much more easily by renaming 'space' as 'not space' instead of relying on convoluted analogies with holograms.

<comment><USER13> I fail to see how this simplifies anything or makes more sense than the provided analogies; could you elaborate?

<comment><USER12> I fail to see how the hologram concept explains anything. Is my OS bootup process a hologram? Is the evolution of the universe from the big bang a hologram? What is not a hologram?

'Hologram' just seems to be a loose analogy for the concept that 'something complex came from something simple.'

On the other hand, the holographic nail sounds pretty neat.

<comment><USER14> >I fail to see how the hologram concept explains anything.

Think about where Classical Physics breaks down (at the big bang and black holes/singularity).

So if you, as a higher dimensional being, fall into a black hole (a lower dimensional space) where does all that higher dimensional information go? Well like a hologram, the idea is the information gets recorded on the surface of a black hole, or event horizon. In short its like a 3D object being able to exist in/on a 2D plain.

If a hologram doesn't work for you, maybe try thinking about fractal geometry where the perimeter of an object can measure infinity while simultaneously the volume is perfectly measurable and well defined.

<comment><USER12> Or a bitstring...

It's unclear what is so important about the 'hologram'.

What they really seem to be trying to do is explain how we get something from nothing, with ever more convoluted mathematical abstractions to try and avoid the inherent logical contradiction.

<comment><USER15> The basic idea is that all of the information required to recreate a higher dimensional space is encoded in a lower dimensional space. The information is "spread across" the lower dimension in that each point encodes a lower fidelity representation of the whole.

Seriously though, look up how holograms work. There's a lot of thought provoking aspects to them and it's no wonder they've inspired a lot of novel thought about the nature of the universe.

<comment><USER16> That doesn't seem to explain anything. The higher-dimensional space isn't low- resolution. We don't live in a flickery monochrome universe?

<comment><USER15> The higher dimensional space has "full resolution" since it is the summation of all of the data in the lower dimensional space. Any given part of the lower dimensional space has less "resolution" or information because it is a smaller sample of the whole.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


'Sex-Positive' URL Shortener Shut Down By Libyan Government - <AUTHOR> http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/10/sex-positive_url_shortener_shut_down_by_libyan_gov.php

<comment><USER2> Earlier discussion <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1764042></comment>


Who wrote the New York Times op-ed? Using tidytext to find document similarity - <AUTHOR> http://varianceexplained.org/r/op-ed-text-analysis/ <comment><USER2> Hopefully the author had a bright intern on staff who was able to crunch the initial draft through this old, old technology, then recommend revisions so as to point it away from his or her real identity.

</comment><comment><USER3> So he suspects somebody because of these 2 words: malign behavior ?

At the end of the article he says that he's satisfied with "tidytext methods", when it should have ended with: this sort of analysis is stupid and tidytext shouldn't be used in this context (less data than a highschool newspaper).

Imagine if by chance a poor guy in the White house gets fired because he tweeted more times about Russia than Trump.</comment>


Computers Evolve a New Path Toward Human Intelligence - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/computers-evolve-a-new-path-toward-human-intelligence-20191106/ <comment><USER2> "More audaciously, he aimed to show that completely ignoring an objective can get you there faster than pursuing it."</comment>


President Signs Portman-Murphy Counter-Propaganda Bill into Law - <AUTHOR> http://www.portman.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=F973E46B-AA8C-4F3E-91B4-8EC0FC7F2F3E <comment><USER2> One man's propoganda is another man's counter-propoganda. If the bill aimed to empower independent sources, such as BBC/Reuters etc, I'd be all for it. But a group that's beholden solely to the US federal government? I wouldn't expect anything less than a biased mouthpiece for the President's interests.

<comment><USER3> One man's independent media is another woman's income stream.

Clinton Foundation donors 2015

[http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/05/clinton- foundati...](http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/05/clinton-foundation- donors-include-dozens-of-media-organizations-individuals-207228)

$1,000,000-$5,000,000

Carlos Slim - Chairman & CEO of Telmex, largest New York Times shareholder

James Murdoch - Chief Operating Officer of 21st Century Fox

Newsmax Media - Florida-based conservative media network

Thomson Reuters - Owner of the Reuters news service

$500,000-$1,000,000

Google

News Corporation Foundation - Philanthropic arm of former Fox News parent company

<comment><USER4> Here's the thing I don't get about that, maybe you can help me out. How did the Clintons profit from the Clinton Foundation? I'm looking on Politifact, which says:

"The Clintons don't take a salary from this work, and they don't receive any other direct monetary benefit."

"The Clinton Foundation is a public charity that, as we have reported, allocates about 80-90 percent of its expenditures to charitable programs, while the rest goes to fundraising and overhead."

So, I'm trying to work how this matches up with what basically became a mass meme, that the foundation was utterly corrupt. It certainly doesn't sound like a particularly valuable "income stream", as you call it. What am I missing? I can see it being an example of the Clintons being too close to the rich donor class, but then, Trump met Carlos Slim the other day (describing him as a great guy) so it's hardly as if there was only one candidate guilty of that.

([http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2016/sep/01/...](http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2016/sep/01/hilary- rosen/democrat-pundit-clintons-get-no-personal-benefit-f/))

<comment><USER5> I admit not knowing in depth, but supposedly (from a Wikileaks released email), Chelsea Clinton paid for her wedding out of foundation funds:

[https://wikileaks.org/podesta- emails/emailid/52046](https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/52046)

Aren't these non-profit P&L/expense reports on file with the IRS and public record?

<comment><USER6> >Aren't these non-profit P&L/expense reports on file with the IRS and public record?

They don't have to disclose full (itemised) expenditures or income IIRC and even if they did someone needs to take a very deep look at it, the clinton foundation issues 1000's of invoices on a monthly basis if not more it's not like they would mark "-150,000$ - Chelsea's wedding" in the books.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Who decides what is propaganda? Here is my favorite piece of "counter- propaganda": [http://www.politifact.com/truth-o- meter/statements/2014/mar/...](http://www.politifact.com/truth-o- meter/statements/2014/mar/31/facebook-posts/viral-meme-says-united-states-has- invaded-22-count/)

Why is this my favorite? Because it defines a word which has an obvious meaning, "invasion" in this case in such a way that it excludes situations that any reasonable person would identify as a referent of that word. For example, according to this article, the United States didn't invade Afghanistan. It also does not count use of air power to enforce a no-fly zone as an invasion. This definition is very in tune with the legal and linguistic shenanigans the US goes through in order to justify their military intervention all over the world.

Fact checking can be propaganda too. The idea that the United States' propaganda is justified and others' is not is pure doublethink. This bill claims that it'll preserve democracy by giving the US government the power and resources to create its own propaganda networks (which, by the way, it has been running clandestinely for decades anyway). The people who will enshrine totalitarianism in the law will do it while honestly believing they are saving something they call freedom.

</comment><comment><USER8> Important points:

New counter-propaganda law was put in place

\- provides grant funding for NGOs working to reduce disinformation from propaganda

\- institutionalize the support of a free-press overseas, particularly around Russia/China

</comment><comment><USER9> Anyone else just slightly concerned that the phrasing of the bill essentially identifies both Russia and China as enemies?

This just doesn't seem to make much diplomatic sense.

<comment><USER10> _See edit below_

If it's the same as the House bill, the citations to Russia and China occur only in the "Sense of Congress" section (which isn't legally binding) and include only:

 _(1) foreign governments, including the Governments of the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China, use disinformation and other propaganda tools to undermine the national security objectives of the United States and key allies and partners;_

 _(2) the Russian Federation, in particular, has conducted sophisticated and large-scale disinformation campaigns that have sought to have a destabilizing effect on United States allies and interests;_

 _(3) in the last decade disinformation has increasingly become a key feature of the Government of the Russian Federation's pursuit of political, economic, and military objectives in Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, the Balkans, and throughout Central and Eastern Europe;_

I would dispute that this constitutes an identification of Russia as an "enemy".

 _Edit_

Further: my understanding now is that this was an amendment on the 2017 NDAA. I read the text of the 2017 NDAA (or, at least, searched it for all clauses pertaining to "Russia" and "propaganda") and it's _not_ the same bill, nor does it call out Russia or China.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I enjoy reading news sources from around the world, including China Daily and Russian Times. All news media carries some bias, and my strategy for understanding the world is to read news from many countries. The news in my country (USA) is also heavily biased. I expect to see less freedom in the Internet in the future, but I hope I am wrong about that!

</comment><comment><USER12> Great, we needed something to counter the domestic propaganda that was legalized in 2013: [https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130715/11210223804/anti-...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130715/11210223804/anti- propaganda-ban-repealed-freeing-state-dept-to-direct-its-broadcasting-arm- american-citizens.shtml)

Oh, it's about foreign propaganda? Never mind...

<comment><USER10> This (2016) bill is extremely silly. But so was that Techdirt story. Can you identify the government "propaganda" we've been subjected to since 2014 that we weren't subjected to in (say) 2007?

<comment><USER12> No, independently these moves are inconsequential. But the trajectory is clear, and reason to worry.

<comment><USER13> this is a good reply. people often get stuck because they get goaded into trying to describe a single "smoking gun" that doesn't exist in such a blatant form. propaganda is much more subtle, a well-timed unsubstantiated allegation that is later claimed to be a good faith error, when the damage is already done.

it's good to refuse to play that game altogether, and focus instead of facts such as the the fact that WMDs were not found, the CIA torture report was not discussed by talking heads, drone bombings aren't personal interest stories, and that bird's eye view kind of stuff.

<comment><USER10> Every one of those things you just cited preceded the bill Techdirt was freaking out about.

<comment><USER12> Turning it around: if the bill changed nothing, why did it need to be repealed?

<comment><USER10> It didn't need to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Anyone else see a risk of the sitting government funding orgs that are only tackling disinformation that said sitting government disapproves of?

</comment><comment><USER15> The whole 'fakenews' narrative is just a ploy to get censorship passed, I hope you guys all realize this. Any foreign media can be classified as propaganda and be called a national security risk - and be banned at will.

<comment><USER16> Where is the authority to ban anything being granted?

<comment><USER15> What do you think "proactively advance fact-based narratives that support U.S. allies and interests" means? It means that US "facts" will get priority in the media over foreign "non-facts". Somebody will decide what is and isnt a fact and those somebodies will sit in the state departement. Nobody is ever going to make a bill saying "we will censor russian and foreign media", you do realize that right? The wording will always seem a lot less threatening.

<comment><USER10> It's always tricky to tell if commenters here are from Europe, the US, or elsewhere, but on the off chance that you're not from the US: the US federal government has virtually no control over the US media industry, and can't prioritize any particular kind of content in it.

<comment><USER15> This is demonstrably untrue, I have read many articles showing collaboration between major news outlets and the US government. I think wikileaks mentioned it too. Specifically John Podesta saying something along the lines of "lets ask one of our friendlies at AP to plant a story". Even if all the wikileaks and other reports were untrue, this isnt a conspiracy theory, the US media _needs_ collaboration from the US government if it wants to get invited to white house press conferences, be called upon in them etc. Revoking media access to the US government is very much in the power of the US government. You are being very naive to think that the US government has zero control over the media. The US government regularly talks with silicon valley companies, I'm sure Mark Zuckerberg had a few meetings discussing how to combat fake news aka suppress articles from rt.com and breitbart. Not just that, it is public knowledge that facebook and google are part of the prism program that gives direct access to their data to the US government. So in light of all that, your tone is quite inappropiate because it is in fact you who speaks out of ignorance.

<comment><USER10> Your theory here being that the US government will use its friendly relationship with the AP to censor stories favorable to Russia, and that it's _a newly passed law_ that's going to enable them to do that? This isn't coherent.

Either the government is constantly acting _sub rosa_ to manipulate media narratives, in which case this bill doesn't matter because they're already doing it, or they aren't, in which case this bill doesn't matter because the US government has no formal control over the media.

It is surprising how many HN discussions about newly proposed (or, here, signed) legislation take this form.

<comment><USER17> I believe the fallacy you've created here is called a false dichotomy. There are obvious shades of gray here.

In the category of the government already doing it, there is a difference in outcomes between doing it with x funds and n*x funds.

<comment><USER10> It's not a dichotomy at all. It's an argument that doesn't hold together. As in virtually every HN argument about legislation, someone has supposed that the government needs a new law to do something the arguer claims the government routinely accomplishes lawlessly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is an excuse for censorship. Censorship is a big problem on the internet. Including sites like Hacker News. Make a somewhat political statement that is popular, it will be upvoted. Make a somewhat political statement that is very critical of the United States or contradicts a mainstream liberal media myth or bias, you will be flagged (censored). This is the same as what happens in China when you criticise the government.

<comment><USER19> This is a ridiculous statement. You are not entitled to free speech on a private website. Downvoting is not censorship; not every comment is privileged to be at the top or completely visible. I agree that flagging is abused at times, but it means that the community has found that some part of your post violates its guidelines, and it's their right to do that. When site staff ban you, they are moderating their community and it is not censorship. Sorry, but "censorship" is not a shield you can use to deflect any criticism or repercussions of your actions. You might find this comic enlightening: [https://xkcd.com/1357/](https://xkcd.com/1357/). Lastly no, this is not at all what happens in China. In China the government will kidnap and arrest you, not hide your comment on an internet forum.

<comment><USER18> I didn't say downvoting, I said flagging. I have seen it or other moderation used many times to remove contributions that contradict belief systems or site-accepted political worldviews but do not violate terms of use. And HN/reddit/etc. are very large groups that allow public participation.</comment></comment></comment>


Homeopathy 'treatments' must be labelled to say they do not work, US gov orders - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/homeopathy-treatments-must-be-labelled-to-say-they-do-not-work-us-government-orders-a7429776.html <comment><USER3> This is long past due.

I'm on a facebook list for dads, and after it came out that a homeopathic teething gel _killed 10 kids_ ([http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/19/health/teething- remedies-i...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/19/health/teething-remedies- infant-deaths.html)) someone asked if it was worth the risk to keep giving to his kids, since it worked.

I tried to explain to him that homeopathic medicine is either 1) Nothing, if they diluted it 'correctly', or never bothered to put the poison in there to begin with or 2) Poison, if they failed to dilute it properly 3) Maybe some kind of actual medicine, in which case it's not actually homeopathic.

There are no other options.

He responded: "Well, it seemed to work for my kid, so I'm going to keep using it."

<comment><USER4> > Nothing, if they diluted it 'correctly', or never bothered to put the poison > in there to begin with

There are both high-dilutionists and low-dilutionists within homeopathy.[1][2] I'm not saying you should run out and buy a bunch of homeopathic remedies or whatever, but also realize that the mainstream 'skeptic' account of homeopathy is not especially accurate.

Also realize that the latest scientific research on food allergies involves homeopathic-like mithridatism, so even though the idea of a like-cures-like high dilutionist treatment isn't anywhere near a universal panacea, it does at least appear to work in certain limited cases.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/History-American-Homeopathy- Academic-...](https://www.amazon.com/History-American-Homeopathy- Academic-1820-1935-ebook/dp/B01KI63DYU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1479752156&sr=8-1&keywords=academic+history+of+homeopathy)

[2] [http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article- abstract/202602](http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/202602)

<comment> nommm-nommm Woah, are you seriously comparing immunotherapy to homeopathy? One has no basis in reality and no known mechanism of action. The other has a solid scientific and biological foundation behind it. Nor is immunotherapy the "latest scientific research," its been around for decades.

James Randi famously starts out talks swallowing an entire bottle of homeopathic sleeping pills. He's not dead yet despite being almost 90.

<comment><USER4> > James Randi famously starts out talks swallowing an entire bottle of > homeopathic sleeping pills.

And that's exactly why I posted my comment, because it's wildly irresponsible to post comments leading people to believe that they can do the same thing and come away unharmed. The fact is that if you chug a bottle of 3x diluted poison ivy oil then you're almost certainly going to die. And not because it wasn't diluted properly, because it had other ingredients, etc.

Most homeopathic treatments on the market today are highly diluted. But not all. And since historically there was more of an even split between high dilutionists and low dilutionists, it's not unlikely that in the future even more low dilution homeopathic products will come on the market. So when you post shit that's going to come up in Google for the next twenty years that's implicitly encouraging folks to try some stunt that could easily get them killed, don't expect to not get called out on it.

<comment><USER5> > if you chug a bottle of 3x diluted poison ivy oil then you're almost > certainly going to die

Haha ok, yes, you have a point there. I guess it is really dangerous to assume that all homeopathic remedies are pure water, because some of them aren't actually diluted that much. Some of them still contain poison.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is excellent news. I am slightly ashamed to admit that an ex-g/f once convinced me to go to a homeopath to try and treat my Crohns, and back then I was completely ignorant of what that meant. Some hundreds of dollars later and a couple of weeks of taking some alcohol with water, carefully measured out in a teaspoon daily, I began to finally realise I'd been had. I wince now, but that was the first time I looked up information on homeopathy. Now, I'm not hugely intelligent, but I'm no dummy either, and have a reasonable education and understand of science, the scientific method etc; through pure ignorance I ended up handing over some cash and having a little bit of hope my health would improve. If there is something staring people in the face, people who are in my position might save their money and time.

FWIW, the only reliable 'treatment' I've found for my Crohns is pizza. And I guess even this is 99.5% psychological!

<comment><USER7> My Crohn's went into total remission as soon as I stopped consuming alcohol.

<comment><USER6> I never drank when I was first diagnosed, and didn't for some years afterwards. Now I sometimes do, but whether I do or don't there is no noticeable influence on my illness. Still, if you have found something that seems to work, you have nothing to lose by keeping at it (except if you love a beer!)

<comment><USER7> I love beer.

But I love not spending days in hospital more.

:)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In a post-truth world, this might make the treatments MORE popular. :-/

<comment><USER9> Is it just me or is misinformation some sort of virus that slowly spreads?

I've noticed a sharp uptick in people utterly detached from reality lately where presumably the former checks to keep people grounded, like a critical news ecosystem, or a robust education system, has imploded.

<comment><USER10> You're not the only one - I've had this sense of a slow, but inescapably- accelerating epidemic for awhile now. Tuesday before last was not a shock.

It feels like we're slowly falling off the trajectory of the Renaissance and Enlightenment; avoiding fatalism about that is my main challenge right now.

<comment><USER11> Two driving factors, I think: dominance of the advertising industry, and a rise of "wicked problems" with no good comfortable answers. Global warming leads this: would you rather believe we're on an inevitable path to doom, or that everyone is lying to you?

<comment><USER12> Take a step further: Human attention has become a currency more than ever before, and pandering to human biases is one way media companies have learned to earn that currency.

You used to need substantial capital to earn the reputation as a serious news organization, but now the barrier to entry is a vaguely-authoritative domain name and social media accounts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In addition to everything said, please don't take homeopathic drugs on the theory that "at least it's harmless." This usually happens when people try to please someone (parents, friends) by "just trying" homeopathy. I made the mistake of doing that, and it was definitely not harmless - the "medicine" contained strong allergens which not only caused hives, but resulted in the acquisition, for a few years, of allergies I never had before - <USER2> this can happen with sensitization caused by strong allergens.

The homeopathic "doctor" was delighted. You see, the other thing in homeopathy, apart from the belief in water memory, is the concept of most disease as a type of itch ("psora"), which can erupt through the skin ("psora miasm"). No, really, I didn't make that up, you can (with some difficulty) find this stuff with Google. Since like cures like, allergens such as poison ivy, which cause skin rashes, are thought to be curing internal disease, and some homeopathic medicines are full of them, and are used as a complement to the super-diluted ones. Stay away from that whole swamp.

<comment><USER14> woah, this is new to me.. so they a ctually think these skin eruptions are a good thing because the disease is being "cured internally"??

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "No scientific evidence this product works" will be ignored. "This product does not work" would be more effective.

<comment><USER16> I have some issues with the statement "No scientific evidence this product works". To me it is toothless and not very convincing. What if the product never has been tested scientifically? In that case, it might work...

However, if a label would say "10 peer reviewed and published scientific studies find no evidence that this product works". Now that is convincing.

<comment><USER17> > To me it is toothless and not very convincing. What if the product never has > been tested scientifically? In that case, it might work...

> However, if a label would say "10 peer reviewed and published scientific > studies find no evidence that this product works". Now that is convincing.

I don't think that this is how medical labelling should work. If you want to sell a product on the basis of its effect on your health, then the onus should be on you to prove that it works, not on others to prove that it doesn't. In this setting, I think that a presumption of guilt (ineffectiveness or harmfulness) until proven otherwise is appropriate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting to compare this with the current political story of fake news (or climate change denial, holocaust denial, conspiracy theories etc.)

It seems we're just generally very bad at this stuff as a species.

<comment><USER19> We're actually very good at it, but we insist on doing it wrong a lot.

You're not going to rationally logically reason someone out of a position they got into via completely irrational illogical unreasoning belief.

Now you might replace their irrational illogical unreasoning belief with another like faith healing or anything an actor in a tv commercial wearing a doctors white coat says is true.

As an analogy, in the history of mankind I don't think any Christian Creationist has ever been converted to evolution by throwing scientific journal papers at him. You'd have better luck setting him on fire or being torn apart by lions in a Colosseum and even that mostly doesn't work. But Christian Creationists DO convert to other religions every day, all the time, plenty of currently Buddhists or Hindus or Pagans or Satanists or whatever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Slightly off-topic, but I can't help but recall a rather hilarious 9 minute beat poem by Tim Minchin

"By definition", I begin "Alternative Medicine", I continue "Has either not been proved to work, Or been proved not to work. Do you know what they call "alternative medicine" That's been proved to work? Medicine."

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtYkyB35zkk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtYkyB35zkk)

</comment><comment><USER21> Here are the must take next steps for US government:

1\. All churches, mosques, temples etc. to have a board outside their "Prayer Does Not Work." 2\. All astrologers, tarot card readers, psychic readers etc. to have a large bold faced notice "This does not work". 3\. All laws passed by congress must begin with "This might have severe unintended consequences that are bigger than the problem this bill claims to solve".

<comment><USER22> It's scary how much power simply give to the government, and how thankful they are that government officials who they've never met can make decisions for people neither of them have ever met.

<comment><USER23> Yes. There's a fine line between protecting people and becoming a full-blown nanny state.

Safety is a good thing, but so is liberty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I agree with others that homeopathy is woo-woo.

One of the oft-cited claims by practitioners is that water has memory[1]

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

This _sounds_ cute and it's probably true that water has some subtle hard-to- reproduce property of retaining certain configurations, but even if this were true, what's so great about it?

I'm not entirely convinced that a hard-to-reproduce configuration of water will affect my physiology, and if it does, then this would have to be put through scientific rigeur, which it is not, it's performed on blind faith that it works.

<comment><USER23> Don't you get it? It's all about the "ionic frequencies" which cleanse the body of "toxins"! ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> How does this deal with the products that are basically just vitamins, but marketed as "homeopathic" as an umbrella term?

<comment><USER26> It's only if they want to claim it treats a particular thing.

They'll simply put the name on the label without an claim about what it does, and leave that to books.

The regulation will do nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The ones who already believe will think it's a government-pharmaceutical industry conspiracy to discredit it. Like my mother.

</comment><comment><USER28> Potentially off topic, but Im trying to navigate the alternative medicine world right now.

My mother in law just gave me a bottle of pills containing a Chinese herb meant to treat hair prematurely graying. I don't mind trying it and finding out it doesn't work in order to keep her happy but I've ran into some reports that it can cause liver damage, but I can't gauge how reliable those reports are. Any tips on how to find scientific research on things like this?

The product is called "Fu-Ti"

<comment><USER29> Check Wikipedia as it usually links out to medical sites and offers a decent summary in most cases. In this case Wikipedia links to [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3240794/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3240794/) which appears to be an analysis of 25 cases. I'd say it's pretty damning and avoid it personally.

Search PubMed there seem to be a few papers around indicating it's toxicity and discussing it like [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22210538](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22210538)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Does anybody have any good links to impressively strong placebo effects of any treatment? Or is it always just a slight reduction in reported pain?

These debates always devolve into how placebo is a proven effect and doctors should prescribe placebos. Placebos seem to have limited effects though (they're not going to cure cancer or a cold) so this feels like a red herring.

</comment><comment><USER31> How does Europe and Asia feel about this news?

From the wikipedia page:

"In Germany, to become a homeopathic physician, one must attend a three-year training programme, while France, Austria and Denmark mandate licences to diagnose any illness or dispense of any product whose purpose is to treat any illness.[284]...

The Indian government recognizes homeopathy as one of its national systems of medicine;"

<comment><USER32> They realize that medicine is not black and white and that there is a reality beyond peer reviewed studies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> It is also about time we force this for vitamins too. The disclaimer of "not been validated by the FDA to cure or treat a disease..." is a bunch of crap. It goes beyond false advertising, it is straight up untrue claims. They should be forced to do true double blind studies with several universities and show tangible benefit or don't advertise.

<comment><USER34> In the case of vitamins, these studies do exist, but they are already prevented by law from referencing these studies to make claims.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> From what I have observed in my life the mechanism of homeopathy has great appeal to people who show some propensity to twisted thinking. Particularly of the all/nothing kind and having trouble with keeping opposites sorted. The problem seekers, the ones that instinctively reach out the most obvious wrong solution.

<comment><USER36> idiots?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I feel alone in thinking I don't want the government regulating any of this. What's next? A prayer disclaimer as you walk into a church?

The people who buy this are probably the ones who can't afford real medicine, and now regulation is going to make this even more expensive. If you think this is the government trying to protect us against ourselves: it's not, and that's not the role of government anyway. This is just an alternative medicine attack to remove competition and keep the price of real drugs high.

<comment><USER37> Praying is free, and arguably a form of expression.

However, goods sold with the expectation of efficacy should _be controlled_ based on that promise.

<comment><USER38> Bingo.

Homeopathic treatments are simply _not fit for purpose_ , even by the standards of ordinary products. If an engine oil failed to provide any lubrication, or if an electric cord could not power devices attached to it, it would promptly be withdrawn from the market. Standards should only be higher for products that are intended for human consumption.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> India, on the opposite end, has a ministry specifically for such woo-woo called AYUSH. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_AYUSH](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_AYUSH)).

Only Ayurveda could possibly be looked at a little charitably, since it involves use of potential active ingredients, but even there efficacy is largely anecdotal, with barely any scientific rigor applied.

</comment><comment><USER40> For anyone wondering if this is real [https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_statements...](https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_statements/996984/p114505_otc_homeopathic_drug_enforcement_policy_statement.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER7> "You know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work? - Medicine." ― Tim Minchin

</comment><comment><USER41> They sometimes do work, because of the placebo effect.

<comment><USER42> I doubt the placebo effect is present in teething babies.

<comment><USER43> It may very well be present in the parents/caretakers of teething babies.

<comment><USER44> Having a young child will bring out the superstitious idiot in you.

Last night the baby went to sleep because I walked counter-clockwise while singing lullabies? That's it, that's the only direction I can walk in from here on out while putting her to bed. The kid ate her veggies with no complaint because I was humming The Simpsons theme? It's now the official meal-time song.

<comment><USER45> These seem profoundly irrational, but one thing I've noticed is that young kids are profoundly irrational beings. You will feel like a vulcan by comparison. My kid flips out if I put the blankets on her in the wrong layering order .... but "wrong" is different every night.

<comment><USER44> Mine's 9 months old; she doesn't care what I hum or how I turn. My examples are 100% me being irrational.

When she gets older and starts having well-developed preferences, then I will no longer be crazy - only my behavior will be, because I'll be in thrall to a tiny crazy person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> ho·me·op·a·thy ˌhōmēˈäpəTHē/noun the treatment of disease by minute doses of natural substances that in a healthy person would produce symptoms of disease

<comment><USER47> That's not correct. Homoeopathy doesn't contain _any_ of the purported substance.

<comment><USER48> It _used_ to contain it.

<comment><USER47> My bank account used to contain money, I guess I'm homeopathically rich.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> \-- Removed :)

<comment><USER50> Please keep religious flamewars off HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> >doctrine of like cures like, a claim that a substance that causes the symptoms of a disease in healthy people would cure similar symptoms in sick people. Homeopathy is a pseudoscience – a belief that is incorrectly presented as scientific. Homeopathic preparations are not effective for treating any condition...

Isn't _like cures like_ the principle behind many modern medical therapies, such as: flu vaccination; anti-venom; and immunotherapy for allergies.

Not saying this is wrong decision, but its always interesting to watch the Government pick winners and losers. In this case their justification includes " _many_ are diluted to the extent..." and " _in general_ claims not based on science". So is that an acknowledgment products are based on science and not diluted to the extent rendering them useless? On the other hand its great watching members of congress explain why they refuse to pass laws require labeling of food containing GMO, because they generally acknowledge GMO _could_ be harmful to consumers but the science is still out and so until then consumers shouldn't be making their purchasing decisions based on GMO labels.

<comment><USER52> The examples you gave aren't 'Like Cures Like' in the way homeopathy works. The things you described work by triggering your immune system to create T-cells with a memory of the disease.

Homeopathy works by taking a chemical and diluting it, generally to the point where it practically doesn't exist. Best case scenario, it's a sugar pill, worst case, they don't dilute enough with something dangerous and you are taking poison.

This isn't picking winners and losers, it's consumer protection that's required for a free market to be fair to consumers. If homeopathic producers follow clinical standards and proven that their products produce statistically better outcomes, then they can call it medicine and sell it on the market.

<comment><USER51> >Homeopathy works by taking a chemical and diluting it, generally to the point where it practically doesn't exist.

Certainly I could be wrong it's just that "process" sounds a lot like immunotherapy for allergies. I am not trying to lump homeopathy and immunotherapy in the same boat by any means, but looking beyond the differences in the two I think it is possible to be more open minded than labeling the _like cures like_ doctrine pseudo science.

>This isn't picking winners and losers, it's consumer protection that's required for a free market to be fair to consumers.

Like I said I don't disagree with the labeling, but that doesn't mean there aren't winners and losers being picked. Sure its fair for consumers to know homeopathy treatments haven't been tested (not unlike supplements require FDA warnings), but they are still losers while others are winners and escape fair disclosures to consumers (e.g. my example of no GMO labeling).

<comment><USER53> > Certainly I could be wrong it's just that "process" sounds a lot like > immunotherapy for allergies. I am not trying to lump homeopathy and > immunotherapy in the same boat by any means, but looking beyond the > differences in the two I think it is possible to be more open minded than > labeling the like cures like doctrine pseudo science.

They do sound similar!

The items you cite work on the principle of training the immune system to react to known pathogens in ways that allow an effective immunoresponse later. Homeopathy works by diluting some compound to the point where you _might_ have one molecule of it in a homeopathic dose and positing that this is a cure.

The former isn't "like cures like". It's more like an educational process, based on an understanding of how immune systems work. The latter isn't really "like cures like" either, because one molecule of anything in a teaspoon of water isn't enough to matter to anything or anyone.

You're absolutely right. The processes do sound similar! They're just very different in very important ways well past how similar they may superficially sound.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Homeopathy does work. Its mechanism is not understood, but it works. It may not cure cancer, but it does work for less severe illnesses. Its working is not placebo effect. People say it works by placebo effect, but without proof, most probably just a guess. So the US gov order is wrong.

<comment><USER55> Any evidence to back this claim up? From what I can tell the answer is no...

[http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6860/has-most- pe...](http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6860/has-most-peer- reviewed-research-on-homeopathy-given-positive-results)

<comment><USER54> In modern medicine, the treatment is for disease; in homeopathy the treatment is for symptoms and conditions. That means one drug treats one disease cannot be basis of the trial. so they may not have been compared well in the previous studies. Double blinded study also will be difficult because the practitioner has to see the patient. So when considering studies, have to consider these. The mode of action explained by homeopaths may be wrong, so could say it is unscientific. This story is on the results and measuring it and results can be measured scientifically.

If it is placebo effect, it will not be effective for multiple times at multiple times in same person, could say there is personal bias. There are many conditions like cold, migraine which have no definite treatment in modern mainstream medicine, so there is no harm in experimenting homeopathy when having these conditions. I believe it is better to get a diagnosis from regular doctor first and then use homeopathy.

<comment><USER56> So, curiously, no scientific test is adequate for homeopathy. How convenient.

But reality is that it doesn't work, it is just a big fraud

When you have any actual proof and no the same "Belieeeve!!!" call us</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The role of mastodon.social in the Mastodon ecosystem - <AUTHOR> https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/03/the-role-of-mastodon.social-in-the-mastodon-ecosystem/ <comment><USER2> I don't really get it, why do more people join when this specific server is open? Is it because it is a general purpose server? If so then encouraging those kinds of servers would be a good strategy.

<comment><USER3> It's the "now I have to do _two_ things?" obstacle. When the goal is "join Mastodon" and "here's Mastodon" leads you to a common, busy instance with open joining that's a fast path without a lot of extra friction. The "this one is closed, here's a link to a searchable list of lots of Mastodon instances options" instead adds a lot of new steps and cognitive analysis paralysis friction that many people would rather not do.

One of the best techniques I've seen for bringing people to Mastodon is the opposite technique to general purpose servers, such as the approach that is that used by instances like friend.camp and idlethumbs.social where a lot of the users were directly invited by the instance admins (because they were friends in RL, or on other social media) with basically "here's your account, welcome, ask me if you need anything" (or similar). That reduces friction to the bare minimum. It scales appropriately in the decentralized way Mastodon was meant to (as lots of small instances), and that sort of "high touch" of "I'm your friendly neighborhood admin" is the sort of "human scale" that Mastodon can sell a lot better than other social media, when done right, helping differentiate from first impressions why Mastodon isn't just "nerd Twitter".</comment></comment>


Form letter template for open source abandonware - <AUTHOR> http://raganwald.posterous.com/form-letter-template-for-open-source-abandonw

<comment><USER2> Brrr, I would be terrified if something like this happened to any of the open source software I regularly use; and I even tried to get some 'pet issues' into them, which weren't honored, so I had to carry along private patches which I had to apply after every update, but at least I didn't 'bitch' about it.

Doesn't this happen all the time?

<comment><USER3> I did an opensource project that ran on the desktop (Windows, Linux and Mac) that talked to cell phones over a USB cable. This meant that approximately 100% of users did not code. There was a constant stream of abuse (all Windows users, correlation is not causation). It was a great relief when I left the project. I actually had the new project leader remove all my details from the project information so that I wouldn't be contacted any more!</comment></comment>


Show HN: Noteb.com – Find your perfect laptop - <AUTHOR> https://noteb.com <comment><AUTHOR> After years of hard work, it is finally done! Noteb.com is a search engine and online database that can help you find your perfect notebook. Thanks for sharing it. I will be watching this thread for comments and feedback.

</comment><comment><USER2> This is unbelievable for any notebook lover! Thank you so much!</comment>


Swirrl: Newly Launched Semantic Web Wiki - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/swirrl_semantic_web_wiki.php

<comment><USER2> I tried this out for a few minutes but gave up on it when I was unable to find any way to export the data.</comment>


Manuscript MS408 (Voynich) has been deciphered - <AUTHOR> This was in an email to the Society of American Archivists today (I can't find a publicly linkable version):
Some of you may be interested to know that Manuscript MS408 (Voynich) has been deciphered. A peer-reviewed article will be formally published in 2019. In the meantime, three pre-print papers are available to freely download from the linguistics website LingBuzz:
The first paper explains the writing system and language: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003737
The second paper translates a pictorial map from the manuscript: ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003808
The thirds paper focuses on volcanic details from the map: ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004381
Please disseminate this information to other scholars who may find it interesting and useful. Regards, Dr. Gerard Cheshire. University of Bristol. <comment><USER2> Very interesting. Thanks for sharing.

So, it wasn't aliens?</comment>


Books (and pasta machines) as monitor stands. XSLT, really? - <AUTHOR> http://monitorstands.tumblr.com

<comment><USER2> Getting an appropriate screen was not an option, I assume?

</comment><comment><USER3> what is wrong with xslt ?</comment>


19.20.21. - <AUTHOR> http://192021.org/ <comment><USER2> This thing suggests there's an unpleasant space halfway between a web site and a movie. It's not random access enough to be a good site, but not engaging enough to be a good movie.</comment>


MacOS Sierra Tidbits: Apple File System, RAID Support, and More - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2016/06/14/macos-sierra-tidbits/ <comment><AUTHOR> "Apple has removed the Gatekeeper option to allow apps to be downloaded from "anywhere" by default in System Preferences > Security & Privacy, resulting in a warning dialog when you attempt to open an app from an unidentified developer. "Mac App Store" and "Mac App Store and identified developers" remain selectable."

This is not good.</comment>


Chickenpox Outbreak Hits N.C. Private School with Low Vaccination Rates - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2018/11/20/669644191/chickenpox-outbreak-hits-n-c-private-school-with-low-vaccination-rates <comment><USER2> My niece attended this school several years ago.

It's the typical Asheville trustafarian culture of naturalistic fallacy gone mad.

While the as antivaccers are morons, chicken pox is a pretty benign illness to make a big deal about.

<comment><USER3> Chicken pox can be a rather serious illness. It can be mild--or, it can damage eyesight, put a pregnancy at risk, or merely cause very substantial misery.

<comment><USER4> The way of dealing with chickpox differs between (western) nations. In my country we don't vaccinate against chickenpox broadly, only some risk groups. We do vaccinate broadly for other illnessess, and the public mind is nudging towards denying child care for anti-vaxxers. I think a main driver for the non-vaccination of varicella is that the risk for children is small when compared to the risk to adults. Vaccination gives about a 90% protection after 14 years, probably decreasing over time. So we could replace the near 100% incidence of varicella in children with several vaccinations over a lifetime, but chose for natural protection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was surprised to find out there is a mandatory vaccine for chickenpox now (at least in Ontario). It is mandatory for all children born after 2010. When I was a kid there wasn't, in fact you would intentionally expose your child to it so they wouldn't catch it in adulthood.</comment>


The Choices Are Fake and the Truth Is All Made Up - <AUTHOR> http://danshipper.com/the-choices-are-fake-and-the-truth-is-all-made-up <comment><USER2> Hey Dan, at risk of being targeted in your next post, I'm going to give you some advice about private sector success:

 _Make things that people want to buy._

Really, that's about it. In the private sector you will either be doing this or working for someone that does it. And when it comes to innovation, it's wierd when you think about it: humans have lived thousands of years without [whatever it is you invented]. So why would they want it? The thing is humans are curious creatures, always interested in new things, so it's always possible to get them to try new things. (It's not always about innovation though, sometimes it's about being more efficient and winning on price.)

(Also contained within this directive is the (sad) fact that you can spend quite a lot of time focused on the 'want' side, manipulating people into wanting to buy something.)

The innovation route is a daunting task. There is already so much good stuff out there, created by people no less intelligent or diligent than yourself. But that innate human restless, curious quality will always favor the underdog, so why not make _new_ things that people want?

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it! Good luck, Dan!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comment. Not 100% sure how it related to the post but I agree. It reminds of a Dalio quote from Principles"

"Self-interest and society's interests are generally symbiotic: more than anything else, it is pursuit of selfinterest that motivates people to push themselves to do the difficult things that benefit them and that contribute to society. In return, society rewards those who give it what it wants. That is why how much money people have earned is a rough measure of how much they gave society what it wanted—NOT how much they desired to make money"

Innovation for its own sake is dumb. Don't build a house with 8 doors instead of 8 windows just because you can.

<comment><USER2> _> Not 100% sure how it related to the post_

It's related only in the sense that your post implied that you're filtering out the advice you've been given. And I wanted to add this in because I think its the most important thing, and easy to lose sight of.

One more thing, before I forget: another useful thing to do is to contrast "make things that people want to buy" with some common alternatives: "make cool things" or "make something the way it _should_ be made" or even "think about how to make things". These are all easy traps to fall into.

In many ways, I feel like "make things people want to buy" is the economic equivalent of the Buddhist prescription to end suffering, "Eradicate craving and aversion." Simple enough sounding, but it has far-reaching repercussions and quite a lot of fruit for thought.

I'll look up Dalio - although strictly speaking he is wrong. There are plenty of ways to make money without making what people want. For example, any kind of passive income. You would have to stretch the definition of "thing" beyond breaking to let it describe "capital". Passive income is at best a kind of 'second-order' "making things" fraught with every kind of moral hazard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I always like to keep in mind that while Zuck may have been in college when he came up with Facebook, Bardeen and Brattain were 39 and 45 when they invented the transistor (respectively), Tim Breners-Lee was 35 when he invented the World Wide Web, Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce were both around 40 when they founded Intel, etc, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did not know that about Tim Berners-Lee. Thanks for commenting!

<comment><USER4> That's the fallacy of the startups at work: just because advances in technology allowed 20-somethings to invent/build something with world-changing effects, it doesn't mean that the older people stopped inventing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One thing you should avoid is advice from people who have an interest in exploiting your ability. I wasted time listening to them. Especially avoid advice from your elders. Now that I am joining their ranks, I have to say that I am profoundly unimpressed, and I certainly would not allow myself to be influenced by the overwhelming majority of them. If you are going to act on advice from someone, wait until after they are dead. There is plenty of advice from the disinterested dead to choose from.

<comment><USER6> This is amazing advice, but you clearly aren't dead yet.

<comment><USER5> You should wait until after I am dead to follow it, of course. If I were to write a commencement speech, it would begin that way.

<comment><USER7> I initially read that as "If I were to _give_ a commencement speech..", which would probably make said speech quite a newsworthy event, despite being a very short speech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Couldn't get this alternate title out of my head as I read the article:

"Welcome to Startups, where the truth is made up and the choices don't matter"

<comment><AUTHOR> Probably better :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> _[T]he total agony of loving two things can help you be better at both. The choice between one or the other is fake._

This is brilliant, and I think that combining strengths in this way is going to be the key to success in the new economy. There can't be very many people in the world who are the best at doing X when there are only O(N) possible X's, but when you go for being one of the best at combining X and Y, now you have O(N^2) choices.

</comment><comment><USER10> An interesting take on things Dan, however I think the tendency for writers and VCs to focus on youngsters is their desire to find enormously outsized returns; specifically, those in the league of Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Google and Amazon.

Take, for example, this list of companies worth more than 1 Billion dollars:

[http://blog.minming.net/post/35553963889/a-billion-dollar- so...](http://blog.minming.net/post/35553963889/a-billion-dollar-software- tech-company-is-founded-every)

You will immediately notice that most of the companies valued over $1Bn are valued at or around the $1Bn dollar mark. Contrast this with companies like Facebook and Google which are tens or hundreds of times larger than this.

The key is - the companies that have such a huge risk involved that they can only be tackled by young founders are the ones most likely to produce an outsized return. While most investors won't complain about a $1Bn exit, they would froth at the mouth at the thought of a $100Bn one.

That said, most entrepreneurs would be satisfied with a $10M exit, let alone a $1Bn one. With this in mind, no age can truly be considered 'over the hill'.

</comment><comment><USER11> Well if you are in your 20s and don't have a lot of experience, you might want to hire some consultants with experience to guide you. If you have venture capitalists you want to listen to their advice as well. Don't make an excuse that you are young and don't have experience and the opportunity cost is it eats up your younger days. You can't be a Lone Ranger, you need to be developing a team, a diverse team of people with different backgrounds and different skill sets. Don't limit yourself to just people in their 20s by the way.

I spent my 20s and 30s writing software for companies, inventing new things, and having managers taking credit for everything I did. I expected pay raises and promotions, but those went to the people in the managers' social kliqs who had people skills (bullsh*tting, backstabbing, drinking at happy hour with the rest, gossiping, schmozing around the office instead of working, watering office plants, making coffee, etc.) instead of technical skills (developing code, coming up with new ideas for inventions and software, writing documentation, debugging, knowing how a computer works, knowing how to do research analysis and design, quality control, keeping up with trends via Hacker News and other sites) and my problem was that I was too good at the technical skills and I had to go. So I was 'used' to get to 'goals' and once those goals were reached I'd be fired and then find work at another company where it started all over again. Until the stress of it all made me too sick to work and I ended up on disability. (Programmers are a dime a dozen these days, we get 500 resumes a week for your position and we can hire a programmer for a fraction of your salary that won't get sick on the job!)

I guess I should have developed some 'people skills'?

Anyway now that I am in my 40's even if I was well enough to work, nobody would hire me, I'm too old. I have dual degrees in computer science and business management, but it just don't matter anymore.

The second myth, yes you need to focus on more than the business. My mistake was not focusing on my emotional, physical, and mental health and I got really sick doing my "balls to the wall" software development and focusing 100% of my energy into my job. Always keep a backup career as well in case software development or whatever doesn't work out. Find something you love to do and turn it into a hobby, that you might be able to turn into a business. Or else if you don't love it you might hate it and it makes you sick anyway.

</comment><comment><USER12> Glad to see you haven't bought into the hype and bullshit from the media over young whiz kids eating sleeping and breathing code around the clock in order to become successful. Kudos.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Although to be honest I have been guilty of that. It's just a matter of finding balance as cliche as that sounds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> As a college junior myself, I am tired of the perpetuation of the unrealistic (and false) idea that if you don't start a company right out of school, you're doomed to failure. Thank you, Dan, for being the voice of reason.

</comment><comment><USER14> Choose something, immerse yourself in it, and course correct as you go. The dichotomies are false, but you do have to choose something.

</comment><comment><USER15> > But the problem with being in your early twenties is that in general you > have very little idea of what the fuck is going on. Trust me, I'm 21.

funny, but it really made me stop reading any further... in these information overdose ADHD-ed times you shouldn't joke with things that can make readers subconsciously mark what you're writing as "not informative enough" and instantly switch to another thread :)

</comment><comment><USER16> Success is mostly luck.

</comment><comment><USER17> I like this post even if for no other reason it doesn't imply that I'm living life wrong if I don't want a family and kids.

<comment><AUTHOR> I love when people apply what I have to say to situations to things I've never thought about. Good luck out there :)</comment></comment>


Tell HN: I created a Greasemonkey script for highlighting relevant articles - <AUTHOR>

I frequently browse HN while at work, and a long time ago I made a Greasemonkey script that visually highlighted items that were relevant to my pre-defined tags. This allowed me to quickly scan through news items and find those most important to my interests.
Someone suggested I make it a bit more user friendly and release it to the public so they too can enjoy it.
The tags are very generic at first, but are easily changed from the new "tagging" menu item added to the page. Personally, my tags include "jQuery,JavaScript,library,redesign,design" and more.
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/65211 <comment><USER2> How does it work? How does the tool know which articles are relevant to certain tag?

<comment><USER3> if(this.innerHTML.toLowerCase().indexOf(tags[i].toLowerCase()) > -1) {

I think 'keywords' is more appropriate than tags.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's very basic but it gets the job done. I have difficulty browsing HN without it these days.</comment></comment></comment>


Bullshit hunting: Digital (and digitalization) - <AUTHOR> https://no-kill-switch.ghost.io/bullshit-hunting-digital-and-digitalization/ <comment><USER2> > TL;DR - the word "digital" became a real catch-all in 2016

No, it really didn't. The author might have found it in a few announcements and marketing blurb but it was in no way prevalent (and in no way did it peaked in 2016).</comment>