Kolmogorov Complexity and Our Search for Meaning - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/63/horizons/kolmogorov-complexity-and-our-search-for-meaning <comment><USER3> While what the author says is true (and I'm sure he knows vastly more about the subject than I do), I think the way that Kolmogorov complexity is described in the article is a bit misleading to a general audience. For short strings, we often can and _do_ compute the Kolmogorov complexity. See some of Hector Zenil's work, e.g. "Calculating Kolmogorov Complexity from the Output Frequency Distributions of Small Turing Machines" ([https://arxiv.org/abs/1211.1302](https://arxiv.org/abs/1211.1302)).

What "uncomputable" means is that for the _general_ case, there cannot exist a program that is guaranteed to find the Kolmogorov complexity of a given input string. This is because as we enumerate through all Turing machines from smallest to largest, some will not halt, but we can't know if this is because the program is just running for a very long time or if it is actually going to run forever. In specific cases for short strings, we can often analytically determine whether the program will halt or not. This is also why we know the first few values of the Busy Beaver function, even though it is also uncomputable.

<comment><USER4> Well, obviously, the shortest program that outputs "0" is "0". And the shortest program that outputs "1" is "1". We're only interested in the general case, not specific cases.

Sometimes I think this distinction between "general" and "specific" is as deep as the whole idea of uncomputability. When someone says "arbitrary Turing machine" it is very difficult for a layman to wrap their head around what this means. No wonder: I'm using the word "arbitrary", which means "random", which means... uncomputable.

<comment><USER5> > the shortest program that outputs "0" is "0".

Im tempted to debate this... in any programming language you need to use some space to differentiate a literal from code to be executed. So, according to Kolmogorov complexity, wouldn't the shortest program to print a random number (or 0) be larger than that number?

<comment><USER6> No, you can conceive a language which echos everything unless it is prefixed with an operator indicator.

<comment><USER5> But you still seem to be in agreement that the implementation of the language has a neccesary overhead... printing the operator that indicates code would require another escape sequence, and the overhead of the operator to identify code would mean that some compressible strings dont benefit from compression.

<comment><USER7> Well of course -- any machine/language is a map from inputs (programs) to outputs, and the pigeon hole principle enforces that if some strings are shortened, others must be lengthened.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "From the earliest days of information theory it has been appreciated that information per se is not a good measure of message value. For example, a typical sequence of coin tosses has high information content but little value; an ephemeris, giving the positions of the moon and planets every day for a hundred years, has no more information than the equations of motion and initial conditions from which it was calculated, but saves its owner the effort of recalculating these positions. The value of a message thus appears to reside not in its information (its absolutely unpredictable parts), nor in its obvious redundancy (verbatim repetitions, unequal digit frequencies), but rather in what might be called its buried redundancy--parts predictable only with difficulty, things the receiver could in principle have figured out without being told, but only at considerable cost in money, time, or computation. In other words, the value of a message is the amount of mathematical or other work plausibly done by its originator, which its receiver is saved from having to repeat."

—Bennett, Charles H. "Logical depth and physical complexity." _The Universal Turing Machine: A Half-Century Survey_.

<comment><USER9> Is there a mathematical theory trying to quantify this value?

<comment><USER10> You might find relative entropy, aka information gain, aka Kullback-Liebler divergence interesting: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kullback–Leibler_divergence](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kullback–Leibler_divergence)

Also this treatment of K-L divergence as a measure of "Bayesian surprise": [http://ilab.usc.edu/surprise/](http://ilab.usc.edu/surprise/)

That's all based on Shannon entropy (probabilistic), not Kolmogorov complexity (algorithmic), but there are a lot of connections between them. This paper is a pretty thorough summary: [https://homepages.cwi.nl/~paulv/papers/info.pdf](https://homepages.cwi.nl/~paulv/papers/info.pdf)

And here's a paper defining algorithmic relative complexity by analogy to relative entropy: [http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/13/4/902/pdf- vor](http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/13/4/902/pdf-vor)

"We define the cross-complexity of an object x with respect to another object y as the amount of computational resources needed to specify x in terms of y, and the complexity of x related to y as the compression power which is lost when adopting such a description for x, compared to the shortest representation of x"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Good article. I find this to be one of those rarer cases where a popular article on mathematics is both precise enough to be informative and accessible enough to maintain the audience.

The only part I dislike is the title. But perhaps that was the editors. I do commend the author though on managing to write this part:

"The fact that Kolmogorov complexity is not computable is a result in pure mathematics and we should never confuse that pristine realm with the far more complicated, and messy, real world. However, there are certain common themes about Kolmogorov complexity theory that we might take with us when thinking about the real world."

I am not well versed in any of Kolmogorov's work, but the introduction certainly makes the spirit of his work much clearer.

</comment><comment><USER12> My webpage [http://tromp.github.io/cl/cl.html](http://tromp.github.io/cl/cl.html) demonstrates a concrete shortest program for the characteristic sequence of prime numbers in a minimal language (if someone can find a shorter program in the same language, I'd be happy to pay a $50 reward).

</comment><comment><USER13> First a small question:

"While a computer might find some pattern in a string, it cannot find the best pattern."

Isn't this wrong? The computer might have found the best pattern, we just cannot know that it really is the best pattern. The two ideas seem close but not quite the same thing, and I think Kolmogorov complexity and its proof is about the latter, not the former.

Anyway, I think the idea of Kolmogorov complexity is absolutely fascinating, and seems highly applicable to a wide variety of human cognitive/information processing. For example, scientific theories appear to be algorithms that "compress" our observations of the real world, and when our theories get better, the compression gets better.

Or music. I think everyone knows the phenomenon that relative novices find certain avant-garde styles to be "just noise", whereas experts find that beautiful and the simpler music boring. Well, if you don't have the "decoding algorithm" yet, the more complex piece really _is_ noise, whereas if you have the more complex decoder, you can decode that piece and see the beauty in it (which appears to be connected to skirting close to the maximum information density you can find).

And so on.

<comment><USER4> Seems like a problem for philosophy of language... When we say "it cannot find the best pattern", what does this mean?

1\. We assume "the best pattern" _exists_.

But what do we mean here by "exists"? If something is uncomputable does it exist? In what sense?

<comment><USER14> The Gödel sentence is uncomputable but is commonly held to be true. A non- constructivst would probably be more inclined to say that something which is uncomputable can exist. But it is not obvious (to me). Noteworthy is that Per Martin-Löf who is also credited for the accepted definition of algorithmic randomness for infinite sequences, based on Kolmogorov complexity, developed inuitionistic type theory, a framework for the foundation of mathematics in the constructivist school.

<comment><USER11> What is Martin-Löf's definition of algorithmic randomness (for infinite sequences)?

<comment><USER14> I'm not competent enough to attempt my own explanation. The Wikipedia articles are good: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmically_random_sequenc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmically_random_sequence)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> >> While a computer might find some pattern in a string, it cannot find the best pattern. We might find some short program that outputs a certain pattern, but there could exist an even shorter program. We will never know.

If more programmers -especially functional programmers- were aware of this limitation, we would have avoided countless flamewars about whose language is best- where "the best language" is the one where someone has written a program to perform some task, that is shorter than some other program to perform the same task in another language sometimes written by another programmer (but often, the same one).

<comment><USER16> Well then I have to ask the opposite question. Can a language be made to maximize the difficulty of all possible tasks?

<comment><USER17> If public key cryptography turns out to be mathematically sound (as crazy as it may seem the functioning of basically our whole tech infrastructure is based on mathematical conjecture), then we can use that to "preprocess" source files before sending them to say a C++ compiler. The result should be turing complete and basically impossible to program.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > _Let us look at the above three strings. The first two strings can be > described by relatively short computer programs:_

> _1\. Print "100" 30 times._

> _2\. Print the first 25 prime numbers._

> _The Kolmogorov complexity of the first string is less than the Kolmogorov > complexity of the second string because the first program is shorter than > the second program._

The second also abstracts away the concept of prime numbers. All of which have their own Kolmogorov complexity, no? Is there such a thing as talking about local and externalized Kolmogorov complexity? Actually, both assume understanding of multiplication, decimal notation, printing.

<comment><USER5> Its a good point, but you wouldn't have to extend the length of the string very much to be able to save space by including a prime number checker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This may sound silly, but does any aspect of this take into account which language is used to print the string? Suppose there's a language where a single dot "." is the command to print out some particular string. Then that string's complexity _in that language_ is the shortest possible, and so forth. I guess that language's implementation would somehow have to contain a representation of the string, but that just begs the question of what meta- language the language is implemented in.

<comment><USER20> You need to choose a language and use it as the basis to define your Kolmogorov complexity for _all strings_.

Otherwise, as you said, the definition of Kolmogorov complexity becomes pointless and vacuous - every string has "Kolmogorov complexity" equal to 1!

Once you have done this and your language is Turing complete, your language's program sizes can be transformed to other languages' and vice-versa by simply emulating languages in each other (which does not necessarily give you the shortest possible program, but just a bound for its size).

</comment></comment><comment> Ono-Sendai In my opinion Kolmogorov complexity is unfortunately limited (if not useless) for saying anything about fundamental complexity - <USER2>

Kolmogorov Complexity - it's a bit silly - [http://forwardscattering.org/post/7](http://forwardscattering.org/post/7) and More on Kolmogorov Complexity - [http://forwardscattering.org/post/14](http://forwardscattering.org/post/14)

</comment><comment><USER20> > Alas, no such computer can exist! As powerful as modern computers are, this > task cannot be accomplished. This is the content of one of the deepest > theorems in mathematical logic. Basically, the theorem says that the > Kolmogorov complexity of a string cannot be computed.

I disagree that this theorem is very deep. Even a CS-grad noob like me can easily understand several proofs of it.

<comment><USER21> _> I disagree that this theorem is very deep. Even a CS-grad noob like me can easily understand several proofs of it._

I guess this depends entirely on your definition of "deep", but many extremely important and far-reaching theorems (and corresponding proofs) in computer science and mathematics are not particularly difficult to understand for a CS graduate. Ideally you _should_ understand the proofs of various deep results.

If you already have an undergraduate degree in computer science, you will likely understand results like the CAP theorem or Noisy-Channel Coding theorem. If you don't already, you can probably get the idea in an hour or two of reading. With a little more effort you can more or less fully understand the proofs of various results in mathematics, like Bolzano-Weierstrass, Bayes, Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, etc. These are all very important results that dramatically changed the research landscape at the time they were discovered. The Pythagorean Theorem and proof (by infinite descent) of the irrationality of non-integral square roots are wildly important, but you should trivially learn those in elementary or middle school.

Basically, it's a little odd to assert a result is not deep simply because you can understand its proof. In fact, good students working through a textbook can often formulate their own proofs of important theorems before they read the author's if the book is structured especially well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I just learnt I independently "discovered" Kolmogorov complexity in my graduation thesis, while comparing the information content of a program and of its refactored version.

The only obstacle to attaining a Turing award is probably being 50 years late, and realizing it 10 more years later...

No buono!

</comment><comment><USER23> It's a nice article and while the example...

"The smallest number that cannot be described in less than 15 words"

...is stimulating, it is an example of a sentence that does not describe a number rather than a number whose description can not be found.</comment>


US proposes change to shower rules after Trump's hair-washing moan - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/12/us-shower-pressure-trump-hair-water <comment><USER2> Can confirm: "People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once,"

That doesn't help any.

Much worse though, and not mentioned, is that the high-pressure spray used in water-limited toilets has been proven to launch fecal matter up into the air. It's like the toilet coughs and sneezes. Lots of people keep toothbrushes in the bathroom, so those get contaminated.

The idea that "current rules saved consumers money by conserving water and fuel" is paternalistic nonsense. Nobody proposes to prohibit low-flow designs, even if they do soil toothbrushes and thus cause a public health problem. It will always be an option to install a low-flow device.

<comment><USER3> > Much worse though, and not mentioned, is that the high-pressure spray used > in water-limited toilets has been proven to launch fecal matter up into the > air.

Residential toilets have a lid to prevent that, and have since before water- restricted designs were common, because _all_ toilets do that (public restroom ones often don't have lids, but then they usually are in stalls well separated from anything else and no one sane keeps toothbrushes exposed in a public restroom.)

<comment><USER2> The really old toilets didn't cause spray. They simply filled the bowl to the top with water, then let the weight of the water do the work.

The somewhat old toilets didn't spray very much. It wasn't notable. It didn't create a fine mist.

On old toilets, the lid was only slightly more sensible than the doors to hide the screen of a 1950s TV set. The bowl could be unsightly, and something could fall in by accident. Leaving the lid up has always been fairly normal, and people still do it today.</comment></comment></comment>


Rails 5.0.0.beta1.1 released - <AUTHOR> http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2016/1/25/Rails-5-0-0-beta1-1-4-2-5-1-4-1-14-1-3-2-22-1-and-rails-html-sanitizer-1-0-3-have-been-released/ <comment><USER2> This is more than a simple upgrade for Rails 5, since it includes several high-priority security patches for Rails 5.0, 4.2, 4.1, 3.2.

Would be great if you can specify this in the title.</comment>


How startups can learn more while building less - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2012/11/17/youre-doing-it-wrong-7-tactics-lean-startups-need-to-build-better-products/

<comment><AUTHOR> I wrote this article because I've seen the many ways that user experience methods can contribute to lean startups. Launching is a good technique for learning. But I've seen many quicker, scrappier methods work great, though they're often overlooked.</comment>


Georgia Schools Inquiry Finds Signs of Cheating - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/education/12georgia.html <comment><AUTHOR> Found via [http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/02/detecting_chea...](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/02/detecting_cheat.html)</comment>


Unapologetic Reductionist - <AUTHOR> http://www.science20.com/culture_weapon/blog/quick_introduction_unapologetic_reductionist_whos_nonetheless_flexible_just_so_long_were_reducing

<comment><USER2> That post was rather long. A post in title alone would have sufficed.</comment>


CodeSpells – Craft Magical Spells Using Code [video] - <AUTHOR> http://codespells.org/

<comment><USER2> This is incredibly cool although I think it would be even better if there was some sort of objective to the game. Perhaps it's just me, but I would quickly lose interest. Then again, I feel the same way about Minecraft, and that's certainly caught on.

<comment><USER3> CodeSpells team member here! Our goal is to make the environment & gameplay as rich as possible with lots of different kinds of magic & ways to interact with the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Man do I wish I had something like this to play when I was in high school.

That quote at the beginning of the video is fascinating to me too. With all that is happening around wearable devices, the internet of things, etc., we're not too far away from a future of people gesturing and incanting various things and having their environment respond to them.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic (and of course the corollary).

Reminds me of a (somewhat cheesy but fun) fantasy book called The Wiz Biz[1] I read once.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/The-Wiz-Biz-Rick- Cook/dp/0671878468/re...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Wiz-Biz-Rick- Cook/dp/0671878468/ref=pd_sim_b_6?ie=UTF8&refRID=1W3HNY2A9P2WJNABX89R)

<comment><USER5> The idea that magic is a branch of maths (mixed with heavy doses of Lovecraftian horror and dour cold-war spy thrillers) is the basis for the splendid Laundry series of novels from Charlie Stross:

[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheLaundryS...](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheLaundrySeries)

<comment><USER6> I really liked the magic system of the Eragon trilogy, which was based on being able to say a phrase in some ancient language that didn't allow for lying. Ok, so that is more natural language, but if you take programming as more speaking in an artificial language than doing math (as I do), then its a more apt analogy.

<comment><USER5> I forget the name of the language that the Laundry uses to program its zombies^M^M^M^M^M^M^M "Residual Human Resources".

<comment><USER7> Enochian?

Also, I recall there being a reference to an Enochian Metagrammar at one point or another...

<comment><USER5> Thanks, that's the one:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enochian](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enochian)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This finally brought me from lurking HN to registering so I could post.

First of all, I just bought into the Kickstarter, go ThoughtSTEM!

I'm a coder and parent in the San Diego area and a scout den leader (2nd graders) and I've run into parents whose kids are in the ThoughtSTEM program and they all love it. ThoughtSTEM and Sarah Esper are VERY well thought of around here and have been actively branching into the community to offer more and more coding classes for kids.

I supported Robot Turtles as a gateway to programming and have a 7 and 5 year old who are now doing code.org. The 7 year old has also done Python turtle programming as well. Many of our cub scouts are on code.org and the technical parents have been very involved in furthering their STEM exposure and Codespells looks absolutely great! I'm going to email it around.

I was thinking of hitting up the ThoughtSTEM folks and seeing if I could arrange a whole class at our school next year. I know I could round up the people and computers, but now it sounds like they might be pretty busy for the next 18 months or so. I wish those folks at ThoughtSTEM the absolute best and encourage everyone to support them, parents around here consider themselves lucky if they can get their kids into the ThoughtSTEM classes!

I've also been aware of CodeSpells for a while and it is clearly a long-term passion for these folks.

</comment><comment><USER9> I just played the alpha I downloaded from their website and it was great, has the player crafting actual code. Not sure what happened between that version and what they have now.

I realise they're trying to lower the barrier-to-entry with the blocks and whatnot but I'd expect that if I bought my kid a game called CodeSpells they'd be writing code, so I'm not sure barrier-to-entry is really much of an issue in this case.

I wish they'd have kept at their original concept.

<comment><USER3> Actually, players WILL be able to choose between typing in actual code or using Blockly! Sorry, it's not clear in that video, but we did want to show that this is a low-barrier entry into coding. If students want to code more complicated spells than in the alpha version, typed code will be difficult. Through our research, we've found students are able to make incredibly complex code using Blockly though. We think students will be able to learn with Blockly until they become comfortable typing with all the syntax.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> While I love anything that encourages kids to learn basic computer science skills (since this is also my niche) this isn't the approach I would take, and I question whether such a simple "recipe" construction of primitive, limited algorithms will really provide any real skill development over what a child would learn from a chemistry or electronics set or even a cooking course.

Based on this, calling your game "CodeSpells" is a bit of a stretch. You've made your definition of "code" so vague that MineCraft may as well call itself CodeCraft and market itself as a computer science education tool.

Sorry to be harsh and I applaud the effort but where you're currently at is like saying "I'll teach people to drive and then they can become automotive engineers," which is, while somewhat true, obviously not going to be all that effective.

Now, "something" may be better than nothing but if you really want to have an impact you desperately need to broaden your concept. What you have isn't enough, from my perspective. That said, you obviously know the whole "teaching code" thing is trendy and maybe you might get something out of your Kickstarter. Best of luck with that.

<comment><USER6> This is not only harsh, but close minded. MineCraft and Legos provide tremendous values to kids in developing at least creativity, and often fire technical interests that drive kids to learn "real skills" later on in life. CodeSpells is just pushing that to the next level.

<comment><USER9> I'm not discounting that CodeSpells has a certain value, but many other things in this context do as well. If it really wants to succeed in its "vision" CodeSpells needs to become much more than what it is. Hope it does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Never forget Code Hero: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Hero](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Hero)

<comment><USER11> We never will. That Kickstarter was a huge disappointment for the coding education community. I hope we can prove ourselves to be more communicative & reliable than "Primer Labs". I think our team has more experience following through on projects...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'd like to see a mechanic whereby player level/experience dictated the amount of physical power players could add to their spells. Low level players could push rocks around, while super high level players with advanced spells could be capable of ripping apart planets (if they had the coding chops). That would be cool :)

<comment><USER3> Yes! We love this idea too! Leveling up will definitely be an aspect of gameplay! We're thinking players will have different "mana bars" for each kind of magic (earth, fire, water, air, life). Then, they can level up their different kinds of magic to become more powerful (more mana available).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is based on MIT's Scratch language, right? If so, I think using it as an embedded DSL is a really good idea.

<comment><USER3> Thank you!! We're using Blockly, which is essentially an open-source version of the Scratch language!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is it scripted in something like Unity3d/UDK or actually developed from scratch?

<comment><USER11> We're using the Unity game engine!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The code it teaches is java :(</comment>


Cloud Traffic - <AUTHOR> https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/08/09/Service-Fabric-News <comment><USER2> I do wonder what the equivalent review of AWS Lambda would look like from an equivalent writer but one versed in GCP and K8S, encountering Lambda and IAM for the first time.

I think one can easily make concerning arguments about all the things Lambda abstracts away and how concerning that is.

HAVING SAID THAT, the substantial fundamental difference between something like Lambda and something like K8S is the value proposition. Lambda works backwards from your business logic. How to go from 0 to "working production code" with the minimal amount of steps, yet will still scale essentially infinitely (so long as you are willing to tolerate the latency costs)

K8S seems to me like it instead works backwards from your infrastructure. How to go from one set of working infrastructure to another set of working infrastructure, but one optimized for solving problems that your organization doesn't have yet until you're at the point where you're looking to migrate your whole cloud strategy to another provider because Azure gave you a 2% higher discount than AWS did.

Meanwhile, by the time you've built your first working K8S-based architecture, your competitor with Lambda is already in production serving customers.

I know, I know, it's not Apples and oranges. But K8S and Lambda are of the same "generation", both launching in 2014. Lambda was AWS's big bet of "Here is the amazing value you can get if you go all-in on AWS-native development", K8S was GCP's equivalent "Here's how you can design your cloud infra to be portable if you explicitly DON'T want to go all-in one cloud provider."

So while they offer almost diametrically opposite solutions (philosophically), they are pursuing the same developers to convince them of the mind share.

Me, I'll take the one that actually cares about getting me to production with working business logic code.

<comment><USER3> It's odd to see this because Google App Engine is (was) not that hard and launched in 2008. I'm no longer doing that kind of work, but it seemed pretty good for people who want to keep it simple?

I wonder Tim Bray would be better off kicking the tires on Firebase.

<comment><USER4> > Google App Engine is (was) not that hard

It's incredible hard to use GAE in the same fashion as the LAMP or whatever web framework stack at its time.

GAE is a primary example of overly confident technologists anticipating the next trend:

They anticipate things happening too far in the future.

Of course, GAE represent the eventual next step for application development. At the time, for anyone inside Google, that's obvious.

And what happened was that neither Google itself, nor the industry embraced that model in the time frame that allows GAE to be relevant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love this quote:

> I worry a little bit about hiding the places where the networking happens, > just like I worry about ORM hiding the SQL. Because you can't ignore either > networking or SQL.

The irony (or not irony, who even knows?), though, is that I always worried a little bit about EBS for similar reasons. It's gotten really, really good but it was a terrifying abstraction back in the day.

<comment><USER6> > it was a terrifying abstraction back in the day.

How come? NAS, SAN, iSCSI, etc. existed and were commonly used way before AWS or EBS. And EBS really is a dynamically routed network share in the end.

<comment><USER7> You get a _lot_ more visibility and control with iSCSI, ATA over eth, infiniband, etc. The downside is you need to use and understand that visibility and control. EBS is surfaced to you as a simple locally attached block dev. The network performance and challenges are not just managed for you, they're largely opaque. As the user you can't observe the (equivalent to) fiber channel topology, SCSI commands, discarded frames, etc. and that's the power of EBS as well, users don't have to deal with anything besides a locally attached virtual disk.

<comment><USER8> So much this.

There's also the part where EBS SLA and durability might surprise you, like the great "internet disappeared" around 10 years ago.

<comment><USER7> The last point is a good one around absolute vs subjective experience.

If you're looking at 1M disks 99.999% availability is great. But if your entire company runs on 10 instances your day will be utterly ruined when any one of those root volumes goes away.

To that sad admin it feels like they're sold 1/100,000 and got 1/10\. And their impact is closer to "business critically failing" than "active automated remediation workflow incremented."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > for that, synchronous APIs quite likely aren't what you want, event-driven > and message-based asynchronous infrastructure would come into play. Which of > course what I spent a lot of time working on recently. I wonder how that > fits into the K8s/service-fabric landscape?

Unfortunately, unlike Envoy and networking, the story for Kubernetes event- driven architecture is not yet as stable. Generally it's roll-your-own for reliability. Eventually Knative Eventing will serve that purpose, but it hasn't hit 1.0[1] or anything more stable than that... the CRDs recently made it to beta, though and an initial go at error handling was added relatively recently (mid-to-late last year)[2]

1\. [https://github.com/knative/eventing/releases](https://github.com/knative/eventing/releases)

2\. [https://github.com/knative/eventing/tree/master/docs/deliver...](https://github.com/knative/eventing/tree/master/docs/delivery)

<comment><USER10> There is Keda [1] which seems to fly under the radar but works well and seems to be a great addition to the Kubernetes landscape

1\. [https://github.com/kedacore/keda](https://github.com/kedacore/keda)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> We "use" traffic director at work. We thought we'd be able to use it for service discovery across our mesh, but it does way more than that in problematic ways that leak internal google abstractions :<

I asked one thing of the product team (roughly), "we like the bits where it tells envoy the nodes that are running the service, and what zones they are in. we don't like all the other weighting things you try and do to act like the google load balancer."

More in-depth we we've had traffic director direct traffic to instances within a specific zone by weighing that zone higher before instances in that zone would even start up, causing service degradation.

We considered writing our own XDS proxy which would run as a sidecar to envoy, connecting to traffic director and stripping all the weights.

After some back and forth with the TD team, we came up with a solution to instead fool it into not weighing things by setting the target CPU utilization of our backends to 1%...

</comment><comment><USER12> _One thing made me gasp then laugh. Kelsey said "for the next step, you just have to put this in your Go imports, you don't have to use it or anything:_

        _ "google.golang.org/xds"

_I was all "WTF how can that do anything?" but then a few minutes later he started wiring endpoint URIs into config files that began with xdi: and oh, of course. Still, is there, a bit of a code smell happening or is that just me?_

It's not a code smell; it's idiomatic Go; the search he wants is [import for side effects].

<comment><USER13> To be fair, you can write a lot of idiomatic code without ever using packages that use `init()` [0].

(The most common usage is importing database drivers).

I've written Go for a while, and it still feels a bit exotic, compared to its other control flow patterns.

Maybe "code smell" was the wrong word. But writing "surprising" logic in an `init()` function would definitely not be considered idiomatic.

[0]: [https://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#init](https://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#init)

<comment><USER12> I guess I'd just say, when a Go programmer sees an "import _" in the README.md for a library in Github, they generally know exactly what's happening; "oh, you import this for side effects".

<comment><USER13> Yea that's fair.

It's admittedly a more exotic than the traditional alternative: importing a module, initializing some struct, passing it to some other module's struct- initialization.

Of course, now that I write it all out, and I imagine that I'd need to write all that _just_ to give my gRPC service a load balancer... ok, I can accept the fancy hand-waves, give me the underscore import! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > There seemed to be an implicit claim that client-side load balancing is a > win, but I couldn't quite parse the argument.

Having 1 hop for load balancing (usually on a server that most likely isn't on the same rack as your application) is worse than 0 hop for load balancing in your localhost. No Single point of failure and much lower chances of domino effect if a configuration goes awry.

> When would you choose this approach to wiring services together, as opposed > to consciously building more or less everything as a service with an > endpoint, in the AWS style?

I do not understand this. What's "wiring services together" vs "service with an endpoint"? They both are one and the same thing in context of gateway vs service mesh. Maybe you should read this - [https://blog.christianposta.com/microservices/api- gateways-a...](https://blog.christianposta.com/microservices/api-gateways-are- going-through-an-identity-crisis/)

> but as with most K8s demos, assumes that you've everything up and running > and configured

Because that is what the whole "Cloud" thing is about. You don't pull out an RJ45 everytime you need to connect your server to your router, you just assume your cloud provider did it for you. You don't compile your own Kernel & OS to run your services, you just use a Linux Distro and get over it. Kubernetes is supposed to be a cloud offering, you are not supposed to configure and run it.

> One thing made me gasp then laugh. Kelsey said "for the next step, you just > have to put this in your Go imports, you don't have to use it or anything... > I was all "WTF how can that do anything?" but then a few minutes later he > started wiring endpoint URIs into config files that began with xdi: and oh, > of course. Still, is there, a bit of a code smell happening or is that just > me?

Because you weren't paying attention to the Speaker. He clearly mentions the drawbacks to sidecar as proxy model - additional latency (although the latency is much lower than that of a single Gateway architecture, but even 1ms could be disastrous for some applications). To cater to this high performance crowd they have envoy as an application library model, which is of course more difficult to adapt, but worth it when the added latency drops to nano seconds.

</comment><comment><USER15> The galaxy levels of architecture bloat implied here for a simple shopping cart app make me deeply uneasy. How much of this complexity is necessary?

<comment><USER16> It buys you stuff. Whether it is necessary depends on whether you need that stuff and how much you are willing to pay for it.

By stuff I mean things like support for migrating a multi-thousand VM component between multiple cloud providers (and possibly your own infrastructure) while maintaining service levels across geographical regions and not having to make your other services aware of the migration.

Or maybe routing that takes into account the current state of the rollout of a possibly-breaking upgrade of the backend VMs.

Want to go from "treat your VMs like cattle, not pets" into "treat your (micro-)services like cattle, not pets"? Then _maybe_ this stuff is necessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > It's impressive, but as with most K8s demos, assumes that you've everything > up and running and configured because if you didn't it'd take a galaxy-brain > expert like Kelsey a couple of hours (probably?) to pull that together and > someone like me who's mostly a K8s noob, who knows, but days probably.

> I dunno, I'm in a minority here but damn, is that stuff ever complicated. > The number of moving parts you have to have configured just right to get > "Hello world" happening is really super intimidating.

> But bear in mind it's perfectly possible that someone coming into AWS for > the first time would find the configuration work there equally scary.

I feel like I missed AWS and K8s... I've been on-metal for the last 6 years, and the 3 before that on virtual machines. My use limited to bucket storage (S3, GCP).

So this sounds like something I could experiment with: Take a simple and existing app and lift and shift a basic equivalent onto AWS, Azure and GCP in whatever is the most idiomatic way. Compare the learning curves and publish the code bases and config on github and see how much I missed (I just know IAM will be an issue due to the number of times I hear people complain about it).

<comment><USER14> It won't be so straightforward because each cloud vendor has multiple offerings catering to how much control you want over your compute. The easiest is Serverless (Cloud functions, lambda), then there is managed Kubernetes offerings (which will standardize your experience over all vendors and on-prem infra), third is opinionated PaaS (App Engine, Beanstalk, Heroku) and last one is empty VMs (Compute Engine, EC2) which is very similar to your current experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I loved this. Every time I try to work with Googles opensourced stuff it always feels so complicated to me.

<comment><USER19> >Every time I try to work with Googles opensourced stuff it always feels so complicated to me.

It is, but so is the problem space, as evidenced by AWS's own clusterfuck of services.

It kinda comes with the problem space they're trying to solve: how do you efficiently run a bunch of services on a bunch of computers? Virtualization solves one problem but you still have networking and service discovery to sort out.

If you're just running a personal blog, and toy projects, then k8s is really just more harm than help.

<comment><USER18> It is, but so is the problem space, as evidenced by AWS's own clusterfuck of services.

It kinda comes with the problem space they're trying to solve: how do you efficiently run a bunch of services on a bunch of computers? Virtualization solves one problem but you still have networking and service discovery to sort out.

Oh it absolutely is complicated. The way amazon does it seems to click better with my mental model for how all of this is supposed to work though. I'm really not sure if it's right or wrong or it just depends on how you model these problems.

<comment><USER20> What's your mental model for AWS services?

<comment><USER18> LEGO bricks basically. They kinda click together in my mind with a sorta super structure of IAM and VPCs

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why does he think GCP regions aren't the same as AWS regions?

<comment><USER22> It seems he means in terms of networking as in the prior comment: "I was particularly impressed by how you could set up "global" routing, which means load balancing against resources that run in multiple Google regions"

GCP has a global networking plane, so in a single GCP project you can have resources and networking configured together from every region/AZ around the world. In AWS (which I don't use so don't quote me, and please correct me) regions are very separate from each other. You would need to create separate accounts for resources in different regions and then configure the networking between them.

<comment><USER23> The big difference is AWS doesn't provide a GSLB (global server load balancing) service outside of Cloudfront. GCP on the other hand provides L7 GSLB.

You still need to create VPCs in each region and manage those but broadly speaking building a multi-region architecture with GCP is a lot better. Hell multi-zone is also easier in GCP because there are more regional primitives available.

<comment><USER24> Would [https://aws.amazon.com/global- accelerator/](https://aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/) be what you're talking about?

<comment><USER23> I haven't actually used this but this looks very similar to Google GSLB actually, in which case that is great news.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I love when cloud experts (Tim, Kelsey) look at other clouds and go "damn, is that stuff ever complicated". Makes regular devs like myself feel a little better.

</comment><comment><USER26> > Kelsey said "for the next step, you just have to put this in your Go > imports, you don't have to use it or anything:

        _ "google.golang.org/xds"

> I was all "WTF how can that do anything?

very suspect language design from golang</comment>


It's The Energy, Not The Time - <AUTHOR> http://carlsednaoui.com/post/29403783270/its-the-energy-not-the-time

<comment><USER2> If you ask a kid to clean his room, he will never do it because to him it takes too much energy, when it would only take 10 minutes. It is all in the eye of the beholder and it is up to you to let yourself perceive the "energy".

I agree with you, but can you elaborate more on the perception of "energy". Just my thoughts.</comment>


SpaceX set to fire Tesla Roadster into orbit - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/05/spacex-to-launch-elon-musks-tesla-roadster-into-space-on-falcon-heavy-rocket.html <comment><AUTHOR> Can't believe this wasn't supposed to go out April 1.</comment>


Web of trust for scientific peer review - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/gpeerreview/

<comment><USER2> This is a really interesting idea. A way of signaling quality of publications that is more useful than 'it made it through the committee at some conference/journal/etc' would be a major improvement for researchers.

The graph analysis is even more interesting - this is a way around the problem that publication decisions can be made based on reviews written by less-well- read grad students instead of the faculty one might prefer to hear from.

One question though - it seems like if this guy really wanted to sell the idea, he'd point us to at least one instance of it being used. All it'd take is asking someone to review an existing paper of his (or something). It'd be great to tinker with the review graph analysis, for example.

Why not even share a signed review of the project itself? I tried to generate one for this post, but it doesn't seem to work on OS X, so I filed a bug instead.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly; the graph analysis was most interesting to me. The current situation is well beyond overloaded, and open to frequent gaming.

One attractive possibility if this took off is that conferences/journals could become less important as publication venues, and blogs etc could have equal weight. A conference provides a forum for meeting people, but I feel that most of the time the value of any venue is perceived solely in terms of its reputation (and hence impact on CV), and as you point out this is no guarantee that your paper has actually been reviewed by someone knowledgeable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The project is an open-source command-line tool called gpeerreview. Great idea!</comment>


Meet Google's Secret Time Machine Investment - <AUTHOR> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20100503/meet-googles-secret-time-machine-investment/ <comment><USER2> Napkin summary: It searches the web for information on future events. Not magical but still interesting.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if there will come a day when financial investors can not do without this type of tool.

Ever since Google became big, I've always assumed that they must have the ability to beat the market ever day because they have access to queries, click trails, and web publications.

<comment><USER4> I'm sure that type of signal is valuable, but it takes a lot more than that to make money. It needs to be combined with a lot of other signal in order to come up with an estimate of alpha (idiosyncratic return). Then you need to understand how to remove market risk from your bets (what risk factors are you exposed to and what opposing positions do you need to take to minimize them). Some of the return will disappear in market impact (movement of the stock due to getting into and out of the position). The people who do this are expensive and apprenticeship is the only road to competence (the distance between theory and practice is vast). Finally, it's a distraction from Google's core business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's a really interesting use for searches. Seems decently well designed, too.

Given that you can search by day, week, month, etc within Google, and even see charts of hits, it'd make sense that they want to allow searches for future dates too. I'd imagine that, if they developed their own, they might be fighting a patent case really quickly. It's probably to cover their asses and get a jump-start at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER6> Google once did an April fools, in Australia. <http://www.google.com.au/intl/en/gday/index.html>

Perhaps they'll be able to implement it for real?

</comment><comment><USER7> So lastly posted on HN picture of time traveler was a guy from google...? :)

<comment><USER5> No, that's going to be posted next week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Google has so much money that I can believe in anything...

</comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if this is going to be a paid subscription service, or open? I can't decide which route would best relate to "Do No Evil"</comment>


The U.S. Civil Rights Movement as an Insurgency - <AUTHOR> http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/12/the_us_civil_ri.html <comment><USER2> I find this kind of high-level thinking about hierarchy and conflict in society to be pretty silly.

It's true that there's always some insight to be gained by bringing ideas from different times and places together, but in this case, the comparison is completely arbitrary. Conflict and oppression has been going on for all of human history, and in theory, all of that combined knowledge could be put to use in helping resolving present problems.

Why compare the Iraq war to the American civil rights movement when you could equally well bring up the French Revolution, the Tuareg Rebellion, or the War against Gallus?

<comment><USER3> because those are both traditional and obvious comparisons; this one is neither - not to mention it's good to discuss given the times

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This comparison doesn't seem particularly valid.

Insurgencies operate by leveraging small-scale, decentralized groups against a large, slow-moving beaurocracy. They succeed by operating faster than the beaurocracy (inside their OODA loops), leveraging the environment to their advantage and attacking critical points of failure. They're difficult to fight against because of their speed and the fact that they don't readily present targets to be attacked.

Granted, the Civil rights movement was largely grass-roots, but it's not clear to me why a comparison to an insurgency is apt.

</comment><comment><USER5> by this definition most elections could be classified as insurgencies as well

<comment><USER6> The founding fathers used the word 'revolution' rather than 'insurgency,' but yes, that's sort of the point. It's better to have a structured, nonviolent way of overturning the current social order, as the alternative ways are rather messy and ill-thought-out.</comment></comment>


Top-level `await` is a footgun - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/Rich-Harris/0b6f317657f5167663b493c722647221 <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12497114](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12497114)

Though, I will add that since the latest version of chrome adds top-level await, it might be time for a renewed discussion.</comment>


Discovery launches its virtual reality network: Discovery VR - <AUTHOR> http://www.adweek.com/news/television/embracing-future-discovery-goes-all-virtual-reality-166580

<comment><AUTHOR> Check out the Mythbusters 360 degree video here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WIS6N_9gjA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WIS6N_9gjA)</comment>


SXSW Interactive Full Schedule - <AUTHOR> http://tracksuitceo.com/2008/03/05/sxsw-interactive-full-schedule/ Here is the full SXSW Interactive schedule with times, locations and descriptions. <comment><USER2> Does anyone know if there will be video of all the panels posted online? live or otherwise...</comment>


Replace RESTful APIs with JSON-Pure - <AUTHOR> http://mmikowski.github.io/json-pure/

<comment><AUTHOR> Similar approach to Facebook Relay and Netflix Falcor, as pointed out by the author. But I wonder if we are loosing something by putting all application- level details in the message rather than the transport... e.g. most Web MVC frameworks (Rails, ASP.NET MVC, etc) allow authorisation and other filtering activities to take place on the basis of HTTP verb and matching the URL to a template. This would have to be re-written?

</comment><comment><USER2> This gets posted every two weeks here. It is the opinion if one programmer and respected but enforcing your view is not.</comment>


Nursing Homes in the US Overmedicate People with Dementia (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.hrw.org/report/2018/02/05/they-want-docile/how-nursing-homes-united-states-overmedicate-people-dementia <comment><USER3> It is a matter of resources. Young children or adults with severe behavioural problems are managed without antipsychotics and sedatives, but it takes a dedicated and skilled care team and a highly functional family. Even then, the drugs still often get used.

Behavioural problems in dementia are very hard. Male patients in particular can be quite strong and mobile. They can easily hurt staff or other residents. They are also a risk to themselves. The coroner in my state published two cases of patients with dementia that highlight this: one swallowed the napkin on his dinner tray and choked, another got put of the facility and died trying to climb a fence.

The reality is that there are few viable alternatives.

<comment><USER4> I hope when I get that degraded I will live in a society kind enough to euthanize me, rather than slowly torture, drug and humiliate me, while extending my demented, horror-show 'life' to the maximal possible extent in order milk my children, savings, and/or the state. Soylent green is a utopia compared to what we have now.

Dr. Scott Alexander writes well here on how we treat the demented: [http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow- decay/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/)

"And now every time I hear that phrase I want to scream. 21st century American hospitals do not need to "cultivate a culture of life". We have enough life. We have life up the wazoo. We have more life than we know what to do with. We have life far beyond the point where it becomes a sick caricature of itself. We prolong life until it becomes a sickness, an abomination, a miserable and pathetic flight from death that saps out and mocks everything that made life desirable in the first place. 21st century American hospitals need to cultivate a culture of life the same way that Newcastle needs to cultivate a culture of coal, the same way a man who is burning to death needs to cultivate a culture of fire."

<comment><USER3> I have to say it is unlikely there will be sanctioned euthanasia for age related decline or dementia. The practicalities of implementing such a system are probably prohibitive, the primary problem being ending the life of someone without the capacity to tell you that is what they want. This is in some ways insurmountable, because although your 50 year old fit and happy self would definitely want to be euthanised if they had severe dementia, how do we 'know' that this same person who now has severe dementia also wants to die?

It is similarly unlikely there will be a test which can predict imminent dementia well enough that you would be happy to euthanise yourself while you still have decision making capacity.

As others have said, what you can do is have some legal document which explains your wishes if you lose capacity to make decisions, where you specify the avoidance of life prolonging therapies, intensive care, resuscitation etc. The other thing which is important is having someone that will take over medical decision making whom you trust will act according to your wishes, in the event you lose decision making capacity. Another aspect of this is making sure friends and family are aware of your wishes. This is a kindness to them as much as anything, so that when the time comes to withhold or withdraw medical treatment, they don't have to ruminate on whether it is the right thing to do.

<comment><USER5> There are a lot of people with their intellectual capacities intact that express a wish to die. They don't get to die either.

For the most part society doesn't care about your wishes.

I think what it really comes down to incentives. As a society we don't want bullying people into a suicide to be a viable strategy for getting the inheritance money early. Or for getting rid of people in general.

<comment><USER6> The inheritance money argument would be a good one if it weren't for the fact that care homes and hospitals get the inheritance money instead.

There's still some sentience in middle stage dementia, but by the late stage there's literally no one home any more. It's really not obvious what - <USER2> mind who - is being kept alive.

It's certainly not a simple problem. But there are existing systems for legal oversight of care, and of power of attorney over family wealth. It doesn't seem an impossible stretch to extend those to allow early termination in cases of extreme suffering or total and irreversible loss of cognitive function.

We have a neighbour in the very late stages of terminal cancer. He's completely lucid. He wants to go, his family want him to go - this has dragged on for over a year now - and it's hard to see a good moral reason for extending everyone's suffering even further.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Make a living will and think through a DNR, so that you are not kept alive against your wishes for a care facility's income stream (or even in the case of well meaning caregivers) against your quality of life interests.

I'm serious, by they way. Almost everyone on this forum (over the age of 18 in the US) should consider getting a relatively inexpensive living will drawn up with advanced medical directives.

<comment><USER8> Living will is fine and good and everyone should have one. The problem is that dementia, by itself, is not a direct cause of death. You can live for _years_ with severe dementia but be otherwise completely healthy. Two members of my family lived out their last years like that.

My wife and I are moving to a state that allows assisted suicide after our kids are out of the house. Neither of us want to live like that or be remembered like that.

<comment><USER9> Here in europe, for what I know, there is a serious problem for getting assisted suicide (in the states that legalized it) for something like dementia because when you have still few effects related to it they can't accept to eutanize you because you are not in a quality of life threating condition, and once the sympthomes are more brutal you cannot get eutanized either because you are no more legally considered capable of making conscious decisions and you must be capable of it _at the moment_ of the procedure, it's not valid to give the authorization before.

<comment><USER10> > you are not in a quality of life threating condition

This seems very wrong. IMO few things are worse for quality of life than slowly losing your mind.

<comment><USER11> In context: _"when you have still few effects related to it they can 't accept to eutanize you because you are not in a quality of life threating condition"_

All people over 75 (and, probably, way earlier) are slowly losing their mind. Early stage dementia isn't that different from 'just' aging in that.

The ethical dilemma with living wills is that they always state a past opinion. It also is well-known from various studies that opinions on when you deem your life worth it shift tremendously over time.

With dementia, locked-in syndrome, etc, that's a catch-22, as there's no way to ask you about your opinion, or even to know whether there is someone to have an opinion anymore.

So, that you say "If I get wheelchair-bound/bedridden/don't know my name anymore, I don't want to live anymore" now doesn't imply at all that you will think the same if it were to happen to you.

⇒ If you have a living will, be sure to regularly acknowledge or update it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My dad passed away with dementia in 2019, spent a lot of time in nursing homes and also making decisions about the care of my father. I actually got to see this first hand with his caregivers in his facility. The requests to put him on different drugs required me to do a lot of research, validation and getting out of pocket advice from a medical professional that wasn't associated with the care facilities.

As someone that has gone through this, there is a fine line to walk between doctors operating under their Hippocratic oath, caregivers, and patient wishes. My dad was prescribed meds that weren't helping his quality of life and had really bad side effects mentally and physically through the the mid- stages of dementia.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is unfortunately my experience in any custodial care setting. Providers (Hospitals, SNFs, Board & Cares, Day Programs, etc...) will use whatever they can get away with prescribing that has a sedative effect, not just antipsychotic drugs.

I imagine a significant number of people diagnosed with dementia likely do not have it. The providers just want people to be docile and lie in bed. Having to monitor and manage people who may get up at odd hours and act in ways we aren't used to requires a lot of other people, which gets expensive.

The worst part is that the combination of over medication and lack of suitable care can lead to someone exhibiting symptoms similar to dementia even if they don't have it.

To be fair, funding likely isn't sufficient for many providers to do a sufficient job monitoring and working with their patients, but that's a separate conversation.

<comment><USER14> _> I imagine a significant number of people diagnosed with dementia likely do not have it. _

I don't think it's as dire as you imagine. People don't just randomly drive themselves to nursing homes for no reason. Like you and I, few who are capable and willing to live independently would want to be in one.

By the time you end up in a nursing home, the odds are good that you require significant care and are unable to function independently. If that's true and you're in a nursing home and not a hospital or hospice, it's probably because the thing incapacitating you is mental — dementia.

However, if you _do_ have dementia and end up in a nursing home... it sucks. Our culture and medical systems just aren't equipped to compassionately take care of fragile, dying people, who are confused, have trouble eating, shit themselves, etc. Caring for someone with dementia is brutal, heartbreaking work. Most people wouldn't want that job, and there's not enough money to pay well and compensate, so you get short-staffed or unhappy caregivers.

<comment><USER15> > If that's true and you're in a nursing home and not a hospital or hospice, > it's probably because the thing incapacitating you is mental — dementia.

You can have musculoskeletal issues that prevent you from performing everyday activities. You might also have neurological issues that don't affect thinking or speech (e.g. as a result of stroke). I'm unsure if vision problems acquired at old age can confine one to a nursing home: it's harder to learn to compensate (e.g. because you have worse medium-term memory and poorer senses other than sight).

<comment><USER16> Medical facilities for the "physically incapable" and medical facilities for "memory care" are _VASTLY_ different.

You don't get admitted to a "memory care" facility easily (multiple doctors and psychiatrists have to sign off) and it's _expensive_ once you do (health care only really pays during immediate medical events).

I do know that there are horrors in nursing homes. I also know from personal experience that there are also good ones. But, it, as always, comes down to money.

<comment><USER13> In my experience it's relatively easy to get admitted to a "memory care" facility even if someone shouldn't be there. All it takes is a dementia diagnosis and a bunch of doctors who don't care enough to look harder.

<comment><USER16> I have no clue where you're located, but that simply is totally alien to my experience.

My mother had to have 3 independent assessments before they would authorize permanent admission. And her Alzheimer's was _beyond obvious_ once you knew what to look for.

A friend of mine wound up in a hospital mental health care facility in California, and within 48 hours had a state appointed patient advocate who immediately started forcing the doctors to justify their assessments. The doctors played some games, but at the end of 10 days, he was released as he should have been since whatever the "episode" was had clearly passed.

<comment><USER13> We're in California as well. The state is pretty good with involuntary holds where someone is being deprived of their rights, but anything that's voluntary doesn't fall under that, even if the patient and/or their family made that decision based on tall tales a physician or physicians spun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's the same deal for troublesome kids.

For the old folks, why not morphine or heroin? That, I've heard, is at least pleasant. As long as the supply is assured, anyway. Anti-psychotics aren't so much fun.

And if that seems outrageous, please say why.

<comment><USER18> We're in a huge pickle in general because every simple, effective drug gets blacklisted pretty quickly, because people realize there's a simple, effective option for treatment that doesn't make them dependent on our horrifically broken medical system and start buying it without funneling through the racket. This upsets the racketeers and they work to clamp down on it.

In the rare case where a simple, effective drug gets into medical practice, it magically ends up becoming "not recommended" about 20 years after it hits the market when the pharmaceutical company's patent runs out.

MAOIs work much better for depression than SSRIs, for example, yet the clock runs down, a few widely-publicized cases of serotonin syndrome caused by careless ER doctors hit the press, and suddenly anyone prescribing those drugs comes under scrutiny, and we all need to switch to the newly-patented option.

<comment><USER17> While that does happen, I don't think that it's as much of a conspiracy as you claim. But I do agree that it's "broken", in that it's more about economics than healthcare.

One issue is that new drugs aren't approved based on testing against old drugs, or other treatments. They're just tested against no treatment. It's generally not until much later that comparison studies get done.

The other issue, as you say, is patent protection. Patent protected drugs are heavily promoted. And a huge chunk of that is detailing to physicians.

Generic drugs generally aren't promoted. That's because physicians aren't actually prescribing them. They're prescribing the brand, which pharmacies fill as generic equivalents, unless the prescription says "fill as directed".

So when some new patent protected drug comes out, it tends to displace older drugs. Because the older brand drugs are no longer being promoted.

<comment> munk-a I really think you and the poster above are disagreeing a lot less than you think. The older post is being vague on the conspiracy and using an unnecessary amount of hyperbole - but what you've stated is the actual source of the conflict of interest... Drugs aren't being sunsetted because they're ineffective but because they're unprofitable.

There are some pretty crazy effects from all the ridiculous players involved in this market with manufacturers plying clients with financial assistance, PBMs extorting manufacturers for rebates and providers over-billing everyone... the beautiful thing is this sunset effect is clear to see even through all that haze.

<comment><USER17> I guess. But my point is that it's all about money.

<comment><USER17> Belated edit. Medical care being about money is one issue, given the Hippocratic Oath. But it's possible to have medical care systems where economics drives good care.

The US doesn't have that.

As I said, there's a very similar situation in the US about child care and education. And really, it's about everyone who isn't effectively competing for resources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Do you know what it's like to have to explain to your mother every day that her parents are dead? That her first and second husbands are both dead? Spend a month watching her soul break anew every single day, sometimes twice a day, and then tell me drugging her until she doesn't think about it is worse than that because I fucking guarantee you there is nothing worse than that.

</comment><comment><USER20> After witnessing family members with dementia, I've decided that unless a true cure is developed, the only 'treatment' I ever want should I get dementia is to be swiftly euthanized. I just hope that by the time that may happen, I don't have to travel far to find a way to get that done legally.

<comment><USER21> Most people think similar when that is still far away. However the closer you get, the more likely you are going to think: 'Nah, its not that bad yet, lets wait another 5 years, lets wait another 2 years, lets wait another 6 months' and so on. The will to live seems to be much stronger for short term decisions. (It is similar probably for other things like sports, living on your own etc. When I am older I do not think I will want an SUV for convenience but who knows how I will think then)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Gosh -- just the premise of the title alone -- really makes me think about what happened to my Grandma back in late 2016-2017.

I won't go into details, but suffice to say, either we got her into the nursing home at the _exact_ right time where she absolutely needed it, or they started over-medicating her right away. Once she stepped foot through those doors, she was never the same again.

Her admittance coincided with the hospitalization and subsequent death of my Grandpa, who was her primary caregiver at the age of 92 (WWII veteran and atomic engineer, btw - smartest guy I ever knew).

Long story short, we started off getting them a two-person room where they were supposed to reunite once my Grandpa was checked out (a room which my Grandpa never made it to). Within a month, we had to move her into a one- person room. She never put two and two together (they were married for 70 years). I was the only person she recognized.

But she was never the same again once she checked in. And it was immediate.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think think the issue is a lot more complex than they're describing. Serious dementia can be quite unpleasant, and as with physical pain, it's not clear that going light on drugs is the ethical thing to do.

Similarly, withholding meds from people in their 80s because those meds might shorten their life some seems dubious.

<comment><USER24> This makes a sort of sense, but only if you know little about the drugs in question - antipsychotic drugs, formerly known as neuroleptics - which do not target nor act on any demonstrated pathology, lesion, or abnormality. What the drugs _do_ do, as much in dementia as in psychosis, is "make it so [you] can't think", as Walter L. tells us. To the extent that anyone, with any diagnosis, is helped because of these compounds, it's because of their extreme tranquilizing effects on both the mind and visible behavior.

You're right that the ethics of the whole thing aren't clear. But a fair discussion of the ethics of cautiously using these drugs for dementia in willing participants - much less rampant, off-label uses in contexts for which there's no empirical evidence of their effectiveness (no FDA indication for any of these drugs for any dementia) - would include an honest conversation about the historical uses of prescribed psychotropics, and of political and economic power in the mental health professions and medicine more generally. Such a historical look would show that stories like this one are far from an abnormality, and that coercion, to greater or lesser degrees, is the norm. Some proportion of people taking these drugs (for any reason) undoubtedly do so of their own volition, and some of these may even derive a benefit from them. I have no objection to this. But vast numbers of people have no such luck, and are forced to take these drugs for some reason or another.

Many of these people are _difficult_ : they're old and agitated and their dementia's getting worse, or perhaps they're yelling to themselves in the street, half-naked, rambling incoherently and looking fairly menacing, etc. What do the rest of us want with difficult people? We want'em out of our way (in a nursing home, say) and we want'em nice and calm. The drugs in this article do exactly that. No one with enough time in the mental health professions, or in geriatrics, is under any illusions about this.

"They want docile" is exactly right. So any discussion about the ethics involved here should also ask: "what are the ethics of coercing people to calm down with drugs?"

<comment><USER25> > So any discussion about the ethics involved here should also ask: "what are > the ethics of coercing people to calm down with drugs?"

My mother currently has dementia and my father had it before he died.

The confusion and unhappiness these people suffer from due to their illness should not be ignored. If they're in a nursing home, its even worse. In many cases it's quite humane to numb them up. Especially if they don't have loved ones to help them. There is no cure, there is no getting better. There is only getting worse and certain death. And they instinctively know something is wrong.

My mother is currently on two anti-depressant/anti-anxiety meds to help, and its made things much much better for her. No more worrying and confusion over everything, no more phone calls crying. She just goes about doing normal things without being upset.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> A nice compliment to that article, via Dylan Matthews of Vox News: [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1d6vYu_uN9keb9iiT2R5UJihA_61...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1d6vYu_uN9keb9iiT2R5UJihA_61K0Fce/view)

Short version: paying CNA more increases lifespan and quality of life for people in retirement homes because they are more motivated and you can hire better staff.

</comment><comment><USER27> Same in Canada. My dad has dementia and is in a home in Vancouver. They had him pretty zombified until I intervened. He's a bit of a pain in the ass, so it's easier for the staff to drug him up...

<comment><USER28> Dementia aside, nursing homes drug up EVERYONE who is a pain in the ass, SOP. American children of families with enough money would typically rather someone else deal with their aging parents rather than they have to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Makes sense. The staff are not so enthused workers.

They don't care for these people, they don't have any special ties with them (e.g. like family), and if they could dispose them and keep the money they would. Keeping them sleepy and docile removes them from most of their day, and makes their jobs easier.

</comment><comment><USER30> Let me guess, the nursing home is sponsored by a Pharma company? This is how US's opioid addiction came into being. Screw the socialists, right? Profit above everything.

I get sick when I see the jokes they make on Big Bang Theory about Penny's job, she's basically a criminal (in many countries literally.)

</comment><comment><USER31> Compared to other nations, is the US overmedicated in general?

<comment><USER32> Don't know how it compares to other countries, but the US is definitely overmedicated in general. Not really my place, since at least with prescriptions they are being distributed by people who are by definition more qualified than me, but it's widely known that doctors will often prescribe antibiotics "just in case", even though tests for specific bacteria have all come back negative, and the use in livestock adds to that. The opioid epidemic is another clear sign that it's being prescribed more than is warranted.

Far more subjective and anecdotal, but the number of people I know who take prescriptions for anxiety or other ongoing mental health concerns but who have never tried therapy is scary. Treating with drugs is clearly solution #1 for a lot of our culture.

<comment><USER33> Therapy is a complicated beast. Not everyone can afford it (generic prozac is fairly inexpensive per month, a therapist is usually more than $20 per month). Even if the insurance is good, not everyone can get off work to go - which is a real issue if you work "doctor hours". And to make it all worse, so many therapists have a waiting list and patients are queued depending on need.

And some folks need the drugs just to talk to someone!

So yeah, drugs is often the go-to. A family doctor is a lot more available than a therapist.

<comment><USER34> Yeah, I've tried to get a therapist here in SoCal and it is an absolute nightmare. Its one of those things where clearly I don't _need_ it, but I'd probably be a lot healthier and happier with it. But even thought I have good insurance and could definitely afford it, there just isn't availability at all. I've called around and no one is taking new patients.

Saying 'therapy not drugs' is all fine and dandy until you consider that for probably 99% of people therapy just isn't an option and may never be.

<comment><USER35> > But even thought I have good insurance ... there just isn't availability at > all.

Were you only asking therapists who would accept your insurance, or did the lack of availability also apply to "out of network" providers?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Can simulated handwriting stop the spambots from getting through? - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/web/21939/?a=f <comment><USER2> If that works --- it will create a lot of jobs in China and India.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't read any of the sample CAPTCHAs provided.

</comment><comment><USER4> Something I have not seen pointed out yet (in articles and discussions over the preceding many years) is the fact that CAPTCHA tests are essentially Gestalt Completion tests. A Gestalt Completion test is a type of IQ test. As CAPTCHA tests get progressively more difficult to solve, they might weed out progressively larger portions of the population - the _human_ population, that is.

Perhaps, as a side-effect, the quality of web-based discussion will rise.

.

From Arthur Jensen's 1980 book _Bias in Mental Testing_ (pp157-158):

 _Gestalt Completion. Familiar words and objects are shown in various degrees of "mutilation" and the subject must infer what the word or object is. Performance is scored according to the average time taken per item or the number of items completed within a given time limit. The difficulty of any given item is a function of its familiarity and the extent of the "mutilation"; these can be varied independently in making up items. ... Gestalt completion items, which are known to be a good measure of the general intelligence factor (as well as of a small group factor labeled speed of closure), merit further experimental investigation in their own right._</comment>