The Powerlessness of Positive Thinking - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2014/02/the-powerlessness-of-positive-thinking.html <comment><USER2> Another article that makes a really basic mistake involving "the secret".

You don't visualize yourself taking the steps to accomplish a goal, you visualize yourself and your feelings as if the desired goal has already been accomplished.

Not "I will lose 25 pounds!", but instead "I have lost 25 pounds and I look and feel awesome and am very happy and thankful to have done so!" \- A great deal of the secret is replicating the emotional state you'll be in when your given goal is accomplished.

The idea being that, I suppose if you were to remove the supernatural element from it, it somehow gets your subconscious to motivate you to doing whatever it is you want done.

Calling it "positive thinking" really doesn't do the concept justice. Thinking of goals as already accomplished doesn't really fit that definition.

<comment><USER3> Really? I think I would rather sit around and fantasize about being fit than put in the effort to lose 25 pounds. If I get the emotional reward before the work, why do the work?

<comment><USER4> "It's easy to sit there and say you'd like to have more money. And I guess that's what I like about it. It's easy. Just sitting there, rocking back and forth, wanting that money." \-- Jack Handey

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A lot of the problem with "positive thinking" is that it's also wishful thinking, rather than the design of resilient systems that make success a natural byproduct of practicing the system.

Instead of naive positive thinking, psychological research in habit forming suggests that creating a robust system and habit (or set of habits) is much more powerful. Assuming and accepting infrequent shocks (e.g. on a diet, but ate 3000 calories at a wedding banquet) and building the system to handle these, is much more likely to create success than fantasy thinking.

<comment><USER6> I've found a lot of system design and habit formation to be a kind of wishful thinking and naive in its own way.

<comment><USER7> Habit formation isn't wishful thinking, but I'd say that habit design is.

Habit formation itself comes from routine. Not the desired routine. This is why we have bad habits.

Good habits are hard, because they are not what we naturally tend towards doing (or we wouldn't try to build them, we'd already have them). Habits are self-reinforcing, and are really based off ideas of success and failure. If we fail to (and regret our failure to) carry out our habit, that is discouraging and actually makes it harder to keep up with the habit.

The best way I have found to develop wanted habits is to never recognize failure in the habit. Always recognize success. You want to do something habitually, keep track of when you do it. Don't keep track in a way that lets you notice when you fail to do it. If you want to do something daily, don't mark on the calendar when you've done it, don't write the date that you did it the last time. Instead write down a simple tick each time you've done it. Increment a counter. Watch it go up.

Say you want to start to wash your brontosaurus (named Rex) on a regular basis, say you never wash him currently. Start by washing Rex and mark a tick down. Then the next time you think about it, wash Rex, and mark a tick down. If you want to do it daily, the next time you think about it, consider whether you already washed him today. If you haven't, wash him, and put down a tick.

Don't tally the ticks up. Don't look back to see how frequently you actually washed him every day. Don't get frustrated because for the past three weeks you washed him daily but last week you missed him three times in a row. When you worry about how well you are washing him, just think "Did I wash him today?" and then wash him if you didn't.

You'll start washing him every day. Or you'll start to wash him every other day and be happy with it. Or you'll wash him from time to time. Think about the results instead. Do you have a brontosaurus that is sufficiently clean? If you do that's great, keep it up, whether you do it daily or monthly. Do you not? Then consider what else you could do besides cleaning him yourself to make him cleaner.

Whatever you do, don't just get mad at yourself for not doing it and demand from yourself that you do it more often, and then promise yourself that you will. That won't work. You'll maybe do it for a bit and then burn out from frustration and failure.

You can always do something like set a reminder if you don't think about it. But if you remember and avoid it, and then get angry with yourself for avoiding it (or rationalize your avoidance), you're doing the opposite of what is needed to make a habit.

If you find you are avoiding it (Ah man, I'm too tired right now.) don't tell yourself you will make it up tomorrow. Don't get angry with yourself. Don't even acknowledge it. It's a habit, not a chore. It's something you want to do more frequently, not something you have to do. Acknowledge when you do complete it, not when you don't. As soon as you start to argue with yourself ("I should do this, but I don't want to") you're already losing the battle. Don't consider at that point what you should do. Just do it, or don't do it. Notice and feel good when you do it.

<comment><USER6> What is "good"? What is "bad"? For most people, those are forms of pleasure and pain. There is no truly "good" or "bad".

Habit formation is a form of wishful thinking. You're creating a rut of the mind, and as such, become more separated from the reality at hand. Wishful thinking, at its core, is a form of separation from reality.

Normally, external conditions reinforces the habit, and so the rut of the mind gets deeper and deeper. But when external conditions change -- as they inevitably will -- you end up with a psychological dynamic described by the Five Stages of Grief. Most people's notion of "bad" are formed from when external changes forces them out of their comfortable habits. They cling to these habits and wish things would "get back to normal".

As such, there is neither "good" or "bad" habits. There are just habits, all of which keep you from adapting to change, and are just as much out of touch with reality as wishful thinking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> From ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Stockdale](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Stockdale))

When [...] asked who didn't make it out of Vietnam, Stockdale replied:

Oh, that's easy, the optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, 'We're going to be out by Christmas.' And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they'd say, 'We're going to be out by Easter.' And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart."

Stockdale then added: This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

<comment><USER9> On the other hand, I've heard Holocaust survivors tell me their optimism was what allowed them to survive. I don't think these witty sayings prove anything.

<comment><USER10> Was it really optimism or rather the ability to find meaning within the experience? I ask because one of the top 10 books I've ever read is Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning". He survived the death camps and figured out how he and others did so. Compared to it, _The Secret_ is revealed to be a shallow mindless "gimme, I'm entitled" attitude towards life where hard work is deemed unnecessary - i.e. reality is nothing but a psychological construct and you can manipulate it with merely your will. In others words, an excuse for airheads to indulge their inner two year old.

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

"optimistic outlook" vs "optimistic thinking" is far better, IMO

<comment><USER9> Very well said and good points. Agreed on the distinction between outlook and "thinking". Obviously, optimism in the sense of ignorance of one's environment is a bad idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "in order to insure that you aren't thinking about an unwanted idea, you have to continually turn your mind to that very idea. How do you know that you aren't thinking of a white bear driving a red Ferrari unless you think about whether you're thinking it?"

I don't believe this is true at all. I'd argue the best way to stop thinking about something, is to divert your mental focus to other thing/s intentionally. Best way to stop thinking about your ex? Find a new boyfriend, dive deep into a work problem, find a new hobby to occupy your brain power, and so on.

Want to insure you aren't thinking about something? Don't attempt to insure you're not thinking about it by thinking about it (a blatantly self-sabotaging concept).

There's absolutely no need to constantly do mental reference checks to make sure you aren't thinking about the white bear in a red ferrari. In fact, that's the worst thing you can do. You can only focus on one thing at a time, and your brain is finite, as such it's not that difficult to saturate it and drown out competing thoughts. Given enough effort and time, the bear is banished from your short term memory and its emotional hold on you is dramatically lessened. After a while you then realize that it has in fact been a long time since you've thought about the bear, and you realize said bear's hold over you is no more. All accomplished without constantly thinking about whether you're thinking about the bear.

<comment><USER12> Yes, the author cherry picks numerous inept counterexamples like the one you cite and this one:

"Ceaseless optimism about the future only makes for a greater shock when things go wrong;"

This is utter pessimism. I feel sorry for people who are on board with it. In my experience, the gains garnished from being super optimistic and taking chances have been much greater than had I sat around on the couch not trying. I never achieve up to the level of my goals and imagination - but that's because I continuously push them higher and higher. Instead, I aim for Alpha Centauri and land on the moon.

I should also add that the emotion of _curiosity_ is a very powerful one for me. When I imagine the future, and I _don't know_ what something will be like, the curiosity is a very powerful motivator for me to at least try it out.

<comment><USER13> In my personal experience there's no way to truly blunt the sting of failure. If I go in optimistic and fail unexpectedly or pessimistically and fail as expected the pain is the same. I don't see the use in torturing myself in the meantime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The thing that's not made explicit about "positive thinking" is that:

(1) It is not enough to think positively. You actually have to change how you feel. If you are out of touch with your feelings, then no amount of positive thinking will change anything.

(2) In order to be in touch with how you feel, you first have to tune into how you feel right now -- whether that is "good" or "bad". Then accept it for what it is now. It's only after that, that change happens.

</comment><comment><USER14> My path: "Hope for the best, plan for the worst"

<comment><USER15> That sounds like a much better definition of positive thinking.

This article seemed to suggest that positive thinking means: "Plan for the best outcome and assume the worst will not happen." That is wishful thinking ('positive fantasies'). I don't think the two are the same thing at all.

<comment><USER16> If, by your definition, positive thinking includes preparing for the worst, how come whenever I bring up worst-case scenarios with my colleagues, they accuse me of being negative.

I don't think most people share your definition.

<comment><USER15> I respect that point of view.

I have a simple mind and not a very strong vocabulary. I have no doubt that I am probably out-of-sync with popular opinion on this topic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> After Barbara Ehrenreich got cancer and was thrust directly into the positive thinking movement, she wrote a really great book called "Bright-Sided".

</comment><comment><USER18> Shameless plug.

We developed a smartphone app at [http://positivethinking.net](http://positivethinking.net) to solve this problem.

I don't doubt ideology like The Secret does more harm than good, that's why our tagline is YOUR SUCCESS STARTS WITH A POSITIVE MINDSET.

Because being optimistic and hopeful is only a small part to being successful, it's only the start, actually practicing and working towards your goals is the other 90-95%.

The way we try to help is by motivating and inspiring you consistently to reach your goals. For example if you want to be successful at business we will send you insightful quotes from the likes of Richard Branson and Steve jobs daily.

If you want to be fit and healthy we have things like "success trains, failure complains" and "to cold, to busy, to tired. NO EXCUSES, TRAIN EVERYDAY".

Being reminded daily of these things has helped changed my thoughts.

Ps, I'm not sure if calling my app "positive thinking" was a great idea because it often gets lumped with the lazy wish-and-the-universe-will-provide ideology but it was purely a SEO move.

I would love peoples thoughts on all of this!

<comment><USER19> The secret defiantly does more harm than good...Ive meet crazies the believe they can cure their sickness with their thoughts

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > I asked Kappes why fantasies hamper progress, and she told me that they dull > the will to succeed: "Imagining a positive outcome conveys the sense that > you're approaching your goals, which takes the edge off the need to > achieve."

This is a massive oversimplification. I know many, many people, including myself, for whom imagining positive outcomes feeds a chain reaction of emotion and motivation which drives us to try things within and beyond our reach and ultimately to come out on top even in the face of numerous failures.

Of course, as posters like theorique point out, it is not enough to merely fantasize. The positive fantasizing must, and will, motivate one to build successful habits. It is not enough to distract ones' self with a utopian mirage. It is necessary to include details and additional questions in the fantasy, such as "back from the future thinking." e.g. "Ok, my startup is successful, who are my customers? Who are they servicing? Which features of what I'm doing/did got me there?"

And I believe doomsayers like the authors of this paper and this article know it damn well. There's just a more comfortable place for them in the larger cultural climate to negatively criticize the author of The Secret than there is in clarifying it. For the authors of the paper, there is more academic capital in running a "computerized content analysis" than there is to actually produce any results that help anyone.

Furthermore the abstract of the Oettingen paper suggests serious misunderstandings of finance (1. Just b/c DJIA goes down doesn't mean the economy is bad. 2. The measurements were made during a financial crisis) and correlation vs. causation.

So, fuck this article! Go out and do something awesome and visualize the shit out of it!!!!!!

<comment><USER6> The quote from the article above can be translated to: "Let's use the fear of failure to drive success."

That can be done to a certain extent. Sun Tzu, for example, advised burning the ships in order to make the soldiers desperate. Desperate people appear to get a lot more things done.

The thing is that, this is not sustainable. Unsustainable efforts like this does not just lead to burn out, it also leads to unbounded profit motives that drives a lot of the inequalities today ... which, of course, makes more desperate people.

I have used this fear-of-failure to drive actions before. But I have learned that it is a part of "intensity". That is, I'm "cooking" myself. If I turn the heat up too fast, then I'm going to avoid it like hell.

When people open up to this part of consciousness where they realize they can change the intensity, it feels like you can do anything you want. BUT, it is the nature of that kind of experience that you overcome all inhibitions and obstacles ... including when you need to stop turning up the heat.

Coming back to the cooking metaphor: if you have ever cooked food before, turning the stove up to its max will not make the food cook faster. (If you don't cook, I highly recommend picking up some basic skills, like from Alton Brown's Good Eats series; there are a lot of interesting life lessons coming out of the application of heat to food).

So I have this knob in my life. I turn it one way and I can intensify the heat and pressure. I can turn it down and I can adjust it. If I want to toast and incinerate something, I'd turn it all the way to max. Usually, I want a nice simmer that will go on and on. It depends on the recipe (your strategy), your ingredients (what you have to work with), and what it is you are trying to accomplish.

A good, quick application of heat might inspire you to take action, but you can flame out quickly. You are totally allowed to turn it down so that once things get going, it will keep going.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Negative thinking seems to help me the most. If I'm afraid of something in the future I tend to obsess about it. The correct way for me to get free from this is to imagine the worst possible scenario that I can, as it already happened and think what's next. Then it appears to be not that bad. This helps me to calm down and actually take some reasonable actions that always prevented the worst case scenario and lot of not the worst but bad ones.

<comment><USER21> Not the way to go if you have real anxiety. You will start to imagine you can contract Aids when using a public toilet.

<comment><USER20> Still, imagining that I already got it and what should I do now would help me to accept the risk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article conflates thinking positively with hubris or denial.

Positive thinking, in my view, is more about saying "What do I need to do make this happen." instead of saying "I will never be able to make this happen." This article seems to use a destructive type of thought that is more like "This will happen to me!"

"Gabriele Oettingen and Doris Mayer asked eighty-three German students to rate the extent to which they "experienced positive thoughts, images, or fantasies on the subject of transition into work life, graduating from university, looking for and finding a job."

I agree that simply imagining things simply working out for you can be damaging. But I think that there's something like positive thinking that doesn't include baseless fantasizing. To think "I get an interview from 1/3 of the applications I send out, and I might be hired for 1/5 of the positions I apply for, so if I make sure I am applying, I will likely find a job" is reasonably positive thinking, but it's more constructive than thinking "Ah, I'm awesome, there's a job I want, and I'm certain they will hire me because I'm thinking positively. I won't bother applying elsewhere, I'm special, they'll need to take me" and then falling into a depression when you don't even get invited for an interview.

On the other hand, both of those situations are better than sitting at home and thinking "I'm never going to get a job anyways, I might as well not apply".

To me positive thinking is about looking at all of the angles, not being afraid to see where things go differently, but still have a positive outlook. "If I do this, there's a 25% chance it will fail. If it fails, I will lose my money, if it succeeds I will make 200 times what I invested. I have enough set aside to try this 10 times. It's worth doing it, and I wont ruin myself if it doesn't work out."

It's that sort of thinking that shows that failure isn't bad, it's just a possibility. Recognizing that and planning to make the best of both the bad situation and the good situation is positive thinking.

Thinking "I'm going to start this business, I'm going to throw everything I have at it, but I'm going to pay myself a fair salary and save. When I succeed, I will be rich. When I fail, I'll be in a comfortable position to start again. Life is good." is positive.

Thinking "I'm going to start this business and throw everything I have into it, and if it starts to look bad, I'm going to throw even more into it until I'm a hollow shell of a man who can't live with the idea that I could fail" is ignorant. Wishful thinking, but there's a difference between thinking positively and being ignorant of the circumstances.

<comment><USER22> I agree. This reminds me of an anime (Kaiji [1]) that conveys this idea in excruciating form, and in particular highlights the converse of your positive thinking: that negative thinking results in often-debilitating myopia.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiji_(manga)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiji_\(manga\))

<comment><USER23> or the myopia leads to an intense focus and drive ... which you obsess over and use to solve a deep problem... (spurred on by the negativity).. that other people just ignore and sweep under the rug.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Here's how things tends to work:

Beliefs -> Emotions -> Thoughts -> Actions.

So trying to force positive thoughts on top of negative beliefs will last as long as that exercise.

When you "forget" to think positively - you get back to the default polarity of beliefs.

So to make the change positive and lasting the beliefs needs to be addressed either directly or via associated emotions.

<comment><USER23> usually its actually emotion -> beliefs

<comment><USER25> Usually it's actually

      Beliefs <-> Emotions
      Beliefs <-> Thoughts
      Beliefs <-> Actions
      Emotions <-> Thoughts
      Emotions <-> Actions
      Thoughts <-> Actions

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Mac: Yeah. The Secret is a self-help book that Dee read and explained to us. It's about how you can get whatever you want without having to work for it.

Dennis: Yeah, man, all you have to do is envision all the shit in the world that you want, cut pictures of it out and paste it on a board. Then you get it, you get the stuff!

</comment><comment><USER27> Possibly relevant Bible verse: "Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours." Mark 11:24

Ancillary to that: "When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures." James 4:3

</comment><comment><USER28> The TED talk "Smile or Die" explains problems arising when positivity is used as corporate or government policy.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo)

</comment><comment><USER29> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbS9jZOlQjc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbS9jZOlQjc)

Just saying.

</comment><comment><USER30> You have to back up the positive thinking with action, of course.

<comment><USER20> Backing up negative (or neutral) thinking with action happens more often or to the better result, studies seem to suggest.

<comment><USER30> The kind of negative thinking that leads inevitably to failure is the "I can't do that, so I might as well not even try."

I don't regard making contingency plans for worst case results as negative thinking.

<comment><USER20> Soulcrushing "I can't do that" is depression (which is just faulty brain chemistry), not negative thinking in my book.

Resonable "I can't do that" (because obese people don't jump 4ft high) is negative thinking but can be quite resonable and motivating to find another way.

On the other hand blind "I can do that!" is still called positive thinking even if it's pure delusion that leads to disaster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> What a beautiful and appropriate photo.

</comment><comment><USER32> Am I the only one who becomes demoralized by positive thinking, precisely because if it worked it would mean that I have some metaphysical effect on reality? That can be a scary notion, when you really stop and think about it, that we have the power to reshape the world around us just by thinking about it.

Having been down in some dark pits of despair, I can honestly say that "The Secret" had a profound effect on my life. I don't mean in a subtle way. It was more black and white: one day I was depressed, poor, and lonely, and then I saw The Secret and started acting more on instinct, the way humans might have thousands of years ago before they were institutionalized. My theory about how it works is the same as when you look at geese flying in the sky in January and it's 10 degrees outside, and wonder how in the heck they are not starving or freezing to death. "The secret" is that they are simply acting in harmony with the reality that brought them into existence, not fighting it every step of the way or dwelling on how things "should be". Modern concepts like scarcity, power, success, money, etc are insidious forms of mind control because they frame reality in a way that traps people. Children don't normally suffer from maladies related to these things, because they are oblivious to them.

Now how come adults dwell on them so much? I think it's because they are so busy working hard to earn a living or provide for their children that they put subsistence at the top of their priorities. But life's a game, we're all going to croak at some point anyway. The truth is that whichever culture you are in, at whatever level of affluence, has a strong incentive to keep you right where you're at. You could stop trying, go on autopilot and spend your time daydreaming, and.. nothing happens. You just continue on your present course. You start noticing how outside forces step in and solve problems that you used to be micromanaging. You start to notice coincidences and miracles, or even the emotional fabric that holds society together, the way that people rely on each other. And your subconscious comes to the forefront and brings opportunities to your attention that you couldn't see before, so you can act on them and create tangible changes in your life. To me, that's the most powerful lesson from The Secret. To let go, realize it's all just details, and experience the act of living without constantly trying to validate it. Then the natural laws come back into play and thriving is a likely outcome.

Anyway, that's the tip of the iceberg, if anyone is feeling a little off lately, or having a sense that its "me against the world" or "me against god" or "everything is hanging by a thread", basically anything along those lines, I highly recommend looking into group meditation. I started with something called The Reconnection, or Reconnective Healing, because a good friend of mine is into it. It's just a tool among many to quiet the mind and let the subconscious come forward.

I still think it's kind of eerie when I think about something and the universe changes to reflect my interests, but I don't necessarily think it's supernatural. It could have something to do with the way we store memories or some physical process like that. I'm not really sure, I just know that the effect is real because as soon as I started trying it, there were too many unexplained coincidences to happen by chance. I think it's loosely related to how faiths become prevalent. It's not due to the specifics of any religion, but the notion that belief in itself creates outcomes. It's sad and ironic that so often, capable people write it off because science has no explanation for it (yet). But would knowing the mathematics behind it, say like psychology or economics, help us incorporate it more readily? I'm not so sure. If you took any kid and told him or her that the universe is governed by strict laws, there is no deeper meaning to any of it, or even free will, then depression is a likely outcome. I know it happened to me, and I wore my depression like some kind of badge of honor, like I had it all figured out, when I really didn't. I still feel depressed from time to time like anyone else, but I actually use that as a signal now that I'm holding on too tightly, and take some time for myself to stare at the stars, or go into the wilderness, or do something that's not governed by man-made laws, and then MIRACULOUSLY, I feel better.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is quite an issue in my life. Believing and practicing positive thinking seems like such a self-evident, unquestionably good thing. Especially among a certain class of people, it's almost never popular or ... I don't know - "socially tenable" to challenge this. But I can't help but challenge it. Because to me, it just looks like a nervous tic. In fact, it looks like a stubborn, neurotic horse that insists on only turning to the right. It looks compulsive, and subtly fear-driven. In conversation, it's a non-stop, predictable and inescapable barrage of "Yeah, but", "Well, on the bright side", "Hey, at least" \- and no matter what I say, they won't stop returning like it's tennis and they're scrambling all over the court to stop the ball going out of bounds by any means.

And the people who do this are as offended by my view of the world as if I spilled shit on their white suit. I'm biased, but I don't see myself as overly negative. The way I see it, I just don't go out of my way to see the bright side, or try in a motivated way to hit positive notes while conversing. I don't feel motivated to be negative, either. But this sure as hell makes me the most negative person I know, by default. To me, I just can't have a view of the world other than the view I have; and I can't speak things other than what I think and see.

From the other side, for myself, I have been guilty of the same thing in the past. But since I became more aware of it, I now try, when someone talks about bad luck or unpleasantness in the world, to listen and nod, rather than allow my larynx to reflexively spasm into a positive platitude.

No, I am not fun at parties. Not to worry - I don't go to them.

Also, yeah I think criticizing positive thinking in general, and The Secret in particular, both in the same short article, is pretty sloppy.

<comment><USER6> "It looks compulsive, and subtly fear-driven. In conversation, it's a non- stop, predictable and inescapable barrage of "Yeah, but", "Well, on the bright side", "Hey, at least" \- and no matter what I say, they won't stop returning like it's tennis and they're scrambling all over the court to stop the ball going out of bounds by any means."

Yeah. Those people suck at it. You are absolutely correct that, use of "Yeah, but" and "Well on the bright side" "Hey, at least" generally indicates trying to gold-plate pig shit.

As I have mentioned in other comments, "positive thinking" is a misnomer. You're really working with emotions, not thought. Thoughts arise from emotions. "Positive thinking" is not so much as using your language to try to gold-plat pig shit so much as tuning into the underlying emotions, and perhaps, shifting the emotions to a different shape. When that happens, the thoughts will arise in a different pattern.

"I'm biased, but I don't see myself as overly negative." <\-- A lot of negative people wading through their crap don't see themselves as negative. I speak from personal experience. I can say this kind of stuff now, only because I was able to tune into the darker emotions and learned how to release them. There are lots and lots of methods to do this, much literature, teachings, and trainings on this. The darker emotions stay within you and color how you experience the world; unless you've had a lot of training and practice at being aware of yourself, it is unlikely that you would even know how much crap you carry, though it would _feel_ as if you were being neutral. (It isn't that you are neutral; it is that it feels _normal_ to you).

Perhaps, be open to the possibility that there are people who don't suck at this stuff. Observe what they do, the play of emotions running through them, and how they affect people around them. There are folks like that out there.

<comment><USER25> I have to ask, because the lack of jargon makes it harder for me to register heuristic labels.

Are you talking about being a darkworker? Or is that too far afield?

<comment><USER34> I don't think that's the right jargon. Darkworkers/lightworkers are more about serving yourself vs. the greater good. (i.e. making money via phishing is more darkworker while building Watsi is more lightworker.)

<comment><USER25> Eh. The way I heard it discussed, that was exactly the kind of simplistic misconception that made people think darkworking was terribad. The way hosh talks about tuning into your "darker emotions" and "releasing them" reminds me of those conversations.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Recommended Python frameworks for desktop applications development - <AUTHOR>

Hello,
I'm looking for a python framework for developing desktop applications. I am looking for an easy to use (drag-drop) interface and the ability to convert the code into an executable file (exe in my case), the availability of a built in DB (files based or SQLight for example) is a plus.
Thank you. <comment><USER2> If I'm understanding your question, your most viable choices are wxPython or PyQt/PySide. For getting it into an .exe, look at PyInstaller (failing that, py2exe). If by "drag-drop interface" you mean a friendly UI design tool (in the mold of Visual Studio), IMHO there are no good choices.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your answer, I am currently considering kivy and I'll also look into PyQt and wxPython.</comment></comment>


IAmA HS teacher. This is a list of "suggestions" we got in our mailboxes today - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/dk8yp/iama_hs_teacher_this_is_a_list_of_suggestions_we/

<comment><USER2> When I was in college, many exams allowed the student to bring in a single sheet of paper with notes. You knew such tests would be hard, because they wouldn't be testing your _knowledge_ (since you had that written down); they'd be testing your _understanding_.

There were apocryphal stories of years past, when the rule had sometimes been "you can bring anything you can carry" (this was decades before WiFi). Supposedly, one test taker carried in a grad student on his back.

<comment><USER3> In my upper-level physics courses, where the exams were mostly derivations and intense problem-solving, we had a rough guide to exam difficulty:

* One sheet of notes allowed: expect to take close to the full 2 hours alloted.

* Open notes and book: expect not to finish at all, and recalibrate to 75%==A+.

* Take-home exam: feel free to spend 40 hours on this. No one in this class is going to get over a 50% anyway.

<comment><USER4> I remember one particular take home test, 25 questions and the prof handed it to us and said "if any question takes you more than 5 hours you should probably move on and come back to it later." She full expected us to spend 80-100 hours on the thing (the week before finals too, oh we hated her). I don't actually know any college student who doesn't cringe at the thought of take home tests.

EDIT: just to be clear this is meant as commiseration not as a misery dick waving contest. It was the largest time requirement of any undergrad class I took in the 5 years I was there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Let's hope future test packets come with a generic, tear-off job application form accepted by fast-food chains and the welfare office.

WTF?

On the other side of the spectrum; Cambridge's A-Level course in pure maths didn't allow us to use nothing more sophisticated than a 4-function calculator. The test authority gave us trigonometric and logarithmic tables.

For English, you're given just _three_ (3) questions. You had to choose two and write an essay response for each. You took 2-3 papers.

Here is the list of subjects, look at the curriculum for your favorite subject and remember this is for high-school students:

[http://www.cie.org.uk/qualifications/academic/uppersec/aleve...](http://www.cie.org.uk/qualifications/academic/uppersec/alevel/subjects)

I tremble in fear every time I remember those days. I went to prep-school after 2-years of American high school and was crushed by the sadistic priestess that is British schooling.

</comment><comment><USER6> As a recent HS grad, these suggestions disgust me. I would have learned absolutely nothing all four years if these guidelines were followed.

As it is, I could make it through a multiple choice/free response test (with 4 or 5 choices, and open-ended questions) in many subjects knowing less than half the material going in. Getting an A, mind you. Granted, I'm not the typical case, but the point is not to have everyone getting easy A's. That's not why we have school.

School is supposed to be a place to learn to challenge yourself continuously. It should teach the value of persistence and hard work, because those are skills that can be learned and will seriously affect the life potential of an individual [1]. This is a separate consideration than intelligence, which according to some studies (that happen to agree with my point... don't you love selection bias?) has a fixed, unchangeable component [2]. The effect of these suggestions would be to lower the effort bar - more students will be like me, and have to put very little effort into their schoolwork to get the grades they want. I did not learn how to work hard (at least from school), and neither will they.

[1] [pdf] duende.uoregon.edu/~hsu/blogfiles/sat.pdf according to University of Oregon researchers, high college GPAs are not correlated with high SAT scores. If we assume the SAT tests what it intends to, the implication of this study is that hard work can lead to mastery at least as well as intelligence, in most fields.

[2] [http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20020017191357data_trunc_sy...](http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20020017191357data_trunc_sys.shtml) Neural plasticity implies that you can learn new things, and the rate at which connections can change determines a "general intelligence factor" commonly called G.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm a community college teacher and a member of the Board of Regents for my system wanted to make our pay dependent upon how many people pass the class. I was praying that his proposal went through.

We get pressure all the time to increase student success. There's no real push to make sure people know what they are supposed to know. The administration just wants a high passing rate. Every year my tests get easier. I let people turn in late work. I give retakes on tests. I'm getting to the point where I just want to give everyone an 'A' and not give any homework or tests.

<comment><USER8> Of course, you're adapting your behaviour to the the metric by which you're assessed.

Any rational person can determine that the metric is the wrong one.

Except it isn't because the stated goal is to pass as many students as possible. Probably because that is how the rewards up the chain are determined, and because there are school league tables whereby the further up the table you sit the more funding you receive. Or something like that.

Extrapolating your current course of action will result in you simply passing all students simply for signing up for the course. No need to attend. No need for the course. Job done.

When setting metrics it is critical to ensure that they provoke the wanted behaviour. In reality, they very rarely do. Determining people's behaviour is trickier than it looks.

For a good alternative, take a look at John Seddon's work and his System Thinking ideas.

<comment><USER7> Well, yes the metric is a bad one and has very bad consequences. But I'm not in a position to fight it. It's a fait accompli at this point. I've lodged my complaints with my superiors and will continue to lower my standards. Society - via our elected and appointed leaders - wants passing grades. They sign my paycheck so that's what they'll get.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I took a course in the first semester of my masters. The professor talked about the final being an open book exam and someone in the 1st row smiled happily as soon as she heard that. THe professor noticed it and said "Smile while you can. People who have taken my courses can attest that a smile's the last thing an open book exam means here"..

</comment><comment><USER10> This was brutal to read. The adminisTRators are basically making it "easier" for students by doing things like changing the number of multiple choice answers from 4 options to 3 and other such nonsense.

That 4 to 3 option choice reduction, by the way, will increase test scores by 33% for a kid who was just randomly picking answers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the most appalling to me was open book tests _with page numbers_! I've taken hard open book tests thanks to a combination of not knowing exactly where the information is and a serious time limit that doesn't allow you to spend much time thumbing through the book. But if the test gives you the page number (especially since teachers probably aren't encouraged to put too much time pressure on kids either), it's almost certain to be a joke

<comment><USER11> If you're testing comprehension, then having a page number doesn't matter. If you're testing recall, then having a page number hurts.

I mean heck, reading comprehension in standardize tests has the entire contents on the facing page! Get students used to the environment in which they'll be tested.

<comment><USER6> Instead of the environment in which they'll be living?

<comment><USER11> Feynman famously bashes recall with his "map of a cat" story (web copied, emphasis added):

The next paper selected for me was by Adrian and Bronk. They demonstrated that nerve impulses were sharp, single-pulse phenomena. They had done experiments with cats in which they had measured voltages on nerves.

I began to read the paper. It kept talking about extensors and flexors, the gastrocnemius muscle, and so on. This and that muscle were named, but I hadn't the foggiest idea of where they were located in relation to the nerves or to the cat. So I went to the librarian in the biology section and asked her if she could find me a map of the cat.

"A map of the cat , sir?" she asked, horrified. "You mean a zoological chart !" From then on there were rumors about some dumb biology graduate student who was looking for a "map of the cat."

When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.

The other students in the class interrupt me: "We know all that!"

"Oh," I say, "you do ? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." _They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I for one support the suggestions and I don't have anything against implementing them in American high-schools, but that may be probably because I am not American.

Now I would request these people to stop saying that the Indians and the Chinese are taking their jobs. They are taking your jobs because they are apparently better educated (for the job). </generalisation>

The new suggestions include some fairly ridiculous points.

>Weigh the merit of using any essay questions at all

Objective-type answering system will seriously affect the way students learn. I suspect this will dampen creativity in students.

>Offer a maximum of 3 choices

This coupled with the suggestion to avoid negative-marking will make the exams just a waste of time for everyone involved.

<comment><USER13> >Now I would request these people to stop saying that the Indians and the Chinese are taking their jobs. They are taking your jobs because they are apparently better educated (for the job). </generalisation>

Wait, so are they, or aren't they? ;)

American here, and software developer specifically. 5-6 years ago there was a trend in the industry that companies thought off-shoring was the best way to get the same product for a fraction of the cost. Nowadays, I find that anyone who still believes that is probably not too bright themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If teachers are relying on any of these techniques to make their tests difficult, they're missing the point of teaching altogether. You _should_ be testing kids on their grasp of the subject matter and, if they demonstrate knowledge of that subject, they should receive full credit. Don't penalize kids for something you're not willing to teach them (complete sentences in a Chemistry course, etc).

</comment><comment><USER15> No Child Left Behind aims to shed light on poor performing schools in part by requiring them to elevate graduation rates in order to meet "adequate yearly progress" goals.

Many schools are addressing the perceived urgency of these federal mandates by doing whatever they can to get the kids out the doors in four years.

<comment><USER16> Or even sooner, so they don't drag down the averages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The suggestions seem absurd. Has anyone considered this being a hoax?</comment>


Twitter, Reddit and Conway's Law - <AUTHOR> https://michaelfeathers.silvrback.com/social-media-architecture-and-conway-s-law <comment><AUTHOR> IMO people who designed social media services like facebook or reddit intended those effects that we see as side effect. For instance facebook side effects that make people from different circles able to see all of your discussion post (and even when they added the option to segregate it was hard to use) is an important piece in the addiction that people have to facebook, it make them able to have a window on other people life and "spy" on them, it's kind of a voyeurism fetish that most of people secretly have and the service is designed to exerce it.

To go back to the Conway's law I see it as a reverse Conway's law, or how communities are mirrors of the software design of the service they are organized in.</comment>


Flask-Skeleton - a boilerplate for flask - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sean-/flask-skeleton <comment><USER2> I found this gem of a comment in the code that perfectly described what I ended up having to painfully learn on my own:

      # SQL ORM Missive:
      #
      # Don't use models to automatically generate schemas. After iterating several
      # times with SQLAlchemy (and nearly every other ORM from frameworks both long
      # since dead and still trendy), to get a schema "just right" requires
      # entirely too much fiddling in the ORM. My hard earned lesson: SQL is the
      # right dialect to describe your database's structure (read: do not use an
      # ORM to generate DDL). Other than portability, what's the advantage of
      # describing your schema in SQLAlchemy?
      #
      # For as fantastic as SQLAlchemy is, using SQLAlchemy to generate schema is
      # the equivalent of giving yourself a lobotomy while in the middle of
      # attempting to write a Pulitzer Prize article. Why handicap yourself? Use
      # SQLAlchemy for what it excels at: generating efficient SQL based on
      # mappings between Python classes and database tables. Manually generated
      # schema results in a few extra lines of code in a tiny number of files, but
      # it goes a long ways towards clarity, predictability and
      # explicitness. Automatic schema migrations, you say? l2dba or gtfo.
      #
      # Re: PostgreSQL vs other RDBMS'es. Here's another piece of hard earned
      # knowledge from my last 14yrs of dorking with countless websites and
      # databases: portability to other relational databases is a straw man
      # argument. PostgreSQL is faster, more stable, the most standards conformant
      # relational database, is ridiculously feature rich and cheaper to operate
      # than its alternatives (both in terms of operations and efficiency on
      # hardware), and that's the short list of reasons. If you are building a
      # website, I am unable to produce a single fact based, data driven argument
      # to use MySQL[1]. Hiring? Training?  Replication? Feh, that's FUD. Please
      # stop perpetrating harm on your own organization and applications by
      # succumbing to unfounded beliefs and lemmingism.
      #
      # [1] There are three situations where I would use a different relational
      # database. The first two situations are: 1) if my target hosting platform
      # did not support SystemV shared memory, or 2) I am architecting something
      # for an embedded or mobile device. In the former case, I'd change hosting
      # providers or would fire my system administrator, and in the latter, I'd use
      # SQLite. What's the third case? The answer is DB2, but what's the question?

I wish I had read this comment 2 years ago.

<comment><USER3> Gosu [1] has a neat ORM [2][3] that actually parses your SQL .ddl file and creates types based on that. It uses Gosu's "open type system" to create types without any code generation.

[1]: <http://gosu-lang.org> [2]: <https://github.com/akeefer/Tosa> [3]: <http://ronin-web.org/Tosa.html>

I really liked using it over the summer even though it was a little unpolished and lacking some functionality. I suspect it has improved since then; it was being actively developed while I was using it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> After reading the install file, I definitely wouldn't use this.

Aside from the snarky comments about bash, the install directions are rambling, encourage poor practices and are generally just pretty awful

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you have a valid point but from the yes/no discussion that is happening here do you have any recommendations for alternatives? in terms of best practices for Flask App Structure

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really can't recommend that.

<comment><USER6> Out of curiosity (I'm a flask user), would you be able to explain why?

<comment><USER7> I'm also a Flask user, and I honestly don't see anything that might cause alarm, though I've only scanned the code so far.

In fact, it looks much more structured than the majority of my own Flask apps, but usually, by the time an app gets to the size that this already is, I'm either moving or considering moving it all to Django.

<comment><USER7> Actually, yeah, I take it back. I don't know that I'd swear it off altogether, but the INSTALL document is really quite convoluted.

While I appreciate the author's statement on avoiding SQLAlchemy to create models, I know that it can be done, and generally, that's what a person looks for from a framework like this -- to get the fiddly bits right.

It might work or it might not, but it will definitely take awhile, and the comments in the INSTALL doc are seriously snarky.

<comment><USER8> Sure he had fun with the install doc but it looks complete. I would much rather have some snark and complete instructions than an incomplete quick start tutorial.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


PyPy 1.4: Ouroboros in practice - <AUTHOR> http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2010/11/pypy-14-ouroboros-in-practice.html <comment><USER2> Currently testing a CPU intensive algorithm I need for my current research project. Hoping it will save me some time. When I am done I will post the results!

[Edit:]

Pretty good so far!

        ~/stuff/Programming/faultire/src/
        hendersont@glycineportable src $ time pypy sleepytree/test_metricspace.py
        .......
        </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----
        Ran 7 tests in 39.621s

        OK

        real    0m39.675s
        user    0m39.150s
        sys     0m0.170s
        ~/stuff/Programming/faultire/src/
        hendersont@glycineportable src $ time python sleepytree/test_metricspace.py
        .......
        </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----
        Ran 7 tests in 69.442s

        OK

        real    1m9.483s
        user    1m8.970s
        sys     0m0.110s

<comment><USER3> Could you please also run this benchmark compiled with Cython? Thanks,

<comment><USER4> Cython is not (nor is it intended to be) a drop-in Python compiler.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting and promising. PyPy 1.4:

        >>>> t1 = time.time(); a=[x*x for x in xrange(1000000)]; time.time()-t1
        0.38609600067138672
        >>>> t1 = time.time(); a=[x*x+math.sin(x/1000000.) for x in xrange(1000000)]; time.time()-t1
        0.42182803153991699

Python 2.7:

        >>> t1 = time.time(); a=[x*x for x in xrange(1000000)]; time.time()-t1
        0.25005197525024414
        >>> t1 = time.time(); a=[x*x+math.sin(x/1000000.) for x in xrange(1000000)]; time.time()-t1
        0.6075689792633057

Both running in 64-bit on a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo. It looks like PyPy's JIT has some fixed overhead, but can heavily optimize operations once it gets going.

<comment><USER6> There is something strange with the example.

      $ pypy -mtimeit -s'import math; sin=math.sin' \
          '[x*x+sin(x/1e6) for x in xrange(1000000)]'
      10 loops, best of 3: 156 msec per loop

With no division it is slower (?):

      $ pypy -mtimeit -s'import math; sin=math.sin' \
           '[x*x+sin(x) for x in xrange(1000000)]'
      10 loops, best of 3: 188 msec per loop

CPython shows expected behavior:

      $ python2.7 -mtimeit -s'import math; sin=math.sin' \
        '[x*x+sin(x) for x in xrange(1000000)]'
      10 loops, best of 3: 231 msec per loop

      $ python2.7 -mtimeit -s'import math; sin=math.sin' \
        '[x*x+sin(x/1e6) for x in xrange(1000000)]'
      10 loops, best of 3: 253 msec per loop

CPython is faster for tiny cases:

      $ pypy -mtimeit '[x*x for x in xrange(1000000)]'
      10 loops, best of 3: 126 msec per loop

      $ python2.7 -mtimeit '[x*x for x in xrange(1000000)]'
      10 loops, best of 3: 67.3 msec per loop

      $ pypy -mtimeit '[x*x*x for x in xrange(1000000)]'
      10 loops, best of 3: 123 msec per loop

      $ python2.7 -mtimeit '[x*x*x for x in xrange(1000000)]'
      10 loops, best of 3: 118 msec per loop

<comment><USER5> _With no division it is slower (?)_

Very interesting. Looks like sin is faster for arguments less than pi/4 (~=0.7853981633974483):

Edit: "Intel's sin/cos implementation sucks golfballs through gardenhoses for arguments outside of [-pi/4,pi/4]": [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/523531/fast- transcendent-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/523531/fast-transcendent- trigonometric-functions-for-java)

        $ pypy -mtimeit -s'import math; sin=math.sin; a=0.786' '[sin(a) for x in xrange(1000000)]'
        10 loops, best of 3: 395 msec per loop

        $ pypy -mtimeit -s'import math; sin=math.sin; a=0.785' '[sin(a) for x in xrange(1000000)]'
        10 loops, best of 3: 375 msec per loop

        $ python -mtimeit -s'import math; sin=math.sin; a=0.786' '[sin(a) for x in xrange(1000000)]'
        10 loops, best of 3: 177 msec per loop

        $ python -mtimeit -s'import math; sin=math.sin; a=0.785' '[sin(a) for x in xrange(1000000)]'
        10 loops, best of 3: 155 msec per loop

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think this is the first PyPy release that's actually viable to use for me (because of x86-64). Very exciting!

(Hope they catch up with 2.6 - or 2.7 - soon, though.)

<comment><USER8> We have a fast-forward branch that is currently working on moving to Python 2.7.

<comment><USER7> I know, I hope its merging is followed by a quick release. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> >PyPy is a very compliant Python interpreter, almost a drop-in replacement for CPython.

What still works in CPython but not PyPy?

<comment><USER10> Anything that relies on C extensions. Numpy is the biggie for me.

<comment><USER11> 32-bit pypy 1.4 can compile and run some C extensions; they just have to really well-written (not relying on CPython behavior). It can't find documentation for this, so freenode/#pypy is a good place to get details.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sorry to bother people with this question, but I've spent ages searching my internet history for an answer, to no avail:

A few weeks ago someone posted a Python related link on HN. It was some sort of guide or in-depth analysis, with code snippets. The code snippets did not have any syntax colouring. The background of the site was a nice dark/deep green texture (slightly bluish maybe). The top of the page had a sort of golden bookmark icon in the corner.

If anyone remembers that site _please_ let me know the url or the title. I need to find it again.

</comment><comment><USER13> I hope they add support for JIT with the Stackless features.</comment>


How to build a cable to access an iPhone debugger - <AUTHOR> http://www.scmagazine.com.au/News/266133,diy-cable-to-build-better-ios-exploits.aspx

<comment><USER2> FWIW, you've been able to buy these things for at least a year (I own multiple, all purchased).

[http://superioraccessory.com/apple_iphone_serial_data_cable....](http://superioraccessory.com/apple_iphone_serial_data_cable.html)</comment>


New experimental console features in Windows "Threshold" - <AUTHOR> http://withinrafael.com/new-experimental-console-features-in-windows-threshold/

<comment><USER2> This feature alone makes me want to upgrade my Windows computers for the first time in a while.</comment>


Show HN: Grafana Live Streaming Datasource Implementation - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/seanlaff/simple-streaming-datasource <comment><USER2> I saw this presentation at grafanacon and it was awesome. I really hope the team takes this and turns it into a first class feature.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very cool, but real time visualization use cases are surprisingly hard to concoct. Almost any signal worth capturing visually at one second or sooner intervals would be better served through automation.

For example, all SCADA systems already have command and control alerting for instant degradation response.

<comment><USER4> Also think about having a dashboard refresh at 5s with 50k datapoints, literally transferring gigabytes of data to every browser looking at that dashboard. If you streamed the data (even at slow rates) it would be a massive traffic savings.

<comment><USER5> Recently I was looking into Plot.ly Dash ([https://plot.ly/products/dash/](https://plot.ly/products/dash/)) for a Python-based real-time updating dashboard.

...until I noticed that it transfers the entire chart and all the datapoints each update. (example: [https://dash-gallery.plotly.host/dash-live-model- training/](https://dash-gallery.plotly.host/dash-live-model-training/))

<comment><USER6> I'll be honest, before I started working at Plotly I had the same reaction to Dash at first glance, but as I worked with it/on it, I realized that most of the time, this client-server chattiness is not much of a problem from a user perspective, and is a great developer-productivity tradeoff.

More to your point, though, this is something we're trying to address in collaboration with the Dash community, in this PR for example if you want to follow along: [https://github.com/plotly/dash-core- components/pull/461](https://github.com/plotly/dash-core-components/pull/461)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> After having looked at what this actually is, I'm a bit disappointed. I was hopping that they wound change the various panels data API so that they would request only the new time slices; ie. instead of querying the last hour of data every minute, query the last minute every minute and reuse the previous 49 data points. But that's not what this is. Instead, you need a specific panel and a specific data source for streaming to work. :-(

<comment><AUTHOR> This datasource doesn't require any custom panels to function. To your point though, it would be nice if grafana supported incremental time range querying out of the box, since many backends don't support streaming data.

<comment><USER8> Something we are looking at.

Problem is complicated when the query applies time series transformations such as moving averages, where requesting only incremental data can be problematic.</comment></comment></comment>


DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis reveals his darkest moment - m-i-l https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46099587 <comment> m-i-l A couple of quotes I like:

"I think the interesting balance you have got to get right as an entrepreneur is to have a healthy disregard for what people are saying. But the key thing also is, how do you not be delusional as well?"

"You don't want to be 50 years ahead of your time, you want to be five years ahead. ... The classic and most tragic example of that [being too far ahead] is Charles Babbage being 100 years ahead of his time with computers."</comment>


The Six-Fold Nature of Snow - <AUTHOR> http://www.storyofsnow.com/blog1.php/how-the-crystal-got-its-six <comment><USER2> John Baez has a nice post about ice crystals here: [https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/ice/](https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/ice/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I get the following error:

"403 Forbidden

Please stop referer spam.

We have identified that you have been refered here by a known or supposed spammer.

If you feel this is an error, please bypass this message and leave us a comment about the error. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

If you are actually doing referer spam, please note that this website/b2evolution no longer records and publishes referers. Not even legitimate ones! While we understand it was fun for you guys while it lasted, please understand our servers cannot take the load of all this cumulated spam any longer... Thank you.

Also, please note that comment/trackback submitted URLs will be tagged with rel="nofollow" in order to be ignored by search engines."

</comment><comment><USER4> Pdf for those unable to access article [http://www.storyofsnow.com/media/blogs/a/March2011/Why%206%2...](http://www.storyofsnow.com/media/blogs/a/March2011/Why%206%20corners%20on%20snow-%20J%20Nelson.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> Ice 9 is best ice.</comment>


Why it may be illegal for Google to punish that engineer over his now viral memo - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/07/it-may-be-illegal-for-google-to-punish-engineer-over-anti-diversity-memo-commentary.html <comment><USER3> The author's arguments have been completely misrepresented. He pointed out widely-believed and sometimes scientifically-established differences in the _DISTRIBUTION OF_ traits in men and women. He said that those differences make attempts to achieve numerical parity misguided, discriminatory, and harmful. What is his conclusion about how we should behave? "Treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group." Wow, what a monster.

The reaction to the memo is really the most damning thing about the whole affair. Everyone is just rushing to virtue signal, to demonstrate their own purity of thought. They've just proved the author's point.

A particular brand of liberalism has reached the point of being a religion, and the establishment is running an inquisition against any who dare to question its points of dogma.

<comment><USER4> I got people in my circle that seriously called for him to be fired. People I know as being intelligent, even a university professor. Either those people are more warped than I have ever known, and you are right about the dogma. Or they did not read the memo.

It is really shocking to see the misrepresentation of the intent of the memo. I normally stay out of discussion about those topics, it's too dangerous - <USER2> that development is just unacceptable.

<comment><USER5> It's very simple: if you believe that others' fitness or qualification for their jobs, based on flimsy (at best) evo-psych arguments, is a topic that you can legitimately put forward for public debate and discussion, then I believe your fitness or qualification for your job, based on whatever I pull out of my ass, is a topic that can legitimately be put forward for public debate and discussion.

In other words: don't dish it out if you can't take it.

<comment><USER4> I think the spirit of the memo even in that section is perfectly acceptable.

> _Note, I'm not saying that all men differ from all women in the following > ways or that these differences are "just." I'm simply stating that the > distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part > due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don't > see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these > differences are small and there's significant overlap between men and women, > so you can't say anything about an individual given these population level > distributions._

It is also not an extremist position to take, it's the scientific consensus. See [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw) for an example stating the same thing with almost the same words. And that's not coming from someone unqualified.

<comment><USER5> The "scientific consensus" is that women are inherently genetically hard-coded to not be as good at or interested in computer programming?

Because... no. Nobody's demonstrated that. What people have demonstrated are small average differences in performance on certain kinds of test tasks, and then Google dude and you decide that's "scientific consensus" for whatever conclusions you'd like to draw from it.

<comment><USER4> > _The "scientific consensus" is that women are inherently genetically hard- > coded to not be as good at or interested in computer programming?_

I did not say that, did I? The scientific consensus is that there are biological differences that have an influence on job fit and job choices. But we are talking statistics here, there are always people from the other sex that are a good fit for a specific work.

Did you watch the video I linked? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw) . Really, watch it.

Also, the Google memo explicitly did not say that women should not be coders. If you think that, this is the warped media representation of the memo you are talking about, not its actual content.

<comment><USER5> _Also, the Google memo explicitly did not say that women should not be coders._

Sure. The author just wrote it as a purely informative note about biology and genetics, and intended it to have absolutely no relationship to hiring or evaluation in any way, shape or form.

Hint: people don't write up this kind of thing if they think it shouldn't affect hiring and evaluation.

<comment><USER4> I know it is bad style, but I still have to sincerely doubt that you actually read the memo. The author explicitly states what his goals were (a change in which pro-diversity methods to apply, end of positive discrimination, being aware that 50-50 is an unreasonable goal if biological differences exist, focusing on what is right for google instead of what gender ideology dictates, which includes raising diversity though, because that's good for google). I'll end this discussion here, you are either unwilling to read or unwilling to understand the memo, as well as the video I linked.

<comment><USER5> It is terrible style for you and Googlebro to keep asserting a 50/50 quota that _nobody else ever said was the goal_ while insisting that it's your critics who are misrepresenting what was said.

It is also terrible style to be so bad at math as to claim or imply that the tiny observed differences on skills tests would produce the gigantic skew in gender ratio we observe. But hey, just piling up more evidence that he was unqualified for the job anyway, and should be replaced by someone with icky girlskills like, you know, actually being able to research something and think critically about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I read his memo (There is a copy on Gizmodo) and while I saw a lot of what I could educatedly guess looked like flaws in logic or even flaws in his reading of the research I've been unable to find someone who has put the effort in to debunk it thoroughly.

Rather all I've been able to find is the equivalent of _how dare he say these things_.

Does anyone have a link to a good debunking of the whole thesis?

<comment><USER7> There are a few, and I'd suggest you look further, for starters scroll up here: [https://twitter.com/GlennF](https://twitter.com/GlennF). Arguments about gender differences in CS should address the large decline in women's participation around 1984, the relatively better gender balance in other engineering/science majors, or the better gender balance for CS degrees granted in other countries.

Annie Lowrey and others argued institutional effects far outweigh biological or IQ effects; basically, there's a much larger environment of harassment and bias, and Google has so many other levers in its control that the arguments advanced in the paper aren't really salient or important to the situation at Google.

Other folks have argued the vast majority of engineers at Google are doing the equivalent of string concatenation; it's not exactly a difficult or demanding job.

I think one reason people have been so angry about this is that women in the tech industry generally deal with much more harassment and bias than men do, see for example elephantinthevalley.com. To argue these are the biggest issues requires looking past everything in that survey, and implicitly declaring it not that important or salient. Imagine going to Flint, Michigan and arguing that a lack of charter schools are the community's biggest problem; you're going to get some bad reactions.

People also tend not to like it when you suggest they're dumb or inferior.

<comment><USER8> I think it is telling that the only actual reference you provided was to a live Twitter feed. Twitter is not the right venue for _any_ kind of substantive debate about anything, let alone one where the opening salvo is a ten-page document.

<comment><USER9> Twitter is an excellent venue for discussion. It's one thing to complain that you don't like it, and another to pretend it's widely agreed upon as an invalid source.

<comment><USER8> > Twitter is an excellent venue for discussion.

I didn't say it wasn't. Is said it was a bad venue for _substantive debate_. It's a fine venue for banal chitchat and voicing unsubstantiated opinions, which is what makes it so popular because that's a lot easier and more fun than actually diving into the depths of an issue.

<comment><USER9> Absurd. It's a fantastic venue for substantive debate, technical political and mediatic. You're speaking confidently about something you're ignorant about.

<comment><USER10> Can you supply examples?

Twitter, by virtue of being Twitter, is not a good medium for substantive debate. The forum is the most populated one in the entire world. It is amazing for equalizing influence and allowing democratic propagation of information (which would otherwise be under the control of media firms), but this also means the bar for voicing one's opinion is in the Mariana's Trench. Anyone can butt in an derail the debate.

Twitter moderation is also very clearly biased in one direction (if you were to simply compare how often each side's individual account's are banned) and thus not an open medium where those debating can speak freely without consequence.

There's also the greater scheme of digital communications which are notorious for not being in anyway productive.

Debate online just simply does not work with the way human communication biologically evolved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Link to the original memo:

[https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...](https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles- Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm going to invoke Occam's razor here. Let's simplify diversity and just look at height. Let's assume men that are short and men that are tall are biologically equivalent, meaning biological trait that might surface are evenly distributed. Now let's inject 100 men with varying height into the general population, and... Uh oh there's a skew in leadership position and income. Taller men have better positions and have higher income.

People who are taller all have tall coworkers. They work for a boss that's a little bit taller than them. Some of them start thinking that you know this is probably just natural, men who are shorter are just biologically unsuited to be a leader. They aren't aggresive enough and they just don't have as much drive, it's probably just written in their DNA.

The short men no matter how much they perform or how brilliant they are always seem to be sidelined for promotion. Some of them make it pretty far but they're performing 50x compared to their peers, and theyre always sidelined when it comes to executive promotions. Other executives think: "this guy is brilliant but what would people think about us... We better promote the other less brilliant tall guy. We could retain investor confidence."

Some of them break out and try to start a company. They can't get any funding, and no one wants to join their company. People think its a company run by a short guy, this guy is brilliant but he's not going to do well in the long term, so they end up joining start ups that have tall guys.

This network effects over a million times.

Now let's take people's perception, and assume people perceive men and women exactly the same. The catch here is that women are one standard deviation shorter than men. Just from height you'll see a discrepancy between men and women representation in leadership positions.

Let's end height discrimination first.

I believe this is a simpler explanation of the discrepancies in representation.

</comment><comment><USER12> Reading the manifesto felt like going through a less eloquent regurgitation of Jordan Peterson's content. So far I have been unable to disprove Peterson's points and his thoughts process is a very robust way to vet ideas. I a very curious to see if anyone can seriously debunk him.

Edit: Clarified that I meant peterson's points and not the manifesto.

<comment><USER13> It should be noted that for many of his scientific claims, not being able to disprove them says nothing. Being able to prove them is the standard of science. If you take a look at a significant number of peer reviewed studies, I think you will struggle to find any version of his points backed up.

As for his thought process, it seems to be well agreed that his argument very strongly lacks a tight argument and seemed to base itself mostly off of creating stereotypes around gender and political opinions and then proceeding to use those to loosely reason for his points. Neither the stereotypes or his reasoning are very sound.

<comment><USER12> I was talking about Jordan Peterson's content not the manifesto itself. I see now how it would be confusing though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> But allowing it, in the first place, is also no legally sound: [https://medium.com/@scurphey/googles-response-to- employee-s-...](https://medium.com/@scurphey/googles-response-to-employee-s- anti-diversity-manifesto-ignores-workplace-discrimination-law-97c7c729cf86)

<comment><USER15> Clearly, Google must neither fire nor not fire the employee.

<comment><USER14> No, they must fire him. As long as Google don't act, they are complicit; very few would believe their recruiters when they'll talk about D&I, yet keep such bigots on the payroll.

It's just going to cost them more to fire him now that the trashfire is blowing full. They have nobody to blame but their own selves.

<comment><USER16> Complicit of what? Wrongthink?

<comment><USER15> Complicit in creating a toxic work environment where women feel their abilities are under constant suspicion and they are not valued as team members.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It is interesting how aggressively people cite science to back their politics (on both "sides"). IQ distribution by gender is inconclusive. There is structurally valid and statistically significant science backing a higher beta normal distribution for male IQ than female IQ. There are similar studies attempting and failing to reproduce this. I think this is an issue like whether caffiene is healthy (or does it cause cancer? both?). Confounding is strong here (men do more school? are smarter? hormones? DNA? patriarchy? all of them?). I support this because it challenges the irrational tone on diversity of genetics. Why is that better? Isn't diversity of thought better? Are our thoughts simply a product of our skin colour and gender? What does that say about free will or moral development? About progress itself? Don't discriminate, don't hire based on gender or skin colour, do understand the science, don't take anything considered progress at face value, do question everything, don't allow people to bully you for your opinion, do assume that people will judge your actions instead of your intentions, do risk being fired for what you believe, don't be surprised when you get fired.

</comment><comment><USER18> Punishment will happen through less overt means, most likely through (1) slower (or lack of) raises and promotions than the person otherwise would have received, or (2) undesirable team placements.

<comment><USER19> Probably much more direct, including personal threats.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What if he wrote this piece to avoid being fired for something else in the first place? Like incompetence for example. Looks like they cannot fire him for any pre-existing reasons now.

</comment><comment><USER21> scott alexander at slate star codex absolutely kills it with a statistical analysis that supports the memo writer's opinion.

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on- exagger...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated- differences/)

he's also very balanced about his conclusions imho.

</comment><comment><USER22> California is an at-will state, so they could also just fire him for any or no reason.

Someone spreading 10-page manifestos internally is generally toxic no matter which opinion they share. It essentially screams "I know better than any manager I could have possibly discussed this with privately." To boot, this manifesto isn't even tactical.

<comment><USER23> "so they could also just fire him for any or no reason."

Not really. There are tons of things that it would be illegal to fire someone for.

For example, you can't fire someone for trying to start a union. You can't fire someone because of their race. You can't fire someone because they have workplace complaints.

The crux of the argument is that Google may have "punish an employee for communicating with fellow employees about improving working conditions", which is illegal.

Also, "California law prohibits employers from threatening to fire employees to get them to adopt or refrain from adopting a particular political course of action."

Furthermore, "It is unlawful for an employer to discipline an employee for challenging conduct that the employee reasonably believed to be discriminatory, even when a court later determines the conduct was not actually prohibited by the discrimination laws".

These are some interesting argument that I hadn't heard until now. It will be for the courts to decide who is right. But it certainly is not as clear cut as you make it seem.

<comment><USER22> prove it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It is probably worth mentioning that I dislike anti-discrimination laws. A good compromise is to probably limit them to manual labor and the like.</comment>


Gmail outage - <AUTHOR>

Did any one else just experience a miniature gmail outage? or was it just me? <comment><USER2> It was just you.</comment>


24 Amazon workers sent to hospital after robot accidentally unleashes bear spray - <AUTHOR> https://abcnews.go.com/US/24-amazon-workers-hospital-bear-repellent-accident/story?id=59625712 <comment><USER2> The uprising has begun

</comment><comment><USER3> Just add another if man

</comment><comment><USER4> "accidentally"</comment>


Ask HN: First steps to check the security of PHP web-application? - <AUTHOR> Your development team made a web-application and asked you to look for the security. What should be your first steps (both back-end and front-end). Which patterns to search first? <comment><USER2> Basic, basic stuff:

If the app is accessing a database, is it using prepared statements, or concatenated strings?

... are you sure that, even if you are using prepared statements, someone didn't concatenate variables into the statements themselves, perhaps to make column selection or something easier?

If the app is dealing with passwords, is it hashing, rather than encrypting them (or, heaven forbid, storing them in plaintext) and comparing them using hash_equals() rather than directly?

Are there any user-supplied variables being echoed to the browser? If so, and if you're not using a templating engine that does escaping by default, are you _sure_ every single one is properly escaped?

Do exceptions leak information to the browser rather than being logged?

Is every POST request validated using a CSRF token, and are POST requests rate limited?

Is every other type of request which requires elevated privileges validated using some kind of token?

If files are being uploaded to the server, are they being chmodded to be non executable?

... ok, are the filenames being randomized?

... ok, are the filetypes being validated using the file headers and not the mime-types?

Do you have a sane Content Security Policy header?

</comment><comment><USER3> \- will the app be storing users details ?

\- is the app using any vulnerable packages

\- will app be displaying secure content

\- look at what information in logs

Just some off top of my head.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. And if you are given a big piece of source code. And no static/dynamic tools are allowed, only manual review. What should you look at first (PHP based site, authentication for users, online payment, very dynamic web-site).

<comment><USER3> I'd start with the basics

\- are any secrets/credentials visible in plain text?

\- how is input handled (escaping HTML etc)

\- how are headers and cookies being handled if any</comment></comment></comment>