Doctor: ADHD, as currently defined, does not exist - <AUTHOR> http://time.com/25370/doctor-adhd-does-not-exist/ <comment><USER2> I feel like this headline is terribly irresponsible. People with mental health issues suffer from a stigma associated with them, as well as denial of their suffering.

Going out with both guns blazing to say their condition _does not exist_ \- not that it's a symptom of a larger problem, or that it's a gross oversimplification of a number of unrelated diseases, but instead the crude headline "doesn't exist" \- that only makes the situation worse.

There are many people out there who need stimulant medication to function properly in their lives for very good reasons. Yes, their attention deficit may be a symptom of a complex problem, but the fact is that _it exists_.

Unless you have a better idea how to treat it, I don't see what this kind of article accomplishes beyond making it harder for anyone to take the condition seriously.

<comment><USER3> Saying that a certain medical condition doesn't exist isn't a denial of the suffering of people who suffer, it's a denial of the label that's been placed on that suffering.

As long as an attack on bad science continues to be interpreted by a segment of sufferers as a personal attack, sufferers groups will never exist as anything other than tools for drug companies to subvert the scientific process.

<comment><USER2> Imagine reading an article on punctuated equilibrium with the headline "Darwin is Wrong". Technically true, but WTF? Or a discussion of potential side- effects of the H1N1 vaccine with the headline "Vaccines Kill People".

Just because it's _true_ doesn't mean you don't need some tact.

Also, I notice you've assumed I'm a sufferer. You might want to put away the "jump to conclusions mat" and maybe just try having a little empathy?

<comment><USER3> >Also, I notice you've assumed I'm a sufferer.

Where did you notice that? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_transparency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_transparency)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some folks are missing the point.

Both the definition of ADHD and the treatment plan for it (in North America) are broken. In France, just 0.5% of children suffer from ADHD (opposed to ~5% in North America), and with those children they find the root cause of the issue and deal with that. They tend to shy away from medication. This is, more often than not, the proper treatment option for behavioural issues.

People need to realize the DSM, in its current state, is a massive cash cow for Big Pharma. When it comes to ADHD specifically, they needed a bigger market, welcome Adult ADHD.

Finally, I realize a lot of people suffer from attention issues. I don't disagree that these things need to be dealt with, but a catch-all diagnosis isn't really the way to do that. I'm much more interested in finding the actual problem, and fixing that.

<comment><USER5> I'm French, have ADHD and had to discover by my own at 28 years old that it was an existing condition. I guess (hope) it's better recognized nowadays but still I suspect it's underdiagnosed and also you only have access to Ritalin and Concerta as possible medication with many restrictions to fulfill a prescription.

Yet it's often presented in the media as "the obey pill that Americans give to their children".

As a coincidence there is currently a shortage of Concerta until mid-April ... great.

<comment><USER4> By no means am I saying that ADHD isn't a thing, shouldn't be treated, and doesn't require drugs in some cases.

I'm sorry to hear about your circumstances, and hope things are going alright for you now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article is dangerously mistitled.

That multiple actual mental health conditions exist that all have been labeled ADHD is well known by the research community. There are multiple causative factors that can lead to ADHD symptoms, and what have traditionally been referred to as different subtypes of ADHD respond to different types of treatment.

This is hardly news! It is also where there are multiple treatment strategies for ADHD, until we get a better naming scheme in place (and make no mistake, the lack of proper names impacts both communication and how we think about the problem), we are stuck with using the catch all term ADHD. (Though some people have split into using ADHD-PI from primarily inattentive, it often doesn't respond to stimulant treatment at all.)

Now I fundamentally disagree with the author's final assertion that "everyone is misdiagnosed" is pure BS.

Primary evidence is that there are structural brain differences in people who have ADHD. The portion of the brain responsible for self control is dramatically smaller. Arguing that "it isn't real" when there is literally missing brain matter is disingenuous at best.

Next up, people with untreated ADHD have _THREE TIMES_ the rates of auto accidents.

Now, maybe, just maybe, ADHD isn't real at all, and instead psychologists have spent their time and energy coming up with the best auto insurance risk test ever!

But I doubt it.

</comment><comment><USER7> My suggested title/tldr: ADHD is a symptom, not a disease.

It's an interesting article, but that title is going to derail conversation.

<comment><USER8> But that's always been the case. They don't understand the root cause or have a definitive test for the symptoms (except recent qEEG tests).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Terrible title. Especially since there are actually people who believe that the title is true in the literal sense. The fact that we can further subdivide something based on etiology or any other criteria doesn't mean that it does not exist.

<comment><USER10> It's amazing how many people here are skipping the qualifier in the title, taking it as "ADHD does not exist".

<comment><USER11> That is the title of both the original time.com article and the book written by its author. The qualifier "as currently defined" is only on HN.

<comment><USER10> Oh, you're right.

That's odd considering how rigorously titles on HN are changed to match the original.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This article is so potentially harmful, even if it's more nuanced than the hyperbolic "ADHD Doesn't Exist" title would suggest.

The reality is that -- whatever the underlying cause -- a lot of people struggle with attention span issues, and that these issues cause a lot of pain and unfulfilled potential.

Even if ADHD medications are overprescribed Band-Aids, people benefit from them. We should try and find better diagnoses and treatments, but it makes no sense to blast people by telling them their condition "doesn't exist."

If I have one complaint about the way we treat ADHD it's a lack of education for patients. The medication is only one part of the solution and in my personal experience it's nowhere near the biggest piece. Diet, environment, sleep, and exercise are just as crucial... but these are things I figured out on my own, not anything my doctors mentioned.

      Firstly, addiction to stimulant medication is not
      rare; it is common. The drugs' addictive qualities
      are obvious. We only need to observe the many patients
      who are forced to periodically increase their dosage if
      they want to concentrate.

This true but disingenuous at best because it omits perspective in a way that borders on maliciousness. Adderall causes only a very mild dependence according to all studies I've ever read. The FDA and my personal experiences agree. I've discontinued my Adderall on a number of occasions (by responsibly tapering it down to 0mg over several days) and it was no problem.

To compare it to something most of us are familiar with: I found Adderall much easier to discontinue than caffeine, a thing I've never been able to quit. (I've never smoked, so I can't compare with nicotine)

And to all those who say ADHD is a matter of "willpower..."

Maybe. For some.

I always told myself that too. I was born in 1976 so I went through school here in the USA right before they started diagnosing ADHD left and right and I was labeled a procrastinator instead. I never even really heard of ADHD until I was out of school.

After four years in college, which were a mix of promise and opportunities torpedoed by procrastination, I worked 10, 12, 14-hour days to finish work that I was more than talented enough to finish in 5 or 6 hours. My happiness suffered, health suffered, and relationships died.

Then I finally admitted that maybe it was a little more than a willpower issue. If it a matter of lacking willpower, why was I at the damn office trying to work long after everybody else had left? Whatever the hell my problem was, it wasn't work ethic.

So I sought treatment... at the age of 32. And while medication was only an imperfect yet valuable part of the solution, my life has been on track again for a number of years.

<comment><USER13> To play devils advocate, I think its possible that ADHD as a title is more harmful. Letting people fall into a self-fulfilling prophecy that may or may not have occurred otherwise.

You say you were more than talented enough to finish said work in 5-6 hours but couldn't. To me that sounds like you thoroughly did not enjoy it and thus got distracted and 'procrastinated'. Why did you choose to work in an office if it was making you so unhappy?

It sounds like the drugs helped you live your life in an office setting, and is helping you get your life on that specific track.

I personally think there are a lot of societal pressures that makes one feel forced into a situation where they do not thrive.

But everyone around says that `you` have a specific problem. Why can't it be the other way around, everyone else doesn't fit to you?

These drugs seem to work great to make you live like everyone else. But why is that good? More boldly, why are the ADHD symptoms bad? Some of the most successful people probably exhibit these symptoms.

<comment><USER14> I've found the opposite. About 6 months ago, I began to suspect I had ADHD. I went for help, and was diagnosed about a month ago. I haven't used it as an excuse, on the contrary I am now able to understand and catch my symptoms in the framework of the disorder. Maybe an analogy is trying to run while having different length legs. Once you realise this reality, you are able to understand, compensate, and adjust.

I do think there is a component of ADHD treatment that is trying to 'fit in' to a society that doesn't think the same way the person with ADHD does. But there are big impacts on people's lives independent of society. And its not easy to always be "different", disruptive, and/or inattentive to people around you.

<comment><USER12> I feel the same way. And congratulations on your progress!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The author could have just as easily written "Cancer, as currently defined, does not exist" or "Arthritis, as currently defined, does not exist".

In all of these cases, the the catch-all phrase is used to describe a handful of similar symptoms that stem from a wild variety of causes.

This is why we won't be curing cancer any time soon. We may cure a specific type of cancer, but we're going to have to cure each type of cancer in a specific a relevant way.

If the author wanted to say "ADHD is actually a catch-all term for a variety of root causes that would be better treated with specificity" I would be all over that. But, hey, page views.

</comment><comment><USER16> The author appears to have a philosophical issue with the DSM itself, more than a useful argument. One could make the same complaint about many of the conditions defined in the DSM. The DSM faces an insurmountable challenge in attempting to taxonomize mental issues. In "reality" next to none of the syndromes and disorders there "exist", except in terms of collections of symptoms and treatments, and assumptions about what's "normal".

Honestly nothing he says goes against anything anyone who's done even a cursory study of ADHD will already know. But he leaves out a lot that folks without much familiarity with ADHD won't already know, such as that many people with ADHD take medicines other than stimulants: anti-depressants, blood pressure medicines. A lot of drugs have been found to address the underlying problems, and each class works differently in different people.

The fact is that, like every other aspect of brain chemistry and function, we understand very very little about ADHD. That doesn't mean that it doesn't exist or that people with the disorder should stop taking medicine that works for them. It means we need to study it more to find out how to better describe and explain all the intricate connections between behavior, diet, genetics, environment, sleep, screens, family, school, work, weather, vitamins, and drugs interplay to create what we now call ADHD.

<comment><USER17> > The author appears to have a philosophical issue with the DSM itself

I find that hard to believe. He argues that some cases of ADHD are caused by bipolar disorder and depression, which have DSM definitions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It might be better to say that the current definition of ADHD is grossly inadequate. The problems start from issues as basic as treating ADHD as one monolithic "thing," when in fact it is a symptom that can arise from many different diseases, some of which respond better to different medications than others, and some of which do not respond to medication at all. By treating them all as a single disease, we do almost all of their sufferers a grave disservice.

<comment><USER10> > It might be better to say that the current definition of ADHD is grossly > inadequate.

Isn't that why the qualifier ', as currently defined,' is in the title?

EDIT: watwut pointed out to me elsewhere that the qualifier is only on HN and not in the original title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> QUOTE "For my second group of patients, who have severe attention issues, I make them undergo a full evaluation to find the source of the problem. Usually, once the original condition is found and treated, the ADHD symptoms go away."

And, when the original condition is the required 14 or so traits of ADHD, which using your "over 20" treatments do not solve, do you decide this is non- ADHD with ADHD Symptoms ?

asshole.

</comment><comment><USER20> This man is peddling a book. I'm not saying that precludes his correctness but it does mean that the more analytical of us should apply a little more salt to our appraisal of his motivations than a journalist might.

<comment><USER21> Exactly what I was thinking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Counterpoint: "ADHD and Brain Chemistry", by Steven Novella: [http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/adhd-and- brain-...](http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/adhd-and-brain- chemistry/)

Also, except on the same topic from the podcast "The Skeptics Guide to the Universe": [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MLdvKzLl6k](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MLdvKzLl6k)

</comment><comment><USER23> Experts like this jackass and Andrew Wakefield should be held accountable for criminal misconduct when the publish crap like this.

Sensationalistic 'findings' that lack a concise scientific method that have an ulterior motive are harmful to those people that expect information from experts to be presented without bias.

</comment><comment><USER24> Horse shit.

There's lots of very well-vetted science supporting the problem of ADHD and attention span disorders. Ditto for the pharmaceutical interventions that are the main-line treatment for them (amphetamine is one of the most well-studied drugs in existence).

Sad to see Time sinking to clickbait headlining.

</comment><comment><USER8> > "It's time to rethink our understanding of this condition, offer more > thorough diagnostic work, and help people get the right treatment for > attention deficit and hyperactivity."

What condition? Doesn't the title say this condition doesn't exist? This article is just trying to sell his book.

Besides the fact that qEEG has shown differences in activity in adults that identify with having ADHD.

<comment><USER25> Article authors often have no input on the how their piece is titled, so I would not be so quick to judge the journalist.

<comment><USER8> That's the title of the guy's book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Pretty funny. Just yesterday I was at Barnes and Noble checking out some Malcolm Gladwell books in the psychology section and right next to them was a book with the title _ADHD Does Not Exist_. I didn't get a chance to take a peek at it because I was too occupied reading the first couple of pages from Gladwell's _Blink_ which was pretty captivating.

</comment><comment><USER27> In my research, ADHD seems to be basically inflammation[1] of the brain. Think: bacteria, free radicals, active immune response, underactive detox and circulation, etc.

Some approaches which are most useful seem to be: Magnesium, Green Tea &/OR L-Theanine, GABA, SAMe, Milk Thistle, Fish Oil, Cholesterol, Vitamin D (Sunlight), etc.

I would say there is no silver bullet. But I would say unambiguously that vitamins and minerals and occasionally herbs are low hanging fruit compared to a pharmaceutical approach. Drugs aren't used as "building blocks" in cells or biochemistry. Drugs modulate various activity in our body which can help but typically is not without some kind of side effect or not as affective as providing enough of the "raw materials" our body needs.

Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder definitely exists although the way it's predominately treated really doesn't help solve the deeper causes of the disorder.

[1] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24240495](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24240495)

<comment><USER12> I don't doubt that inflammation is one of the myriad things that can cause attention issues.

One thing to realize re: supplements is that, by biological design, it's _really_ hard to get chemicals into your brain simply by digesting them.

There are a lot of steps between eating something and it winding up in your brain.

I mean, the very first thing that happens to ingested items is a bath in the insane mixture of acid and bacteria that is your stomach. A lot more has to happen before it even reaches your brain-blood barrier, which is a thing specifically designed by evolution to keep things out of your brain.

<comment><USER27> The mechanisms of action that I'm referring to don't depend upon physically transporting molecules into the brain. Also, as it turns out, even inflammation in your gut or elsewhere changes the signals that the nerves send to the brain. And levels of neurotransmitters in the brain are absolutely impacted by what's going on in the rest of the body...regardless of the BBB.

What specific point are you trying to make about the Blood-Brain Barrier? And stomach acid? Sorry but neither of those things somehow render the foods and chemicals we ingest meaningless! Your HCL won't somehow break down Magnesium! Even Vitamins will mostly make it through intact.

I'm not a scientist but I don't get my information from Men's Health magazine either...I research reputable scientific studies and make reasonable connections.

<comment><USER12>
      Sorry but neither of those things somehow render the
      foods and chemicals we ingest meaningless!

Nobody's saying that. The things we ingest have a profound influence on us.

However, the connection between our brains and the things we inject is extremely circuitous. "Reasonable connections" often don't apply, and things we do might often have the opposite effect of the one we intend.

All that said, I think personal experimentation with supplements (within safe limits) is a very good thing. I have tried a bunch!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is ADHD considered a disability? If so, looking at the timeframe (2008-2012), and the population segment (young adults), this could be the product of a backdoor welfare program, where ADHD diagnoses are the fig leaf employed.

<comment><USER29> I don't think so, as far as receiving financial assistance for mental health conditions in the US. In fact except for developmental disorders and conditions involving psychoses (schizophrenia), I've heard that it is quite difficult to get any sort of assistance, regardless of how severely your life has been affected, without a good lawyer at least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I remember reading an interesting hypothesis of adhd being an evolutionary trait/advantage, anyone know anything about this? I have not been able to find it.

</comment><comment><USER31> A doctor? Intelligent discussion doesn't start with "one guy thinks". Authority is not a reason for scientific conclusion.

</comment><comment><USER32> Modern civilization has certainly invented ADHD. It used to be that if you had ADHD, you probably weren't a banker, lawyer or politician. You certainly would not work in a cubicle and rot away all day. You also lived 15 years longer than your sedentary counterpart. You would do a more physical job. Physical work often creates the necessary stimulation that so many of these _ADHD_ cases need.

The argument that _it just isn 't fair_ that someone's mind is more suited for a desk job than someone else, so we should put them on equal footing by administering drugs the rest of their lives is a flawed and slippery slope mentality. Do we say the same the same thing for aspiring athletes who weren't born with the muscle mass to play pro football? "Lets make things fair and pump this kid full of roids so he can be an all pro linebacker"...

Severe ADHD sufferers I agree should be given medication, but the majority That I personally know (some of whom I worked with before and after meds) should just have changed careers. They still have problems while on the meds and also have to deal side effects from the mind altering drug they are using. Those I know who have either pursued alternate careers, or switched are much happier overall.

Imagine that, doing what traditionally, naturally was done leads to greater happiness... Wow

<comment><USER12> Physical work isn't necessarily easier for those with ADHD than desk jobs. In high school and college I had some physical jobs. Those jobs are often menial, and the monotony and repetition are really the opposite of what those with ADHD (especially those with ADHD and high intelligence) are "naturally" suited for.

      Do we say the same the same thing for aspiring athletes
      who weren't born with the muscle mass to play pro
      football?

We don't "pump them full of steroids" because unlike the (admittedly imperfect) ADHD treatments we have now, muscle-building steroids have negative side effects that greatly outweigh their benefits.

We _do_ give them the best medical care possible. If an aspiring athlete breaks a leg or has plantar fasciitis, we treat those things. We don't just say, "guess you weren't meant to be an athlete."

      It used to be that if you had ADHD, you probably weren't a
      banker, lawyer or politician.

Yeah, and if you had bad eyesight, you were probably steered away from those professions as well.

And if you were left-handed people assumed you were under demonic influence or something.

And if you were dyslexic people assumed you were stupid.

I'm glad people like me are winning against people like you.

<comment><USER32> > _Physical work isn 't necessarily easier for those with ADHD than desk jobs. > In high school and college I had some physical jobs. Those jobs are often > menial, and the monotony and repetition are really the opposite of what > those with ADHD (especially those with ADHD and high intelligence) are > "naturally" suited for._

You simply had the wrong type of physical jobs. There are physical jobs that are mentally challenging as well.

> _We don 't "pump them full of steroids" because unlike the (admittedly > imperfect) ADHD treatments we have now, muscle-building steroids have > negative side effects that greatly outweigh their benefits._

OK then change steroids to HGH.

> _We do give them the best medical care possible. If an aspiring athlete > breaks a leg or has plantar fasciitis, we treat those things. We don 't just > say, "guess you weren't meant to be an athlete."_

Apples to oranges. Bones heal naturally. ADHD does not go away by "resting".

> _Yeah, and if you had bad eyesight, you were probably steered away from > those professions as well.

And if you were left-handed people assumed you were under demonic influence or something.

And if you were dyslexic people assumed you were stupid.

I'm glad people like me are winning against people like you._

I see you are missing the point. How about this. In 20 years, 90% of people working in office jobs are taking ADHD medication Only 5% of them really have ADHD, but the rest have learned that they can concentrate longer and be more productive by using it. Now those with ADHD are no better off (on a relative scale) than those before these medications were invented. They often cannot compete with their non ADHD counterparts and lose their jobs (just like before ADHD meds came around). As a side effect, now billions of people on earth are taking a drug everyday that alters various things in their mind. They no longer think naturally and with the rational that they were born with. You think that this is good? This is where we are heading.

Like I said in another post, in those I know who changed careers VS those who take drugs every day, the ones who changed careers are far happier and have better quality of life mentally and physically.

Don't you want to be happier? Blame yourself and this system which has nudged you out of your natural path.

<comment><USER12> I think you're hinging a lot on this incredibly faulty belief:

      [Users of ADHD medication] no longer think naturally and
      with the rational that they were born with. You think that
      this is good?

So which chapter of Scientology do you belong to?

Stimulants are, of course, psychoactive substances and nobody denies that, but you're blowing this so far out of proportion that you have zero credibility.

I bet you have lovely opinions about antidepressants and antianxiety medication as well. I suppose those people, too, should also just find lines of work that value depressed and/or anxious people just like Xenu intended.

<comment><USER32> > _I think you 're hinging a lot on this incredibly faulty belief:_

First of all, this is not MY belief alone. It is listed among the side effects on the side of the box. Further studies have pretty much conclusively agreed that these drugs do affect reason and rational.

> _I bet you have lovely opinions about antidepressants and antianxiety > medication as well. I suppose those people, too, should also just find lines > of work that value depressed and /or anxious people just like Xenu > intended._

These are proven to be even worse of course. The sad thing is that many people who are on them do not need to be. This is like taking morphine when you have a broken leg and continuing to walk on it so it cannot heal, vs setting the bone and casting/resting it.

Also funny you should mention depressed people changing lines of work. A high percentage (over 10%) of people put on antidepressants have been found to have very low levels of vitamin D (something they never would have had if working outside). Many of them were also overweight and very out of shape. Many others were also later diagnosed with S.A.D. Something that people working outside rarely experience.

Antidepressants and ADHD drugs are often given as a quick fix. There are often alternatives that can fix the actual problem rather than mask the symptoms. That is all I am saying. You don't seem to be able to accept this fact, so out conversation must end here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Did ADHD exist when people were hunter-gatherers? If not, it is not a real disorder in my book.

</comment><comment><USER32> Lets get half the population on ADHD Drugs, then the other half on Anti- depressants. Then we as individuals don't actually have to deal with any personal challenges, not even controlling the growing, intrusive and overreaching power of government.</comment>


The Founder's Workbook - Companion to The Startup Owner's Manual by Blank/Dorf - <AUTHOR> http://www.zoomstra.com/foundersworkbook/ <comment><AUTHOR> We're very excited to partner with Steve and Bob to release The Founder's Workbook. It's an interactive step-by-step guide to growing a successful startup following the approach that they wrote about in The Startup Owner's Manual. If you're familiar with Steve Blank and Bob Dorf, you know the quality of their content. Let me know if you have any questions.

</comment><comment><USER2> I made the payment, they said they will send the login information, but it's a half an hour already.

Is it scam?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not a scam at all. As soon as Amazon tells us about a transaction, we send out the login info. Sometimes Amazon delays notifying us until the purchase has passed their security check (often non-US payments fall into this category).

Drop me a message with the email you used to make the purchase and I'll look into it and get right back to you (here: <http://www.zoomstra.com/contact.php>).

<comment><USER2> ok.

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Thank you!

<comment><AUTHOR> No problem! Thanks for circling back and letting us know it arrived.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> nice!

</comment><comment><USER4> Oh cool - you can add your own notes as you go along. Nice!

</comment><comment><USER5> Looking good!

</comment><comment><USER6> d.o.p.e</comment>


More on the Political Economy of Permahawkery - <AUTHOR> http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/09/20/more-on-the-political-economy-of-permahawkery <comment><USER2> You know, my entire life I've been trying to figure out why high interest rates and low inflation are always desired by the rich who control the United States. This is the first credible article I've read to explain it.</comment>


There have been 11 US school shootings this year. Is it time to arm teachers? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42804741 <comment><USER2> Proponents of guns as "defense" are always _so sure_ that, if only they had a weapon, they'd take care of a shooter. The fundamental problem with this is that it is likely to do a lot more damage from added chaos.

You probably _will not_ be in a focused frame of mind in a crisis, and you probably _will not_ have the best aim (despite your normal skill). And, if you're obviously armed, there is a better chance that _you'll look like the perpetrator_ to any bystander or police trying to make sense of the situation. This will divide resources as people try to figure out exactly who it is they're trying to take down.

And guess what, if your dream comes true and you're allowed to be an armed civilian, then you probably won't be the _only_ armed bystander in the next crisis. If there are 3 or more people all pulling out weapons and all looking like The Shooter, what then; will these people become confused and try to shoot each other? And when they miss, will there be even more casualties? And will the police actually figure out who the real shooter is, or just shoot all the armed people to make sure they have control of the situation?

There are _so many problems kids have_ that could be addressed before we make society even more militaristic. Poverty? Racism? Bullying? Domestic abuse? Poor investment in education, making schools worse places than they ought to be?

</comment><comment><USER3> In the 2011 Tuscon shooting [1] (the one where Gabby Giffords was badly injured), Joe Zamudio, one of the people who helped subdue the shooter, was carrying a concealed weapon and nearly shot the wrong guy. [2] Ultimately the shooter was completely subdued without the use of firearms.

The conclusion that I draw from this incident and many others is that it would be more effective to train people to take down shooters by hand, and there would be considerably less chance of serious collateral damage because an armed bystander didn't know what he or she was doing.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Tucson_shooting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Tucson_shooting)

[2] [http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_natur...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2011/01/friendly_firearms.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Asking a teacher to shoot a kid, even a kid who is shooting others, is asking too much in my book. And I say that as someone pretty firmly opposed to gun control.

We need to stop shoehorning kids into high schools that assume that kids are either college-bound, or losers destined for welfare (if they even graduate). There is nothing worse for a kids' self esteem than forcing him to participate in something that he's systematically excluded from.

At my high school, if you were not college bound, you got no attention from career or guidance counselors, and were pretty much written off unless you were gifted athletically.

</comment><comment><USER5> Strange how the policies posited by conservatives to stop "terrorism" never apply to school shootings.

Racial profiling (most of these school shooters are white!!), extreme unfettered surveillance of children, running sting operations to offer mentally disabled children $250,000 to agree to commit school shootings and then arresting them (as in the Newburgh Sting Operation: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Newburgh_Sting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Newburgh_Sting)). These should all work just as well, right?

Why does the US, particularly, have a problem with suicide attacks like this? No other place in the world has a problem like this with the kind of political and economic stability that the US has (regrettably, in countries that are constantly in war or political flux, these kinds of attacks are more common, see Ireland during the height of the IRA for example).

</comment><comment> King-Aaron You know, while correlation doesn't necessarily equate to causation, it has to be said... There hasn't been a gun-related massacre here in Australia since we took away semi automatic and automatic firearms. I don't know when the last time a child here even accidentally shot someone else with their parents firearm either, I don't recall hearing of it in recent times.

Arming teachers _will not solve anything_ while there is a culture of gun violence in the country. In fact, I see this as making it worse. They're talking about actively desensitising adults to shoot at a child. Even seasoned soldiers have problems in that scenario.

</comment><comment><USER6> Instead of arming teachers how about using webrtc to bring the classroom into the home? Its less money to give every kid a chromebook than to buy guns, ammo and weapons training for every teacher.

<comment><USER7> It seems to me that the actual benefit of good teachers is not usually conveying information, but rather motivating students. And proximity plays a big part in that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yep, anything but gun control!! /s

<comment> King-Aaron I know that it's policy to downvote sarcastic/non-constructive comments, but this is fairly poignant I feel. How on earth can someone come to the conclusion to arm teachers and effectively train an adult to shoot a child, instead of just controlling the supply of high-powered and semi automatic firearms.</comment></comment>


Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy - <AUTHOR> http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html <comment> buff-a Great, informative read. Have to complain about this bit tho:

 _But learning from experience is the worst possible way to learn something. Learning from experience is one up from remembering. That's not great. The best way to learn something is when someone else figures it out and tells you: "Don't go in that swamp. There are alligators in there."_

Works great for avoiding alligators. Fails miserably for riding bikes.

<comment><USER2> I dunno about that. I think it's probably easier to learn to ride a bike with someone experienced helping you.

If someone sets up the seat for you and explains how to shift and brake and rides with you a little bit, I'm sure learning would go much faster than if you were just left in a driveway with a bike and told to figure it out.

<comment><USER3> When learning to ride a bike brakes and shifters are really irrelevant. You're going to crash anyway.

As for how I learned to ride, my dad took me to a hill, sat me on the bike and pushed me down. I learned how to ride pretty quick...well until I hit a small stump hidden by the grass.

After that I was mostly fine and learned to ride pretty quick.

<comment> buff-a Indeed.

If you want a kid to learn to ride a bike, remove the fear of failure. Do it on a gently sloping grassy hill that levels out, for example.

When I first learned to ice skate I learned that falling on ice fucking hurts. I didn't learn to ice skate. I learned to not fall over. Then my friend dressed me up in his team's goalie's pads - I pretty much bounced back up again if I fell over. By the end of an hour I could do the sprint exercises with the team and keep up (over short distances anyway!).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yes, it's a good read, but it's eight years old (not that old is bad, just that it's not "news") and this essay has appeared in many places over the years, including the book "Best of Software Writing I", edited by Joel Spolsky.

</comment><comment><USER5> LambdaMOO is a fascinating virtual world. Users are allowed to expand the virtual world by building areas, and users with the Programmer Bit are also allowed to program new objects and areas.

<comment><USER6> Is there any MUD/MUSH/MOO where this _doesn't_ happen? SMAUG allows you to do that as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A recklessness on the part of the author within an otherwise thought-provoking set of ideas: his analogy concerning Calvinism and the "Book of Revelations" limps badly for a strawman. Evidently, not much time was spent reading John Calvin's "Brève Instruction chrétienne" (Brief Outline of the Christian Faith) nor "Revelation" (singular).

<comment><USER8> Mind expanding your thoughts there?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thanks for that, the full text is a much better read than Jeff's cut down version.</comment>


Font Awesome: The iconic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap - <AUTHOR> http://fortaweso.me/font-awesome

<comment><USER2> Love it, but am I the only one looking for an "icon-phone"? Pretty please.</comment>


Source code for Zork, Hitchhiker's Guide, and other Infocom games - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/historicalsource?tab=repositories <comment><USER2> Hitchhikers Guide was one of the first PC games I ever got. I had no idea it was a "text adventure." Nor did I understand it was based on a book.

My dad got it for me used from The Computer Club in downtown Lake Oswego, Oregon. I picked it out largely due to the green guy on the front of the box.

I remember being delighted by all the weird stuff it came with, including a small packet of fuzz, and other artifacts from the story. I didn't know why they were in the box but it was weird and that appealed to me.

Even though I was raised by Nintendo games like RC Pro AM, I spent many hours trying to figure out how to advance in HG. Often starting over from scratch.

Eventually, I got the book, read it and attempted the game again, and though the context made it more fun, I think I still got stuck somewhere around where you put the Babel fish in your ear.

<comment><USER3> It is an extremely difficult game. In theory, I know the answer to all the puzzles, however, there are so many ways to lose without realizing it that I've never managed to string together a single play session in which I do it correctly. Though I've also long since stopped trying. :)

For instance, there are subareas where you must collect various tools. Many of these are themselves rather fragile affairs, easy to ruin. At the end of the game, to open a door, you will be asked for a certain random tool. However, this is not a matter of collecting 8 out of 10 tools and having an 80% chance at the end; if you are missing even a single one, the game will draw its random selection from the tools you do not have. IIRC this is also after a point-of-no-return.

The Babel fish puzzle is another example of the evilness of the game. While this one _is_ possible to complete without a guide, it isn't possible to complete it on your first attempt. There is a machine that will vend the Babelfish. It will fail in various ways, such as vending the fish into areas you can't get to if you don't block that direction. You have a limited number of tries before the Vogons come to get you and it's a game over if you don't have the fish at that point. However, the amount of time you have is not sufficient to go through the loop of trying the machine, fixing the problem it reveals, trying the machine again, fixing the next problem, etc. There are simply too many problems and not enough time. You have to simply memorize/write down the solutions once, then next time directly implement them in what would appear to be a psychic manner next game. (There's also an early "silent failure" state here; if you did not pick up the junk mail from your house, you lose here.)

If you wrote down an objective standard to measure an adventure or text game by, such as "should not have unlabeled no-win situations", or "should be solvable on the first play (even if hard)", or other such things, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text game would flagrantly fail most of them. Whether it's a _bad game_ , I leave that to the reader, but it certainly breaks a lot of rules.

<comment><USER4> Frankly, this sounds like terribly punishing game design. Why did so many players put up with it? Was there really nothing better?

<comment><USER5> The other responses about difficult Infocom games are all accurate, but it's worth noting that Hitchhiker's Guide in particular played this as _comedy_. There were genuinely tough puzzles, but there were also lots of elements which essentially pulled the rug out from under the player to amuse them with unreasonable demands. Broadly, the game didn't feel as fundamentally _hard_ as many of its contemporaries. Instead, it felt like competing against an obstinate and sarcastic opponent, so failing repeatedly was exasperating and funny instead of aggravating.

For instance, lots of early text games required tricky-to-identify commands for technical reasons, like the myriad ways to phrase "use key on door". Mostly, that was just frustrating and accepted because there was nothing better. _Hitchhiker 's Guide_ came late enough to parse language somewhat more gracefully, so it replayed that trope as parody by occasionally requiring absurd phrasings for basic commands. "Take aspirin" didn't work, but "get buffered analgesic" (a phrase the game did present to you) did. And then the rest of the time, it went back to fairly normal naming standards so as not to irritate the player.

As a horribly-dated example: _Battletoads_ is infamous as one of the hardest platform games in history, but it was challenging by simply taking the standard play elements of a game like Mario and making them excessively tight and demanding. _Syobon Action_ is also infamously difficult, but its gameplay is (often) relatively forgiving. The challenge comes from suspending normal conventions of games like making threats visible and giving consistent behavior to objects. Putting any one instance of that style in a normal game would be a ridiculous design error, but Syobon is built on escalating that unfairness to the point of humor, and openly demands trial and error as the way to progress.

<comment><USER6> +1 - Another great example of difficult games as parody is I Wanna Be The Guy ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Wanna_Be_the_Guy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Wanna_Be_the_Guy)). Take all the existing conventions and stereotypes of difficult platform games and exaggerate them to the extreme.

<comment><USER5> IWBTG is another great example, definitely. And almost the exact same type of classic-NES parody, where Mario:Syobon::Metroid:IWBTG.

Thinking about it a little more, this pattern seems to describe an entire class of games, including non-parodies. _Dark Souls_ is famously hard because of sheer mechanical difficulty, certainly. But it's also rife with learnable, low-threat moments like "when you walk up this staircase, a boulder will fall on you from offscreen". They don't alter the overall difficulty too much, but they clearly convey that the game isn't honoring standard design principles about giving the player a "fair chance". In an odd way, it makes later departures like "the illusory wall doesn't have anything marking its location" feel more justified.

<comment><USER7> When you put it that way, I can almost see the brokenness of the controller support in the PC port as part of the joke. Almost ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is the correct link, not the one on the HN post: [https://github.com/historicalsource?tab=repositories](https://github.com/historicalsource?tab=repositories)

As a zipfile because someone is bound to get that repo taken down.

[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S1CgtZNEKS8VITqTAWAkeyO0LBf...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S1CgtZNEKS8VITqTAWAkeyO0LBf4ninh/view?usp=sharing)

<comment><USER9> not likely to be taken down as the CEO tweeted about it: [https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1118057606159798274](https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1118057606159798274)

<comment><USER10> I love how a tongue-in-cheek reply about the lack of syntax highlighting for ZIL files drew the attention of someone who _actually_ implemented syntax highlighting for it.

[https://twitter.com/taradinoc/status/1118181848494985216](https://twitter.com/taradinoc/status/1118181848494985216)

<comment><USER11> Who _is_ that handsome mystery developer, where did he come from, and why can't we get enough of him?

<comment><USER10> We'll probably never know, it's a mystery for the ages.

Rumor has it that he owns [http://zilf.io](http://zilf.io), but that appears to be unfounded

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't see it here, but Bureaucracy[1] was also really great. The whole premise of the game was that you are trying to change your address with your bank after a move. It's never that easy...

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy_(video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy_\(video_game\))

<comment><USER13> It's there! [https://github.com/historicalsource/bureaucracy](https://github.com/historicalsource/bureaucracy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you have an interest in odd programming languages, the 'spiritual successor' to these games written in the Infocom ZIL language would be Inform7.

I think it is quite a fascinating declarative language that reads much like English, for example:

 _The same division between creating things, and laying down rules, is visible in Inform source text. The creation of the world is done by making unconditional factual statements about it. For example,_

      The wood-slatted crate is in the Gazebo. The crate is a container.

More info: [http://inform7.com/learn/man/WI_2_1.html](http://inform7.com/learn/man/WI_2_1.html)

<comment><USER15> IMHO, Inform6 (which is a true object-oriented programming language) is much more powerful than Inform7. I tried both and found that: I7 is not consistent and often ambiguous: some pieces of code would get broken after inserting a perfectly valid "sentence" with no explanation; compilation is slow, execution is slow; some tiny compiled text games with no picture and no sound weight more than 5Mo. If I had a large project to code, I would take I6 without a doubt.

<comment><USER11> Everything you said about I7 is true, but its real value comes from the abstractions it introduces.

That is, it isn't just an English-like syntax for writers who are used to writing in complete sentences... it's a programming model based on concepts from narrative, technical writing, and linguistics, for writers who are using it to write narratives, describe technical systems, and manipulate text.

I7 integrates high-level domain concepts of interactive fiction into the language: scenes and continuity, rules and their exceptions, relationships between objects, templates for parsing and printing text.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Something that I just learned about as a result of this story: According to this blog post[0], Brian Moriarty himself shared the source for the TRS-80 CoCo version of the official interpreter[1], so that's out there too.

[0][https://retrotinker.blogspot.com/2018/02/z-intepreter- source...](https://retrotinker.blogspot.com/2018/02/z-intepreter-source-for- coco-recovered.html)

[1][http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/coco/Programming/Source/...](http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/coco/Programming/Source/Infocom%20Adventure%20Games%20Interpreter/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Found some funny scripts used for the unreleased game "The restaurant": [https://github.com/historicalsource/restaurant/blob/master/t...](https://github.com/historicalsource/restaurant/blob/master/things.zap#L49)

<comment><USER18> Note that this is probably based on the the sequel[1] to H2G2 given that H2G2 was completed as game.

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

<comment><USER19> You can find a somewhat playable early "prototype" linked from here: [https://waxy.org/2008/04/milliways_infocoms_unreleased_seque...](https://waxy.org/2008/04/milliways_infocoms_unreleased_sequel_to_hitchhikers_guide_to_the_galax/)

<comment><USER20> What might have been if Infocom hadn't tried to "grow up" and make business software.

<comment><USER21> The name Infocom comes from their desire to make business software. To a large extent they considered games that they had written in the past to be a way to raise money so they could afford to make the business software that would make them rich. Games were always a distraction in their eye - a profitable one, but not their purpose. As far as I know they never got anywhere with business software...

<comment><USER20> I realize. Still doesn't mean I can't lament them for not realizing they were already successful and could continue to be. Just imagine if BioWare had kept trying to make medical software despite the success of their RPGs, just because their name said they should.

<comment><USER22> The Infocom brand and creative team outlived their failed business software division, but couldn't survive the tension of being acquired by a games company that wanted to churn out more content. It's possible the company regarding the games division as a side project to raise seed money rather than a cash cow actually indirectly helped the creative side...

(Either way, I think it'd have struggled to survive the emergence of story- driven games with good graphics. There's plenty of comparatively well-written and user-friendly modern IF which only reaches niche audiences despite it being freely available and publicised across the internet )

<comment><USER20> Infocom was experimenting with graphic adventures towards the end. (Zork Zero was a fascinating experiment. Maybe not a successful or entirely enjoyable one, but something with possibility.)

It's impossible to say how well Infocom might have done as graphics continued to take focus. The diaspora of Infocom's creative talent worked on many well- beloved graphic adventure games (Moriarty's LOOM and influence on other LucasArts games, Meretsky's The Space Bar and influence as a consultant to a variety of game companies in roughly the same time span, as two examples quickest to mind).

They still probably wouldn't have survived the "adventure game" crash that eventually broke Sierra and LucasArts, but it's interesting to wonder what sort of a contender they might have been had they not been forced to sell to Activision (or had they stumbled into selling to a publisher that was a better fit creatively).

Anyway, its interesting to armchair quarterback with decades of hindsight. The business software was a technical marvel of a sort and potentially had it been much better timed and budgeted it could have eaten Lotus and Excel's lunch. Maybe there's an alternate universe where we are all using an Infocom office suite and Infocom operating system on hardware Z-Machines, which is a fun idea to think about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I love interactive fiction (as these types of games are now denoted) then and now. In principle. There are possibilities with the text-only canvas that are not even conceivable in other media.

But really, does anyone have time for these games anymore? Playing these Infocom games is a multi-month project, with a significant amount of note- taking, manual mapping, and patience (read: replay) required. To call the "parser" interface limiting is an understatement, especially where it concerns dialog.

See [https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=aearuuxv83plclpl](https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=aearuuxv83plclpl) and [https://hadeanlands.com/](https://hadeanlands.com/) for modern examples. They've tremendously expanded on the old guard, both in technological terms and in creativity, and yet still suffer from the same fundamental limitations.

I don't know what the future holds for IF, but more evolution is needed before these games can compete for mindshare in the 21st century. I read a lot, but I just can't make the time for these kinds of games anymore. Not even close.

<comment><USER24> Have you tried any of the modern games other than the two you linked ? A lot of the games being made right now are shorter and punchier than the classic infocom games.

Suveh nux ([https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=xkai23ry99qdxce3](https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=xkai23ry99qdxce3)) is a great example of a modern game that is short, interesting and uses the medium in an interesting manner.

<comment><USER25> Anchorhead, Jigsaw, Curses... aren't so short.

<comment><USER26> wat? Anchorhead took me an evening to complete.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I saw this extra feature on the downloadable special edition of the Hitchhiker's Guide TV series a little while back, which talks about the engine behind the infocom game and the language that it's programmed in.

BBC Micro Live - Douglas Adams BBC Micro Live presenter, Conner 'Freff' Cochran, talks to Douglas Adams about The Hitchhiker's Guider to the Galaxy computing game and future software plans. [https://www.facebook.com/BBCArchive/videos/594990580873976/?...](https://www.facebook.com/BBCArchive/videos/594990580873976/?v=594990580873976)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Announcement: [https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1118005126457888768](https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1118005126457888768)

</comment><comment><USER28> If you're interested in this, you might appreciate I Spent My Weekend Hacking Zork: [https://redd.it/10dtch](https://redd.it/10dtch)

</comment><comment><USER29> > In general, Infocom games were created by taking previous Infocom source > code, copying the directory, and making changes until the game worked the > way the current Implementor needed. Structure, therefore, tended to follow > from game to game and may or may not accurately reflect the actual function > of the code.

Some things never change...

EDIT: this is how I do most of my personal projects!

<comment><USER30> I think this has to do with the authors being more literary than tech savvy.

<comment><USER31> Infocom was famously tech savvy though. The founders came from MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) where they developed the first Zork adventure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Each game (from the ones I recognize) fit on a single 5.25" 360KB floppy. We barely think in megabytes anymore.

<comment><USER33> and ran in < 40 kilobytes of RAM on the Apple ][, less on TRS-80 and Commodore if I recall correctly. The game ran in a virtual machine built for various architectures so that the game could be built once and run anywhere. (Write once, run anywhere -- an idea that would later catch on with a certain programming language that is now displaying this text on your browser screen.)

Those games felt miraculous back in the day. I still recall the amazement I felt playing the detective game Deadline ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadline_(video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadline_\(video_game\)) ) and the way the simulation moved on in real time -- people wandering through a house, or suspects fidgeting nervously or offering additional info while I questioned them -- even if I didn't enter a command and merely waited.

Appreciating the severe limitations it operated within makes it all the more amazing. Another fine example of "scarcity drives innovation."

40,000 bytes for all code and data. Wow.

<comment><USER34> >40,000 bytes for all code and data. Wow.

That sounds impressive, but it really isn't that much, because it's text-only.

If you want to see something truly impressive, look at Super Mario Bros. on the NES: the entire game is about 64k! Most of the NES games were on that order of size, and they were graphical real-time games.

Also, I'm pretty sure that you'll find with these text-adventure games that they compress quite readily down to a fraction of the size you stated. NES games, not so much. ASCII text isn't a terribly efficient medium of storage, and they didn't have much if any data compression in those days.

<comment><USER35> > I'm pretty sure that you'll find with these text-adventure games that they > compress quite readily down to a fraction of the size you stated.

You might be surprised. Infocom games don't store text as ASCII; they use a more compact format [1] which packs three characters into every two bytes, and allows for "abbreviations" of commonly used text fragments. Obviously it's nothing like a modern compressor, but still surprisingly effective.

I tested GZIP and XZ against a sample of 19 vintage Infocom games. GZIP only managed to compress them by 30%; XZ did a little better at 40%, but still nowhere near what you'd expect for text (70-80%).

[1]: [https://www.inform- fiction.org/zmachine/standards/z1point0/s...](https://www.inform- fiction.org/zmachine/standards/z1point0/sect03.html)

<comment><USER34> Very interesting, and better than I would have expected (as in, that's a lower compression rate than I would have expected).

I wonder how gzip and xz do with Super Mario Bros. and other NES games though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Reminds me of that time I hacked together Zork for the Google Home.

You can still try it out, I think, if you say "Ok, Google, let me talk to Dungeon RPG"

[https://github.com/mitchellgordon95/DungeonForGoogleHome](https://github.com/mitchellgordon95/DungeonForGoogleHome)

<comment><USER4> Oh, cool! I'd love for someone to make a more fully-baked version of this. Get some good audiobook narrators and voice actors, and add sound effects and stuff!

Smart assistants, ironically, feel like the perfect medium for "text" adventure games to have a resurgence.

<comment><USER36> I totally agree! I think this will be more true as we get better at natural language understanding. (coincidentally, this is my PhD research area)

There's still a lot of unsolved problems for making this kind of stuff usable. But we can dream, haha, and we're getting closer. I think the possibilities for games are actually much more impressive than most people imagine, right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> "Want some rye?" "'course ya do!"

<comment><USER38> Great game, was my introduction to the Zork world. Like 8bit/16bit games, I wish video capture adventure games would make a comeback, even though I know it's a pipe dream...

<comment><USER20> There was a Tex Murphy game (Tesla Effect) released in the last couple of years (and was Kickstarter backed), and Her Story made a big splash slightly more recently than that. Several Her Story inspired productions since have been in the works or released. They'll probably never be mainstream/"AAA" again, but there likely will continue to be some people building them so long as they can find their audience.

Plus, AAA game mo-capping has gotten to the point where some of them such as Uncharted and Quantum Break feel very close to classic FMV, with the benefits of a full 3D environment. Quantum Break even had entire "TV episodes" in the middle, making it perhaps the wildest "FMV" game of the last few years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> For those of you who are new to text adventures you can find images of most of the game boxes here - [http://infocom.elsewhere.org/gallery/](http://infocom.elsewhere.org/gallery/) and various other resources here [http://infocom.elsewhere.org/](http://infocom.elsewhere.org/)

</comment><comment><USER40> I found a swear in the Hitchhiker's source code:

[https://github.com/historicalsource/hitchhikersguide/blob/ma...](https://github.com/historicalsource/hitchhikersguide/blob/master/globals.zil#L671)

<comment><USER41> I can't find a definition for that, but it's used in several places. Is <FUCKING-CLEAR> a ZIL primitive??!

<comment><USER11> It's defined in verbs.zil.

[https://github.com/historicalsource/hitchhikersguide/blob/d7...](https://github.com/historicalsource/hitchhikersguide/blob/d7fddb5ebf706e6b7ce2398169a4a987a8f8aeb2/verbs.zil#L2862)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Looks like GitHub will quickly have support for syntax highlighting of ZIL files. [https://github.com/github/linguist/pull/4497](https://github.com/github/linguist/pull/4497)

<comment><USER43> It's live! [https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1118647837951004672](https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1118647837951004672)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> [https://bitbucket.org/jmcgrew/zilf/wiki/Home](https://bitbucket.org/jmcgrew/zilf/wiki/Home) could zilf compile it? (i am not familiar with this language at all...)

<comment><USER45> It does, at least Zork runs, see [http://blog.zarfhome.com/2019/04/all-of- infocoms-game-source...](http://blog.zarfhome.com/2019/04/all-of-infocoms- game-source-code.html) and [https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew- core/pull/38990](https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/pull/38990)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> This is a codebase I've long been interested in seeing. I just always assumed it would be inscrutable assembler, though I should have known better given the game's lineage.

Boy, this brings me way back to playing Zork on a 20 lb amber-screen ibm "portable".

</comment><comment><USER47> Also relevant: [https://archive.org/details/infocomcabinet](https://archive.org/details/infocomcabinet)

</comment><comment><USER6> The notation for player death appears to be "JIGS-UP". Glad to see the classic Infocom sense of humor is present in the codebase too.

</comment><comment><USER48> Amazing Games!!! I still have boxed Amiga and ST Infocom games which I will probably never play, but keep just for the packaging!

</comment><comment><USER49> My that looks like LISP!

<comment><USER50> Basically the history goes Lisp -> MDL -> ZIL

<comment><USER11> MDL and Lisp kinda co-evolved, and some MDL features (lambda lists, maybe others?) made it into the evolutionary branch that lived.

<comment><USER51> Basically correct.

The first Lisp for MIT's IBM mainframe was ported to the AI lab PDP-6, running standalone. Later ITS was written for the PDP-6, and Lisp was ported to run under timesharing by 1968. This evolved into Maclisp.

MDL, first called Muddle, is mentioned in Project MAC Progress Report VIII, covering 1970-971. "The extension of LISP is known locally as "MUDDLE". It was designed and has been implemented by Carl Hewitt and Gerald Sussman of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Christopher Reeve, David Cressey, Bruce Daniels, and Gregory Pfister of Dynamic Modeling".

Ideas from Muddle made it back to Maclisp. The first Lisp Machine Lisp (later ZetaLisp) was basically a reimplementation or Maclisp (as is Emacs Lisp), and Common Lisp is to a large degree a subset of Lisp Machine Lisp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> [https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1/blob/87a3b787d166a...](https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1/blob/87a3b787d166a441cab8d89d87f9a3753d40daa8/gverbs.zil#L1640)

</comment><comment><USER53> Cool. I still got my Masterpieces of Infocom cdrom somewhere. I was very dissapointed Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was not a part of the collection :)

</comment><comment><USER54> I used to enjoy the fortran-to-c ported pre-infocom zork on BSD. I never got into the bigger world they went with but friends spent many fine hours in them.

</comment><comment><USER55> So, are these playable online over gh-pages? It would be so cool if the gh- pages contained an interpreter that loaded the source from github.

<comment><USER56> The compiler for these source files has been lost. You can play the zip files that were released commercially with Parchment, but because the copyright on those has not expired you wont be able to do so legally on the public internet I believe.

<comment><USER57> [https://iplayif.com/?story=https://github.com/historicalsour...](https://iplayif.com/?story=https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1/raw/master/COMPILED/zork1.z3)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Alas no Trinity - the greatest IF game of all time.

<comment><USER58> Er, Trinity is there: [https://github.com/historicalsource/trinity](https://github.com/historicalsource/trinity)

<comment><USER8> You're right. Good news. You should play it if you haven't and if you love IF.

Along with The Enchanter, which is equally good, if not better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There is no existing compiler for all this programming language any more. Maybe someone will give it a try and create an interpreter.

<comment><USER59> There are plenty: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine)

<comment><USER60> Z-Machines aren't compilers, they're virtual machines that can execute the compiled output.

There's no (known) compiler that still exists that can compile ZIL into Z-code.

edit: except for zilf, as mentioned, but it's not functional for even zork 1.

<comment> david-given ZILF works just fine. There's even a competition for games written in ZIL using it:

[https://www.facebook.com/groups/ZILcom/permalink/76701623374...](https://www.facebook.com/groups/ZILcom/permalink/767016233740109/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I've just now realized why when the movie came out I had already heard about Hitchhiker's!

</comment><comment><USER62> Is there any good modern analogue to Infocom games that I can plan on my iPhone slowly?

<comment><USER33> Slowly? the iPhone is many thousands of times more capable than any of the target systems these software were built for -- typical was a 1 megahertz 8-bit CPU with 32 kilobytes of RAM.

Even the most inefficient ZIL interpreter will spend most of its time in a stall loop.

<comment><USER63> I think "play slowly" in this case means "take it out during odd moments of the day such as waiting in a line or riding a bus and poke at the puzzles instead of catching up on Twitter".

I am pretty sure that even a first-generation ZIL interpreter spent the bulk of its cycles flashing the cursor and waiting for the player to type something.

<comment><USER33> Thank you - that makes perfect sense. I obviously forgot that there's a human element to all this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> <TELL " You are likely to be eaten by a grue.">)> <CRLF>

<comment><USER35> \-- [https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1/blob/master/gverbs...](https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1/blob/master/gverbs.zil#L1640)

The SPRAYED? global wasn't used in Zork I, but showed up in Zork II as the Frobozz Magic Grue Repellent.

<comment><USER65> Just another reminder that the Zork trilogy started as a single PDP game, I guess :) It's remarkable how they were able to cut it up almost without breaking a sweat.

<comment><USER35> I wonder how much work it would be to glue the games back together?

<comment><USER51> Or you could run the un-split original MDL Zork.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Just looking at the source code. Things haven't changed all that much.

</comment><comment><USER67> No license anywhere. These games are still valuable IP aren't they?

<comment><USER68> At the bottom of the README

> This collection is meant for education, discussion, and historical work, > allowing researchers and students to study how code was made for these > interactive fiction games and how the system dealt with input and > processing. It is not considered to be under an open license.

So all rights reserved, basically

<comment><USER69> Not too bad really. This code is so old I doubt anyone really knows how to work with it properly or get it running on a modern machine. Only good for curiosity

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Is that some kind of angle bracket lisp?

Can anyone shed more light of zil files?

<comment><USER20> It's exactly a Lisp derivative/fork. Zork was originally written in MDL [0], a Lisp derivative in use on MIT's mainframes (that in turn went on to inspire parts of Scheme). When the Zork team left college to form Infocom, they built ZIL to port Zork to home computers, based on their experience of MDL, and their needs for their Z-Machine virtual machine.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDL_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDL_\(programming_language\))

<comment><USER71> > Scheme

don't know. But Lisp Machine Lisp and then Common Lisp.

<comment><USER72> I've seen EQUAL? in some of the code snippets. I can believe that inspired Scheme predicates.

<comment><USER71> Yes. But I think that's relatively minor.

From 'The Evolution of Lisp' Steele/Gabriel:

> MDL also introduced through example the use of a final ? in a name to > connote a predicate ... Lisp Machine Lisp would pick up the lambda lists and > the locatives, and would adapt the evaluation and splicing markers in > backquote, though the evolution of the concept passes through Conniver where > it is refined into a form very similar in appearance and effect as in Lisp- > Machine Lisp, but in fact the implementation is quite different. Scheme > would pick up the use of a trailing "?" for predicates. MDL had a > multitasking facility that would reappear in various forms in Lisp-Machine > Lisp, Conniver, and various implementations of Common Lisp.

Scheme got the '?'.

LML got complex arglists, locatives, markers for evaluation/splicing in backquote, multitasking.

<comment><USER11> Hmm, which evaluation and splicing markers is it referring to?

MDL doesn't have quasiquoting, but it has "segments" that expanded while evaluating a structure (prefix a form with "!", and the result is spliced into the structure), and reader macros expanded while parsing source code (prefix a form with "%" and the result is inserted, or "%%" and it's discarded).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Is it possible to download all these 136 repositories at once?

<comment><USER74> curl -s "[https://api.github.com/users/historicalsource/repos?per_page...](https://api.github.com/users/historicalsource/repos?per_page=300") | grep \"clone_url\" | awk '{print $2}' | sed -e 's/"//g' -e 's/,//g' | xargs -n1 git clone

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I wrote some comments on the Wikipedia Zork talk page:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AZork#Link_to_the_origin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AZork#Link_to_the_original_Zork_source_code_in_MDL)

Link to the original Zork source code in MDL

I suggest linking to the original Zork source code in MDL which is available here:

[http://retro.co.za/adventure/zork-mdl/](http://retro.co.za/adventure/zork- mdl/)

Is it OK to link to that source code from Wikipedia? I don't know who officially owns it, though. It was never a commercial product, and was developed at MIT. As the Zork article mentions, the Zork source code was leaked way back in 1977, so the cat's been out of the bag for a long time. A link to the actual source code would be a nice thing to cite in that section.

It is fascinating to read, and really beautiful code, quite understandable even if you don't know MDL, and practically a form of literature.

I played the original Zork on MIT-DM and also the Infocom versions of course. Reading the source code is like seeing the behind-the-scenes underground rooms and passages at Disneyland!

While I was playing Zork, I found a bug. First some context: when you're battling the troll, you can give things to him, and he eats them! Sometimes he drops his axe, and you can pick it up and kill him with it. He blocks the exits until you kill him.

So I tried "give axe to troll," and he ate his own axe, then cowered in terror: "The troll, disarmed, cowers in terror, pleading for his life in the guttural tongue of the trolls."

Not satisfied with that, I tried "give troll to troll", and he devoured himself: "The troll, who is remarkably coordinated, catches the troll and not having the most discriminating tastes, gleefully eats it."

...Except that I still could not get out of the exit, because every time I tried, it said "The troll fends you off with a menacing gesture."

I figured there must be a troll flag that wasn't getting cleared when the troll devoured itself. And sure enough, I found it in the code, and it's called "TROLL-FLAG!-FLAG"!

Here is an excerpt of the MDL troll code, where you can see the bug, where it should clear the troll flag when the troll devours itself, but doesn't (well that's how I would fix it!):

                   <COND (<VERB? "THROW" "GIVE">
                          <COND (<VERB? "THROW">
                                 <TELL
        "The troll, who is remarkably coordinated, catches the " 1 <ODESC2 <PRSO>>>)
                                (<TELL
        "The troll, who is not overly proud, graciously accepts the gift">)>
                          <COND (<==? <PRSO> <SFIND-OBJ "KNIFE">>
                                 <TELL
        "and being for the moment sated, throws it back.  Fortunately, the
        troll has poor control, and the knife falls to the floor.  He does
        not look pleased." ,LONG-TELL1>
                                 <TRO .T ,FIGHTBIT>)
                                (<TELL
        "and not having the most discriminating tastes, gleefully eats it.">
                          <REMOVE-OBJECT <PRSO>>)>)
                         (<VERB? "TAKE" "MOVE">
                          <TELL
        "The troll spits in your face, saying \"Better luck next time.\"">)
                         (<VERB? "MUNG">
                          <TELL
        "The troll laughs at your puny gesture.">)>)
                  (<AND ,TROLL-FLAG!-FLAG
                        <VERB? "HELLO">>
                   <TELL "Unfortunately, the troll can't hear you.">)>>

Xardox (talk) 02:45, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

You can give something that you don't have? I was under the impression that it wouldn't work. Double sharp (talk) 13:17, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

You can give anything that's in the room or your inventory to the troll. So if his axe falls on the floor, "give axe to troll" will work without having to pick it up first, which is supposed to work. But even before he drops the axe you can go "give axe to troll" and he'll eat it while he's holding it, since it's transitively in the room. That's the first thing I did, that made me think of typing "give troll to troll"! Xardox (talk) 03:32, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

<comment><USER51> Bob Supnik got a copy of the latest version from the Zork team, and it's openly published here:

[http://simh.trailing-edge.com/games/zork-mdl.zip](http://simh.trailing- edge.com/games/zork-mdl.zip)

I'd like to think this is officially blessed somehow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> Cool! Now, does anyone know the significance of 'xyzzy' and 'plugh'? :)

<comment><USER11> Here's a ZIL version of the game where "xyzzy" and "plugh" first appeared: [https://bitbucket.org/jmcgrew/zilf/src/tip/Examples/advent/a...](https://bitbucket.org/jmcgrew/zilf/src/tip/Examples/advent/advent.zil?at=default&fileviewer=file- view-default)

<comment><USER51> I have the oldest available Crowther version running using a DEC Fortran compiler.

YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING . AROUND YOU IS A FOREST. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND DOWN A GULLY.

<comment><USER76> I remember digging up these to run on simh

[https://jerz.setonhill.edu/intfic/colossal-cave-adventure- so...](https://jerz.setonhill.edu/intfic/colossal-cave-adventure-source-code/)

Do you have older ones?

<comment><USER51> No, I got them from the same place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> YYYAAAAAAASSSSSSS

</comment><comment><USER78> "Zork I is a 1980 interactive fiction game"

Surely, these were called Adventure Games at the time. I never recall them being called that.

<comment><USER79> The box art calls it Interactive Fiction: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ac/Zork_I_box_ar...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ac/Zork_I_box_art.jpg)

EDIT: Some more info on the origins; apparently it was first used by an early creator of such games (Robert Lafore), and then picked up by Infocom: [https://www.filfre.net/2011/09/robert-lafores-interactive- fi...](https://www.filfre.net/2011/09/robert-lafores-interactive-fiction/)

<comment><USER80> that would be the right term.

you can see the evolution in cga vga games like quest for glory 1 or kings guest 1 or even space quest 1 you still had the console style input but was replaced with the menu bars that most remember from adventure games.

<comment><USER81> Even games like Maniac Mansion or Monkey Island where the ability to input text commands was gone retained a pseudo-commandline above the lower part of the screen with the verbs and inventory.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: RESTful API Handler || NodeJs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/talonbragg/apihandler <comment><AUTHOR> This is a very simple RESTful API handler, that allows you to use the data, from an API without creating your own GET request, simply use the function from the module to get the data.

</comment><comment><USER2> Is checking in the dependencies into git something recommended? Your package.json should state the dependencies.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just saying, it does state all of the dependencies:

{ "name": "apihandlerrestful", "version": "1.0.1", "description": "A simple api handler for nodejs", "main": "handler.js", "scripts": { "test": "mocha --reporter spec" }, "keywords": [ "api", "handler", "restful", "apihandlerrestful" ], "author": "Talon Bragg", "license": "MIT", "repository": { "type": "git", "url": "git+[https://github.com/talonbragg/apihandler.git"](https://github.com/talonbragg/apihandler.git") }, "bugs": { "url": "[https://github.com/talonbragg/apihandler/issues"](https://github.com/talonbragg/apihandler/issues") }, "homepage": "[https://github.com/talonbragg/apihandler#readme"](https://github.com/talonbragg/apihandler#readme"), "devDependencies": { "chai": "^4.1.2", "coveralls": "^3.0.0", "istanbul": "^0.4.5", "mocha": "^5.0.5" }, "directories": { "test": "test" }, "dependencies": {} }

<comment><USER3> Just to expand a bit on what theomega was saying, the node_modules folder should generally be excluded from the repository.

The idea is that anyone can grab a copy and run npm install to get the devDependencies listed in package.json. Not only does that keep your repo cleaner but it also lets the package manager handle the management of packages.

The last part is the important bit. Anyone running npm install after Coveralls 3.0.1 came out, for example, would get the updated version and all the correspondingly updated dependencies. As it stands, anyone who grabs a copy of your repository and uses the included node_modules won't get all the non- breaking incremental updates to all the dev dependencies, their dependencies, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am no longer using coveralls, I am using codecov.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Digital Age Is Slow to Arrive in Rural America  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/us/18broadband.html

<comment><USER2> The province I live in, Alberta, had a similar problem getting rural communities online. There are a few dozen independent wireless ISPs that cover most of the smaller towns, but the sticking point was getting a decent backbone connection out that far. The phone company was basically never going to turn a profit on rural service, so the government eventually paid to trench out >10,000km of fibre and build point-to-point wireless links:

<http://www.servicealberta.ca/AlbertaSuperNet.cfm>

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't imagine being cut off from the Internet so badly. These things take time to spread fully, though. It's hard to force it when our networks are slower and more expensive than most other modern nations in the world.</comment>


Ask HN: Is Product Hunt just a launchpad for new YC startups? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Keep in mind there is a selection bias in play since there has been a YC Demo Day over the past few days. When other accelerators have their demo days they spam PH too.

But essentially yes.

</comment><comment><USER3> I too realised the same a year back.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes with its referential systems & wanton need for your twitter account.....</comment>


Cigarette smoke curbs lung's self-healing - <AUTHOR> http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/10958.html <comment><USER2> Blogspam of

[https://www.helmholtz-muenchen.de/en/lung- allergy/news/news/...](https://www.helmholtz-muenchen.de/en/lung- allergy/news/news/article/38006/index.html)

(this original has much more reference material)</comment>


Swimming Nanobots Carve Out Next-Gen Computer Chip Lithographic Features - <AUTHOR> http://www.neomatica.com/2014/10/17/robotically-controlled-swimming-nanomotors-carve-next-generation-nanoscale-computer-chip-lithographic-features/ <comment><USER2> The features generated are >200nm wide and the writeup doesn't mention a path to scaling this down so it isn't clear why this provides any advantage over conventional lithography.</comment>


Generalized Additive Models in R – A free interactive course - <AUTHOR> https://noamross.github.io/gams-in-r-course/ <comment><USER2> This even works on mobile - wow.

GAMs are great tools. However in my understanding they can be quite unstable when working with (subsets of) medium sized data. In other words: it's easy to formulate quite complex models that seem to work, but fail at prediction. So as with any complex modelling mastery is the key.</comment>


Edward Snowden nominated for Nobel Peace Prize - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2363191/Edward-Snowden-nominated-Nobel-Peace-Prize-Swedish-Professor.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

<comment><USER2> The irony when one Nobel Peace Prize winner is hunting a nominee down.</comment>


Initial Free Offerings as an Alternative to ICOs - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/0xnil/initial-free-offerings-as-an-alternative-to-icos-cfb318505566 <comment><USER2> Airdrops and token giveaways of unregistered security tokens is still a securities fraud.

You need either to register your token with the SEC, or find an exemption from registration or prove that your token is not a security.

If you can prove that your token is not a security, then you can sell it as well (providing you are doing proper KYC/AML and not an MSB or money transmitter.)

IANAL

</comment><comment><USER3> Current ICO List [https://icomarks.com/icos](https://icomarks.com/icos)

</comment><comment><USER4> I like the idea,

I'm miss one thing: the minute someone says "I'd buy 100NIL for X ETH", the IFO becomes an ICO no? We just added an extra-step.</comment>


Scientists Report Finding Reliable Way to Teleport Data - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/30/science/scientists-report-finding-reliable-way-to-teleport-data.html#

<comment><USER2> Application: Create an intelligent sequence of quantum states, "teleporting" this across further and further distances (as well as that can be gauged), the idea being that potentially the sequence will appear somewhere an intelligent, scientific group of non-humans may be active at the quantum level and see this sequence, understanding that it was transported intentionally. We could create the equivalent of a tin can phone and communicate with intelligent life forms it would otherwise take us tens of thousands of years to locate, if not longer.

<comment><USER3> Interesting concept, but how would you implement the initial entanglement? Or would you just grab a passing electron and transmit states to it on the theory that it must have been entangled with another electron at some point? That seems pretty hit-and-miss to me.

I'm sure the first applications will be diplomatic/military, since that's a field with an obvious need for ultra-secure communications, plus many countries with resources to spare have global networks of secure embassies/installations where you would want reliable communication without any reliance on external infrastructure. My impression of the apparatus from the description provided was that it was relatively compact, the bulkiest part being the cooling bath for the diamond 'electron prison' \- it seems like you could build this into something the size of a refrigerator, and it was put together with existing commercial components, a big plus.

A more medium-term application with obvious benefits would be on interplanetary probes, manned and unmanned. We could probably significantly cut the attrition rate of space probes if we had real-time telemetry data and control with no transmission lag. If I understand Bell's theorem correctly, then the energy requirements ought to be independent of the distance involved.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars#Probing_dif...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars#Probing_difficulties)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Methods data from the paper: [http://www.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2014/05/28/science.1...](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2014/05/28/science.1253512.DC1/Pfaff.SM.pdf)

This is a Big Deal - disappointing to see it get so little attention here.

</comment><comment><USER4> A dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7818467](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7818467).

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops. Thanks and sorry.</comment></comment>