Ask HN: How do you spend your free time in office? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I work as a freelancer from home, so my answer might be less interesting to people at an office, but I've found that at home I'm mostly just doing the things I wanted to do at the office when I worked in one, but felt uncomfortable doing there. These include:

Taking short (15 - 30 mins max) naps if and when I need them, which pretty dramatically helps me creatively problem solve.

Going for a long-ish walk outside. This is by far the absolute best thing I've added to my days. I feel more energized after, I mentally and emotionally am much happier, and physically it made me slightly fitter. Plus it helps relieve some of the problems I know I'm developing sitting all day.

Podcasts. This one I only do when I'm taking a break, I can't focus and get into a flow listening to other people talk about interesting topics. Awesome for those walks though.

Chat with other developers and friends on slack or some other messenger. Usually at some point during the day I'll have a 15 minute flurry of messages with a developer friend about some side project or something we think is cool.

And finally, this one is half work half fun, but I'll research something I think is cool or would be useful. Might be a service, framework, product, methodology, anything at all. I probably spend an hour or so of my work day, every other day, on researching something that's not an absolute necessity to the work, but might benefit it. In some cases it's paid off big time. Mostly though it just keeps me happy, interested, and hopefully a little sharper.

<comment><USER3> > Going for a long-ish walk outside.

Do you have a real objective on those walks (ie getting groceries, lunch) ?

I like walking with non-gym clothes but only when I'm actually doing something in the way...

<comment><USER2> No, usually that lessens my enjoyment actually. The point for me is to get outside and just enjoy being there, and being a little bit active, not to pack another objective onto my to do list. I'll often make a small coffee and sip that while I listen to a podcast, which could be a business or programming podcast, something like freakonomics, or just entertainment like 'How did this get made?'. On the way back I might stop and pick up a few groceries or something though.

I can see how my way do the opposite for some people though, where the mental pressure valve for them is released by getting something else on their to do list done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This question self-selects an audience that obviously uses their free time to read hacker news

</comment><comment><USER5> In my free time, I try and automate things. This ensures smooth and fast solutions during crunch time.

<comment><USER6> So you work in your free time. :)

<comment><USER5> I work in an automotive company (one of the big three's) I specialize in Noise and Vibrations. My job description involves testing, analyzing, and solving problems. Everyone I work with has very little to no programming experience (edit - programming is not a part of my job description). We* deal with huge amount of data (coming from sensors and microphones) I like to build custom tools (write software to process the data) so when I am really solving problems, I am spending very little time/effort in data processing and more on analyzing. (edit - a lot of people dont appreciate the things I do, they like to spend hours on running calculations using a standard software that we have, I see this as waste of time since it can be and should be automated)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why would you have free time in the office? Or to put it another way, why would you be in the office during your free time?

<comment><USER8> For me, free time is when I don't have the motivation to start something new right then and there so I look something up or work on learning a new framework/language. It can also be when I finish work and still have 30 minutes until my train. I don't want to start on something to get interrupted but I also don't want to just sit at the train station waiting for my train.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> When I was working, I settled into a rhythm of being in the office for about 4 hours a day, with almost no free time. No YouTube, no social media, not even checking personal e-mail accounts. I think I would check HN, but I would save the articles to read later and not read them in the office.

It also helps to write down the major things you want to do before you get in the office. When you get there, just start doing it rather than slowly warming up. Also I find that test-driven development helps get rid of this "warm-up" procrastination.

Not everyone can do this, but programmers can sometimes work themselves into that position (e.g. work for a place long enough that people don't question your hours.)

Though I would usually take a break for tea (with no computer) and occasionally a nap... I think those are productive uses of time.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm going to go on a bit of a curve here, and say take a walk -- the motion helps me think better and I think there have been studies to that effect.

</comment><comment><USER11> I go for half-hour walks once or twice per day, or read HN or something. My /etc/hosts file is littered with filled-in rabbit holes like Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc., but HN gets a pass for now.

</comment><comment><USER12> I work. Now, there are a couple of caveats here that are integral to what I've said. First is that I _love_ programming. I actually go home at night -- well, I work from home, but you know what I mean -- and I write code for side projects or contribute to other open source projects. I also love my job and the people I work with. I would not do this for a company that shit all over me or didn't go the extra mile for employees. Having worked for startups my entire life, I've never actually been in a work environment where the work ran out -- there is always something to upgrade, refactor, or fix -- but I suppose if it did, I'd use that time to research things related to work I see in the future.

</comment><comment><USER13> I work from home, and free-time is not something I have, but it's an illusion that plagues me, like an evil force begging me to step away from work and play with the dog, take a nap, or read hckrnews.

</comment><comment><USER14> Researching ideas that previously came to my mind minutes before when I was busier. I write down these kinds of ideas to save them for later and them I put them out of my mind as I'm trying to do my work. Or, I just browse HN.

Usually I look at this through my phone as I'm walking somewhere. Taking a 4-5 minute break for a walk is important because sitting all day is not healthy. Sometimes the walk has a purpose such as going to the coffee machine. Sometimes it's just randomly moving around then go back to my seat.

</comment><comment><USER15> Apart from binge-read HN?I usually bring whatever I'm reading and sneak a few pages whenever I'm waiting for feedback or getting a little stir-crazy.

</comment><comment><USER16> Productivity doesn't happen to me at office, so i have conversations with people on various topics of common interest - which further opens up avenues for exploration.

I sometimes prefer asking the hard questions, which we usually take for granted and try to get another perspective. Its fun and intellectually engaging when you actually sit down with a person and have a conversation rather than text!

<comment><USER16> > Productivity doesn't happen to me at office

what i meant here, is the "free time in office". I have struggled to learn something new at office since i am always surrounded by people and thats not how i learn. i like isolation when i am learning. Sorry i wasn't clear above. I didn't clearly distinguish the difference between office work productivity and free time productivity. (did i clarify ? :) )

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I keep a drum practice pad and drumsticks at my desk. When it's time for a break, I take it to an office and practice for a little while.

</comment><comment><USER18> I set goals for what I want to accomplish that evening and over the weekend. My wife and I have a running shared todo list that we reorganize and prioritize when we have free time. By the time we get home, we can start getting things done instead of watching TV all night.

</comment><comment><USER19> I network. I will get coffee with folks (managers, ICs, Execs) who I randomly bump into in meetings, code reviews, fire drills etc and find out what they are working on, future job openings, collaboration opportunities, new product ideas, etc.

</comment><comment><USER20> I try to take walks. I also check up on stuff that I enjoy as a hobby, such as Youtube channel subscriptions for car videos and other interesting topics.

It gives my brain a bit of a break to think about other things for a little while.

</comment><comment><USER21> I've been playing Kerbal Space Program at the end of the day at work lately. It's fun as heck, and almost always becomes a team activity involving beer and fun mishaps.

</comment><comment><USER22> Recently, playing [https://meatshields.com](https://meatshields.com) Two 10 minutes breaks during the day is enough to have fun.

</comment><comment><USER23> Asteroids, Ms. Pac Man, Ping pong, a walk outside, etc.

Just about everything else can be attributed to work-related socializing or efficiency enhancement.

</comment><comment><USER24> Learning a new skill or doing research on something that could help me or my company in the future.

</comment><comment><USER25> [http://codewars.com](http://codewars.com)

</comment><comment><USER26> Tittibhasana C - the insect pose

</comment><comment><USER27> I mostly read HN, the morning paper, go to the bathroom.

Would love to see more answers to this.

</comment><comment><USER28> Reading HN, checking RSS feeds and talking in freenode #startups.

</comment><comment><USER29> I wish I had any.

</comment><comment><USER30> YouTube

</comment><comment><USER31> crunchyroll.

</comment><comment><USER32> Ironic newsletter popup...

Edit: Ok it's actually talking about contrast. With ironic low-contrast quotes.</comment>


Random.org and the number 66 - <AUTHOR> Am I crazy or... it's more often to get 66 as a response? <comment><USER2> The widget calls a URL. I didn't get a single 66

       for i in `seq 1 100`; do curl 'https://www.random.org/integers/?num=1&min=1&max=100&col=1&base=10&format=plain&rnd=new' ; done

<comment><USER3> I got four 24s and four 62s, but only one 66. It's pretty obvious that OP is _not_ on to something suspicious about that particular number.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I suspect you're biased towards making a note of the number 66 when it comes up, and that it's not coming up more often than other numbers... Is it your favorite number, or significant to you in some other way?

</comment><comment><USER4> Uneven distribution seems like a sign of a good random number generator.

</comment><comment><USER5> [https://www.starwars.com/video/execute- order-66](https://www.starwars.com/video/execute-order-66)</comment>


Reddit's database DOESN'T has only two tables. - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/z9sm8/reddits_database_has_only_two_tables/c62uz89

<comment><USER2> I have heard of Oracle and MySQL and PostgreSQL and MS SQL Server, but what is DOESN'T?

<comment><USER3> Maybe we should expect a follow up post: 'Reddit DOESN'T use DOESN'T'</comment></comment>


Why do the poor make poor decisions? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/utopia-for-realists/why-do-the-poor-make-such-poor-decisions-f05d84c44f1a#.th0e5su00 <comment><USER2> This article tries to shift perception from "poor people make bad decisions because they're intrinsically dumb" to "poor people make bad decisions because poverty makes them dumb." But this is also wrong; the decisions poor people make are, for the most part, sensible decisions given the circumstances they're in. Here's a list from the article:

> "The poor borrow more, save less, smoke more, exercise less, drink more, and > eat less healthfully. Offer money management training and the poor are the > last to sign up. When responding to job ads, the poor often write the worst > applications and show up at interviews in the least professional attire."

Borrow more: because you only need to borrow if you don't have money.

Save less: because you can only save if you have money.

Showing up at interviews in poor attire: because good attire costs money.

Eat less healthfully: because healthy food costs more than unhealthy food.

Exercise less: because exercising requires the energy that poor diet and the other stresses of poverty sap away.

Writing poor job applications: because applications are judged based on whether they sound like something a poor person would write.

The only genuinely questionable decisions in the list are smoking and drinking, but even these have sensible explanations that don't involve moralizing.

I think the real answer is that things have been labelled "poor decisions" not because they are strategically bad choices for the people who actually make them, but because seeing someone make them provides others with evidence that they're poor, which is stigmatized.

<comment><USER3> I don't think that's the real answer. Each of your bullet points has some truth to it, but is far from the whole story:

> you only need to borrow if you don't have money. > you can only save if you > have money.

Certainly more income makes these easier. But consider the following impossible-to-conduct-in-reality-experiment: Set group A to be a set of 100 randomly selected poor folks who are only qualified to be cashiers or stock shelves. As group B, select a random set of people who currently earn 6-figure salaries and doom them to only ever work the same class of jobs as group A for the rest of their lives. I would not be surprised to find that the formerly wealthy would, in general, borrow less and save more.

> healthy food costs more than unhealthy food.

While an optimal diet does certainly cost more than a calorically-equivalent amount of cheetos, you can shop at walmart - buying only eggs, oatmeal, and bananas - with the probable result that your diet will be both healthier and cheaper than those of most low-income families.

> good attire costs money.

Maybe so, but anyone can get a dress shirt/jacket/slacks at a thrift store for probably less than $30 all told. It won't be high-end clothing, but will at least look professional.

> based on whether they sound like something a poor person would write.

Idk about this one. What would a poor person write? Is this just a matter of whether they have good grammar? Nobody (almost nobody?) is conspiring to keep the poor stuck where they are. I don't think anyone would reject a qualified applicant just because they have no money.

I have no hard data to back this up, but I suspect that most of the chronically poor's lack of success, and their poor decision making has much more to do with the fact that their upbringing has not instilled into them (at least not deeply enough) the idea that their current behavior can affect their future wellbeing.

<comment><USER4> I think this post is pretty ignorant.

Yea, people who were formerly rich will have better financial habits. If you were born into poverty, who is going to teach you those good financial habits in the first place?

Yea, that would probably be better diet. But do they even know how to eat healthy? Do they have time to cook? Are they even able to get to a grocery store?

Yea, you could probably get a decent suit at a thrift store for $30. But some people literally can not spare that money. $30 could be the difference between your kids eating or having a roof over your head.

<comment><USER3> > I think this post is pretty ignorant.

I'm not expressing any animosity toward, or disdain for, people in poverty. I agree with the article that being poor inhibits people's ability to make good decisions for themselves, and that the best way to break the vicious cycle may be to provide them with enough income that they have more freedom to make decisions that will improve their circumstances.

I disagree with the parent comment's thesis that the poor don't make bad decisions in their lives. That doesn't mean I blame them for their poor circumstances or think that they deserve what they get.

> Yea, people who were formerly rich will have better financial habits. If you > were born into poverty, who is going to teach you those good financial > habits in the first place?

I agree. Your rhetorical question is correct.

> Yea, that would probably be better diet. But do they even know how to eat > healthy? Do they have time to cook? Are they even able to get to a grocery > store?

They probably don't know how to eat healthy - just like with the financial habits. I think it must be a pretty small fraction, though, that doesn't have access to a better diet than what they eat now. Cooking need not take more than a single-digit-number of minutes.

> Yea, you could probably get a decent suit at a thrift store for $30. But > some people literally can not spare that money. $30 could be the difference > between your kids eating or having a roof over your head.

It's true that some people's circumstances are so poor that they cannot survive an additional one-time $30 purchase and can't even set aside $1 per day for a month despite their best efforts. If such a person interviewed for a job that needed professional garb, I would hope that they would explain their situation to the interviewer and that the interviewer would give them special consideration. Maybe they wouldn't, but this scenario seems pretty rare to me and not especially relevant to the discussion at hand.

<comment><USER4> Yea, I didn't think you were being harsh or anything. I meant ignorant literally. Certainly people in poverty make bad decisions, everyone makes bad decisions, but alot of those bad decisions are based on a lack of education that is largely out of their control.

I don't have hard numbers, but I think you are overestimating people in poverty's disposable income and access to fresh groceries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> TL;DR

Duke researcher Jane Costello tries to answer the question: do poor people make poor decisions, or is it that poor decisions lead to poor people. In order to answer this question, she looks at the extra money that a casino brought in to a poor native tribe.

She concludes that it was poverty that was leading to the "poor decisions":

"Ten years after the casino's arrival, Costello's findings showed that the younger the age at which children escaped poverty, the better their teenage mental health. Among her youngest age cohort, Costello observed a "dramatic decrease" in criminal conduct. In fact, the Cherokee children in her study were now better behaved than the control group."

Importantly, the parents didn't work less. They worked just as hard but the labor was redirected towards parenting.

<comment><USER6> The second part of the article is pretty interesting too. Apparently giving poor people money would save money in the long run.

<comment><USER6> "Granted, it would take a big program to eradicate poverty in the U.S. According to economist Matt Bruenig's calculations, it would cost $175 billion. But poverty is even more expensive. A 2013 study estimated the costs of child poverty at as much as $500 billion a year. Kids who grow up poor end up with two years' less education, work 450 fewer hours per year, and run three times the risk of bad health than those raised in families that are well off."

<comment><USER7> It seams like a lot, but then I think about military spending and at least its less then that.

Can't really compare them more than that though.. I'm not trying to start something. Just a thought.

<comment><USER8> I think the last figure I saw for military spending was 650bn a year.

Of course if you cut that by half you'd lose a lot of workers many of those with families (in one respect you could look at the military as a jobs program, what was the last time the US had more than 10% of it's total military personal actually _fighting_ a war).

<comment><USER9> Imagine if the military was converted to be mostly Corps of Engineers, building schools and roads and cafes, instead of building stuff to blow up.

<comment><USER10> The left opposition in Germany has actually recently run a bill in Parliament to establish a "Willy Brandt peace corps" next to our army. The line of thinking is that the army is well-regarded because of their development aid during foreign missions, and especially because of their help during domestic natural desasters. If that reputation went towards a peace corps instead, we would have an easier time arguing for less military spending.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I know more than a few poor people, and the one thing they all have in common, is that they either consciously or by virtue of their personalities or aptitude, do not treat maximizing financial impact as the primary criterion in their decision making.

And I would venture that in general, this group of people thinks running around, chasing money 'cause the man says it's important, is a sad way to live your life.

</comment><comment><USER12> "Poor Economics" is a good book about that topic, based on field studies of the authors. I found the investigation of economics at those margins very interesting. Most concepts of small business etc as people who have grown up in the West don't work anymore at those margins, because people have to pay enormous interest rates, shops can't really buy stock etc.

[http://www.pooreconomics.com/](http://www.pooreconomics.com/) and [http://www.amazon.com/Poor-Economics-Radical-Rethinking- Pove...](http://www.amazon.com/Poor-Economics-Radical-Rethinking- Poverty/dp/1610390938)

</comment><comment><USER13> Being poor is hard. There is no flexibility to be nimble around hardships or mistakes.

Its easy to make money if you have money. But try to start a business with no backup funds.or credit line? The first time your vehicle breaks down can put your business in a death cycle.

<comment><USER14> Forget the breakdowns as an impediment to business. Most businesses have high startup costs just from taxes and fees alone. I'm trying to start a small hobby business and just getting the ball rolling I've forked over $500 in filing fees. I imagine it must be nigh on impossible if you are poor and want to start a small business. And I know people do it but they borrow heavily from friends and family.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The trick is, how do you get anyone who doesn't already think UBI is a good idea to read this line of thinking and agree with it? The 'bootstrapping' mentality is crazy-strong in the US. Too many people say "I did it, so you should be able to, also, and if not, that's your problem," without understanding the underlying reasons behind how they overcame poverty and how others get trapped in it.

</comment><comment><USER16> "The poor are poor because all of their choices in life suck."

There are 2 ways to interpret that. Which one you choose has radical implications for the methods you might use to remedy poverty.

</comment><comment><USER17> "Granted, it would take a big program to eradicate poverty in the U.S. According to economist Matt Bruenig's calculations, it would cost $175 billion."

Is that a correct figure? It's hardly that large and there's no excuse for us not spending it to end poverty if it is.

<comment><USER18> Agreed, except that it would have to be spent by Congress. That makes me... let's say somewhat less optimistic about it being doable.

Could Congress allocate $175 billion? Sure. Could they sell it to the public that it was worth it? Maybe. Could they do it in a way that actually eradicated poverty, rather than throwing big chunks of it down the sewer? I'm not optimistic.

If they could actually do it instead of larding it down with pork, though, I'm all for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> In my city, the poor school children in 8th grade are at a 3rd grade reading level. They also frequently go without food, have parents addicted to drugs, and are in or have friends who are in gangs. There are also no jobs in their neighborhoods and no transportation to areas that have jobs, that they can't get anyway, because they're in 8th grade at a 3rd grade reading level. And miraculously passing their exams every year.

Poor people do dumb things because they live in shitty situations and are trying to survive, not thrive.

You don't mainline heroin because it's a great idea. You do it because your drug addiction has progressed to the point where this is the only thing you can do. You are addicted to drugs because it's the only thing you can do to escape endless depression from how shitty your life is. And you were born into this life, so "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" seems less likely than winning the lottery (hence why poor people play the lottery).

</comment><comment><USER20> The stress-caused-by-poverty narrative feels plausible to me but I'd like to see more evidence.

Scott Alexander recently posted this study [0] that seems to show that stress is not linked to poverty:

      > socioeconomic status has no relationship to hair cortisol level
      > which complicates theories about how many body systems are
      > affected by "the stress of poverty" since we might expect hair cortisol
      > level to be an indicator of biological stress levels.

On the other hand, a couple of years ago I lost access to my bank accounts for 2 months, and I will say it was a fairly stressful experience, and did force me into situations where I made what I would generally consider bad economic choices.

[0] [http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/05/24/055244](http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/05/24/055244)

</comment><comment><USER21> Because poor decision makers become poor.

<comment><USER22> Most executives of failing companies say hi.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> A better question might be, why do poor US born Americans make poor decisions while poor legal immigrants (regardless of race or color) arrive with nothing and make wiser decisions. These first generation immigrant often escapes poverty within 15-20 years (albeit with very hard work). Their children are more successful then they were and far more successful financially than the US born American's children.

Knowing some of these people immigrant and US born poor the answer is quite obvious to me. No study needs to be conducted, only casual observation. Here are the key differences.

The influence of the US culture is obvious in the US born American. He expects more for less effort (entitlement), he is more easily discouraged when facing adversity, he expects someone to care for him and hand him all the tools and opportunity, his expectations are polar opposite of the immigrant (who expects nothing but what he has earned with his bare hands). He is disillusioned easily and when discouraged, drinks or abuses drugs to forget his problems. He supports liberal or socialist ideals because he feels that they will put cash into his pocket and bring down the wealthy people who "oppress" him. The US born minority (non white) thinks the cards are stacked against him, the minority immigrant sees other minority immigrants who have created wealth and aspires to replicate their success despite it's challenges.

The culture of the US born poor person comes from the media (not just news - all media) they consume and the media saturated people surrounding them. Plain and simple that is the most corrosive thing. Secondarily, the idea that these people must be helped out, they don't have to fight through adversity to succeed. This is the worst thing you can do to a man. A man must be a man and have a fighting will to survive and flourish. If you make him a dependent, you are extinguishing this flame... perhaps forever.

Some of the immigrants I know come from socialist countries and they are coming partly to escape from them. They respect the opportunity to work hard and succeed whereas the US born man does not. Americans have been given too much, they watch too many TV shows and other media which slants their view of reality and what life really is like. They have been over medicated and indoctrinated with views that are unproven and those which claim they are proven "cannot be replicated" (psychological studies).

America needs to look back to see what has worked for us when we were great, take some good things we have now that have worked and put some other things back to the way they once were.

The most revealing thing when looking at immigrants is how by the third generation, they hardly stick out from the lazy culture that their grandparents were so different from.

TLDR: America is too liberal, has too much cheap crap from China (materialism) and watches too much Garbage TV and other media and is too medicated. We are lazy. An immigrant of any color comes over here and works his ass off, escaping poverty.

<comment><USER24> Cannot find a more bigoted version of it elsewhere of the Internet.

You do know said immigrants tend to work illegally or for subhuman wages, pooling their wealth and network in local societies? They also tend to immigrate not to rural our crime-laden parts of the US.

On the other hand, US poor are nuclear and in places with few perspectives. They might be saddled with debt, a problem which the immigrants do not have. (Medical, educational or housing.) Therefore helping them establish local communities might be the first step, but it is not enough most of the time. There have to be actual opportunities to be had.

It is easier to start with nothing in a good place, than with less than nothing in squalor.

<comment><USER23> The people you describe are not the people I am describing. What debt do poor Americans have? they can't even get credit. These immigrants I describe live in ghettos along with the US born poor but guess which ones move out and into a nicer neighborhood in ten years? Trust me, debt means nothing. We have this thing called bankruptcy. I know plenty of people who were in debt, declared bankruptcy and started over with a clean slate, they built themselves back up. You have no idea what you are talking about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Or, asked another way, "Why are people who make poor decisions poor?"

<comment><USER5> If you read the article, it is about someone's attempt to tease apart which is the cause and which is the effect.

In other words, the article is about debunking exactly this restatement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> BASIC INCOME

</comment><comment><USER26> TL;DR

Because they are poor.</comment>


Hopfield Networks Is All You Need - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.02217 <comment><AUTHOR> > We show that the transformer attention mechanism is the update rule of a > modern Hopfield network with continuous states. This new Hopfield network > can store exponentially (with the dimension) many patterns, converges with > one update, and has exponentially small retrieval errors. The number of > stored patterns is traded off against convergence speed and retrieval error.

[https://github.com/ml-jku/hopfield-layers](https://github.com/ml- jku/hopfield-layers)

[https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/i4ko0u/r_h...](https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/i4ko0u/r_hopfield_networks_is_all_you_need/)</comment>


Windows 8 won't play DVDs - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/microsoft/9246493/Windows-8-wont-play-DVDs.html

<comment><USER2> "Data indicates, however, that only 6 per cent of Windows 7 users ever used Media Center."

Indeed. I'm glad to see that they're getting rid of the bloat (that is underutilzed).

</comment><comment><USER3> I agree :D</comment>


Googlebot Mobile - <AUTHOR> http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/introducing-smartphone-googlebot-mobile.html

<comment><USER2> Odd that it's posing as an iPhone rather than an Android device. Maybe it's just enough sites having "iPhone sites".</comment>


Personal info for 300K exposed in FLA college hack - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/personal-info-for-300k-exposed-in-fla-college-hack-already-50-identity-theft-cases/

<comment><USER2> > _The data was stolen from a shared folder on the college's main file server, > and it contained social security numbers and dates of birth for over 200,000 > Florida students from across the state who had applied for scholarships_

Somebody should be fired over this.

<comment><AUTHOR> State uni? We'll see. Firings are hard there.</comment></comment>


Universities Rush to Roll Out Computer Science Ethics Courses - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/12/business/computer-science-ethics-courses.html <comment><AUTHOR> Individual-level ethics seems like a weak force when compared with the strong force of company-level financial incentives.</comment>


They're Going To Do It Anyway - <AUTHOR> http://intermittentintelligence.com/2010/10/businesses-should-encourage-developers-to-openly-work-on-startups

<comment><USER2> But but but... Then companies would have to trust their employees! Black would become white! Up would be Down!

I think this hits the nail on the head of why good developers are developers: They want to build shit. Help them. Some of that shit will help you. Tangentially, you'll get a better developer. Some of them will even work on pet projects to help you directly, so you'll get free work.

The flipside is that contracts saying that you own their IP are disgusting, they foster distrust and show that as a company, you don't really care about them as anything except a resource, and not a human one.

(See also making developers front up cash for salary sacrifices and not offering time-in-lieu)</comment>


Nintendo touchscreen controller patent offers clues about upcoming NX - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/12/nintendo-touchscreen-controller-patent-offers-clues-about-upcoming-nx/ <comment><USER2> I just want them to be friendlier to indie devs. It's better, but not ideal. Nintendo has interesting control schemes and game design could benefit from being able to experiment with them in the form of game jams or smaller niche titles.

<comment><USER3> Not sure if you've signed up, but Nintendo has an excellent program for indie developers. Check it out here:

[https://wiiu-developers.nintendo.com/](https://wiiu-developers.nintendo.com/)

<comment><USER4> Is there a similar program for 3DS development? I looked around, but all I could find was a page that really pushed individuals to try the Wii U Developer program.[1] For anything else, it looks like Nintendo wants a real company with prior game dev experience.

1\. [https://developer.nintendo.com/register/about](https://developer.nintendo.com/register/about)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I will point out that as interesting as this is, patents are not always an accurate clue to what a company is planning. Heck, Nintendo's patented a lot of things over the last few years or so, For example:

[http://www.nintendolife.com/tags/Patents](http://www.nintendolife.com/tags/Patents)

That said, based on my experiences with their 'gimmick' controls in the past, I wouldn't want something like this used for the NX default control scheme. Quite a few examples were just buggy as all heck.

</comment><comment><USER6> _Since we 're basically saying what Nintendo should do here, I'll add in my two cents:_

They should make more games. New games not just spinoffs and sequels and many of them. In fact they should limit each game series to 5 games each cycle (including spinoffs)

Give several small teams of about 7 people 2 years to finish their games. Reward the most financially successful teams with bonuses and more autonomy. Demote or retire the ones that we're not at all successful during the cycle.

<comment><USER7> Nintendo's model has always been to use a relatively small number of common characters (Mario, Kirby, etc.) with varying game mechanics. There's more fundamental differences between any two given Mario titles than there is between, say, Watch Dogs and Grand Theft Auto.

I would rather play ten high-quality Mario games with diverse mechanics than ten over-the-shoulder cover shooters where each one features a different gritty man shooting people for a different gritty reason.

<comment><USER6> I never said they should make several GTA clones (though one couldn't hurt their library).

Recycling the same material over and over again gets old real fast unless you're a die hard fan or toddler.

It's also a bad idea for a entertainment company to rely so heavily on a few series like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It'd just be nice if they released a system whose CPU/GPU wasn't obsolete on day one.

<comment><USER9> What they should do is wait for PS4/XB1 to come out, wait a year, then release a console with the same specs at a much cheaper price (due to economies of scale) but with Nintendo's titles and new control system. At least that way they still get the cross platform titles coming across.

<comment><USER10> It wouldn't be much cheaper. It'd likely be much more expensive. There's three components to that:

1\. The prices of the competing consoles aren't static, but dropping regularly as Sony and MS get better prices for the components or finish redesigns. If anything, the competition is probably getting better economies of scale.

2\. Nintendo has traditionally tried to make a profit on the hardware sales at every point in its lifecycle. Sony and MS on the other hand have been willing to sell at breakeven or even a small loss. (The loss is made up on software licensing, and lately on the yearly fees for semi-mandatory online services).

3\. You want the new control systems. Well, that's going to cost you. A large part of the Xbox's failure this generation was launching with the Kinect. That added $100 to the cost, which was pretty lethal early on. The Wii U is obsolete and underpowered, but by now costs as much or more than the PS4 / Xbox One at least where I live. Why? Most likely because of the gamepad. The speculation for the NX is that the controllers are essentially handheld consoles, which will just make this worse.</comment></comment></comment>


The Internet Tidal Wave [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/exhibits/20.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> Unbelievable for having been written in 1995. It bears testament to Bill Gates' vision and incredible foresight.

Quote: _In the next 20 years the improvements in computing power will be outpaced by the exponential improvements in communications networks. The combination of these elements will have a fundamental impact on work, learning and play._</comment>


Don't Poke the Bear - <AUTHOR> https://growthcompound.com/2020/08/13/dont-poke-the-bear-2/ <comment><AUTHOR> Think twice before calling out your competitors.</comment>


Three Best Business Books of 2019 (According to Every Other Best-of-2019 List) - <AUTHOR> https://marker.medium.com/the-3-best-business-books-of-2019-according-to-every-other-best-of-2019-list-c53a97e69be6 <comment><USER2> The only way to win is not to play.

Read some nice fiction. If you find yourself in a crowd that wants to talk about this stuff, find a blog that summarizes books like this into a few bullets or paragraphs.

<comment><USER3> > If you find yourself in a crowd that wants to talk about this stuff, find a > blog that summarizes books like this into a few bullets or paragraphs.

A long time ago, I created a web site that did this. It wasn't real successful, but I did cover the cost of some books, a few of which were actually worth reading.

There's a quote out there somewhere about how most business books could fit their core concept into 10 pages. But since there's no market for 10 page books, they get fluffed up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've found when I read business books, I usually know about 1/2 of what's in it, don't care about the next 49%, and then there is that 1% that is brand new amazing wisdom that I couldn't have found anywhere else.

I then internalize that wisdom and promptly forget where it came from, which makes me useless at helping others with this knowledge.

If there was a way for me to make an AI that could just find these wisdom nuggets without all the work of reading a whole book, that would be super powerful.

Sadly, I think that's a pretty hard AI problem to solve. At least today.

<comment><USER5> Can you list some recent books you read and their 1%? That would be awesome.

<comment><USER6> Parent's complaint is specifically that he can't remember which books he read.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 2019 is actually the best time to pick the 3 Best Business Books of 2009 (Yes, 2009!).

<comment><USER8> Googling for "Best Business Books of 2009", I'm struck by how few of them I would bother reading today. I remember Shop Class as Soulcraft fondly, although it was a bit of a slog at times, and Brightsided is still on my Goodreads To-read list, but otherwise... Would anyone who's read it recommend Lords of Finance - if so, I'll add it to the list after Brightsided.

But really, do any of those three count as "business" books in the traditional sense?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Range was enjoyable, but it was essentially just a mirror image of Outliers. The same sort of interesting anecdotes about some people you've heard of and some you haven't, but saying you should eschew 10k hours in favor of a more broad experience.

Felt like a very "poppy" sort of management book. Not bad, but def not highly recommended.

<comment><USER10> Every time I see a reference to the 10k hour rule I can't help but think back to this article:

[https://www.inc.com/nick-skillicorn/the-10000-hour-rule- was-...](https://www.inc.com/nick-skillicorn/the-10000-hour-rule-was-wrong- according-to-the-people-who-wrote-the-original-stu.html)

<comment><USER11> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_McLaughlin_(golfer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_McLaughlin_\(golfer\))

<comment><USER10> What a fantastic yet somewhat tragic example. Thank you for sharing

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Utterly banal content marketing discussion of the books which goes on and on but says very little.

The books are:

Range - David Epstein

Nine Lies About Work - Marcus Buckingham / Ashley Goodall

Loonshots - Safi Bahcall

His fluffily meaningless takeaways which apparently bind the three books and are a common theme:

How can I be better at solving hard problems? Take a bigger view!

How can I work better with those around me? Trust them to share their knowledge and use that knowledge differently.

How can I bring new things into the world? Hold the innovation and the delivery in equal regard, give each what it needs, and think hard about what your organization rewards.

</comment><comment><USER13> I understand the value they add, but medium.com and Pinterest should really be banned by google and HN due to their efforts in making the flow of useful information harder. On medium for example, one has to pay to be able to read the article. I was considering taking my blog to medium.com but given how they basically __own __the article I would never do that.

</comment><comment><USER14> I have been seeing a lot of hype around "Range", I read it and thought it was good but I felt like he just took ideas from other good books and combined them into his work.

</comment><comment><USER15> The trick about business books is that generally they are quite short, like a few pages long. The problem is a three page book doesn't work on an airport bookshop shelf, so they are padded out. This is even true of the good ones.

Good example is crossing the chasm. An insightful book (at least when it can out) but really is one drawing and perhaps one page of explanation.

Innovator's dilemma: one graph and a few pages of explanation (it was a non- obvious thesis). Good insight though is it actionable? And some of the examples were...perhaps not really supported.

But at least 99.999% of business books contain 0 pages of insight.

</comment><comment><USER16> For me, personally, "Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies" by Jim Collins, still stands as THE canon to read for a business book. His research based style resonates with me and makes me trust the findings much more.</comment>


A Guide to Virtual SIM (eSIM) Card - <AUTHOR> https://www.allinallspace.com/virtual-sim-card-esim-the-full-guide/ <comment><USER2> >What is a virtual sim card(eSIM)?

>A virtual SIM card is a cloud-based number

Wait, what?

<comment><USER3> Looks to me that as our technology evolves, some other people's understanding of it becomes increasing limited, as evidently shown in the article.</comment></comment>


The Making of Night Cafe (Part 1) - <AUTHOR> http://www.borrowedlightvr.com/2015/09/28/the-making-of-night-cafe-part-1/ <comment><USER2> Makes more sense if you watch the promo vid first [http://www.borrowedlightvr.com/the-night- cafe/](http://www.borrowedlightvr.com/the-night-cafe/)</comment>


Ask HN: Where to live within California - <AUTHOR> I'm a software engineer thinking of moving to California. There are many options within California, so I'd like to get opinions from people in the know about the various locations.
Could residents (or those with experience) state where they live/work and why they do or don't like it?
I don't care about salary, living costs, and jobs available - these stats are all widely available online. I'm looking for subjective and human perspectives on what it's like to live there.
Thanks to anyone who can help, I'm sure others will find this helpful too. <comment><USER2> I moved from NYC about 6 years ago. I first moved to San Mateo and it was a great location. About a 20 minute express train ride into the city and the rest of the Valley is commutable also.

When we had to consider school for our daughter we moved out to the far east bay in San Ramon where its the only place with good school districts that we could afford a house. If i time the BART right my commute door to door is a bit over an hour. The office was like a minute walk from a BART stop in the city.

I don't take any jobs where I have to drive since the commute to San Jose might be 90 minutes (usually 30 minutes with no traffic)

We are in the process of moving out of the area. We love it here but can't afford it on a single salary. We got lucky with owning a house in the area but making almost 200k and living pay check to pay check sucks.

<comment><USER3> Wow.. You are very wealthy. I am also a software engineer in the Bay Area and don't have anywhere near your wealth. Well done!

<comment><USER2> Not wealthy.. just lucky. I've been through 2 exits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Subjectively I find areas surrounding Monterey Bay very pleasant, which includes places like Monterey, Pacific Grove, Carmel-by-the-Sea, and Pebble Beach; but also on the other side Santa Cruz and its suburbs. It's expensive, but you're close to the coast, surrounded by greenery and potentially redwoods, and are reasonably close to SV/SF without having to contend with it daily. Though traffic is a challenge, it's within plausible commuting distance of SV.

If you're looking for somewhere a little more removed from major activity centers, the extended San Luis Obispo area including Morro Bay and Pismo Beach is decent, and you're nearly equidistant from both LA and SF, about 3-4 hours away. It's outside of commuting distance, but well-within daytrip distance.

I happen to be enamored with San Diego too, but it's all the way down at one end of the state, and it's two hours closer to Phoenix than to San Francisco. If you're looking for centrality, you won't find that there, but the city is lovely, and it's a functional metro with good jobs and a large military presence.

Edit: Bay Area peripheries like Santa Rosa (in the north) and Gilroy/Morgan Hill/Hollister in the south, maybe Tracy/Stockton in the east, are probably a good compromise, but other than striking a balance between affordable and not- too-far from SF/SV, are not too compelling in their own right.

Edit: Coastward LA periphery cities like Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks, Ventura, Oxnard, are quiet, shaded, suburban, but also pricey. LA traffic is a nightmare; you're 'on paper' within reach of LA, but don't bet on it.

Other than possibly Sacramento, I don't find the Central Valley particularly appealing. The cost of living is lower, but with the exception of Sacramento and Bakersfield, none of the valley cities project a strong sense of place; this applies to the desert exurbs like Palmdale and Victorville too, except for maybe Palm Springs.

Every other area of the state is on the periphery and you're too far away from major employment centers to be a useful place to make a living in the general case.

</comment><comment><USER5> The South Bay (Redondo Beach, Manhattan Beach, Hermosa, parts of Torrance) is a great place to live. It's relatively close to Downtown LA (8-12 miles). Driving from South Bay to west LA is only 30 mins so the drive isn't horrible. Driving from the valley to West LA is horrible. South Bay and Valley are great for families. Having lived in NY for a few decades, then to NC, LA traffic is not that bad considering. It's more about how to navigate and that's where Waze is really helpful.

</comment><comment><USER6> Ive lived here most of my life, in both southern and (currently) northern California. Sure, the weather is nice, but my advice would be to stay away unless you are already wealthy or forced to move here for work etc.

If you live in any sort of population center expect traffic to be a nightmare from 6-11am and 3-7pm. Taxes are also some of the highest in the country and poorly implemented social policies continue to increase these on an annual basis.

If you are looking for something in particular that California has to offer, there is almost always better alternatives (see: Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, etc...)

<comment><USER7> Oregon is one of the most expensive states to live in, as well. (If you opt for Portland.)

It doesn't compare to California, but it's getting there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I moved from SF to Midtown in Sacramento. I personally really like it. Its probably the most affordable urban area in California. Its not as dense as SF and has nowhere near the tech jobs but its a very interesting enjoyable place in its own right. Great people, food, beer scene and vibe. Might be a place worth looking into.

</comment><comment><USER9> I live in Santa Cruz and really like it here. Fantastic mountain biking, beach-going, and all around outdoors stuff. With the bay just over the hill, there's a pretty reasonable tech scene and some jobs. Housing is pretty out of control, though.</comment>


Jimmy Wales: Fox News Is Wrong, No Shake Up - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/16/jimmy-wales-fox-news-is-wrong-no-shakeup/

<comment><USER2> I wish we would stop calling drawings of small girls with boobs "child pornography". Not you thing? Sure. "Obscene" under the Miller Test? Possibly. Graphical depiction of the abuse of actual children? Nope. Drawn by people who abuse children? Nope. Enjoyed by people who abuse children? No more so than Fox News is.

In order to approach the problem of obscenity on Wikipedia rationally, we need to call a spade a spade. This has nothing to do with child pornography; that expression is only being used because it stirs up so much automatic hate. When all we can think about is hate and protecting our children, we can't think about the actual problem.

Criticizing Jimmy Wales until he deletes some pictures from Wikipedia is not going to prevent a single child from being abused. So if we really care about child abuse, we should think about focusing our attention on something other than Wikipedia. Perhaps child abusers...

(I guess this is a little off-topic, but having done a bit of research into this, I haven't seen anything on Wikipedia that remotely resembles pornography with children. But the media, even tech-savvy sources without a religious agenda, keep using that term, and it's not helping the discussion at all.)

<comment><USER3> There's no point applying ordinary reason to a witch hunt. You're right, of course, but no one cares about the finer distinctions. (Compare the ongoing depiction of Iraqi and Afghan guerrillas as "terrorists" even if they solely attack military targets.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:ListUsers/...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:ListUsers/sysop&limit=2000)

* Jimbo Wales (checkuser, founder, oversight, administrator) (Created on 27 March 2001 at 15:47)

Looks like Fox News didn't do a very basic fact check.

<comment><USER5> More likely it was intentionally fabricated with without regard to facts. Reread the article which describes wikipedia has having already internally collapsed into war: [http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/05/14/exclusive- shake-wi...](http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/05/14/exclusive-shake- wikipedia-porn-pressure/)

Especially considering that FOX News called wikipedia's corporate donors and told them they were funding the distribution of child porn, I'd put the odds at 75% that this was a deliberate media hit by someone with a vested interest in wikipedia's demise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I figured it out. They hate wikipedia because it's socialist! Or maybe communist.</comment>


LangPro: Natural Language Theorem Prover - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.09417 <comment><USER2> I'm really interested in this.

I follow the field fairly closely, I've implemented an open language question answering system myself, as well as re-implemented parts of the Watson QA system form their papers. I've built NN based entailment systems, and I built a text summarisation system which still wins benchmark competitions 15 years after it was built. Also, I use Superset (AirBNB's opensource Tableau competitor) daily.

Basically, I'm not a complete neophyte in this and related fields.

But I don't have a clue what this system does.

I know Prolog and some about CCG. But the it talks about Tableau and I'm completely lost.

Can someone please explain?

<comment><USER3> No need to brag, buddy.

<comment><USER4> It didn't come across as bragging to me; it provided useful context for the question. For a naive reader like me, it demonstrated to me that someone much more experienced in this area than me was confused by it. For a reader capable of answering their question, it provided a baseline of their knowledge, which is useful for determining what level of detail to go into when answering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How does this differ from what prolog does?

<comment><USER6> Prolog is a programming language, and this isn't a programming language. Prolog doesn't process natural language by itself. Prolog isn't a tableau- based theorem prover.

This project is a natural-language-processing, tableau-based-theorem-proving application implemented in the Prolog programming language.

<comment><USER5> I mean how does the pruning constraint tree search applied in prolog implementations differ from the tableaux method

<comment><USER5> After some research, the tableaux method seems to require full coverage, which would only converge with the search tree if all conditions have to be exhausted.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Best of Stack Exchange, every month - <AUTHOR> http://stackmonthly.com/ <comment><USER2> An RSS feed would be great.

And a way to link to the question.

<comment><USER3> Feeds - <http://stackmonthly.com/feeds> Click the timestamp to read the question

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Surprised to see my little project on HN.

All feedback welcome.</comment>


Selective Ignorance - <AUTHOR> http://titojankowski.com/selective-ignorance/ <comment><AUTHOR> 'Do you ever avoid reading a book because you don't want it to pollute your thinking? Have a new idea and don't want to read the "best in the industry" perspective, but want to read the basics to nurture your own seedling of an opinion without it getting obscured by better polished and refined thinkers?

I've been learning about climate change for the past year. There are already so many "big" opinions and "big" writers on climate change. Everyone "knows" what climate change is, how could I possibly have something different to say? There are times when I wonder if reading everything that's out there is really the best path. My brain is soft and I risk parroting others ideas and squelching my own voice. So I try to stick to the basics. My friend Dan Walsh suggests reading more tangential books. For example, if you're interested in carbon markets, read a book about hedge funds and Wall Street, but NOT the book by an expert in carbon markets or the book with "Carbon Markets" in the title.'</comment>


Should Mental Disorders Have Names? - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/should-mental-disorders-have-names/ <comment><USER3> Most researchers agree that mental disorders should not have names, as it is difficult or impossible to draw discrete boundaries in this complex and poorly-understood spectrum of symptoms. However, as a broad generalization, researchers are the only group who feel this way:

\- Doctors like names because then they can provide a diagnosis and recommend action based on the diagnosis

\- Patients and their loved ones (often) like names because it is easier to think/say "I have schizophrenia" than it is to describe their factor scores on a myriad of benchmarks

\- Drug companies like names because they can develop drugs for specific disorders rather than for a combinatorially large number of factors

\- Regulators like names because they can approve treatments and standards of care for a finite number of situations

\- Insurance companies like names because it allows them to approve or deny claims in a more straightforward way.

While names are often times arbitrary, they make many things more convenient. I am not saying that I personally agree or disagree that there should or should not be names, only that this is a complex issue with many complexities besides the underlying science.

Also, I see nobody has mentioned RDoC yet, which is the taxonomy researchers are starting to use to classify mental disorders: [https://www.nimh.nih.gov/research- priorities/rdoc/constructs...](https://www.nimh.nih.gov/research- priorities/rdoc/constructs/rdoc-matrix.shtml)

<comment><USER4> I completely agree with your overall analysis, as well as the main point of the original article. The one thing I would add or clarify is that even the phrase "mental disorder" may not be the best way to refer to this class of symptoms/behaviors. I believe that "mental injury" would be both more accurate, and more conducive to healing.

A substantial portion of the things we refer to as "mental illness" are the after-effects of trauma. When you break your leg and you can't walk for 6 months afterwards, people don't say you have a "leg illness". It's not some unspecified thing which caused your leg to stop performing like most people's legs. It's a fracture. If set properly and given time to heal, it will resume normal functioning. If it's never set, or if it gets reinjured, it may lead to a permanent disability.

Minds can be broken as well. Any one who has ever experienced an abusive relationship knows this. Survivors of child abuse know this. A "mental fracture" isn't primarily physical, like a fracture of the leg, but it has a similar effect in terms of impairing the organ to perform its role correctly.

But mental injuries can be "set" and healed, just like physical ones. Perhaps not 100%, perhaps there will always be scar tissue or some version of impaired mobility where the injury occurred. But injuries heal with time, given proper care.

I am aware that this concept is fairly at odds with the western conception of mental health with its myriad disorders, all of which are unexplained and presumably lifelong diseases. I attribute this entire weird world of DSM pseudoscience with its gargantuan and ever-growing list of labels to the massive social pressure against dealing with the actual problem of trauma and abuse.

Correctly diagnosing someone with a "mental injury resulting from trauma/abuse" would lead to some extremely difficult conversations, which most people (even the ones experiencing the abuse) would prefer not to have.

<comment><USER5> How exactly would you "set" a mental injury?

<comment><USER4> It's like setting a physical injury, but significantly harder because usually you're not dealing with it at the time of injury, only much later.

You find the original source, some event or series of events that caused the psyche to fracture. By fracture I mean caused the mind to operate according to some models that were necessary to survive at the time of crisis, but are no longer adaptive in the normal/real/adult world. You then update your mental model to one that is more aligned with reality.

In other words: go to the source of the pain, unlearn whatever lesson you learned at the time to deal with the situation, learn a different/healthier way of looking at it, and then practice a lot until the new mental model is firmly in place.

This is hard. But it gets easier with practice. And it's much easier than trying to set an injury by taking lots of pain-killers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The root issue here is finding some path forward for helping people. Psychiatry, psychology etc aren't doing a great job with that.

He tries to determine what has happened historically but not _why._

Why was this guy using drugs starting at age ten? What led up to that? Shouldn't it be classified as a parenting failure, not a "disorder" on his part?

What was the history with the father? Perhaps assaulting his father wasn't simply due to insanity. Some parents are really awful to their kids and it's a huge problem for the kid. That doesn't necessarily stop being true just because the kid became a legal adult.

Labels determine what mental models we use when trying to intercede in a problem. Different labels get very different reactions and treatment modes.

We need to up our game in myriad ways, but labels are a critical tool for this problem space. I hate labels, but they are a useful communication tool.

<comment><USER7> _> He tries to determine what has happened historically but not why._

The biggest advance in the history of psychotherapy was to stop asking _why_ and start asking _what_ and _how_.

The psychoanalysts broadly believed that mental disorders could be treated by revealing and resolving unconscious conflicts and forgotten childhood memories. That's a very slow process, and eventually randomised controlled trials would demonstrate that it wasn't particularly effective.

Rational emotive and cognitive behavioural therapists essentially argued _I don 't care why you're nuts, I just want to teach you how to be less nuts_. If you have habitually fearful or negative thoughts, you can learn to disregard those thoughts as unhelpful and consciously replace them with more useful thoughts. Knowing who to blame for your cognitive bugs doesn't really help you fix them. Aaron T. Beck had the good sense to subject his psychotherapeutic approach to randomised controlled trials, demonstrating that a relatively short course of cognitive behavioural therapy was at least as effective as several years of psychoanalysis.

Psychiatry, clinical psychology and psychotherapy undoubtedly has a lot of shortcomings and there are a lot of patients we don't yet know how to treat effectively. A far bigger problem however is lack of access - the vast majority of people who could benefit from psychiatric medicine simply don't get treated. In the developed world, it's usually fairly easy to get prescribed medication, but there are often long waits or financial barriers to access psychotherapy. In the developing world, most people can't even access SSRIs despite the cost being around $1 a month. Stigma and a lack of awareness are still a substantial barrier to accessing care.

We need better treatments, but the priority right now must be simply to get more people to try the treatments we do have. Trying a treatment with a 40% success rate is obviously better than doing nothing, but nothing is still the default and it's causing immense amounts of needless suffering.

<comment><USER8> > _The biggest advance in the history of psychotherapy was to stop asking why > and start asking what and how._

> _Rational emotive and cognitive behavioural therapists essentially argued I > don 't care why you're nuts, I just want to teach you how to be less nuts._

This is part of why schema therapy is getting so much attention right now: it takes CBT but combines why, what and how into a cohesive whole. The success rates seems to be even better than CBT, a lot better in some cases.

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

<comment><USER9> It's interesting that a lot of the 'hot new thing' therapies are around Personality Disorders or PTSD. I'm curious what the theory is to apply this to depression or anxiety. And what about dissociastive disorders, or oppositional defiant disorder, or autism?

<comment><USER8> > _oppositional defiant disorder_

Tangent: I have a lot of skepticism about that one being a proper disorder on its own, in the same sense that I wouldn't consider "fever" an illness in and of its own, but a symptom of other illnesses.

<comment><USER9> I agree, but even then, should the symptom be treated with the same treatment designed for personality disorders? What is the evidence of it? etc. I genuinely don't know these things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just imagine a doctor telling you what ICD code you have. There's nothing wrong with classification and labeling things. I think society is getting a little carried away with such topics. Personally, I think it's a phase that collectively we'll pass and reflect on how extreme we took things in order to try and obtain balance.

There's a difference in calling someone "crazy" vs saying they have a mental disorder. The meaning of "crazy" has changed over the years due to the abusive context it's been used in more and more. A lot of words got redefined over the years, so this isn't new, but the idea of dropping labels or trying to eliminate well established scientific and testable classifications is new.

To future generations, I hope you don't create a culture in which you're continuously stressed out about how others will label you publicly. When I was younger, a kid that was bullied in school could escape it by coming home. These days, you have no escape because of social media. I hope you learn to adjust and navigate these new times. Even older folks struggle with how things are currently.

<comment><USER11> For me one of the issue of the current names is that their definition change too much depending on the context and the person interpreting them.

For instance if you say someone your arm is 'broken', they understand something is deeply damaged (not just fissured). They might not know the specifics on how it broke, where exactly, how you are healing it or how it impacts you, but they know the basic criticality of it.

If you say you have "depression", they don't know if you'll take your week off to recover or actually need extensive professional follow up with a long term medication. There is no common sense of how bad it is 'broken'.

From there people all have their anecdotes, visions of how they solved "depression" and come with a very personal idea of what your issue is that most of the time will have nothing to do with your actual diagnosed issue.

In that sense the word doesn't work that much as a conveyor of information, they'll just know you have "something". I see the reasoning behind getting rid of a word in medical context if it doesn't bring any viable information with it.

<comment><USER10> I think what you're doing is comparing medical vs layman usage. A doctor will tell his patient they have a "broken arm" due to past experiences in speaking with patients using medical terms. e.g, fracture or distal radius fracture in the case of a broken wrist.

When it comes to mental disorders, it can be very difficult to accurately classify the severity. It reminds me of how doctors prescribe blood pressure medication; it's guess work. e.g, They will prescribe what they think will work and have you come back later to see if it's working properly. In my mom's case, the first prescription made things worse.

Depression can be rooted in chemical imbalances, diet, sudden loss of a job or family member, etc,. It's not like taking a walk will solve everyone's depression. In most cases, it's much more complex than that. That's why there's psychologist and psychiatrist. In some cases cognitive therapy works, some a good diet + workout routine works, and other cases medication is required. There are different levels of depression and they are properly classified by professionals. The word "depression" is like a doctor telling you that you're arm/wrist is broken. e.g, Bipolar Disorder is a type of depression that's treated with medication.

It's a terribly complex thing we're talking about and telling professionals how to define their own vernacular is pretty foolish. It would be like my mom telling me that engineers should drop the phrase "eventually consistent" and just say "consistent". :)

<comment><USER12> I'm afraid you are giving the psychiatric profession way too much credit.

Most DSM disorder categories don't perform well on measures of inter-rater reliability. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter- rater_reliability](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-rater_reliability)). One implication of this is that the categories can't be assumed to be well- defined scientific entities. Now, the DSM _could_ be a shadow of some more complete, correct taxonomy of mental disfunction—certainly it's based on observation of genuine distress, so it's not completely arbitrary—but by scientific or medical standards, it's very shaky.

Here's an article about the situation in relation to the DSM:

[https://www.madinamerica.com/2013/03/the-dsm-5-field- trials-...](https://www.madinamerica.com/2013/03/the-dsm-5-field-trials-inter- rater-reliability-ratings-take-a-nose-dive/)

It's not uncommon for people who haven't looked seriously at the mental health field to assume that the so-called medical model of mental illness meets the same high standards of intellectual rigour as other areas of medicine, or other endeavours such as engineering. I put it to you that you are in exactly that position: the very basic point you are making ("This is as complex as engineering! Leave it to the experts!) indicates that you are unaware of the unique flakiness of psychiatry. This is contested territory, and many professionals are invested in a certain dubious framing of the situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The danger of naming mental disorders (or any other abstract concept) is when you confuse the map for the territory.

The map (the name) should serve as the best possible mental model of the territory (the actual, descriptive physiological condition) - not as the thing-in-itself.

<comment><USER14> It is tempting to stare at the map when the territory is obscured by the fog of war. The rigor of the SCID very much hides the fact that several places on the territory have similar features but are miles apart. And then every observer loves certain places and hates working in others.

As bad as the state of diagnosis is (some say >50% for certain conditions) there is no way around a diagnosis for treatment as one needs to make decisions and these need to be based in whatever tenuous grasp one has on reality. At this point imho. we can only try to make sure all sources of bias, tendency to defend previous decisions, treatment capacity and financial considerations (diagnosis is key to insurance payments) are as far isolated from decision making as possible. There is lots to be done. SCID is only the symptom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I personally think this is a great sort of walk-through of the pitfalls of the strictly DSM-based approach. I don't necessarily see it as something that particularly reflects this guy. If he wanted to create a new diagnostic approach to include people who are, in a sense, indistinguishable from the patient population of strictly DSM-V bipolar that would be its own study. In addition to the above, and a host of other matters, this article does demonstrate something about how diagnosis and diagnostic approaches greatly influence how we understand, classify, and teach psychiatry, psychology, medicine, and other clinical fields. Plus, it presents some things about practitioners understanding of patients and clinical priorities in patient visits can be so structured by these approaches, research based on them, even conventional clinical wisdom structured by them, and so on. They cause a ripple effect, and one that influences clinical and academic practice in a sufficiently complex and opaque way. So, even clinical providers, academics who try to radically depart from these approaches are still quite effected by it.

That said, the point I really want to reach is that it's my opinion—and there is a body of academic work within and about many clinical fields on this matter— that the longevity of these diagnostic approaches and their bases, the categorization of disorders, how clinical fields themself are taught, how priorities are set in the clinic is owed and hugely influenced by the necessity (and the hegemony) of US insurance coding, especially as it relates to prescription drugs. I'm not insisting that prescriptions, or necessarily any of this is inherently negative in it's effects, just that insurance coding as it is, health insurance in the US as it is, has (sometimes quite extreme) far reaching influence over essentially every aspect of clinical practice, research practices. At least that's my opinion/conclusion/interest in this article.

</comment><comment><USER16> The neurological field has grappled, over the last few decades, with an increasing understanding of the interconnectedness and pliability of the brain and the rest of the body. We've gone from categorical localization of function to neuroplasticity for example, and likewise we've seen how distinct disorders can involve a number of different physiological differences and deficits (comorbidites are rife, e.g. see atopy + neurological sensitivities). The brain is especially complex. Our grappling with the terminology around its disorders is entirely ok IMHO. It's important to not get tied down in dogmatic categorical thinking. It's also important to let people explore different treatment paths, and find what works for them. There is never going to be a canonical "cure" for depression, just as there won't be for IBS.

</comment><comment><USER17> I tell people I have Tourette's. I don't have Tourette's. I'm missing one of the required criteria

\- must have tics that begin before he or she is 18 years of age.

In a medical standpoint that makes it different, but in any practical sense the name conveys all of the information people need, it is perhaps unusual in that it is also a condition that occasionally requires rapid explanation.

<comment><USER18> > I'm missing one of the required criteria

Are you sure about that? Tics don't always manifest in obvious ways. You may well have had them in a very mild form but never noticed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Us humans certainly prefer to put boundaries and names on things. And indeed, it is often unwise i.e. with (one of our) species definitions: A can procreate with B, B can with C but A cannot with C, meaning A==B, B==C but A!=C, a paradox because of our tendencies.

Could it be a cultural thing? While I grow older I find it more natural to think of things as continuous or to assign uncertainty to "facts", but perhaps our educational system does not give much attention to this. Perhaps it's too much about facts and names and boundaries.

In this articles' case though, of course mental disorders are a continuum but the drugs and methods for treatment we have are not. So perhaps in this case a label is nice. One should always keep the continuous nature in the back of one's mind though.

<comment><USER20> True, but do definitions not encourage a more thorough analysis?

If A is a male, B is a female, C is a male, your operator definition is even troublesome within a species.

What kind of mathematical object comes closer to this abstraction of a species? Maybe it's not about names and boundaries, but about getting to understand things for which you need abstractions.

I always appreciate when people do not fuss about definitions and easily change them but reason consistently after indicating their interpretation of those concepts.

<comment><USER21> I don't think your example really applies, because no one expects the definition of "species" to imply that the "individual A can mate with individual B" relation to be transitive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If you don't have multiple names, you'll have a single name ('insane', or some new euphemism.) People with any sort of disorder would all get lumped together, and human nature being what it is, others would tend to assume the worst of all of them. I find it hard to believe this would be an improvement over the status quo, as imperfect as it may be.

</comment><comment><USER23> The thing that unsettles me is that the diagnosis is all self reported. If I'm already going in to see a doctor because I think my mind isn't right, how can I trust that I am answering the questions correctly with respect to how they are intending them. You're trusting me to answer your questions when I don't feel confident in my ability to answer them and in a couple of hours you've handed down a diagnosis which basically amounts to 'here take these drugs and we'll see you again in a month' Good luck navigating the side effects as well as the problems you originally came in here with by yourself.

<comment><USER24> Most of the neurological diseases have no conclusive and unique biomarkers or tests, and symptoms often not unique. There is not much can do to without scales with current knowledge

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm skeptical as hell of the entire field of psychotherapy, psychology, psychiatry, and cog sci. I think we're doing better than before, sure, but it's all such a shit show from my perspective as a participant.

Rambles:

Back in highschool we had a massively depressed friend. They tried it all with her: cognitive behavioral therapy, drugs (ALL OF THEM), weed, religion. Tough love. Exercise. Diet. Nothing cured her and her depression killed her via suicide. What's the psych tell me after? Sometimes there's nothing we can do? That sucks. Human genome, done. Prevent HIV from killing someone. Can't do shit about depression sometimes.

And if you get depression - do you take the ssris? Fuck knows? [http://www.healthtalk.org/peoples-experiences/mental- health/...](http://www.healthtalk.org/peoples-experiences/mental- health/experiences-antidepressants/deciding-take-antidepressant) and the "next page." Sometimes they make you numb to the world or feel like you're being controlled. Sometimes they make you have suicidal thoughts. Sometimes they take a weight off your shoulders. Sometimes they make you feel like you actually have a chance. None of my psychs were able to describe any of this. I had to research it on my own.

And Lord forbid you've got multiple. Is it ADHD still? Newest psych has the idea that it's all ADD now - so, my memories of wildcat behavior that I'd be ashamed of in seconds as a kid, what was that? When shit bubbles up out of my mouth without me thinking, is that not the H anymore but just something else? And why did nobody tell me in 2 decades that a common symptom of ADD is shit memory? I had to find out on Reddit. Is it actually? Who knows!

Does Adderall help? Well, I suppose! Hard to say. Technically, I _could_ work without it. I am more productive with. But, also more robotic. And, it's nearly impossible to track the subtle personality changes that come with medicating via Adderall, no matter how hard I journal. Ask the psychs and they shrug and say "keep a journal." Ask what dosage and they say "higher until the side effects are unbearable, then one dosage down," instead of "lower until the medicine is ineffective, then one dose up." And as for those personality changes - perhaps that's a "better" me anyway? It's certainly a smarter one.

Don't get me started on what fresh hell you find yourself in if the State discovers someone is suicidal and locks them in a psych ward. Came damn close to ruining my life by performing a full on jail break to get my friend out of that psuedo science nightmare.

I welcome all thoughts on my rambles and I apologize if no helpful meaning was able to be extracted, on this subject I can think of no other way to get my thoughts on paper.

<comment><USER18> Sorry to hear about your friend. I swear psychiatrists are exempt from observing the Hippocratic oath.

"I need help. My life is falling apart. I'm struggling with work and school. I might have a learning disability."

"You sound depressed. Here's a prescription for some obscure variant of an SSRI not covered by your insurance."

"These meds you put me on make me feel sick."

"Let's increase your dose."

"I want to hurt other people. I want to die."

"It takes 4-6 weeks for it to take full effect."

"This just isn't working."

"Let's add another variable to the equation. Here's a second prescription. Take both and see what happens."

The experiment must continue. It always ends the same way.

I know psychiatry helps some people (especially where sedatives are involved), but for the rest of us who slip through the cracks it's just the new Nazi science.

<comment><USER21> I can only imagine the frustration you are describing, but I still wonder if the blame is really on the doctors or the branch of medicine. Is there a better alternative?

<comment><USER26> The first thing you need to ask is are we, collectively, seeing an improvement or a deterioration of aggregate mental health? And how does this compare and contrast against nations where pharmacological treatment of illness is less and, if such a thing exists, more common? In other words is what we are doing better than nothing? The answer to this question is not always yes, because it's entirely possible that in the process of trying to do something you end up going backwards.

This also cannot be answered with isolated consideration such as the effectiveness of drug 'x' since there are externalities involved. What happens to these individuals in the longrun? The treatment of ADHD with amphetamines is a great one for this question. For those who showed no response to the treatment, are their outcomes better or worse than if they had never pursued treatment? What is the false positive rate and what is the affect of medication on these individuals?

The answer to this question should be obvious, but I'm not so sure it is anymore.

<comment><USER27> I don't disagree with your basic point, but that's a huge correlation bias. Why would a country with little mental illness introduce these medications?

<comment><USER26> It's not countries introducing drugs, but companies. And companies are driven primarily by a profit motive. This is not a bad thing in and of itself since it creates a private incentive for the research and development of drugs. However, when the money starts to become prioritized more heavily than the product being made, it creates a severe conflict of interest. The recent issue with opioids being an obvious example of this. Quoting this [1] great article from the Houston Chronicle:

\----

 _" The trigger of the opioid crisis was a misrepresentation of a 1980 letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine, reporting on 11,000 hospitalized patients receiving opioids. It concluded that "despite widespread use of narcotic drugs in hospitals… addiction is rare in medical patients with no history of addiction." This became a landmark study, cited more than 600 times, particularly after Purdue Pharma introduced OxyContin (extended-release oxycodone) in 1995.

Large opioids manufacturers began funding nonprofit groups such as the American Pain Society; and pain experts advocated for pain to become an important "fifth vital sign" to be queried in every doctor's visit when checking blood pressure, heart rate, respiration and temperature.

Caught in the trend, the Federation of American Medical Boards encouraged punishing physicians for under-treating pain. This policy was drafted by individuals with ties to opioids manufacturers. Some were members of industry speakers' bureaus, and later became company executives.

Purdue funded more than 20,000 educational programs between 1996 and 2002 to influence physician prescription habits nationwide, and developed a misleading advertising campaign that claimed that the risk of addiction from prescription opioids was "much less than 1%." OxyContin sales grew from $48 million in 1996, to over $1.5 billion in 2002. With increased sales came increased abuse and addiction. By 2004, OxyContin was the leading drug of abuse in the United States.

In 2007, Purdue (and three executives) pleaded guilty to misrepresenting the risks of OxyContin addiction and paid $634 million in penalties, a fraction of the $35 billion in sales in two decades."_

\----

It's pretty sick stuff, but extremely clear evidence that these comes have come to see profit as the sole point of their existence. And these companies have extensive reach. And opioids are obviously not the only example here. This is a typical pattern, even if a rather extreme case. For instance the nonprofit industry tool used to push medicating and diagnosing of ADD is CHADD - Children and Adults with ADD.

[1] - [https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/Opi...](https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/Opioid- crisis-began-with-a-lie-about-the-risks-12917033.php)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Pretty great article. This characteristic that many patients have multiple disorders is an interesting point. Reminded me of my real world PCA applications which were never satisfying. In such a case you'd take the attributes of answers to questions in a population, and then get principle components (PCs) to these vectors of examples. Who says that each example in a population has to be dominated by 1 principle component? Many people have the view that PCs are just whatever linear combinations of attributes that explain your data, and I've seen many people try to name them in ways that encapsulate the attributes that each PC selects for, but it always seems like an awkward exercise after you get past the first few PCs.

And of course, I'm not literally saying this SCID is the attributes to the DSM "PCA," or any other subspace method. I don't work with subspace methods often, so if anyone wants to fill me in on what is done in the medical world (or other high stakes domains) in practice, much appreciated.

In cases of segmenting customers and then targeting each one differently, I have found that subspace methods work well for raising typical startup metrics. But the interpretability was not cut and dry in my experience, something that obviously is needed when you work with individuals like Doctors, not populations like many companies.

My guess is that the DSM segments patients to different treatments though. If this is the case then it does't really matter what the name of the constellation is as long as after they send the patient there, everything is hunky dory.

</comment><comment><USER29> Person comes to conclusion that objective tool doesn't work because it doesn't give him the results he wants. I'm glad he didn't get to just subjectively call people bipolar or not based on what he wants, it would just bias his research and make it all scientifically useless. Whether you like skid or not, at least "According to skid patient is in box X" has a definite meaning, and can be scientifically trusted to mean something. Opposite to that "This one specific doctor based on this one single interaction decided that the person fits in box Y" is just completely useless.

</comment><comment><USER30> Why is the author is so troubled? They're just using an instrument to transform qualitative data into quantitative data. Such methods are used pretty much anywhere there's subjectivity in observation. To do science, you have to have a standard way of measuring.

<comment><USER31> Are names quantities?

<comment><USER30> Yes, categories are as long as they're well-defined. Measurement instruments get better over time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The conclusion of the article raises a great question. Wouldn't it be more valuable to diagnose based on quantitative criteria instead of binary answers to extremely complex questions? I'd love to hear an opinion from a SCID practitioner.

<comment><USER32> Something like the SCID is useful as a structured way of measuring or assessing behavior. A binary output is probably not helpful though.

What's interesting is that the people who developed the SCID (and the DSM and its predecessor, the RDC) actually developed a very similar tool in the 60s, but instead of it producing binary diagnoses, it produced scale scores more like test scores. It actually had better statistical properties and provided fairly detailed information. It's always been a mystery why they moved away from that, except that the DSM as a whole moved away from that.

<comment><USER27> That's interesting. It reminds of the BMI, a metric intended only for use at the population level. It's been adopted (some would say misappropriated) as a yardstick for individual health, because... reasons?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, and autism. All caused by chronic mercury toxicity. The name of the disorder should be "mercury toxicity" in my case.

</comment><comment><USER34> Sure, we can label and categorize human behavior, but first you need to define what is normal.

<comment><USER35> Jordan Peterson, is that you? Pretty sure we can ballpark it. I had a cup of coffee this morning - normal, a woman in the news kept her dead sister in a freezer for almost 20 years - not normal.

<comment><USER36> >I had a cup of coffee this morning - <USER2>

You casually drank a psychoactive drug. Is "normal" just another word for common?

If your culture demanded that you keep your dead refrigerated, and everyone around you did exactly that, would that behavior be promoted to normality?

<comment><USER35> Now you're just playing semantics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> "It's seven am on a frosty Wednesday morning" Oh my God, not another one of these articles that starts with a goddamn novel before it gets to the point.

</comment><comment><USER38> Should anything have a name?

It seems that people are just running out of shit to write about at this point.

And from Scientific American! I trusted you as a kid!

<comment><USER31> I not sure if you are just trolling here, but reading the article it seems clear that the author has a point beyond the usual signifier-signified semiotic crisis.

The author ends by musing about mental diseases being described by coordinates in several dimensions. Sure, perhaps connected regions of that space can be given their own names, but in general, the author believes that our vocabulary lacks the granularity to identify the fingerprint of individual diseases.

I know a lot of hands have already been wrung over the ineffectiveness of natural language in describing the phenomena of the inner world, but in a clinical setting this takes on a new meaning, and the essay is, in my opinion, poignant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Sure they should, they have a life of their own. Mine are called Alice and Edward... Sorry, we could not resist.</comment>


Wacky, all volunteer Open Source Bridge conference previews speakers and topics - <AUTHOR> http://opensourcebridge.org/2009/04/open-source-bridge-conference-confirmed-speakers/

<comment><AUTHOR> (Disclaimer: I'm doing light-volunteer work for them, but am in no way a primary organizer.)

I am _really_ looking forward to this event. It's got the spirit of a BarCamp (and one free-for-all unconference day), but the "curation" of OSCON or a more traditional event.

It's a really good mix of some big name speakers like Rasmus and Chris Messina, and not-so-big-names, giving fresh topics a second look.

</comment><comment><USER2> What makes this event "wacky"?

<comment><AUTHOR> They have a 24 hour hacker lounge for code sprints + scheming and socializing (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=532314>), a rude robot on Twitter ordering people to submit proposals/ attend (<http://twitter.com/osbridgebot/status/1536795780>), all proposals were automatically updated to a public page + feed, even before accepted, anybody could send (private) comments to committee on what they thought should be/not accepted, the rude robot submitted a (rejected) talk, i've seen various organizers appear on a public-access like show drinking tiki drinks, promoting it.

It's all volunteer run, so it seems to have the spirit of BarCamp, but its scale and logistics is a bit more OSCON-like, held at same convention center where OSCON was last year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Pricing makes me think of YAPC. I went to one of those; it was a great time. Lots of talent, both local and big name. Larry Wall ended up being sick (IIRC), but Damian Conway gave a great introduction to programming in Klingon (with working prototype).

<http://www.archlug.org/kwiki/KlingonPerlProgramming>

<http://www.perl.com/lpt/a/560></comment>


Investigatory Powers Act – devil in the detail - <AUTHOR> http://www.revk.uk/2016/12/investigatory-powers-act-devil-in-detail.html <comment><USER2> I think one should reconsider purchasing products or services from UK companies. Economic impact will be the only force that changes these laws.

Hoping that the RIPA laws do not apply to your communication provider product or services is wishful thinking.

When they come for your metadata, or want you to back door your customers, one must either shut down or comply.

<comment><USER3> So what do I do if I live in the UK? I've already written a letter to my MP, and in reply got a copy-pasted response that doesn't even make a coherent point. You can't complain, you can't even pay your way out of the problem - the best I can do is have a VPN enabled by default on all of my devices, but it's a pain sometimes(can't access my bank or my paypal account through VPN for some reason, so I have to switch it off from time to time). It really feels awful to be living in the UK at the moment from the privacy point of view.

<comment><USER2> A brain drain of skilled information technologists from the UK will also drive home this message to the authorities.

Consider EU or US

<comment><USER4> Nah, they'll become leaders of free trade by deporting all EU citizens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have to say that A&A are expensive, but they are damned good, a case of _" you get what you pay for"_. And in this case, they're also trying their hardest to do the right thing for their customers.

<comment> mike-cardwell They wont break the law though. Obviously. And if the law says your traffic is logged, your traffic is logged. I don't know if this is going to be done at the A&A level, or at a higher level in the network stack, but it will happen regardless of whether you're using A&A or Sky or Virgin or whatever.

</comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell He says he spoke to a lawyer, yet also suggests he'll be able to get away with claiming that his individual customers are "telecommunications operators" so he can't log their data. I'm not a lawyer, yet this sounds _highly_ unlikely to work to me.

</comment><comment><USER6> Seems like a loophole not likely to last long.</comment>


What Is a Better Call to Action Than "Request a Demo"? - <AUTHOR> https://capitalandgrowth.org/questions/1539/what-is-a-better-call-to-action-than-request-a-dem.html?childToView=1606#answer-1606 <comment><USER2> Just give me the price and I'll know whether I can pay it.

We've been talking about this at work today. A piece of software we use used to be great. It was a good price, price was up front, worked on a per seat licence, feature packed.

They recently updated to a new version, and now they licence per team, and tell you to request a price. Recent blog posts imply that they have tripled the price. It's very unfortunate.</comment>


Is a rocket scientist smart enough to make it in mobile games? - <AUTHOR> http://www.pocketnext.com/interviews/blast-into-the-great-unknown/

<comment><USER2> We were just featured on the AppStore! <http://www.cannoncat.com/images/itunes_feature.png></comment>


EU launces flagship Sentinel Satellite project to monitor Earth - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26875544

<comment><USER2> The title of this submission: "EU launces flagship Sentinel Satellite project to monitor Earth"

The title of the article: "EU launches flagship Sentinel satellite project to monitor Earth"

Lately I've been seeing one of these every five minutes. Literacy is dead, and so is text-based search.</comment>