A new form of brain stimulation relieved severe depression in a small study - <AUTHOR> http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/04/stanford-researchers-devise-treatment-that-relieved-depression-i.html <comment><USER3> Actual paper is available here: [https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2019.1...](https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2019.19070720)

n=21, no control group, zero blinding. Placebo response is notoriously high in depression studies, so it's unacceptable that they didn't include a control group.

This technique is a variant of rTMS, which has been around for a long time. We've had years of positive rTMS study results that failed to replicate in real-world conditions. There's some early evidence that it might do something positive, but it's not clear that it's a viable treatment option. In most major cities you can usually find at least one obscure rTMS clinic somewhere, but they won't offer the exact rTMS technique studied here. They also won't give you 50 sessions across 5 days as used in this study.

It's very disappointing, even suspicious, that they didn't include a control group. It's trivially easy to include a sham rTMS treatment because the patients can't see the magnetic field. At minimum, they could have split the group into low-dose and high-dose to demonstrate a dose-response relationship. Yet they deliberately chose to avoid any control group or dose-response measurements.

I can't access the full text, so I don't know when they measured the patients' depressive symptoms. If they scored the depression inventory on the final day of the 5-day treatment, this wouldn't be very promising as a long-term treatment. The real test would be how the depression remission holds up after the rTMS treatment is discontinued. If the remission persists for months, that would be truly impressive. On the other hand, if this only works with 50 in- office rTMS sessions per week, it's not a practical outpatient treatment.

I would love to be wrong and for this to be the holy grail of depression treatment, but given the circumstances I think it's best interpreted as an outlier study unless/until someone else reproduces it. I don't think we'll all be going in for 50 sessions of rTMS across 5 days any time soon.

<comment><USER4> How do papers like this get published? This is a conference paper at best.

<comment><USER3> > How do papers like this get published? This is a conference paper at best.

The why is obvious: It's #1 on Hacker News right now, and spreading like a wildfire across my social media. People love to hear about promising new depression treatments, because we all know someone who suffers from depression.

Strangely, most rTMS papers follow similar patterns: No control groups, small sample sizes, questionable methodology.

The methodological issues would have been trivially easy to correct from the start, so I assume the omission of control groups is intentional. I think it's geared toward generating publicity and drumming up grant money. The core rTMS technique seems to do _something_ for depression, so it would be great if someone could translate that into a practical, sustainable treatment.

<comment><USER5> Treating `depression` or claiming to have cured depression is something a lot of people look forward to. Couple that with the fact that we are all sitting in the midst of an ongoing pandemic, news stories with catchy titles like these are bound to attract extra eyeballs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Either this will win the Nobel Prize, or it won't hold up. (Guess which one is more likely.)

A few reasons I don't think it will hold up: \- this is a university press release \- N = 21 \- no control group \- no blinding \- university press release doesn't even claim it's a new approach, just incremental improvement on an existing approach \- the paper (link below) is about evaluating safety, feasibility, and "preliminary efficacy" (i.e., they're not advertising this as a robust result)

Paper available here:

[https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2019.1...](https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2019.19070720)

[https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/581280v3.full](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/581280v3.full)

<comment><USER7> Indeed.

>With SAINT, study participants underwent 10 sessions per day of 10-minute treatments, with 50-minute breaks in between. After a day of therapy, Lehman's mood score indicated she was no longer depressed; it took up to five days for other participants. On average, three days of the therapy were enough for participants to have relief from depression.

One imagines that three to five 10 hour (!) days of a presumably highly- trained professional spending time and attention and focus on a patient serves as no less than an incredibly strong placebo. It would be interesting to see a blinded study where the transducer functionality was replaced by a small heater (or whatever is needed to make the system act, feel and sound the same for all involved).

It would be lovely if this held up. Depression and other psychological issues are insidious.

<comment><USER8> They are doing said study. From the second sentence:

> The researchers are conducting a larger, double-blinded trial in which half > the participants are receiving fake treatment.

<comment><USER9> How does fake treatment work in a clinical therapy test setting?

I'd think I'd either figure out that the person giving me therapy was talking nonsense pretty quickly, or their 'placebo' therapy is indistinguishable from actual therapy, in which case am I still a control?

<comment><USER10> This is magnetic stimulation. You could have a control group where you don't turn on the magnet.

<comment><USER11> Yeah but there was an article posted a few days ago about how Reiki can't possibly work but it still does.

IMO the only way to blind this is to put people in an automated machine that either turns the magnet on or it doesn't (and it makes some noises either way). You can't have highly trained professionals in the loop making people feel valuable by giving them all this attention, as that could be a confounding effect in both the alleged-treatment and the alleged-placebo.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22764824](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22764824)

<comment><USER12> > _IMO the only way to blind this is to put people in an automated machine > that either turns the magnet on or it doesn 't (and it makes some noises > either way). You can't have highly trained professionals in the loop making > people feel valuable by giving them all this attention, as that could be a > confounding effect in both the alleged-treatment and the alleged-placebo._

It's fine as long as both the experimental group and the control group get the same amount of attention, right? If both groups show the same amount of improvement, that means it was caused entirely by the attention, not by the magnetic treatment.

<comment><USER10> This probably only works if the professionals are blinded to whether the machine is enabled

<comment><USER13> That's what the "double" in double-blind means

<comment><USER10> msandford is saying that you can only run an experiment like this and get good results if the treatment is administered entirely by a machine. PhasmaFelis is saying that as long as both groups get similar amounts of professional attention then you can still get good results. I'm saying that to make sure you get equal levels of professional attention you need to blind the professionals to whether the machine is enabled.

(I agree that this is what the "double" in "double blind" means, but that's not what we were talking about.)

<comment><USER14> In that case, let's just call it triple-blind... /s

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you're feeling depressed, you might be helped by a—warm bath.

A 2017 Freiburg study [1] took 36 moderately clinically depressed patients and assigned 17 to 30-minute, 40 °C hyperthermic baths, with 19 as control.

After bathing twice a week for four weeks, the study claims the 17 patients had a "moderate but significant improvement".

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5371197/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5371197/)

<comment><USER16> People must not want to hear the truth, hence your downvotes. Most forms of depression can be cured with self-care.

"In health care, self-care is any necessary human regulatory function which is under individual control, deliberate and self-initiated."

<comment><USER17> I think Johann Hari has the gist right: in the vast majority of cases, depression is a signal from the body of some biological/social/emotional needs that aren't being met, rather than necessarily being an immutable medical condition.

For n=1, I've struggled with (manic) depression and anxiety most of my life. And while I've used a variety of strategies to cope (Seligman's "Learned Optimism" and a potpourri of Buddhist ideas were incredibly helpful), the secret sauce was getting off of sugar and junk food. When I'm staying on a whole-foods, keto-ish diet, mood swings and unwanted negative thoughts have their volume is turned down by 90%, making the remainder relatively easy to process.

Everybody's different, so YMMV; in some cases, medication are an appropriate tool. But there are some universals that basically benefit every human: drink more water, get more sleep, go for a walk in the sunshine, eat your vegetables, and the less sugar (probably) the better.

<comment><USER18> The phenomenological impact of poor diet and harsh glycemic index ASDR cannot be overstated. 'refined sugars negatively impact mood and emotional well- being' might be one of the most rock solid universals of human nature.

All medical interventions should include the no-brainer diet, vitamins, exercise, self-esteem interventions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> One thing to note is that the study population consisted entirely of severely depressed people. As far as I've read about it, the current consensus seems to be that the more severe the depression is, the more likely it is to respond to medical interventions as opposed to psychological/behavioral ones. This ties in to a broader understanding that depressive disorders are considerably heterogeneous and no single theory or treatment target is relevant to all cases.

So while this may be a genuine breakthrough, I hope people don't get the idea that it's _the_ cure for depression generally.

<comment><USER20> > As far as I've read about it, the current consensus seems to be that the > more severe the depression is, the more likely it is to respond to medical > interventions as opposed to psychological/behavioral ones.

I've never heard this in my life, can you link? These test subjects were people with treatment-resistant depression though, which I have as well. My experience, along with others I've known with it, is that we're more likely to deal with nocebo effects. HN is tossing heaps of cynicism on this report but even for unblinded testing these results are remarkable.

> "There's never been a therapy for treatment-resistant depression that's > broken 55% remission rates in open-label testing," said Nolan Williams, MD, > assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and a senior > author of the study

<comment><USER19> I suppose _consensus_ might not be the right word; maybe something closer to _bias_ or even _superstition_ might be appropriate. But basically, I'm synthesizing my own view of several trends here. That being the case, I don't have a link that neatly sums this up. Perhaps this is even my own little hallucination. I'm only an expert by comparison to the general public, in the sense that I periodically try to survey the literature with the most open mind I can manage. But the components I'm thinking of are mostly:

1) A sense that antidepressants tend to work better the more severe the depression is. This often comes up as a counterpoint to the anti- antidepressant talking point that SSRIs "don't outperform placebo" (often, in turn, in reference to studies that directly or indirectly exclude or otherwise under-represent people with severe depression).

2) A sense that the more severe a person's condition is, the less likely that psychotherapy is to be effective, at least as a first-line treatment. There's a lot of heat over whether or why this is the case, with a common refrain among advocates of psychotherapy being that some people need antidepressant drugs _temporarily_ in order to be able to "do the work" of psychotherapy.

3) A longstanding belief among various people in the field that "melancholic" depression is both more severe/treatment-resistant/chronic/personality-based and more amenable to biologically-oriented interventions. There is a particular thread of HPA-axis (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal) [1] dysfunction that has been a subject of research for decades and continues to attract interest, with a more specific clinical focus being the dexamethasone suppression test (e.g. [2]).

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothalamic%E2%80%93pituitary...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothalamic%E2%80%93pituitary%E2%80%93adrenal_axis)

[2] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27736954](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27736954)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I hold the prejudiced opinion that most, if not all, psychology research is bogus. It's the one field with the most abuse of statistics and a crisis of reproducibility that dates back to the last century.

<comment><USER22> This is psychiatry. Psychiatry certainly respects its sister field but takes an independent look at the brain. We could always go back to the wild wild west with no psychologists or psychiatrists.

I mean, does depression even exist, or is it a psychiatric scam?

<comment><USER23> > I mean, does depression even exist, or is it a psychiatric scam?

Yes. You're being disrespectful to people whose lives are severely affected by depression.

<comment><USER24> I think the hypothetical was posed to highlight the utility of these fields of study, despite their issues with reproducibility and stats.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> 90% is really high. Like actually scary high. All the previous treatments were lower than 60%.

I hope everything goes well with this treatment, and there will be no serious side effects. It can save many people's lives.

<comment><USER26> It looks to be a form of TMS which has already shown a lot of promise for several mental disorders. I wasn't able to look at what they changed specifically, but TMS itself is rather safe.

<comment><USER27> Instead of one long treatment in a day repeated for up to six weeks, they made it higher intensity, ten times a day, ten minute treatments on a day, repeated with patients seeing difference in three to five days and they used an MRI to target an exact location in the brain for each patient.

<comment><USER26> Interesting!

Not to get to into it - but last summer I had a bad episode and was recommended to ECT therapy and/or TMS (I have some other mental disorders that would also benefit from TMS). My biggest problem with both of them was that for TMS I'd have to travel a distance everyday for a month, with ECT it would only be a few times a week but somebody else would have to drive me, and it's not recommended to work during that time.

So this would be a game changer for me - I can take a week off no problem.

On safety: I'm no medical expert, my understanding is that why TMS works is not really well understood (similar to SSRI's and other antidepressants) - <USER2> just know it _tends to work_ and we have some theories for why. So from my naive perspective higher, more concentrated doses certainly sounds like it has the potential to be more dangerous - but that's just speculation.

<comment><USER28> Does TMS affect long long term memory? Or is that ECT?

<comment><USER26> Modern ECT causes temporary confusion and short term memory issues, but my understanding is that they generally clear up after treatment. However, it's a month long treatment, and it's not advised to work or drive during that time. I don't think long term memory loss say several months after treatment is a common problem, but I could be wrong.

To my knowledge TMS doesn't have those memory issues.

Please keep in mind that modern ECT is nothing like what people see in the movies. While I'm not at all saying it should be a first tier treatment, it's a treatment option for those with otherwise treatment resistant depression (and also a few other disorders)

I was personally referred for ECT therapy last summer by my psychiatrist. I was in the middle of a massive depressive episode, had already tried a ton of different medications (and took a break from meds to see if that would help - it didn't), diets, etc. I even mentioned to my doctor I was to the point where I was potentially thinking about self-dosing on psychedelics or ketamine because I felt I had no other options. At that point ECT therapy even with bad side effects (which again to my knowledge don't normally last forever) would be better then suicide.

I didn't go through with it because I'd have to take a month off work, and get transportation to the clinic several times a week. Personally if it gets that bad again I'm going to try to get TMS therapy, as I'm also on the ASD spectrum, and there's been some evidence that suggests it may help those symptoms as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> As soon as I saw "magnetic stimulation" I was a tad skeptical as they've already achieved this with brain electrodes in the past. The difference is it could actually be practical, on psych visits. I see it as a stand-in for medication with all sorts of side-effects. Not a solution mind-you, just a way to bridge the gap to recover, which is what medication is meant to be.

EDIT: a stand-out line: "One month after the therapy, 60% of participants were still in remission from depression. Follow-up studies are underway to determine the duration of the antidepressant effects."

<comment><USER30> TMS immediately dials my skepticism up to 11 as well. But there's some fairly good evidence that is helps people who suffer from migraines with aura. From what I understand, it has something to do with increased cortical excitability in migraineurs, and TMS is somehow able to reduce that effect. I don't know how this would translate to depression treatment, but it's interesting nevertheless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Reading some of the comments is a good reminder that solid and meaningful mental health research is very tough and expensive, just based on the sheer variability, which can't be meaningfully captured by 99.9% of studies. Each needs to be seen as one piece in a much, much larger puzzle.

I wrote up some of the problems with doing/interpreting mental health research here: [https://mhnav.com/lies-and-evidence/](https://mhnav.com/lies-and- evidence/)

</comment><comment><USER32> Anyone able to find the actual paper? I'm having a difficult time locating it.

EDIT: Here it is [0]

[0] [https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2019.1...](https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2019.19070720)

</comment><comment><USER33> > Intermittent theta-burst stimulation (iTBS) is a noninvasive brain > stimulation treatment that has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug > Administration for treatment-resistant depression.

If this is anything like Neurofeedback treatment, it wouldn't surprise me that it is effective. Neurofeedback treats 3 major frequency ranges of the brain, Delta, Theta and Alpha. Although this treatment seems passive whereas Neurofeedback treatment requires active modulation and stimulation by the person getting the treatment.

Going through Neurofeedback treatment myself and seeing the incredible life changes because of it and now seeing the similarity of the affected brain regions in this study shows that there might be some consensus reached on treating these conditions without medication one day.

<comment><USER30> That sounds interesting. Do you have any links with more information regarding that neurofeedback treatment?

<comment><USER33> I found out about it in this book The Body Keeps the Score[1]. Its a massive book, so I would just focus on the Neurofeedback section. But it doesn't have the first hand experience so mileage may vary. By co-incidence the researcher that pioneered this breakthrough treatment was located in the same city as me. You can see some of the videos[2], but it will be difficult to understand and appreciate unless you spend a lot of time reading papers and learning about the brain. I will say its worth it to learn, especially if you want your ability to focus to go from below average to far above average. Feel free to email me if you want details, I had to become well versed at it out of necessity more than anything.

[1][https://www.amazon.com/Body-Keeps-Score-Healing- Trauma/dp/B0...](https://www.amazon.com/Body-Keeps-Score-Healing- Trauma/dp/B00OBT7KAO/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Trauma&qid=1586284274&sr=8-1)

[2] [http://addcentre.com/page-34/page-28/media.html](http://addcentre.com/page-34/page-28/media.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is some of the worst HN commentary I've seen. Boundless cynicism on an early study which is actually showing unusually high success rate. What's noteworthy is that the these results are good _among unblinded studies_ on depression treatment. They are doing a double-blind study right now, mentioned in the second sentence. These were patients with _treatment-resistant_ depression, which is defined as people who have undergone multiple treatments without success and are rife with nocebo tendencies. These are not people who are hopeful about their nth medication or round of talk therapy. They are tough nuts to crack. That the treatment is showing any success with this group is worth doing further studies.

</comment><comment><USER34> Here is the published study including an abstract, for those interested: [https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2019.1...](https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2019.19070720)

This new form of rTMS appears to have truly incredible potential to help people whose depression is otherwise resistant to treatment, which is sorely needed.

Having over 85% of participants meet remission criteria is, to put it mildly, incredible, though with only 21 participants, sample size is too small to make conclusions regarding large scale effectiveness.

As the paper notes, we now need double-blind trials. I very much hope that this treatment will be able to help people on a larger scale.

<comment><USER35> These incredible numbers will almost certainly drop in larger trials and once more medication resistant participants are included in a study. ECT is comparable to the efficacy of this small scale trial, but their novel approach and increased dosage could yield a major improvement to TMS.

Also, here's the biorxiv link to the full study: [https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/581280v3.full.pdf](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/581280v3.full.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Sounds interesting. I wonder what's the best way to try such a treatment without first spending tons of money and energy dealing with insurance and doctors.

<comment><USER37> This. It sounds like this should be the FIRST thing to try, rather than the last. Sadly this is not very likely how it is going to be for a very long time.

<comment><USER38> This is very similar to electro shock treatment. Causing localised seizures.

I don't really think this should be the first thing to try.

<comment><USER39> The _point_ of ECT is to cause a seizure. The point of TMS is to achieve the same effect without causing a seizure, though there is some risk of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Individual TMS is really interesting. My understanding was that most large- scale TMS was untargeted and not really that effective.

I was about to write something about a side effect I had read, which was about people losing the ability to swim, but that apparently a DBS (deep brain stimulation) side effect for tremors from parkinsons.

</comment><comment><USER41> > The researchers are conducting a larger, double-blinded trial in which half > the participants are receiving fake treatment.

This second sentence from the article is enough: let us not comment on an experiment that had no control group. I will be interested in the results from the second trial though.

<comment><USER31> I agree. There's not a chance that it will be enough to change practice at this early stage, but it will be interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Important note: this result is not from a randomized controlled trial, and have been done on small number of subjects. The article mentions that the researcher are designing a larger and proper trial.

</comment><comment><USER43> Here is a short interview with comedian Neal Brennan about his personal experiences with (40 30-minute sessions) of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. He says it was more effective and longer lasting than Ketamine Therapy or Zoloft. He was able to stop taking Zoloft.

[https://youtu.be/vB9DHMOiojE](https://youtu.be/vB9DHMOiojE)

This is an excerpt from a longer interview about his depression:

[https://youtu.be/FfsUxrGmbdU](https://youtu.be/FfsUxrGmbdU)

</comment><comment><USER44> Assuming, on the off chance, that this isn't some sort of quack treatment ploy, anything that works significantly would be a plus.

I'm on my 13th antidepressant now that is yet-again not working well and I'm starting to wonder if my condition is inflammation-mediated rather than receptor- or neurotransmitter-caused as only mirtazapine (also a powerful antihistamine) ever helped me significantly, but only for a limited time.

<comment><USER45> Obvious disclaimer that every depression is different.

My depressive symptoms have never been medicated yet I'm pretty sure are inflammation-based: changes in my diet drastically affect my mental and physical well-being.

Exercise, lifestyle changes help, but diet seems to be the primary cause and solution in my case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Is there further documentation about this, or other papers I can read? This part in particular seemed counterintuitive to me:

> _"The less treatment-resistant participants are, the longer the treatment > lasts," said postdoctoral scholar Eleanor Cole, PhD, a lead author of the > study._

<comment><USER47> I interpreted this as "The less treatment-resistant participants are, the longer the [effects of the] treatment lasts," which would make more sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> If stimulating some part of the brain can increase neural activity in a lasting way, could you use this to, say, make yourself better at math? Or, could you use it to suppress unrest by making everyone happy? If this works there are a lot of larger implications.

</comment><comment><USER49> Do I understand correctly that they basically: 1\. find the subpart of your brain that causes you to be depressed 2\. use TMS to essentially block that region from being so active ?

Wonder if you could use this one day also for the regions that cause me to e.g. procrastinate...

</comment><comment><USER50> I've done transcranial magnetic stimulation for my bipolar depression. Didn't seem to help. It's a pain to try to work and go for treatments every day. Meds work better for me.

</comment><comment><USER51> HN click bait. Actual title is: Stanford researchers devise treatment that relieved depression in 90% of participants in _small study_.

</comment><comment><USER52> um, where does 90% come from?

 __ _Only about HALF of patients who undergo this treatment improve, and only about a THIRD experience remission from depression._ __

and then

 __ _One month after the therapy, 60% of participants were still in remission from depression_ __

this isn 't a magic wand but one tool in a toolbox

</comment><comment><USER53> Depression is one the single most important economic problems the world need fixed.

<comment><USER54> Not a moral problem? Humanist? Why can't we have nice things and do this out of simple human empathy for those who suffer?

<comment><USER53> Well. If you have depression and you're a business owner or small trader for example. It would be impossible to get out of bed some days and feed yourself. So id say it's one of the most important financial fixes for every human.

You took it as if it needs to be a fix just so people can be happy. Happiness doesn't mean you're surviving.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Is this the same concept as ECT?

</comment><comment><USER56> yeah like i want the only thing that has stayed with me my whole life to leave.

</comment><comment><USER57> Sounds like mesmerism!

</comment><comment><USER58> Reproducibility crisis.

</comment><comment><USER59> Where do I sign up ? :rofl:

</comment><comment><USER60> This is equivalent to banging the brain with a sledgehammer.

No thanks, I prefer ketamine. At least it feels like a gentler one.

<comment><USER61> That's great until you find someone with underlying psychosis and the voices in their head after a few months of treatment tell them to take out a big knife and go for a murder/suicide.

It's great for the people it works for, but Spravato/esketamine isn't for everyone.

<comment><USER62> As someone who has schizoaffective disorder, I take offense to your assertion that psychosis=murderer. Your claim only serves to perpetuate the stigma attached to psychosis, when the disease itself is already bad enough. Coincidentally, I happened to have taken ketamine infusions for depression long before I was diagnosed with schizoaffective.

<comment><USER61> > As someone who has schizoaffective disorder, I take offense to your > assertion that psychosis=murderer.

I did not mean to imply that. I was relating a real event that I personally observed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Since this isn't double-blind, I wonder if there's reason to upvote it to the top of HN now versus after the research progresses a little more.

Sometimes early signal, even if inaccurate, is very valuable (e.g. bitcoin). With alleged medical advances, I almost never find that to be the case (I can't recall the number of times I've read about cancer being beaten here).

</comment><comment><USER18> This reads as extremely ethically dangerous. I'm not sure it's possible to justify any course of treatment leading towards individual neurocircuitry 'tweaks', even for an unambiguously good cause.

Harkens too closely to 'scientist seeks to cure homosexuality through direct brain stimulation' in the 1950s. ( en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Galbraith_Heath )

<comment><USER47> Isn't every treatment we have for depression some form of neuro-circuitry tweaking? Whether you're using prescription medication, electroconvulsion, psychosurgery, counselling or self-medicating with legal or illegal drugs, you're deliberately altering your brain function in the hope that it'll result in temporary or permanent changes to your feelings and behaviour. What makes this procedure more ethically dangerous than those?</comment></comment>


CheckMate: Verifying processors through automatic exploit synthesis [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://cs.stanford.edu/people/trippel/pubs/ctrippel_IEEETopPicks19.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Quick clarification: I am not an author of this paper, I just found it while doing literature review and thought it was worth sharing, as its probably similar to what is done in industry to prevent future designs from being vulnerable to Spectre/Meltdown-type attacks.

Dr. Trippel's work over the course of her doctorate has also helped improve security in the RISC-V ISA by contributing to the atomics extensions.</comment>


Show HN: Prescreen candidates using timed interview pages - <AUTHOR> http://fastcandidate.com/csoon.php

<comment><USER2> Maybe it's just me, but I would prefer if clicking on "Pricing" brought me to a _page_ that says "Coming soon", rather than an _alert_.

Also, clicking on the logo at the top left results in a 404.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. point taken. Will correct that</comment></comment>


Ask HN: The "New" page – bug or feature? - <AUTHOR> After lurking here for several years, I've come to realize that there's a basic problem with the manner in which this forum works: while posts that make it to the main page usually get up-voted according to their merit, the way they get there seems much more random and capricious, having nothing much to do with their intrinsic merits.
This is because most HN members probably do not visit the "New" page at all, and even those who do, would not browse more than the first few pages of it. Consequently, the first 5 or so up-votes a post gets are somewhat randomly dependent on the amount of viewers visiting the "New" page during its short stint there - before it gets hopelessly buried behind newer submissions, most of them senseless spam.
Hence, my questions: which percent of HN members actually visits the "New" page?
Shouldn't this perhaps be solved/improved by the addition of a "Rising" page - displaying only new posts that have already received an up-vote or two?
I'm mostly thinking of all the important/interesting stories (especially from obscure sources) that get lost, but would have got a serious up-vote had they made the front page. <comment><USER2> I remember that someone proposed this a few years ago, but it didn't get implemented. You can use some of the unofficial HN search engines, for example: [http://hnapp.com/?q=score%3E2](http://hnapp.com/?q=score%3E2)

Also, sometime the mods cherrypick a story to give it a second chance. More details by dang: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926)

Anyway, please visit the "newest" page. It's very nice to find an interesting story and later see that it reached the front page.

</comment><comment><USER3> I visit the new page at least daily, sometimes more often. I agree that it is up to us to upvote the stories that best fit the Hacker News guidelines and are from good sources and gratify intellectual curiosity.</comment>


Obama: It is 'insane' to let people on no-fly list buy guns - <AUTHOR> http://www.rawstory.com/2015/12/obama-it-is-insane-to-let-people-on-no-fly-list-buy-guns/ <comment><USER2> Well, I find it insane that the government has decided to take rights away from people who haven't even yet been charged with a crime, let alone convicted.

</comment><comment><USER3> I find it sad that the media and, through them, most of the public, are so easily duped by a _totally false story_.

The vote in question failed because it was _strictly an attempt to derail the ObamaCare repeal_ and had nothing to do with actual gun legislation (it would have been unenforceable anyway, being in the wrong realm of U.S. Code). That is why it was RULED OUT OF ORDER.

Specifically:

Here's the proposed language it is looking to overlay: [https://www.congress.gov/congressional- record/2015/12/01/sen...](https://www.congress.gov/congressional- record/2015/12/01/senate-section/article/S8245-2) (the Obamacare component repeal)

Now, here's the Feinstein amendment (scroll down to "SA 2910" portion, read it only): [https://www.congress.gov/amendment/114th-congress/senate- ame...](https://www.congress.gov/amendment/114th-congress/senate- amendment/2910/text)

Now, if you look at the amendment in a vacuum, it looks sorta like what it claims (but it looks odd, to the experienced eye, because there is no mention of a specific criteria for "terrorist" or refer to the FBI watchlist by its proper statute name). Plus, it's in the wrong Title of U.S. Code anyway. So it wouldn't have any effect on its own, being unenforceable vague.

But that's not the point.

Now, note carefully how the legislation starts: _" In lieu of the matter proposed to be inserted, insert the following:"_

See THAT?! In LIEU OF the matter ("the matter" being ALL of SA 2874, the Obamacare repeal). In other words, _strike and replace the text of SA 2874 with this text, SA 2910._

The parent bill is H.R.3762 - Restoring Americans' Healthcare Freedom Reconciliation Act of 2015, which had NOTHING to do with terrorism, or guns. That's the first clue right there.

Congressional Democrats have used this tactic (overwriting legislation they oppose with _unrelated_ content that sounds obviously beneficial in order to trick the media into carrying water for their politicking) clear back to the Tom Foley days, if not Tip O'Neill or beyond.

The ignorant media consumers have been duped, successfully, because few bother to look at the bills...

...which, in this case, took me all of about 8-10 clicks in total.

</comment><comment><USER4> I find it insane that the US defines liberty as a function of its capacity for violence.</comment>


Ray Ban Virtual Mirror  - <AUTHOR> http://www.ray-ban.com/india/science/virtual-mirror

<comment><USER2> \- We are sorry -

Browser error

Your browser is not compatible with the application (supported browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome)

(Running Opera on OSX.)

EDIT: it's worse than that, read the bottom of the sys requirements: "Note: The user must have administrator rights to the computer he is using."

So they're installing some shitty Windows-only plugin?

<comment><USER3> I'm impressed by your ability to deduce whether or not a plugin is shitty based solely on what OS it runs on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> FYI: Only works on Windows (No Mac/Linux love, yet)

I wonder why.

<comment><USER5> Apparently it's an executable.

<http://www.fittingbox.com/web/en/20-live-technology.php>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems to me they could do this in Flash and support things that are not Windows. I don't feel like rebooting to try this, even though I'm sure it's a cool example of face tracking.

</comment><comment><USER7> What is this built in? And does it use any Open Source libraries.

I know that you can do facial tracking in OpenFrameworks.

</comment><comment><USER8> _\- We are sorry - Browser error Your browser is not compatible with the application (supported browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome)_

</comment><comment><USER9> Very cool, but execution didn't work for me and made me very frustrated.</comment>


Ask HN: Need a host with some balls, offshore maybe? - <AUTHOR> I'm posting under a different name for various reasons but I'm a regular contributor here.
So, my host is a pussy. I have a site doing a good amount of traffic - 2mm uniques, 8mm pages/month, heavy data and growing - but we're having some legal issues right now. I can't really get into it but suffice it to say we're being bullied by a major public company and our host is flipping out. No, we're most certainly not doing anything illegal and no, this doesn't involve the music/entertainment industry. ;)
So we need a new host - right away. Ideally, I think we might be looking to go offshore because that will at least give our oppressor(s) one less avenue through which they can attack us. At the same time, this is scary to me. We do a lot of data and we can't afford to be slowed down or, god forbid, drop offline for any period of time.
So my question is - does anyone have any recommendations for a stellar offshore host or even a local host with some marbles that won't retract into their stomachs every time they get a frivolous BS C&D? The Planet seems to be the go-to option here in the US. Any others? <comment><AUTHOR> You guys rock. I'm checking out nearlyfree right now but I think PRQ might be the way to go. Moving our site over is going to be painful and expensive so we want to get it right the first time and not have to deal with it again. With PRQ, it looks like we can do just that.

The best part about all this - the company who is bullying us has never, not ONCE, sent a notice directly to us. Nope, they just pelt our host as a scare tactic. Low and behold, it finally worked and our host gave us a week to vacate. Super, thanks...

So as usual, you guys rock. Thanks so much for the help. Sweden here we come - where the air is cold, the women are blond and the hosts have brass balls.

<comment><USER4> I run a.. shall we say, niche site. 9 million hits a month, about 2TB of data.. and we use Hetzner. They're pretty good.

<http://www.hetzner.de/>

<comment><USER5> 2TB... hmmm... no guessing needed :-D

<comment><USER4> Would guessing still be needed if I said it was a non-subscription website? :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Try and look into where the pirate bay is hosted. They seem to have balls of steel.

<comment><USER7> "PRQ has gone out of its way to host sites that other companies would not touch. It is perhaps the worlds least lawyer-friendly hosting company" - <USER2>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRQ>

<comment><USER8> Thanks for info.

I have some adult art drawn by myself that just sit there; there should be a way to share it with a real world... I've never even thought about do it with normal hosting company or, "God have mercy", do it on my own servers...

We have dark sides -- we need dark sites. Long Live PRQ!

Edit: please comment if you downmod it, I really want to know what do you think about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can you at least name the company that's bullying you so we can go out of our way not to do business with them?

<comment><AUTHOR> Believe me I would love to but for the time being we've been advised not to.

<comment><USER10> Make sure you tell us about your company when this blows over, I love businesses that insult powerful people ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've heard NearlyFreeSpeech.net is good. No colo or dedicated, tho.

<comment><USER5> Yup. More details here: <https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/help/abuse>

<comment><USER12> "When our members upload content to our service, they are asserting two things:

        * That the content is legal in the United States.

        * That they have the legal right to make the content available."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> <http://www.reflected.net>

They're very good. I have a dedicated server with them. They also host www.ytmnd.com, which has had a long history of copyright trouble.

<comment><USER14> Their parent company (Server Central) might be good to talk to as well, if you want something other than dedicated servers (colo and whatnot).

<comment><USER13> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I asked about Euro-based hosts here recently:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=295949>

That might help

</comment><comment><USER16> Host offshore, but put heavy assets on AWS S3? I don't have an answer on the host, but thought this idea might help, since offshore hosts can be slower for US access. Amazon might be pussies too, I don't know; but this might buy you time.

<comment><USER17> They shut down Muxtape.

<comment><USER18> Muxtape was not hosted offshore, and it dealt with music. I am not sure its situation has any bearing on that of the original poster.

<comment><USER16> I would think it would have a bearing. Wimps are wimps. I retract my AWS S3 suggestion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> redundancy is key

keep complete copies in different hosting companies on different continents.

For details beyond that, we'd need to know what kind of trouble. The US is pretty good for most kinds of political speech, but horrible for many kinds of commercial speech. Many other countries are the opposite.

But yeah. if you make sure you have a hot spare of your complete system in more than one country (this should be pretty cheap with the proliferation of VPS providers) you will be in much better shape. Once you have that covered, you really only need to worry about your DNS provider.

</comment><comment><USER20> Thanks for this thread. I've been becoming increasingly concerned about both stability and liability in the face of today's legal climate. Even the little discussion community that I've managed on my own nickel I see increasingly as a potential liability. One nut whose posts get some official or professional attention, and my life might be made cr*p. Although I wasn't actively researching, this gives me some options to consider.

</comment><comment><USER21> SoftLayer is an amazing US host. They have a quality service, the support is great, and the price isn't bad, although they do have their 'premium'. I can't vouch for how they'd act with legal matters, but I'm sure the sales reps can give you a good idea.

Don't go with PRQ. I've had a server with them before, and their support is nonexistant, and the speeds are nothing amazing. We've once waiting 3 months for a RAM upgrade.

Leaseweb is good if you need a cheap, decent server. They stand up for their clients in legal matters, and the speeds are pretty good.

I've had dedicated servers with all of these hosts, and all my reviews are based on first hand experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the info lacky. The comments about support and speed are pretty alarming. LeaseWeb might be worth looking into but cost isn't really a concern right now. We need premium (fast) service and a host who isn't afraid of the possibility of a frivolous suit (especially since we pay any and all legal fees!).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Would it be possible to create a web hosting system which doesn't have a single point of "legal failure"?

I guess by definition, it couldn't be run as one company. But you could have independent but co-operating companies in multiple countries, each holding a copy of the hosted data.

Would the directors/shareholders/managers have to be different personnel? (e.g. if Alice receives a cease-and-desist for material hosted by company A1 in country C1, is Alice under any obligation if she also works for company A2 in country C2 which also holds the material (and is available under the same URL, so would probably come under the same letter)?

Some sort of a redundant array of inexpensive countries would be needed to have an 'internet state' that wasn't beholden to the laws of any individual country.

<comment><USER23> I think the model would have to be to develop an open source kit that allows standardized pluggable distributed hosting in "a box".

I wouldn't expect a significant market for simple non-dynamic hosting - <USER3> solution would have to accomodate blogs, forums and other dynamic content- apps.

Any provider of such hosting would just be provided with a config-file, and then start to pull the content, sync the DB etc. The kit should be designed to expect nodes to drop of randomly, and be self-healing (i.e. "elect" a new master-node, or be purely peer-to-peer).

Maybe the kit could be modelled on top of Google App Engine.

One single-point-of-failure would be DNS though. If your domain is .com, and Verisign pulls it, you could be hosted on the moon, and still disappear.

<comment><USER22> > If your domain is .com, and Verisign pulls it, you could be hosted on the > moon, and still disappear.

Ouch. I forgot about that. I guess one approach would be to have the same name under several registries, trying to get decent coverage across juridictions where the physical nameservers are located.

You could encourage people to choose a random (supported) top-level part (.com, .fr, .se, .co.uk, etc) in links, so a single DNS takedown would only hit a portion of links (which could then still be hand-edited to a working link).

Network resilience and peering would also be an issue. A country can always filter you out I guess, a la Great Firewall.

The sync issues would be interesting. Not sure what the people using the hosting see (a db? a filesystem?). Do-able, tho.

(Off the top of my head, I'd go for a DVCS-like model, where it's fully peer- to-peer, automerge when we can, punt to a human when we can't).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> We can accomodate you in the Netherlands. As the first ISP here I know my way around. We applied to Ycombinator this cycle with a site that we host ourselves, but I am happy to help find you any type of hoster you'll like. Merik at Knoware.nl

</comment><comment><USER25> I would host in sealand by havenco see <http://www.havenco.com/>

<comment><USER26> Havenco is _gone_. They never had more than a few servers hosted there (I managed one of them back in 2001-2002), and as far as I know, they aren't accepting new orders. They had pretty constant problems when they were up, due basically to not having the funding required to do what they were doing.

Ryan Lackey, the former CTO of Havenco, had a postmortem of the company up for a while, but it seems to be gone right now.

<comment><USER27> it used to be hosted on metacolo, which seems to also be gone. but i found another copy here:

      http://www.securitytechnet.com/resource/rsc-center/presentation/Defcon/11-2003/dc11-havenco.pdf

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> As long as you're posting anonymously, you should tell us all who your current (vaginal) host is.

<comment><USER29> There's nothing wrong with vaginas.

<comment><USER28> His word, not mine. :-)</comment></comment></comment>


Top Five Regrets of the Dying - <AUTHOR> http://beyondtheopposites.com/2011/11/22/top-five-regrets-of-the-dying

<comment><USER3> It all seems so obvious, yet it's crazy how many people I meet that work absurdly hard on something they hate - like finance at Goldman Sachs - <USER2> because "it's a great way to learn the skills and then [they]'ll quit and do what they really love".

Bullshit. Be happy now, not tomorrow.</comment>


Similarities between Musicians and Entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://blog.earbits.com/online_radio/5-similarities-of-musicians-and-entrepreneurs/ <comment><USER2> People struggling to succeed are all the same. Startups, writers, script producers, musicians, ...

See how much of this write-up rings true with you: <http://matt.io/entry/tz> (Note: it's a reformatted version of [http://www.dannybarnes.com/blog/how- make-living-playing-musi...](http://www.dannybarnes.com/blog/how-make-living- playing-music) because the original is nigh unreadable.)

From a screenwriting point of view, John August has well written success advice in his ongoing Q&A series: <http://johnaugust.com/answers>

<comment><USER3> > People struggling to succeed are all the same.

What does "to succeed" mean anyway? I was always wondering, and don't really know to this day.

<comment><USER4> If you ask me, "to succeed" is when you do something you believe in, and enjoy the process, regardless of the outcome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Though lots of HNers might disagree (or be reluctant to admit it), I find striking similarities between rappers and entrepreneurs. Behind the flashy front of a rapper is a guy who has a dream. With enough drive, dedication and passion, there's nothing stopping that rapper from achieving his dream, regardless of the naysayers and the obstacles along the way. Entrepreneurs are no different.

</comment><comment><USER6> I couldn't agree more. A fair number of the entrepreneurs I know have some sort of background in the arts. I was/am a musician and participated in the high school marching band. This was, strangely enough, a "cool" activity at our high school, where our band was openly appreciated by our sports coaches and student body.

I regularly reflect on the experiences I gained in marching band when looking at my entrepreneurial efforts. Mastery, confidence, leadership, discipline, teamwork... The list of attributes developed when taking part in a performing art is long and strongly correlated with those required to succeed in just about any setting.

</comment><comment><USER7> Glad to see somebody finally put to words what's been knocking around my head for quite some time now. Although it's not a state that's exclusive to either musicians or entrepreneurs (as others in this thread have noted), I think it's an analogy that seems to resonate more deeply with people in general. I know I've seen it mentioned here that startups are the new 'rock bands' (in the sense that success/fame-thirsty people are now forming companies instead of bands to fulfill their dreams), and that's a comparison that everyone understands, because who hasn't fantasized about being in a wildly famous rock band at one point?

In fact, I'm not sure why this is even an analogy; in my mind, musicians ARE entrepreneurs. I'm currently in the process of recording my first album as a solo musician, and founding a music related startup at the same time (<http://www.tabrat.com/>), and can already see the similarity of the hurdles I will have to face on both frontiers. I would imagine this connection to be painfully obvious to any musician working on a startup though. To elaborate on this perspective, you could say record labels are analogous to investors in the startup world (major labels being like larger VCs, and independent labels being like Angels), where they could potentially approach you, but most likely you'll end up pitching your product/music to a lot of them with marginal success, if not deciding to just completely bootstrap as an 'indie' artist. And there are plenty more 'connections' like that to be made, so I really think musicians are a subset of entrepreneurs, not just merely their analogs.

</comment><comment><USER8> As an indie musician I've found that a lot of the skills I developed over the years in rehearsing, getting ready to record, deciding which songs were best for the recording (your product) and promoting shows through any outlet available have proved invaluable in building my startup.

</comment><comment><USER9> One can also see many parallels between bands and startups. Both is working on getting 'signed'. Both start small and usually low budget. Both relies on creating stuff to make their way. Both has to struggle with small group issues and drama. So on and so forth.

</comment><comment><USER10> Great post. I can relate, and I have always thought the same thing. Starving Musician === Bootstrapping Entrepreneur.

<comment><USER4> Totally!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A musician friend and I recently discussed the similarities in naming a startup and naming a band.

</comment><comment><USER12> Very true my colleague was a musician before starting his own (music) related company.

</comment><comment><USER13> Forgot one thing:

Lots of them do similar things and imitate, failing to stand out in the crowd.

</comment><comment><USER14> The main difference is you can make a good living playing music.</comment>


Researchers teach AI to think like a dog - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/14/17234570/artificial-intelligence-dogs-research-science-learning <comment><AUTHOR> All throughout reading this, I kept wondering what a cat would do (besides not cooperating).</comment>


Julian Assange's Twitter account is gone - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/julianassange <comment><USER2> As far as I can see it's back, also with the entire history intact.

<comment><AUTHOR> But without the hundreds of thousands of followers he had before.

<comment><USER2> Could be "incidentally" removed, then restored through backup when discovered like Trumps personal account.

Seems plausible because some people hate Assange the same amount (or possibly even more) as Trump these days.

Another option would be him temporarily putting his account in the deletion queue then undoing this later. But I can't come up with any good reason why to do this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> didnt he always have a deadmans switch for his twitter account?

</comment><comment><USER4> Because Twitter won't let "non-state hostile intelligence services" have accounts? Or is it just good old fashioned censorship?

<comment><USER5> Or maybe he deactivated it to get attention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good, he's done nothing but damage to his cause in recent years. Not sure what happened, but glad it's stopped.</comment>


Tubes vs. Torrents: The Ethics of Piracy - <AUTHOR> http://graphicdescriptions.com/28-tubes-vs-torrents-the-ethics-of-piracy <comment><USER2> That blog has a surreal intersection with the issues people talk about on HN.

Put aside the politics of pornography. She's a content creator trying to make a living, trying to have a reasoned discussion about how to make that happen.

But she can't get paid because we don't have easy, secure, anonymous payment systems, and her customers won't trust small time studios with credit card or personally identifying information because they don't want to get double charged by unscrupulous bastards or end up in a database.

So customers don't have a good way to pay her which means her work is inevitably going to get pirated more often than bought. At that point she wants the rational next best thing, which is to distribute her work for free to as many people as possible, because the only way to make money when only a small percentage of people pay is to grow your fan base so that it's a small percentage of many people. Which means that what she wants is a platform for community engagement -- something like BitTorrent and The Pirate Bay which is open to everyone and doesn't censor anything or divert your viewers to your direct competitors. But those platforms and their users are under attack by the aforementioned unscrupulous bastards and their extortionate "settlement letters" that push users to their own streaming sites.

So she writes a very reasoned explanation of this, only to have her entirely- not-inappropriate reasoned discussion blocked by overzealous corporate proxy servers.

Which can only lead to the conclusion that this content creator would be better off if the likes of Bitcoin, BitTorrent and Tor were more widely used.

Yet people keep saying that stuff is only useful to criminals.

<comment><USER3> _So she writes a very reasoned explanation of this, only to have her entirely- not-inappropriate reasoned discussion blocked by overzealous corporate proxy servers._

To be fair, I did see an ad for a Fleshlight product when I visited the page.

<comment><USER2> The ad and the nature of the site is obviously the reason the page is blocked. But the page is still blocked.

If you mean to argue that this isn't a false positive, I disagree. It's just an extraordinarily hard false positive to avoid. The post and the ad shown contain no pornography but they're _about_ pornography and other content from the same source might. None of the filters are that granular.

And that's the problem. Nobody's boss has any justifiable reason to allow their employees to read HN but not the post in question, but the burden of false positives doesn't fall predominantly on the company with the filter or even its employees. It's a negative externality that harms the author of the blocked content even though she has no ability to fix the filter.

So filters with false positives are a bug and anti-filtering proxies like Tor are the patch. Which is why everyone benefits when they're more widely deployed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just a heads-up, this appears to be _related_ to NSFW content. I say "appears to be" because I got a nasty "you're trying to access some sketchy domain and your admin has been notified" warning when accessing this through my work computer. Nothing in the title or URL seems to suggest this so I figured I'd share share in case anyone else may have a similar setup.

<comment><USER5> Why would you work for a company that censors your internet?

<comment><USER6> I work for a great company and I'm happy with my job. They also happen to censor my internet (very mildly, I should add). In fact, there are plenty of sectors where all viable positions would include internet blacklisting. And finally, plenty of people can't be so picky about their jobs to make litmus tests out of relatively minor factors like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This was an interesting read. It is pretty crazy, and easy to parallel to something like Youtube, how the Manwin empire is built on linking to work that someone else produced and using the ad money to buy the creators of that work out. I wonder if Manwin makes an effort to keep content that Manwin-owned properties put behind a paywall off of the tube sites.

<comment><USER8> Well they have a monopoly on tube sites, I don't think they'd care enough to keep their content outside the few others.

BTW, CreativeCommons BY-NC-SA porn videos is a great move.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Pulling a Louie, I see.

Good. More people should.

If this works out for Stoya like it did for Louie, you should see work from new/upcoming artists coming from her studio soon after the business method is validated.

Porn and comedy. Really the same, when you get down to it.

</comment><comment><USER10> In Germany you can get sued if you use Torrents, but you can't if you use a streaming service, because your're not the distributor.

So many people stopped torrenting at all and started streaming all their video needs.

It's also faster for smaller things, like those clips mentioned by her.

For this particular type of content it's simply the superior platform :\

<comment><USER11> That isn't wrong, but a bit oversimplified. The difference between streaming and Torrents is that it's easy to get hold of the IP addresses of Torrent users but difficult for streamers[1].

The situation is special in Germany because:

1\. It is possible go get the name and postal addresses if you have the IP address. The lawyer just asserts infringement and the prosecutor will hand it over.

2\. Legal fees for cease and desist letters are based on the amount in controversy and to be paid by the addressee.

No lawsuit will be filed, just a cease and desist letter sent with a fictitious amount. People will pay out of fear, it's border line extortion.

As far as I can tell, Torrents are dead in Germany.

[1] Assuming the copyright holders don't cooperate with the streaming services.

<comment><USER12> You are mistaken. In many countries an explicit, legal line is drawn between uploading and downloading copyrighted material, and some allow downloading because otherwise clicking on a link might already incriminate you. What k___ is saying is that it's the illegal upload part that moves people away from torrent.

<comment><USER11>
        In many countries an explicit, legal line is drawn
        between uploading and downloading copyrighted material,

Not true in Germany, as far as I know.

        Nach aktuellem Urheberrecht stellen sowohl Download als
        auch Upload eine Urheberrechtsverletzung dar und sind
        als solche prinzipiell auch strafbar. [1]

My translation:

        Under the current copyright law both download
        as well as  upload are copyright infringement and
        as such, in principle, punishable.

        and some allow downloading because otherwise clicking
        on a link might already incriminate you.

In Germany it does. The most prominent case, so far, was when in 2013 the law firm Urmann + Collegen sent a large number of cease and desist letters to people that used a popular adult video portal. They obtained the IP addresses from ads they allegedly published themselves. This was major news in Germany.

The reason it doesn't happen more often is that going against Torrent users is much easier and less risky for the law firm. Urmann + Collegen went bankrupt in 2014 from the fall out of this case, but this is the exception.

I don't have a number for 2013, but in 2011 the mentioned law firm alone sent 70000 cease and desist letters amounting 90 million Euro.

        What k___ is saying is that it's the illegal upload part that moves
        people away from torrent.

I understood, but that's not relevant for Germany. Even if it was true it wouldn't matter, because the two points I mentioned give the cease and desist lawyers (Abmahnanwälte) a much easier way to go against downloaders.

[1] [http://www.rechtsanwaltskanzlei- urheberrecht.de/news/Abmahnu...](http://www.rechtsanwaltskanzlei- urheberrecht.de/news/Abmahnung_Download_Uplo)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I agree with the sentiment. Charging for pirated content is among the worst things someone can do. It's also why I was at least a little bit glad when the megaupload/rapidshare sites were taken down. There may be an argument to be made about traffic costs and the like, but that doesn't legitimize anything.

Nevertheless, the real issue here is that those services exist because there is demand for them and the "legitimate suppliers" don't seem to feel a need to attend it. As Valve's founder put it "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem".

Is there any service out there with Netflix-level breadth of the titles available? Is there any service out there that let's you watch without having your name associated to "adult videos" in various databases? Is there anywhere people can turn to when still underage? Is there anywhere people can go to for getting the latest "fappening" leaks?

Hence piracy.

Yes, some of those reasons may be questionable or outright wrong, but given that the situation is what it is, why not try to at least make the best out of it and settle for some youtube-like service/agreement where the content creators will get at least some share of he profits and at least some control over the contents can be retained?

The argument about torrents vs "tubes" however seems pretty irrelevant. If you want HQ videos, don't mind the wait and have plenty of storage available then torrents are likely the better choice. If you need something _right now_ , don't have much bandwith or storage and don't care much for quality, a steaming service might work well enough for you. That there exist some unscrupulous streaming service providers is no different from torrents containing malware or torrent-indexing/tracking-sites/communities engaging in similar behavior as streaming services.

</comment><comment><USER8> > Long term crew members have found themselves replaced by inexperienced > people willing to do their jobs for lower pay. The quality of videos made > under these conditions tends to suffer.

Do people care that much about video quality in porn? Hopefully the people gone can use their experience and go to higher payed industries.

<comment><USER14> Like what? I mean, the problem that people with expertise are being replaced by people without it but who will work for less is not a phenomenon unique to this industry, in the first place (look at the rise of services like MyGengo or Mechanical Turk or TaskRabbit or or or), and, besides that, if a whole industry's worth of filming people are suddenly unemployed how can the other industries (which are presumably already well-staffed) really absorb them all?

<comment><USER15> "people with expertise are being replaced by people without it"

Worth noting that the replacements presumably lack expertise _initially_ but inevitably improve along the way. Being paid to learn isn't all bad and is better than occurs for many trades.

<comment><USER14> Yeah but it's an ever-rotating parade of amateurs and since the road to advancement is gone they don't stick around to build up the expertise. When I was young you'd walk into a place selling hi-fi stereo equipment and the guy there had worked in the field for decades and had some appreciable knowledge of it. Does the guy at Best Buy do that?

<comment><USER16> Best buy will never pay more than a few dollars above the minimum wage, thus best buy has decided that the guy behind that counter will be pulled from the lowest acceptable pool of candidates. I'm sure stores that have knowledgeable people for that type of thing still exist, you just have to pay more for that service. Myself, Ill just read the reviews on Amazon.

<comment><USER14> > Best buy will never pay more than a few dollars above the minimum wage, thus > best buy has decided that the guy behind that counter will be pulled from > the lowest acceptable pool of candidates. I'm sure stores that have > knowledgeable people for that type of thing still exist, you just have to > pay more for that service.

And so this brings us back to my initial contention. Yes. That's true. The problem is that this sort of "good enough" stuff makes being an expert an untenable position and those stores are pretty much just gone, even if you are willing to pay (the pool of customers who are is too small to support it).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> WiggleYourIndex, you are hellbanned, just fyi

</comment><comment><USER18> "Appears"?? I don't appreciate having fleshlight ads displayed on something I read at school.

<comment><USER19> Please install adblock plus.

<comment><USER3> Why? I have no problem with people trying to monetize they content they generate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wish I could write like that.

<comment><USER15> I checked the index to see what topics she typically covers and found a story which I thought was well-written (NSFW for prudish workplaces; no inappropriate images though) -

[http://graphicdescriptions.com/27-mitcz](http://graphicdescriptions.com/27-mitcz)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> why couldn't you put a NSFW tag? is that asking too much? Thanks for the awkward office moment.

</comment><comment><USER22> tl;dr

I worked for a company that got screwed by shrewd business tactics. don't give money to that company.

<comment><USER3> Not only is this not really a summary of the article, the little that is there, is wrong.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: So, you have a million dollars. Now what? - <AUTHOR> http://paraschopra.com/blog/personal/so-you-have-a-million-dollars-now-what.htm

<comment><USER2> aim for 5% annual return, leave 2,5% for inflaction, and you'll be forever free with 25K/year yea you should carefully pick up your bank or your freedom could vanish in the next credit crunch :)

<comment><USER3> You're going to be paying taxes on that 5% so you're not going to net 25k.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> is that 1 mil before or after taxes?

</comment><comment><USER5> What do you mean, now what? "Now what" is you go and make the rest of the money you'll need to buy a decent apartment in any world city. A million bucks ain't that much anymore and you certainly couldn't retire or anything, unless you plan on living in a lower-income country.

On the bright side, you won't need an angel investor for your next startup..

</comment><comment><USER6> "Two girls at the same time."

<comment><USER6> To whoever downvoted this: this was a JOKE, a quote from 'Office Space'.

<comment><USER7> It's almost as if they decided to JUMP to CONCLUSIONS.

And yes, that is very much on the topic of what to do with a million dollars-- You can fund your business idea... even if it's terrible. Earn a million dollars and you can start marketing _Jump to Conclusions_ mats.</comment></comment></comment>


IPad publishing platform used for Popular Science now released (free download) - <AUTHOR> http://www.magplus.com/

<comment><USER2> free download...

$500/month if you actually want to distribute it

<comment><USER3> Yeah, that was a let down.

Anyone know of a similar platform, free or lower fixed cost, to start your own iPad magazine-like publication?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "The permitted use of Mag+ Create is for the creation of digital content (but this license excludes any right to deploy produced content on any tablet or other mobile media device"

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER5> Yeah the second half of that sentence, which explains (in admittedly pretty mangled English) that distribution rights are covered in a separate document.

"Mag Create" lets you create content for free. But to distribute it you need to pay for their "Publish" product.</comment></comment>


Toki Pona: A created language that has only 100 words - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/toki-pona-smallest-language/398363/ <comment><USER2> > The point is simplicity. And in Toki Pona, simple is literally good. Both > concepts are combined in a single word: pona.

That's how you end up with words like English "cool", which means low(-ish) temperature, except when it's about people, or "blue", a particular color, except when it's about feelings.

It's anything but simple, and honestly it doesn't sound good to me, either.

<comment><USER3> How often does that really lead to confusion though?

I can't think of a time someone said "blue" meaning sad and I thought they meant "blue" the color.

Humans are great at disambiguating things.

<comment><USER2> If you are a native speaker, rarely. Otherwise, all the freaking times (for the first ten years or so).

E.g., consider the difference between a "cool guy" and a "cool attitude". If you think about it, they describe almost totally opposite situations.

Or consider "No, it's cool." After all, "it's hot" means the temperature is high.

<comment><USER4> > "cool attitude"

Do you actually use this much, though? I had to double take because I'm not familiar with the phrase and I'm a native speaker. Typically you might use cool to in this way to describer an action or gerund, or with a prepositional phrase, or as an adverb.

Heck, if anything, I'd say a "cool attitude" is a _calm_ attitude—as in, the person played it cool.

<comment><USER5> Maybe not that exact phrasing but "he gave me a cool look" can mean exact opposites. Depends entirely on dialect / register. The direct metaphorical version ("he gave me an unfriendly look") is reasonably common in English. The other reading of it isn't so much, but is perfectly understandable (probably incorrectly).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This reminds me a lot of a natural language processing tool called word2vec. It reduces words into vectors, where each dimension represents something about the meaning about the word. E.g. whether it's a place, or if it's male or female.

And these vectors are not designed by humans, but learned from data. It's optimized so that words that occur in similar contexts have similar vectors. E.g. places tend to occur near words talking about places, like "there" or "go", and male names tend to occur near "he" and "his", etc.

You can do really interesting things with these vectors. Like 'King'-'man'+'woman'='queen'. Recently a computer program beat the word analogy part of an IQ test using this. It's useful in computer translation. Take two languages and constrain a few identical words to have the same vector. Then all the other words also end up with similar vectors.

Anyway, with something like this, the actual words and symbols don't matter, just the 100 or so dimensions needed to accurately represent the meaning of every word. Of course speaking a 100 dimensional vector is way less efficient than a single word or symbol.

But perhaps using this, we could come up with an absolute minimal set of symbols necessary. And some rules for combining them to get all words.

I know a lot of the comments here are complaining that this doesn't make a good natural language. But that's not the point of an auxiliary language. The main thing auxiliary languages should optimize for is how easy it is to learn. Simpler is better. Reducing the words and grammar is hugely important.

Another advantage of such an approach, is that it might be more amenable to machine translation. Which is another advantage for an auxiliary language.

<comment><USER7> That may be the way to reduce duplication and bloat in the Lojban [1] root- word list. Currently, about 1300 root words exist. A lot of them have overlapping or redundant meanings, and it has already been proposed to (manually) unify them and reduce their number.

Combined with the already existing rules for word composition, and the grammar, it could make a very nice language.

The idea is still very far from possible completion though. One (of several) things to look at is: how do we characterize word composition? word vector adding? averaging? I guess the operation could be learned too.

[1] Lojban is an artificial language based in predicate logic [http://lojbo.org/](http://lojbo.org/) .

Source for the "could be used in AI" claim in that website: [http://www.goertzel.org/new_research/lojban_AI.pdf](http://www.goertzel.org/new_research/lojban_AI.pdf) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cool. There's a similar project put forth by linguists in the early 70s called Natural Semantic Metalanguage, with about 70 "primes" that all other words can be factored out as, like you would have to do if you wrote a dictionary without circular definitions.

Unlike Toki Pona or the other languages mentioned in the article, Natural Semantic Metalanguage is mostly used for thought experiments and to analyze existing languages for ambiguities and double meanings.*

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguag...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage)

*"Double meanings" may not be the right word, but is there a word to describe what happens when a system is non-orthagonal and the same piece winds up with multiple responsibilities?

<comment><USER9> Overloading?

<comment><USER8> Totally, perfect!

<comment><USER10> For us geeks :-) others know such words as 'homonyms'.

<comment><USER8> But within NSM scholarship, overloading is probably more descriptive than words that happen to sound the same but have well-known distinct meanings. In blurb form:

"This book is based on two ideas: first, that any language--English no less than any other-represents a universe of meaning, shaped by the history and experience of the men and women who have created it, and second, that in any language certain culture--specific words act as linchpins for whole networks of meanings, and that penetrating the meanings of those key words can therefore open our eyes to an entire cultural universe. In this book Anna Wierzbicka demonstrates that three uniquely English words--evidence, experience, and sense--are exactly such linchpins. Using a rigorous plain language approach to meaning analysis, she unpacks the dense cultural meanings of these key words, disentangles their multiple meanings, and traces their origins back to the tradition of British empiricism. In so doing she reveals much about cultural attitudes embedded not only in British and American English, but also English as a global language."

[http://www.amazon.com/Experience-Evidence-Sense-Cultural- Eng...](http://www.amazon.com/Experience-Evidence-Sense-Cultural- English/dp/0195368010/ref=pd_bxgy_14_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=1ME4VECZ3R26YBX27A6Z)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There was a nice episode of The Allusionist about Toki Pona, where you can hear people trying to learn and speak it:

[https://soundcloud.com/allusionistshow/tokipona?in=allusioni...](https://soundcloud.com/allusionistshow/tokipona?in=allusionistshow/sets/allusionist)

</comment><comment><USER12>
        Toki Pona has a five-color palette: loje (red), laso
        (blue), jelo (yellow), pimeja (black), and walo (white).
        Like a painter, the speaker can combine them to achieve
        any hue on the spectrum. Loje walo for pink. Laso jelo
        for green.

I wonder if there's a reason for using the pigment color combinations instead of the light combinations of color.

<comment><USER13> Because that is what most of us learn as children?

Even now, other than white and black, I'd have to think what light combinations make what colour.

<comment> david-given Of course, one of the problems with colours is that different cultures have different colour values.

The Celtic languages like Scots and Irish Gaelic distinguish between _dearg_ , which is the red of paint or blood, and _ruadh_ , which is the red of hair or heather. To them these are completely different colours, and a native Gaelic speaker would be really confused to find that English translates them both as the same word.

Toki Pona's limited root vocabulary really just demonstrates its cultural biases.

<comment><USER14> Or the fact that many languages don't distinguish blue and green at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I actually know the woman who created Toki Pona, here in Toronto.

She taught me that professional translators can only translate into their native language, which I found frustrating but it made sense.

<comment><USER16> Wait what?

This doesn't sound right to me at all.

There is no arbitrary skill ceiling that can only be achieved by being a native speaker.

<comment><USER17> I can kind of see the logic. It's certainly _possible_ for an adult to learn to speak another language indistinguishably from a native speaker, but in practice there's a surprisingly large gap between that and a person who can speak fluently on complex subjects with no fear of being misunderstood, but makes occasional minor errors--or even usages which are grammatically correct, but _sound_ stilted--that betray them as non-native.

There's a big jump between 99.9% and 100%, is what I'm saying, and if you want a really professional translation job, you're not going to settle for 99.9%. And the thing is, you can't tell the difference between 99.9% fluent and 100% fluent without _being_ 100% fluent. So if you want to be sure you're getting 100% fluency, a native speaker is your best bet.

<comment><USER18> Imagine a translator who is 50% fluent in source language and 100% fluent (native) in target language. He would often misunderstand the source text and, even though he can produce target language natively, the translation would be incorrect.

Now imagine a translator who is 100% fluent in source language and 50% fluent in target language. He completely understands the source text and, using only simple sentences, can accurately convey the meaning in the target language.

This thought experiment demonstrates that the knowledge of source language is _far_ more important for the accuracy of translation.

<comment><USER17> Both of those people would be equally unacceptable as a professional translator. It's true that #2 would be better if those were your only two options, but that's an unrealistic limitation.

A guy who is 99% fluent in source and 100% fluent in target will generally produce a flawless translation--if he happens across a word or idiom in the source that he doesn't quite understand, it will stand out to him, and he will pause to research it before continuing.

A guy who is 100% fluent in source and 99% fluent in target will produce a perfectly clear but very slightly stilted translation, because he's not aware of the few mistakes that he makes.

If you're translating a commercial product and you have my two guys to choose between, you would want #1.

<comment><USER16> >A guy who is 100% fluent in source and 99% fluent in target will produce a perfectly clear but very slightly stilted translation,because he's not aware of the few mistakes that he makes.

Why isn't the reverse true? It is only that the lossyness of the conversion process is invisible in the result, so somebody reading it would not know that it's wrong, it still produces the same quality of translation i.e. that its not perfect (or as good as can be).

Additionally, there are so many words in english that it's not possible to know them all, and so one has to assume that all people are at most 99%. But my english alarm doesnt go off everytime a word like 'mellifluous' isn't used. So I even doubt the claim that a guy who is 99% in the target language will make a 'stilted' translation. There exists a skill level where a person can produce a text that won't read as 'wrong' but won't be as good as it could possibly be and this skill level is sufficient to not have a text feel stilted. Not to mention most people do not have the same writing skills, and a very good high school student writer writes a much more pleasing text than his schoolmate who is not very good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The article also describes another more complex language. Toki Pona on wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona)

Both languages seem to encourage thinking about language and how we describe things and the world. A bit like E-Prime (of which I'm a fan).

<comment><USER19> The other, more complex, language is called Ithkuil ⌘ [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil)

<comment><USER20> Iun-niu ti casexh

I keep thinking of implementing a crude translator for that lovely language but lack the skills. Anyone interested in playing around with it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> So it's like the vi of languages? I.e. memorize the relatively few meanings of the "words" and then customize/combine them to the context. Seems like with languages there would be a lot more room for ambiguities though.

<comment><USER22> No. vi has a grammar, like all natural languages, including this one I guess. vi's is simple, mostly combining a noun with a verb, plus some simple modifiers. It sounds like the interesting thing about this language isn't that it has a grammar, it's that it has so few (and well chosen?) words that virtually every noun and every verb must be expressed by combining these building-block words. vi doesn't seem like that to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Link to the homepage: [http://tokipona.org/](http://tokipona.org/)

</comment><comment><USER24> "What is a car?" "You might say that a car is a space that's used for movement, tomo tawa"

Luckily, it is not widely used. Otherwise, it would be a nightmare of translators, especially for Google Translate developers!

Before I wiki it, I thought it was a language used by the tribes in Africa or ancient civilization, but it was created in 2001!

Find out more about it on Wiki: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona)

<comment><USER25> Toki Pona isn't meant as a universal language to be translated from nor to translate into (unlike e.g. Esperanto). When you translate from/to, a lot of subtleties are lost (which is exactly what Toki Pona intends).

Toki Pona is just a "toy" language (for lack of a better adjective), somewhat like yoga for the language (for lack of a better simile). Each person uses Toki Pona in their own way: for some it's pushing language to the limit, for some it's just fun, some others consider it an experiment in psychology, an experiment in language construction, an introspection tool, a challenge, poetry in and of itself...

Obviously it's not the best to communicate precisely, just like yoga asanas aren't meant to walk.

<comment><USER26> Perhaps 'recreational' rather than 'toy' is a better word. :) The analogy with yoga is good, or plenty of programming languages. They make you better as a person, stretch you, widen your knowledge, and expand your mind, without necessarily being directly useful. For me it is enjoyable, definitely poetry. Though the opportunities to actually speak it is very limited.

sina sona ala sona e toki pona? (do you know it?) ... if so: sina kama sona tan seme?

<comment><USER25> I assume "sina kama sona tan seme?" means "where did you learn it from?". Did I get that right?

A small nitpick: proper nouns have to be preceded by a Toki Pona common noun or noun phrase (in this case toki, language) and then the proper noun in capitalized case. E.g.: toki Toki Pona, telo Coca Cola, etc. I.e. proper nouns must modify a preceding common Toki Pona noun.

\---

mi toki e toki Toki Pona. taso mi jo ala e tenpo mute. tan tenpo suli la mi toki ala e toki Toki Pona. mi kama sona tan tan mute. lipu Tokipona.net en lipu Tokipona.org en lipu Reddit.com/r/tokipona li pona. lipu Tokipona.org li anpa. taso lipu Forums.tokipona.org li pali. sina wile la sina ken toki tawa mi lon ni: "el" en nimi mi pi lipu HN, lon kulupu Gmail.

(I speak Toki Pona, but I don't have a lot of time. It's been a long time not talking Toki Pona. I've learn it from many different sources. tokipona.net, tokipona.org, /r/tokipona are good. tokipona.org is down but forums.tokipona.org is still working. If you want, you can contact me at "el" concatenated with my HN username at gmail.)

<comment><USER26> Nitpicking is welcome! mi toki mute alla pona. I've not seen 'toki Toki Pona' used that way though, I've rarely seen it capitalised and used as a proper noun. So 'sona e toki pona' (nimi pi lipu pi jan Piljin e 'o kama sona e toki pona!'). That said, the rule for the extra verb I end up dropping quite often from carelessness, so 'sina telo allo telo Coca Cola?' rather than 'sina telo allo telo telo Coca Cola?' So it was a good nitpick.

'tan seme' is usually 'why', I think (I learned it as a compound lexicon entry I guess). 'sine sona kama tan seme?' for where from?

Thanks.

<comment><USER25> Ah! Very true. My Toki Pona is very rusty as you can see. I forgot a lot of compound lexicon and idioms :(

I've always seen 'Toki Pona' used as a proper noun following the proper noun rules to avoid confusion with 'good talk' and the like (which I guess is the purpose of the rule in the first place, as well as discouraging proper nouns). I learnt it a long time ago so maybe the requirement has been dropped? Or lousy usage since it's very common that people forget to follow the proper noun rule. In 'kama sona e toki pona' I'd be inclined to understand "learning to talk well" rather than "learning Toki Pona". Perhaps that was the intent? Anyways, there's so much outdated and non-canonical material, and most of the canon has holes and even doesn't follow its own advice. And actual usage has diverted so much too (plus having zero native speakers everyone has their own usage). "Language-ing" is hard :P Even more so in a vague language like Toki Pona.

The Coca Cola example would require 'e' to mark the direct object ('sina telo ala telo e telo Coca Cola'). I've grown so accustomed to a common noun following 'e' that it missing sounds really jarring.

mi toki e toki Toki Pona tan ni: toki Toki Pona li musi tawa mi. toki Toki Pona li pona kin tawa ali! tenpo suli la mi toki mute e toki Toki Pona. taso tenpo ni la mi toki lili e ni.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> V-2 Interesting. Eye is "oko" (same as in Polish), a man is Jan ("John"/"Ian" in Polish), a hand is "luka" ("ręka" or "renka" in Polish, "ruka" in Russian), a leg is "noka" ("noga"), a mouth is "uta" ("usta") etc.

But the creator isn't Polish or even Slavic, even though the interviewed language fan (?) Krzeminska is. Go figure

<comment><USER27> "oko" is also similar to words of romance origin (compare: "ojo" in spanish and "occhio" in italian).

Anyway, the author of the language basically just got random words off of many languages, see

[http://archive.is/6lxwq](http://archive.is/6lxwq)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is there a good sub-Reddit with interesting topics like this about language?

<comment><USER29> There's a subreddit for constructed languages: [https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/](https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> > In Chinese, the word computer translates directly as electric brain.

Computer has two translation in mandarin, while "electric brain" is the only translation in cantonese

<comment><USER31> This is straight off the top of my head, but are you referring to 计算机? I have always considered that best translated as 'calculator', but obviously it is used in a lot of places where the English wouldn't be calculator.

Of all the massively incorrect reporting out there on Chinese language and culture, this seems pretty innocuous.

<comment><USER32> If you think about it historically, calculator would be a more accurate translation - it was something that computed or calculated numbers for you. In German, calculator and computer are also both Rechner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914534](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914534)

</comment><comment><USER34> First thing i thoughtof was Darmok and Jilad at Tinagra. :)

</comment><comment><USER35> Original article from July 2015: [http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/toki-p...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/toki- pona-smallest-language/398363/)

The BI copy doesn't even bother correctly distinguishing pull quotes from the following text in its copy-paste job.

<comment><USER36> Thanks. Url changed from [http://uk.businessinsider.com/the-worlds-smallest- language-h...](http://uk.businessinsider.com/the-worlds-smallest-language-has- only-100-words-and-you-can-say-almost-anything-2015-7).

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I can't see this kind of language used for technical documentation or at any kind of tech workplace. There are already nuances with current languages. This would be terrible.

<comment><USER38> A fruitful interpretation could be that there is no one language for all jobs. Just as programming languages are chosen for the specific task at hand, you can also choose a natural language by its effectiveness for the current task.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's your toolchain for bootstrapping a new local environment? - <AUTHOR> When you start in a new local environment (eg new Linux desktop, Windows desktop, MacBook, etc) how do you efficiently make it "home" to you? For example, dotfiles, ssh keys, file sync such as Dropbox, terminal and preferences, etc. <comment><USER2> I install Firefox and Sublime Text, and do everything later.

I'm currently joining a new company and have to redo everything, but this is probably the most consistent thing. New environments are good situations to reevaluate everything I've been doing so far.

</comment><comment><USER3> Custom shell script that automates everything from UI settings to installation of applications and dependencies, preferences and dotfiles.</comment>