Why do people put on differing amounts of weight? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35193414 <comment><USER2> The full study is much more interesting: "We devised a machine-learning algorithm that integrates blood parameters, dietary habits, anthropometrics, physical activity, and gut microbiota measured in this cohort and showed that it accurately predicts personalized postprandial glycemic response to real- life meals."

[http://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(15)01481-6.pdf](http://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674\(15\)01481-6.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Thank you for the link - the study is very interesting to read. I have been bumbling around for a while trying to see what fits for me and there have been counter-intuitive things that seem to work. This study makes me think of that. Part of diet is finding what works to keep things in balance, cravings and spikes might indicate the diet is not working.

As an example - initially starting dieting, I stayed away from fruit as a vehicle of carbs. Over the past two weeks I have allowed myself bananas, apples, melon and berries as breakfast and afternoon snack. This appears to not 'spike' me as I would have thought but gives me stability.

Night snacking is a killer for me and I have been able to get by with a cup of tea around 2200 with a single biscuit.

Its just been 2 weeks but these two little cheats actually seem to give the diet some stability - for now anyway.

This study is really useful for me.

<comment><USER4> What are you using to monitor spikes? Trying to locate something that would give continuous readings rather than manual testing after every meal.

<comment><USER5> Would continuous glucose monitoring devices used by diabetics be suitable?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is pretty astonishing research, not so much for the results, as for the methodology.

Doing research on what people eat is VERY hard, it's very hard to get accurate data.

Pairing people and having them eat identically is brilliant. I hope it's also scalable for longer term studies.

By pairing people they are likely to give much more accurate reports about what they actually eat, and it allows direct comparisons.

<comment><USER7> It is very interesting. I wonder, however, if it's enough to isolate all relevant variables (this is peanut gallery speculation, I am not a scientist of any stripe)? The narrator explains that she is "an accident & emergency doctor [...]. Rushing around on my feet all day with strange working patterns". Never mind that the stress and adrenaline of such work must affect her body in some ways, she probably also moves quite a bit more than the average person. We're not told anything about her counterpart than her name, and that she's the same age and gender.

<comment><USER8> I've commented a bunch of time on gut microbiome before and I'll say it again here who may have not caught it. If this article is interesting check out "The Good Gut" by Justin and Erica Sonnenburg, PhD. I've been experimenting with an ad hoc restorative process through ideas in the book and reading/research around a myriad of pro/prebiotics + diet change.

For me the whole subject adds a lot of weight to the idea of "skinny fat" vs "fat". I'm glad we're in an age of companies like WellnessFX where I can objectively see the positive changes made by changes to a lifestyle... But, again, I can't stress enough how much great information and studies that have been broken down is in the book. No affiliation, but it's very powerful knowledge.

$0.02.

edit: "we're not in" to "we're in", whoops

<comment><USER9> I am in agreement about the microbiome and it's importance but I found the good gut to be a terrible book full of wild speculation and little facts to back them up. Many sections started with a few thin facts then the authors made jumps that didn't exactly connect to those facts in order to speculate as if that was a fact. I hope there is a better book out there on this topic or one coming soon.

<comment><USER8> Interesting. Do you have any specific examples you can remember? I read the book from the perspective that it wasn't verbatim research results, but example based results from their research. I found the connections between the test and result generally existed, although I would say the book got a bit muddy on reuse of a few key topic areas. It's definitely a dry book - it took me a while to get through as it didn't always hold my interest.

That being said I agree that I hope there's more to come.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The report makes no mention of any inclusion of genetics or epigenetics (environmentally-influenced gene expression) in this study.

It would be a shame if that were excluded as a factor worth investigating, as research I've seen elsewhere indicates that it is [1].

The notion that the gut microbiome is a major factor in metabolism and health is now widely known and accepted, but it just raises the next question: what is the cause of variance in the health of the microbiome?

A good diet and supplementation with good microbes (probiotics, ferments, etc) is part of it, but the body itself also needs to do its part to create an environment that is fertile and hospitable for beneficial microbes, and inhospitable for harmful ones.

This requires a well-functioning immune system, correct enzyme activity, oxygenation, pH, optimal function of all the organs, to name just some of the factors in the vastly complex system that is the mammalian body.

Genetics and epigenetics play a key role in this system, and you'd hope to see this being included as a part of a study like this.

[1] [https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2014/09/15/how- epigen...](https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2014/09/15/how-epigenetics- our-gut-microbiome-and-the-environment-interact-to-change-our-lives/)

</comment><comment><USER11> This happens in pigs and other livestock. Animals are specifically bred for their Feed Conversion Efficiency ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio)). I don't see why something similar couldn't happen in people as well.

<comment><USER12> Well, something similar shouldn't happen in people because eugenics is considered to not be a particularly good idea.

<comment><USER13> it's actually a pretty good idea.

who wouldn't want to be born with excellent immune system, strong and tall, smart and attractive?

<comment><USER14> You need the ugly to actually realize beauty. If everyone is beautiful, the word "beautiful" wouldn't make any sense.

You could argue that this would be a solution to many discrimination issues today if _everyone_ is beautiful, strong, tall, ... . Mhh. Interesting thought.

<comment><USER15> As you realized, beauty is relative (to ugliness). I can't quite grasp how you missed this relative aspect by going further with your assumption of "everyone is beautiful". People will always find distinctions and there always will be a scale of beauty (or whatever else).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > For Leila, the results were very different. Whereas pasta was "bad" for me, > it was fine for her. Yoghurt was good for me, but bad for her, and our > responses to bread and butter were also complete opposites.

(Note: "bad" and "good" above refers to "high-GI" and "low-GI", respectively.)

Another interesting anecdotal observation from my acquaintances: our relationships with food differ significantly. While some people simply _like_ to eat (like myself - I find great pleasure in food and seemingly can't ever get enough), others simply don't find such enjoyment in eating - food tastes good for them, but not particularly amazing, and they don't seem to perceive the same amount of Freudian pleasure from the feeling of fullness. Interestingly, this seems to correlate highly (and again, anecdotally) with our life-long struggles with weight - the first group has to be conscious not to eat too much (and put on too much weight), while the second group consists of mainly skinny individuals, some of whom struggle putting on weight.

So the "goodness" and "badness" of food might have completely different base levels across population!

<comment><USER17> I guess the saying, everybody is different applies here.

I still remember the days when I could eat 3 - 4 pound of beef, along side with mesh potato, or 12 inch Pizza, or whole bucket ( 10pcs ) KFC, per meal! And these meals would come with Coke as well. in Tea time i will eat Ice Cream, eat lots of yogurt etc.

I dont do lots of sports, may be once a week maximum. Otherwise I just sit down playing World of Warcraft or watching TV.

All while I don't gain 1 pound of weight! I had a VERY hard time gaining weight when I was in the age of 16 - 22. I even tried those weight gainer and protein. And does't work

Now that i am a lot older, trying to lose some weight, I find out a lot of these theories simply don't make sense when i was younger. If you are what you eat, then I was definitely eating 4000+ calories per day and not getting Fat.

I think, everybody has a different body type that reacts differently.

<comment><USER18> > then I was definitely eating 4000+ calories per day and not getting Fat.

Not true at all, you weren't even counting your calories you're just throwing out a number. And if you were counting you were counting wrong. That's a huge part of people who say they can't gain or lose weight. They claim to eat these vast amount (or extremely low amount) of calories when they really have no idea. People trying to lose weight will look at a burger and say "that's about 400 calories" and someone trying to gain weight will look at the same burger and say "that's about 1500 calories", when in reality its somewhere around 900. Do that for 3-4 meals a day and boom, you've got your "I eat 4000+ calories and can't gain weight".

<comment><USER19> It definitely can be the case. Absorption of calories depends on the person so the same people who eat 2k calories could get roughly 2k calories OR LESS depending on the gut bacteria and other variables.

I do agree with you on people's reported caloric intake. Most people inaccurately record their eating habits. I use an app to get an idea of what my day was like.

<comment><USER20> Nutritional panel information is not an _in vivo_ measurement.

If you put 100g of broccoli in a bomb calorimeter and burn it in pure oxygen, you heat it up by 34 kilocalories.

If you put it in a human digestive tract instead , the human can absorb anywhere from 0 to 34 kilocalories of food energy from it. We already have ample evidence that the food energy absorbed may be affected by the microbiome in the intestines, the preparation method used, the time of day, the time of year, and other foods that may have been eaten at around the same time.

But the calorimetry does establish a hard upper limit on absorbable food energy.

This is why non-ruminant herbivores with shorter digestive tracts--like the arctic hare--will engage in coprophagy. They will eat their "first-through" turds, because there is still some food energy in them. Ruminants do essentially the same thing with multiple stomachs and regurgitation.

If you aren't weighing your food and burning your poop in a calorimeter, you are inaccurately reporting your caloric intake. Even then, you can't really know for sure how much of that energy was absorbed for use by human cells, and how much was used to sustain your microbiome.

<comment><USER21> Burning your poop isn't necessary, but yes, weighing your food is a good idea. Want to know how much you're really absorbing from food? Calculate your real TDEE: [https://www.reddit.com/r/leangains/comments/2rv09z/this_is_h...](https://www.reddit.com/r/leangains/comments/2rv09z/this_is_how_you_calculate_your_tdee/)

No matter what conditions you may have (or _think_ you have) the above method will tell you _exactly_ how much your total daily energy expenditure is, including what passes through you that you don't absorb, so you can know how much you need to eat to lose, maintain or gain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Could a similar approach work to find the impact of foods on other health factors (sleep quality, digestion, ...) in a personal experiment?

I picture logging my coffee consumption (or even all foods + sports etc) and sleep over a few weeks, then using machine learning to find a possible relationship.

I'd appreciate any links to OSS projects/commercial apps that work on this.

</comment><comment><USER23> Michael Moseley and the BBC are doing some great work challenging the status quo recently, especially with diet.

If you're able to access iPlayer where you are, the programme he did on fasting is well worth a watch if you have an hour spare.

<comment><USER24> I have a lot of time for Michael Moseley, but recently his "Trust me, I'm a Doctor" TV show has been falling into the same traps as the medical establishment, making concrete claims based on the flimsiest of evidence.

In a recent show one of the presenters (admittedly not Moseley) claims "The good news is that we have shown that Olive oil really is good for us", which was a ridiculous claim based on the evidence presented.

<comment><USER25> Yes, it seems the more mainstream the program the more they feel they need to simplify it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> On an individual level the study shows why some people are more prone to weight gain than others. But there's been an epidemic of obesity over the past few decades, and there's no reason to believe people's gut flora changed over that period. Even if it did, there must have been an underlying cause.

What has undoubtedly changed are people's lifestyles:

(1) Less smoking. (This is a good thing, but it has resulted in weight gain.)

(2) More driving and less walking/bicycling.

(3) Children playing games on computers instead of outside.

(4) More sitting at desks, and less moving about, at work.

(5) More eating out.

and probably a few other factors.

<comment><USER27> Yep. Lifestyle change without dietary change.

I'm M27 6' 150lbs and mostly sedentary; calorie recommendations for me are 2300+.

Last time I counted my calories I was eating closer to 1600. My weight is maintained and I experience no lack of energy compared to peers.

I think people over estimate the amount of food they "need" and over estimate how many calories are burned for x-amount of activity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> There is a new book out called "Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body's Most Underrated Organ" by Giulia Enders:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/97817716...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/9781771641494)

I can't recommend it enough as it is both entertaining and packed with comprehensive information on a taboo topic (hint: you are "the borg";)

Interview with Giulia Enders on "Gut":

[http://youtu.be/weskzCKki-s](http://youtu.be/weskzCKki-s)

</comment><comment><USER29> I have a very high metabolism. Some envy me, others find me too skinny. What troubles me though, is that I don't have weight as a heuristic in regards to my health. I sometimes worry, as everything else is quite ambiguous. Energy levels depend on sunlight, sleep and so on. How often I fall sick is equally dependant too many variables for it to be a reliable indicator.

I would love for something like this to be reliable/easy/cheap so I have something I can turn to when I feel uneasy about my health.

</comment><comment><USER30> Interesting results. While I understand the microbes do affect how we process foods does our diet affect how they work? As in, if long term she eats grapes then perhaps either the microbes in her changed or the microbes themselves adopted a new behavior.

So the idea is, put a group of people on a strict diet long enough to affect which microbes they have and the exposure of the microbes to the diet. Then take three different directions from there and monitor how it all works out.

<comment><USER15> I'm not that versed in the subject, but my (dilettante) guess is that our own behavior may affect the fauna of our digestive microbes by consuming spicy food, alcohol, having nicotine in blood, or through other unhealthy habits.

<comment><USER31> Spicy food is unhealthy?

<comment><USER15> There is a lot to be said about spicy. In a few words, "spicy" is not really a taste like sweat, bitter, salty, and acid are. Spicy is actually the sensation of the inflamed taste buds. (But there are condiments that are inducing only this inflamed sensation without actually causing it.) This chemically-induced inflammatory effect is deadly for many bacteria. This sanitizing effect was one of the main reasons why the hot and wet south Asia developed so many spiced dishes in their traditional cuisine. (In Europe they used alcohol for the same effect.) So although spicy will not harm you (directly, in the long term), it will kill some of your symbiotic pals!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Very interesting.

Startup idea: stool sample testing and custom diet design via a mobile app.

I call "not it" for the stool testing part. I'll work on the mobile app instead.

<comment><USER33> They could create a probe that attaches via a lightning adapter for the stool sampling part.

You sound like a great candidate to be the team lead on that project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Does anyone know where/what that continuous glucose monitor that gets implanted is?

<comment><USER35> Dexcom makes one. It isn't a permanent implant though, as mentioned in the article it is good for a week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Well the biggest reason people put on weight is because they don't understand how calories work from a lack of education, which is why poor people and immigrants generally become the most overweight. People who don't speak English well won't run into scientific articles that talk about calories, so they aren't even thinking about the subject.

<comment><USER37> Most people don't understand calories as it relates to their food intake. However lack of education has very little to do with it. Just look at all the comments in this thread. The things that can be said to be true are: Thermodynamics is correct.. People consuming same amount of food may end up absorbing different calories from it. They also may burn calories at slightly different rates.

This is all very helpful but not a plan to control weight.

Poor people (anecdotal) have less time to cook healthy meals and hence end up eating calorie dense fast food. PS: edit . typo. Grammer. Phone..

<comment><USER38> I would assume education would cover differences in individual metabolism, so you'd know if you were gaining weight to consume less food.</comment></comment></comment>


Leftwinger brands GIMP "racist" over skin whitening plugin - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/dymaxion/status/495382826372853761

<comment><USER2> To solve this, add two new Beautify plugins: "Skin darkening" and "Skin tinting". Someone needed a "Skin whitening" plugin and wrote one, sigh.

Honestly, I think some people browse the Internet for the sole purpose of finding something that offends them.

</comment><comment><USER3> If we're trying to be historically accurate, I think skin darkening would be the more racist option.

</comment><comment><USER4> oh god, these things make me want to become racist towards idiots.

</comment><comment><USER5> Some random dummy says something off the cuff on twitter, gets HN post written about them by some other blowhard.

Where should I submit _my_ HN post?

<comment><AUTHOR> Congrats on being the third layer of "blowhard"

<comment><USER5> Acknowledged.

However, at least I'm not doing anything to inflate the story.</comment></comment></comment>


Why States Should Aim for 100 Percent Vaccination - <AUTHOR> http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-states-should-aim-for-100-percent-vaccination/

<comment><USER2> Is this just bad use of stats?

The article's premises are based on the regression lines he's put on them, but the're at best very loose.

Looking at the second graph in particular, where the author's point is that the positive skew is unexpected. It seems to me that (1) the line is only just positive anyway; (2) no error bars or survey methodology is evident even though we're talking numbers lower than 0.5 in 100,000; and (3) it's clear that outliers NY and NJ not only form part of the regression, but are skewing it dramatically.

I can't do it at the moment but I bet that if you remove those two outliers, the line will tip negative (as expected).

<comment><USER3> FYI the author is a she, not a he.

<comment><USER2> My bad. Luckily, that doesn't really affect the regression lines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> " Although both numbers are high, Montana has four times as many whooping cough cases per person than Louisiana. "

\- how much of this is due to vaccination and how much is due to different climates? Or other non-obvious factors?

</comment><comment><USER5> If these states supported voluntary instead of FORCED vaccinations I think this topic wouldn't be an issue.</comment>


Pluot – big-screen video conferencing for startups - <AUTHOR> https://pluot.co <comment><AUTHOR> Hi. Co-founder of Pluot, here.

We built Pluot because we know first-hand how much big-screen video conferencing improves the experience of working with remote colleagues. Daily standups, project meetings, and lots of other stuff gets way better when you can sit around a table, and everyone can see both camera feeds and screen shares at the same time.

But all the video conferencing systems on the market are too expensive for startups, or are somewhat involved set up and maintain, or didn't have the features we wanted. So we scratched our own itch and built a little appliance, using WebRTC and atom-shell (which is now electron). Once we'd built it and showed it to some friends, we decided enough other people might want it that we kept working on it.

You can play with the software stack from any Chrome web browser. Go here to bounce through to a unique meeting URL, then copy that URL and send it to anyone you want to have a video call with: [https://pluot.co/new](https://pluot.co/new)

So far, that's more or less like Google Hangouts. But that same video call stack runs, with a different UI, on our little Pluot device. So if you've got a Pluot hooked up to the TV (or two TVs) in your conference room, you can join the meeting that way.

The Pluot device is an Intel NUC running Ubuntu Core. We boot from the stock Ubuntu kernel, then load a bundle of Javascript that looks for the network (and walks you through configuring a wifi connection with a QR code, if there's no ethernet cable plugged in and no previous wifi configuration). Then we pull down another bundle of Javascript that defines the basic behavior of the system. Finally, when you start a video call you're hitting the same web stuff as in the [https://pluot.co/new](https://pluot.co/new) link, above. But we know you're running on our hardware, so we customize the UI for the TV screen.

All the WebRTC media streams are peer-to-peer. That means generally you're going to get the best latency and encoding quality possible for whatever internet connection you're on. The downside is that we have to do a lot of encoding/decoding -- we support four locations joining a call and two simultaneous screen-shares from participants. That's why we're using an Intel Core i3 instead of a cheaper ARM option.

Finally, it's a lot of fun to design a unified UI that runs on big screens, laptops/desktops, and phones, and that multiple people are going to be using simultaneously for real-time interaction. You can participate in a Pluot call on a big screen or a laptop/desktop. We don't ship with a plastic remote control, instead you use a web browser on a laptop or phone to control the big screen experience. So, lots of different pixel contexts. At the moment, we're still working on layering in the final UI for the browser client. It's basically still wireframes!

Thanks for reading this far, if you got this far. We'd love to hear the HN community's feedback on what we're doing. We love talking about this stuff.</comment>


Best place to post writings so they'll survive in perpetuity? - <AUTHOR>

If I wanted to post some writing that'd be in the public domain, Google-searchable, and highly likely to remain accessible in perpetuity (e.g., without pay), what would be a good way to do this? <comment><USER2> Both archive.org and perma.cc are doing this. I believe currently anyone can use archive but only professionals can use perma.

Write something online, then save the link to one of these repositories.

</comment><comment><USER3> Publish a book with an ISBN and make it available on Google Books</comment>


Psilocybin found safe for consumption in largest ever controlled study - <AUTHOR> https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/magic-mushroom-depression-psilocybin-trials-kcl-mental-health-addiction-a9251451.html <comment><USER2> Counter-anecdote: I've experimented with this stuff extensively in various settings and have known many other people who did, and in my experience it's unequivocally bullshit.

Here's what happens.

First, any given trip alleviates depression for about a month or two. That makes sense to me in a sense that the word "trip" isn't a coincidence-- a really fun intense vacation in a foreign country also alleviates depression for a month or two. You swear that when you come back things will be different, but then you have to answer slack messages at 9pm, and your project is slipping at work, and your wife is flirting with strangers every time you go to a bar, and well... in a month or two you're back to feeling exactly the same way you did before (until you take the next vacation).

Second, people who discover psychedelics go on a multiyear quest for enlightenment. They keep taking various drugs, keep feeling like they understand things better and better, get sucked into the psychedelic social vortex of other truth-seekers, and generally believe that their life is full of meaning and is going to turn around at any moment. Except by any objective measure they're still nervous wrecks-- they have every physiological symptom of stress and depression, and aside from temporary alleviation of their symptoms (see part one), they always regress to the mean.

Third, after a few years of this people eventually reach a fork. Most people realize that their psychonautic journey is at best leading them in circles, and at worst is causing their life to spiral down the drain. So they give it up, get a job without 9pm slack messages (or find a better way to adjust to stress), marry someone who isn't constantly on the verge of cheating, start doing regular exercise, and generally find a way to settle into a reasonably balanced life.

A small minority of people double down, grow out their (usually grey by then) hair down to their shoulders, go to festivals and workshops, talk of energy and chi and chakras, stare into the eyes of strangers, and touch each other's faces.

Generally speaking, I haven't run into anyone yet who found a third path. So, while I'd be the first to admit I'm wrong and celebrate if this proves to actually work, if I were a betting man I'd bet against at any reasonable odds and sleep secure in the knowledge that my money is safe.

<comment><USER3> No, your conclusion is bullshit.

> First, any given trip alleviates depression for about a month or two. That > makes sense to me in a sense that the word "trip" isn't a coincidence-- a > really fun intense vacation in a foreign country also alleviates depression > for a month or two. You swear that when you come back things will be > different, but then you have to answer slack messages at 9pm, and your > project is slipping at work, and your wife is flirting with strangers every > time you go to a bar, and well... in a month or two you're back to feeling > exactly the same way you did before (until you take the next vacation

Your problems are situational, and when you remove yourself from that situation (using mushrooms or not) your life gets better and when you come back it's worse. It's not the mushrooms fault your life is a mess. Why are you answering slack messages at 9PM? Quit your job or just don't do it. Get rid of your wife if she's making you unhappy.

Do you think that maybe you should be giving your wife your attention at 9PM, rather than slack? How is this not painfully obvious?!

Some people just love misery, it's like - you have identified all your problems but rather than solve them you'll just sit around and point fingers and complain.

What did you expect? You'd take a mushroom and your wife disappears? Or transforms into a princess? You take a mushroom and your slack messages start answering themselves at 9PM?

What did you actually expect from the mushrooms?

<comment><USER4> Brutal honesty at its best. If everyone had the guts to talk this tone to their boss the world would look a lot better.

<comment><USER5> Well there is a saying "It is easy for a single man to divorce a wife". I am not sure his suggestion is practical also tone is terrible. I hope they can cope with other people who are being "brutally honest" with them being a jerk in real life.

<comment><USER4> I read love your wife more in the morning because her soliciting other guys in front of you is the most obvious sign she will give before filing for a divorce herself.

If no one tells you this , you can't solve problem number one. Problem number one always results in no sex followed by a system break down hence the princess comment. In the western society women initiate 2/3 of the divorces.

GP is nuanced giving a helicopter view on the personal projection at hand so it doesn't dilute the actual news brought here to light . If this tone sounds offensive we could ask HN to introduce emojis.

Someone once said something about a hammer the same applies for the mushroom.

Edit: your original comment included in Turkey we have a saying.

<comment><USER6> > In the western society women initiate 2/3 of the divorces.

Interesting. Source?

<comment><USER7> I found this by quickly googling [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/08/150822154900.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/08/150822154900.htm) but there are more sources as well. From my anecdotal non-scientific observational experience it seems completely doable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yes no doubt they've found it safe when allowing for the effects to fully wear off and at a certain dosage. Chemicals of this class are similar in structure to serotonin itself and do the opposite of SSRIs. This would mean the therapy is meant to go straight through problems regarding depression not simply make one happier. Generally speaking psylocibin is more prone to culminate in a really bad trip than delysid if the participant doesn't have their mind settled! This is also dependent on how it's isolated and from what. Oregon azurescens raised in wood chips is much more mellow and yet stronger than other varieties for example. Migraines are an extremely good use case but factors of depression can vary so wildly I'm not really convinced it would be a silver bullet. If nothing else works then maybe it would do the trick. Don't play with magic unless you want to be tricked.

<comment><AUTHOR> _" Generally speaking psylocibin is more prone to culminate in a really bad trip than delysid if the participant doesn't have their mind settled"_

One of the most interesting interviews about psychedelics that I've heard is one with Stanislav Grof, who personally supervised over 4,500 LSD sessions throughout his life (many of them during his research in to its effects, back when LSD was legal) and at about 1 hour and 56 minutes in to the interview he said:

 _" If somebody has a bad trip that means they are dealing with a difficult aspect of their unconscious and when it's coming up, it's coming up for healing... people can benefit from bad trips. I saw many of those situations where people experience what they would be hospitalized for in the psychedelic sessions, and if we stayed with it, it would actually be a major healing, a major transformation."_[1]

I also found in my own experience that my bad trips were the ones that I learned the most from and the ones that I found the most beneficial, because they would force me to face my demons and other major issues that I would avoid facing in my sober state of consciousness.

Interestingly, the study this HN post links to seems to refer to something like this:

 _" Recent work has sought to develop and validate a measure that is sensitive to difficult or challenging psychedelic experiences (Barrett et al., 2016; Carbonaro et al., 2016) and there is some evidence that the intensity of such experiences is predictive of positive long-term outcomes, whereas the duration of struggle is predictive of negative outcomes (Carbonaro et al., 2016). This is presumably because the successful resolution of conflict brings with it, insight and relief, whereas the failure to breakthrough perpetuates suffering."_

My impression from listening to and reading many interviews with veteran psychedelic researchers (who did studies with pretty massive doses of psychedelics back in the 60's) is that they seem to believe that an inability to "break through" was due to having too low a dose, and I wonder if that's the case in the unresolved difficult experiences this study refers to. On the other hand, too high a dose of psychedelics can result in post-trip amnesia (and current psychedlic researchers seem to be erring on the side of caution and give moderate doses). So there's probably some good middle ground.

[1] - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mdYUmvTeig](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mdYUmvTeig)

<comment><USER9> My bad trips made me learn to stop tripping. But my good trips made me learn a whole lot more about what might have been possible for myself and my social anxiety after I stopped. I'm still learning lessons related to those insights but compared to the confidence I had on a trip versus the confidence I have now I say I'm 70-80% at that level.

<comment> o-__-o Just want to point out you are taking the chemical at recreational doses and not therapeutic doses. This is why a professional administrating the drug is key. Look at it this way, Zoloft may give you a bad experience but not the same bad experience at 5mg vs 100mg. You can recognize the bad experience and work towards something else at 5mg vs 100mg (or replace with your favorite drug/dose) where you may end up in an outpatient hospital.

<comment><USER9> The point I'm trying to make is that for all the risks I was taking none of the outcomes were psychologically unrecoverable or fatal. Using the word "bad" was just pointing to the class of experiences that people on the psych might consider, "not pleasant", but "not pleasant" doesn't mean "not valuable". Quite the opposite, I learned from basically every experience both through its intrinsic and extrinsic qualities.

Giving psychedelics the psychiatric treatment and connoting that there are hard distinctions between "recreational" and "therapeutic" doses for some of these drugs fundamentally misunderstands them. I had therapeutic effects from "recreational" doses.

<comment> o-__-o You can say the exact same thing for Zoloft. If you took a single 100mg dose you will notice the effects. But the line that crosses therapeutic to recreational (yes SSRIs are abused recreationally but are very short lived) is somewhere between 0 and 100mg and differs based on your biological makeup. Clinical trials and reports from prescribing psychiatrists helps find that hard distinction..

<comment><USER9> They can track and establish the base rate of such effects conditioned on a random population to blur the role of one's "biological makeup", and then apply value judgements as to what doses are useful for their purposes, yes.

In that sense if you're allowing whether or not a drug is recreational to depend on a person's makeup, how could you have known I was taking a recreational dose? Could bad trips not also occur at lower doses considered sub-recreational if a person is particularly sensitive? Likewise what happens if the drug only ends up benefiting a person past the point where they also have hallucinations as a "knock-on"?

<comment> o-__-o >In that sense if you're allowing whether or not a drug is recreational to depend on a person's makeup, how could you have known I was taking a recreational dose?

that is literally the point of a psychiatrist. there is only the law preventing psychiatrists from administering psychedelics like LSD in the same fashion. there are natural practitioners who do this for e.g. marijuana today.

if someone has an adverse reaction (bad trip) then the doctor usually alters the administration of the medicine in some manner (Lower dosage, increase dosage, change medication all together etc). but to say that there are only recreational doses for illicit drugs and there is no method to validate potency in human consumption is disingenuous.

a drug is a chemical. our body is nothing but a chain of chemical reactions. modern medicine and science has come up with a pretty good method of determining dosage

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Now that mainstream club drugs such as MDMA, Ketamine, and LSD/Magic Mushrooms are finding their way into therapeutic usage. I'm wondering if and how governments will change the current narrative about "all drugs are bad for you".

Edit: I'm not advocating recreational drug usage. Just saying, that if mum is on magic mushrooms and studies like these have established safety dosage and clear therapeutic benefits. You can't really tell your teenager that they are going to go crazy if they try some.

<comment><USER11> I don't think Psilocybin mushrooms or LSD are used as a club drug.

<comment><USER12> They're a party drug for sure. LSD is great for festivals, and though I've never done shrooms, I know my friends have gone to shows on them.

In fact, I'd say LSD is used more as a party drug than it is used for anything else.

<comment><USER13> I don't know about that. All my psychonaut friends would rather lay out in a field in the sun than hit the club on a trip. Festivals are different though.

<comment><USER14> It also certainly depends on dose. I know after my first experiences my initial thought was that there was no why in hell I'd try that at a festival, but then I saw so many people/friends doing it and decided to give it a try. Was definitely mind blowing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm personally excited to see what sorts of new treatments will come out of using psychedelics medically. I've always been on the skeptical side of medical marijuana usage in all but the most extreme cases, but I have a feeling that LSD and psilocybin can really provide mental turning points and help people break out of depression.

<comment><USER16> > I've always been on the skeptical side of medical marijuana usage in all but > the most extreme cases,

Really? I've always found the milder claims fairly believable (fighting nausea or chronic low level pain relief). As an anecdote, I can attest to dealing with kidney stone pain well (rather than stopping the pain it reduced how much I noticed it) and it ended up more effective and felt less dangerous than the opiods I had used in the past.

Some of the more "miracle" claims, however, seem pretty suspect to me and I'd want some reliable reseach.

What makes you skeptical of so many claims?

<comment><USER17> Personally, I'm a skeptic that 1. CBD+THC offers any additional medical† benefits over CBD used alone; 2. that it makes any medical sense to prescribe a (non-dose-controllable) plant over a pill, or at the very least an extract with tested dosage. I'm not skeptical of the medical benefits of (some of) the compounds _in_ marijuana; I'm just a skeptic of prescribing _marijuana itself_ as a way of delivering those compounds. It's like prescribing willow bark for a headache when aspirin exists.

† For what it's being prescribed for, I mean—pain, nausea, anxiety, etc. THC, in its function as a psychedelic, _may_ function as a treatment for certain psychiatric disorders (i.e. for much the same purpose LSD/MDMA/etc. are being investigated for.) But nobody's prescribing medical marijuana for this use- case right now; they're prescribing it for things where the presence of THC seems pretty irrelevant to the goal.

<comment><USER18> Hydroponic cannabis is grown in highly controlled environments and the dosage levels are tested to be within an acceptable range. There are also dozens (hundreds) of other cannabinoids found in marijuana which (may) have additional medical benefits.

>It's like prescribing willow bark for a headache when aspirin exists.

Willow bark contains salicin, not aspirin, while marijuana contains both THC and CBD. Willow bark also doesn't have the same blood-thinning effects of aspirin, which makes both viable pain relief choices for different populations.

This really just sounds like "plants bad; pills good!"

<comment><USER17> My point was more, "measurement good; eating psychoactive things off the ground bad."

The "key advancement of chemistry"—the thing that makes chemistry _chemistry_ , rather than alchemy (and as it happens, the thing that differentiates baking from cooking) is being able to measure the reactants we put into a beaker, and clean the product of the reaction of any side-products, such that we can then crystallize/distill/etc. out the product alone, weigh it, and thereby determine the exact potency of product. Once we know that, we can then do all sorts of things: dilute it to a controlled strength; create delivery vehicles that deliver it at particular speeds; put it straight into the body in ways that would just kill you if you put into the body all the _other_ stuff that you isolated the product out of; etc.

Anyone can do this. People make THC tinctures and essential-oils all the time, in their kitchens. It doesn't matter to me whether you do it or someone else does it for you; but it seems irresponsible to me to tell someone to go eat the non-processed version for medical effect.

> Hydroponic cannabis is grown in highly controlled environments and the > dosage levels are tested to be within an acceptable range.

Sure, you can control everything about the production of the marijuana itself. But the key to medical treatment is the last mile, and _specifically_ the ability to relate a patient's response over time to a dosing schedule/pharmacodynamic profile for the drug. If you prescribe someone "medical marijuana", without fixing down _how_ they're going to take it, they could very well do anything from eating the whole batch at once, to vaping it every three minutes, to just doing hits off a bong whenever they feel pain. These _are not the same thing_ , and medically they should be _different prescriptions_ if the doctor has any hope of knowing whether the treatment is _working_.

Pills (or, really, anything more specific than "here's a plant, go to town") let a doctor say something more specific like "take one of these every two hours", and then from there know _exactly_ how much of the active ingredient should be in the patient's bloodstream at any given time of the day, and so be able to measure effects (and side-effects!) against those that are normal, or abnormal, for that level of dose being in the patient's body for that period of time.

<comment><USER19> Pills let a doctor _reasonably guess_ that that the prescription will have expected results. When you get to psychiatric medicine it is a well-funded and socially approved game of wheel of fortune, e.g., [https://www.verywellmind.com/antipsychotic-medications- black...](https://www.verywellmind.com/antipsychotic-medications-black-box- warning-379657)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is sub-anecdotal, I know - but I recently after many years of "don't mess with my head" took mirtazapine for mild-depression/over-awareness-of-the- actual-state-of-the-world-around-me.

I feel better. Only noticeable effects were that I fell asleep much faster and woke up (refreshed) remembering all manner of weird clear dreams. Previously was one of those people who for the last decade couldn't recall a single dream (and had trouble nodding off). My random guess is that dreaming/tripping just loosens the mind up.. maybe like a deep tissue massage for the mind.. allowing things to mentally move about a bit and drop back into place (or mentally gives your mind a chance to beat the previous day into manageable lumps)

<comment><AUTHOR> _" I fell asleep much faster and woke up (refreshed) remembering all manner of weird clear dreams. Previously was one of those people who for the last decade couldn't recall a single dream (and had trouble nodding off)."_

Just another anecdote, but I've found many techniques that have worked for me to greatly enhance my dream recall that don't require any drugs.

The first technique is just to get interested in dreams, read up about them, study techniques of dream recall, dream analysis, the science of sleep/dreams, etc.

The second is to have an intention to remember your dreams when you wake up, and consciously focus on that intention before you go to sleep.

Third, when going to sleep try to remember your day in reverse, from the moment you laid down in bed back through your day to when you got up that morning. The theory is that you're kind of priming your mind to think back to your dream when you wake.

Next, as soon as you wake up write even the smallest little thing that you remember about your dreams down on paper. Alternatively, you can record your dream in a voice recorder, which is what I do as I find it much faster and more convenient than writing.

Something else that I've noticed is that if I move my body when I wake, it can adversely affect dream recall, so I try to stay as still and as much as possible maintain the exact body position that I woke up in while I record the dream.

Also, when I have a really long dream to record, I found that I would often forget the end of dream while writing it down, as writing all the details down would take too long and by the time I got half-way through I'd forget. So I suggest writing down some key words and images first, and then go back and fill in the details afterwards. The words and images you've written down will help you remember.

Then, what's helped me is to go over my dreams and try to make sense of them, look for patterns in them, and try to see the connection between them and my waking life. I've found they have a lot of meaning and aren't just "random neuronal noise" that some people make them out to be.

Using these techniques and others, and just taking dreams seriously and being interested in them led me to go from remembering maybe one dream every three months to remembering three long dreams every night, and filled up hundreds of pages in my dream journal with records of dreams and dream analysis.

The downside is that doing this takes a lot of time, so I stopped after a while, and lost interest in dreams, and went back to very rarely remembering my dreams.

<comment><USER14> This sounds very identical to my process as well. I obsess about recalling as many of my dreams as I can when I wake up. I have a similar experience all the way down to trying to not move my body or so anything that can disrupt my dream recall, including avoiding actively thinking about my dream (similar to a meditative state).

The only difference is that I don't record anything after. I find that just thinking about it a few times after I wake up is enough for my satisfaction. Dreams are very powerful tools for thought that I think society could benefit more from.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is NOT a trial that was designed to assess the safety of psilocybin. This was a trial meant to show that a particular dosage of psilocybin is /safe enough/ to pursue further research in that dose range.

This was a /phase one/ clinical trial.

Phase One: administer small doses under very close supervision in a tiny number of people to determine whether it's immediately dangerous, or safe enough /for further study/. They used 89 - initial randomization of 30 each to placebo, 10mg, and 25mg. That's a good number for a phase one trial. But when we look at the sort of things that start hurting people when released to market, they're the sort of adverse effects that go undetected in trials with thousands of participants, and would need an infeasible large trial (>10k patients) to detect.

This trial does not prove safety. This trial is meant to establish a dosing range that is /safe enough/ to participants to allow for further study. They found no "serious" adverse effects, in healthy volunteers - that is, not depressed patients. Can drugs like this have different effects in people w and without depression? Yes they most certainly can, in particular if those people are on concurrent medications (which they will be, since this is being developed for treatment-resistant depression).

"We wanted to look at the safety and tolerability profile of our psilocybin, and to look at the feasibility of a model where up to six one-to-one sessions are held at the same time." No they didn't /want/ to - they /had/ to. This is article is just a press release.

Phase 2 is generally a range of doses, within the range established in phase one, wherein we attempt to determine, to a rough level of accuracy, which doses show toxicity, which show therapeutic benefit, and at roughly what proportions. This phase is meant to determine what dose will be used in a phase 3 trial, if any dose exists with an appropriate proportion of therapeutic benefit to side effect.

Phase 3 - a dose (or couple of doses) of a drug in a regimen meant to reflect real-world proposed usage is distributed and compared against either a currently used drug or a placebo. Depending on how big an effect is expected, how common the disease, etc. we'd look at trials of hundreds to thousands of patients. This is the trial where we get a real sense of safety, side effect profiles, efficacy, etc. This is the make-or-break line for getting your drug to market.

Phase 4 "trial" \- aftermarket surveillance. Goes on for years after a drug hits market, because there's no trial that comes to close to capturing the rare side effects that may be visible when applied to the general population.

This was, also, presented to a neuropsychopharm conference, not published data. Which is to say, they're ready to brag about it, but they're not ready to submit themselves to close scrutiny.

<comment><USER22> Are controlled experiments necessary for proving safety? Intuitively, there shouldn't be a placebo effect, and you could get twice as powerful a study by giving twice as many people the drug and using statistics for the general population as the control group.

<comment> semi-extrinsic Why shouldn't there be a placebo effect? It's well documented for basically any drug, even for alcohol. Serve people non-alcoholic drinks but tell them otherwise, and they get drunk.

<comment><USER22> Because the trial wasn't about finding the expected effect (drunkenness) but the secondary effects. People don't get heart disease or cirrhosis from non- alcoholic drinks, or at least, I'd be interested in reading the study where they do.

<comment> semi-extrinsic No, but they can get short-term secondary effects such as nausea, headaches the next day, etc. Probably this category of things is what they want to control for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Related: How To Change Your Mind is worth reading. It covers the history of psilocybin & LSD research including the early parts of this recent resurgence in interest.

</comment><comment><USER24> I was performing my own informal tests on various psychoactive agents in the late 60's and early 70's and can attest to the efficacy of psilocybin, as best as I can remember...

</comment><comment><USER25> Some charts and data:

[https://compasspathways.com/wp- content/uploads/2019/12/poste...](https://compasspathways.com/wp- content/uploads/2019/12/poster.pdf)

"Psilocybin administration to healthy participants: safety and feasibility in a placebo-controlled study"

"Poster presented at the 58th Annual Meeting of The American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, Orlando, FL, USA, 8–11 December 2019"

</comment><comment><USER26> Could become legalized? [https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomangell/2019/12/16/andrew- yan...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomangell/2019/12/16/andrew-yang-wants- to-make-psychedelic-mushrooms-more-freely-available/)

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm gonna sound really cliched but I have become really fascinated with Psychedelics thanks to the Joe Rogan podcast.

I wouldn't say I am depressed but as someone who doesn't drink, smoke, drugs or take caffeine. I really want to try them.

The fact that mushrooms have been used by shamans all around the world since neolithic times, is truly fascinating.

I hope to try them at some point although at the moment I have been trying Sensory Deprivation Tanks and it really has reset my mind and emotions.

<comment><USER28> I'd steer you toward kava kava as a legal and otc way to change your mind and emotions for the better or more open. Also St. John's wort.

<comment><USER27> After googling, it appears that kava causes liver damage, thanks but no thanks

<comment><USER29> Yes you probably would not want to take it for an extended period of time [1] There is not a direct causation link to liver damage as of yet. It may be that people have a preexisting issue that is exacerbated by kava.

[1] - [https://examine.com/supplements/kava/](https://examine.com/supplements/kava/)

<comment><USER28> There was something of a hit campaign against it at one point. I forget the specifics, but it's safe if you do your homework and buy from proven sources.

<comment><USER29> That's happened to several food compounds. Scientists don't spend time on a compound unless there is a compelling medical need to do the research. There just isn't much money in supplements / foods as compared to prescription drugs and the risk of litigation is really high, according to a few of my favorite scientists that I follow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Recently tried shrooms for the first time and was a bit underwhelmed, but not sure if I'm micro-dosing or what. Tried the regular variety and some other allegedly Thai shrooms, which definitely had a stronger effect. I tried a few stems at first, and then ramped up the dosage with slightly more 'visuals', but it's like I have to eat a whole handful or just let my body learn to process it or something.

<comment><USER31> From what I've heard (no real scientific data to back this) the stems contain very little psylocibin.

And the dosage for mushrooms is surprisingly high. For run of the mill strains, I believe 3.5 grams is considered a standard dose. Which is still not a blast you off the planet amount, but enough to experience visual distortions and euphoria.

<comment><USER32> On some strains 3.5 grams is a serious therapeutic dose requiring a sitter.

My last trip was about this much with another 1.5 set aside but I was blasted out of time and space and opted not to re-up.

It all depends on the strain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Majority of my mental energy in relation to drugs, some consideration:

\- having a mortgage and life insurance attached to it

\- parents prevented contact with their children due to government intervention

\- people in jail for possession of drugs

\- safe driving limits

\- undoing 50+ years of propaganda and social conditioning

</comment><comment><USER34> Awesome! Can't wait until 2030 when it is legal in a handful of states in the US.

<comment><USER35> Denver is actually full of those little chocolates wrapped in tin foil , easy to find easy to get and also cannot get arrested for as long as no $ exchanged per the new law that was voted by the people

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> One day we'll be able to buy Psilocybin supplements on the shelves of stores like CBD, 5-HTP, and St. Johns Wort today.

In small doses it's super useful and seems to be relatively benign.

</comment><comment><USER37> Always safe. Only it can't be patented is why you never got it!

</comment><comment><USER38> This could dramatically improve my family's life.

Been following and supporting the research at Johns Hopkins since Tim Ferris brought attention to it.

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm curious what the sample size is in this study?

<comment><USER40> 6th paragraph

> _... 89 healthy volunteers._

<comment><USER39> Sorry, I was tongue-in-cheekly referring to @coffeemug's study.

<comment><USER40> You're fine, I just wanted to be helpful :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> How the hell do I get into one of these trials?

<comment><USER42> I got in to one of those trials when someone posted the sign up link on HackerNews and I applied. If you're near Baltimore you could see if you are a match for any of their current studies: [https://hopkinspsychedelic.org/](https://hopkinspsychedelic.org/)

Other in process research studies: [https://maps.org/other-psychedelic- research/211-psilocybin-r...](https://maps.org/other-psychedelic- research/211-psilocybin-research/psilocybin-studies-in- progress/research/psilo/passiepsilocybin1.html%7D)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> The study seems to be this one:

[https://doi.org/10.3389/fphar.2017.00974](https://doi.org/10.3389/fphar.2017.00974)

Would it kill the PopSci article to include the DOI to the actual study?

<comment><USER44> OK, we've changed to that from [https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/magic-mushroom- dep...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/magic-mushroom-depression- psilocybin-trials-kcl-mental-health-addiction-a9251451.html). Thanks!

<comment><USER45> That's the wrong study.

<comment><USER44> Urgh. Thanks. We'll switch back to the original URL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Don't rush out and take mushrooms. If you're not taking it in a clinical setting, you're doing it wrong.

<comment><USER47> > If you're not taking it in a clinical setting, you're doing it wrong.

I'd be interested to see some support for this statement.</comment></comment>


Computer science and creativity - <AUTHOR> http://seejanecompute.blogspot.com/2006/06/computer-science-and-creativity.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I think there's some confusion as to what "creativity" might mean in computing. I suspect that for most people, creativity really just applies to the application idea.

Creativity at the implementation level is not so interesting because it does not manifest itself in obvious ways to the user.

Sure, creativity can result in faster more elegant code, but so what?

I would rather focus on creativity that results in new kinds of applications that users can immediately see as something novel and interesting.

Unless computer scientists understand that this kind of creativity is more rewarding for most people, I predict that CS enrollment will continue to decline.</comment>


A story about <input> - <AUTHOR> http://meowni.ca/posts/a-story-about-input/ <comment><USER2> She didn't even touch upon the crazy <input type="number"> which will allow the user to enter in non-number input such as a dollar signs and letters. However, when you try to access said input's value from the DOM it will give you back an empty string since what the user entered (and what is still displayed to the user) isn't a valid "number". Great!

In this case the input won't even fire a change event because before the user entered anything the value was "" and after the user entered the invalid input the value (according to the DOM) is still "". No change!

<comment><USER3> Number inputs are amazingly bad. In many languages, comma is considered the correct decimal separator [1], but if your users enter that they will break the input in about half of the browsers.

As far as I understand, there's no way to feature detect this stuff. Why not just use text input? Because on iOS, `type="number"` is the only way to get a keyboard with both digits and a decimal separator. So, browser sniffing it is...

[1] [http://www.statisticalconsultants.co.nz/blog/how-the- world-s...](http://www.statisticalconsultants.co.nz/blog/how-the-world- separates-its-decimals.html)

<comment><USER2> The mobile on-screen keyboards are the only reason I even attempted to use <input type="number">. I could've gotten away with using <input type="tel"> which doesn't have any type of validation associated with it, but the keyboard presented on iOS doesn't have a period key (or a comma for those other languages) which means you can only enter natural numbers. Android on the other hand does provide a way to enter periods form the "tel" on-screen keyboard.

What I don't understand is why this weird validation behavior only exists for <input type="number"> and not for other input types that have built-in validation rules such as <input type="email"> and <input type="url">. Imagine an <input type="email"> reporting that its value is an empty string if the user didn't enter a completely valid email address.

<comment><USER4> I actually had that exact problem, when writing an app with Ionic. It looks like a "feature" of Angular, as can be seen on their documentation [1].

[1] [https://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng/input/input%5Bemail%5D](https://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng/input/input%5Bemail%5D)

<comment><USER2> You can still get the actual value from DOM even if Angular is updating your model with an empty string.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am creating a test app that record and replay user's actions on web apps, so I have to deal with many low level html/js behaviors, boy was I surprised when I found out those quirkiness she talked about and many others during development.

For example, if you have a <form> with a text field (input[type=text]) and a submit button, if you hit 'Enter' in the text field, you get a submit event, nothing surprising. But did you know you also get an artificial click event on the submit button, before the submit event?

Now what if you don't have the submit button? Then hitting the 'Enter' key would still generate a submit event, but without any artificial click event now.

OK, what if you want to have two textfields now (and still no submit button)? Then hitting 'Enter' would...you guessed it, NOT generate any submit events. No submit event, no artificial click, not even moving the focus from one text field to the other.

But what if you have a non text base input (color, date, range, etc) and hit 'Enter' on it? Yes, you get a submit event, but ONLY if you have a submit button. Otherwise no, even if you have just a single non-text based input.

And all these are just for Chrome. Other browsers behave somewhat differently.

<comment><USER6> I've had the best luck just globally swallowing the submit event and pretending like it doesn't exist, and deciding for myself when to submit based on clicks or keystrokes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The <input type="image"> isn't just an image, it actually inputs data too. It tells the server the coordinates on the image where your click occurred.

Everybody seems to think they are just for decorating submit buttons, but that's not true - their primary purpose is telling those coordinates of the click!

<comment><USER8> I was really surprised by this so I had to check by myself. This is true! And I never learned that all the time I roamed the Internet.

Thanks for spreading arcane knowledge!

<comment><USER9> You obviously never had the misfortune to deal with image maps - the Ramsey Bolton Bastard brother of Flash. :-)

<comment><USER10> They were very popular before that. I recall finding great use for them around 97. Easiest way to have complicated graphical navigation.

<comment><USER9> All was find until you had to define clickable areas as polygons. Urrrrgh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yeah, the haphazard/inconsistent nature of HTML/CSS/Javascript is the flip side of the "open standard" coin. I always tell students "a perfectly architected system would mean it's controlled by one company, and you'd need their permission and/or have to pay money to build those apps/sites" (then I talk about the negatives of the app store review process to demonstrate the point).

Which of course doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying to improve them... just something I remind myself whenever I start to get angry about all the annoying things that need to be thought about when writing HTML/CSS/JS.

<comment><USER12> Architected system designed by one company isn't a silver bullet. Win32 or COM APIs? Even modern iOS has stuff like Core Data which is an incredible pain to work with. Don't think anybody needs to even get started on some of the APIs lurking in Android...

There's good and bad APIs from both open standards and closed ones.

<comment><USER13> jordanlev said "a perfectly architected system would mean it's controlled by one company"

not "every system controlled by one company is perfectly architected"

to counter, you'd need to find an example of a perfectly architected system developed as an open standard by multiple companies

<comment><USER12> I was going to do a quick search for "open standard" systems to try and pull out the gems that really are good to help prove the point - but I realized I wasn't entirely sure on which systems fit as 'open standard' and which don't. It's more of a spectrum of openness.

Anyway, the best example of an open system that is better than other system designs controlled by single companies is extremely obvious: UNIX.

I'd say it's closer to perfect than all the other OSes that are heavily controlled by single organizations. Or does UNIX not fit as an open standard from it's origins? If so, Javascript, css, etc come from similar origins (Netscape?).

<comment><USER14> I would disagree about the UNIX standard being a) comunity developed, as the UNIX the specification describes was mostly developed by AT&T/Bell Labs and b) being an open specification, as it is owned by Novell, who only allows usage of the UNIX trademark after verification and a large sum of money.

That said most moden _NIXes are community developed and although they are arguably superior to non-_ NIX systems, they are (again, arguably) about as much of a mess as HTML.

<comment><USER15> While what you have said is true about the origins of UNIX, the current reality has changed. The current UNIX standard is developed in an open fashion - anyone can contribute ([https://www.opengroup.org/austin/](https://www.opengroup.org/austin/)).

Novell no longer owns the UNIX trademark - it now belongs to the not-for- profit industry consortium The Open Group. You don't need to pay any license fees to read or implement the standard, only to access the official test suite and use the trademark. Those fees go to The Open Group to pay for the maintenance of the standard and test suite; to the best of my knowledge, none of that money goes to Novell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> That was really well written; I hope she writes more stuff, it looks like the blog is updated really sporadically.

Bonus easter egg: place your mouse over the author's photo.

<comment><USER17> Check the source for an image too.

<comment><USER18> And an emoji used as an element id.

<comment><USER19> Source: [https://github.com/notwaldorf/emoji- selector](https://github.com/notwaldorf/emoji-selector)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Fun read, but to say web components would solve any of this is just wrong. You've got to remember that there are two sides to the coin: presentation and functionality. The presentation problem can be solved by web components (more accurately: the encapsulation of presentation,) but the functionality bit should be solved with proper JS APIs. That there were no proper JS APIs available 21 years ago is understandable – after all the language barely existed. But that we don't have proper input APIs today is just silly.

<comment><USER21> To be fair, that's only true of one type of input; the file picker; possibly the color picker too...

The rest of the input types are just text values and some presentation. There's no _technical_ reason for them to all be as absolutely terrible as they are; it's just legacy bloat.

That said, I agree, 'in general' web components probably aren't going to be 'the thing' any time soon; the polyfills are too rubbish, and the native browser support basically doesn't exist yet.

...but the issue is mostly module imports and the shadow dom being ridiculously slow and terrible with nested components.

Input types are inherently simple; there is no reason to have another component inside your input; simple web-components for the most common input types (text, textarea, date, number) seems like a very reasonable and plausible goal.

You've got to admit, if there was a simple way to get consistent cross browser responsive input tags, it'd be awesome.

<comment><USER22> > Input types are inherently simple

Maybe if all you need to support is English.

I have so much trouble typing Japanese even in many _native_ apps (cross platform libraries are usually the culprit), I can't imagine Web developers ever getting it right... For instance it's quite broken off and on in Google Docs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Really fun read! Oh man, file, that could take up another post entirely couldn't it?

I wonder about textarea though, I always related the closing tag requirement to XML where you could not put CDATA into attributes. So was it shortsighted to have <input> use value instead?

This is where I run away screaming like my hair is on fire, specifications are a beast.

<comment><USER24> <input value="In an <input> tag's "value" attribute,&#0a;you can put any text" />

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Hey HN staff, there's a bug here: body shows fine, but the title renders as "A story about <input>"

<comment><USER26> I'm seeing this as well. The served html says

<title>A story about &lt;input&gt; | Hacker News</title>

It looks like it got double encoded.

<comment><USER27> Funny, my HTML based HN app on iOS actually rendered[0] an input field in the title. Disappeared after a second. No one submit titles with <script>alert()</script> please!

It looks like the title in the API is encoded correctly[1].

[0] [http://i.imgur.com/CDnwDZJ.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/CDnwDZJ.jpg)

[1] [https://hacker- news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/10433793.json?pri...](https://hacker- news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/10433793.json?print=pretty)

<comment><USER28> The API is returning "title" : "A story about <input>" for me. I don't consider that correct encoding, as "<" is not a special escape sequence in JSON, and expecting API consumers to either blindly trust you did their escaping for them, or HTML-decode JSON strings to use in another context, is silly. It is probably another symptom of something HTML-escaping the title when it shouldn't be.

<comment><USER27> Yes, you're right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I can't agree more with the points raised in the post.

But input type file... now that's really screwed up at the moment. Ever wanted to style that thing? Good luck, there's pretty much no cross browser CSS support for styling just about any of it. Oh, you can do some stuff in Webkit or Blink, but good luck trying to do the same for Gecko or Trident/Edge powered browsers.

Ah well. The input element is at least easier to style than the select one. That one's so annoying to customise that just about every major site replaces it with a Javascript version.

<comment> nommm-nommm <input type='file'> is unbelievable for its inability to be styled. IE is even more bizarre in that it displays the full path of the file chosen in a text field with a blinking cursor like you can type when active but ignores keyboard entry - except the backspace or delete keys that removes the file if there is one selected. IE11 changed file selection from double-click on mystery text field to single click on mystery text field. Browse always worked however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Opening the HN app on iOS actually loads an input field in the title of this article for a split second. Anyone else notice that?

<comment><USER27> Yeah, see my comment above. Got a screenshot of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> And people wonder why there's a 300+ line angular directive maintaining our Credit Card input box...

</comment><comment><USER32> I originally thought it is a really story about `input` like the one with `printf` - [http://ferd.ca/the-little-printf.html](http://ferd.ca/the-little- printf.html)

<comment><USER33> Yeah, me too! Although after reading the article, 'input' is clearly unworthy of being glorified in an Antoine de Saint-Exupéry redux.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Oh, it seems Firefox still has this bug that "<" and ">" and rendered as-is in the window title bar and tab title and not as '<' and '>'.

<comment><USER25> It's not a bug in Firefox, it's a bug in HN, it's double-escaping the <title>.

<comment><USER34> Oh right. I remembered having problem with this a few years ago, so I didn't bother to check and just assumed it was the same problem. Thanks for correcting me!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> > Now imagine the future where Web Components are supported natively, and > someone else is allowed to write a <better-input>, an element that is a > real, encapsulated DOM element, and not just a div soup.

For now, you can just use Polymer any other components-backed library like React. I think it's good enough, although native support of Shadow DOM is very exciting.

<comment><USER36> Shadow DOM is there in Chrome and might soon be added to WebKit. I personally don't think they will last.

<comment><USER37> Edge and Firefox are getting native shadow dom too!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The HN iOS app actually displays an input field for a brief second in the title of this article. Anyone else notice that?

<comment><USER38> Same on Android, and the same weird second delay. Huh.

Screenshot: [http://i.imgur.com/FKPvJsq.png](http://i.imgur.com/FKPvJsq.png)

Feels pretty sketchy; I wonder what other kinds of things could be snuck in there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> What's painfully missing is a way to properly style the textbox of a file upload separately from its button.

At the moment it's only possible in Chrome, with the added downside that you cannot combine the pseudoselector with any other rules because Firefox and IE will drop the ENTIRE rule as they cannot parse the pseudoselector.

</comment><comment><USER40>
      Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, JavaScript

I guess I'm nitpicking here but she meant the DOM or Web API and not JavaScript because it's not the fault of the underlying language that they made a mess of their API this way.

</comment><comment><USER41> Ad `textInput.checked = true;`, this quite a misconception. You can totally set `anyDOMnode.whateverProperty = 'batman'` and retrieve it back. It's just few special DOM object properties that are mapped to HTML attributes on certain types of elements that actually do something meaningful, like the @checked property of HTMLinputElement objects that happen to have @type="checkbox".

<comment><USER6> But "checked" on a text input isn't undefined; it exists and is false. It's not the same as just being able to hang arbitrary crap on any DOM node; it exists in the API, and some other nonsensical input properties don't and are undefined, and still others throw errors when you try to access them. It's bonkers API inconsistency that can reasonably be called out.

<comment><USER41> I'm not defending the API, and I admit I was commenting without proper understanding here, so yes, you are right that that property is really defined as false. But I'd like to correct your statement about 'some defined some undefined' properties. Fact is that all [HTMLInputElement] interface instances no mater what [type] they are shares exactly the same set of properties. And because that "type" is also just one of the them you can for example convert password input into text input and text input into checkbox just by setting it's @type value:

        data:text/html,<input id=i type=text checked><script>document.write(i.multiple);i.type='checkbox'</script>

Yes, it is weird and in retrospect it seems silly that there are not extra interface for each type of input (there is no HTMLRadioButton interface for <radio> tag DOM elements inheriting from some abstract HTMLFormElement interface). Perhaps some witness of standardizing process have good argument for that. (My guess it something like "Oooh, so many Elements, that means so many tags, no, let's keep that simple, ok? They are mostly similar anyway.")

[HTMLInputElement]: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/HTMLInputEl...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/HTMLInputElement) [type]: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/in...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/input#attr-type)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> eric-hu That was a fun read, and now the million dollar follow up question: What can be done to improve the situation?

Is there even a single place that catalogs or demonstrates such inconsistencies? Could anyone demonstrate the ways in which HTML elements are inconsistent across desktop and mobile browsers in a compelling enough way to draw the attention of all the browser teams out there?

</comment><comment><USER42> This is really well written, and an interesting read for all us markup nerds, but I don't understand why the author persists with criticising browsers for extremely minimal differences in language used to communicate that a file hasn't been selected. If the meaning is there, why on earth should each browser be utterly stripped of personality?

<comment><USER43> And this is assuming the world only speaks one language, English. Should the other-language strings also match across browsers? Should it be embedded in the specification?!

It's nonsense, really. HTML is user-agent-agnostic. User agents have free reign in how they implement controls to suit their platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Input might suck but I'm not looking forward to webcomponent based solutions that break in every non European language in strange ways. Is your webcomponent going to handle right to left input?

Heck, even non webcomponent solutions don't work with non-English languages. AirBnB's message UI breaks with Japanese innput

</comment><comment><USER45> I'll never forget the first time I saw "Submit Query" as the value for a submit button I had created. I spent hours scratching my head and double- checking that I had indeed not written "Submit Query" anywhere in my HTML and was absolutely flabbergasted.

</comment><comment><USER46> I always considered the quiet years up until 2005ish. After that we had XForms and the WhatWG hijincks to keep the web nerds entertained.

<comment><USER27> Well? Are you not entertained?

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Input tags are a pain, but the prospect of every designer getting to make up their own UI controls gives me Flash-backs. ;)

</comment><comment><USER48> The mouseover link colors on this site...

</comment><comment><USER49> Damn, that's some great writing. :)

</comment><comment><USER50> This makes me want to dive in deeper

</comment><comment><USER51> Now shall we talk about date pickers? With timezones? And input/output formats?

Nah, let's not :P

</comment><comment><USER52> Did anyone else see the title and think this would be about Perl?

</comment><comment><USER53> If you stupid its always hard to deal with any API.

</comment><comment><USER54> Great article.

Though links on that site can produce headache..

</comment><comment><USER55> her page is all bubbly and cute

<comment><USER56> It's also a good read.

<comment><USER57> And really nicely designed/styled

<comment><USER56> I would like to see a helluva lot more like this. I often don't read coding articles. I read this one. I enjoyed it. I learned something.

<comment><USER58> It is a very nice, clean design. The rainbow blink effect gives me a little bit of a headache, but other than that it's a pleasure to read.

Also, ASCII squirrels are always a pleasant bonus.

As always when I learn about the guts of the web, I'm amazed anything ever works. It's like the Rube Goldberg breakfast machine...

<comment><USER59> > As always when I learn about the guts of the web, I'm amazed anything ever > works.

So true. Whenever my wife is complaining about something on her computer not working (or being too slow), I try to remind her of the amazingness that a computer works AT ALL, and quite reliably at that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Welcome to web development!

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm of the opinion that this is how open standards evolve and have immense respect for people who got us to where we are today. Rants like this not so much.

<comment><USER61> because of "rants like this" open standards evolve and these issues gets fixed, otherwise if nobody ranted - nothing would have been fixed

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Apparently HTML is annoying, different implementations aren't always compatible and Javascript sucks.

So the web is the same as it was 15 years ago. Still glad i'm not a web dev.

<comment><USER63> I would say that Javascript as a language doesn't suck, but many of these old browser API's do.

<comment><USER10> Crazy scoping rules? Crazy conversion rules? 8 character lambda keyword? Crappy numeric type? It's safe to say it sucks. It's understandable, given the 10 day timeframe it was created in plus the constraint of needing to be "like" Java for cachet. It's less understandable how so many have doubled down on it.

And even new APIs suck. Look at the silliness npm encourages people to do.

<comment><USER64> At least the scoping and verbose lambda problem have been solved in ES6, with the introduction of let-vars and fat arrow functions, respectively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> > The <input> API isn't quirky — it's literally just a jar of spiders, and the > moment you open the jar, it's too late. You're covered in spiders.

<comment><USER66> Re-posting a snippet of the blog isn't useful or valuable on its own. I am quite able to read a blog post without you copy-pasting it into the comments.

<comment><USER65> Fair enough. It's still a good line :)</comment></comment></comment>


".sucks" registrations begin soon–at up to $2,500 per domain - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/sucks-tld-to-accept-sunrise-registrations-soon-but-theyll-be-pricey/

<comment><USER2> This is great. Companies with a lot of cash who are concerned about their brand image such as Comcast and Scientology will be snapping these up.</comment>


The only alternative is to work harder - <AUTHOR> http://paraschopra.com/blog/personal/the-only-alternative-is-to-work-harder.htm

<comment><USER2> No offence, but this is something that I see every day from my Indian colleagues at work -- instead of stopping for a moment and finding a right way to go, they just keep pushing harder in some unoptimal direction. Yes, this might fill you with a sense of righteousness, but no way the carpenter (see comments to the blog post) who works 10 hours a day is better off than the one who does only 5 hours of _right_ work.

<comment><USER3> The dynamics at work in a typical IT shop are different.

Indian IT industry does not depend on "programming geniuses". getting their shit done by the day it was promised is more important for them, because the client will not pay for "indian outsourced guy" for having a moment of programming epiphany.

Of course, this is not just to blame the customer.. Most Indian IT Managers still believe in Taylor's "scientific" management methods.. So, whoever is "seen" working 10 hours to solve a problem will earn a brownie point.

note: Edited for clarity

<comment><USER2> Actually, that was my conclusion also.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are at least three alternatives to working harder: automate the work, outsource it, and elect not to do it at all. These are often better choices, since not all work adds equal amount of value (and much work subtracts value).

I'm working on a blog post about this subject, as "longer hours is a proxy for productivity" is the most pathological thing I have seen in my career as a Japanese salaryman.

<comment><USER5> These are not alternatives to working harder. These are strategies to make your efforts more efficient. If you outsource some work, there is other work you can be doing. Presumably your competition will be automating, outsourcing, and avoiding unnecessary work as well.

People can reach many types of goals with ease. This guy is talking about goals which require beating competition to achieve. If your goal is to compete in low latency market trading, and you aren't already extremely wealthy, you aren't going to be able to be competitive and live a life of leisure at the same time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm reminded of the advice of Thomas Jefferson to his daughter: "It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing," from this HN post:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=675308>

<comment><USER7> _It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing_

... and have a team of slaves or servants doing everything else.

I'm not picking on Jefferson. It's worth remembering that most such famously productive historical figures were of a class that never had to cook anything, clean anything, plant anything, etc., and didn't even raise their own children. That's got to free up some time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Somehow I don't really buy it. Seems to me it is more a management problem. Looking at sports, I suspect simply running 10 hours more every week than the competition won't automatically make you the winner. Rather, there is a system to getting the best effect from training (when to take breaks, what muscles to train when, what to eat, ...).

If you are stressing out with working harder and harder, perhaps you lose the time for having inspirations and seeing the important things to work on.

<comment><USER5> Working harder does not mean being stupid. I don't understand why people keep pretending working harder is somehow how inversely related to the quality of your decisions. Your IQ stays the same, you just work harder.

Let's take your example. Working harder doesn't mean naively running 10 hours more a week. It means doing research on training systems, consulting with coaches, monitoring your diets, revising workout plans, etc. Having been involved with sports all my life, I can tell you that this stuff matters, you can always do more of it, and it's work.

<comment><USER8> Sure, I am not against working harder, just against the simplistic "work harder". Also I still think it is a management problem and breaks are important.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> To sum up what this article says along with the insightful amendments in these comments: Perhaps it is best to work smarter _and_ harder.

<comment><USER5> He was talking about factors under your control. So I guess you have to decide whether you think you can get significantly smarter, which I don't. You can learn more, but that takes time and should be considered part of working, of course. Even if you can get smarter, that would also presumably take work and the more of it you did the smarter you'd get. What we know for sure is that you can't just wake up today and say, hey, I'm going to make decisions that are twice as good as yesterday.

And if working smarter means things like automating tasks, that also doesn't quite make sense. Of course you should automate tasks. Working harder doesn't mean being stupid. It means you should spend more of your brain time working toward your goals. If you free up time by automating some stuff, that gives you more time to be working on (including automating) something else.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I was borrowing from the old expression "work smarter, not harder".

Smarter in this context means bringing our intelligence to bear on the issue of workflow and _how_ we go about doing our work. I wasn't meaning to imply that it means we need to literally become smarter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "What do you do if you feel you are born unlucky? What do you do if you feel that the whole world is conspiring against you to make you not succeed? And, what do you do if you feel you have less intellect, less resources and less everything to succeed?"

Just a word of warning: There are many people who will default to _feeling_ this way, whether it's true or not. Don't rule out mental illness or anxiety.

Turning yourself into a workaholic is not the solution if what you really need is to talk to a therapist. I've known several people who learned this the hard way.

Before diving head-first into work, do a quick reality check and ask yourself whether your feelings are reasonable, and be honest with yourself about what you're giving up in order to get those extra few hours of productivity.

<comment><USER11> So many people have undiscovered personality disorders or neuroses that they think are just "how life is." I wish that there was a "mental health check-up" that everyone, whether thinking themselves healthy or not, was encouraged to attend at long-but-regular intervals, similar to a dental- or eye-exam.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> In the spirit of providing equal and opposite cheap advice:

Except for the alternative of taking a break and thinking about your life, and perhaps choosing to focus on something where your hard work is more likely to pay off or where working harder comes more natural because you love what you're doing.

<comment><USER13> I agree -- my point is that _everything else being equal_ working harder pays off. Once you have determined what to do and if it is what you like to do, putting in more hours will do harm to no one but probably increase your chances of success.

<comment><USER14> Honestly, I don't know where to begin, but suffice it to say, everything else is NEVER equal in the real world.

1\. You're assuming "success" is zero-sum-game. 2\. There's no opportunity cost for working towards a different goal. 3\. There is some sort of equitable measure of "success" across all participants in "the game". 4\. The effort/reward curve is averages positive for your given set of stratagems. 5\. You are the ONLY vested participant in the game (e.g. no ancillary costs for increased efforts to other parties (e.g. family, friends, partners, investors etc.).

<comment><USER5> It's only hard to know where to begin because you're seriously expanding the topic. Let's take point 5:

"You are the ONLY vested participant in the game [...]"

The point of the post was that working harder is one of the few resources under your control for working toward a goal for which there is competition. Whether there are other vested participants is irrelevant to that point. Whether there are costs to your family is a quality-of-life choice and a moral choice, but doesn't say a single thing about whether working harder makes you more likely to achieve your goal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would amend this to "Work Harder on the Right Thing".

What's the right thing? That's something you'll just have to figure out for yourself. Sometimes finding the right thing is harder work than actually working on it.

<comment><USER5> Obviously, working on the right thing is the best choice. The problem is that knowing the right thing is probably a function of mental abilities of one sort or another, and you may be deficient in that area with respect to your competition, which is the point of the post. You can't control whether you're good at knowing what the right things to work on are (although you can get better at it, maybe).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is not right. Work in a manner that the work you are doing can be spun off and will continue to work on its own, leaving you free to do something new that will build on top of that.</comment>


That'll Never Work - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jgc.org/2012/11/thatll-never-work.html?

<comment><USER2> John's a good speaker and has done a few "crazy" things.

However I thought this talk was going to be about the wingnut ideas that really will never work because they defy human nature / currently known laws of physics / principles of good software design / basic logic / etc.

<comment><USER3> What's "human nature"? Human nature, if anything, is adaptability. What feels "natural" to us is largely determined by our socialisation and our environment (i.e., things which we can change).

<comment><USER4> If you change it so that what feels "natural" to you is not what feels "natural" to everyone else, then you are in for a world of hurt when you find that all the resources you were relying on are no longer presented in a way that you're compatible enough to access.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That was a great talk, and well worth listening to. I think it also highlights why we find your blog posts interesting -- because you are an engaging speaker with that mysterious "charm" quality.

I feel that the HN post title is missing much needed air-quotes around "That'll Never Work" since the talk is all about ignoring the internal voice that tells you to give up.

While I've only done much less impossible things, I have found that the act beating the impossible helps give confidence for future tasks. You realize that things aren't as impossible as they seem at first glance.

</comment><comment><USER6> Hi John, is there any way you can provide subtitles (in english) on this talk? or a transcript? English is not my native language so it's kinda hard to understand everything you say

<comment><AUTHOR> If I had time I'd listen to what I said and write it down for you.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure if this was a snarky reply or not, but you can get pretty cheap english translators on oDesk. Average price is $1/minute of translated material. The accuracy is usually superb, especially considering the price.

<comment><AUTHOR> What would make you think that was a snarky reply on my part?

<comment><USER8> Strange. I think it's bleed over connotation from when you ask someone to do something and say something like "have you got that or shall I write it down for you?"

Something about the "write it down _for you_ " is often used in a condescending way.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I think this was it. Sorry jgrahamc, I wasn't trying to be insulting. It was just the phrasing with threw me off.

Something about the mix of _"I'd listen to what I said"_ and _"I'd write it down for you"_ just seemed like an unpleasant way to say _"sorry I don't have time to transcribe it"_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Never heard you speak before, jgrahamc. Enjoyed the video immensely.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

I'm more than happy to speak at people's events on the following conditions:

1\. I have something to say. I never give the same talk twice so I usually need quite a lot of warning so that I have time to come up with something original.

2\. It's convenient for me to get there.

3\. The talk is videoed and made public. Since I'm not being paid my pay is publicity.

<comment><USER10> Thank you very much for making it public.

Is publicity the only reason? I thought it was because you take pity on those born with the unfortunate curse of being constantly curious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What was the previous talk? You've piqued my interest now!

<comment><AUTHOR> Linda Sandvik's talk about "Making Things Better" was a really touching talk. It started slowly and I thought it wasn't going to be good but it just got better and better over time: <http://vimeo.com/53074443>

<comment><USER12> Mandatory plug for the HNLondon Vimeo page: <http://vimeo.com/hnlondon>

A collection of all our previous speakers including jgc (obviously) Eben Upton, Rand Fishkin, Joel Spolsky and many more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The first thing I thought of when reading the title of this post is Adaptive Optics (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_optics>). When I was told the idea of using a mirror which could reposition itself thousands of times a second to correct for atmospheric disturbances I had an initial gut reaction of "this will never work". There just seemed like there was too much which could go wrong or would have to be compensated for. Of course I was completely wrong - the technology works brilliantly and along side telescopes is now being used in microscopes, medicine and weapons!

</comment><comment><USER14> Excellent talk and well worth the time to watch. Thanks for making it publicly available.

</comment><comment><USER15> whens the next hacker news meetup in london?

<comment><USER16> 22nd Nov <http://www.meetup.com/hnlondon/></comment></comment>


The case of the 500 mile email - <AUTHOR> https://ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail <comment><USER2> Not my article. I am just posting it here.</comment>