My TEDx Talk about Entrepreneurial Depression / Happiness - <AUTHOR> https://elasticsales.com/blog/2012/08/03/entrepreneurial-depression-happiness/ <comment><USER2> I think this is a very under talked-about topic in Silicon Valley. I'm on my third startup after two successful exits and still deal with the "roller coaster" of emotions related to work in this field. I don't think it ever really subsides, at least not for certain people.

Like others mentioned I found meditation very useful. Also, I watch Stephen Hawking's documentary called something like "A Brief History of Everything" and this provides me relief as I'm reminded that eventually the sun will cool, the earth will implode, and all living beings who ever existed will return to the atomic ether.

<comment><USER3> so my ex-girlfriend and her new relationship will eventually die out too? That's a relief...

<comment><USER4> They might, but their undying love will never subside.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nicely done SteliE. I particularly enjoyed the part towards the end where you discovered meditation was a useful tool. I discovered the same thing a couple years ago; recently, I haven't been meditating enough. The value of it being able to clear all the things from your mind and to try hard to just exist without everything else is extremely calming and, in my opinion, necessary.

I really need to start doing it again and you've inspired me to start.

Being happy is the only thing that really matters at the end of the day.

Thanks for sharing.

<comment><USER6> While I would agree that meditation helps to introspect and obtain perspective, I don't think that _aiming_ for happiness (of itself) is meaningful at all.

Yikes, I meant ... you cannot pursue happiness for happiness' sake. It's a byproduct of living. Happiness is an oblique outcome of being - of existing.

I like what Robert Oppenheimer wrote to his brother Frank in one of his letters:

"Everyone wants rather to be pleasing to women and that desire is not altogether, though it is very largely, a manifestation of vanity. But one cannot aim to be pleasing to women any more than one can aim to have taste, or beauty of expression, or happiness; for these things are not specific aims which one may learn to attain; they are descriptions of the adequacy of one's living. To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly." ~ Robert Oppenheimer

<comment><AUTHOR> I have experienced happiness much more as a personal choice than a byproduct of living.

Your living creates certain external circumstances that can lead to happiness or depression. Often it really doesn't matter what the external result is produced by your "living" but how you internally decide to respond to it.

To share one of my favorite quotes on the topic :)

"If you can't be happy with a lollipop - how could you possibly be happy with a yacht?" Richard Bandler

<comment><USER7> Wonderful point. I've become convinced over time that how my life is going (at least, above a certain threshold and beyond short-term effects of recent unusual events) has relatively little effect upon how I'm feeling. It's more about how I choose to see things.

As a result, I've found my way to a great deal of happiness without any truly extraordinary achievements. Nowadays, my friends tell me I'm 'easily amused', which I take as a great compliment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good talk. Your method of writing down what the worst case scenario falls in line with what is known as cognitive-behavioral therapy, which is the recommended method of working through mild-to-moderate depressive episodes.

In fact, as a physician observing the HN community, I have acquired a folder of bookmarks, "Depression in Entrepreneurs", mainly centered around Andrews and Thomson's analytic-rheumination hypothesis, which highlights exactly that component of CBT as the cornerstone of successful coping: identify the problems, the worst possible outcomes, prioritize, and start working through them.

My brief summary of the AR hypothesis

</comment><comment>=

Your hippocampus, home of working memory, gets overwhelmed with all the problems. Something like this:

====

It's still crashing!? Wait, I have that widget sitting in /usr/bin still. I'm so hungry. Maybe I should take ritalin, I wouldn't be hungry. My girlfriend is totally pissed because I haven't taken her out in forever. I have to make payroll, but I can't quite do that unless I skip some meals, I can't tell Mr Investor that I can't go to lunch, because I need money. I can't talk to my girlfriend about Investor's lunch because it will just remind her .... shit, was that in /usr/bin or /sbin. Payroll. Lunch. LUNCH! I'M LATE FOR LUNCH WITH MR INVESTOR! AND THE SITE IS DOWN!!!! GREP! WHY DID I CHOOSE BSD!

====

So, CBT is a hack, which shunts some of that linguistic processing over to the only other area that does linguistic processing: Broca's area. But you need to verbalize to activate Broca's area. So you need to talk to someone. But not someone who's got a dog in the fight, not your girlfriend, not Mr Investor, not employee #1, not your business partner. Because then you'd just be doubling the load on your hippocampus again. So, talk to a counselor, priest, somebody who doesn't have a dog in the fight. Explicitly enumerate your problems, worst case scenarios, and some branches and sequels.

</comment><comment>=

Here's the current contents of that folder, if anyone wants them...

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2734449/pdf/nihm...](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2734449/pdf/nihms129978.pdf)

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/opinion/sunday/how- depress...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/opinion/sunday/how-depressed- people-use-the-internet.html?_r=1&hp)

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=depressions...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=depressions- evolutionary)

[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/magazine/28depression-t.ht...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/magazine/28depression-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print)

[http://muddylemon.com/2011/05/depression-burn-out-and- writin...](http://muddylemon.com/2011/05/depression-burn-out-and-writing- code/)

<http://blog.asmartbear.com/burn-out.html>

and newly added: [https://elasticsales.com/blog/2012/08/03/entrepreneurial- dep...](https://elasticsales.com/blog/2012/08/03/entrepreneurial-depression- happiness/)

<comment><USER9> _"Andrews and Thomson's analytic-rheumination hypothesis... the cornerstone of successful coping: identify the problems, the worst possible outcomes, prioritize, and start working through them ... Explicitly enumerate your problems, worst case scenarios, and some branches and sequels..."_

This is the exact discovery/scenario process drilled into the planning phase of hikes over long distances and/or difficult terrain.

<comment><USER10> Risk analyst at PwC. This also sounds very similar to my role.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One of the greatest speaches I've heard recently. The work/life balance problems are so common among us entrepreneurs. For me the solution was to start jogging regularly - it's almost like meditation and you can just run and not think about your next problem to be solved.

I also like your comment about being happy. Perhaps it may sound a bit hedonistic, but it really is the most important thing in live! Well done.

</comment><comment><USER12> Three points that stood out for me were: 1) meditate 2) work on one thing that matters the most for today 3) know that you have good options even if your startup fails

In essence through meditation entrepreneurs can bring forth deep resources from the subconscious, through one pointed attention they can complete tasks that matter and by putting others first, deliver right value at the right price.

I am an entrepreneur too and the way I keep my balance is follow the eight point passage meditation program (<http://www.easwaran.org/the-eight-point- program.html>).

</comment><comment><USER13> Very very nice. Great job SteliE.

I used to meditate every day, and have fallen off the wagon lately. This reminded me to get back in the practice. That alone was worth it.

I am no entrepreneur (yet) but I think your advice applies well to life in general - it's just a ride - many things that we fret over today won't matter 5 years from now - this, along with "what's the worst that could happen?" can help put many things in perspective.

Congrats on getting married, and your first-born :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks sir! :) Appreciate the kind words & wishes!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Really great talk. Thanks! You hear a lot of people talking about how to succeed more, faster, etc. but very few people seem to mention all the little side effects of being a die hard entrepreneur, or how to deal with them.

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't think you ever truly get over a burnout like that, especially not if it has any long lasting effects.

Too much was familiar to me a couple of years ago. Glad it is not so anymore.

<comment><USER16> Jacques Mattheij's blog posts on burnout are very helpful. I recommend reading them and re-reading them:

<http://jacquesmattheij.com/Are+you+suffering+from+burn-out>

<http://jacquesmattheij.com/dealing+with+burn+out>

There are various useful discussions in the HN archives, including this one:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2300244>

mrcharles's comment rings in my head to this day: "The first thing I've learned is that I can't accurately judge my limits."

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is a great and inspiring talk. Thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate the kind words :) Happy you liked it!

<comment><USER18> I agree, great talk.

Sorry but I can't help be curious about this, what were the results of the drinking game?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! :)

Unfortunately I can't publicly tell that part of the story yet. But ping me at email@example.com if you really wanna know ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Steli means it when he roots for the entrepreneur - first hand experience here. Thanks Steli! :)

</comment><comment><USER20> I feel you man...great talk!</comment>


How I Spent A Million Bucks And Ended Up With These Two Chairs. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mixergy.com/how-i-spent-a-million-bucks-and-ended-up-with-these-two-chairs/

<comment><USER2> Keep your costs down, sure ... sort of a basic lesson

Cal me crazy, but I'm really skeptical about this author in general ... why is it so hard to find info about his previous $30MM revenue business? What exactly did Bradford & Reed do–and how much was it acquired for? I see mentions of greeting cards and games ... but no mentions of any actual profit or acquisition details.

I'm starting to feel like the startup world is becoming inundated with people who _just want to sell stuff to startup founders_ (be it books, info, their name or whatever). Frankly, its getting old.

Yes, startup founders need solid advice and lessons from those who have done it before. But, for God's sake, use some discretion when it comes to the source of your advice.

<comment><USER3> _the startup world is becoming inundated with people who just want to sell stuff to startup founders_

He's part of the parallel universe in silicon valley (physically, and in spirit) of people who hold seminars, arrange mixers, make blogs, write twitter posts, and generally act as a big sideshow and social group for 2nd rate startups and their entourages.

It's a surreal place filled with the same people at every event (and linked on every blog or re-tweeted on every tweet) who seem like they must be important, but aren't.

Sometimes worlds collide and Tim Ferris does a talk at Google (or TED - WTF?) or Tara Hunt doles out free beer at a conference room at Yahoo!...

In my experience unless your girlfriend is working for one of their boutique PR firms you can safely avoid everything about this world.

<comment><USER4> I'm coming to do a geek/startup tour of silicon valley... can you recommend any events/groups that don't suck? Because what you're describing sounds pretty similar to the worst of our local networking groups, and I get really irritated when I show up for one and its a bunch of guys trying to sell me management consulting and a 'startup' speaker that made millions selling used hardware.

<comment><USER3> It's hard for me to recommend anything, because I don't feel like I've gotten much out of the good events I've gone to. I'm not really an event guy. I'd probably be more useful in the negative for particular cases, like "that one sucks - definitely DON'T go to that one." Also - I haven't gone to any of these things for almost a year.

That said, SuperHappyDevHouse is the only event that is genuinely hacker oriented. Some of the particular tech specific meetups I've been to have had good presentations.

If you really want to network it's probably best to figure out where your favorite startups go out to drink beer on Fridays. If you're looking for hackerish, generally interesting things to do, events like Maker Faire are pretty good.

<comment><USER4> So you wouldn't recommend the entrepreneur educational events Stanford organizes? The tech stuff we have here, somewhat, although I'll be there for the Hadoop Summit. Was hoping to get a glimpse into people making all these connections that the valley is supposed to offer a startup.

Gonna catch an open coffee, but still looking for things to do relating to startup/biz side of things. I'm not looking to network for anything in particular so much as get a good sense of the environment.

<comment><USER3> Oh, actually that kind of thing sounds cool. I just haven't been. Stanford is great and is worth going to an event there if you're in the area.

<comment><USER4> But you're saying that cocktail hour by Blanko.com would not be a great networking event as it would be characterized by wanton douschebaggery? I'm trying to catch some of those too, just to experience them.

Sorry to pick your brain, but I'm 'exploring' valley/provincial market differences for fun.

Which groups suck? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Jerry Yang slept under his desk, Amazon had door desks.

I tried to emulate Yang by renting an office - I wanted to sleep nights in it. But I chickened out and continued to work from my bedroom (a UK equivalent of a USA garage).

<comment><USER6> I never understood how someone ACTUALLY sleeps "under" a desk:p My desks have too many power cords to make any kinda sleep possible.

I went with this: <http://zaid.posterous.com/me-office-and-bed>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A great lesson we should all learn from. His mistake was in thinking that money could buy him prestige, power, and respect. It hardly ever works.

<comment><USER8> i would agree with this statement if it said "money alone".

money's a tool, and if you put it in the hands of someone who deserves prestige/power/respect, someone wise/thoughtful/intelligent, it could potentially speed along that process faster than it would happen without it (if used wisely).

/$0.02

<comment><USER9> I would disagree. I would suggest that this dude is a tool, and that money is just fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> He doesn't even say what business this was for. And don't tell me it was for Bradford & Reed... why would they need to impress clients - why are clients even going to a Manhattan corporate office to buy greeting cards?

<comment><USER11> Good question. Wish I asked that at the time.

My clients were the sponsors who bought my ads.

Like you said, they hardly ever came to NYC to meet. Pretty much all my business was done by phone or I flew to a clients' office.

But when I had a dinky office in Queens, one of my clients came to see me. And I was embarrassed when he saw my office.

And instead of being smart and dismissing it, I magnified the incident in my head.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If he sold the rest of the furniture he bought with the million, then presumably he has/had that money too.

<comment><USER13> It was an ambiguous statement; the implication was the loss of value for that venture was a million, with the only benefit being 2 chairs. I don't think a floor in Manhattan + retail cost of furniture + a decorator is going to be cheap even if you sublet the space and sell the furniture. (Then again subletting might have been a net gain.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> There's an observation in value investing that if a company buys a gorgeous new headquarters the stock is going to do poorly, presumably for similar reasons as this guy. I think it was Peter Lynch who commented on this.

</comment><comment><USER15> 404</comment>


Nvidia Face Works Tech Demo; Renders Realistic Human Faces - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvaGd4KqlvQ <comment><USER2> So how long until we see that kind of graphics in games? 5? 10 years?</comment>


The Teensy Files: Creating teensy ELF executables for Linux - <AUTHOR> http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/home.html

<comment><USER2> Great read. This bit from part 3 cracked me up:

 _When this program is executed, what will happen? (Deep breath.) The kernel will map it into memory, whereupon it will see the entry in the program segment header table marked PT_INTERP. It will hand the image of our process- to-be over to the program named in that segment, which is the dynamic linker. The dynamic linker will refer to the dynamic section (thanks to it also having an entry in the program segment header table) to find the relocation table. The relocation table 's one entry tells it to obtain the absolute address of the first symbol in the symbol table, the location for which is also retrieved from the dynamic section. The first entry in the symbol table provides a position in the string table (and again, the location for the string table comes from the dynamic section) where the symbol's name is stored, namely "_exit". To find that address the dynamic linker starts going down the list of shared-object libraries that our program has requested; this list contains only a single library, namely "libc.so.6". The dynamic linker will now shift its attention to that library's ELF structures instead of ours. It will compute the hash value of "_exit", and consult libc's hash table, symbol table, and string table in order to find an entry for that symbol. (If it failed to find this symbol, it would then try the next library mapped into our process space. Since there are no other such libraries, the dynamic linker would display an error message and quit the process.) The symbol table entry, once found, provides a value for the symbol, which the dynamic linker adjusts to match the address of the shared-object in our process space, and finally stores a relative version of that value at the address specified in our relocation table entry. (Phew.)_

</comment><comment><USER3> I was thinking this would either be about running a tiny subset of linux on a Teensy, or running a Teensy binary on ARM linux. [https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/](https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/) Interesting anyway.

</comment><comment><USER4> I saw Brian's presentation at SEAGL[1] this year, it was excellent! He's a very dynamic and expressive speaker and takes something that could be dry and boring and makes it interesting for all experience levels.

[1] [http://lanyrd.com/2014/seagl/sdfgdw/](http://lanyrd.com/2014/seagl/sdfgdw/)

</comment><comment><USER5> For anyone looking for more ASM related information, [http://asm.sourceforge.net/resources.html#docs](http://asm.sourceforge.net/resources.html#docs).

That's where I've first seen this site.

</comment><comment><USER6> A wonderful educational tool for anyone interested in writing an in-memory compiler or who just wants to get a feel for the ELF format documentation, which can be... deep.

</comment><comment><USER7> Has anyone got something similar for Windows? I'm trying to teach myself x86 assembler but the executables produced out of gcc/VS2013 are massive.

<comment><USER8> There's a ton of info on creating tiny executables for Windows' PE file format; here are a few examples:

[http://www.phreedom.org/research/tinype/](http://www.phreedom.org/research/tinype/)

[https://code.google.com/p/corkami/wiki/PE#minimal_sizes](https://code.google.com/p/corkami/wiki/PE#minimal_sizes)

[http://hugi.scene.org/online/hugi21/cosmalpe.htm](http://hugi.scene.org/online/hugi21/cosmalpe.htm)

I don't know how much of it can be attributed to the popularity of the platform or its culture, but I've noticed the amount of information on making tiny executables for *nix systems (including OS X's MachO) is much less in comparison.</comment></comment>


Why I Quit Twitter and Left Behind 35,000 Followers - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/10/insider/why-i-quit-twitter-and-left-behind-35000-followers.html?smid=nytnow-share&smprod=nytnow&referer=https:/t.co/uAsHTgffeV <comment><USER2> Seems like an awful lot of the 'internet hate speech' cliches in one long article here. Talk about Bernie Bros, about right wing extremism, about Twitter not enforcing its rules, etc. All it needed were some calls to 'censor' the internet, and it'd have been perfect.

Not saying there aren't horrible people on Twitter and other social networks, and that personal attacks don't happen, but it's been a somewhat tired subject for articles recently and pushed like its the end of the world by the press.

<comment><USER3> I don't think we read the same piece. This one focused on the rampant anti- Semitism and racism that Twitter's been loath/unable to limit, contrary to its own TOS.

<comment><USER4> I said this below but I'll say it again, race & ethnicity don't matter. This was anti-semetic because the author is jewish, just like it would be anti- muslim, pro feminism, anti-feminism ect. It's like the scene in fight club where they screen recruits. So declaring you are mad because people said mean things to you on the internet on a platform that is going through very public growing pains is stupid, boring and old. Godwin's law was frim bbs i think.

The point is that you dont feed trolls because thats what they want.

<comment><USER3> No, this was anti-Semitic regardless of the target, just as misogynistic insults hurled at me remain misogynistic (I identify as male). For that matter, there are plenty of people who consider accepting abuse on the internet to be passé. Maybe trolls do want people to get mad, and this counts as "feeding them," but trying to shine a light on the problem at least has the potential to make it clear those who have been bullied into submission that somebody cares. Being silent and ceding ground in the name of Don't Feed the Trolls normalizes these people's destructive behavior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> On another note, I found a more interesting comment about quitting Twitter from someone with a similar amount of followers that I used to follow on the site. They said they quit because it became an addition that took up more and more of their time and drove them to become a more and more negative person in general.

I'd say that would make a somewhat more interesting article to read about Twitter and why people might quit.

<comment><USER2> Note that if you're wondering, it was this video that had the comment about quitting Twitter (it's the first subject):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUBsueDMEAU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUBsueDMEAU)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I understand his frustrations, but that's simply the way the internet is. A similar effect can be seen on Reddit - visit /r/worldnews and scroll through the comments on any article to see what I mean.

What I don't see is why this is worthy of an article on the NY Times. You left Twitter for various reasons, none of which are newsworthy.

Also, I don't understand how Bernie supporters are misogynists for criticizing Hillary.

<comment><USER6> I guess that he's talking about a particular type of Sanders follower who suffers from cognitive dissonance because many people choose Hillary over Bernie, and thusly reverts into misogyny.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Look, I don't want go victim blame and it is pretty difficult for me to conclude the fault was with the author. He didn't deserve to be treated that way because of his beliefs, cultural heritage, ect. However, this article is meta-example of how not to deal with this. First, it's the internet, so private anonymous people can effortlessly target you and repeatedly avoid bans. Intellectually though, I can't conclude there were real threats. This is why we don't feed trolls or negotiate with terrorists.

Sure twitter could curb free speech (even hate speech) but probably millions of tweets a day prove Godwin's law. You really should not take out a massive article in the times to tell them they won. You shouldn't leave a platform and stand aside for shit like this.

This article hurts twitter, and free speech while telling trolls that they won, in the _The New York Times_. So I am mad and blaming him for his _reaction_ because now they have more incentive and everyone else is worse off. Some of these trolls are probably Jewish. They care about fucking with people in a low effort way. What the author has done here is garuntee they continue to say annoying shit on the internet. I love the internet, and it is filled with utter garbage, so it would be nice that after I wade through spam wordpress sites I didn't have to read an article praising them(that is how they see it).

Don't feed trolls. Put on the settings that only let certain people tweet at you, ect, and actually stand up for free speech because the press needs it more than ever. Twitter has shadowbanning functionality (or I remember Walt Mossberg mentioning something about that) on air.

The real reason this was shitty, is because there is a teenager, fellow journalist, ect. who is now dealing with these trolls because the root cause didn't go away.

<comment><USER5> I also don't see how NYT allowed him to post this. I'd assume there is a review process before something like this goes live. I mean, did nobody think that it might actually help trolls see that what they're doing is working?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Bernie Bros"? seriously? stick with the solid story of racist twitter users threatening you with violence and you might get some sympathy...

I was hoping to read something more considered than "I can't take the harsh verbal repartee" perhaps along the lines of "hey Twitter is using my content to make money, I'd rather write a column for the NY Times and get paid for it- same negative comments but no character limit and plus I get paid!"

<comment><USER3> Anti-Semitism, racism, and other hate speech are not "harsh verbal repartée."

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> TL;DR. NYTimes failing in its task to provide real, valuable journalistic information like that provided by The Intercept, TYT, Democracy Now, etc.

</comment><comment><USER9> The kind of things he talks about here are the same kind of things that made me leave reddit, never to return. I haven't found issue with twitter really, but I guess when you get to that kind of renown things must get harder to avoid.

</comment><comment><USER10> With articles like this one can see why all the social media companies and even Google put people in a "bubble". Twitter for the most part doesn't, and this sort of thing happens. Expect more bubbles, and to be isolated further from reality on the internet as time goes on.

</comment><comment><USER11> People need to grow thicker skin. By quitting you basically demonstrated that hate speech works. You need to do the opposite, just ignore the haters and keep your followers happy.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a way to quantify opinions into a tangible tree/graph? - <AUTHOR> Take any given topic, say political for example.
Say the president does or says something.
Is there a way to quantify everyone's opinion about this into a tangible set of statements that you can agree or disagree with? <comment><USER2> In addition to ACH (mentioned by tboyd47), there is argument mapping.

[https://www.rationaleonline.com/docs/en/tutorials#h9qc66](https://www.rationaleonline.com/docs/en/tutorials#h9qc66)

See rationale for software:

[https://www.reasoninglab.com/](https://www.reasoninglab.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> There are many ways to do it.

You could load documents containing facts, opinions or other information into a database and then add another "table" that links one thing to another so we can say that "opinion B is a response to opinion A" or that any sort of relationship exists between them.

I think this even more interesting when we apply it to a set of documents that have business, engineering or science value.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes! There is a great way to do this called ACH (Analysis of Competing Hypothesis). It's a wonderful way to clarify your thoughts about a complex issue. It is used within the CIA.

[http://competinghypotheses.org/docs/ACH,_Step_By_Step](http://competinghypotheses.org/docs/ACH,_Step_By_Step)</comment>


Ask HN: Embed Stripe in Desktop app, will users find this shady? - <AUTHOR> Paying with a credit card from a desktop app is certainly very unconventional. However, it will make my life much easier.<p>Do you think the average user will have a problem with this? Will they find this insecure? The last thing I need is people thinking twice about paying? <comment><USER2> Without a middleman server, this would require you to embed your secret key within the app, allowing your customers to access said secret key, which would allow them to manage your Stripe account. Not a good idea.

If you're not embedding your secret key within the app (i.e. you're only generating a card token using the public key), I don't see a problem with embedding a checkout form directly within your app, though that's rare to see.

</comment><comment><USER3> Since not many desktop app do this, it will surely raise concerns. How about direct to website for completing the payment ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for confirming "surely raise concerns". That is enough for me to think of an alternate solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can you not use a usb card swiper? I dont see the problem here.. What is the use case? What is an average user? Do a survey about these questions to your potential users?</comment>


WeWork laid off 2,400 employees–but its execs just got up to $18M - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90448185/wework-laid-off-2400-employees-but-its-execs-just-got-a-potential-extra-18-million <comment><USER2> It's almost no longer surprising that this happens seemingly every time. Even when companies do terribly the executive teams are often rewarded and even in cases of terrible neglect are rarely punished in any serious way. I do understand the benefit of these pay packages for new incoming people who are brought on to specifically do a turnaround of such a risky company but to give this to people who were part of the executive team that led to this mess seems like a shockingly bad move.</comment>


Merging two python dictionaries - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/38987/how-can-i-merge-two-python-dictionaries-as-a-single-expression

<comment><USER2> This is a question from a few years ago......what am I supposed to be looking at here?

<comment><USER3> You are looking at techniques to merge 2 dictionaries into a new one. Some will find it useful.</comment></comment>


Flint threatens to take away 8K families' homes for failure to pay water bills - <AUTHOR> https://boingboing.net/2017/05/05/snyder-and-me.html <comment><AUTHOR> I couldn't squeeze it in the headline but this is poisoned water. Water you can't drink, use for cooking or cleaning or use to bathe. It has extremely high levels of lead.

[http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/04/us/flint-water-crisis-fast- fac...](http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/04/us/flint-water-crisis-fast-facts/)

It's like a runaway train of bad behavior by both the community and the state's leaders.</comment>


The Purpose of Sleep? To Forget, Scientists Say - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/science/sleep-memory-brain-forgetting.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> As someone with no neuroscience background I've suspected this for a while just based on how Boltzmann machines work. These are a type of unsupervised artificial neural network.

The training algorithm for Boltzmann machines has two phases:

1\. (Awake phase) Feed the network training data, and increase the weights between neurons that tend to get activated simultaneously in this phase.

2\. (Dreaming phase) Let the network run without any training input, and decrease the weights between neurons that tend to get activated simultaneously in this phase.

This training algorithm wasn't designed to emulate how human brains work, it just sort of falls out of the math. And yet (1) resembles the Hebbian principle from neuroscience (neurons that fire together, wire together), and (2) resembles the process described in this article. Actually I suspect something stronger than what the article claims based on this: that the connections that get pruned are the ones connecting neurons that fire together while dreaming. It would be nice to have someone who knows stuff about neuroscience comment on this.

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't be so sure that Boltzmann machines were designed without how the brain operated in mind. Terry Seknowski, one of the inventors, is a computational neuroscientist.

In general, I think the influence of neuroscience on neural network research has been subtle and perhaps underrated. For example, modern day convolutional neural networks Havea lineage going back to Fukushima's neocognitron, which was heavily inspired by Hubel an Wiesel's simple/complex cell model of visual cortex based on single cell electrophysiology.

<comment><USER4> They weren't. They were a generalization of the Hopfield networks. Boltzmann machines are a stochastic version of the Hopfield network. The training algorithm simply tries to minimize the KL divergence between the network activity and real data. So it was quite surprising when it turned out that the algorithm needed a "dream phase" as they call it. Francis Crick was inspired by this and proposed a theory of sleep.

<comment><USER5> Unpacking a comment like this is one of the quieter pleasures of reading HN.

<comment><USER4> Haha I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic so I'll try to unpack the comment. Hopfield networks were one of the first models of associative memory. They themselves were based on a model of simple magnets called ising model (generalized). Basically a group of binary units, each connected its nearest neighbors with a coupling strength. Each unit prefers to be like their neighbors. Hopfield developed a clever method to change the coupling so that the networks can store and retrieve patterns of activity. In the Hopfield network everything is deterministic, Hopfield himself realized that if this constraint was relaxed this model could become a very powerful computational machine. Which means that if instead of being always on or off, the units had a probability of being on or off the networks could perform very general computational tools [1]. Unfortunately, training these general stochastic systems was not easy. With their Boltzmann machines Sejnowski and Hinton proposed a possible solution. The activity of stochastic binary units effectively encodes a probability distribution, so all they had to do was make sure that the probability distribution being encoded by the activity of the units was the same as that of the input. They did this by changing the connection strengths between the units such that the activity pattern minimized something called the Kullback-Leibler or KL divergence, which is a measure of how close two probability distributions are (the one encoded by the network activity, or the dream activity of the network and the probability distribution of the real data e.g. a set of natural images). If two distributions match exactly then the KLd is zero and if not it's large. When they wrote out the math it turned out that the algorithm required two phases, an awake phase where the connections were changed according to the real data, and the sleep phase where the connections were pruned by the spontaneous activity of the network without any input (or dreams). This analogy got a lot of people excited, including Francis Crick and several others tried to test this idea in real brains, but we are still waiting for a convincing result.

<comment><USER6> Wow, this is a really good explanation! Thank you. I wonder though, are RBMs being used in practice? Are they worth any future research?

<comment><USER4> In applied machine learning not so much. They feel ancient! But some use them to study the physics of computation. They were used to make the connection between renormalization group (RG) and machine learning. RG is one of the main workhorses of quantum field theory and condensed matter physics. The fact that there's a mapping from RG to RBMs means that we can understand how deep learning works by using the same techniques that modern physicists use to understand the world! Here's a nice article on this topic if you're interested [https://www.quantamagazine.org/20141204-a-common-logic-to- se...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/20141204-a-common-logic-to-seeing-cats- and-cosmos/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As an aside, in trying to make a title compelling (have a person as the subject), the Times is inadvertently hurting science.

This article is about a hypothesis that has some evidence in mice, but tells nowhere near the whole story, especially in humans with regard to sleep. However, the title suggests more confidence than warranted. Likely, in the near future, some newspaper will publish a similar article, except the purpose of sleep will be to remember (which is also supported by studies).

The problem is the average person will see that and think, what scientists say is always changing, and they are contradicting each other all the time. Then when they see an article stating scientists say that climate change is worsening, they will view it just like any article that has "scientists say" in the title.

<comment><USER8> > when they see an article stating scientists say that climate change is > worsening, they will view it just like any article that has "scientists say" > in the title.

Actually, you should see it exactly the same way - a possibly interesting finding from probably a single study, and if you actually want to know the scientific information behind it, you should go read the science, not the newspaper, and look at multiple studies, and look for weaknesses in the study that may weaken the findings.

...especially if it is something you already believe.

<comment><USER9> ...which means newspapers are failing to educate the public, which is what the OP is complaining about.

Just because they don't doesn't mean they shouldn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not convincing for me.

While forgeting might be one of the effects that happens it is certainly not the main purpose of sleep.

If you forbid people to sleep long enough they die and nobody knows why (not counting microsleeps). Fatal Famililal Insomnia is erm.... fatal. Its certainly not because you didn't forget. You can use alternatives for that, such as boosting endocanabinoid system. THC in mices also make them forget stresfull events in life and vice versa (blocking CB1 receptor makes them remember). There is strong anecdotal evidence that it happens in all human consumers too. Also, there are few people that can never forget [1], one depicted in House MD episode and those people sleep and I bet they would still die if they didn't.

All those facts do not align in my mind with above stated hypothesis.

AFAIK, some neural pathways get improved during the sleep while others are pruned. That sounds more like a brain is in a maintenance mode, filtering out irrelevant stuff from important (among other things that might happen).

[1] [http://discovermagazine.com/2006/jun/j-woman- memory](http://discovermagazine.com/2006/jun/j-woman-memory)

<comment><USER11> It's possible Fatal Famililal Insomnia kills you by some other mechanism, and the sleeplessness is just a symptom, I figure. I don't think we know that the sleeplessness is the thing that kills you.

"Like all prion diseases, FFI is a progressive neurodegenerative disease, which means over time there are fewer neurons (nerve cells). Loss of neurons in the thalamus, as well as other mechanisms not yet fully understood, cause the symptoms of FFI."

"Although the main target of FFI is the thalamus, other parts of the brain are affected as well including the inferior olives. The inferior olives are part of the medulla oblongata and are important for coordinating our movements (motor control). Losing neurons in the inferior olives can make it harder for a person to control their movements as seen in later stages of FFI."

[https://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/diseases/6429/fatal- famili...](https://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/diseases/6429/fatal-familial- insomnia)

When your whole brain is going haywire due to neuron loss, attributing death to sleeplessness seems premature.

<comment><USER10> > When your whole brain is going haywire due to neuron loss, attributing death > to sleeplessness seems premature.

Or it could be another way around, as its not easy to have experiments like this I guess we can never know.

But yes, that is certainly possible that in FFI you die due to some other reason. I didn't see that info you provided but I remember reading in NGeo many years back that FFI people seem healthy in other aspects.

There was 1 experiment with mices tho - after 32 days they all died witout sleep:

[1] [http://health.howstuffworks.com/mental- health/sleep/basics/d...](http://health.howstuffworks.com/mental- health/sleep/basics/die-if-never-sleep.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The brain naturally employs dimensionality reduction for memory. Sleep is one example. Another, simpler one is reading -- how far back can you remember word for word when you are reading something? Maybe a sentence at most? But you still remember enough to understand what you're reading, because of efficient dimensionality reduction.

Some neural networks mimic this, such as LSTMs. But it's a poor mimicry at best. The brain has a natural, built-in selection mechanism. It seems to "know" what to remember and what to forget. How could we implement something like this in a deep neural network?

(This is key step to giving computers "personality". Which emerges from a selective set of memories and trained behavior)

<comment><USER13> The process in the article is pretty similar to dropout in neural nets. But instead of "knowing" what to get rid of, we randomly prune. The brain may do it randomly or intelligently, hard to say based on these studies.

See here for info on dropout: [http://bit.ly/1mneaL5](http://bit.ly/1mneaL5)

<comment><USER14> Seems like it scores the pruning algorithm and adjusts it as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I went through a 3 week period of sleeping no more than an hour a night, if at all. Things like "this morning" became very muddled. If I thought about what I had for breakfast, there was no difference between breakfast today and yesterday and even a couple days before that -- they were recalled to mind equally.

Multiple days in a row felt like "today." It's hard to describe the feeling because I've never felt anything like it before or since. It just felt like the stack was overflowing for "today". One night of sleep and things were back to normal.

<comment><USER16> _I went through a 3 week period of sleeping no more than an hour a night, if at all._

Can you explain why this happened? Off the top of my head it is either military or having a child, but I have a feeling there might possibly be an even more interesting explanation.

<comment><USER17> Could also be a manic episode.

<comment><USER16> Didn't think of that. Hope my original question didn't come off as rude, I'm just seriously interested how this is possible since I have trouble just pulling a single all-nighter :-|

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It seems like forgetting is more of a side-effect than a purpose. I thought of some more headlines in this vein:

"The purpose of fire? To create CO2, Scientists Say"

"The purpose of exercise? To Sweat, Scientists Say"

"The purpose of music? To Make Noise, Scientists Say"

<comment><USER19> Replace "Scientists" with "Journalists" and you got it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> No, no, that's the purpose of Drink.

</comment><comment><USER21> The whole premise of there being a single function or main function of sleep seems slightly far-fetched IMHO.

For example, is the brain's function to think rationally? To speak and understand language? To unconciously regulate bodily functions?

Wouldn't it be more likely that due to the brain's multifunctional nature that an evolutionairly pruned process has developed which encompasses multiple necessary subroutines (energy preservation, memory consolidation, waste cleansing, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER22> In other words, to garbage-collect.

<comment><USER23> Damn, it'd be nice if our brain were stack-based and automatically called destructors.

<comment><USER24> That would be nice till you accidentally buffer overflow and writes garbage over your entire brain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Since I learned that lack of sleep causes hallucinations I though sleep exists to avoid neural network overfitting.

</comment><comment><USER26> While I prune at night, I keep waking up to this strange american dream.

</comment><comment><USER27> My second favorite quote from the Kingkiller Chronicles:

>First is the door of sleep. Sleep offers us a retreat from the world and all its pain. Sleep marks passing time, giving us distance from the things that have hurt us.

Full quote: [https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/156661-perhaps-the- greatest...](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/156661-perhaps-the-greatest- faculty-our-minds-possess-is-the-ability)

<comment><USER10> Meh... dreams can be very nasty and hurtful. When I dream bad, I am frecked up entire day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> For a theory of sleep to convince me, it would need to explain how the benefit from sleep can possibly be worth the huge disadvantage of leaving yourself completely vulnerable for hours a day. Evolution-wise, that seems hard to justify. A variant of human that didn't have to sleep seems like it would overrun the sleep-needing humans, unless the non-sleeping human just isn't possible.

</comment><comment><USER29> "Life without absorbing occupation is hell; joy consists in forgetting life."

</comment><comment><USER30> Remember that sleep evolved very early on. Arthropods (insects, arachnids, crustaceans, etc.) sleep. Worms experience a sleep-like state. It's even been shown that cyanobacteria experience circadian rhythms.

Fruit flies whose sleep patterns were disrupted were slower to learn new things and faster to forget the things they learned. I'm not sure there is a single purpose for sleep, but memory is certainly a critical factor.

</comment><comment><USER31> People have speculated that sleep is meant to organize your thoughts for years. I know when I worked in a Neuroscience lab years ago that is what many researchers thought. But to say it is to "Forget" is almost certainly an over simplification. It might be to optimize to remove the extraneous, but that is probably not all of it either. Nothing about how the brain works is simple.

</comment><comment><USER32> What's the animal with the least brain that sleeps? Jellyfish apparently take prolonged rests on the sea floor which is a kind of sleep.

<comment><USER33> If you count that as a kind of sleep, then it would surely be them, since you can't have less brain than a jellyfish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Anybody that studies Carl Jung work on dreams will understand how superficial this theory that tries to explain sleep as forgetting is, and how this theory fails to account for symbols and archetypes that show in dreams, also any event can be remembered by hypnosis so nothing is really forgotten with sleep.

<comment><USER35> Also they will understand how this work is scientific and not psuedoscientic falsehoods.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This article suffers from the single cause fallacy. Sleep exists, and evolved for multiple reasons.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm thinking its more like, to integrate memories. Lessen the impact of the most recent memories lest we lose earlier lessons. Kind of like a moving average or filter. Dim traumatic events so we can think about them without over-reacting.

</comment><comment><USER38> Surely it's not the other purpose. How about recovery and healing processed?

<comment><USER39> s/other/only I guess.

Yeah, global maintenance of the mind and body is more like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Every parent probably intuits this, whether they consciously realize it or not. The #1 cause of babies crying [that isn't pay or hunger]: overstimulation & a need for sleep to "reset".

<comment><USER41> I think most would intuitively attribute that to sleep restoring energy levels so the baby feels better, not anything to do with memory.

<comment><USER10> The main reason is probably is need to be calm while the body is experiencing that level of growth. You wouldn't want to build a house with constant earthquake I guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> reposting a comment I made a while ago @ [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11327157](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11327157)

\-----

Very relevant PubMed article many of you will undoubtedly find interesting: "Partial sleep in the context of augmentation of brain function."

Abstract: Inability to solve complex problems or errors in decision making is often attributed to poor brain processing, and raises the issue of brain augmentation. Investigation of neuronal activity in the cerebral cortex in the sleep-wake cycle offers insights into the mechanisms underlying the reduction in mental abilities for complex problem solving. Some cortical areas may transit into a sleep state while an organism is still awake. Such local sleep would reduce behavioral ability in the tasks for which the sleeping areas are crucial. The studies of this phenomenon have indicated that local sleep develops in high order cortical areas. This is why complex problem solving is mostly affected by local sleep, and prevention of local sleep might be a potential way of augmentation of brain function. For this approach to brain augmentation not to entail negative consequences for the organism, it is necessary to understand the functional role of sleep. Our studies have given an unexpected answer to this question. It was shown that cortical areas that process signals from extero- and proprioreceptors during wakefulness, switch to the processing of interoceptive information during sleep. It became clear that during sleep all "computational power" of the brain is directed to the restoration of the vital functions of internal organs. These results explain the logic behind the initiation of total and local sleep. Indeed, a mismatch between the current parameters of any visceral system and the genetically determined normal range would provide the feeling of tiredness, or sleep pressure. If an environmental situation allows falling asleep, the organism would transit to a normal total sleep in all cortical areas. However, if it is impossible to go to sleep immediately, partial sleep may develop in some cortical areas in the still behaviorally awake organism. This local sleep may reduce both the "intellectual power" and the restorative function of sleep for visceral organs.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24822040](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24822040)

</comment><comment><USER43> This sounds like defragmentation for the brain

</comment><comment><USER44> the article title (and indeed, upon groggy inspection, the article itself) is misleading: it's likely the the _hypothalmus_ "forgets" while the the _cortex_ "remembers"/"learns" during sleep.

i think ppl have been generally aware of this since the 80's

</comment><comment><USER45> Haha, So basically its saying brains use the old JVM 'Stop the world' garbage collector?

</comment><comment><USER46> If so, then what function do dreams have? Are they akin to zero-filling a disk?

<comment><USER47> Perhaps dreams are the mechanism that allows the dimensionality reduction to take place? Or at least a side effect of us becoming semi-conscious while the process is taking place?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Man, I have to ask, how the hell does something like this actually evolve.

<comment><USER49> I frequently recommend the Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism (AronRa) videos on YouTube. They're obviously more about addressing creationism, but it's enjoyable and educational and necessarily explains a lot about evolution that I didn't know previously. One great part is where he explains the lineage of species by using folders on Windows.

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL126AFB53A6F002CC](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL126AFB53A6F002CC)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> this study seems to contradict people being more forgetful when not getting enough sleep

</comment><comment><USER51> My only complaint is that we sleep only 6-9 hours, oh god it should have been 20-22 hours

</comment><comment><USER52> If you trust your intuition, you've known this is one of the MANY purposes of sleep for a while now. The western science culture of needing scientists to validate what you know as true damages our own ability to trust ourselves. You're not going to have statistical and scientifically proven evidence for 99.99% of most things you encounter in your daily life. That's why the mindset of waiting around for science to prove something is harmful. You need to be able to go with your own intuition most of the time. Anyway, this was obvious. And keep in mind, it's just one of the purposes--can things not have multiple purposes??

<comment><USER53> Let's pick some intuitive false facts:

* The lack of inertia is very intuitive. Once you stop pushing something it will get to rest soon. This is extremely intuitive. (Unless you live nearby a frozen lake???)

* The spontaneous generation of small creatures like worms and flies is intuitive. You put some crap and wait a while, and you'll get a few small animals. (Did someone ever believe that elephants were generated spontaneously?)

* Leeches are good for your health. I'm not even sure that this was intuitive, or that it was even a popular cure, but it was used in traditional western medicine. Modern medicine use penicillin, I don't think that using an extract from a mold is intuitively good.

<comment><USER54> > lack of inertia.

What? No, im pretty sure that some people knew what friction was and that if theoretically, there was none of it, things would continue to move. Thats intuitive to me.

> Spontaneous generation of animals.

Fair example; ive read this old theory before.

> Leeches Blood letting is still somehow advised as being healthy for certain > conditions (too much iron, and "resetting" a percentage of ones blood. That > or they just really want people to donate) Plus you even admit that youre > not sure about it being 'false' fact brought by intuition, so why even > include that?

OP's point is not that intuition is infallible. Not much is infallible (perhaps nothing, if one is atheistic) It's that science has seemed to shunt/reduce/eliminate the intuition of a subsection of the population. It's his opinion (and mine) that this has harmful effects that are worth examining.

<comment><USER53> >> _lack of inertia._

> [...] _That 's intuitive to me._

It was a popular idea a long time ago [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertia#Early_understanding_of...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertia#Early_understanding_of_motion) and after teaching physics I think that inertia is not so intuitive. What did you thought when you were 13 years old and had no formal training in physics?

> _OP 's point is not that intuition is infallible._ [...]

The problem is that if you ask enough people, each one may have a different intuitive idea. Some of them will be slightly different and some of them completely contradictory. Everyone has an intuitive idea of how to manage economy and a country, but not everyone has the same intuition about that.

That's why to do science you can use intuition to design experiments and make theories, but you MUST confirm them with experiments.</comment></comment></comment></comment>