Trump Administration Weighs Ban on Flavored E-Cigarettes - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/11/health/trump-vaping.html <comment><USER2> Related discussion from yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20929796](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20929796)

From recent months:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20535474](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20535474)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18717697](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18717697)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18716016](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18716016)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17968645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17968645)

</comment><comment><USER3> Most the people who got sick or died was from THC related vape products, ecigs had nothing to do with it.

Also, they didn't ban flavored alcohol or flavored THC products.

They really need to stop being a nanny state about adults and stop use the agenda of (Think of the children!) bans.

Kids (Young Adults) did start using juul, because gas stations could sell them easily, 7-11 banned those juice flavors awhile ago.

The Feds banned an entire market for adults, that has nothing related to the THC vitamin E grease fiasco...

Vaping is hell of a lot healthier than smoking, but of course not-smoking is best. But I hate when nanny stats bann something for political reasons, just like they are doing with trans fats (donut scare!) or cities with sugary drink taxes.

Video showing cotton balls with smoking vs vaping, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Pwj6BuS8Ds](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Pwj6BuS8Ds)

<comment><USER4> They banned flavoured cigarettes in 2009, which seems like the closest comparison.

<comment><USER5> If they're banning flavored cigarettes, why not ban sugary/flavored alcoholic drinks (alcopops) as well? As others have said, this seems like a shakedown and/or a bit of an overreach.

<comment> munk-a These are separate issues - there is a clear close corollary to flavored e-cigs which is conventional cigarettes - the flavored versions have been banned. Banning other flavored stuff might be a good idea but is entirely beside the point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Let's be honest, this is a shakedown. E-cigarette manufacturers just need to grease the right palms, this is absolutely not about public health.

Amount of money that States in the Master Settlement Agreement profited from tobacco sales this year: $27 billion

Amount of tax revenue States collected on tobacco in 2018: $12.86 billion

Number of people killed by tobacco last year: 480,000

Number of States that spend the CDC-recommended amount on tobacco prevention programs: 0

Number of states that have made efforts to ban tobacco: 0

[https://www.tobaccofreekids.org/what-we- do/us/statereport](https://www.tobaccofreekids.org/what-we-do/us/statereport)

[https://taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/tobacco-tax- revenue](https://taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/tobacco-tax-revenue)

[https://www.statista.com/statistics/248964/revenues-from- tob...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/248964/revenues-from-tobacco-tax- and-forecast-in-the-us/)

[https://cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast_fac...](https://cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast_facts/index.htm)

<comment><USER4> In 2009 flavoured cigarettes were banned. This just brings e-cigarettes in line with cigarettes

<comment><USER6> There's a very strong drive to make an equivalency with tobacco and e-cigarettes, and I think it's extremely irresponsible.

"We don't know the long-term effects" is usually put forward as an argument. However, preliminary evidence is pretty strong that they're orders of magnitude less harmful.

Putting e-cigarettes, (which look like they might save hundreds of thousands to millions of lives if all smokers switched to them) in line with cigarettes is potentially a public health catastrophe.

<comment><USER7> Six people have died so far from what seems to be a vaping-related lung condition. This may be several orders of magnitude lower than the number killed by smoking cigarettes an equivalent amount of time, but it's not something to be ignored. Strangling a baby in its crib is easier than taking out the full-grown adult later.

<comment><USER6> > Six people have died so far from what seems to be a vaping-related lung > condition.

Vaping what, exactly?

This whole situation is like if the government allowed (and profited in the billions on sales of) heroin, and a small industry sprang up selling methadone pills. A few people who took _some unknown kind of pill_ got sick or died, and the government then makes moves to shut down the methadone industry.

<comment><USER7> Oh, I think banning flavored pods is dumb, but then I also think vaping is dumb. My point was that it's unrealistic to expect reason on the subject, because "an order of magnitude less" is hard for most people to reason about when you can list the name of people who have died.

People want action _now_ because the numbers are low _now_ , and if a couple of years from now we find out things aren't so bad, presumably deep-pocketed companies will push for rescinding the laws.

It's not great, but it's hardly realistic to expect politicians to make laws based on science, even in administrations that aren't anti-science on the record.

<comment><USER6> Vaping is dumb, smoking tobacco is dumb, smoking weed is dumb, drinking alcohol is dumb, eating meat is dumb, driving above the speed limit is dumb.

The difference with speeding, drinking alcohol, and eating meat is that the government has active measures to make them safer. With smoking weed (specifically vaping) the regulatory environment forbids reputable labs from performing quality control, and the FDA isn't helping whatsoever with regulating the purity of the products.

What I'm getting at is that it's government policy, specifically the lack of FDA regulation/testing of THC vaping products, that is killing people.

The voting public overwhelmingly supports legalization, and the politicians' refusal to enact public policy that fulfills this wish and reduces harm is the problem. Congress has the blood of these victims of tainted product on their own hands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The land of the free, where the government decides what adults can with their own bodies.

I'm all for taking new steps to reduce the troubling increase in teen use of nicotine. Also, cigarettes should not be nearly so cheap: they should carry taxes that fully offset the health impact so smokers are not free riders. (This would add $10 per pack to the price.)

However, freedom means adults should be free to make their own choices—even if they're bad ones—as long as they bear the costs. It's appropriate for government to persuade, but not to choose.

<comment><USER9> > The land of the free, where the government decides what adults can with > their own bodies.

I have found that such black-and-white sentiments are common here in the US, and surprisingly missing a lot of very importance nuance.

So... you will _never_ use publicly funded (often emergency) healthcare? Do you _really_ understand the risks that you are taking? Are you _sure_ that the risks have been accurately and understandably explained? Are you sure that _only_ adults will be targeted? Are you _sure_ that commercial interests are not lying or exaggerating to you?

I remember analogous arguments in the late 70's / early 80's regarding the use of seat belts. "It's my body! I know the risks!"

It _is_ the role of a functioning society to find a way to help protect its own members from non-obvious, long-term harm. We can argue if government regulation is the proper outlet, and we can argue about efficiency and details, but... no no sane world does a "I can damned well do whatever I want!" attitude build a safe, equitable society.

<comment><USER10> There's nothing other than an annoying chime preventing you from not using a seat-belt. In all but the "nanny-ist" of states they can't even pull you over for it (but they may be able to tack on a $50 fine or something if they see you not wearing it when they pull you over). You can even buy clips that plug into the seat belt latch that make it think it's buckled when it's not.

Mandating that seat belts be available in vehicles for those that choose to use them and making it annoying to not do so is a far cry from banning an entire category of product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is 100%-grass-fed, free-range, organic bullshit. How on earth could anyone, with a straight face, propose an outright ban on e-cigarettes while _real cigarettes_ are still legal...

In public opinion, this is shaping up to be another tour-de-force showcasing the defective actors of our democracy. Starring, in order of appearance:

1 Moms that want the government to do their parenting, as the technology doesn't yet exist to Black Mirror them. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkangel_(Black_Mirror)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkangel_\(Black_Mirror\)))

2 Obnoxiously smug people that are willing to outlaw anything that doesn't affect them if there is morale high-ground to stand on

3 Corrupt politicians dressing up a power-move or money-grab in the name of protecting the children/public health

4 A recent but powerful entrant, Facebook users that have conjured degrees in both Medicine and Statistics, rapidly propagating the most poorly reasoned, common denominated, premature-birth-of-a-coherent-argument to all of their friends and family

Good times!

</comment><comment><USER12> _Mr. Azar said that the F.D.A. would outline a plan within the coming weeks for removing most flavored e-cigarettes that are not tobacco products from the market._

Title is editorialized; should read "Are Planning To Ban" or the like.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, I came here to say this. The title here suggests that the FDA just banned them. They have not. Misleading at best, straight up lying at worst.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The amount of regulation of these devices is insane. At their core they have 3 parts; a battery, a heating element, and the juice/carrier. There are a lot of things that could potentially be consumed using these simple devices; nicotine and THC are just the first most popular ones. The fact that the FDA has the authority to regulate tobacco products should never have extended to anything but actual tobacco.

<comment><USER15> Flavored e-cigarette cartridges (or whatever they're called, I don't smoke) are a tobacco product.

<comment><USER16> In the US! Technically, you can extract nicotine from sources other than tobacco.

[https://academic.oup.com/ntr/article/21/3/267/5041976#target...](https://academic.oup.com/ntr/article/21/3/267/5041976#targetText=Products%20that%20contain%20nicotine%20derived,legal%20framework%20for%20FDA%20regulation.&targetText=However%2C%20describing%20e%2Dcigarettes%20as,regulation%2C%20but%20others%20do%20not).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A ban would be devastating for those using ecigs to quit nicotine. I love the fruity flavors, and purposely started with those when I switched to ecigs. I figured that would help me get rid of the desire for tobacco flavor, and it worked so well that just the smell regular cigarettes would make me nauseous. It was a huge factor in my quitting successfully.

</comment><comment><USER18> I bet there will be a rush to hoard flavored pods and a crazy resale market will follow.

<comment><USER19> I don't know anybody who uses pods. Most likely people will simply start mixing their own juice, as aphextim mentioned.

<comment><USER20> I mostly only see people using pods and almost never see anyone mixing their own juice (besides dense clouds flowing out of the random car on the highway). My guess is that is all related to your friend circle, age, and area. Juul's are INCREDIBLY popular.

<comment><USER21> No one needs to mix their own juice yet. The difference is when there is no longer an option in the market for pre-mixed juices, amazon will be flooded with various flavouring oils.

Just like how the vaporizers are often sold as for 'potpourri'.

<comment><USER19> > The difference is when there is no option amazon will be flooded with > various flavouring oils.

Which is highly likely to increase the percentage of vapers using unsafe ingredients and exacerbate the current health crisis. Hooray for progress!

<comment><USER21> Of course and it just further masks the liability chain and helps fund associated shady acts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Hilarious seeing all the Juul shills in here already, saying we need vapes to quit regular cigarettes and that, "this is a shakedown"

</comment><comment><USER23> The USA should give gun control powers to the FDA...

</comment><comment><USER24> Can we please update the title to reflect that they're still deciding whether to ban them.

Original title: "Trump Administration Weighs Ban on Flavored E-Cigarettes"

<comment><USER2> Whoa, that's bad. Fixed now. Submitted title was "FDA Bans Flavored E-Cigarettes".

NYT is known for changing their headlines; did they get this wrong in the first place? If not, the submitted title broke the HN guidelines: " _Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don 't editorialize._"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Guess I'll go back to making my own again.... If anyone else wants to learn how to mix your own juice here is my go to guide.

[https://liquidnicotinewholesalers.com/how-to-make-e- liquid](https://liquidnicotinewholesalers.com/how-to-make-e-liquid)</comment>


Ask HN: How much do you program? - <AUTHOR>

I am not satisfied with the effort I put in. I was wondering about the  working style of other programmers.
How  many days in a week do you write code, and, how many hours in a day?
What else do you do with your time?
Are you working on your startup? <comment><USER2> Therapeutically, 1-2 days of 12 hour stints. If I am not programming, I am researching for it. Today I am doing some translations for a Free Software app.

Most days I have about few hours I spend reading specs, history, books. And I have emacs and slime running at all times, so I code about 2-3 times a day just trying things out. Everything is done in a Lisp repl; i might do calculations, test stuff I read in the spec, few attempts at solving someone's problem on IRC or Usenet,or trying out new API.

Just yesterday I hacked up stuff using the Dropbox API, and I ported a few OOP stuff from the Dylan spec to CLOS. Last week I wrote a util that separates the audio and video tracks in FLV videos; because my fiancee wants to listen to youtube vids in her MP3 player.

etc.

Just productive procrastination.

FWIW, I have ~600+ _.lisp,_.sh, _.c and_.asm files in my ~hacks directory, with absolutely no method to the madness. I sometimes forget I have done something previously and do it again. Gotta automate that part of my fun life I guess.

[Edit:

Lest my employer sees this; I wasn't counting work hours. Of course I put in 9+ hours of highly productive programming, design and analysis. Things that are crucial to meet our business objectives and execute our shared vision. Ooooh, shiny LLVM plugin!

]

<comment><USER3> Interesting to hear you say that you forget code you've written and do it again. I do the same. Code is so dense that I get the impression that the brain just has to do a bit of mark and sweep.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It depends on a lot of factors. How interesting the work is, how much other stuff there is that has to be done, how rested I am. Some weeks I don't code at all (some months even!), but then I make up for it by working extra hard.

I've always thought that if you do your work as a programmer well you get to a point where things 'just work' even if you don't code every day, and it has been my goal to be able to take more than a month off from work without being missed.

System administration is similar, most if not all of it has been automated to the point where I can sleep through the night unless there is a major crisis (say a power failure at a hosting facility, but even then, there's not much that you can do but sit around and wait for things to come back up and that's automated too... but I find it hard to ignore such things even in the knowledge that I can't do anything).

Major bouts of coding usually indicate either a fascination with something new and shiny or an unforeseen crisis.

Other things I do with my time: spend it with family, travel a lot, meet people.

I'm also not too impressed with the effort I put in but I remember years when 16+ hour days where the norm and I'm still coasting on the stuff I built back then, so I don't feel too bad about it.

I've been working on my 'start-up' for the better part of 12 years now and that also is part of why I don't feel particularly motivated to work extremely hard on it, the challenging bits all got taken care of long ago, all that's left is maintenance and staying 'current'.

</comment><comment><USER5> Before working on my startup, but with full-time development job:

1) Weekdays: 8 hours at job, occasionally another 2 at home on hobby stuff. 6 hours on hobby stuff on Saturday or Sunday (rarely both) on most weekends. Hobby stuff almost always related to game development.

Currently:

1) Often 7 days a week, for 10-12 hours on weekdays that I dedicate to programming and 4ish hours per Saturday/Sunday if I decide to do stuff.

2) Spend time with my wife, visit family/friends, and RARELY record some music / play video games.

3) Yup. And even with the hours mentioned above, it's been pretty great so far :)

Oh, I should add that programming hours just count for me sitting at my computer with the goal to write code. There's lots of thinking, researching, reading documentation, and of course procrastination on things like HN in those hours.

</comment><comment><USER6> Monday thru Friday, 9am to 6pm I work as a programmer.

Monday thru Wednesday code my own projects from about 630 till 1 or 2am.

Thursday I play in a pool league, so I play pool from about 7pm to 10 or 11pm. Then I head home to code for an hour or so.

Friday/Saturday consists of heavy drinking. Sunday is recovery and I plan the rest of my week out and research what I'm going to code.

You will need balance when you code because you will burn yourself out if you do it 24/7. That's why the weekend is reserved for fun and planning what I'm gonna do. I try not to do any coding on those 3 days. It works for me, it might not work for you.

</comment><comment><USER7> Depends on the problem I'm attacking.

If I'm planning out architecture, I'll write code for an hour or less and then go get coffee and write notes. Basically I "ramp up" to a complete implementation by starting out on something and seeing if it has a major flaw.

If it's coding up something deep and algorithmic(e.g. recently I started implementing a small scripting language and associated type inference engine), I'm going to be buried in it more-or-less continously for however many days it takes.

If it's debugging the deep algorithm, I'll work on it off-and-on(the stage I'm in now with the type system project) in blocks of an hour to a few hours at a time. This is the stage where a lot of insight is needed so I don't push myself too much to "force" solutions to appear.

If it's a "trivial features + fixes" type of thing, I'll procrastinate a ton and then take the hour or two needed to finish. Since this is most of what I do I spent a lot of time procrastinating.

In the rest of my (working) time I'm mostly focused on game design tasks. I'm working with two others on a Flash/iOS game, and I'm taking the lead design/implementation role. We meet occasionally, several times a week; so I don't own a startup, per-se(one of my partners is in charge of the business aspects), but I'm doing something entrepreneurial just the same.

Outside of work, I mostly try to relax(walking and some body-weight exercise), clear my mind(some occasional meditation), and learn a little(reading). My social activities are mostly online, these days. When I have time, my friends don't. And when they do, I don't. So I only get to hang out occasionally.

</comment><comment><USER8> Seven days a week, from say 4 - 16 hours in a day, depending on other work that I have to do. When I don't have something that I need to program, I usually find something that I want to program and work on it. I played around with node.js for a while and recently was laying the groundwork to learn Obj-C. (By writing command line programs in Obj-C and compiling them with gcc. Xcode gives me the willies.)

I'm currently involved in a startup.

I also run a startup group (monthly). I run several times a week and try to cook a nice meal several times a week as well. I occasionally go to a movie or out to a bar/club with my gf.

If you're unsatisfied I would recommend learning as many new things as possible. I really find learning a new framework or language helps me keep moving forward.

</comment><comment><USER9> I write code every day. Depending on the day, how I'm feeling, what I'm working on, etc, I'll spend more or less hours doing it. Every day I hit a wall where I'm done coding for the day and I've learned to embrace that. My brain and my body just say "stop working" and I do. Sometimes I hit that wall after 4 hours, sometimes I hit it after 12 or more. I've learned that if I try to push myself to work past that wall, my work becomes lower quality and I don't really pay attention to what I'm doing.

</comment><comment><USER10> 11AM-5PM: customer support, customer development, business development, marketing/PR planning, and other tasks that require communicating with normal humans in the working world.

6PM->2AM: Only coding... and with no distractions, the 8 hours are highly highly productive.

(6 days a week)

Think Maker's schedule. If you're not already selling your product and if you don't have much prototype to show, time should be 100% focussed on product development.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm working on my second startup and trying to keep the hands-on coding versus commercial work to a 50/50 split. Remember, your coding time will be a subset of your actual time spent on technical work, even if you are developing a system from scratch - its important to understand that as a founder your days are very interrupt driven which leads to lots of distraction, try to find a routine where you get 'quality' time to get your coding done.

</comment><comment><USER12> All the time. It has varied over the years, but for the last 6 months:

1) 7 days a week. Usually at least 6-10 hours on weekdays when not dealing with the business side of things. 10-12 hours on weekends since there are fewer distractions. I have also been coding in my sleep more frequently...

2) Watch cartoons and play music. See related comment here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1350743>

3) Yes. Notifo - <http://notifo.com/>

That may seem like a whole lot of time to spend coding (and it is!), but I truly _love_ to write code. I am my own boss, so it's not like I am being forced in any way to do it. I just find it fascinating.

<comment><USER13> That's exactly how I feel. If I don't make an actual effort to be social, I'll spend every second I get "working". I love it so much it doesn't feel like work and that's the real blessing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> When I was in startup mode, the first 4 months was 10-12 hours of programming, 7 days a week. I may not have showered every day, but I sure as hell made forward progress. It was a remarkably "pure" feeling.

Turns out that's not a sustainable pace. Not only do you run out of stamina, you run out of _ideas_.

Now I work at a medium-sized but incredibly fast-paced company. I write code every day. But since I work on performance and not a particular feature, my checkins tend to be small but well-chosen. A few people I work with have net- negative lines-of-code scores.

</comment><comment><USER15> I usually code 5-7 days of the week, ranging from 1/2 hr - 7 hrs. My hands are the limiting factor in this regard, seeing as my carpal tunnel syndrome dictates the amount of time I spend on my computer.

And if I'm not coding, I read about programming/implementation/software design/etc. Currently I'm working through "The Mythical Man-Month" and "Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach Featuring the Internet". For non- computer-related stuff, I run, I spend time with my boyfriend and cats. I also recently got into Rabbids: Go Home! on the Wii. Programming is my passion, so naturally most of my time is spent on related subjects. My sister faults me on spending so much time on my computer, but I am constantly amazed at the incredible breadth and depth of the topic! I wouldn't have it any other way; breaks from the subject are important, but no other interest of mine compares in scale to this one.

Don't have a startup. Setting up my personal business/front for freelancing & contracting.

</comment><comment><USER16> I only sit down and write code for maybe 5-10 hours a week. Programming is always on my mind, so I am mentally preparing my work at all times. I am working on a startup full time. I spend the rest of my time on diversions which are not too mentally taxing, like exercise and watching movies.

</comment><comment><USER17> 7 days a week, at least few hours a week. Usually up to 12 hours a day. Saddly, most of that time is more or less procrastination :(

I spend the rest of my time cycling, listening to music, browsing interwebs, making food and just well.. living my life.

Yes, I'm working on my startup

</comment><comment><USER18> M-F 8 hours a day at work, 7-7.5 of which are programming. Pair programming exclusively; if my pair isn't there, I'm not doing anything more complex than fixing a broken test, writing a new one, or maybe CSS/layout changes.

This leaves me pretty tired on the weekdays, so I read HN but generally stay away from coding for myself (maybe 30 minutes to an hour). Weekends I don't do much more. Somewhere between one and four hours total between both days.

I'd like to code more in my free time (currently I lurk the internet or play games), but coming from a full day of pairing, after having only ever paired while writing production code, I find attempting to sit by myself and produce quite a bit harder.

edit: Oh, and I'm not at a startup.

</comment><comment><USER19> I probably code half of my time, with data analysis, testing , thinking about approaches, etc. taking the rest.

My startup is not really a startup anymore, it is 10 years old :) and as such we are more in maintenance mode for most of the product lines.

</comment><comment><USER20> Typically I spend about 6 hours a day programming. Sometimes many hours more if what I'm doing is extremely absorbing. I have a no programming on the weekend rule and have a diverse number of hobbies that keep me occupied...

</comment><comment><USER21> I find that I spend much less time programming than I did in my early 20's.

For work I do 8-10 hours 5 days a week doing programming/server admin/researching.

Depending on burnout, I work on personal projects 0-5 hours on Saturday and Sunday and 0-2 hours during the week. Lately its been closer to 0 hours. Personal projects are generally game related.

Recently I've been spending about 1 hour per day exercising.

Other than that I spend time hanging out with the girlfriend/friends and doing nothing (relaxing).

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm not really a programmer, but I'm a front end web developer. When I'm working on a project I usually spend the full day split between; design, research, and coding. The amount of time I spend between these things is about 7hrs/4days a week. In my spare time I work on freelance projects.

</comment><comment><USER23> After getting a 9 to 5 doing web development I rarely program in my free time. I usually open vim, write a few lines, lose interest and start browsing the internet or hanging out with friends. :/</comment>


Ask HN: B2C CRM with email marketing integration? - <AUTHOR>

@patio11 emphasizes doing frequent and appropriate mailings. It's good advice! It works well for us.
But what is a good B2C CRM able to be well-integrated wil email marketing?
We do detailed segmentation of our mailing list and I can't find a good B2C CRM that integrates sufficiently with an email mktg platform.
I'm currently looking into synching many more fields (needed for segmenting) from Zoho CRM to MailChimp via API with CloudWork/ItDuzzit/Zapier. Their defaults are useless (3-5 main fields), as we need complete contact info in order to segment well. <comment><USER2> Couldn't find an email address in your profile... We're about to launch something that may well address your needs; it's been an itch of ours as well.

I'd love to share the URL to the product right now, but we're really not ready to be judged just yet (at least not our world-facing website). So if you are interested in having a look at a beta in a few weeks time. Shoot me an email (address in profile). :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, most people simply reach me via @TweetSmarter. Have emailed you now :-)</comment></comment>


Dynamic_cast(C)++ - <AUTHOR> http://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/dynamic_cast_std_integer_c.html

<comment><USER2> Don't forget Bjarne Stroustrup's [http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:JyMHnEtpuZgJ:t...](http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:JyMHnEtpuZgJ:theory.cs.uni- bonn.de/~ignatios/white%2520space%252098.pdf+Overloading+of+C%2B%2B+Whitespace&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESgbozSsC6N43XD1hDJI21nqkKGYoQtpxWs1SBP7sbzCDufxtMwHYFXRzk6KYe03FyaajeIinKacO3y504P2c9IkSOauuFp07rbTXpxIphOdogmJIzCefTt0PGwMp4WELDYVMr6u&sig=AHIEtbTVNtr9i9lVkpWGBQBTDSywn2IuJw) Generalizing Overloading for C++2000. We'd all be a lot better off if we'd just listened back then.

<comment><USER3> He does a good job of making the justifications for each feature almost plausible. Whitespace as operator overloading for physicists who want to write "x y" to mean "x times y." Sure, why not?

<comment><USER4> operator (....) {} :p

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Someone, somewhere will read this and use it as a basis for upcoming interview question answers. Now my job is more complicated by the fact that I have to separate the gullible from the ignorant. Thanks...

</comment><comment><USER6> Early April fools?

<comment><USER7> _To reflect the enhancements to the language since 1983, the name of the language has been changed to: dynamic_cast <std::integer>(C)++._

I would think so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> You knew the pedantry was going to come.

The title is invalid syntax. Or at least I'm pretty sure it is unless you have a function or class named Dynamic_cast. I hate C++.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is - HN stripped out the template name from the title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> xD

Looks frighteningly real in a few places.

<comment><USER10> Maybe there's a C++ equivalent for Poe's law where real C++ extension drafts are indistinguishable from parodies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I love point #2: all local variables must be explicitly freed. Truly raises the bar on breaking backwards compatibility :)

<comment><USER12> Hey, given how the price of memory has fallen I would consider that sufficiently backward compatible.

Data doesn't need to be deleted these days. not even in RAM!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> shared_ptr & weak_ptr are way cooler</comment>


Ask HN: How do hackers hack? - <AUTHOR>

How do hackers hack into systems and networks, like how do they discover vulnerabilities. Is it possible to learn this? Can you guys share some examples. I have briefly read through a few hacking for dummies type of books, but non of those techniques would actualy work in real life. In the news you see so many of headlines claiming hackers hacked into bla bla. But it has always confused me of how they acctual do it. It would be awesome if you guys can share your thoughts. <comment><USER2> I can call myself a hacker maybe - start from reading some blogs and articles, maybe books too, but you have to be a good programmer first.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am preety good at programing, even know assembly. But still its really boggles my mind of how these folks acctualy hack?

<comment><USER2> Start with simple concept like SQL injection or XSS. And keep thinking about how you can use your code in a bad way. Check my blog too - homakov.blogspot.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> nice try FBI.</comment>


Even Recreational Marijuana May Be Linked To Brain Changes - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2014/04/15/even-recreational-marijuana-may-be-linked-to-brain-changes/

<comment><USER2> This is not that surprising; one would expect the brain to adapt after exposure to a substance that affects its chemistry.

It is also completely meaningless, as there is no comparison done to measure brain change in response to alcohol, nicotine, sugar, caffeine or even different diets.

Finally, the article implies the brain change is harmful with no explanation, which puts it square into junk science land. Shame on the authors.

</comment><comment><USER3> How is 11.2 joints a week use categorized as recreational use?

[http://jn.sfn.org/press/April-16-2014-Issue/zns01614005529.p...](http://jn.sfn.org/press/April-16-2014-Issue/zns01614005529.pdf)

Marijuana use control MJ user No. days/week 0 3.83 (2.36) N/A No. joints/week 0 11.2 (9.61) N/A No. joints/occasion 0 1.80 (0.77) N/A No. smoking occasions/day 0 1.80 (0.70) N/A Age of onset (years) — 16.6 (2.13) N/A Duration of use (years) — 6.21 (3.43) N/A

I would consider that to be more than recreational use.

<comment><USER4> do they quantify the joint too in terms of weight?

<comment><USER3> No. They could be smoking giant Bob Marley joints.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The problem is that pretty much anything we do differently from our ancestors harms the brain while it is still growing. Using sugar casually probably harms the brain just as much as smoking pot casually does.

Sitting all day harms the brain. Heck, living in certain parts of the country can harm the brain.

I agree with limiting pot use until the age of 18 but that applies to everything else that's unnatural as well, such as sugar and salt (assuming we set a limit that's healthy based on ancestor's diet and no BS chemicals).

So many things changed in the last century that our bodies can't adapt quickly to support our diet and lifestyle. It takes tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years for the body to adapt to the environment we're living in and how we're using our bodies. That's why obesity is starting to become #1 problem for the whole world as we continue to go further into the information age.

<comment><USER2> Not sure if pot smoking is something we do different from our ancenstors...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Bullshit study. Sampling of 40 people means nothing. Also, it said that certain parts of brain changed in terms of shape and density but did not determine whether this is a bad or good thing. In addition, I would like to know who funded the study.

<comment><USER7> Paper: [http://jn.sfn.org/press/April-16-2014-Issue/zns01614005529.p...](http://jn.sfn.org/press/April-16-2014-Issue/zns01614005529.pdf)

The statistical treatment looks solid, good p-values and they even controlled for multiple testing with an adjusted p-value cut-off (alpha) of p < 0.0125

Funding is a bit biased: This work was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (Grants 14118,026002,026104,and 027804 to H.C.B. and Grant 034093 to J.M.G.), the Office of National Drug Control Policy, Counterdrug Technology Assessment Center (Grants DABK39-03-0098 and DABK39-03-C-0098), and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institutes of Health (Grant 052368 to A.J.B.). H.C.B. was also supported by the Warren Wright Adolescent Center at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and Northwestern University, Chicago.J.M.G. was supported by a Harvard Medical School Norman E. Zinberg Fellowship in Addiction Psychiatry Research

Figure 1 has the gist, interestingly, gray matter density slightly increased with Marijuana usage. The changes weren't that extreme for the most part, but statistically significant. The L accumbens has the largest F (Table 2), indicating a larger difference in gray matter density, the other areas don't look that extreme.

I guess no-one can really say what that means exactly - is it good, is it bad? Everything you do seems to change the structure of your brain in some way (like reading a novel [1]), so it's really hard to tell whether this is 'good' or 'bad'.

P.S.: It's a bit annoying that Internet discussions about publications nowadays immediately just scream 'sample size!' without looking at the stats themselves.

[1] [http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/01/study-r...](http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/01/study- reading-a-novel-changes-your-brain/282952/)

<comment><USER8> Any time stats are used as "evidence" then you know its bs. You can just keep picking variables until you got a chart you want.</comment></comment></comment>


The Classic Super Star Trek Game - <AUTHOR> http://www.almy.us/sst.html <comment><USER2> > In December 2013 I added three new commands -- CLOAK to cloak the > Enterprise...

A true Star Trek fan would know this violates the Treaty of Algeron: [http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Algeron](http://en.memory- alpha.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Algeron)

<comment><USER3> it mentions it in the game :)

under "help cloak"

> The Treaty of Algeron with the Romulans in Stardate 2311 prohibits the use > of cloaking devices. If a Romulan ship observes you cloaking or uncloaking > after this point in time you will be in violation, which will hurt your > final score.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Upon seeing this game, Tom Nelson and a friend wrote Begin, a tactical Star Trek simulation. It's been in C for over a decade, and still has a following. You can find it on Abandonia and other places. Even has a Wikipedia page. Though as far as I know it ISNT based on the Star Trek Battles paper game as suggested there. I'll ask Tom tomorrow.

<comment><USER5> The Begin series is fantastic!

There's actually a third game now, for Windows, you can find it here: [http://www.starfleetproject.com/](http://www.starfleetproject.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, this is one of the first computer games that I played. It was running on an HP minicomputer connected to a teletype device with a paper printout.

<comment><USER7> Same for me, but our Teletype Model 33 had to use a 300 baud acoustic coupler to connect to the HP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I learned programming by reading the source code of this game in the fantastic book by David Ahl. I still remember an array called K which contained the X,Y coordinates and shield strength of each Klingon warship.

<comment><USER9> Oh, wow, that takes me back. I haven't thought about that book in over 25 years...

[http://www.amazon.com/BASIC-Computer-Games-Microcomputer- Dav...](http://www.amazon.com/BASIC-Computer-Games-Microcomputer- David/dp/0894800523)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I remember playing Star Trek on HP teletypes connected to the Peoria mainframe in the high school math lab. Jeez we burned through a lot of paper.

A friend modded a version to automatically fire photon torpedoes when you entered a sector with Klingons. It calc'd the trajectory so it never missed.

Of course the downside was the blow back if you shot one right next to you. Or if there was a star in the way. Or there were >3 Klingons that would hammer you while the computer is cycling through the auto firing sequence.

<comment><USER11> Illinois?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I remember playing this game as well, many, many years ago.

If memory serves, I was playing it on thermal printer that eventually became the TI "Silent 700" series.

I believe the program was written in what was called "Super Fortran" at the time.

It was a great deal of fun.

[1] [http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/ti- tymshare-100/...](http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/ti- tymshare-100/DSC02096.JPG)

</comment><comment><USER13> Watch! if you don't want to play it !

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-XWl9x13PU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-XWl9x13PU)

</comment><comment><USER14> Great game. I played it recently in CPM on my Altair clone.

<comment><USER15> ok, i just tried it again. Still have no clue how to move or fire. That version is too simplistic (just fire a torpedo at X Y and you destroy the klingon) and the bsdgame original is completely arcane. this is what the man page says about movement and targeting:

""" The course is determined by the Space Inertial Navigation System [SINS]. As described in Star Fleet Technical Order TO:02:06:12, the SINS is calibrated, after which it becomes the base for navigation. If damaged, navigation becomes inaccurate. When it is fixed, Spock recalibrates it, however, it cannot be calibrated extremely accurately until you dock at starbase. """

looking at the source it validates course as 0 to 360.. so looks like angle. yet 0 goes up. 90 goes up...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> meh. this game was painful to be played after the 80s.

here is the usual session [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-XWl9x13PU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-XWl9x13PU)

every time i started that game because people around me said it was fun, it reminded me of the "typical novice's session with ed" after a while.

[http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?EdIsTheStandardTextEditor](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?EdIsTheStandardTextEditor)

         Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty ed:

      golem> ed

      ?
      help
      ?
      ?
      ?
      quit
      ?
      exit
      ?
      bye
      ?
      hello?
      ?
      eat flaming death
      ?
      ^C
      ?
      ^C
      ?
      ^D
      ?

If you still want to play it, you distro probably have a package called bsdgames on the main package repo.

</comment><comment><USER16> Emscripten .js port Plz.

<comment><USER17> Here you go - [http://z-machine.appspot.com/game/ztrek/play/](http://z-machine.appspot.com/game/ztrek/play/)

(It is actually not emscripten -- it uses a z-machine emulator I adapted to js a long time ago to run the z-machine version of star trek. But - should be good enough :) )

<comment><USER16> Thank you!! :D</comment></comment></comment>


Don't blame addicts for America's opioid crisis. Here are the real culprits - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/13/dont-blame-addicts-for-americas-opioid-crisis-real-culprits <comment><USER2> One of the commenters pinned part of the problem down: as opposed to countries like Spain, where opioids are given in hospitals, Americans are left to essentially self-medicate.

A Tale of Two Surgeries:

A good friend and I had exactly the same type of benign tumors removed, within a year of each other, around 2006-7.

Her surgery was outpatient, and she was sent home an hour after the procedure with 30 doses of Vicodin, which even back then she shied away from taking more than a few doses of. The whole thing cost over $6,000, most of which her insurance picked up, but she was still on the hook for about $1,000. She joked that she could have covered a lot of that by selling off the unused Vicodin. She didn't.

My surgery was outpatient, but my surgeon told me that she might decide to have me stay overnight for observation. I passed out when I saw the normal amount of blood, so she had me stay. I received paracetamol (Tylenol) and Tramadol (weak prescription opioid), given to me by the nurse. I went home the next day, fearing the bill for an emergency overnight. I took home a week's worth of Tramadol and instructions to write down when I took it to show my doctor who I had a follow-up with in a few days.

I shouldn't have worried: the whole thing was 1400 EUR, which my US-based insurance company paid with surprising alacrity.

My friend was a grad student at UW Seattle, treated in their system, and I was a US Army IT contractor, working in Germany, treated at a small city's hospital.

</comment><comment><USER3> ugh I'd argue that addiction is much more so a result of America's failed medical system, failed mental health system, long slow decay and the internalization of it's populace that the american dream has always been a lie and what little of it that every existed was a cruel and dehumanizing experience.

<comment><USER4> It's so cruel and dehumanizing to have live in the wealthiest country in the world, with one of the highest standards of living.

<comment><USER5> America is indeed one of the wealthiest countries in the world, but that wealth is not spread evenly across the country. Most of the wealth is concentrated on the coasts, with incredibly skews towards NY/SF. See: [http://labs.time.com/story/how-many-rich-people-live-near- yo...](http://labs.time.com/story/how-many-rich-people-live-near-you/) Many of us in tech, esp those in NY/SF tend to live in a bubble of wealth, or at least comfort -- that is not the case for all our fellow citizens.

Much of the country is not that rich at all, especially once you get to central parts of the country where industry has fled leaving people with odd jobs and insufficient healthcare. The opoid crisis centers around parts of America which are the hardest hit financially: [http://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/23/health/heroin-opioid- drug-...](http://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/23/health/heroin-opioid-drug- overdose-deaths-visual-guide/index.html)

Finally, there is also something about expectations. For my generation, we grew up hearing "work hard, study hard, and you will live a good life, own a home, enjoy the life your father and grandfather lived." Except that formula does not work anymore -- industries which worked for our parents got offshored and we're now competing internationally. An entire generation still holds the expectations of an American lifestyle, buying a home with our 8-5 factory job, having barbecues in our backyard, playing "Where the Boys Are" but that expectation is no longer valid for all, leading to unmet psychological contract an entire generation expected to live.

<comment> at-fates-hands >> America is indeed one of the wealthiest countries in the world, but that wealth is not spread evenly across the country.

This is the blessing and curse of capitalism.

You have winners and you have losers. In strong economic times, the rising tides will lift all boats and everybody benefits. When the shit hits the fan, those who are prepared, suffer less. Those with no safety net will suffer more, but there's plenty of government assistance to help those people when they hit hard times.

You can cry however much you want to, but the opportunity is out there. You can take online free courses, you can get scholarships and get your college paid for. You can go to a technical college and be employed in a trade in two years if not sooner. The best thing is that ITS UP TO YOU to make it happen. You can sit around and watch everybody and life pass you by, or you can put in the effort, change things up and find a different route than your parents did to be successful.

Success is out there my friend, but nobody is going to just hand it to you.

<comment><USER6> _You can cry however much you want to, but the opportunity is out there._

There are numbers on this and they don't back up your argument at all. The US has some of worst economic mobility of developed countries [1]. Its almost as bad as the UK which has an archaic class system. You're perpetuating a myth.

Also, this idea that people are "crying" about it is a myth. People are angry.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_United_States)

<comment><USER7> WNYC did a five part series on poverty myths, including the myth of rags to riches for most people - [http://www.wnyc.org/series/busted-americas-poverty- myths](http://www.wnyc.org/series/busted-americas-poverty-myths)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There are, not surprisingly, persons who actually truly really have chronic pain, and who benefit from use of opioids -- and miracle of miracles, some of those persons use the opioids responsibly and as directed. They may become tolerant of the medication (this is a biochemical/biological response to exposure to opioids and is NOT the same thing as addiction), but the medication can give the patient very significant relief from suffering. This type of patient should have access to opioids under the guidance of a knowledgeable physician, at whatever dose is necessary for relief of suffering.

However, this same medicine produces a sort of a buzz or feeling of euphoria desired by persons who are not truly suffering from chronic pain. Since in the USA (and many countries) opioids are restricted to prescription only and are not legally usable for the 'buzz', persons who seek this effect of opioids have 2 choices: (1) see a medical doctor and pretend to have pain that requires treatment with opioids, or (2) purchase an opioid through non-legal pathways, and assume all the legal and medical risks of doing so (arrest, incarceration, violence, inadvertent overdose via unknown content of purchased supply).

Also, in the good old USA, treatment for addiction is expensive and not available for those w/o medical insurance or other source of funding -- it is not a right or benefit of citizenship, but a private matter for negotiation with the service provider. So many persons who might benefit from addiction treatment are never treated.

So the 'blame' for the opioid crisis goes beyond drug manufacturers, and includes addicts themselves, the medico-legal system that drives addicts into doctor's offices to pretend to have pain to get an opioid prescription, the lack of treatment for many addicted persons, and the legal (public health) decision to treat use of opioids in the context of addiction as a crime and not a disease.

So don't just blame drug manufacturers. there is plenty of blame to spread around to other actors! JMHO.

</comment><comment><USER9> _... too often that addiction began by following the advice of a doctor who, in turn, was following the drug manufacturers instructions._

ok. it's the doctors and big pharma. so, let's get doctors to prescribe fewer painkillers? is that the policy proposal?

the next thing you see is a news story about the huge amount of unnecessary suffering because our evil, immature government has unjustly demonized painkillers, which are, after all, just good medicine and common sense.

these stories go around and around.

<comment><USER10> The only reason you'll see the demonizing articles you mentioned is because the news media is approximately 70% funded by pharma.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Americans feel entitled for a quick cure for any ailment that befalls them. They demand pain killers for cough and antibiotics. Norco 5/325 is the most dispensed drug in the pharmacy and is now commonly prescribed for cough here. BigPharma works because there is an open market eagerly to abuse and consume as much as possible.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think there's another culprit : not letting patients see a doctor, and the general quality of doctors.

I was admitted to the hospital recently at 2am with a stomach (I think) issue. It hurt like hell. This was in a big hospital in the middle of a huge city. It was extremely clear what the issue was, but without a doctor, policy is, no diagnosis will be made, and of course that means, you can't get so much as a drink of water, never mind medicine.

Of course, there was no doctor anywhere near me until well past 11am (effectively the day after). He did a blood test, which showed mild inflammation, and otherwise nothing. He gave the industrial strength version of an anti-inflammation med and some stomach drugs. An hour later, everything had disappeared.

Analyzing the situation, I can only conclude that the doctor only had a few negatives to go on, and that's why he took this action. It wasn't appendicitis. It (probably) wasn't acidosis (a leak in the stomach). It wasn't an actual wound, either visible or internal bleeding. It wasn't ... But zero positive diagnoses. So he gave something against stomach cramps and a milder painkiller, and patient (me) happily goes home, not because the pain stops but because I was unable to detect the pain any longer. I don't know how they work, but I am sure he gets to add 1 to his "patients cured" tab for the quarter and the government and my insurance (and me, of course) will get billed for that.

Needless to say, issue restarted the very next day. I still have no idea what the problem is, but why go back to the hospital or GP (GP is worse than hospital).

So you might wonder, what is done to someone who is admitted to the hospital with painful, but trivial complaints, to avoid having to allocate a doctor to them ? Well, large doses of morfine (enough that I couldn't walk without toppling) combined with other painkillers (not sure which). Because that's the only thing they have permission to do.

But this allowed me to put the pieces together of things I already knew : Unfortunately there are a ton of painful ailments (just wait until you're 45 and you pull your back. It will happen, I guarantee it. But there's stomach problems, there's hairline fractures (ouch), there's heart issues, there's blood vessel obstructions (ie. the dr. house problem), there's unfixed "mild" allergic reactions, ...). They won't entirely prevent you from moving or even working, but they hurt like hell, all the time 24x7x365. You'll find out that the pain easily exceeds what you can reasonably work with, even at a desk. But there is no obvious problem.

Pray tell, what is a patient supposed to do who fails to get a decent diagnosis, but has an unidentified long term painful ailment ? Other than getting strong painkillers on a regular basis ?

Of course, these people will fight for their painkillers.

But we, as a society, have decided that saving costs by sabotaging the training of physicians, resulting in far too few available physicians (and too incompetent), and even when you have a physician, they don't have easy access to diagnosis equipment, or labs. Everything has to be shared, accounted for, and nothing can be done by the doctor. It must all instead be done by people who, in the worst cases, have no knowledge of what they're doing beyond the safety instruction video (but even in the best cases never have a physician's knowledge). I am not against specialization, but having blood tests done by people who would not be able to recognize a heart attack from a test result is strictly not an efficient use of resources. It's killing people to save 5$.

The consequence of this is a LOT of older people undiagnosed, and utterly dependent on very strong painkillers.

I am also convinced we won't fix it.

<comment><USER2> That was one of the big differences I saw in medical care here in Germany: pretty much all primary care physicians, and all gynecologists, have ultrasound machines at their practices and do the scans themselves. Sometimes the devices are a bit older, but there's such a lively market for them that I've seen old ultrasound machines at veterinary offices!

They are also very, very reluctant to prescribe opioid-based painkillers, and even the over the counter ones like ibuprofen or paracetamol (acetaminophen) are sold in 10-packs and truly from behind the pharmacist's counter, not economy-sized jars of 500 on grocery store shelves.</comment></comment>


New algorithm determines ideal caffeine dosage and timing for alertness - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180604093116.htm <comment><USER2> Being funded by the military, I imagine this study is predominately towards the goal of keeping soldiers / pilots awake on long-running operations and/or mitigating combat fatigue through the use of caffeine pills or combined stimulants. Not that it makes it any less interesting, but from the average caffeine consumer's perspective, this encounters a practical barrier in precisely dosing caffeine through coffee or tea.</comment>


An alternative for tech interview process - <AUTHOR> Many feel that current interview process is almost worthless and the only guarantee it provides is you are not hiring worst of the worst. Also, within a hiring company hardly any employee is an expert interviewer and there is no standard criterion, which makes the process even more useless. Hiring team wastes time in going through tonnes of candidates and candidates waste time in preparing differently for different companies. Maybe following can be an alternative-

    1. The hiring team should only do culture and personality fit, which will be the last phase.
    2. One or two interview for above should be sufficient, could even be one-to-many type interview.
    3. A 3rd-party company should bear the burden of technical interviewing.
    4. Anyways, everyone asks similar questions so doesn't matter who asks it but having specialized company interview for various tech companies will ensure certain level of consistency.
    5. Since this 3rd-party will focus just on technical interviewing skills/process, it will become expert in this domain.
    6. Taking it further, the interview could be SAT/GRE type score, valid for certain duration (3-6 months). Take the test, apply to various companies at your own pace.
    7. Such standardized score could also help reduce size of target company, further saving candidate's time.
    8. May be candidate can opt for in-person interview and still get standardized score.
    9. Since 3rd-party has no other thing but to interview, it should be able to provide whole gamut of options - in-person, online, whiteboard, with IDE, with vim, specialty topics, pick-your-own topics, etc. Hiring company set their criteria, candidates set their own and someone finds a match.

 Process can be further tweaked in umpteen ways but will ensure a degree of standardization across industry. Multiple third-party companies will compete for better services and will get engaged accordingly. Is this viable alternative? <comment><USER2> Seems like a good idea to me. We need to think about a. Feedback loop on quality of hiring (to the 3P company) b. What is the check for 3P company maintains the quality level c. There will be many 3P companies doing this. How they candidates move from one to another (if need be)? d. Training programs to candidates if they are weak in some area. e. What stops 3P company from evil doing? Trust?

<comment><AUTHOR> > What is the check for 3P company maintains the quality level

It'll be quality of hire. Eventually, hiring company does culture/personality fit but can also do some quick filtering (and hopefully not full-fledged interview) to ascertain the quality. Same would apply for trust too. Eventually, it's in 3P's benefit to have good process as there would be multiple players.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This exists but I forget the name of the company. They claim that you can do one interview and automatically get multiple offers depending on your score.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are leetcode and such but AFAIK they are all focused towards interview practice.</comment></comment>


Show HN: µTT – A new faster MQTT broker - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/uNetworking/uTT <comment><USER3> Maybe this post should be "Show HN"?

I am happy for you, hope this grows!

However, may I suggest you add to description on GitHub page some more info? Performance is only a part of equation and description only talks about that. Did you give any thought to reliability and robustness? How about security? It is written in C++ - was it fuzzed? Does it support TLS? Authentication?

These are much more important questions (to me) at this time (disclosure: using Mosquitto and happy with it, didn't hit bottlenecks yet). I have no doubt you will address them sooner or later, but it might be good to start working on some of them as soon as possible - or, if you already have this covered, to write about it.

Of course, I might not be your target customer, at least at this stage, in which case please disregard this advice. :)

<comment><USER4> I was very excited to see this post since I happen to be looking for a scalable high performance MQTT broker.

The first thing I noticed when I opened the GitHub page was the lack of documentation. Then I opened the source files. No headers describing what each module does. No method headers. No code comments. Nothing that would let me get a feel of how well this could fit into my project without doing a lot of code reading...

Maybe I'm just an old fart and need to accept that this is the way code is written these days, but with my own projects I always tried to make sure that at least minimal documentation was available and that the code was easy to read and understand before releasing it to the world.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry but HackerNews thinks they know better so they mod the title into something misleading.

Original title was "I'm developing a new and faster MQTT broker" with extra focus on "developing". It is a 7 day prototype, not a finished product. The naming is not even known to be final at this point.

Thanks

<comment><USER4> Ah, that explains a lot - I was not aware that HN was editing titles. Will be watching the project with interest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you need a demo use case, we provide an open MQTT feed of some 1500 public transport vehicles, soon once per second (plus per-stop departure prediction feeds): host mqtt.hsl.fi, port 443 and 1883, topic /hfp/#

<comment><USER6> Out of curiosity, which vehicles/city?

<comment><USER5> HSL provides the bus, tram, suburban rail, subway and ferry system in the Helsinki metropolitan area.

<comment><USER7> I've written a few toys that use their GraphQL API to show real-time displays of trams. Pretty neat system.

<comment><USER5> Thanks! Waiting for your MQTT integration ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's great to see a message broker that's optimised for performance - <USER2> looked at the source of a few of the more popular brokers it's clear that there's a lot of overhead in many of them (object allocation/boxing, multiple copies being made of the data, inefficient serialisation, verbose wire protocols and so on).

I'd be really interested to see how uTT performs compares to Aeron[0], which, while not MQTT, as far as I'm aware it is the fastest message transport around[1,2].

[0] [https://github.com/real-logic/Aeron](https://github.com/real-logic/Aeron)

[1] [https://github.com/benalexau/rpc-bench](https://github.com/benalexau/rpc- bench)

[2] [http://akka.io/blog/2016/12/05/aeron-in- artery](http://akka.io/blog/2016/12/05/aeron-in-artery)

</comment><comment><USER9> Does it scale horizontally or it is bound to a single machine?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Please note my original title was "I'm developing a new and faster MQTT broker".

HackerNews changed it and I cannot edit. Point being (a) I do not even know the naming is final, (b) this is in no way a finished product, it is a 7 day prototype.

</comment><comment><USER10> Have you also compared with NATS?

<comment><USER11> Interesting thread, and it is always good to see performance pushed by OSS messaging. NATS is lightweight and performant as well. Both are TCP based - any thoughts around other transports underneath (LPWAN, BLE, etc)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm really excited about this. It's by the creator of uWebSockets[0], alexhultman[1]. It looks like it builds heavily on his work there. Based on the performance compared to redis, this is already an impressive start. Excited to see where this goes! I also second an attempt at comparing it to ZeroMQ, even though they're obviously somewhat different.

[0] [https://github.com/uNetworking/uWebSockets](https://github.com/uNetworking/uWebSockets)

[1] [https://github.com/alexhultman](https://github.com/alexhultman)

</comment><comment> yc-kraln Are you considering support for MQTT-SN, or willing to take pull requests to support it? The ability to handle lightweight clients could be a very important differentiator.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is very useful if it's faster than the competition. MQTT is one of those things that's so useful that you tend to overuse it, and extra speed/reliability on the broker is always welcome.

</comment><comment><USER14> Nice work! I'd be curious to see a comparison w/ RabbitMQ's MQTT extension. By any chance have you done such a comparison? Also I assume the comparisons are done at QOS level 0?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have in fact tested RabbitMQ but it was not at all impressive. The two fastest brokers I have found are emqtt and Mosquitto, both good at either large or small broadcasts but not both.

Edit: yes they are qos 0 (just like Redis)

<comment><USER15>
      > The two fastest brokers I have found are emqtt and Mosquitto

What about vernemq? I [ran across][1] a comment a while back about some tradeoffs with emqtt's usage of mnesia. Haven't gotten around to trying verne myself yet though.

[1]: [https://github.com/erlio/vernemq/issues/83#issuecomment-1781...](https://github.com/erlio/vernemq/issues/83#issuecomment-178168282)

<comment><AUTHOR> We can have a big bench-off with more brokers later on. I have tested maybe 6 and from this I have decided to write my own. I wouldn't spend time reinventing the wheel for free if I didn't have a reason for it :) Then you also have memory usage which is impossible to optimize in VM/GC languages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Do you know why/how is it faster than say RabbitMQ? Is it some tradeoff in features for instance?

</comment><comment><USER17> Is there some information on what makes this faster than the alternatives ?

</comment><comment><USER18> I would like to see metrics against Apache Kafka.

<comment><USER19> They are not even remotely worth comparing. They are so different in goals.

Probably the best comparison would be to ZeroMQ and or other MQTT brokers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why do only mqtt ? You usually need several protocols anyway. E.g crossbar does wamp, mqtt and http, with pub/sub and rpc.</comment>


Tech Titans Thwart Former Workers' Autonomous Startup Dreams - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-31/tech-titans-thwart-former-workers-autonomous-startup-dreams <comment><USER2> Aside from them trying to call Levandowski a casualty of two large companies competing....

Has any field done a good job of balancing the tension of letting employee's be able to freely move and the employer's ability to protect IP from moving to a competitor?

I only really know the finance and software fields well and there its very acceptable for an employee to leave for a competitor, however the line starts to get very murky when the employee starts recruiting other employee's to their new employer.

Typically there is a garden leave involved where the employee gets paid but can't compete with his/her former employer and can't recruit from them for the same period. Other than that, quant's often walk out the door with their models, while programmers can't leave with their source code, open source aside.

How does, say the drug industry, handle top scientist switching companies, or does this not happen as often due to the large time required to produce drugs?

<comment><USER3> >I only really know the finance and software fields well and there its very acceptable for an employee to leave for a competitor

Maybe in California. Non-competes are a reality pretty much everywhere else.

<comment><USER4> People leave for competitors all the time in many states. It's the norm rather than the exception. The exceptions usually involve high-level people taking a similar position with a direct competitor. (There are also some specific professional services-type organizations that take a hard line. The thinking there is mostly that they'll take clients with them even if they don't actively solicit.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There may be a valid point to be made about big companies discouraging star employees from leaving to become founders, but they couldn't have picked a worse example.

<comment><USER6> No kidding.

This entire article could have been summarized by - "Don't steal stuff from work."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Startup dreams involves stealing trade secrets?

</comment><comment><USER8> "if you quit to set up your own company" that directly competes with and/or rips off your work for your previous employer, "tread carefully"

</comment><comment><USER9> Such a weird article.

This man at this stage is pretty suspicious that he didn't approach his dream LEGALLY. That is the problem.

</comment><comment><USER10> So much money wasted on lawsuits and acquiring companies from former employees. The same tech should not have to cost this much to develop and be made available to people. The consumers will pay for all this. The inefficiencies of capitalism.

</comment><comment><USER11> Ton of startups by Google employees. Yet they focus on one with stolen property. Great journalism.

</comment><comment><USER12> If two parties negotiate a deal, and one of both parties gets to write the contract, then, the other party will pretty much be screwed. That is why the contract must be written by a third party, such as a marketplace.

<comment><USER13> A marketplace is not a party.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> >waiting for available socket...

hmm interesting</comment>


Swatch Internet Time - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time <comment><USER3> I remember the time (heh) when this was all the rage.

It's an interesting concept, especially since the notion of 60 minutes - <USER2> hours are derived from Babylonian numbering system [1] and even without timezones I find myself having to stop and calculate minutes & hours all the time because they're not nicely divisible by 10 like the metric system.

Having said that, if the goal is to eliminate timezone confusion, we can all just use UTC time and be done with it :)

In short, it was an interesting concept, but even an impressionable young me at that time thinks it's more a marketing effort rather than a scientific effort to "fix" clocks.

[1] [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-time- divi...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-time-division- days-hours-minutes/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting.</comment>


Loss aversion is not supported by the evidence - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-the-most-important-idea-in-behavioral-decision-making-is-a-fallacy/?sf194849524=1 <comment><USER2> This article is essentially a press release for the author's own paper: [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jcpy.1047](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jcpy.1047)

Which itself is a part of a series of articles in JCP debating the issue: [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jcpy.1054](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jcpy.1054)

The definitive statement made by this article's headline isn't really supported by the evidence presented in the papers. Rather, the state of affairs seems to be that "loss aversion" has been the victim of incessant overgeneralisation. It's a very simple hypothesis about human behaviour that plays nicely into a lot of interesting (and therefore publishable) narratives. This has lead people to blindly accept the general hypothesis of loss aversion without enough critical investigation of its manifestation. The authors don't really refute "loss aversion" (i.e. they don't present an alternative theory to explain the papers that purport to demonstrate "loss aversion"), but rather they refute the pop-psychology belief that it's a general principle of human behaviour.

<comment><USER3> That's a great summation. It seems as though there's confusion as to what constitutes loss aversion. IIRC, the original paper by Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler [0] talked about losing something you had. Meanwhile, the posted argument talks about whether someone is more or less likely to buy something if the price goes up or down. These are such different situations! The first is losing something you have, the second is deciding whether you want to trade some money for a thing.

[0] [https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.5.1.193](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.5.1.193)

<comment><USER4> "The price will rise, but now" is the most tenuous loss aversion I've ever heard of.

"You have a $10 credit, it expires in 2 days" would test loss aversion.

That consumers behave rationally in the face of price rises is an interesting finding. But it's a far cry from testing loss aversion.

<comment><USER5> "Loss aversion" as a cognitive bias is not just the desire to avert any loss.

If it really is a general cognitive bias, it will show up as a difference from expected statistics.

Imagine a held asset that has an even chance of going up or down. You'd expect to see about half of people sell it and half hold it. A cognitive bias would alter that ratio. If 75% of people sold it, and only 25% held it (despite even odds), you could say that there appears to be a bias at work.

A great example of cognitive bias at work in the real world is the Monty Hall 3 door riddle. Most people get this wrong even though the math is not hard.

But simply avoiding a predicted loss is not "loss aversion" as a cognitive bias. It's not even a bias at all; it's rational to avoid loss.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article is getting flamed pretty good. Here's another perspective I've learned as a software developer. Building on incorrect abstractions is much more damaging than redundancy in your code. It obscures the underlying design that you're trying to unearth and model, leading others down a path with a weak foundation. I think we're well served to narrow the scope of any scientific finding beyond what might seem reasonable. The human mind is a pattern identification machine, and it finds false positives in science as often as it does in religion.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm picking through the author's paper and I don't buy this conclusion. I have a bone to pick with his evidence: for example, he makes a comparison between "willingness to expend time to drive to obtain an accidentally left behind unused, new-condition notebook (vs. willingness to expend driving time to obtain a new notebook at no financial cost)". The extent of the former he denotes as WTP-Retain and the latter WTP-Obtain. Even if these two values are equal in a study, that doesn't contradict the principle of loss aversion. In the case where a subject has already left behind his/her notebook, the loss has already happened. How can this measure loss aversion when the loss has already occurred? I think it's good the authors are trying to tease apart action vs inaction from loss/gain but these conclusions don't seem valid to me.

<comment><USER8> He did that all throughout the linked article too: "People do not rate the pain of losing $10 to be more intense than the pleasure of gaining $10." Okay. That's not loss aversion though.

"People do not report their favorite sports team losing a game will be more impactful than their favorite sports team winning a game." Same.

<comment><USER9> How to you rate pain like this? There is no metric for pain/pleasure per dollar.

And there are other factors at play. Often the thrill is the dopamine release when you make these decisions — that's the pain. If you're intensely interested, losing $500 in Monopoly or scoring a run in baseball may be felt profoundly.

It all depends on context, not the means by which we measure an outcome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I do struggle sometimes to see how one could do proper science in the field of psychology. It always seems like every experiment contains multiple hidden assumptions, a myriad of uncontrolled-for variables and has more alternative hypotheses that fit the data than you could shake a stick at.

Is this me being all Dunning Kruger? Is it my positivist bias obscuring my vision? Have I misunderstood the nature of the scientific method or missed some major aspect of practical epistemology? I sincerely hope so as the alternative explanation regarding the nature and visibility of the emperor's couture is rather upsetting.

I do genuinely think I am probably - at least partially - incorrect on this. But I would like some help in shaking my sense of unease.

</comment><comment><USER11> The loss aversion is almost trivially explained by the marginal value theorem. The subjective value of money is around log(money), that is, a meaningful change takes an extra 0 in the paycheck or in the price tag.

So, if you have $200, getting $100 one thing, losing $100 is way worse, since log(200)=2.30, log(200)-log(100)=0.3, log(300)-log(200)=0.18. A potential loss of $100 must be rewarded by a gain of $200 to "feel" worthwhile if you already have $200, since log(400)-log(200)=log(200)-log(100).

<comment><USER12> Something along those lines is what I recall reading in Kahneman's book. I just double-checked the 'Loss Aversion' chapter, and indeed he writes, and elaborates further:

" _What is the smallest gain that I need to balance an equal chance to lose $100? For many people the answer is about $200, twice as much as the loss. The "loss aversion ratio" has been estimated in several experiments and is usually in the range of 1.5 to 2.5. This is an average, of course; some people are much more loss averse than others. Professional risk takers in the financial markets are more tolerant of losses, probably because they do not respond emotionally to every fluctuation. When participants in an experiment were instructed to "think like a trader," they became less loss averse and their emotional reaction to losses (measured by a physiological index of emotional arousal) was sharply reduced. [...]_"

<comment><USER13> >Professional risk takers in the financial markets are more tolerant of losses, probably because they do not respond emotionally to every fluctuation.

Or more plausibly, because they're richer, and the utility they stand to lose is smaller.

<comment><USER12> Good reminder. Although subconsciously I realize that, I didn't remind myself that way and after re-reading that paragraph, I thought: "hmm, maybe I should up 'risk-seeking' dial a bit more"—which can be evaluated independently, though, depending on one's "risk profile".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hmm...

So here is an interesting thought experiment. Suppose you take a person with some appreciable intelligence (at least average) but no particular knowledge about a certain topic. In this instance, we'll let that topic be psycology.

Now we present this person with an unfortunate dilemma. For a particular hypothesis, they observe a significant amount of peer reviewed literature asserting empirical evidence in the affirmative. They don't have any real familiarity with any individual papers, but they can understand that there's an established consensus.

On the other hand they are given an article like this one, which mounts a critical refutation of all the established literature. Furthermore, this lone paper is presented to our stalwart examiner amidst the zeitgeist of a reproducibility crisis. Thus we have a mountain of peer reviewed but undigestible evidence on one side, and one readily digestible paper on the other which specifically rebuts the mountain of evidence.

The fundamental dilemma is this: how should this person examine the available evidence to maximize their chances of coming to the correct conclusion? Should they abstain from trying to discern the truth of the matter, and strike out any opinion they could have as unqualified? Should they read through the most comprehensive surveys of available evidence to come to a full understanding? Should they take the new, contrarian paper at face value?

There are a few dimensions here which (from my view) make the dilemma nearly intractable unless you 1) abstain from an opinion, or 2) become a subject matter expert. The cloud of the reproducibility crisis is a first dimension of uncertainty - not only does that muddy the waters for existig research, but we also have to be careful not take contradictory research at face value simply because it's contrarian. For another, we have to figure out how to weight the reliability of evidence against our own time. It's tempting to discount the evidence of existing research if an especially compelling critique is released, because we can more easily read it and follow its arguments.

It seems like this is enormously difficulty all around. How do we rate the critical correctness of differing amounts of conflicting literature published under academic uncertainty?

<comment><USER15> There is no alternative to 1) or 2).

You either have to follow consensus of the experts, or, to go contrary to consensus, you must understand the consensus well enough to be one of the experts.

Down any other road lies pop-sci nonsense. It's incredibly easy to be a wrong contrarian, when you don't actually understand what you are attacking.

<comment><USER6> What you call popsci nonsense is the way most of the people on this planet live. Making decisions based on the available data and living with the fact that we may be wrong. Nerds are a special class, and not better nor worse.

<comment><USER15> They are absolutely better at things they are experts on.

You don't hire a plumber to do a colonoscopy.

<comment><USER6> Not better or worse in terms of value as human beings

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> After reading the paper that this article was based on, this article and title feel sensationalized. It's not that the evidence of loss aversion was wrong, or statistically invalid, but just may point to different underlying factors or psychological mechanisms.

However, this is just a couple of researcher's opinions, and tomorrow a response article may come out saying that loss aversion IS supported by evidence.

To me, this is the sign of a healthy science.

</comment><comment><USER17> Interesting how their review omits the paper that has conducted the most direct test of loss aversion:

[https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mnsc.1070.071...](https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mnsc.1070.0711)

Also they claim the body of evidence doesn't find support for loss aversion. But a meta analysis on the topic does in fact find support for loss aversion (albeit the magnitude is probably smaller than originally thought):

[https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3189088](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3189088)

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't find the listed examples convincing. Especially:

> And people are not particularly likely to sell a stock they believe has even > odds of going up or down in price (in fact, in one study I performed, over > 80 percent of participants said they would hold on to it).

How naïve is that? We're not interested in what people said they would do. We want to know what they did!

<comment><USER19> Have you paid attention to either of the past US market busts, in 2000-2001 and 2008? People overwhelmingly ride it into the ground because of two things:

\- The fear of realizing a loss \- The unrealistic expectation of upside

Also, you'd be hard pressed to find a stock IRL that you could predict in advance as "50/50" and see what participants do, wouldn't you?

<comment><USER20> It seems like it would be fairly simple to design an stock market simulation (with real money payouts) to test this.

<comment><USER19> Either way it is not realistic. People losing a few cents on what they know is a simulation is far, far different than people watching their life savings evaporate in an uncertain environment.

Besides, the point of that particular study isn't a stock, it's that they have a 50-50 chance of losing money they were just given. The stock is just a placeholder for anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > However, this process advantages incumbent theories over challengers for a > number of reasons, including confirmation bias, social proof, ideological > complacency, and the vested interests of scientists whose reputations and > even sense of self are tied to existing theories. A consequence is > scientific inertia, where weak or ill-founded theories take on a life of > their own, sometimes even gaining momentum despite evidence that puts their > veracity in doubt.

A wonderful, concise summary of some of the human obstacles to the progress of ideas, theories, stories and models about people and the world, scientific in nature or not.

</comment><comment><USER21> On the face of it, and with the benefit of hindsight if the paper's presented theory is valid, if loss aversion as dominant motivation were a thing wouldn't human civilization have never progressed beyond hunter gatherer nomads?

Doesn't the fact that we keep growing and progressing as a species even tho the getting of these gains exposes us to risks, not just in the getting there, but once we have arrived, the "curse/paradox of development", suggest that loss aversion is _not_ a majority principle of human behavior?

But... maybe...gain attraction / gain pursuit _is_ a general principle...perhaps of all life, not just ours? Maybe that's one of the characteristics that tautologically has to define life. Life exists in an uncertain environment and couldn't continue to do so without taking risks / experimenting into that unknown.

<comment><USER22> Not really. Loss aversion doesn't mean complete refusal to face loss or complete lack of interest in gains, it just means that we weight losses more heavily than gains. I also don't think anybody's claiming it's a dominant motivation, just a common characteristic.

<comment><USER21> Interesting perspective. It doesn't really relate to how I think of it. Useful to know that's how you think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > People do not report their favorite sports team losing a game will be more > impactful than their favorite sports team winning a game.

For fans of winning teams (Warriors, Patriots, etc.) I'm not sure if this is true. They're expected to win, so watching them win can feel like nervous relief or ambivalence but watching them lose can feel like disappointment.

I think we see loss aversion in soccer too where teams will often play "not to lose" and "park the bus" rather than risk pushing forward and trying to win the game but being vulnerable to counter attacks.

In video games however most seem to favor aggressive styles of play and loss aversion is likely an instant loss.

I'm sure as with most social behavior loss aversion varies and depends on a complex set of conditions. I'm sure in some contexts it's certainly at play though.

<comment><USER24> I anecdotally agree with this. Since I learned about the concept of loss aversion, I've noticed instances where I have to consciously force myself to acknowledge opportunity cost, or the tangible loss dominates in my head.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The article's author David Gal claims that 'loss aversion' is a fallacy. But in the book Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman says that the following experiment demonstrates loss aversion.

\-----

People are randomly given one of two problems:

Probem A: In addition to whatever you own, you have been given $1,000. You are now asked to choose one of these options: 50% chance to win $1,000 OR get $500 for sure

Problem B: In addition to whatever you own, you have been given $2,000. You are now asked to choose one of these options: 50% chance to lose $1,000 OR lose $500 for sure.

\-----

According to Kahneman, many more people will take the gamble when it is framed as potential win (Problem A) rather than as a potential loss (Problem B).

So is Gal saying this experiment is not reproducible or that it doesn't demonstrate loss aversion?

</comment><comment><USER26> Economics as a pseudo science of emphatic statements about human behaviour is looking pretty tragic.

<comment><USER27> Behavioral economics exists only because psychology has completely lost objectivity and focused on agenda. This article is a good example, uses cognitive 'proof' for a behavioral hypothesis. Trash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've long been skeptical of much of the behavioral economics literature. Not that it's necessarily wrong, but that the experiments are so contrived that they're difficult to generalize. But the pattern we see is, a contrived example with undergraduate students given $20 bills or something, and then cherry picking of anecdotal real world evidence.

It's easy to say that consumers and investors behave irrationally, it's harder to tease out hidden factors in a rational utility/loss function that may depend more on the expected value of one action.

</comment><comment><USER27> I think the whole point of Thaler's assertion is that loss aversion is a type 1 bias, so will be demonstrated despite whatever people say when using their type 2 reasoning.

</comment><comment><USER29> Losing money makes you a loser, gaining money is normal, so beyond the actual event, there are identity things at play. In their terms, spending more on a product or less, is not actually touching that identity, because both are just being a spender. I agree about the consequences part: losing equals no roof vs winning equals extra vacation. I think the rest is about the identity that comes with losing.

</comment><comment><USER30> Hypothesis: the set of people who want to see loss aversion refuted intersection (sic) heavily with the set of people who want to raise taxes

</comment><comment><USER31> The author is the one "peddling" the idea that loss aversion is a phalacy but at least he seems to (ironically) recognize that his argument is in itself part of the social/argumentative part of science. Even so, this article seems to draw conclusions as if they were widely held beliefs (I'm not qualified to speak to these claims until I do my own research).

</comment><comment><USER32> Isn't the bias in loss aversion the fact that losing 50 bucks out of 100 isn't symmetric to winning 50 bucks from a capital of 100? If I lose 50, I need to double my new capital to recover my former position, but when I win 50, I "only" need to lose 33% of my new capital. When I lose, relatively speaking, I'm further away than when I win.

<comment><USER33> That would be risk aversion; the fact that marginal utility of money/wealth/ gains decreases as one gets more wealthy.

Loss aversion is the "fact" that "buy now to save 10$" is less motivating than "buy now to avoid 10$ surcharge", and that "here's 100$; if the coin tails, you lose $50" is more distressful than "here's $50; if the coin heads, you gain another $50".

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The Ikea effect is a form of loss aversion. This alone shows that someone hasnt done their homework.

"A bird in hand is worth two in the bush" is a popular saying with its equivalent in almost every culture.

Diversification which is studied, recommended and practiced by almost every investor, CEO, child... Is related to loss aversion.

There are many more real life examples of loss aversion.

<comment><USER35> Calculated strategies to prevent loss are not loss aversion as psychologists use it. Neither is preventing catastrophic "I spend the rest of life in jail" loss.

<comment><USER34> Calculated or not, loss aversion is loss aversion. The principle, thinking or motive behind diversification isn't investment growth. It's to prevent total loss. I'm other words, loss aversion.

You said nothing about the Ikea effect.

Here's more.

Why do people stay in abusive relationships with individuals & companies? I've put in so much, can't back off now. Scammers know and use this to great effect. Once you've paid, you'll keep paying.

Why do investors rush to sell winning stocks but stick stubbornly to losing losing stocks or trades?

The network effect is powerful because of loss aversion. "All my contacts, friends, pictures are in..." so I can't switch.

LOSS AVERSION CHEAT SHEET.

Ask anyone for the reason behind an action. If the sentence begins with or is dominated by, "I don't want" or "I didn't want..." the action was motivated by loss aversion.

<comment><USER36> This is not loss aversion and is explicitly covered in the article.

<comment><USER34> Whether my example was stated explicitly in the article is irrelevant.

What's important is the primary motive behind an action.

In fact, strategy in military, business and soccer is divided into two - offensive and defensive.

Offensive strategies are primarily motivated by gain. Defensive - by turf protection, prevent loss of market, or prevent a goal.

Both strategies use similar, virtually the same tools. And like loss aversion the difference is simply motive.

If China learns that Iceland is planning an attack on them and decides to attack first, it's a defensive strategy.

Again, the key is motive. It doesn't matter what the action is, what matters is why it's done.

If I kill someone for the heck of it (gain), it's called murder. If instead, it's to protect myself (loss aversion) it's called self defense.

Limiting loss aversion to just financial behavior is a myopic view of the subject.

<comment><USER35> The discussion is about loss aversion phenomenom as defined and used in psychology. It is not about what you intuitively guessed from how it sounded like to you.

But also, you horribly simplified military and soccer strategies too. Fun fact: army can decide for offensive strategy, because defense would end up in bigger losses. They may also go for defensive strategy despite bigger loss, bc some other reason.

Lastly, no not every kill to protect yourself is self defense. That is not how law and sentencing works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Contrarian science is important if it can successfully refute a claim, but has it in this case? Scientific American is sharing how the sausage is made (peer review science), potentially before the final product is ready.

<comment><USER6> It's not refuting a claim so much as narrowing it. I think we could afford to do a lot more of this, especially in sciences where we've made questionable amounts of progress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Loss aversion, as it stands today, can be falsified in certain situations so its obviously not writ in stone. What is required is even more study of the context where it still holds.

</comment><comment><USER39> a suggestion - loss aversion might be a manifestation of something else - namely poor decision making under stress.The loss causes the stress, which causes the poor decision making.

</comment><comment><USER40> psychology as a discipline is not looking so hot these days

<comment><USER41> Maybe not, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

<comment><USER42> I think this is a fair comment, it's relevant and sparks an interesting debate about psychology as an overall discipline. Not sure it's fair to call it unsubstantive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> With the paradox of choice, most people are hypersatured with (the paradox of) choices, opportunities and distractions... so any "loss" seems inconsequential at the time because no one seems any more valuable than another. The key fallacy of this attitude is that the world is a small place, life is finite and will end. It doesn't imply feverishly hustling every tiny opportunity, but filtering and carefully exploring choices with a sound decision framework.

Also, most people rarely make rationally-beneficial decisions based on other a myriad of fears, prejudices, laziness, negative cognitive distortions, distractions or inadequate future-planning. Worse, most people are sold on hype, feelings, gossip, peer testimonials and appearance when they can't be bothered to do due-diligence.

OTHO of gain avoidance/scarcity: You can put a "free" sign on a decent household good, set it out, and it won't move... put a price-tag of $100 on and watch it get "stolen."

tl;dr: The human condition is messy and imperfect... there's no firm solution except thorough qualitative hypothesis testing via experiences.</comment>