Color wheels are wrong? How color vision actually works - <AUTHOR> http://blog.asmartbear.com/color-wheels.html <comment><USER2> Wow, just wow.

This is what happens when someone who knows a little bit about how the eyes and brain interpret colour decides to write an article where they fill their gaps of knowledge with mistakes instead of doing some research. Since the author wanted to talk about the eye, they should have kept to additive colour only and not tried to be confusing by introducing subtractive colour, which they neither understand or present factually.

<comment><USER2> Here's a few of the factual errors:

>They'll launch into a treatise about how the Three Primary Colors

They'll try to teach you Subtractive colour theory. Artists don't actually work in three primaries, however the idea of 3 primaries form the basis of subtractive colour theory. An artists knows you simply don't get brighter colours out of darker ones.

>Primary Colors produces the Secondary Colors (orange, green, and purple):

The colours shown here are additive colour mixes, not subtractive. E.g. Magenta is not Purple. Purple has a single wavelength, magenta does not.

>infamous color wheel you probably learned in school

It's based on Goethe's colour wheel, it's artistic not scientific. (As limited by the few amounts of colours available in earlier times.) Although it's still a decent representation of colour than the result this author produced.

>Doesn't stand up to scrutiny/ Three colors of ink which, when combined, produce all others: cyan, magenta, and yellow. (Black is included as a money- saver — black is the cheapest and most common color; it's cheaper to have a black cartridge than to dump ink from the other three.)

CMYK does not produce a full gamut of colour, not anywhere near it. Black is not included as a money saver, but because CMY simply doesn't produce a decent 'black' and there can be registration issues. What CMYK does produce is a nice compromise of commonly occurring colours, however you won't get a vivid blue, green or red out of it - there is simply no building blocks in those colours to produce a good version of each. Instead you'll get a purplish blue, a yellowy green and an orangey red. This is why printers have 'spot colours'.

>But wait! I thought the "Primary" colors were red, blue, and yellow, not cyan (bluish-green), magenta (bluish-red), and yellow.

Not only does the diagram falsely misrepresent the results of mixing of CMY colours(e.g. it should be a dark mess in the centre), but it also falsely represents the individual colours themselves. It's actually pretty difficult to get a computer screen to display a true Cyan, which is not, in any stretch of the imagination "bluish-green".

At this stage the author has created a bunch of confusion, seemingly his own because he doesn't truly understand what is going on here. The actual difference between additive and subtractive colour aren't explored or explained. There are lots of common school boy mistakes like assuming subtractive mixing produces similar colours to additive mixing, e.g. he shows that purple is akin to magenta(it's not), or that you can get any colour your want out of mixing three primaries(you can't). Or that RGB, or CMY allows for a full gamut (neither do.)

>This isn't adding up. Let's turn to science. From here the article gets better, but it trips a few times before getting to actual physiology.

For a short while he talks about the 'magenta' problem, which actually is well resolved. It's called an extra-spectral colour, it's not generated via a single wavelength, but rather the absence of wavelengths from white light. Oddly later he mentions this.

>Opposites

"Complements" rather, are well resolved scientifically, there are two sets of complements and two colour wheels to demo these. Since he's talking about eyes, he should just focus on additive colour.

The wheel the author has created is utter rubbish, it skips swaths of wavelengths and is only interested in preserving 'opposites', which are represented by incorrect renditions of those colours anyway.

<comment><USER3> In a way I appreciate your pedantry (though not your tone), but I must also say that the details you add seem to be technical, specific to printing and not particularly important to the point of the post.

<comment><USER2> Half the article is about subtractive colour, which happens to be print/painting/any kind of colour mixing which isn't combining light sources.

The author (is it you?) has done zero research on the topics they don't understand, and deserves any amount of critical writing in response.

The whole point of the internet is that it represented the end of people waffling bullshit, access to accurate information is there, and if people want to run around spreading incorrect information they deserve to be taken down as many notches as possible.

I might also add that this is important to the authors conclusion, should the author has done any real research they'd see that not only does a colour wheel that addresses their concern exist, but that they've misrepresented the foundation of their entire argument to begin with.

<comment><USER4> But every one of his illustrations has a "pin" button on it. And that's really the point, isn't it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In the S/M/L chart (this one [http://asmartbear.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp- content/uploads...](http://asmartbear.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp- content/uploads/Cone-fundamentals-with-srgb-spectrum.png)) you can see that at the right-hand side, the M (green) activation is pretty low and goes to zero where L (red) is still strong enough to be visible. But there's no frequency on that graph where M (green) is active all by itself. So you've probably never in your whole life experienced a pure "green" sense input!

CIE takes this into account when defining visible color spaces. Since you have 3 "primaries" you would expect the colorspace to be bounded by a triangle, each corner being a pure input of each primary. But you can see here [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Commission_on_Il...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Commission_on_Illumination) that the top green corner is missing. That's because there are no frequencies of light that would let you see any color that is "greener" or further toward where that corner would be.

OK one last thing before I get to my proposal :) Your eyes gradually adapt _against_ the colors you are looking at. For example if you're wearing red/blue 3d glasses for a while, when you take them off things will look greenish out of the "red" eye and yellower out of the "blue" eye. You can play tricks like this [http://wxerfm.com/blogs/post/jfrieders/2012/jan/25/picture-c...](http://wxerfm.com/blogs/post/jfrieders/2012/jan/25/picture- cool-optical-illusion-star-negative-photo-/) In fact it's possible to exhaust some of your photoreceptors, like the "spot" from a camera flash or the streak from a glare of sunlight.

So here's my idea: if you strobe a really bright red & blue light, enough to temporarily blind the S & L receptors in your eyes, you should be able to see a green that is more pure and intense than you have ever experienced, right off the CIE chart of visible colors! Who's up for experimenting? :)

<comment><USER6> >But there's no frequency on that graph where M (green) is active all by itself. So you've probably never in your whole life experienced a pure "green" sense input!

I wonder if there is a medical condition out there where someone is missing the L (red) cones in their eyes - in that case they COULD see pure green sense input. In fact despite being disabled, they could see colors that everyone else is unable to see!

edit: It does seem to exist, protanopes (a severe form of red-green colorblind) are missing the red cones. So if I understand correctly, while we tend to think of them as having a restricted spectrum, they may actually see some colors that others can't.

<comment><USER7> No, they wouldn't be able to see colors most people can't -- they'd be able to _experience_ colors most people can't. It's an important difference. Their "ultra-green" would really correspond to our "yellow".

<comment><USER6> Thanks for clarifying. That's exactly what I meant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> He's got one minor thing wrong -- in CMYK, black isn't there to save money, it is because that in theory, CMY mixed will produce black, but in reality the ink's aren't "pure" enough, so they end up being a muddy color. So the K is there to produce the darker blacks.

Also, a) Ink is translucent; light goes through the ink, reflects off the white paper, goes back through, and that affects the color change of the light. Therefore ink uses CMYK. Pigments in paint are opaque, so light reflects directly off them. In this mode, Red-Yellow-Blue-Black works. For monitors, light is emitted not reflected at all, so that is why they use RGB. Oh, and many colors can translate from one model to another, but not all of them. Some can only be expressed in RGB but not CMYK, others can only be made in RYB.

<comment><USER9> True, and not even the K in CMYK is 100% black, hence the notion of "rich black", which is a collective name for colors produced when K is at maximum and yet other colors are added to the mix. It even has its own Wikipedia page: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_black>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's definitely an interesting topic and a nice high level overview of the problems of colour and colour spaces. I like the 4 point colour wheel in some way, but I don't entirely see the benefits.

From a computer vision perspective, this representation still has problems (as do all colour spaces). Look at how massive the green space is. There's 4-5 greenish slices that are close to each other, yet only 1 slice for yellow and 2ish for red. Red is the colour humans see "best", physiologically it should have the largest representation, whereas blue should be smallest.

From the simpler side (i.e. a basic colour wheel application), I'm not sure if this makes it much easier or faster for me to find a colour.

In any case, the article is very nice high level overview of a fascinating problem.

<comment><USER11> "look at how massive the green space is..."

This is why, in non-symmetric color coding systems, Green is given the largest share. For example 16-bit image formats give 5 bits for Red and Blue, but 6 bits for Green. The Bayer color pattern pattern used on CMOS sensors (basically all sensors on consumer devices) has interleaved rows of Green and Red and rows of Blue and Green: twice as much green as the other colors! Finally, green represents more than 50% of Luminance!

From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense to be more sensitive in the green spectrum: we were surrounded by green plants. Better catch the nuances to better identify predators or prey!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I knew when I saw the title I was in trouble. I've got stuff to do tonight, and don't have time to write a real response. And a _real_ response isn't even really necessary; there's nothing wrong with the all the various color theories and models that paper the floor of the world. They are all imperfect, but often useful, approximations generally designed by trial and error usually for specific use cases.

So the notion that those wacky, touchy feely artists (aren't they cute!) don't know jack about color is specious. Their knowledge is specific to their domain and tools they use. While many of them could use some touch up here and there, it's really not necessary because ... dramatic pause ...

 __ _It doesn't matter!_ __

No artist is trying to produce a particular color found in nature. They are trying to produce the _appearance_ of a perceived color of a certain local color source under certain lighting conditions, and, here's the kicker, under certain psychological conditions. A good artist can make you think you see any color they want to using nearly any available palette. The more colors the better, up to a point; limited palettes can be a very powerful tool.

And the color interactions you get when mixing pigment paint is not just an optical problem, it's a chemical problems as well. Artists do some very odd things to get the colors they need. I'm reminded of a story about the MIT hackers back in the 50s/60s who found out that a radio produced interesting sounds depending on what the computer next to it was doing. The electronics would produce radio noise that would be played as sound. With a little experimentation the hackers found out what kind of operations produced what kinds of noises, and at what frequencies. So they wrote one of the first computer music programs using this system. Needless to say, they needed to make the computers do some pretty odd and complicated things to get the radio "noise" they needed.

The chemicals we use for pigments are the ones that "happen" to reflect, re- emit, or transmit light at particular frequencies. Finding the colors is hard enough, but you also have to worry about how they interact chemically with each other, for both stability (boom!) light fastness, or toxicity. In the early days, toxicity wasn't too big a considerations, and many, many artists died from rather nasty chemical poisoning.

If you are interested, get a book on oil painting. _Creative Illustration_ by Andrew Loomis is a pretty good place to start. I also highly recommend John Gurney's books on painting or artistic color usage. These are good things to read even if you have no intention of every picking up a brush, because they are not at all about the physics of color. They are about using color to communicate and create a certain kind of perceptual experience. If optics and physics were what was needed to understand the mechanics of picture and image making, anyone with a good camera could do the job. But a good photographer knows that their job is _not_ to perfectly transcribe whatever may be happening in front their lens at any old arbitrary time. (As an alternative, you _can_ learn a lot about practical color theory by studying older photography books.)

As for CMYK and RGB color spaces, these are simple but quite effective tools for dealing with color in a purely mechanical way. And they dovetail rather nicely with the artistic color models used in the past by painters and photographers. It _is_ important to know that these are abstract color models intended to produce an approximation that is almost always good enough for most everyday usage by non-specialists. Specialists use tools that are often similar, but with more special cases and provisions for calibration and feed back situations.

If you really need a color model more closely tied to how human visual physiology works, LAB was designed as a good approximation of that. Specialists sometimes use other, often proprietary systems. If you need this level of knowledge, you got some book _larnin'_ to do. No blog posts or comments on HN is going to help you too much.

Finally, speaking of human physiology, the model of filters he describes seems to make it impossible to distinguish red from green. In other words it seems to be describing a system that exhibits red/green color blindness. I have a suspicion that the author read a complicated article, got hung up on the part that talked about r/g color blindness, and thought that was the general case. When I've talked to specialists about this kind of thing, the answers I get are all the equivalent to "It's complicated ..." Human visual physiology is real complicated, even the purely mechanical aspects of it, and frankly not a lot is known about some aspects of it. What I've been told is that when you reduce the complicated aspects of what _is_ known into a workable set of approximations, for specific use cases, you get something very similar to ... wait for it ...

 __ _Artistic color wheels and paint mixing systems._ __

<comment><USER13> I agree that this blog post takes a sort of silly tone, and also that many artists are very sophisticated in their understanding and use of color.

He goes wrong in a few places, for instance in using quite confusing coloration of his diagrams, and he really shouldn't put the labels R, G, B on cone responses: these are too evocative and are likely to confuse as much as they enlighten.

But to be fair, basic paint mixing models in artists' heads often aren't very good, and many artists would really benefit from studying human color vision more seriously. Explaining how vision works to visual artists, especially amateurs, is one of the more rewarding things I ever do: you can see these lightbulbs going off in their heads as a bunch of stuff that they know "intuitively" and experientially is given proper names and ordered into a comprehensible model.

> _As for CMYK and RGB color spaces, these are simple but quite effective > tools for dealing with color in a purely mechanical way._

I think these spaces have no place being taught to non-specialists. They are not intuitive to humans, being based on particular technology rather than on human vision. Any user interface which exposes these color spaces to non- experts is letting them down. Just as bad is using HSL or HSV or some similar trivial derivative space. Image editing software, in particular, is dramatically harder to use than it would be if the dimensions were at all relevant to vision.

> _If you really need a color model more closely tied to how human visual > physiology works, LAB was designed as a good approximation of that. > Specialists sometimes use other, often proprietary systems._

Specialists looking for models related to vision mostly use open, publicly developed and specified models. At root, most of modern colorimetry is based on the CIE system, which has served very well since the 1930s. Recent fairly effective models that would be useful for software include CIECAM02 and IPT, which behave better in some ways than CIELAB, but are a bit more computationally expensive.

> _If you need this level of knowledge, you got some book larnin' to do. No > blog posts or comments on HN is going to help you too much._

That's reasonable. Let's start with some pointers to good sources!

For this audience, Maureen Stone's SIGGRAPH notes from 2001 are a nice first start, with lots of pointers to other good resrouces: [http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs448b-02-spring/04cdro...](http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs448b-02-spring/04cdrom.pdf)

For anyone who wants to really dive deep, I recommend <http://www.handprint.com/LS/CVS/color.html> (edit: Actually, I see that the blogger does link there. So that's nice.)

Also, anyone looking for pointers to books, feel free to email me (address in profile), and I can point you in some direction based on your specific interests.

<comment><USER12> Artist's color mixing models aren't simple mechanical ratios. They use emergent properties of chemicals that just happen to be a particularly useful color. In fact, artist try to do as _little color mixing as possible._ Mixed pigments of the types artists use do work like the inks used in printing and the dyes used in RGB displays. Color wheels are guides and approximations. Learning a color theory that is more accurate is counter productive because you can't find pigments that behave that way. And if you ever get a chance to see a painting in the flesh and compare it to even a very good reproduction, you will see that the simple color model primaries used in printing and on screen reproduction are only loose approximations of the real colors.

Now what an artist _does_ need to know is how color works perceptually. And the models used for this are pretty good. And remember the intended result is seldom "photo realism"; not that photos are particularly realistic. But that's another discussion altogether.

If you are talking about amateur artists, or beginners, then, sure, lecture away, but if you talk to someone who's been successfully painting for 40 years, my advice is to listen to him/her. They may or may not know much about the physiology of human vision, but don't be surprised if they do, but they certainly know the ins and outs of making you _think_ you see what they want you to see.

The nice thing about standards are there are so many of them. I've spent more time than I cared to writing software to convert and compare between systems. They are a few _lingua franca_ systems, but if you are doing serious, critical color work, your special cases are going to be the bulk of your job. Which only makes sense if you think about it. The sources I used are going to be about 30 years out of date, and the chemistries and optical systems no longer relevant.

Doing mechanical color reproduction is a specialty and few people need to know more than the basic RGB/CMY model and whatever specific systems that they need for their domain of activity. These days these models are very good and well tuned for their domains. Unless it's a brand new technology (Or NTSC; don't get me started!) This usually means working with a specific palette and color gamut.

And while a lot of people in the various industries feel that they are dealing with the _real_ color models, and the rest mere approximations, there is no such thing. In the end it all breaks down and you are left with making specific measurements with specific types of equipment for use with specific use cases. And then you calibrate.

Color theory is very much a case of the map not being the territory.

<comment><USER13> > _Learning a color theory that is more accurate is counter productive because > you can't find pigments that behave that way_

Learning theories can be tremendously helpful for crystalizing existing knowledge. Ultimately the only way to learn is to make visual art and look at it, a whole heck of a lot. But having theoretical models can help guide that thinking and looking, and can forestall a lot of confusion.

There are two kinds of models an artist needs to learn to deal with color:

(1) How the human eye sees color. This is so that texture and shape can be made to convey the desired effect of the picture. It's helpful to learn about simultaneous contrast, adaptation effects, and even more obscure things like Ralph Evans' (Kodak) theories about what he called "brilliance". Learning this doesn't tell you how to mix the paint, but it helps you figure out what results you should aim for.

(2) Color reproduction technology: the physical properties of paint / displays / printers / whatever.

Many people in the general public, including many artists, don't properly understand the distinction between (1) and (2), and also take the radically oversimple concept of primary and secondary colors, etc. (whether it's elementary school teachers with their red, yellow, blue, or programmers with their sRGB) as some kind of ultimate truth.

All of our models of color are approximations. Color is complex and contingent, depending on observer, lighting, viewing conditions, temporal effects, and so on.

<comment><USER12> My point is not that artists shouldn't learn about color and learn color theories. And I'm not saying that they shouldn't learn how human's see and process information. What I'm saying is that they already do that. But they are doing it with different models and techniques that are keyed to their domain and tools.

Sure, learn about RGB/CMY. It doesn't hurt. And printing technology, which is a _different domain_ is very similar, though not the same in critical areas.

There's nothing magic or even very special about the methods and models you are talking about outside their domain of use.

If you are a designer who is working in print or onscreen display, you will learn to think in RGB/CMY(K). But there's _nothing_ universal or special about that system compared to other systems. It's not more _science_ compared to the systems artists use in their various working practices.

It's _not_ more keyed to human physiology, in fact I'd argue that it is less intuitive and useful. I'll agree that it's not a numeric model and it's not a model designed for _accuracy_ ; and reproducibility. But it _is_ a model tightly coupled with human perception, expression, and communication.

(As a designer working with digital imagery and renderings, I make major use of HSB style color models. I've written many special purpose tools for giving me effects I want, using all kinds of hair brained models, and then converting the results into RGB.)

To create a numeric model of how artists use color would be very difficult. If it weren't we'd be able to make cameras that made illustrations. And we can't and don't.

What an artist does is make an observation, and I mean this in both an abstract and practical sense. He or she then takes that observation and creates an abstraction of it, and then tries to make a work that communicates that abstraction. With the tools and mental model at hand.

There's a photo floating on Reddit right now of where a hair stylist has arranged hair clippings found on the floor in the shape of a dog. It's a wonderful piece of throwaway art. Now you could sit down and say, "If I take these hairs and arrange them with these percentages, I'll be able to get this range of colors and represent these textures ..."

But that's silly. The artist sees the hair, it reminds them of something, like a dog, and they spontaneously arrange them, making corrections and following intuition as they go.

<http://i.imgur.com/ZNmxV.jpg>

Now if you are going to start an artistic tradition of arranging hair clippings for art, you might come up with some theories to model different effects. But I don't think you are going to be making numeric models. For one thing you never know what kinds of hairs you are going to find on the floor. Instead you are going to learn to "fake" it by using the relative and comparative artifacts of the human's visual and perceptual system. But it will almost certainly be intuitive and spontaneous. Lots of trial and error.

If this art form becomes a tradition, then special markets will develop in hair clippings, special dealers selling hair patches arranged nicely in special ways, maybe even a bit like RGB/CMY. (But don't push it.) Hair dyeing might become a specialty, but purists will insist on nature hair and natural hair colors. There will be much arguing about it and many bar fights.

And if you decide that there's a market in selling hair floor arrangements in mass quantities, then you might see something akin to what you see in modern printing or broadcast. Specialists will arise.

And most artists will say, "It's hard enough to make a pile of dog hair look like something interesting while worrying about all that. I'll make a good pile of hair and leave it up to the specialists to mass produce it. Maybe I'll use standard hair patches to make things easier, I do like it when the reproduction is well done. But I hate limiting my choices and opportunities, and besides the reproduced hair piles never look as good as the original anyway. After all, it's just a copy."

<comment><USER13> I think you're misunderstanding me, because I mostly agree with you.

> _There's nothing magic or even very special about the methods and models you > are talking about outside their domain of use._

Learning about how cones & brains interpret light into the colors we perceive is definitely "special" compared to models designed around some particular physical medium like ink or dye or CRT displays, and the domain of use is "any time you want humans to look at colors".

> _[RGB/CMYK] is not more keyed to human physiology, in fact I'd argue that it > is less intuitive and useful._

Sure. Which is why what I advocate teaching is the physiology and models aimed at approximating it (something with dimensions like the Munsell system or CIECAM02, etc.) ... which is absolutely more "intuitive" than RGB or CMYK or some paint mixing model, in the sense that it tracks perceived color attributes directly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you want a good introduction to color theory, see Marc Levoy's lecture notes from CS 248 (Introduction to Computer Graphics). The notes are quite dense but contain a lot of good information.

[http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs248-08/color/color1.h...](http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs248-08/color/color1.html)

[http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs248-08/color/color2.h...](http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs248-08/color/color2.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> _Ask any artist to explain how color works, and they'll launch into a treatise about how the Three Primary Colors_

Nope.

If you ask an artist or designer about how colour works when you'll usually get is a deep sigh, followed by "it's complicated", followed by a _looooooooooong_ explanation of some of the options presented here and a good few more besides.

(Fascinating bit of trivia: There is some moderatly persuasive evidence that some folk have more varient cone cells and can see more colours than people with "normal" vision. See [http://www.post- gazette.com/stories/news/health/some-women-m...](http://www.post- gazette.com/stories/news/health/some-women-may-see-100-million-colors-thanks- to-their-genes-450179/) and <http://www.klab.caltech.edu/cns186/papers/Jameson01.pdf>).

It's usually developers who have the broken models of colour perception because, unsurprisingly, they're not trained in it :-) Artists and designers deal with multiple colour models all of the time - just go look at how many of the preferences in things like Photoshop are about managing colour... and that's just in the digital editing space.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm somewhat surprised that no mention was made of L * a * b color, since the four point color wheel corresponds to the a and b channels.

</comment><comment><USER17> > Every seven-year-old kid in America is taught that "the opposite of red is > green" and "the opposite of blue is yellow."

Did I sleep through second grade or something? I've spent the first 30+ years of my life in America and I've never heard of this.

<comment><USER18> Different schools teach different things; many don't introduce colour theory at all. And it's an odd thing, but most people don't know intuitively how colours combine or invert. Of course, as a synesthete and maybe a tetrachromat, I'm not really statistically relevant to this discussion. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Terminology note: This is called the opponent process theory.

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

</comment><comment><USER20> I had a short bit about this in my datavis talk at Pycon. Youtube link directly to the explanation of vision / color physiology: <http://youtu.be/vfYul2E56fo?t=18m31s>.

</comment><comment><USER21> Nice article, even better comments. But am I the only one who thinks explaining stuff by "it's because your brain tells you that..." doesn't really solve anything, simply relocates the mystery?

</comment><comment><USER22> Previous discussion (more than a year ago) <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2166494>

</comment><comment><USER23> awesome post. this is not 100% related, but if you're interested in color as it pertains to human perception (and how to cure color blindess and how a mantis shrimp can perceive 6x more color) there is a great podcast on RadioLab! <http://www.radiolab.org/2012/may/21/>

</comment><comment><USER24> could be a much better article if not so sensationalist about kindergarten learning not being perfect.</comment>


How Mailgun Uses Docker And Contributes Back  - <AUTHOR> http://www.rackspace.com/blog/how-mailgun-uses-docker-and-contributes-back/

<comment><USER2> Sasha has been incredibly involved and helpful in the docker community. He's one of my favorite sources of feedback on what should be fixed or improved next on docker. You can't beat large-scale production experience :)

Thanks Sasha!

<comment><USER3> Thanks Solomon! It's a great tool to use, and I'm glad to see that Docker gets wider and wider adoption at Rackspace. As a data point - almost all projects in SFO office have adopted it one way or another.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am working on a similar tool in Node, called bon[1]. I'm glad to see so much interest in Docker lately, it's a very exciting technology.

[1] [https://github.com/strapper/bon](https://github.com/strapper/bon)</comment>


The path to $100B [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.startupschool.org/videos/51 <comment><USER2> A lot of people here are saying $100B is too high of a goal to accomplish.

The best advice of the video is to have a strong vision of the future. How will the world be fundamentally different in 10 years compared to how it is today. Think about that change, and then build a company that will be well positioned with the new change. The stronger your vision, and the more accurate it is, the better your chance of success is.

In 10 years there will be a dozen 1 trillion dollar companies. The number of $100B companies is going to explode as well. More and more commerce is happening on the internet which scales much easier than brick and motor commerce. More and more goods purchased are entirely virtual, and have huge margins. More and more value is in software, which can be copied and used without practical limits. If your goal is to start a company that grows to $100B there has never been a better time to do that than right now.

<comment><USER3> > In 10 years there will be a dozen 1 trillion dollar companies. The number of > $100B companies is going to explode as well.

Devil's advocate, is that actually a good thing?

Might be good for the consumer but not great for the laborer. Working for someone else is a bummer. Increasing consolidation means increasingly more of us will be in that position.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, the future is the Dystopian-Cyberpunk-Anime future of the mega- corporation-government-states which own and control everything.

People may say that is too-dystopian and cynical of a perspective, but all data-points over the last several decades are very solidly pointing in this direction....

There will certainly be lots of 10B, 50B and 100B companies - then the 1-5T companies will consume them just as the 5B companies grabbed up everything they could to build their moats over the last few years.

There will be cyber-wars for privacy in the next 20 years. There will be digital outcasts who seek to hack and bring down large systems.

There will be plenty of cyber-terrorism to come.

Personally, I thin kthe US is sitting on its laurels way too much and will be completely unprepared for a real cyberwar when it actually happens.

Anyone know of some good authors with a contemporary grasp of where we currently are with technology who is putting out some good cyberpunk fiction about the impending future?

<comment><USER5> _Anyone know of some good authors with a contemporary grasp of where we currently are with technology who is putting out some good cyberpunk fiction about the impending future?_

Gibson is the master of the genre.

<comment><USER4> Neuromancer is what made me. Cyberpunk was what i was in the late 80s through today.

But I see the dystopian dark nature of it. I helped, along with everyone on HN, build this monster we have now.

I tried Gibson's latest story, and I wasnt too into it...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was thinking about this in light of the recent MegaMillions lottery frenzy. Chance of buying a winning ticket is about one in a million times the number of successive draws in which no winner is declared in order for the jackpot to reach a sizeable pot. Ballpark estimate around 1:10M.

Whereas the chance you could actually build a company with billion dollar valuation is probably well under 1:1M. Just from being in the pool of startup school attendees or auditors. There are additionally many other factors which could substantially increase those odds.

Also, would just like to mention the recent podcast with Laura Deming of Longevity Fund was excellent. Incredibly informative and reasonably optimistic about the probability of a breakthrough in our lifetimes.

<comment><USER7> Odds in a lottery are uniform and do not account for personal attributes. Assuming 1 ticket per person, anyone that buys a ticket has an equal chance of winning. A 98 year old grandmother has the same chance of winning as a 21 year old man.

Odds of starting a successful startup do not follow the same rules. There are a small number of people with the skillset/connections/etc to start a successful startup and thus have a very high chance of success, and a large number of people without those attributes, and thus a very low, if not zero percentage chance of success.

<comment><USER8> One small caveat is if someone is very wealthy, they can spend $0.9Billion buying lottery tickets which increases their odds vs someone that just buys 1

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The insight on Facebook's success and its implicit focus on the network vs Google's focus on product is interesting. Same with their conviction on the newsfeed.

</comment><comment><USER10> How about the path to $1

<comment><USER11> This.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm interested to see who can build the first $100B, fully remote company.

<comment><USER12> Not sure if fully remote is the best goal. What if a company is fully remote, except for ~10 employees in a city who request an office at the local downtown co-working space? That kind of flexibility would be ideal, IMO.

<comment><USER13> I think it is important that there is no headquarter. Some people having desks at the same co-working space is fine. All the executives in the same building means everyone else is at a satellite office.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> startup culture is destroying the planet! we don't need more innovators we need inventors!

</comment><comment><USER15> Around 32:00 : I was confused a little when Paul was talking about when 80% of facebook's user revolted against the decision on newsfeed and then facebook decided to stick with the decision which is ultimately successful. Seems to in direct contrast in what he believed when he was building Gmail.

</comment><comment><USER16> Why would anyone worry about scaling to 100B? Once you are at that level you probably won't watch this video and everybody else is probably more worried about 1 or 10 million.

<comment><USER17> Yeah I would much rather see something about 10M. I'm not looking to win the lottery, I want to live a successful, comfortable life.

<comment><USER18> I'm more interested in knowing if some companies are inherently designed to be $100B companies, or can any company get there by gradually expanding its operations.

Can the $1M ARR SaaS startup build products that can take it to $1B ARR? Or does that require a different DNA altogether?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This a fun challenge! Check back this comment in 10 years if I built it. We are doing some work in AI that could have a shot.

</comment><comment><USER20> Right now I am worried about the path to $10k

<comment><USER2> Focus on what you can ship today. Find users that love your product and determine what they love about it. Talk to the users that do not love your product, and determine which features you can add to make them fall in love with your product. Go after high impact easy to implement features first.

100 users paying $8.25 a month will equal a $10k/yr MRR business.

<comment><USER20> I did try it with gridgenerator[0]. A painting application to create geometric patterns and shapes. I tried to have users, people loved it but didn't feel they were the target audience. Tried to get some b2b partnerships afterwards which failed for various reasons. I have a few debts to pay now (because I was using my pension money for it) and a large amount of bugs to fix when my willpower comes back up again.

Today no one uses it. I had to shut down the export server, and got about 40 followers on instagram with some of the works I managed to do with it[1].

[0] [https://gridgenerator.com/](https://gridgenerator.com/) [1] [https://www.instagram.com/gridgenerator/](https://www.instagram.com/gridgenerator/)

Now i work at a web company trying to slave my way to pay the debt and in another 10 years try it again. Does it entitle me to say "been there done that" ?

<comment><USER2> Who were your users? Were they paying? Why did you feel they weren't the users you wanted?

I'm really interested in your decision to move away from a consumer model to a b2b model.

<comment><USER20> Still in spite of all of these I do believe that there is a lot more this tool can give. My plans for it in the near future (early 2019) are:

\- Present it in a slightly different way (remove landing page and instantly start playing a dumbed down version of it that introduces the current features as a 'initialization/introductory process')

\- Improve the mobile experience (by default shape creation must be done by choosing which areas to paint instead of the current approach of connecting points, this is a small fix that makes using it in mobile a much better experience)

\- Allow anonymous export and sharing of works. Remove the login until it is absolutely needed.

\- Create thematic portfolios with it and share them with current graphical artists that work with grids

\- Restart instagram marketing

If you have any other ideas that don't fit the traditional "startup book" approach I will gladly do them or try to incorporate them in the reboot.

<comment><USER2> I wouldn't take this as the path to success. You are in a very different industry than I have ever worked in. I do have some ideas for you to consider.

\- Add a share button. Freeware gets a watermark, paid gets the clean image. Integrate with twitter, facebook, and instagram to make posts.

\- Rebrand the application to something more artsy sounding. I now have three tabs open that say "Grid Generator" and it sounds like an engineer tool, while the application runs like an art tool.

\- Hows the tablet experience? I would focus on desktop and tablets more than mobile. I think this application would lend itself to larger screens than cell phones have.

\- Run a subreddit for people to share their work.

\- Server costs for the export engine can be lowered by using AWS lambda to provide on demand computing. Implementing this can range from easy to difficult depending on which language the engine is written in.

If you want to reach out to me more about this subject you can find an email address in my profile. Good luck to you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Tres commas

</comment><comment><USER22> I applied to YC for the first time after attending Startup School.

They said they would release the outcomes of who got in or not at 10pm PST. Instead it started to trickle in some 3 hours later. During that period the Slack channels had entrepreneurs panicking about whether they got in or not. Some even talking about suicide. And apparently this happens every, single time.

I have lost any and all respect for YC and the partners who claim they represent the interests of founders.

Founders should focus on making great products not trying to reach some arbitrary number.

<comment><USER23> This is not YC's fault. I am not sure why you would blame YC for this.

As you said, founders should focus on making great companies (not just great products), so they should not focus on the outcome release time.

If you get into YC that's great. If not, you are still going to build your company anyways. There's not going to be a change in direction of your company either way.

YC is an accelerator. It accelerates your progress up a path, but ultimately you are responsible for setting the path and running up it.

Please don't consider suicide over a YC application. There's going to be a lot more obstacles ahead, that will be more stressful than applying to YC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Startup School material has been incredibly helpful for us at Biterica.com. Highly recommend checking out all their videos, especially on finding product market fit and growth. We just launched if you want to check us out: [https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=18293997](https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=18293997)</comment>


XSS in Google Finance - <AUTHOR> http://miki.it/blog/2013/7/30/xss-in-google-finance/ <comment><USER2> Does anyone else feel that XSS on google.com is probably worth a bit more to the wrong people than $5k? Arbitrary-eval is pretty much the worst. Unless I'm missing something, somebody could steal a user's cookie strings and post them to an arbitrary endpoint, which could then use them to log into, e.g. GMail, which an attacker could then use to trigger and retrieve password-reset links for all sorts of other sites.

When I worked at Yahoo, an XSS on yahoo.com (which almost never happened) was a code-red, drop-everything, holy-shit event. If I were at Google I'd probably give this guy a bonus.

<comment><USER3> In addition to the session ID cookies, you need the HSID cookie as well, which is HttpOnly. While this type of bug is bad, it doesn't allow for a malicious third party to get all of the cookies needed to take over the users session.

<comment><USER4> Also compartmentalization helps (Keeping products in different javascript origins, e.g. mail.google.com, accounts.google.com, etc)

<comment><USER2> Yes, but Google Finance is on google.com/finance (for some reason; I'm sure it used to be finance.google.com at some point...).

The importance of httpOnly had somehow escaped me until today :-)

<comment><USER5> _Yes, but Google Finance is on google.com /finance (for some reason; I'm sure it used to be finance.google.com at some point...)._

Cookies set for just subdomain.hostname.com can only be "seen by" that particular subdomain, while cookies set for hostname.com can be seen from hostname.com and any and all subdomains. I think that's why they do it constantly, at least stuff like www.google.com/glass certainly makes no sense otherwise. Why not make a fancy new domain for that? I think it's cookie greed.

<comment><USER6> cookie greed doesn't explain it, because they don't issue any cookies for www.google.com, or at least, I don't have any; they do issue cookies for .google.com, which www and finance can access equally. It's either a branding thing, or a they paid for the fancy load balancer so they're going to use it thing.

<comment><USER5> That's a good point, I stand corrected. Of course, if you wanted to be "minimal" about cookies, you'd _have_ to use a subdomain, but using one doesn't mean anything by itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if emailing them and asking for e.g. a 25k reward before disclosure exposes one to criminal liability or not.

I mean, is there a law making it illegal to sell exploits to the black market? These bug bounty programs must know they compete with a large market for these sorts of things.

<comment><USER8> IANAL, but action with malicious intent is pretty much enough to get you behind bars.

<comment><USER7> Not always. For example, speaking truthful factual statements with malicious intent to harm someone's business by damaging their reputation is totally legal, provided you're not defrauding or blackmailing anyone or otherwise acting sketchy.

There're a lot of actions based on malicious intent that are (and should remain) legal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Slightly off topic, but if a bug like this is discovered does the engineer who wrote it get notified?

It would be funny to have a sort of wall of shame for that week or something else internally. Or you could even go as far as making that engineer pay for the bug bounty (that's a bit much though). Anyone have any experience as to what happens on Google's end besides the obviously patching of the bug and paying of the fine?

<comment><USER10> A wall of shame sounds amusing at first blush, but it would quickly become a source of a lot of negativity and unhappiness. Yes, developers need to be aware of bugs, and learn from mistakes, but intentional harassment seems a step too far. I know I've written thousands of bugs.

<comment><USER11> A friend that used to work at Apple once told me a story of their department having a big banner over the desk of the last person to broke the build. Eventually a frustrated recipient of the banner solved the problems causing it to be brittle in the first place, and as a result had the banner himself for months. A rather unexpected disincentive to solve the problem

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Where in the code is the eval() is performed? There is not a single call to eval() in that source.

Maybe a listing of the Wi() function would be useful.

</comment><comment><USER13> Nice one. Curious how it was discovered. Manually toying with URL parameters on google.com links?

<comment><USER14> I'm not familiar with Google Finance, but the author states "This part of the code is responsible for querying an external domain for a newsfeed to be displayed on the plot as an overlay.". I'm guessing they just happened to come across a Google Finance URL using the &ntrssurl= parameter and figured that would be worth digging into.

<comment><USER15> He says also in the comments: "Manual testing, the ntrssurl parameter was present in an example in the documentation for adding custom news feeds to the plot :) ."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> 5k is not so much for this kind of huge vulnerability.

I mean with a "great" hack this guy could have made much more in a few hour, but let say it's a generous reward anyway :)

</comment><comment><USER17> Wasn't this one around for ages?</comment>


Ultra-Time-Efficient Exercise Lowers Blood Pressure, Boosts Brain Function - <AUTHOR> http://www.sci-news.com/medicine/inspiratory-muscle-strength-training-blood-pressure-brain-07077.html <comment><USER2> Wait, they achieved a _10%_ reduction in blood pressure in 6 weeks with only a 5 minute daily breathing exercise? That is off the charts great, if true. How have I not heard of this before?

The original study with these claims is here: [https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article- pdf/39/6/1179/2667404...](https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article- pdf/39/6/1179/26674049/aasm.39.6.1179.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> I was going to buy the Powerbreathe on impulse, but there is a lack of authoritative news on IMST devices. People on running and cyclist forums also don't seem to be fans of IMST. Perhaps that's because it provides lower marginal benefit for them. Can anyone with a medical background provide their opinion on the linked study?

</comment><comment><USER4> Same as bhastrika pranayama exercise in yoga. Except you do it without blowing into a device.

<comment><USER5> Slight tangent: a few years ago it clicked for me how critical breath is in regulating the pH of the blood. The way you breath directly moderates the balance of oxygen vs. carbon dioxide in your blood, which on a basic level effects its pH.

When you hear people talk about drinking alkaline water or eating alkalizing foods... the most direct thing you can do to effect your blood's pH is by learning different ways of breathing and how they make you feel.

If you're brave and would like to experience just how powerful your breath is for yourself, try the technique "bioenergetic breathing": [https://www.painscience.com/articles/breathing.php](https://www.painscience.com/articles/breathing.php)

<comment><USER6> Have you ever measured the pH of your blood, both before and after eating certain foods or performing certain exercises?

Animal blood is a buffer system, with normal pH of 7.35 to 7.45 . It takes a lot to push it out of balance. You have the buffer [H+](aq) + [HCO3-](aq) <-> H2CO3(aq) <-> CO2(g) + H2O(l). Lungs remove excess CO2(g), and kidneys remove excess [HCO3-](aq). You also have the buffer [H+](aq) + [H2PO4-](aq) <-> H3PO4(aq), and [H+](aq) + hemoglobin(aq) <-> O2(aq) + hemoglobin(aq). As muscles produce acid, hemoglobin binds the proton and releases oxygen. A healthy body does not need to do anything at all to consciously regulate its pH; actions that can significantly change blood pH can cause alkalosis or acidosis, which are indicative of serious metabolic problems.

If you haven't had a blood test that showed blood pH out of the range 7.35 to 7.45 , you never need to worry about your blood pH or blood gases, ever-- unless you're a SCUBA diver or astronaut, or someone else that routinely breathes a different mix of gases from normal atmosphere.

[https://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/DSH/coral...](https://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/DSH/coral2.html)

[https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/controversial-science- news...](https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/controversial-science-news- quackery/alkaline-water-nonsense)

[http://www.chem1.com/CQ/ionbunk.html](http://www.chem1.com/CQ/ionbunk.html)

[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Alkaline_diet](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Alkaline_diet)

<comment><USER5> Try it yourself if you don't believe me... I dare you!

Lay down in a comfortable place. Begin breathing deeply and comfortably but quickly, leaving no pauses at the top or bottom of your breaths. Keep a steady rhythm of 1-2 breaths/second. Keep doing this for up to 5 minutes... or as long as you can stand to. Well within 2 minutes your lips and hand muscles will cramp up.

That's _tetany_ , and it's a very clear sign of respiratory alkalosis. No pH meter necessary!

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

You are free to keep going if you can handle the intense and unusual sensations. _It will_ get more intense. Take it as far as you'd like. At some point you may begin to experience some psychological discomfort, so I'd err on the side of caution if you are easily spooked by unfamiliar states of mind.

I've experienced quite severe tetany from controlled and deliberate hyperventilation ("bioenergetic breathing"/"round breathing"/"breath of fire"). When I did this exercise, I was involuntarily convulsing as my lips and hands became uncontrollably tensed and misshapen. It's surprisingly easy to do and is an extremely powerful experience.

After doing this exercise I felt a profound sense of well-being and relaxation as I laid and stretched in the sun.

\---

Let me state more clearly my point: eating or drinking a certain way in order to moderate your blood pH is useless if you're not paying attention to your breathing habits.

Breathing is an _actual_ way to quickly alter your blood pH.

By the way, on the flip side, some people might experience blood acidosis because of hypoventilation:

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and- dentistry/...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and- dentistry/hypoventilation)

> _Hypoventilation in the absence of alkalosis to inhibit ventilatory drive is > a primary respiratory problem. This can result from CNS depression caused by > trauma or by some drugs that inhibit respiratory drive such as barbiturates. > Hypoventilation increases PCO2 and leads to acidosis. There can be no > respiratory compensation for a primary respiratory problem._

You don't need to be an astronaut or scuba diver to have CNS depression/trauma. I can attest to that personally.

<comment><USER6> You are describing woo. Produce objective repeatable measurements, or it didn't happen. The burden is upon the claimant to make a falsifiable assertion and then support it with evidence.

Please explain _why_ anyone should _deliberately_ choose to induce alkalosis by breathing exercises. What purpose does that serve? Have the claims ever been examined objectively? Both alkalosis and acidosis are potentially dangerous conditions, and should not be toyed with because of woo.

<comment><USER5> Okay hold on... Did you take the time to actually read any of the links I posted? Or any of what I wrote? Did you read the quote I shared from the last link? It gave a compelling reason for doing alkalizing breath exercises... Chronically or acutely disrupted respiration from CNS depression related to trauma or anything. This is quite a common kind of situation and the article is saying "people can have acidosis because they aren't breathing well."

In that case, according to science and folks traditions alike it's necessary for them to retrain their habits of breath to be more oxygenizing.

And there's a spectrum here. You can do alkalizing breath exercises without inducing tetany. I mentioned the tetany exercise because you were asking me to hook up a pH meter to my bloodstream to "objectively prove" that voluntarily changing respiration can lead to significant pH shifts in the blood. I've shared links to non-controversial scientific articles and book exerpts, including peer reviewed ones, corroborating this.

 _Involuntary_ , chronic shallow breathing or hyperventilation are respectively dangerous because they can cause acidosis or alkalosis that an individual is unable to recover from without some intervention.

Just because there also happen to be numerous folk traditions around this, notably pranayama, doesn't nullify the objective, scientific basis for what I'm talking about!

If you'd genuinely like to understand my perspective from a scientific point of view, check out this peer reviewer article: [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17432979.2011.57...](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17432979.2011.574505)

<comment><USER6> That article is on psychotherapy.

I am not disputing that breathing exercises can make one _feel better_. I am disputing that the sense of wellness is causally linked to any changes in blood pH.

It is perfectly acceptable to claim that breathing exercises are useful for mental health. You are making additional claims that are not supported, regarding health benefits for people that do not have a diagnosis that requires therapy.

The folk remedies do not automatically invalidate the claims. They do surround the relevant questions with a cloud of woo, which makes objective study more difficult. This is especially relevant when scammers adopt pseudoscientific terminology that mimics genuine science for the purpose of selling their products and services. It becomes difficult to sort the fact from the fiction, because the fictions are explicitly designed to look like related facts.

<comment><USER5> > _This paper provides an overview of the physiology of breathing, a review of > the literature on breathwork._

I don't see any indication that you read the paper or the abstract. The article isn't "about psychotherapy", it's about bodywork, and draws from scientific literature on physical aspects of respiration. This article gives a pretty clear picture picture of how breath, pH and wellness are intertwined.

\</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---

You wrote:

> _It is perfectly acceptable to claim that breathing exercises are useful for > mental health. You are making additional claims that are not supported, > regarding health benefits for people that do not have a diagnosis that > requires therapy._

From the article:

> _Unfortunately, very little research has been done on the psychological > effects of acidosis and alkalosis, though it may be possible to make some > inferences via research done on the stress response._

Also from the article:

> _To put breath physiology into more gaseous detail, if body activity stays > the same, an increase in breathing will increase the rate of CO2 diffusing > from the blood into the lungs. This can cause the CO2 concentration in the > blood to fall, which will cause the acid level of the blood to drop, and its > pH will become alkalotic (too alkaline). Alkalosis often leads to muscle > spasm, tetany, anxiety, and panic (Fried, 1987; Lowry, 1967; Nakamura, 1981; > Rhinewine & Williams, 2007), with Nakamura noting that when the pH exceeds > 7.60, hyperventilation tetany takes place. If breathing is depressed, CO2 > concentrations in the blood will rise, causing the acid level to rise, and > the pH of the blood will become more acidic. As was noted before, chronic > alkalosis or acidosis can both cause long-term harm to physical well-being. > Farhi (1996) states that relaxed breathing enhances the immune system, > assists in the absorption of nutrients and proteins, supports bone growth, > and boosts overall cellular health in the body. In addition, it is believed > that balanced breathing sustains circulation, maintains mental clarity, > strengthens organ function, and provides pain relief (Boerstler & Kornfeld, > 1995). Balanced breathing in this sense is defined as a relationship between > the inhale and the exhale such that an appropriate blood pH is maintained. > Farhi (1996) also emphasises that good breathing increases physical energy > and mental concentration via the oxygenation of all our cells, and asserts > that using specific breathing practices in conscious ways has been shown to > ease migraines, lessen chronic pain, assuage panic attacks, and lower > symptoms of asthma. Perri and Halford (2004) found that conscious breathing > reduces chronic pain._

<comment><USER6> Yeah... not going to pay $43 to read that. The journal is "Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy". It's a psychotherapy article, marked as "theoretical article", and is a meta-study survey of other published articles. My education included minors in chemistry and cognitive science. I recognize and admit I have a prejudicial bias against "soft" science, so you're probably not going to change my mind without some actual biochemistry experimentation. You might sway someone with different standards, though. Again, objective, repeatable measurements, or the effect does not exist.

It would be easy enough to do. First, extract some blood plasma from a volunteer using normal donation protocols. Divide it into three portions. Remove the dissolved CO2 from one. Saturate the CO2 in another. Do nothing to the last. Inject the fractions, in random order, into the subject intravenously, and observe the results after each one. My hypothesis is that the acidic sample will prompt an increase in respiratory rate, the basic sample will prompt a decrease, and the placebo sample will do nothing.

Did you have your blood pH tested before deciding to change your blood pH through conscious alteration of your breathing?

No? Then stop doing it. Actually test your blood pH before continuing. If it is normal, do not resume. If it is low, condition yourself to breathe faster or more deeply. If it is high, condition yourself to breathe slower or more shallowly. Re-test to titrate your results. And please stop advising strangers on the internet to use breath therapy to change their blood pH. A randomly chosen individual is highly unlikely to have chronic acidosis or chronic alkalosis, and your advice may lead an otherwise healthy individual to undertake practices that could be detrimental to their long-term health.

I understand you are excited about learning that you have the power to change the chemical environment in your blood just by overriding natural unconscious pulmonary responses with your brain. That does not mean it is safe, or effective for any particular purpose. In normal, healthy individuals, appropriate blood pH is automatic, unconscious, and absolutely effortless. So step back and ask yourself from the perspective of a disinterested observer why you are so concerned with your blood pH.

Along with temperature, pH is one of the highest-impact variables on aqueous biochemical reactions. Animals are full of amphoteric molecules, that can behave differently in different pH ranges. And some of them participate in vital chemical reactions and cycles. As previously mentioned, animals have several different chemical buffer systems to regulate pH, and both respiratory rate and the sense of respiratory distress are governed by concentration of CO2 in the blood. Free divers hyperventilate to clear excess CO2, before holding their breath for an extended period, and this puts them at risk of hypoxia, because they won't feel the compulsion to breathe from excess CO2 in the blood until much later than they normally would. Forcing yourself to breathe abnormally will have noticeable and measurable physiological effects. Not all of them are necessarily good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just immersing your face in cold water apparently has a similar effect on blood pressure -- with no additional expense.

[https://www.fasebj.org/doi/abs/10.1096/fasebj.29.1_supplemen...](https://www.fasebj.org/doi/abs/10.1096/fasebj.29.1_supplement.993.21)

<comment><USER8> Maybe for a short term period of time, but probably not long-lasting enough to have a consequential health benefit, unlike exercise. Exercise, when done regularly, permanently lowers blood pressure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks similar to Kapalabhati and Bhastrika pranayama breathing exercises.

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

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

<comment><USER10> Just looked into this, and it is fairly similar to what I will do sometimes to relax before falling asleep.

Basically deep but not too deep breaths in and out and usually around the fifth breath there is a noticeable decrease in tension and I am suddenly very relaxed and able to fall asleep.

Didn't read very deeply into the two, so may be completely off the mark. But breathing exercises definitely do help reduce stress and tension, so I can see why they would help with blood pressure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's great combined with cold showers. Check out Wim Hof method if you need examples (although breathing and cold training are as old as the hills.)

</comment><comment><USER12> Site is down for me, mirror: [https://outline.com/mYww6T](https://outline.com/mYww6T)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's still responsive for me, weird. Thanks for offering an alternative to people who need it though!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> How does the device work and what does it do?

[https://www.powerbreathe.com/powerbreathe-k5](https://www.powerbreathe.com/powerbreathe-k5)

On the Powerbreathe website it says

>The POWERbreathe K-Series uses Electronic Variable Threshold Resistance Training to overcome this. This type of training offers a tapered loading resistance to match the contraction curve of your own breathing muscles throughout your entire breath.

Is it restricting the flow of air so you have to breathe harder?

<comment><USER14> It's an " _inspiratory_ muscle trainer". That is, it increases resistance breathing in.

I can do the same with my lips (or a finger) and make funny noises too :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Two things come to mind:

The first is that I wonder if this has the opposite effect on people who use CPAPs? About a third of their life their diaphragm isn't needing to exert nearly as much force for them to inhale.

The second is that I wonder if this has any effect on people who vape, especially with small sub-ohm units. Many of them have very limited airflow, which seems like it would emulate the effect of this device to some degree.

<comment><USER16> >people who use CPAPs? About a third of their life their diaphragm isn't needing to exert nearly as much force for them to inhale.

Most recent advancements in CPAP is to provide as little pressure as possible while still keeping the airway open. Higher air pressure increases discomfort and undermines compliance, and the effect is huge. The pressure never goes up high enough to force the diaphragm to move, sooner the mask will fly off the face.

<comment><USER17> Auto CPAPs are fantastic, they're still under-prescribed by doctors however.

Good news is that a lot of patients have figured out you can trivially re- configure a fixed pressure unit to be an Auto CPAP because most CPAPs sold today are both.

The great thing about Auto CPAPs is that they use predictive algorithms to figure out when an Apnoea–Hypopnoea will likely occur, ramp pressure up preemptively, and can sometimes avoid the event entirely.

A recent software update to Respironics/Philips Auto CPAP in particular had people seeing a lower AHI because the machine was making better predictions and stopping events in their tracks. This directly results in better sleep/better compliance.

PS - Obviously don't take medical advice from Hacker News. If you have a high air pressure/a high AHI you may not be suitable for Auto CPAP therapy and could cause harm, talk to your doctor. There's a lot of information/literature out there if you wish to learn more. Right now Auto CPAPs are under- prescribed, but that doesn't mean everyone is a suitable candidate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> open-source-ux The device shown in the video is the Powerbreathe K3 breathing trainer. On Amazon US, the Powerbreathe K4 is selling for $499. However, there are lots of more affordable inspiratory muscle training devices from other manufacturers.

Has anyone used these devices and what improvements in health, if any, did you notice?

<comment><USER6> Seems like you could also get tuneable levels of inspiratory resistance with a U-shaped bit of tubing. Put water in the bottom of the U, no more than halfway up, and breathe in through one leg of the U.

Your inhalation pulls up the water column until air bubbles can cross the bottom of the U.

<comment><USER18> Just don't breathe in the water! That sounds.... dangerous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if you could get the same benefits by just blowing up a balloon.

</comment><comment><USER20> Interestingly enough I bought this what I thought was a scam/sham/illegitimately represented product from Bas Rutten (the O2 Trainer) awhile ago on a lark. It seems like it actually has some merit (at least the idea, most likely not the product).

</comment><comment><USER21> Interesting, I've had asthma all of my life, with varying levels of control, I wonder what the knock on effects of that have been, and I wonder if this would be worth giving a shot

</comment><comment><USER22> Are there any consumer grade devices that are safe/recommended?

<comment><USER23> I'm giving this basic one a shot for $27: [https://www.healthproductsforyou.com/p-respironics- threshold...](https://www.healthproductsforyou.com/p-respironics-threshold- imt-inspiratory-muscle-trainer.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> What's a good IMST routine? I take it one could do it well enough by just slightly holding your nostrils together and breathing hard?

<comment><USER25> That might foul up your Eustachian tubes or sinuses: probably better to do it through your mouth, holding your lips together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Reminds me of fighters training for MMA wearing gas masks to increase their VO2 Max.

</comment><comment><USER27> As a childhood asthmatic, apparently I got on this training regime early.</comment>


Steven Spielberg and George Lucas predict 'massive implosion' in film industry - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2013/6/13/4425486/steven-spielberg-george-lucas-usc-film-industry-massive-implosion <comment><USER2> What I never understood about theaters is why they never got into physical movie sales as well. When I exit the theater for the second part of some trilogy movie, why can't I pick up the first on Bluray on the way out? Theaters are dying because they don't fully embrace the culture of movie lovers. Instead they charge you heavily with the food there.

Going to the theater is an experience much like the theme park. Go on the ride and tantalize me afterwards with memories and other things to offer a more complete experience. Otherwise I'm just going to a giant living room and sitting in a chair hundreds if no thousands of people have farted in at risk of my experience being interrupted by people cheering because Stan Lee appeared on screen for a second.

I don't think theaters will ever be as big as they once were. Offering film versions, HFR 3D, or beer won't change that solely because of the net. They need to attain a "can't beat 'em, then join them" attitude.

<comment><USER3> It's not like physical movie sales are doing too well themselves. And by the time a sequel is released a physical copy of the original would have been out for a while, meaning it will already be severely discounted online and in bargain bins.

<comment><USER2> I agree. My point is that theaters do not embrace all of the industry on both ends. They only look to distribute a single viewing and they rely on gouging that gimmick when they could be doing so much more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's already been like that for awhile, even at a lot of 'normal' theatres. Would you like two large drinks and two large pretzels? That will be $42. Would you like two 3d movie tickets? $36, thank you. So $78 at the 'cheap' theatre for two people. For that kind of money you'd damn well better bring my stuff to my seat.

That's why I usually avoid the 'normal' theatres if possible and only go to the 'fancy' ones that have real menus, nicer chairs, and drinks service etc. Costs about the same, much better experience.

But the nicest experience is usually just at my house where I can eat two pretzels for $2 instead of $40 and there is no chance I have to smell anyone else and I can pause whenever I want. And also, usually the movie is already paid for on Netflix/Amazon Prime or sometimes 'free' on Kodi.

<comment><USER5> Yep €4 for a 0.5 liter bottle of water. Needless to say I eat and drink before going to the theatre.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I still think the theater experience has value. Big screen, big sound, big popcorn. You just can't duplicate that at home without spending absurd amounts of money.

But so far as what I choose to watch in the theater -- a big part of my choices revolve around the quality of the movie. And there Sturgeon's Law [1] is definitely in effect. This past year has been filled with films that just weren't good enough to get me to open my wallet. The message to the studios ought to be clear: Make better films and you'll make more money.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law)

<comment><USER7> In terms of quality I find it hard to watch movies. TV shows offer much better content these days I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This totally makes sense to me. Entertainment is taking so many different forms these days, and it's increasingly on-demand and more personal. People are getting used to getting whatever they want, whenever they want it, wherever they are at the time.

I always go back to Wall-E and think about the people riding around in their floating chairs with their personal TV screens and constant flow of food and drink. It was funny at the time, and perhaps a little too real, but every single day since Wall-E, that future looks more and more realistic.

I've noticed a tone of more boutique theaters opening up, offering more than popcorn and soda. You get recliners, quality dining, a full bar, etc. I definitely see this trend continuing. All I hope for is that the culture and community around movies and genres doesn't die out due to the increasing reality of everyone staying home to watch movies.

I love big premiers, and I love IMax, and I love going to the theaters, but the movies need to be worth my time and money. It needs to be an experience.

<comment><USER9> In my area taking a family of four to the movies is a $100+ affair after tickets and refreshments. On top of that, the theaters have all converted to a lower seat count luxury seats, so they preassign seating and it's harder to get a decent seat (esp at the last minute).

The net change there is that they serve a niche better, but there's a higher barrier to seeing a movie on a casual whim some weekend afternoons. That means a reduction in the numbers of people seeing movies in-theater to me.

<comment><USER8> Yeah that's totally true. Costs have been skyrocketing and I'm not totally sure why.

<comment><USER10> Over time, studio have increased the share they demand of ticket sales in the early phase of movie releases, especially those expected to be blockbusters. In some case to 100%. So, theaters have to make even more of their money than they used to on later parts of the run, smaller films, and concessions, forcing (because of uniform pricing, which you could write entire articles about why it is the norm) all ticket prices higher, as well as concession prices higher.

Plus, increased competition from more new media means that people who are indiscriminate in their entertainment choices are more likely to go elsewhere no matter what theaters do, so it's increasingly sensible to charge higher prices to the smaller share of the potential audience for whom the in-theater movie experience is a strong preference (and thus who are less price sensitive) rather seeking the broadest audience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't understand why they say going to the movies will cost 25,50 or 100$, with a (better experience?). I would never pay that much. Am I weird, is this what consumers want?

I won't even downgrade to the 3D version for an extra 3$ -> I'd rather miss the movie than pay extra for something that looks worse.

Movies are fine the way they are right now. Just concentrate on the core experience -> making a good movie with great characters and plotlines and scripts.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I was talking about this with my son and he said "Of course! I decided many years ago that for most movies it wasn't really worth my time to go out to a movie theater to see it."

And I know for a fact that he truly believes it, we live just across the street from a movie theater complex and he never goes there. The only thing that can make him go to a movie theater is a Godzilla movie.

</comment><comment><USER12> One of the many problems is Hollywood trying to target Millenials who only watch YouTube instead of watch movies or TV shows. Then the movies and tv shows flop and they can't understand why.

Ghostbusters reboot failed because they tried to target social justice warriors and feminists who don't watch sci-fi or horror movies. Trying to make Ghostbusters 3 was really hard and got delayed as they could not get the formula correct in the first two movies. Now Star Wars and Star Trek are suffering.

Just know your target market and cater to them.

My mother watches old movies on Hallmark and TCM etc. She does not like Ghostbusters, Star Wars, Star Trek anyway. She likes mysteries, drama, soap operas etc.

Yeah Amazon and Netflix are making their own movies for a good reason as Disney buys out Fox and will pull all of their IP from other sources to put them on Hulu it owns 60% of now or make their own movie streaming platform.

</comment><comment><USER13> Arnold Swarzenegger suggested tiered pricing 25 years ago, that a big-budget movie like Terminator 2 should be $25. The problem is that movie budget is inversely proportional to audience budget. A big, special-effects movie appeals to kids with no money. A deliberately paced character study like Lincoln appeals to grown-ups, who could afford to pay $25.

With what I see on Youtube that can be made with one person and a copy of After Effects, maybe one day kids' movies will be the cheap ones. The superhero movies will "just" have special effects and some mid-priced actors. Meanwhile the grown-up movies will have all the best screenwriters and actors, which will be the major expense left after technology levels everything else.

</comment><comment><USER13> Let us not forget that the best part about going to a movie was never the big screen. It is shared emotion. Despite complaints about others sometimes disturbing us, I think we enjoy a funny moment more when we hear others laugh, a thrill more when we hear others gasp, and a spectacle more when we hear others cheer.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm okay with this. Hollywood isn't producing interesting content and hasn't done for quite a while now.</comment>