Brain Gain: The Underground World of Neuroenhancing Drugs - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/04/27/090427fa_fact_talbot?currentPage=all <comment><USER4> I was expecting an exploration of nootropics like Piracetam or Vasopressin. Stuff we'e been reading about for 30 years and maybe there's new research.

But this all reads like a generation of kids amped on semilegal stimulants and nothing else. Is that really "neuroenhancing"?

<comment><USER5> Here's a sincere informational question. Where is there a sound research base on any "nootropic" or "neuroenhancer" or "smart drug" or the like that has been subjected to thoughtful scientific examination

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

and has resulted in genuinely superior levels of human cognitive performance? I'm not talking about Wikipedia articles. (I'm a Wikipedian, and I know how many fudged references and commercial product-pushing there is on Wikipedia.) I'm talking about large-n, placebo-controlled, double-blind experimental studies that get published in a major, high-impact journal and pass muster with a process like Cochrane Review

<http://www.cochrane.org/cochrane-reviews>

or at least the joint blog Science-Based Medicine

<http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/>

or prominent mention in a major textbook or practitioner's handbook on pharmacology.

There is huge worldwide interest in people engaging in smarter behavior, but where is there the evidence that anyone really, truly becomes smarter at anything in a sustained way under the influence of any of the "smart drugs," "nootropics," or "neuroenhancers"?

I ask, because I have been reading claims for smart drugs in online communities since 1992, and I have yet to see any examples of especially smart behavior on the part of anyone making those claims. I have acquaintance with the behavior of highly smart young people,

<http://cty.jhu.edu/set/>

<http://www.davidsongifted.org/>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/>

so perhaps I know smart behavior when I see it, but I have not found, after diligent search, any reliable evidence that any drug intervention is more effective in bringing about smart behavior than drinking coffee. Where is the good quality evidence?

P.S. I just found the earlier submission, from the year of publication, to HN of this article:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=571686>

The duplicate submssion detector was defeated here by submitting a noncanonical form of the URL.

<comment><USER6> There are plenty of studies showing "genuinely superior levels of human cognitive performance". However it is unclear how well these tests ("microbenchmarks" if you will) correspond with "smart behavior". It is difficult to imagine how improvements to short-term memory span, visual memory, spatial planning etc would cause a _decrease_ in "smart behaviour", though.

Having said that, here are a couple of studies I've posted elsewhere on this story (ironically in rely to another similar comment by you, which you seem to have missed?):

 _Modafinil produced a similar pattern of cognitive enhancement to that observed in healthy adults, with improvements on tests of short-term memory span, visual memory, spatial planning, and stop-signal motor inhibition. On several measures, increased accuracy was accompanied by slowed response latency. This alteration in the speed-accuracy trade-off may indicate that modafinil increases the ability to "reflect" on problems coupled with decreased impulsive responding. Improvements were also seen in sustained attention, which was unaffected in healthy subjects._

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15121488>

 _Modafinil significantly enhanced performance on tests of digit span, visual pattern recognition memory, spatial planning and stop-signal reaction time. These performance improvements were complemented by a slowing in latency on three tests: delayed matching to sample, a decision-making task and the spatial planning task. Subjects reported feeling more alert, attentive and energetic on drug. The effects were not clearly dose dependent, except for those seen with the stop-signal paradigm. In contrast to previous findings with methylphenidate, there were no significant effects of drug on spatial memory span, spatial working memory, rapid visual information processing or attentional set-shifting. Additionally, no effects on paired associates learning were identified._

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12417966>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you're going to try it, consider following a similar procedure here before you commit to it since it's rather expensive compared to other enhancers: <http://www.gwern.net/Nootropics#adderall>

<comment><USER8> What an interesting web page.

However, there's a massive difference between instant release (IR) and extended release (XR) Adderall pills. The body is effective at downregulating pharmacological peaks as they happen, so IR is less effectively potent than XR. For example, for me, a 20mg XR lasts longer with greater effects than an entire 40mg IR pill rationed apart and taken within 4 hours.

I'd go as far as to recommend _against_ IR amphetamine. The peaking of IR doses builds tolerance incredibly fast. I'd place XR amphetamine on a different plane entirely.

If anyone isn't having success with IR, I recommend XR.

Finally, prescription amphetamine is dirt cheap with insurance. I don't have script drug insurance and pay $160 for 30 pills of generic 20mg Adderall XR. With insurance, it's a mere $12 for a month's worth.

<comment><USER9> _If anyone isn't having success with IR, I recommend XR._

SWIM[0] (who couldn't get IR) didn't get much lasting value from XR, because it took too long over the course of the day, but discovered that opening the caplet and crushing the contents before ingesting made for a bigger immediate kick. SWIM also found it hard to find a consistent optimum dosage this way, but experimenting has been helpful.

0: <http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/showwiki.php?title=SWIM>

<comment><USER8> Well, we're talking about therapeutic use, here. I think upping an XR dose (no more than 30mg XR) would be more effective than crushing pills and bumping them for an "immediate kick".

<comment><USER9> SWIM has found otherwise; even at a 30mg dosage the effects became neglible after a week. Targeted immediate effects worked better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In Russia there is also a widely popular among students and programmers neuroenhancing drug Phenotropil/Phenylpiracetam/Carphedon (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenylpiracetam>).

Unfortunately there are no research about safety of long term use.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've tried Adderall a few times and never got the productivity burst that users claim to receive. It tends to have the opposite effect on me. My attention darts everywhere and my skin feels like it's being pricked by thousands of needles.

The reason why I was productive in college and pulled 4.0s most semesters is because I actually found my coursework interesting. It wasn't something I was plowing through because the degree would get me fame and fortune. I didn't need exogenous motivation in the form of a pill.

I know three people who swear by Adderall/Ritalin/Vyvanse/etc and I've heard the same summary from each of them: "It helps you get through boring work, but it kills your creativity." One guy will switch between pot and Adderall to do his work. He smokes when he needs to be creative and takes Adderall when he wants to bang out lines of boilerplate code.

The substance lifestyle really isn't something I can buy into.

<comment><USER12> "takes Adderall when he wants to bang out lines of boilerplate code."

Tell him to smoke a bit more pot and learn how to program the boilerplate away. :)

<comment><USER13> Also, it sounds like "Takes a hit of crack just before servicing a client".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _Warning, Long Post_

There are a few things that you can do that are good for your mind before considering supplementation. These are really basic but most people do not follow them. I didn't till a few months ago.

 _Do you get enough water?_ About 2L a day is good for most people but is something to be modulated by your activity levels. Dehydration drastically degrades physical and mental performance (stamina, ability to focus, encode memory etc). As you get older you get less able to notice that you are thirsty.

 _Do you get enough sleep?_ It seems almost a matter of pride these days to boast about how little sleep one gets. But sleep continues to be important. There is evidence to believe that sleep aids in mental maintenance and the encoding + consolidation of memories - moving them from the lower level hippocampus to the higher level neocortex. Akin to transferring bits from high speed, throughput RAM to longer lasting but slower long term storage. If you are not getting enough sleep then you are impairing your ability to learn higher level abstractions and patterns.

 _Exercise_ \- Everyone knows exercises is good for you. In addition to all the other cardiovascular benefits it is also good for your mood (opiates - <USER2> opiates as in opium - such as endorphins get released) and memory. Exercise has been linked to neuron growth in the hippocampus and new nerve cell survival rates. As well as benefits to spatial reasoning and memory (makes sense).

 _Diet_

This one is involved. But the greatest offenders are high Glycemic Index foods such as Refined grains and sugary food/drinks and hydrogenated fats. Other than the fact that providing nutrients to your body in a suboptimal way will reduce the performance of your mind and body and wanting to maintain a health weight, such foods have further negative effects. The brain does not store energy so low GI food that provide a more smooth delivery insure that your brain will have access to energy across the day. In addition, sugar spikes will result in a release of insulin to manage the glucose, antagonising further use by say your brain and thus making you feel tired and unable to focus. Constant Insulin and glucose spikes are no good in general though e.g. increased diabetes risk. Furthermore chronic high levels of blood sugar has been linked to memory, mood and attention disorders as well as nueroinflamation.

 _Do you know if your fatty acids balance is optimal?_ DHA in omega 3 is important for optimal brain function. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega-3_fatty_acid#The_n.E2.88....](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega-3_fatty_acid#The_n.E2.88.926_to_n.E2.88.923_ratio)

 _Adequate Choline intake?_ Choline is often not sourced at adequate levels despite being an important nutrient. It is also a precursor to acetylcholine which is involved in arousal, reward, attention and synaptic plasticity (in particular to do with learning).

Other minerals such as Magnesium, iodine and selenium have been shown to have a positive effect on mental health but are not sourced well enough in modern diets. Also indicated for energy and mental function are B Vitamins.

 _Other considerations_

 _Think More_ \- your brain is not some static rock. See nueroplasticity. Using your brain increases survival rates of new neurons. This stacks well with exercise, meditation and calorie restriction.

Did you know that your foods contain drugs (they obviously must if they are nueroactive). Eating foods that are high in precursors to certain monoamines - e.g. high in tryptophan or tyrosine etc. such as turkey, eggs, parmesan cheese may or may not have an effect - at the least they increase the bioavailabity of chemicals such as serotonin and dopamine. Also consider foods that interact with the GABA pathway for anxiolytic effects (various teas ++green) and a healthier way to achieve the so called Ballmer peak.

 _Reduced Calorie Intake_ \- There is aging related benefits to this. But there is also evidence that it is neuroprotective as well as inducing nueron growth. This tricking the body to releasing stress proteins is well studied. You must come to your own conclusions.

Did you notice I sourced nothing here? This is because I don't want you to blindly follow my writing. I am not a medical expert and so I prefer you to search, do your own research and come to your own conclusions. I did leave search able key phrases interleaved through out.

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>====

I don't take what people typically mean by drugs. But before going on I will ask you, do you know what you or I mean by drugs? When I say drugs I mean the stuff that is neurotoxic or prone to tolerance and or addiction (ethyl- alchohol, Tobacco: MAOIs in herbs + nicotine is culprit of addiction, MDMA, amphetamines, cocaine,heroin,opium, etc). I also have never taken the less harmful stuff like LSD or marijuana because they are illegal and hence not regulated. But more importantly I don't want to aggravate my chances of getting arrested by dealing with the people who typically deal such things. I also do not take marijuana beacause although it has been shown to be neuroprotective and anticarcinogenic it is also indicated in short term memory damage. And short term memory is strongly correlated to IQ.

When you say drugs you probably mean stuff that the government has deemed illegal and waging war on for whatever arbitrary reasons without thinking about what the term actually means. For me anything that is psychoactive is a drugs. So I am amused by the contradictions of people who say they don't take drugs while drinking beer or coffee, eating chocolate, eggs, meat or eating foods that are high in sugar (nueroactive by serotonin pathway amongst others).

<comment><USER15> Try and get some non-fluoridated water too, sodium fluoride is neurotoxic - move to Europe or <http://findaspring.com>.

"Drinking fluoridated water is linked with reduced cognitive ability in children. There are also over 30 animal studies showing that fluoride is a neurotoxin which reduces learning and memory. Essentially, fluoride makes you a bit less intelligent."

[http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/07/whats-the-deal- with...](http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/07/whats-the-deal-with- fluoride/)

<comment><USER16> Please, research your topic more carefully.

I would be hesitant to depend on Steve's conclusions, this is a man who believes number 11 rules his life: <http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2009/02/1111/>

<comment><USER15> Speaking of research, check this out:

"Nationwide, pharmaceutical manufacturers routinely pay medical professionals..State-employed doctors and researchers are generally no exception, though they are supposed to comply with their individual institutions' conflict-of-interest policies."

"Beginning in March, federal law will require drug and device companies to report and disclose all of their payments to medical professionals and researchers; by September, the data is supposed to be displayed in a searchable online government database."

[http://preventdisease.com/news/11/112811_Doctors- Researchers...](http://preventdisease.com/news/11/112811_Doctors-Researchers- and-Medical-Experts-Routinely-Paid-Off-By-Pharmaceutical-Companies.shtml)

So who do you trust for health information, agents of pharmaceutical companies, or self-help experts?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Advocating the daily use of stimulants is dangerous. I have tried Adderall but could never do anything productive while using it. It'd make me feel odd and irritated.

My roommate had a prescription and ultimately abused it to the point of destroying his life. Of course, it was his abuse that was the problem not the drug per se.

But to me, Adderall is no different than meth. It is more pure and clean but essentially the same thing. The best way to increase your productivity is to do it naturally as Dn_Ab outlines above.

</comment><comment><USER5> From the article: "Users are also more likely to belong to a fraternity or a sorority, and to have a G.P.A. of 3.0 or lower." If what is usually said about grade inflation

<http://gradeinflation.com/>

fits the baseline at the colleges surveyed, the implication is that the "neuroenhancer" users have below-average G.P.A.s, which then raises the question of whether "neuroenhancer" is really the correct term for drugs used by below-average performers.

What's desperately needed, in the social context reported in the submitted article, is verifiable research

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

showing what drugs might actually genuinely improve performance (as judged by knowledgeable third parties) rather than merely gaining user self-reports of subjective improvements in performance. Maybe there is something that can help a harried parent, or a college student working his way through college, match performance with a colleague or a classmate with fewer distractions in life, but the way to find out what that is would be to do careful research. For the moment, the help that is found from drugs seems mostly to help people at the low end of the performance scale. Again from the article, "Farah told me, 'These drugs will definitely help some technically normal people—that is, people who don't meet the diagnostic criteria for A.D.H.D. or any kind of cognitive impairment., But, she emphasized, 'they will help people in the lower end of the ability range more than in the higher end.'"

<comment><USER6> That's a fault of the article, not the research. There is adequate evidence that some drugs help the performance of some tasks associated with intelligence:

 _a two week regimen of piracetam was found to enhance verbal memory in healthy college students in a double-blind, placebo-controlled study_ [1]

 _Another study of fighter pilots showed that modafinil given in three divided 100 mg doses sustained the flight control accuracy of sleep-deprived F-117 pilots to within about 27 percent of baseline levels for 37 hours, without any considerable side effects._ [2]

 _Modafinil selectively improves neuropsychological task performance in healthy volunteers, possibly through improved inhibitory control._ [3]

 _Modafinil significantly enhanced performance on tests of digit span, visual pattern recognition memory, spatial planning and stop-signal reaction time._ [4]

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracetam>

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modafinil#Military_and_astronau...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modafinil#Military_and_astronaut_use)

[3] <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15121488>

[4] <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12417966>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm a libertarian and I am in favor of drug legalization. In addition, I'm a big fan of The Singularity and believe that mankind is not going to stay the same biological construct. I experimented with various drugs in high school. I am a big believer of hacking my mind for optimum performance and I take a few nutritional supplements on a regular basis because of that. Finally, I have a sleep disorder and have both a prescription for various neuroenhancers and a traditional reason to use them. So I'm about as big of a poster boy as possible on the benefits of better living through modern chemistry.

But I must advise caution here. The main problem is that _your brain is not the thing to use to measure how your brain is doing._ It doesn't work. What we end up measuring instead is how good something makes us feel. For instance, Provigil is great stuff; it fulfills a role of addressing wakefulness. But it also makes a person feel really good.

I'd never support further legal restrictions, but I would most certainly caution folks to take a hard look at what you are doing. From what I see, once you start down this road you can never stop. Let's say you took your magic pills and aced your exam. Was it you, or was it you _with the pills_. Well, honestly, you don't know. Maybe you could have passed without the pills and maybe not. So now it's a few months later and time for the next exam. Do you take the pills again? I don't see how you couldn't -- why handicap yourself when you know the pills give you enhanced performance?

It just continues on like that -- more and more exams, job interviews, dates, parties -- life becomes a series of achievements. As you use neuroenhancers to accomplish each one, the natural conclusion is that you should take them again for the next one. The pattern builds up, and pretty soon you're telling yourself you'd be a fool to do X without the extra help. Note: I'm not trying to describe psychological addiction here. You may be perfectly able to physically quit at any time. What I'm saying is that you become _logically_ addicted; that the most logical thing for you to do is to continue taking them. So now suddenly instead of a kid who took some speed back in college to ace an exam or two, you're the 30-something who has been taking pills on a regular basis for over a decade to change the way his brain works. Is this where you want to end up?

I'd be very careful about heading down this road.

<comment><USER19> There are certainly people for which your description of "drugged life" is true, but the older I get, the more I see that everyone has a sense of self- regulation (and at least the people I'm around seem to listen to it). People know when they're turning into automatons, people know when they're compromising their health. There comes a point with any drug where your tolerance rises and you have to decide whether to consume more or take a break, explore other avenues. Almost everyone I know on Adderall has slowed down or quit over time. The returns diminish and regular usage of a strong dose tends to make people noticeably neurotic (incessantly talkative) - <USER3> off of it is kind of a relief.

My experience with Adderall has been far different than the "faster, faster faster" characterization. It really makes the psychological term "executive function" make sense - I temporarily get a much clearer sense of all of my priorities and the systemic obstacles to reach them. It's made me more social, organized and energetic long after the high wears off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> There are a bunch of subreddits on this topic:

<http://www.reddit.com/r/nootropics>

</comment><comment><USER21> Unnecessarily long article, but I appreciate it.

I take 20+ something supplements every day, half of which are intended to improve cognition. (You can see most of them at <http://supplementwiki.org/Supplement_Wiki:Todo_List> ) I attest to their utility, however their cumulative effect is actually really mild. If anyone's taken adderall or other stimulants before, you know it kicks in and wears off really quick. With nootropics you'd actually want to take long term, it's almost as if they don't work. After a few months, however, you notice you learn and observe more quickly and your speech and interactions become a lot easier and articulate.

Also: ImmInst (for Immortality Institute) is now known as Longecity, see <http://longecity.org/forum>

</comment><comment><USER22> This article is from 2009, I'm pretty sure it's made the rounds on HN before. Please put the year in the title.

</comment><comment><USER23> "Since, in essence, this life was impossible, Alex began taking Adderall to make it possible."

If you're doing this, or thinking about it, consider that it's a prescription drug and if it's not prescribed for you then you're getting a) illegally, and b) _reducing the supply for people who need it_.

There is a shortage of Adderall and similar drugs. <https://duckduckgo.com/?q=npr%20adderall>

By using these drugs casually you're not only improving your all nighters, you're possibly ruining someone's quality of life.

<comment><USER24> This is a lame argument, akin to complaining that people using computers for fun are reducing the supply for people using computers for work. We can just make computers for everyone. That is what the free market is designed to do.

You should direct your ire at the people who are actually reducing the supply directly, namely the DEA, who are the ones preventing the production of sufficient Adderall. If there were not arbitrary restrictions on manufacture, then both the people who need it and the people who want it would be able to obtain it, and more cheaply at that.

<comment><USER23> "This is a lame argument, akin to complaining that people using computers for fun are reducing the supply for people using computers for work."

The DEA limits how much of these drugs are allowed to be made. Companies have to petition to make more. The DEA says there's enough, yet people with prescriptions sometimes have to get the drugs illegally themselves.

"CONAN: Well, I was interested in your piece to hear the DEA say there is no shortage.

KNOX: Yes, I was - I was surprised, too, because the FDA says there is. And, you know, they have a website on the FDA that lists all the drugs in shortage, and there are a lot of them these days. And I've - one thing that caused me to do the story is I found that methylphenidate, the Ritalin-type drugs, popped up on that list a week or two ago."

[http://www.npr.org/2011/11/22/142661880/adhd-sufferers- fear-...](http://www.npr.org/2011/11/22/142661880/adhd-sufferers-fear-an- adderall-shortage)

If you think that's lame, maybe you could tell the DEA that we need more, so casual users won't cut into legitimate users' supply.

<comment><USER25> The DEA is only one factor. I don't think it's a conspiracy theory to suggest that Shire is giving less than 100% towards the production of Adderall since they have a new brand-name drug Vynase that is still protected by patent.

I'm still not exactly sure how Shire managed to set it up so that they are the only ones making the ingredients for generic Adderall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> A couple of relevant articles (old but good): Why it's so hard to pay attention: [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124018463826033223.html?mod=...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124018463826033223.html?mod=googlenews_wsj)

Is LSD the geek's wonder drug? <http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/01/70015>

</comment><comment><USER27> This isn't "underground". I'm in high school and many, many people I know pop ADHD medication and other stimulants so they can get better grades and focus more; AKA, to be more boring (kidding..sort of).

Find any bored suburban neighborhood and many of the people there are popping lots of pills, openly and unashamedly (is that a word?), for lots of different purposes.

<comment><USER28> Thanks for the view into high schools, things sure have changed over the past decade.

The word you were looking for was unabashedly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I sometimes think people are less scared throwing in some mind-altering drugs than altering their xorg.conf (that could break something and it'll take all weekend to fix!).

</comment><comment><USER30> I agree with the author that "it makes no sense to ban the use of neuroenhancers." I'll talk about Ritalin, because that's the one I know.

Let us stipulate, for now, that Ritalin both improves certain aspects of human cognition and causes negative physiological side effects, potentially including addiction. (I believe both to be true.)

As it stands, doctors generally can't prescribe Ritalin if there is nothing 'wrong' with you. Just improving cognitive performance for 'normal' people isn't allowed.

In my opinion, that is not as it should be. What could possibly be more generically worth doing than improving human cognition -- thereby potentially advancing all worthy human pursuits: curing disease, saving babies from starvation, traveling the stars, etc. etc.

That's the big picture, and one reason that I think we as a society should allow people to dope their brains if they want. But the small picture is also interesting. What if you personally could significantly improve the quality and rate of your output (be it software, architectural designs, robots, whatever), but doing so involved some negative consequences and a minor amount of risk to your health. Would you be interested? I was.

I have used Ritalin extensively, and in my mind very successfully. It definitely helps me write cleaner code with fewer bugs in less time than without it. It's a programming force-multiplier for me.

(It can also help with getting various other things done more efficiently. However, I personally don't find taking a powerful simulant to do something like clean my garage to be a worthwhile tradeoff.)

Using these stimulants need not be illegal, at least in the US. There are many doctors you can visit, describe certain aspects of your personality, how your concentration isn't where you'd like it to be, and recieve an ADHD diagnosis with a prescription.

But since you have to obtain a 'disease' diagnosis to get the drug legally, many people don't, and the result is that many kids (and adults) end up popping their friends' pills illegally, without appropriate medical supervision. It would be better if everybody could discuss it frankly with a competent doctor, without the little sham of pretending they're taking it to 'fix' something rather than just to improve mental function.

Whether Ritalin is 'worth the risk' is a personal judgement, one that depends entirely on what you are using it for. But for me, it unquestionably has been. At certain times in my life, I've used Ritalin to _dramatically_ improve my contribution to important projects. I think that at least one of these project would have failed entirely, without me being in superman mode. And these are the projects that have shaped my career, and so have pretty much directly led to the comfortable standard of living I and my family now enjoy. Ergo, if I had never encountered Ritalin, I think it's very likely that I would have a smaller house and less free time than I presently do have. Verdict: Ritalin is fucking awesome.

OTOH, I'd never use it year round (heart and addiction risks), never instead of sleeping properly, never ever ever fucking give Ritalin to a child, I get kinda irritable after a whole day on it, it somewhat degrades the quality of my, uh, _stools_ , it feels a little bit speedy (which I dislike), and it totally degrades certain _other_ aspects of human cognition, such as those required for writing fiction, watching a dance recital, or listening sympathetically to my wife bitch about her day.

I've always been interested in nootropics and have dabbled with most of the ones you can get on your own -- piracetam, vasopressin, choline, DHA/DHEA, green tea, etc. -- and none of them had nearly as noticeable an impact as Ritalin. (Green tea is the only one of those I've stuck with.) I have never tried Modafinil but am keenly interested, and am likely to discuss it with my doctor the next time I have a software project where I feel that it's really important to me to be at my absolute best.

<comment><USER31> _"Ritalin is fucking awesome."_ You are talking about Methylphenidate <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methylphenidate>

Methylphenidate is a rather new drug. Until we know all the risks doctors won't prescribe it when not (absolutely) necessary. I don't think that's a bad thing. And I don't relate caution with banning.

<comment><USER30> Sure, I can understand that point of view, although I don't quite agree.

But I probably should have mentioned somewhere in my comment that I believe pretty much _all_ drugs should be legal, even just for people who want to get high -- so of course I advocate individual choice for drugs that demonstrate benefits that can actually improve one's quality of life (beyond simple recreation).

<comment><USER31> Ever heard about Thalidomide? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide> I think there are good reasons why we are careful with prescribing drugs. Take cocaine for example. Before 1900 they used it a lot. Even on children. But cocaine addiction caused a lot of troubles.

<comment><USER32> Are Ritalin and Thalidomide in the same reference classes, that it makes any sense to compare them? Specifically, one drug was offered for less than 3 years or so, and then withdrawn due to horrible unexpected side-effects that were suspected within a year or two. And another drug has been publicly prescribed for roughly 50 years and has been investigated in detail with a long list of pretty well-understood side-effects. (You tell me which is which.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra I don't understand why people do this. I mean, overcommit to activities which would unlikely produce money or fame.

Why not throw it all out, watch porn and write patches for amaroK all day like I did today?

I can understand when you're pulling a lot of weight for a short time doing incredible things, but continuous pointless activity is a thing I strongly resent.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

<comment> guard-of-terra I also wonder how Americans talk about ADHD as if it is something bad. Prescribe meds against it, even.

After reading a list of symptoms, I clearly have it. But it's a part of my _I_! How would anybody take meds aimed agains a vital part of their self?

<comment><USER9> _I also wonder how Americans talk about ADHD as if it is something bad._

Last regular go-to-the-office job I had there was no end to the number of people who would proudly declare how ADD they were. I think it was a roundabout (and ironically commonplace) way to say, "Look at me! I'm so creative."

I finally decide that the way to tell if someone really did have ADD was to note how often they seemed so cheerful about it.

 _Prescribe meds against it, even._

Have you ever been driving on the highway, and found yourself struggling, I mean really _struggling_ , to pay attention to the damned road, because it was too boring and your brain kept deciding to redirect your attention to everything else on the off chance it was more interesting? Knowing that if you don't pay attention you could die, yet having to fight to look out the windshield?

ADD is not about a lack of attention, it's about inappropriate attention. Sometimes that's a wonderful thing. Sometimes, though, you really do have to pay attention to something even when your brain has other plans.

BTW, schizophrenia and major clinical depression might also be considered "a vital part of [the] self" but not everything you're born with is a 100% good thing.

People taking brain drugs need to weigh the pros and cons.

If you're happy with whatever chemical soup is naturally in your skull, more power to you. Other folks might need some seasoning.

<comment> guard-of-terra I don't drive car much and when I do it's interesting enough to be able to focus.

But I am unable to watch movies without company because I will immediately switch tasks, either physically on my PC or mentally, focusing on something else. And I annoy everybody who I watch movies with by commenting things we see because this switch helps to flush temporary boredom.

<comment><USER9> The list of symptoms you read, did it include hating yourself and thinking yourself a loser because you failed to complete (or even start) important tasks, lost jobs, failed in school, even when you knew how important it was to pay attention, stay on task, and get shit done?

<comment> guard-of-terra Yes it did. I failed in school a lot. Ditto for failed to complete or even start important tasks.

I didn't lose jobs because I happen to be fairly fit to those.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra I also concur to this:

 _"Many sectors of society have winner-take-all conditions in which small advantages produce disproportionate rewards." At school and at work, the usefulness of being "smarter," needing less sleep, and learning more quickly are all "abundantly clear."_

Let's drop school because you're not earning money there.

You getting rewards for needing less sleep is called "abuse" and "slave labor" and should be strongly discouraged.

I fail to see how being a little smarter (or learning a little faster) would help oneself in the workplace (I can see how it can be useful once per month, but not every day). In workplace you need competence, mental model of what you're doing, passion and the ability to see the big picture. I don't think that the said drugs would greatly help in any of those areas.

<comment><AUTHOR> Malcolm Gladwell showed how small advantages often turn into huge advantages over time in his book "Outliers". I realize its not universally applicable, but his anecdote shows that more things are winner-take-all than you would think.

Brief Summary of His Case Study: A hugely disproportionate number of Canadian NHL players are born in the first couple months of the year. Someone investigated this, and attributed this to the cutoff date for kids' hockey leagues was January 1st. Note that this is for ~7 year old kids or something. Because kids grow so rapidly, the boys born in January and February had a small but real size and strength advantage over the hockey players born towards the end of the year. This lead to the older players being perceived as superior (because they were), and therefore getting more attention from coaches and more playing time. This in turn made the gap one not just of size, but also skill. These better players eventually went to play on travel teams and play even more hockey with more attention, and got much better. Some of these eventually went to play in the NFL.

<comment> guard-of-terra One year difference is huge when in that age range.

I went to school when I was 6,5 years old. Everybody else in class was 7 with some months. I was the weakest and could not do anything properly despite the fact that I'm pretty gifted. I could only get good grades for any subjects in the fifth grade. And even now I feel the weakest and the least protected by default. ADHD certainly didn't help too.

So no, being 7 years old and being 7 and 3/4 years does give you a big advantage. The fact that everybody is uniform only magnifies it.

In the workplace everybody have the different age, story and skill set, so this hardly applies. It's no longer a function of two variables monotonous on both of them, but a function on dozen.

And also while small difference give clear boost in competitive environments, it's not so obvious in cooperative environment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Lulz at the history major needing adderal/Ritalin to write papers/gpa. Most likely he was procrastinating all night too, and using the drugs as a crutch to be coherent at 3 in the morning. Many people have survived ochem/thermo/analysis without anything other than coffee, you just have to be _interested_ in the subject.

</comment><comment><USER34> It's quite clear not a lot of the posters in this thread have actually used these illegal substances. Which is understandable, as those who have would be reticent to come out.

I'll come out and say that although I haven't used amphetamines (though I know the story of Erdos as well as the military using it), I have been prescribed valium for anxiety issues. It's helped with random things in life like striking up conversations with completely random women at bars by reducing the anxiety felt in a situation.

Anecdotally I know in the SF startup scene, amphetamines are used quite a bit. Amphetamines (of which adderall is one) are basically a better version of caffeine. It allows you to stay up three or four days perfectly lucid (unlike the stress response from caffeine from increasing cortisol levels in your bloodstream), and you also get a mental speedup (quite literally, the clock speed of your brain is increased)

Anyways, I really hope they legalize this stuff someday hah! I'd be a lot more productive, especially with reading the laundry list of books on my reading list...

<comment><USER35> > _[Amphetamine] allows you to stay up three or four days perfectly lucid_

Nope. No known stimulants negate the need for sleep, nor do amphetamines significantly "increase your clock speed" (certainly not by the amount necessary to counteract sleep deprivation even before the end of your second day).

By the end of day three, you'll suffer from increasingly severe effects of sleep deprivation including but not limited to: cognitive dysfunction, paranoia, and hallucinations (probably auditory at first), plus of course the compulsive behaviour induced by most stimulants.

<comment><USER6> >> [Amphetamine] allows you to stay up three or four days perfectly lucid

> Nope. No known stimulants negate the need for sleep

Technically true, but there is a whole class of _non-stimulant_ drugs that do approach this level, without the weird, "amped" feeling of stimulant. Provigil (modafinil) is the best known of these.

Eg: _Another study of fighter pilots showed that modafinil given in three divided 100 mg doses sustained the flight control accuracy of sleep-deprived F-117 pilots to within about 27 percent of baseline levels for 37 hours, without any considerable side effects._ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modafinil>

<comment><USER35> That's correct, I used "stimulants" in the narrow sense and should have been clearer.

I don't have much information on modafinil or other substances in its class so I can't speak to it except to say that the early studies seem promising (I say this as someone who really, really _hates_ the waste of time that is a good night's sleep) despite some reported side-effects.

I would certainly like to see more studies, as well as further information about sustainability. That is, it's great if it really does let you work reasonably well for 3-4 days (within 30% for < 2 days isn't really conclusive), but even then there's the question of what happens after. I doubt you'd just be able to sleep 8 hours and get right back on track.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A coronavirus antibody test that is more than 99% accurate is now cleared in US - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/antibody-test-that-is-more-than-99-accurate-gets-emergency-clearance-by-fda-2020-5 <comment><USER2> This seems very promising. Hopefully they can eliminate the regulatory red tape and ramp up production to meet demand.

<comment><USER3> Regulatory "red tape" exists for a reason. And it is a very good reason.

<comment><USER4> Do you care to elaborate?

<comment><USER5> Seems pretty obvious to me. Regulations impose oversight and verify quality of product, in order to protect people from self-interested business practices.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple: Don't use your iPhone to mine cryptocurrencies - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/11/dont-even-think-about-trying-to-bitcoin-with-your-iphone.html <comment><USER2> Interesting:

" (v) Cryptocurrency apps may not offer currency for completing tasks, such as downloading other apps, encouraging other users to download, posting to social networks, etc. "

This might outlaw the "Earn" App, which pays you in Bitcoin for doing various tasks. They might have to switch to other forms of reimbursement.

<comment><USER3> But paying people in other forms of payment is allowed? Just not cryptocurrency?

<comment><USER2> That is my read of it</comment></comment></comment>


How I introduced a 27-year-old computer to the Web - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailydot.com/opinion/mac-plus-introduce-modern-web/ <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6892935](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6892935)</comment>


Ask HN: What do people think of Ray Kurzweil's theories (AI, etc)? - <AUTHOR>

Someone mentioned in another thread that Ray has a controversial reputation amongst the machine learning community. If you're into machine learning, I'd especially like to hear from you.<p>Personally, I agree with some of his theories (eg. that humans aren't really hard-wired to think in exponential terms). I certainly take his claims of immortality and mind uploading with a grain of salt, however. <comment><USER2> In to machine learning, met him personally a few years ago.

Very interesting guy. I don't necessarily think all of his stuff is crazy outlandish. The key to think about with some of his theories is that his projections (stuff happening in the next 25 years) may not be all that impossible. Just like predicting a startup will fail 90% of the time and you'll likely be right, you can also say the same for crazy predictions like this. If we map his predictions to things that people 50 years ago were saying about our current tech now, some weren't too far off the mark, and we even surpassed some of the predictions (See the world's fair in the 30s as a good example of this)

That being said, he has still done some solid work in speech processing, he's definitely not just some crazy scientist. Google hired him FOR moonshot projects. If someone's not crazy enough to attempt them, who will?

<comment><AUTHOR> The 90% fail / 10% success analogy is a kind of helpful way to put things in context, thanks for your input.

Technology is a bit of a wild beast, I feel like Dr Kurzweil is almost the personification of its unpredictability/mystery in some ways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I would work for him, but what do I know?

</comment><comment><USER4> I think he's a huckster.

Intelligence is not a function of CPU power, and all his AI predictions so far have failed.

The singularity seems to me like science fiction. Theory after data, not before.

<comment><USER5> I sort of agree but I think his arguments are more complex than just CPU power. Which isn't even entirely wrong, machine learning has advanced a lot recently because computers are finally big enough.

Kurzweil has a pretty good prediction track record for what it's worth: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/gbi/assessing_kurzweil_the_results/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/gbi/assessing_kurzweil_the_results/)

The future always seems like science fiction ([http://lesswrong.com/lw/j1/stranger_than_history/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/j1/stranger_than_history/)).</comment></comment>


Nassim Taleb (Black Swan) open letter to David Cameron - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/16/nassim-nicholas-taleb-economics-cameron

<comment><USER2> Taleb needs to find something new to talk about. In his book Fooled By Randomness, he takes a paragraph and makes it a chapter. Takes a chapter and makes it a book, talking endlessly about black swans, how people who are successful are successful because they got lucky and repeating analogy after analogy to make the same basic point. In this post he makes sweeping statements about debt being bad, based on wisdom from Babylonian times and Roman proverbs:

"David, you must counter this complexity by lowering indebtedness. We have known since Babylonian times that debt is treacherous and allows no room for mistakes: felix qui nihil debet goes the Roman proverb ("happy is he who owes nothing")."

He sounds like Ahmedinejan in his letter to former president Bush advising him to embrace the ways of the prophets of old :)

There are many situations where debt is your friend but like all good things it can be abused. Common Taleb, find something new to talk about! Black Swan is so 2002!

<comment><USER3> Isn't it better to have one idea that is insightful and correct, than to have many ideas which are wrong, like most commentators?

<comment><USER4> Not when it keeps being rehashed _ad nauseum_.

<comment><USER5> Maybe he intends to keep rehashing it until people _understand_. Good ideas, it seems, need to be repeated.

<comment><USER4> _Good ideas, it seems, need to be repeated._

Absolutely not. Ideas that are diffuse and unoriginal, on the other hand, are often repeated because they are uncompelling.

I've read _The Black Swan_ , and although it was entertaining, I didn't feel like I learned anything of value.

<comment><USER5> _Absolutely not._

Bastiat articulated the Broken Window Fallacy in 1850, and here we are 159 years later shredding perfectly good cars to 'create jobs.' It certainly seems like some good ideas can't be repeated often enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Work on building a "robust" society, capable of withstanding errors, in which the role of finance (hence debt) would be minimal. We want a society in which people can make mistakes without risk of total collapse. Silicon Valley offers a good example, where people have the chance to fail fast (and repeatedly)."

<comment><USER6> Impressively scathing of both the Obama and former Bush administrations. I'm not sure how he would go about implementing some of his ideas since on one hand he argues against additional regulations and on the other he argues for a ban certain types of complex financial products (ie who would be the arbiter of what he calls a return to products that dependend on trial and error?). He is however a great writer and more importantly, he, even more than Peter Schiff was right (from an FT article that echoes some of his points in the letter and in some cases is a bit more specific - <http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/tenprinciples.pdf>) :

"Then we will see an economic life closer to our biological environment: smaller companies, richer ecology, no leverage. A world in which entrepreneurs, not bankers, take the risks and companies are born and die every day without making the news."

Having been on both sides of the coin, I do wonder how much those who allocate the capital (bankers) should make relative to those who generate the ideas and innovation - but clearly in recent years, it was skewed towards the former. Lots more from Taleb at his site: <http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/>

<comment><USER7> Taleb wants financial services to come in two flavors: boring, predictable, public banking utiliies; and no-safety-net no-bailout risk-taking investment.

He sees current regulation as helping to create the monsters we have now, where the risk-takers are allowed to play with the money that's supposed to be stable.

<comment><USER6> "Taleb wants financial services to come in two flavors: boring, predictable, public banking utiliies; and no-safety-net no-bailout risk-taking investment."

But how do you get there? How do you make sure they don't spin out of control or even how do you decide which firms to break up and how? (I don't disagree, I am genuinely interested in learning how he sees it can be implemented and without new significant regulations no less).

<comment><USER8> One way to make banks boring and predictable would be to define precisely what kind of products they are allowed to sell. This sounds like what Taleb would want, but it don't think it would be good to entirely eliminate innovation.

But if regulators would forbid any product valued by models they don't understand, it would probably be a good start.

<comment><USER9> Taleb has no problem with innovation - as long as the risk of the innovation is borne by the innovators, or investors putting their own money at risk. The problem occurs when people bet other people's money, reaping nost of the rewards when the bet pays off, and incurring little loss when the bet goes wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Having not read his book, was I the only person annoyed that he used the phrase "black swan" a dozen times in the first paragraph without qualifying it?

He could have been saying _"You and your party may be the only hope we have for a resilient society insulated from negative oranges and in which everyone has the opportunity to benefit from positive oranges."_ for all the difference it makes to me.

<comment><USER11> I cringed too - especially at the capitalization. I shall cringe again when Cameron starts using it. Forced memes like "black swan", "outlier" and "tipping point" are like little mini-advertisements for their books and their authors. Getting them into the vocabulary of politicians and business leaders is the ultimate marketing ploy.

<comment><USER12> I honestly don't know what memes you're referring too (nor the books) but outlier and tipping point have basic meanings without interpretation: tipping point is a cusp or specifically the point at which the force vector originating at the centre-of-gravity passes outside the foot of a body causing it to tip over. Outliers are statistical anomalies or unexpected results that are usually ignored as if they are insignificant.

Black swans on the other hand are birds with a particular pigment.

Now what are the additional layers of meaning, we see black swans referring to apparently unlikely events that nevertheless will occur (that's possibly not the definition given by this guy), but what about the super-definitions for the others?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Unless you're an entrenched partisan, I think it's still a tad too early to call Obama's economic policies "disastrous" or "calamitous."

<comment><USER6> I'm pretty sure that Taleb isn't a partisan - having also been pretty critical of Bush/Republicans (though he did point out the Obama administration's spending is magnitudes larger than his predecessor(s)). In the lead up to the crisis, Taleb was one of maybe only a couple people who not only forecasted the crisis but bet right on how it might occur. He used similarly dire language and was laughed at by many of his detractors. For this reason alone he shouldn't be so quickly dismissed.

<comment><USER14> "For this reason alone he shouldn't be so quickly dismissed."

I'm not sure he'd agree with you. Taleb's books repeatedly stress the importance of survivorship bias. In any population, they'll be someone forecasting just about any conceivable event. No matter how unlikely events turn out to be, _somebody_ is eventually going to be right, and then that person is lauded as a genius for having forecasted correctly. When really they've done no such thing; rather, people have just retrospectively picked out the person who happened to guess right.

I think Taleb would say you shouldn't dismiss him because there's ample evidence _throughout history_ that he's right, not because he happened to guess right this time. Whenever debt levels have risen to what they are now, it's resulted in economic instability and chaotic behavior. It's not just this century: you can find examples back to Roman times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is ridiculous. The financial crisis was not a "black swan." Many people saw it coming and prepared accordingly. It was only groupthink and willful ignorance which kept most people from doing so.

<comment><USER16> It's not a black swan for everybody but it's a black swan for a lot of people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think Taleb makes an excellent point with his Black Swan theory. The point is, that we don't know what will happen. We don't know and governments don't know. Problem is, governments spend like they know :-)

</comment><comment><USER18> Before one gets hysterical, consider debt as a function of GDP.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USDebt.png> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt>

<comment><USER19> Yeah, but the problem is that the rest of the world is not currently blown to smithereens and in need of American labor and capital to rebuild it the way it was in 1945 (not to mention deeply indebted to the United States as well). The trough of that graph is about the point where Western Europe and Japan managed to rebuild their economies to the point where they could actually compete effectively. The United States has no such competitive advantage at this point.

<comment><USER18> So where is all the US output going?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wonder how Taleb reconciles his views on probability with respect to Cameron winning the next election in May?

</comment><comment><USER21> Forget the Black Swan, please God just deliver us from Cameron.

Margaret Thatcher when asked what was her greatest political achivement - 'Tony Blair' she replied. Isn't Cameron just a more greasy version of the slimy Blair, Black Swan spotter or not?

</comment><comment><USER22> Submarine.

</comment><comment><USER23> > It is a low-probability, high-impact event that, because of its rarity and > the instability of the environment, cannot be scientifically evaluated in > terms of risk and return.

I stopped reading here. The _only_ objective evaluation of economic matters is in scientific, risk-and-return terms. Anything else is quackery, fear- mongering, or worse.

A great deal of evil has been done in the last decade or so in the name of protecting us against horrible things. We are told that much good has come of it, because nothing horrible has happened. While I'm sure this is partly true, I wouldn't mind trading a few more horrible things for a little more autonomy.

<comment><USER24> Black Swan theory isn't about denying science; it's about recognizing the limits of science.

Taleb's position (and argument in this paper) is that we need to recognize instances where we don't know the answer instead of making decisions based on assumptions that we do.

<comment><USER25> You can't discount the apocalypse. You just can't. And this pan-phobic concept "black swan" is just various degrees of unknowable apocalypses that we are supposed to account for based upon their very unaccountableness. I don't buy it. Read the tea leaves first, then tell me about swan feathers.

The housing bubble was _BLATANT_. No black swans involved. I remember talking about it with friends in 2005. No big deal, really.

<comment><USER26> _"The housing bubble was BLATANT. No black swans involved."_

Yes, but what was not blatant was that the housing bubble popping would kill Lehman Brothers, cause runs on banks and almost bring down the whole world economy.

Taleb's point is that you can't go around behaving like any system is, to borrow a phrase "too big to fail" - or rather too cleverly thought out/regulated to fail. To some extent this is simple engineering. I can test the resilience of my cluster to network failure by pulling out an ethernet cable and see what happens - maybe there's a small hiccup while systems fall back onto local resources, maybe nothing fails over properly and I am hosed for 12 hours. As I understand Taleb, his argument is that the economic powers (bankers, traders, politicans) spend too much time trying to figure out how to prevent network failure, rather than making sure that when the network does go out, it doesn't take your whole mission down with it. Because, no matter how well you think you have engineered the system, the chance of your network going out somehow, sometime is non-zero.

I do agree with the posters that Taleb overstates the cleverness of his own insight; but unfortunately, in his field, it seems that people really were too dumb/greedy to grasp this. Irrespective of what you think of his interpretation of events or the validity of his suggestions (and I too question them), I think as systems engineers we can appreciate the risk of designing political and economic systems under the assumption that they can't fail.

<comment><USER27> the problem isn't that people were too dumb/greedy to notice. it's that they weren't punished for not noticing it. you'd be amazed what a little incentive does to people's willingness to self educate.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Open-source server appliance is "free" - <AUTHOR> http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS4471547300.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you guys are missing the point. The appliance is free and yours to keep forever. You can even keep using the software on it for as long as you want. The support contract gives you much more than that though. Sure, if you have the time & experience to set up and maintain a system like this its not a good deal. But I'd bet that you would spend far more than $3,000 in time, energy and opportunity cost to keep it running.

With us you also get disaster recovery, software updates, & paid support and in my experience that really makes the boss sit up and take notice. The one friction point I always had when trying to "sell" an idea internally was they needed someone to blame if/when things went south. I started KangarooBox to get FOSS out into the world and to let people know that you don't have to pay overinflated prices for crappy software.

If you can set up Redmine on your server and your boss doesn't mind paying you to do it, great! I will be the first one in line to congratulate you and push you forward. If not, then we can help.

</comment><comment><USER2> Spam... it's not free, it's loaned if you take on a $3k support contact. This is just a poorly disguised advert for an over-expensive piece of kit.

Flagged this article.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's spam. You get to keep the device if you take out the contract. That said. I wouldn't buy this thing I'd just go get an actual wrap board.

<comment><USER4> Does the fact that the submitter is the CEO/founder of the named company change your opinion on its spaminess?

<comment><USER3> No, I'd venture a guess that a good portion of the articles that get submitted to this site are from the author / owner / whatever.

The issue here is the 4 up votes that put this on the front page instead of letting it float to the bottom of the 'New' section.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting idea, freebie hardware with paid support. Similar to MySql arrangement but for hardware. It's the actual terms that just don't seem attractive. $3k support contract on what is practically an embedded device? I could see paying some money for support on a cluster of these to do something interesting, like distributed data acquisition nodes maybe? But not to the tune of 3,000 per node.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yeah, it's "free" with a $3k support contract. Yikes!

Based on those stats (wait, only one ethernet port?), you would probably be better off with something like a Soekris board (<http://www.soekris.com/>, esp. a 4801 <http://www.soekris.com/net4801.htm>). They run OpenBSD quite well...</comment>


Ask HN: Is it time for a career change? - <AUTHOR>

I've been a software engineer for over six years.  In that time, I've been at three large tech companies.  I've been at my current company for three years.  However, during my career I haven't actually been promoted, nor have I gotten a substantial raise.  This is not because of my inability to play politics, but due to my inability to work at a higher level.
Having observed myself at work for six years, I noticed that I enjoy the problem solving and implementation aspects of being a SWE: debugging, writing new code, etc.  However, I haven't been very interested in the higher level stuff at work: design reviews, architectural decisions, etc.
I also don't have any particular direction I'd like to move into.  For the past few years, I've been working on Linux kernel, but only because it was for my job.  I am not interested in Linux kernel work for its own sake.
At work, if I say I'm bored with the work, people would just suggest that I find a different project.  The projects may be technologically interesting/important... But it seems like none of the work really creates anything of value.  Everything seems like an incremental tweak, but there wasn't much wrong with the existing products.
However, I've been working on a personal hardware project for the past few months.  I've been performing at a level far higher than what I've been capable of at work.  I've been surprised by my own level of accomplishment on this project and it shows that I'm neither lazy nor incompetent.  Yet I can't seem to consistently muster that work drive for projects at work.
I don't think the issue here is software vs hardware, or finding the right project.  I suspect it's either a matter of working on my own thing vs working for others, or working on things that people pay for.  Maybe both.  I'm thinking I will become either an entrepreneur (sell my project) or a freelancer. <comment><USER3> 6 years at a specific career is the new midlife crisis. A career change sounds drastic. I'd give some deep thought to what you actually enjoy about your profession and go after it. I went through the same thing a few years back and decided I absolutely cannot do onsite permanent full time jobs anymore. I absolutely die. I thought about a career change but ended up just quitting my FT gig, starting a couple small businesses and making a go of it on my own. I've never felt more fulfilled. I love programming more then I ever have and I don't see this burning out anytime soon, however if it does. I can always go back.

</comment><comment><USER4> Not that long ago, I found myself in a similar situation as you are. Though I was running my consulting company - I hit the bottom and needed to change, change I did.

Few things I do differently now and has helped me a lot: 1\. I focussed on side projects as a way to blow-off steam - this helped me a lot. (Looks like you are already doing it) 2\. Spice up your work environment - good audiobooks always help me stay sane on those long coding days. I usually choose some good light-hearted reading rather than the intense novels. 3\. I allocated days to work on my side projects during the work-week. ThIs meant I had to get creative around how I schedule my work-work. Eg: Sometimes I had to work long hours (10+) to finish up with my work schedule. 4\. Switch off day - <USER2> on Sunday I tend not to do anything work related.

</comment><comment><USER5> I had a similar problem - though it was after a decade of work. At the end of the day, I'd come to hate technology, writing software, engineering management (especially), and pretty much the entire industry. And, in the interest of full disclosure - I had some pretty good management.

But I was burning out. I changed careers (within tech) and became a Scrum Master, only to find that I started to miss coding and problem solving, since those skills were rarely in use.

Then, I moved into consulting. I've never looked back. I try to balance multiple clients at the same time, because love having the different challenges these clients require. All of a sudden I'm focusing on a core competency (DevOps in my case), but I get to see the world from Python, C#, Java, and even Physical Hardware scenarios. But that generalist approach doesn't work for everyone.

Try different things. See if you can take a couple of hours a week to poke around with new technologies, or industries. Trying to take the bull by its horns is the key.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the responses. It's good to hear that others have been in the same place as me. Sometimes it feels like I'm the only one when everyone else at work seems to be doing just fine in their jobs.

I should add that my educational background is actually in electrical engineering, not CS or software engineering. So it wouldn't be a super drastic change of career fields.

I've also wanted to become more independent of full time employment for a while. Ever since I graduated college actually. But it took me a long time to actually figure out how. I wonder if suppressing that desire has resulted in me ending up as a lousy employee.

</comment><comment><USER6> Hit me up directly (address in profile) and I'll sort you out with a free copy of [http://leanpub.com/freelancedeveloperbook](http://leanpub.com/freelancedeveloperbook) \- it'll be food for thought, at least</comment>


Ask HN: What are some blogs/ books that gives fresh and positive life ideas? - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> I started reading signal Vs noise blog by Basecamp and their books too and I have started enjoying it due to it's novel and different take on business.

Are there any similar blogs and books?</comment>


Sprouts Explained - <AUTHOR> http://nrich.maths.org/2413

<comment><USER2> Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column that popularized this game also included a description of a variant: Brussels Sprouts ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprouts_(game)#Brussels_Sprouts](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprouts_\(game\)#Brussels_Sprouts)), played with small crosses instead of dots.

While appearing similar, in Brussels Sprouts the result is always fixed: if there are an odd number of crosses initially, the first player wins; otherwise, the second does.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've thought it would be interesting to have an app to play this game. The hard part would be intersection detection on beziers or splines.

<comment><USER4> Maybe you could simply check whether the graph is planar?

<comment><USER3> Thought of that, but then there's the aesthetics. Perhaps, the answer is drop user-guided drawing and have an algorithm determine whether it is planar and do the routing. But, I still like the idea of user-guided drawing.

<comment><USER5> A user-guided force layout and the algorithmic check would be fine aesthetically if it were implemented well. For one thing, it would bring more attention to the mathematical abstraction by removing an unnecessary degree of freedom.

Seems like the sort of thing that some clever hacker could put together in a d3 fiddle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting: Co-inventor of Sprouts is John Conway, inventor of Conway's Game Of Life

<comment><USER7> Another trivia point is he's the inventor of surreal numbers, which Knuth (yeah, that Knuth not some other Knuth) wrote an enjoyable little semi- fictional novel about in the 70s. I thought it was a fun book, its not intense like TAOCP.

Conway's also the author of ONAG. On Numbers And Games. You'll probably run into that acronym in serious discussion about game theory, like computer game design or RPG system design. Its a pretty intense book. From memory its one of those "$50 for 100 pages" hardcovers. But, worth it.

<comment><USER8> [http://www.amazon.com/On-Numbers-Games-John- Conway/dp/156881...](http://www.amazon.com/On-Numbers-Games-John- Conway/dp/1568811276)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As a ten year old I played a game like this one but where you chose a fixed grid, and took turns filling in the edges of the component small squares. The winner enclosed the most squares, I think! As a chorister in a C11th cathedral there was a lot of time to be spent not listening to sermons, so we devised (or learned from someone's dad) these fun games. I think we usually used an 8x8 grid.

Edit: here we are: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dots_and_Boxes](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dots_and_Boxes)

</comment><comment><USER10> People who like this might want to try Simon Tatham's puzzles. (the author of Putty)

        http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/

Bridges and perhaps Untangle might be most similar.</comment>


Ask HN: ML, EEG, metal 3D printer, evolved antennas = high resolution BCI? - <AUTHOR> Hi, what do you think about the combination of these technologies?
EEG has a problem breaching the skull. Evolved antennas would be used to pick up better signal on various frequencies that are interesting. Because these need to be very small and ideally integrated into a head cap, we would use 3D printing to create these, which should also open room for even crazier (and more efficient) kind of fractal designs (fractal antennas are what phones use AFAIK). Then we would use GAN to clean up and another GAN to understand the signal. Because of (supposedly, that's what my question is mainly about) significantly better signal, it should have much better performance.
I'm not an expert in any of these. What do you think? <comment><USER2> I would not trust experiments using GAN on EEG to provide higher resolution/'quality' signals. You're not going to have a reasonable method to collect the data needed to train such a network, nor to be able to generalize the network. It will hallucinate patterns and given the dubious statistical quality of many comp-neuro papers I would be even more skeptical of many results.

If you're interested in applying some of these ML techniques I'd consider looking towards ECoG or LFP array recordings where sensor noise and sensor failure could in part be approached by techniques like this. For long term LFP arrays sensor failure is expected and models do not need to necessarily generalize to other individuals (and there is enough data to train on).

Overall you're not going to create signal when there was none in the first place.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't have the clear data but I know people that work on obtaining them and making them open (from local universities). I would like to use this method together with other methods, so even poorer performance than other methods could help - provide certainty in some uncertain edge cases, for example

The big question is whether the signal detectable on the outside of skull is closely correlated with what's going on inside

<comment><USER2> As an ex-researcher in this domain (still doing research, but elsewhere), the data does not currently exist. I believe you are grossly underestimating the amount of efforts, subjects, time, funds, and bureaucracy needed to obtain this data.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are probably assuming I'm in the USA. I'm in Central Europe and this data is produced by local university (that has many great hospitals attached to it), open. I have friends who work on the project, they will start releasing data next year. They're working on the project for past 5 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Perhaps you should first learn what a GAN is, because what you wrote makes no sense.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wrote the question precisely to learn more about these topics. Why do you think GAN doesn't make sense in that context? There are many papers about using GANs to clean radio signal, not this one specifically but as an example of a GAN/radio paper: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6263619/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6263619/)

<comment><USER3> In the paper you linked to a GAN is used to generate fake data. This fake data can help when training a classifier, just like any other data augmentation method.

I could not find any papers about using GANs to clean up radio signals. It could probably work if you have large datasets of both clean and noisy signals, but in this context you most likely don't. And even if you did what makes you think denoising with GANs would work better than traditional methods?

Just because it's a hot buzzword doesn't mean you should use it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why are you condescending me? I studied applications of GAN nets for dozens of hours (still an amateur beginner of course). I didn't even know it was such a buzzword when I got started as I don't follow twitter etc.

Here is a paper that talks about exactly what I am proposing, using GANs, minus evolved antennas: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.01875](https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.01875) (it is no secret that this paper has inspired me to write this question - my thoughts were about improving it with evolved antennas).

About the clean data requirement, it is common practice to record as much as possible once doctors open somebody's skull because such opportunity is scarce. So people are working on it.

<comment><USER3> I apologize, for some reason I was in confrontational mood.

This paper is also about using GANs to generate fake data.

Here's the thing - to generate high quality fake data you need to have a lot of real data, but if you do then you don't really need fake data.

Re denoising with GANs: do you have a lot of clean data (eg from inside the skull) that is equivalent to the noisy data (from outside the skull)? Let's assume you do. Do you have any example of someone using GANs to clean those signals? Or any radio signals? What makes you think it would work better than any other existing denoising methods?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fantastic Mr. Fox (2005) - how-about-this https://granta.com/fantastic-mr-fox/ <comment><AUTHOR> Wow - this is old journalism at its best. A few things really stand out:

\- a 36(!!) minute masterpiece, and difficult to cut anything out to make it shorter without losing something

\- the journalist covered both sides of the story, and did so beautifully, allowing us to enter into his shoes and feel like we were in the action, talking to the people on both sides

\- both sides were given more than fair treatment to voice, not just their political stance, but their passion and feelings about the issue

\- added supplementary information about foxes, the history of hunting, animal rights, English dissenting tradition, even his personal experience with foxes - all to add color to the issue and make it come alive within its historical and humanistic context

\- the opinion on whether or not fox hunting is right is not the main point of the article - the issue isn't front and center, the people are

\- does not write his opinion into the article, remains the unbiased third party throughout while still allowing the reader to get into the heads of both sides and form their own perspectives and views

\- an absolutely amazing conclusion (i want to avoid spoiling it) that manages to tie everything mentioned in the article together and turning fox hunting into commentary about the entire British society

2004, huh? Would love to see this kind of journalism make a comeback.

<comment><USER2> I disagree. This shows some of the worst flaws of modern journalism: The smarmy tone, writing the story about personalities rather than facts, the narcissistic urge of the journalist to insert himself into the story.

It's a travesty.

<comment><USER3> So, what's the alternative? And would it be as interesting to read? People generally _like_ the human interest aspect. Especially as this isn't "news" but more a form of anthropology, a visit to two secretive warring tribes of rural Britain.

<comment><USER2> I think the fact that the journalist is pushing the warring tribes narrative is part of the problem. I should have listed that among its flaws.

The journalist here is egging the two sides on, deliberately setting up confrontations, and rooting for blood. It's interesting read because it stimulates your lizard brain, but it's not good journalism.

<comment><USER3> The confrontations were always there - the two sides were engaged in regular confrontations for _years_. If anything the journalist tries to defuse it at one point by pulling the "I'm with the press" card, and eventually sets up a non-confrontation reminisce between the two old men of the old sides.

<comment><USER2> I don't see how bringing the activist into a bar full of hunters and then announcing that you're his protector is anything like trying to diffuse conflict. Acting like a macho tough guy and flippantly giving a library card as a press credential when you get called out is a pretty cheeky thing to do.

<comment><USER3> Farmyard, rather than bar: "we drove into a farmyard full of farmhands and hunt supporters."

> Acting like a macho tough guy and flippantly giving a library card as a > press credential when you get called out is a pretty cheeky thing to do.

Flippant, yes, macho .. not exactly. It is however _extremely_ English, this kind of whimsicality in the face of interpersonal violence. Reminds me of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digby_Tatham- Warter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digby_Tatham-Warter) carrying an umbrella about the Battle of Arnhem and leading a bayonet charge wearing a bowler hat.

The British Library membership card is fantastic for this. It's almost literally saying "Don't punch me, I'm upper middle class". Given the importance of class signifiers in the whole affray, that moves him perfectly to bystander status. Probably worked better than an actual press card. Or warrant card.

But as he points out, this is an extremely routine conflict, almost as if this is what these people do at the weekends rather than have fights at football matches:

> "Then, I had the sense, it was all just like old times. The saboteur women > screamed murderous abuse at the terrier-men while the terrier-men tried to > knock video cameras from the women's hands, there were scuffles and a good > deal of debate about who started what, and vicious, well-rehearsed arguments > about the bloody business of killing foxes. I wandered around asking if > anyone happened to have seen my car keys."

(There is probably a whole other article to be written about the dark whimsy of violence that pervades this article!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting article. I have two bits to offer.

Firstly, when I was young, my dad used to judge fox hunting. The trials he judged were almost never to the "death" though. He once told me that he only saw a hound actually catch a fox once when the fox ran though a culvert while the hound ran over it and got to the end first. There is a clear opportunity to separate the hunt from the kill.

The second is that I now live on a rather large piece of property. Some fields and some woodland. We allow a local group of "fox hunters" use our property as part of their hunt. While they show up with a dozen horses and twice as many hounds on a semi-regular basis, they don't actually hunt or chase fox. Prior to the hunt the hound master comes to our property and uses a scent rag of some kind to scent a trail for the hounds to follow.

In fact, there is a fox den within 50m of my home office and the hounds show no interest in the den. Fox tend to raise their kits "closer" to people as coyotes (the main local threat to fox) are reluctant to come as close to people as fox are. Not great news for my chickens as we loose one or two a month to the fox, but that is the price I pay for living where I do.

The gist of it is this. It is unfortunate that the various players can't typically reach a compromise. There seems to be ample opportunity to do so. I live in a world where the "fox" hunting tradition thrives and yet no fox are actually chased let alone killed.

</comment><comment><USER5> Oscar Wilde summed fox hunting up best: "The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable."

</comment><comment><USER6> What the cuss, expected this to be about the Wes Anderson stopmotion film or Roald Dahl book

<comment><USER4> Are you cussing with me?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > shout 'Free Tibet' into the startled [chinese] premier's car. When the > pictures of his solo protest appeared on Channel 4 News, he lost his job at > London Underground.

what a pathetic society.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, that wasn't very clear. He hardly lost his job because of the politician action outside work, is that legal? Maybe it caused him to miss too many days of work and that was used to fire him, maybe by management who wanted to appear faithful to the establishment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> >He was going to attempt the Three Peaks Challenge, running up Snowdon and Sea Fell and Ben Nevis, the highest mountains in Wales and England and Scotland, in one day.

Sea Fell? Scafell Pike?

<comment><USER10> Yes, Scafell Pike. Another, sad example of a townie knowing nothing about the countryside.

[https://www.threepeakschallenge.uk/national-three-peaks- chal...](https://www.threepeakschallenge.uk/national-three-peaks-challenge/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> [https://youtu.be/Jjbu0kSEuQQ](https://youtu.be/Jjbu0kSEuQQ)

I did this the moment I read the article's title.</comment>


Ask HN: How realistic is it to get your bachelors as a working professional? - non-entity Excluding online schools since those seem to be mostly for profit scams or look to have poor curriculum compared to traditional schools <comment><AUTHOR> I did it. It's about 50% harder and takes 50% longer. Realistically you need an employer that is supportive of your efforts.</comment>


US bans government personnel from using Huawei and ZTE devices - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2018/08/14/us-defense-huawei-zte-ban/ <comment><USER2> I don't know what the govt knows, but they know more than I do. I won't use or let my family use those devices either until that ban is lifted. :-/

</comment><comment><USER3> just use AT&T, that way only the US gov will be spying on u</comment>


Ask HN: Should a website work without JavaScript? - <AUTHOR> http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cp-javascript/all/all <comment><USER2> Many websites would be dramatically improved if they stopped fucking about with stupid pointless javascript and just delivered content, marked up for HTML and styled with CSS.

Some websites have applike functionality and so they need javascript. I am not talking about those. I'm talking about newspaper sites that preload a huge chunk of JS before displaying any text.

(The way you've asked this question is sub optimal.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Define "a website".

Should Government statutory information be accessible without JavaScript? Yes, without question.

Should something intrinsically 'app-like' \- for example, a draggable map explored by panning, zooming and interacting with vector data - work without JavaScript? Much less compelling.

Ask yourself where your site falls between the two.

</comment><comment><USER4> In an ideal world even websites at the 'app-like' end of the spectrum would degrade gracefully but I think it's idealistic to expect someone building something akin to Google Maps to put the extra work in.

So all I think it's fair to expect is that 'content' is always accessible. That does include complex search interfaces in most cases - that's one situation where I think it is obligatory to put the extra legwork in as you're basically still a content site rather than a web app.

<comment><USER5> It's a lot to expect graceful degradation when we can't even get cross browser support (looking at you whatsapp).

I think it far more likely to get a super basic alternative, almost a raw data version. Sadly the main driver for this is SEO rather than accessibility for disabled users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is no objectively correct answer for this (yes or no).

It's up to the use case. What do you want to accomplish? What users do you care about or not?

Should a website use images? Sprites? Font icons? Tables or CSS positioning? Should a site have a dedicated mobile version? Should your site have an app? A twitter account? Should your site use flexible layouts? Should your site use any features unique to one browser? And so on. The only answers are opinions.

</comment><comment><USER7> Users should be able to access all your content without JavaScript. I think the old rule of progressive enhancement still applies, JavaScirpt can add extra things, but everything should remain functional without it. If it does not work without it, your doing yourself harm I think, remember one very important user is search engines, and they don't (as far as we know) use JavaScript.

</comment><comment><USER8> Professionally speaking, that is one of my most important tests of the quality of a site. When I see an Ajaxed site on a resume, it's the first thing I check as it is a sign of a true craftsman taking care in their work.

Ajax should ALWAYS degrade gracefully. Sites that use Ajax just to use it with no real benefit to the end user perhaps for a slight bandwidth savings are a particular irritation. It's often just a strong degradation of the user experience to make up for the deficiencies of your back end, or worse yet for no real reason other than it being the flavor of the decade.

</comment><comment><USER9> If graceful degradation is possible, it should happen. Of course, if you implement critical features in javascript it is unreasonable to demand a full fall-back server side, but things like menus, displaying text and images, normal form input shouldn't break with javascript disabled (or just EXTERNAL javascript disabled, which opens up another can of fun bugs).

Your landing page should work without javascript. Your blog shouldn't need javascript to display your content in useable form. I should be able to use your webshop (including content filters, shopping cart, checkout) without javascript, but payment widgets from external providers are a reasonable exception. Online office apps like Google Apps need javascript, but it would be great if one could at least view documents without it.

</comment><comment><USER10> If you are making a mobile application based around a wrapped in-app browser(Apache Cordova/PhoneGap and Appcelerator Titanium), I'd say yes.

I know most people wouldn't even think they could disable Javascript on their phone or even know where to look in the first place, but there is always a chance that it could be disabled.

The most recent experience I had was when I disabled the Javascript on my iPhone 4s for a web accessibility course and forgetting to reenable it. Later I'm looking to find a place to eat with good reviews, and Yelp's mobile view would not load and gave me a lovely message to enable Javascript. I know it is not a wrapped in-app browser liked I mentioned before, but the app should at least give me a bare bones list at the end of the day.

</comment><comment><USER11> Some things just won't work without JavaScript. Or would be way, WAY too hard to implement without JS.

But a website should at least _appear_ without JavaScript. I've seen lots of websites that look empty or horribly distorted when JavaScript is disabled. That should not happen.

<comment><USER12> Like.. instagram photo pages? (seriously, without js they're just a blank page!)

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure; I think it's telling that Instagram, arguably one of the most popular / trafficked and supported (Facebook) websites out there, thinks it's unnecessary to even show an ERROR page if a browser has JS disabled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If "a website" is a resource intended to be opened in a modern web browser, the answer is yes. In this case developers can safely assume the three integral parts - html, css, and js - are enabled and available for use.

If a website - a blog - just displays some text, a raw/plain version can be provided along with it, not necessarily on the same web address.

When a website displays/formats/filters some data, an API can complement it.

But sometimes, a website is an app where no alternative representations would make sense. Then the answer is no.

It's all about needs, requirements, possibilities, and common sense.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'd be curious to know what percentage of sites remain in the 88.2% list after ignoring these three use cases:

1\. Site analytics

2\. Displaying ads

3\. Fighting spam

</comment><comment><USER16> Yes.

</comment><comment><USER17> Yes.</comment>


Scientists uncover new mode of evolution - <AUTHOR> https://www.livescience.com/yeast-reveals-new-mode-of-evolution.html <comment><USER2> Clickbait title. They looked at the details of a long known mode of evolution in a specific organism.

Epigenetics has been seriously studied for decades by now, and methylation in general is also an old hat. Sure, there's many details we don't know, and it's natural and commendable to study those. But this is working out the details and not some groundbreaking new concept.</comment>