How Zara Grew Into the World's Largest Fashion Retailer - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/magazine/how-zara-grew-into-the-worlds-largest-fashion-retailer.html?_r=0 <comment><USER5> Zara should be closed and owners go to JAIL. It used slave labor (including minors) for YEARS in Brazil.

I've been to a 'camp' myself in 2011 just before the scandal broke. This is how they did it: a coyote paid by Zara would go to Bolivia and give some money to Bolivians that wanted a 'better life' in Brazil. They paid travel expenses and brought them illegally to Brazil. After they were here they would work for no salary - just for the promise that Zara would 'give the papers' to work legally. It never happened.

To mask the operation they opened a number of ghost companies in Brazil and hired those companies to manufacture their products. When hell broke loose, they stated that those companies were guilty, not them.

I hope Zara burns in hell.

<comment><USER6> you can replace 'zara' with any fashion or electronics corporation.

<comment><USER7> And that makes the objection invalid?

<comment><USER8> No, it means that if you are going to police the morals of the industry, you have a lot of work to do.

<comment><USER9> There are immoral things, and there are illegal things. He's talking about outright crime.

<comment><USER6> you should read about coke/pepsi wars in 3rd world countries.

when it comes to fashion, there are the companies that you hear they use bogus companies to exploit the poor world to save 0.05c/item, and the ones you just haven't yet heard they use bogus companies to exploit the poor world to save 0.05c/item.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> what isn't that clear in the article, is the speed advantage over chinese- produced cheap fashion goods. the t-shirt might look the same, a sort-of copy of a Lagerfeld piece. but the Zara one is in stores practically immediately after the fashion show in say Milan is over, while the container ship from China is leaving port.

speed kills, and fashion is a speedy business. your customers see what fashion magazines show them, and they want it _now_. Zara has understood this. awesome, awesome application of clear thinking and strategy.

Zara is being taught over here in EU together with Red Bull as one of the key modern examples for smart business models.

<comment><USER11> Haha, funny that you point out Red Bull. Now THERE is a company that knows how to brand. I don't even drink Red Bull, but I love the brand, love the things they do, love the events the sponsor, and usually root for the teams they sponsor, should I not already have an allegiance in that sport. They've probably made tons off of somebody like me, who doesn't drink the drink, but buys into a lot of the other stuff they do.

<comment><USER12> Agreed, although I use Redbull as my "I'm not in the mood for something hot" coffee/tea alternative.

<comment><USER8> Cold canned coffee is my new addiction, but I've been to Japan one too many times. Red Bull tastes like some bland pop to me, but they've really heightened their appeal by being the premier drink mixer (which ironically, used to be coke!).

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I'm a fan of the canned starbucks doubleshot expresso drinks. A bit high on the sugar content for regular consumption, but I like the tasty treat every now and then.

<comment><USER12> Zero calories/carbs is why I drink Redbull instead of the Starbucks stuff.

Japan has plain cold coffee, it's harder to find that here, otherwise I'd be happy to drink it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What's striking is that the entire org is designed to listen to customers... aka "Make something people want". Relevant quotes from the article below:

1\. STORE OPENINGS

"When we open a market, everyone asks, 'How many stores will you open?' " [Inditex communications director Jesus Echevarría] said. "Honestly, I didn't know. It depends on the customer and how big the demand is. We must have the dialogue with the customers and learn from them. It's not us saying you must have this. It's you saying it."

2\. PRODUCT OFFERINGS

[Store managers] also monitor customers' reactions, on the basis of what they buy and don't buy, and what they say to a sales clerk: "I like this scooped collar" or "I hate zippers at the ankles." Inditex says its sales staff is trained to draw out these sorts of comments from their customers. Every day, store managers report this information to headquarters, where it is then transmitted to a vast team of in-house designers, who quickly develop new designs and send them to factories to be turned into clothes.

<comment><USER14> That's what jumped out at me too. It's one thing to do a startup which listens to customers - that's pretty much tablestakes. It's another to run a vast multinational organization which does this across the board. Beautiful execution on a large scale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I work for H&M, their competitor, in their IT HQ in Stockholm. It is a great place to work. H&M is a success story as well, currently the highest valued listed Swedish company. IKEA might be more valuable, but is not listed. Ericsson used to be more valuable, but not any more.

The IT challenges are not always technically of the most interesting kind, and rarely bleeding edge, but that is made up by the scale of things, by a good atmosphere and people dedicated to doing a good job. It is an organization that is suited to grow professionally in.

</comment><comment><USER16> _The managers field calls from China or Chile to learn what's selling, then they meet with the designers and decide whether there's a trend. In this way, Inditex takes the fashion pulse of the world._

So big data (and associated systems) is not always needed to detect patterns and trends.

<comment><USER12> Non-sequitur.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've already heard comments about quality going down. I feel like once H&M started blowing up their quality declined. Not saying it was the highest quality to begin with but my older H&M hold up better than my newer purchases. Zara is destined for the same dilemma.

<comment><USER18> Yes, but quality is going down _everywhere_. Walk into any clothing store in any mall and take a look at the seams. Brands that used to be known for standard, quality pieces are jumping on the fast fashion train, but their prices aren't coming down.

I think the more interesting part of this article was this statement by Prof. Fraiman, "And what is the problem in America? They don't fit in the clothes. So why do it? Having to make larger sizes makes production so much more complex."

I've heard that SO many times from high end designers, but which fast fashion brand is making money hand over fist? Forever 21. And they're also the ones offering lots of options for plus-size women. Bigger women are begging for cute, trendy clothes and whoever delivers it will hit pay dirt.

<comment><USER11> >> And what is the problem in America? They don't fit in the clothes.

This. So America gets completely different cuts of clothes. If you're not overweight, or huge, most clothes sold in America suck. I didn't realize this until I spent some time studying in Italy, where even the cheap t-shirts they give away at 5ks races fit so much better and look so much nicer on me. It wasn't until then that I realized the cut of the clothes, not just "size" or "style" make a huge HUGE difference in appearance. That, and when you would walk into a store, the employees will say "don't buy that, this here fits your body style soo much better" and they are right. In the states, I've noticed people just buying whatever is trendy, with zero understanding of what actually looks good on them, and what doesn't....

<comment><USER19> I've come across this same "issue", specially with suits and shirts - for some reason in the US these are more "baggy".

<comment><USER18> Yup. In my experience, designers don't want to explore proportions beyond that of the standard fit model. So if you don't have a "normal" (not necessarily average) body as determined by the designer, you're outta luck. And if you're plus size, you have to be the right kind of plus size.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Ha! Zara is the HFT of fashion.

Constant demand feedback from random, irrational and finicky customers who want cheap liquidity (the latest fashion) now is used to front run the competition with supply side flexibility and incredible production speed, allowing them to capitalize upon short term market dynamics (fashion fads) and grab easy alpha (cash money).

> _"Prada wants to be next to Gucci, Gucci wants to be next to Prada. The > retail strategy for luxury brands is to try to keep as far away from the > likes of Zara. Zara's strategy is to get as close to them as possible."_

\-- <http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotellings_law>

Game theory FTW! Zara is using other people's clout, clothing designs, advertising and foot traffic to free ride and not pay the advertising or branding taxes most brands need to pay to stay competitive. They are commoditizing high fashion with volume, speed and ruthless efficiency.

> _Echevarría said that is because the customer is always determining > production — not the other way around. Every piece of clothing the company > makes has, in a way, been requested. A business model that is so closely > attuned to the customer does not share the cycle of a financial crisis

...

The managers field calls from China or Chile to learn what's selling, then they meet with the designers and decide whether there's a trend. In this way, Inditex takes the fashion pulse of the world. "The manager will say, 'My customers are asking for red trousers,' and if it's the same demand in Istanbul, New York and Tokyo, that means it's a global trend, so they know to produce more red pants," the P.R. person said. _

Just like traders at a desk. Or computers watching lines move. Supply is now meeting demand when it exists, thus reducing inventory, waste and maximising both consumer happiness and Zara's profits. This is an example of big data + lean manufacturing running at scale to meet random and short term thundering herds that really, really want the latest in whatever is hot. It's a little like Akamai and popular videos - find the probabilistic trends of content demand (aka Cat videos :), cache the files at edge nodes - reduce backbone bandwidth waste via local file streaming - profit.

> _"To the luxury brands, they are copycats, they are like mushrooms feeding > off the main body of fashion," Golsorkhi says. "I was of the same mind > myself, but I have grown out of that because I realize that the fashion > companies also copy each other. In the end, no one's original."_

Why isn't this obvious :D. Everything is a remix - and anyone who denies it doesn't pay enough attention to how things are made. Zara, like Samsung, is bringing things that people want, at the prices they can afford, when the people want them. Supply is matching demand and that's a good thing. It's good for the consumer - and funnily enough - it's good for the brands they copy.

If people want Gucci they'll get Gucci - not Zara. For everybody else - <USER2> just want to social signal to others that they are fashionable, good looking and wealthy - let them for pete's sake! Each knock-off Gucci just adds to Gucci's brand recognition as _THE_ brand other brands copy.

> _"The reality is: a T-shirt is a T-shirt is a T-shirt," Golsorkhi says. "It > costs the planet the same thing whether you have paid £200 for it or £1 for > it. It does the same amount of damage. A T-shirt is equivalent to 700 > gallons of water, gallons of chemical waste, so much human labor. But it > used to be that we could do with three T-shirts a year. Now we need 30. > Sometimes it's actually cheaper to throw away clothes than to wash them. > That has got to be wrong."_

Perhaps. But that assumes that everything that went into the T-shirt just flat out disappeared from the Earth. That water went back into the rivers. Those chemicals were recycled (they're expensive). That human labor needs something to do - or they'd starve to death on subsistence farming. The T-shirt ends up being used for years, donated to charity, or recycled.

Globalisation, crass consumerism and funny T-shirts have saved the world and brought billions out of poverty. It's the pointless things that keep things running. Cat videos have done more for the internet than Wikipedia (I'm not messing around). Indeed Wikipedia's dominance is directly helped by Cat videos (reducing cost of bandwidth, getting more eyes online, reducing cost of information access).

Non-cyclic thinking is really - well - short-sighted.

We need MORE consumption not less - our entire world economy is based on 75% personal consumption - that means CONSUME.

Without it we're all fucked.

Discouraging consumption is ridiculous - how will people in poor countries get out of poverty-subsistence cycle if Americans won't buy their shit. As much as people hate to admit it - consumerist, debt laden Americans make the world better off than thin, hard working, non-consuming Germans.

The Germans only live because the Americans consume. People only buy expensive German cars to move their lazy asses around.

This is a good thing because, without lazy consuming people doing pointlessly complex commuting and travelling - people wouldn't buy cars - period. And if people don't need what you produce (starving artists anybody) - you don't exist - no Germans. See what happened to Japan's economy - they killed consumptions - and once you kill consumption, supply never comes back easily - because no one is going to work for free or invest in an economy, unless they know that in the end - they'll get paid by consumers.

Next time you watch Jersey Shore, really, really shallow consumerist people, reality television, QVC or any of the other crass consumerism crap you see everyday - don't denounce them, don't say the world has "jumped the shark".

Instead you must thank them for keeping your ass employed, and the world economy running with their wasteful, arbitrary and pointless consumer habits.

<comment><USER8> There are other ways to drive the economy beyond essentials rather than through just consuming. Infrastructure is one, wars are another. But really, we could focus our resources on getting to the moon, getting to mars, and just lots of crazy R&D that would pay off greatly in the future. We could also spend more time in cultural endeavors, supporting more artists, writers, musicians, movies, and so on.

Buying a cheap shirt from Zara hardly does much more than buy someone's lunch in a Chinese factory.

<comment><USER20> Buying that cheap T-shirt pays for your R&D through taxes and value produced. The item at hand is irrelevant. So long as it is consumable, in demand, and people are willing to pay for it - it will be supplied. The best you can do is tax negative externalities, and invest any market surplus via taxation into long term R&D.

All the crap that was produced post WWII paid for your cutting edge shuttle program. That shuttle program subsequently helped the research of all the crap that was subsequently produced.

It's a crap cycle. Embrace it. The cookie monster should be the cheerleader of capitalism - he eats, and eats and eats, but none of it ever goes down because he lacks the stomach to actually ingest any food - it all goes to waste - <USER3> he enjoys it anyway.

We need more cookie monsters.

<comment><USER21> How many cookie monsters until we see diminishing returns?

<comment><USER20> You can never have enough cookies - the only upper limit is that of the second law of thermodynamics or the catastrophic end of civilisation.

If people want cookies - it's cookies we'll make - because the markets one and sole purpose is to provide goods that people want, at prices they can afford, at the times they want it.

The sole purpose of governments is to tax the negative externalities of said cookies (obesity/health etc.) and invest those market surpluses into the future safety and prosperity of said obese consumers through negative ROI R&D and scientific research that will allow us to make cookies taste like whatever we want on Mars.

Both governments and markets exist to serve consumer demand.

Everyone in the world is somebody's bitch.

Ignore consumer demand at your own peril. The world runs on french fries - <USER4> it for the health concerns, invest it into rockets that'll let people eat those self-same fries on Mars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Last year I happened to be in Sydney staying at a hotel around the corner from their grand opening. _Huge_ crowds! I had never heard of them, but then I'm not in their target demographic.

</comment><comment><USER23> We recently did a case on Zara at my b-school (Ivey). Really pragmatic use of technology and a very humble management team.

They really take the old maxim that 'fashion is fleeting' to heart in their operations and manufacturing chain.

</comment><comment><USER24> Does anyone know what software they use for fashion design?</comment>


Teacher certification a painful farce - <AUTHOR> http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2009/sep/15/teacher-certification-a-painful-farce/

<comment><USER2> From my anecdotal experience, maddening red tape like this is much more of a problem for attracting quality teachers than pay is. There are lots of people who are smart and driven but don't care much about money; just look at the ranks of the non-profit world. But you have to be a special kind of crazy to want to put up with these Kafkaesque rules.

<comment><USER3> This again is anecodotal, but my wife is in the process of working on her master's thesis in history. She went for the master's for personal development reasons, but now that she is close to getting it she started looking at what she wanted to do to pay off the student loans and thought of teaching.

Once she finishes she will meet the requirements to apply as a full instructor at the multiple community colleges within commuting distance, and as and adjunct professor/instructor at both the local 4 year college and the university she is about to graduate from. To teach at the public high schools though, she will need to go back and complete classes in education the equivalent of another full-time year in college.

<comment><USER4> Practically speaking, at a minimum, she should be required to demonstrate an ability to student teach for a half year before being hired.

There are definitely some tricks to running a good classroom, but I have no idea if the education courses are in anyway connected to what is needed for the real experience. At a minimum, I would hope they would provide some guidance in how to compensate for different learning styles, how to properly handle difficult students, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ironically, my wife has a problem of too much education. She graduated in 2006 with a bachelor's in both Elementary Education and English as a Second Language. She tried to get a job for a year somewhere in the state (Montana). No one would hire her because she didn't have enough practical education.

So she went back and got her Master's in English as a Second Language. Also while doing so she taught at the school to build up her "contracted" work experience.

Now she doesn't even get interviews for elementary teaching positions because she has too much education and too much experience. Most of the school districts have a policy to hire only those fresh out of school because they can pay them less.

My wife is a very talented teacher and just wants to be able to teach. She doesn't care about the money and would be happy to take the lowest pay grade available. Union rules require that they pay her at her experience/education level.

I have no hope for the public system.

<comment><USER4> Then she should be applying at the private schools, who still have the option of paying her less.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My wife, a civil engineer from Georgia Tech, was told she did not have enough college math credits to become a teacher in California. If she wanted to teach here, she would need to take another college math class, such as basic algebra.

<comment><USER7> To throw my anecdote in there:

Several years ago my family moved to Florida to be closer to my grandparents. My mother found out that the only teaching position she was "qualified" to do was as a substitute teacher. She had previously taught several different levels of Science in a different state, had a BS in Biology, a Masters in Chemistry and a Law Degree (Teaching was actually the 5th profession she tried). In order to teach science in Florida, she would be required to take roughly a year and a half worth of college courses, and get a different certification.

<comment><USER4> This is probably closely connected to why Florida is in the bottom 25% of states in terms of school quality.

The red tape scares away some of the best teachers.

Of course, I'm not sure any of those rankings compensate for social-economic factors that will skew these factors. What I have heard is that the Florida districts really set back the migrant students who ended up in my Mother in Laws classroom in NJ for part of every year. That might be due to them ending up in some of Florida's worst school districts of course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the teaching certification cluster is due to a few cultural dynamics:

1\. There is an overall trend to more bureaucratization, and bureaucracies often evaluate their officers based on formal certification, especially when there is no structure to measure output. So I support wide spread standardized testing ....

2\. The public educational system is designed to enculturate the entire population, including a big proportion of folks that are needed to provide working class labor and reproduction of more working class laborers. So if 80% of the country get a crappy education due to a certification system that rewards mediocrity and punishes excellence, then the system has succeeded.

3\. Good education hurts. Not be Nietszchean (sp?) or anything, but most people are taught that fun and ease are the highest ideals in life -- how can you really teach if you, your administrators, the kids, and the parents all believe that you should maximize personal pleasure rather than maximize personal accomplishment?

I apologize for the rant, but the unbelievably bad education in the US is probably the issue that most infuriates me.

</comment><comment><USER9> No surprises here, anything that reduces supply increases price (of a teacher) is lobbied for by the powerful teachers unions.

</comment><comment><USER10> _I have a BS in Foreign Service from Georgetown_

What? If you can get a Bachelor of Science in something not even tangentially related to science then what is the degree for?

<comment><USER11> Ever hear of Political Science? My wife majored in it, and she used to always talks about her statistics course; doesn't know a lick of stats though.

<comment><USER12> "The misnaming of fields of study is so common as to lead to what might be general systems laws. For example, Frank Harary once suggested the law that any field that had the word "science" in its name was guaranteed thereby not to be a science. He would cite as examples Military Science, Library Science, Political Science, Homemaking Science, Social Science, and Computer Science. Discuss the generality of this law, and possible reasons for its predictive power." (Gerald Weinberg, "An Introduction to General Systems Thinking")

[Actually it's from the fortune program.]

<comment><USER10> Eh, I at least understand getting a BS in computer science degree if it's in the engineering school. As an engineer I'm required to take a very math and science heavy course load and all the various engineering core curricula. In addition, I can see computer science as being categorized as science for historical reasons, but if it's not science it is at least applied mathematics. Given that applied math is an engineering degree, I see no reason why computer science shouldn't be.

In contrast, not only does political science have nothing to do with science, but the course requirements aren't even science related. Maybe, if you're lucky, you'll take one basics statistics course. However, I have yet to see a polisci course that requires differential equations.

<comment><USER12> Yes. I just posted the fortune cookie because it's funny. In German we talk about natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) and mind sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). I guess it's just in English that sciencies implies natural sciences.

Interestingly, while using math is in practice the hallmark of a proper science, in theory the experiment as final arbiter separates the sciences from the rest. So math, with no experiments to rely on, is not considered a proper science.

<comment><USER10> You're not gonna believe this but I was going to say the same thing. I speak German and was going to mention Naturwissenschaften/Geisteswissenschaften but I figured no one else on HN spoke German so it wouldn't be that helpful :)

BTW I wasn't using math as an example of why computer science is a science, but rather why it can be justified that computer science gets placed in the school of engineering and one earns a B.S.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Like most standardized testing ... like the largely invisible 'accreditation' establishment ... like most education ... certification has been politicized. That's because education has been twisted into a vehicle of social- engineering.

I'll quote Zinn the Wise here: "... honest, and therefore unmanageable."

</comment><comment><USER14> Makes me think about how programmer certification would work in the context of licensing. Working as a government contractor, we already see a fair amount of certification requirements. At least those are tests though, just taking courses doesn't guarantee much of anything.

</comment><comment><USER15> Teacher certification is vitally important: it props up teacher wages.

Oh, did anyone think it had another purpose?

Education is a funny field. When you test the IQ of people by university subject, you generally find that the hard sciences have the highest IQs (physics and math at the top) followed by the social sciences followed by the artsy stuff. Education is at the very bottom.

However, in every field but education, you find that people with PhDs are smarter than the people with Master's who tend to be smarter than people with just BS or BA degrees.

Education is the only field where this is reversed. The people with PhDs are the dumbest of the lot.

I heard a funny story once about someone who cheated on his teacher certification exam. He had failed twice and was about to lose his job. So he paid a homeless person to take the test for him. They only caught the cheater because the homeless guy scored better than anyone else in the district and officials got curious about the improvement.

<comment><USER16> I don't find the IQ correlation that important, to be honest. What makes a good educator? Is it the ability to process IQ-type problems? Or is it more tied to some other attribute not measured by IQ, say, emphasizing with students? (I have no clue, just saying that IQ may or may not be the end all be all for educators).

<comment><USER17> I think it really depends on the subject being taught. I had an eighth grade Algebra teacher who could barely do the problems herself. She could empathize with the student pretty well, especially when neither of them could figure out how the get the answer in the key.

<comment><USER18> * when neither of them could figure out how the get the answer in the key.*

It's possible that the answer in the key was wrong. I spent a few years volunteering for RFBD.org, reading math & science textbooks a few hours a week, and many of the texts had answers in the back which frequently were not for the question in the front.

<comment><USER17> Unfortunately that was not the case. She just had to rely on the smarter students to help her. Then they hired us (woohoo 4.15/hr) to come tutor the algebra class after school three times a week while we were in high school. Almost every algebra student came to the tutoring session most of the time. The teacher never showed up once.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Iceland, a land of Vikings, braces for a Pirate Party takeover - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/pwa/#https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/iceland-a-land-of-vikings-braces-for-a-pirate-party-takeover/2016/10/23/f1bfe992-9540-11e6-9cae-2a3574e296a6_story.html <comment><USER2> This kind of change could only happen in Europe, due to the multi-party system. In America, as has so often been proven, the system is rigged to prevent alternatives to the established parties.

I honestly believe this proves the superiority of this system, over the American one. The great advantage of democracy is that it provides an avenue for peaceful change, or, if you are more cynical, the appearance of such. This acts as a vent when the people are fed up to their neck with the powers that be - they don't have to storm the palaces and chop off heads but can engage in political activity. Unless the political system in the U.S. changes, how long before Americans will have to resort to this?

<comment><USER3> > In America, as has so often been proven, the system is rigged to prevent > alternatives to the established parties.

But the difference is that the parties in the US and the UK aren't very powerful in their own regard. Trump wasn't even a member of the republican party until very recently, and he won the nomination -- and Sanders forced Clinton very far to the left before dropping out.

On the other hand, the leaders of european parties are mostly selected through opaque backroom deals and yet are very powerful (through "party discipline", another throughly undemocratic concept, all but unheard of in UK/US parties). Policy is made by these leaders (or their appointed nominees) meeting each other and negotiating a compromise, and then (except in very rare cases) _every_ MP of the parties in this negotiation defends in the media it as a solid and credible response to the issues faced by the country (despite, often to great hilarity, the compromise being orthogonal to several very firm positions and red lines drawn by that very same politician just days before) and then votes for it.

The mechanism for this power is that few individual MP carry their own seat, they're assigned proportionally, according to the national share of votes won by the party. Party leadership wields significant influence over who runs where (especially who runs in "safe" seats), and thus who gets in. MPs who cause too much trouble will find themselves campaigning in a difficult district, or next to a more popular/well-known candidate.

<comment><USER4> Why is party discipline undemocratic?

If you want to get the benefit of the support and branding of a political party it seems reasonable that you should have to follow their rules. The discipline only extends so far as removing that support. That seems fair to me. Does it not to you?

<comment><USER5> _Why is party discipline undemocratic? Why is party discipline undemocratic?_

Can you explain why you think it's not? I think party discipline is simply autoritarianism applied within a political party. If anything, it advertises to me that said party doesn't really believe in democratic principles.

<comment><USER6> You can still pick which parties to support or even create a new party and that choice seems to me to be the foundation of representative democracy.

<comment><USER5> The "foundation of representative democracy" is to have a representative in the decision making process (-cracy) for every part of the populace (demos). Political parties are not essential to that premise. Representatives that can have their voice heard are.

<comment><USER6> Sorry for being unclear, but it's having a choice that is essential, not parties themselves. It is a representative democracy, you just choose a party instead of a person but it's the exact same concept.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _It has offered Edward Snowden a new place to call home._

I love Iceland. I truly do. My wife and I visited twice last year. I think it would be a wonderful place to live. Given a choice between Russia and Iceland I would pick Iceland without hesitation (although I have to admit that I have never been to Russia). However, I do not believe that they would be able to protect Snowden from the CIA. I hope Snowden sees this the same way and stays safe in Russia.

<comment><USER8> The PP is a fringe radical party that if they somehow become the majority party in Iceland, they're not going to retain it for very long. I would not recommend that famous dissidents like Snowden move there immediately.

I like visiting Iceland too, the few Icelanders I know can't wait to move though. The winter weather and high price of everything is a bit of a drag.

I am not an expert on Iceland but I have read that it's really controlled by interests behind the two main industries of fishing and smelting. Iceland is really pushing tourism these days, since flights to Iceland are incredibly cheap.

I recommend reading The Grapevine

[http://grapevine.is/](http://grapevine.is/)

<comment><USER9> There's a lot of negativity among young adults here in Iceland. I can understand them to some extent because housing has become insanely expensive because of inflation, lack of new housing and airbnb companies. What I don't undestand is the "everything is terrible" attitude that's been so poisonous in recent year. Yes, we have bad weather and most of our politicians are hopeless but it's always been like that. The grass isn't greener on the other side.

The grapevine is great but often let themselves down with clickbait and hyperbole.

<comment><USER10> As an Icelander living abroad for almost a decade now, if you think the grass isn't greener or the other side how do you explain the rapid increase in Icelanders who are expats over the last decade? Are all these people just wrong in thinking they've found a better live abroad?

<comment><USER9> Plenty of people have left and found a better life, I'm not trying to say otherwise. I just hate it when people use the weather and the government as reasons to move because every country has its problems. A large number of Icelanders move to another country sometime during their lifetimes but a large percentage of them move back at some point. That tells me that maybe things aren't so bad over here.

<comment><USER10> For plenty of people something like the weather or the government really is the reason they moved.

The government was a major reason for my move. I moved after the collapse, which was entirely caused by Iceland's dysfunctional government policies (none of which have really changed), and the measures put into place post-collapse largely benefited homeowners at the expense of the rest of us.

I didn't want to spend the next decade paying for other people's bad financial decisions at the cost of the currency & my purchasing power having fallen around 1/2.

Similarly people move from say the UK to Spain for the weather. As I'm sure you know Iceland doesn't just have "bad" weather, it's on a whole different level where working around the weather often becomes a major logistical difficulty. Whole towns often become snowed in during the winter.

So it's hardly a surprise that someone would move just to be rid of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "They know what they're against. But it's difficult to find out what they're really for."

Well, reading what the Pirate Party wants to be, it makes sense they don't have things to be 'for'. They want to give the people more room to decide. The pirates just want to give the people that space. They don't care about all the topics traditional politics discuss and promote. They just want the people have have more of a say in it, instead of a once-in-four-year vote.

The political party shouldn't decide on the largest decisions, the people should make that decision (through matters as referendum).

With current technology, the people could even represent themselves. "We need your decision on this political matter: swipe left for yes, right for no."

<comment><USER12> The more I've tried to learn about issues, the more I've learned that they are often very complicated & require a lot of research. I feel this is to hard & time consuming for the average citizen. Electing people to represent your interests makes more & more sense to me every day.

I do wish they were more open & transparent though in an easy to understand & honest method. Unfortunately it seems that is very difficult for them to do.

<comment><USER13> Representative democracy would work much better without lobbyist that, for reason that should be discussed, are represented much more than voters. Like the Utopian dream of communism, Representative democracy that actually represent their citizens seems to be one of those government types that people talk about but never actually achieve.

Take copyright law (since this is about the pirate party). were your interest represented when the elected people let Disney lobbyist buy a law that extended copyright? Somehow, a company that "give" millions to a political party is not a bribing and completely not doing so with any expectation of returns. One could ask why they spend those money, or why historically it is so effective to spend so much totally-not-a-bribe money.

From the representative politician view, issues are often very complicated & require a lot of research, which is too hard and time consuming. Easier to just choose the highest paying lobbyist and have them decide for you. That way, you picked the politician, and they picked the lobbyist, and the lobbyist decide the law.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's nice to see that libertarian ideas are winning at least in some counties when in most of the world governments get more and more control over people's lives.

<comment><USER15> I wish that Johnson had been better prepped for some of his interviews. I really don't like where the democons are headed in this country.

<comment><USER16> No amount of prep was going to help that train wreck -- Johnson never had a reputation as a particularly _smart_ politician (he was rather proud of his ignorance, actually), but he showed less knowledge of world affairs than the average evening news viewer. And he's still the most credible candidate the Libertarian party has posted!

If you want libertarian views to gain political credibility, you'd probably be better advised to try to start within the GOP, especially given the state of factional conflict likely to follow Election Day. Libertarian, moderate and the few remaining Rockefeller-style Republicans are the only ones who have kept their hands clean when it comes to Trump, and who have an arguable basis for reconstructing the party -- though it would be a long slog to do so.

<comment><USER17> The GOP has made it clear they don't want a libertarian a la the Pauls. I don't think it can happen with the hard push to the social right they've made in the past 8 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Very cool experiment. It's easy being the opposition. Governing is hard. Let's see how they handle it.

</comment><comment> q-base There are some very interesting discussions on government and electorial constructs(for lack of better word) in different countries and pros and cons of these, in the comments here.

Can anyone point to any good documentaries, books or other reading digging a bit deeper into this subject? Given the focus on the US election at the moment and a lot of people seeing it as two bad options, then why is the US system like that and in for instance Denmark where I'm from we have multiple choices. What's the history behind each, pros and cons etc.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm really curious about a lot of the more nuts and bolts of their government. Things like the economic policy. As a small nation that relies heavily on importing they are particularly susceptible to changes in the exchange rate, and they are all aware of this because of their financial crisis. But this party is focused on technology, which is wonderful unless there's no bread on the shelves.

</comment><comment><USER20> Could Iceland become the first country in the world to adopt Bitcoin (or an alternative crypto) as its national currency? If the Pirate Party wins, this could be one of the numerous cool experiments in government to take place.

<comment><USER19> Bitcoin can't handle the number of transactions required. It's simply not technically possible for the blockchain to be used as a country's (or medium sized city's) primary currency.

<comment><USER21> Really? I always thought it was very powerful. Any place to read up more about this?

<comment><USER19> You can read up on bitcoin scalability here:

[https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The Pirate Party are not going to win the election. They are radical extremists.

Well this is just my opinion, but lets check back next week after the vote.

<comment><USER23> What is your definition of 'win'? They're currently polling at around 20-25%. The traditional conservative party is polling at similar numbers and other parties have less.

Obviously no party will take the majority of the vote. So what is your criteria for winning or losing? Even if the pirates election results were 5-10% less than the polling numbers they'd still have 'won' by some measurements since they'd have more seats in parliament than they did last time.

<comment><USER22> They got 15%, it was an easily predictable failure.</comment></comment></comment>


An Experimental Autism Treatment Cost Me My Marriage - <AUTHOR> http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/an-experimental-autism-treatment-cost-me-my-marriage/?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=mini-moth&region=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below&_r=0 <comment><USER3> I work with John's son, Jack, on LBRY ([http://lbry.io](http://lbry.io)). The whole Robison family is full of people with interesting stories:

\- Jack went to trial as a teenager, facing 60 years (!) in prison for chemistry experiments ([http://www.masslive.com/localbuzz/index.ssf/2009/06/actionre...](http://www.masslive.com/localbuzz/index.ssf/2009/06/actionreaction_how_one_teens_c.html))

\- John showcasing a guitar that Jack's mother and Jack built for KISS ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXZi4UZjiiI&t=10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXZi4UZjiiI&t=10))

\- John's brother is Augusten Burroughs ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusten_Burroughs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusten_Burroughs))

I pointed Jack to this thread. I believe he went through same treatment as John at one point if people have questions.

<comment><USER4> I didn't know HN was interested in the subject, very neat!

I'll keep up on this thread, and if anyone wants to ask me a question via email you can reach me at firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER5> _tremendously_ interested, for many reasons - general knowledge, personal empathy, and for many friends and family.

Is there any good, reliable source of information on the treatment described? If it started in 2008, I'm surprised I have not seen it mentioned more recently. Are results as reliably dramatic as described?

Many thanks for joining the discussion - much appreciated :-)

<comment><USER4> My fathers newest book - Switched On - is all about TMS and his experience. The research is being led by Alvero Pascual-Leone at Harvard medical, he's got a lot of material published.

How it pertains to autism is very new, I'm not sure what the team has published yet. The finding that I thought was most significant is that TMS provides an instrumental test for autism - although there's a ways to go before it becomes the means of diagnosis. An autistic person has measurably different neuroplasticity than a non autistic person, this low level biological distinction has the potential to take subjectivity out of diagnosis. And it is a big step towards a low level understanding of what autism is, how it can pan out to be a gift or a disability (not mutually exclusive), and how the challenges many autistic people face work on a fundamental level.

<comment><USER6> That's _fascinating_ , thanks for sharing.

Where would one go to try out TMS? I would be quite interested in finding out what my brain is like so long as it was done in a safe manner.

<comment><USER7> Any good research Uni's psych department will have some TMS studies going on over the course of a year. You'll probably have to do a repetitive task and they probably won't be doing any diagnostics (for that you're way better off with a FMRI or EEG study, where they're often happy to share the data with you), but if you're just curious about the experience you can probably get paid a pittance to try it out.

<comment><USER6> Interesting! I will ask my friend in the neurology department if she knows anything :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is the way he describes intensely feeling others emotions normal?

When I was younger, I was awful at reading people. Very shy with others as a result, because I was missing most of the data.

I eventually decided to learn how to read body language. I did some training to recognize expressions, focussed on one skill at a time, and viewed every conversation as practice. I improved to the point that people comment that I'm surprisingly good at reading them.

But the emotions don't hit me the way this author describes. I just....see them.

Granted, I've also practice stoicisim and mindfulness, which explicitly trains you to not worry about things like someone insulting you (or hearing a comment that might be construed as insulting).

But, I've wondered if something is going on. When I was younger, before learning to read people, I read descriptions of Aspergers and it sounded much like me. Now when I read them it sounds not very much like me, because a significant component of those symptom descriptions involve poor social skills.

Thoughts?

<comment><USER9> How did you learn to read body language? Can you point us to books, websites or courses?

I also would like to know if you notice different body language based on culture, race, gender or not. If so, can you describe how?

I am also quite bad at reading body language, and learning some basic acting skills helped me to read body language a bit better, but I would love to have more information about this subject.

Thanks!

<comment><USER10> You'll see a few tips and tricks that are useful. Like when a person crosses their arms, they generally disagree with what you are saying, etc.

The most important thing is to pay _less_ attention to the content and more attention to the tone, stance, demeanor, circumstances, likely self-interest in the situation, notice the little things everywhere and that will give you a clearer picture of what you're dealing with. Do this often enough, over and over again, and it'll become second habit.

Content is rarely useful unless you're engaging in a very data heavy conversation, like for example you would when describing requirements for a project at work. During regular conversation, everything is generally geared toward communicating emotional state, so focusing too much on content dulls your senses and you don't pick up what you need to pick up.

<comment><USER11> I want to add to this that you want to be careful about deriving meaning from one's physical actions alone.

I may have just crossed my arms, but if you'll look closely you'll notice I wasn't looking at you when I did so. It's not that you said something that I'm closing myself off from, it's that it sent my mind on a tangent that made me feel insecure. There's a number of reasons to cross one's arms other than shunning away from people around you.

<comment><USER10> Let me add a bit more then.

It doesn't matter _why_ you're closing yourself off.

You start wondering about the why, you'll set out on the path of trying to figure out what people are thinking ... and let me skip to to the end, that path is a dead end. People feel and think things that are based on their experience, but you have no idea what the totality of that experience is.

You mention you like jazz. The other person crosses their arms because they stubbed their toe in the morning and jazz was playing in the background, now they remember their toe hurts and they're feeling shitty. How can you possibly foresee that? That sort of random stuff comes up in conversation all the time. The proper response isn't to try to mind read or to convince them that jazz is wonderful.

It's to talk about something else.

<comment><USER12> Sometimes people cross their arms because it's a comfortable resting position. It's common in overweight men, the arms rest on the belly quite naturally. Often people will lean back against the chair or wall at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A functionally autistic woman, Temple Grandin, wrote a fascinating book on autism. She offered a simple test for autism. Think of a church steeple (stop and do that).

If you thought of a real steeple you had actually seen then you probably tend towards autism. If you thought of an abstract non-existing steeple then you don't tend towards it.

I was at a gathering of employees in my company. There were about a dozen random people sitting around a table. I tested the whole group at once. Every single programmer answered with a real steeple and every non-programmer thought abstract.

I know this doesn't represent a real study and chance was involved. But it matches something else she said. Functional autistics with jobs are predominantly programmers. She quoted a number, like 70%, but I don't remember for sure.

I, a programmer, personally prefer human interaction on the web. Meeting in real-life, not so much.

<comment><USER14> Simple tests like this are fun, catchy, spread like wildfire and almost always completely bogus.

<comment><USER15> Hey I hear if your hand is bigger than your face you are autistic.

*Smacks your hand and gives you a bloody nose

<comment><USER16> This (s/autistic/stupid/) is how I met one of my best lifelong friends in my first week of junior high.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Later, people at work told me they'd liked me better the way I was before.

Whenever you make a large change in yourself, you are going to alienate people in your life. This doesn't say anything about whether the change is good or bad.

The set of people currently in your life is highly biased towards people who like you the way you are. If they didn't, they wouldn't _be_ in your life.

The more interesting question is _after_ you make a change and get a new set of people, how do those people compare to your old set?

<comment><USER5> Agreed. The change doesn't have to be quite as profound - and it's up to other people to choose how to react and proceed.

Different quantitatively but I think similar qualitatively, my best friend (despite my warning) attended a high-intensity motivational/NLP weekend seminar a few years back. It is no exaggeration that he came out a completely different person, in the sense that the stimuli/response has radically changed. He was more emotional, open, intense, etc. My reaction initially was confused and highly negative; and eventually settled down on "The person I knew is in some ways gone; but let's give this _new_ person a chance and see how we get along".

Others, erm... did not react as positively :P

<comment><USER6> That's quite interesting. I have a former friend who joined some sort of super happy cult a year or so back, and undergone a similar change literally over a course of a single week. It was quite... disconcerting to watch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The extreme sense of feeling the emotions of others that is described in the article seems like something stronger than normal for typical people, but perhaps it's just relative to previous baseline of little insight into the emotions of others.

Some research opposes the deficits of autism to the excesses of schizophrenia. Not sure it's totally relevant to this item, but seeing emotional meanings where they don't exist is a very schizotypal (positive schizotypy) phenomenon:

[http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/how- is-c...](http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/how-is- creativity-differentially-related-to-schizophrenia-and-autism/)

<comment><USER19> Take someone used to wearing stiff-bottomed shoes, and tell them to walk around barefoot on the street or on a forest trail. They'll suddenly be intensely aware of the temperature and texture of the ground. Stepping on a little pebble will cause pain from sensory overload of nerves which have been carefully shielded for years. (Most people in developed countries can try this experiment out first-hand.)

For someone who is habitually barefoot, by contrast, walking around on very rough surfaces is no problem.

Same kind of thing here.

<comment><USER20> As some who used to walk around barefoot all the time as a kid, this effect is not due to habituation, but due to the skin on you feet becoming thick to the point that you are effectively wearing shoes. The more you wear shoes the thinner the skin gets. They other factor is you learn to walk differently such that you are more careful placing your feet on the ground to avoid sharp objects.

<comment><USER19> A big part of it is nerve/brain response, in my own personal experience, though sure, a different walking technique makes a difference too.

I started wearing mostly thin soled shoes a few years ago: simple leather moccasins, $5 Chinese canvas shoes, Vibram Five Fingers. (I don't typically walk around outside barefoot.)

When I first started, if I walked barefoot, stepping on a tiny pebble was painful. Wearing thin-soled shoes itself let me very dramatically feel the ground in a way I didn't when wearing stiff-bottomoed shoes. Now, a few years later, the effect is much reduced, even though the skin on the bottom of my foot is not noticeably more callused than before. I can notice how the ground feels if I pay careful conscious attention to it, but it's not constantly in my mind as I walk around.

I think the walking barefoot -> calluses idea is exaggerated in popular imagination. I have a friend who does significant amounts of barefoot trail running, and frequently run barefoot on pavement. His feet are also not obviously more callused than anyone else's.

<comment><USER20> I can say that to get thick skin on your feet you need to not wear shoes at all for long periods of time and walk/run lots over harsh ground. I would go the entire summer without wearing shoes and running around all day and it would take a month to get thick skin on my feet and it would still be getting thicker by the end of summer. I would start wearing shoes and within a month my feet were back to a more standard thinness.

You do retain the careful walking/running skill, but without the thick skin you can't really run effectively on gravel, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's hard to imagine what it must be like to go from feeling no emotions to feeling them all, like the colourblind glasses.

It's relatively easy to imagine seeing the world in black and white and then having the colour switch flipped. I can't imagine the same for emotion... what a wild ride it must have been. It must have been so painful at first, especially when he realized that some of his "funny friends" had really been making fun of him...

<comment><USER22> Ask someone who is an experienced psychonaut or meditator. These kinds of experiential shifts can, and does happen to people. In this guy's case, it was an awakening of empathy -- however, there are other kinds of awakening, other kinds of consciousness shifts that people are not normally aware of.

<comment><USER23> I have gone through some of these shifts and they made a profound impact on me. I'm still learning to integrate many of the things I learned into my life in such a way that I can function in a modern society and remain authentic. It's very, very hard.

Can you give examples of the other shifts you're referring to? I realize many of them may not have names (or may not have names in the western culture), but it would be very meaningful to me if you gave it a shot.

<comment><USER22> Awakening of empathy is one of them. There is also tele-empathy which lets you sense people who you could not have possibly read through body language.

Direct experience of "oneness" is another one. This can range from feeling the interconnections of everything, to feeling that all is One (monism), and there ever just the One.

Seeing through your acquired self is another. That sense that the acquired self -- the socialized personality -- has never been real. People often come back from that one thinking "my ego died". (Well, it often resurrects ;-)

Another is direct experience of Nothing (similar to the Oneness experience), where things somehow, mysteriously, spontaneously arises and passes. Also related is spaciousness.

Then there's a host of parapsychological effects which might make you feel crazy. They don't feel as insightful as the examples that I listed, but they do break down the conventional beliefs most people have and think of as "normal". For example, clairvoiyance, clairaudience, etc.

There are actually transpersonal psychologists holding Ph.D.s who specializes in counseling for spiritual emergence. There's a great thread on Quora related to that integration process. I'd find it right now, but my wife is waiting for me to go with her to the grocery store. ("Chop wood, carry water" You never thought you'd understand _that_ koan, eh? :-D)

Feel free to email me at talktohosh at gmail.com if you want to continue this conversation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The author's life was radically changed by a procedure that runs a magnet over his brain. It appears to have induced a severe bout of depression and anxiety that negatively impacted his performance at work and cost him 2 marriages. He seems to believe that this "treatment" worked, though the empirical evidence would hardly suggest that. Does he believe that he was reading emotions instead of descending into anxious paranoia just because the doctors told him the first thing is what would happen? The unfortunate thing here is that doctors have probably recorded his case as a success.

I've found that the emotions we read out of people are often exaggerated from their true thoughts. It's easy to feel like there's some harsh judgment occurring when, in fact, there isn't. Someone should've told the author this, and not to take his new "emotional superpower" too seriously.

<comment><USER25> Yeah, unfortunately for the author, it sounded a lot like that to me as well. I've cared for people overly anxious and it sounded like he would have improved a lot with some sedative or just knowing when to take a calm down break.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm surprised there was no protocol where he went to regular therapy to help him process the new emotions, and his new ability to read emotional cues in others. I suspect therapy may have helped with his understanding that he gained years later, which is that your _perception_ of someone's emotions is not always correct.

<comment><USER27> I agree. Depending on how TMS treatment is setup, it could stimulate a particular region of the brain, or a large section (frontal lobe). EEG biofeedback can also be focused on a small section of the brain (eg. prefrontal cortex). Its possible the situation in the article was a result of parts of the brain being "out of balance" and creating different emotions than what the person previously experienced.

Even if TMS 'activated' the emotional areas of the brain (right frontotemporal) correctly, the person still may not be ready to use that brain region effectively. This is where therapy would likely help.

Through research, its believed that Autistic Spectrum Disorders are the result of poor neuronal connectivity between certain regions of the brain. I'm not sure TMS would help with that.

Disclaimer: I'm not a physician and this isn't medical advice.

<comment><USER28> Former neuroscientist here. Emotions are not confined to the right frontotemporal area. There's multiple regions involved. It appears the TMS here was targeted on dorsolateral PFC, but keep in mind that there will be spreading effects, and presumably post-treatment effects, too, that can be quite widespread.

<comment><USER27> > Emotions are not confined to the right frontotemporal area. That is true. I > should have been more specific.

Just out of interest, do you believe that neuronal connectivity between regions of the brain are involved in ASD?

<comment><USER28> That's one of the more likely theories yeah. While the defining ASD characteristic is impaired social processing, which seems like it would be _specific_ , scans show it has relatively wide effects throughout the brain. There's a host of differences. Some are possibly connectivity-based. Localized processing seems hyperactive, and longer-distance processing is hypoactive.

But, there are other issues as well. In developing ASD brains, there have been shown to be areas of excess cortical thickening, areas of cortical thinning, underactivation, etc.

Connectivity certainly plays a role, but given that structure and function are so deeply interrelated, it doesn't make much sense to try and separate them.

We think there's a strong genetic component, but nobody's been able to figure it out yet. It appears to be more developmental/structural, but there could also be a neurotransmitter component, given that a large fraction of ASD people have elevated serotonin levels, and report intestinal issues (intestines have huge numbers of ST receptors).

In short, pretend you're debugging an intermittent parallel error in a network 50x greater than the total number of computers on earth, every computer had to coordinate its protocols on the fly, and your only tools are telnet and email. I respect what my former colleagues do, but reality was way too murky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Maybe a more apt title would be "An experimental autism treatment gave me my son back".

<comment><USER30> I agree with you... though it wouldn't be that dramatic and thus less clic- baitish.

<comment><USER31> Really? Strikes me as equally dramatic: both are equally correct statements without added tone.

I can understand preferring the glass half full, though.

<comment><USER30> Getting something back is positive, losing something is negative. Negative is obviously more dramatic than positive.

<comment><USER31> > Negative is obviously more dramatic than positive.

I agree in the general case, but not everywhere. Shit like "Scientist cures cancer!" is equally dramatic and clickbaity in spite of being hugely positive.

<comment><USER30> I think you mix up dramatic and tabloid-ish

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm "spectrum" _enough_ to have an opposite reaction to various drugs - Ritalin being the important one, here - and my experience is... similar, in some ways.

I probably didn't notice other people's emotions a lot when I was younger, to the effect that now that I'm older, and do notice them, I frequently don't have any idea what to _do_ with that understanding.

<comment><USER22> From a meditator's perspective, there isn't anything to do other than to witness the underlying suffering, and giving space to the other person to be.

<comment><USER33> That's overly simplistic and frankly trite. The reality is that in the workplace, in society, etc the emotions of others matter a great deal to your personal wellbeing, that is if you don't want to be broke or in jail.

Navigating the emotional world is very important and should be taught, not dismissed. As someone who only picked up these skills later in life, its incredible how much life makes sense now. People's emotional responses more or less rule the world. Logic and rationality take a backseat to all of that and being able to gauge other people's emotions and knowing how to respond to them is the difference between failure and success in so many parts of life. Especially if you aspire to any kind of leadership or founder role.

<comment><USER34> I'm with you. I've encountered the thinking in GP and thought that way for a while, and ultimately reached the same conclusion as you. It's too easy to use it as a way of dismissing the pain and complexity of the world.

<comment><USER22> What makes you think I was dismissing it?

What I was describing is the opposite of dismissing it, and if anything, much healthier. You do realize I was talking about Vipassana and directly experiencing the suffering of others, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It's too bad John felt he needed to seek treatment to 'cure' his autism.

I was diagnosed when I was 17, and I get to interact with a lot of other students on the spectrum every day at my school. There are a few students that believe autism is something to overcome, and that if they try hard enough perhaps one day they won't be 'autistic'. Most of us are comfortable with the fact that we're different.

<comment><USER36> Then you're lucky enough to be on the "functional" end of the spectrum. There's a lot of people out there on the "non-functional" end whom a cure could help.

As someone who is also on the functional end of the spectrum, I'm tired of having to intellectualize a feeling of empathy for others. It's draining, and I'd rather have that brain power to work on something more meaningful. For better or worse, most of our work involves other people, and being able empathize with them makes that work much more productive.

<comment><USER37> However scientifically sound it is I wonder how much sense it really makes to lump together all ASD the way we do; how much does the author of this piece really have in common with nonverbal autistic people, for instance?

<comment><USER36> I blame the DSMV for lumping us all together. There are definitely some similarities, like stimming, touch aversion, and hyperacusis, but the degrees to which they affect daily life are dramatically different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Reminds me of Flowers for Algernon, my grandfather's favorite book.

<comment><USER39> I love that book and it was the first thing that came to my mind reading this story.

<comment><USER5> Ditto... the first half of the article was eerily similar; and it makes you ponder some of the very same questions (including, is ignorance bliss?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Emotional beauty is a multiplayer game. It's created when people use their time and energy to break the script and let the people around them know that they are valued. It's not something that's easy to just receive passively - <USER2> order to experience it frequently one needs to be bold and sensitive. Above all, one needs to be patient.

I grew up in an environment where nobody every expressed themselves. I was also given the impression that I was the smartest person in town. This is not a combination that makes for deep human connections. But I was fortunate enough to have the friendships of several very charismatic people over the years. Their ability to make instant connections with basically everybody around them seemed magical, and remained mysterious for years. But as I watched them and gradually opened myself, I found that skilled observation wasn't enough. Not only did I need to be open to others and willing to say what was on my mind, I also had to drop my pretensions and try to engage people on their own terms, even if those terms were things I would have previously found silly, like tarot or fireplace ceramics. When I've been successful at this (which isn't all the time, but it happens more and more), I've made new friends and learned all kinds of weird and interesting things. Even though the same period has contained some of the roughest periods of my life, I can honestly say that I've never been happier to be alive, and it's the beauty I find in small, everyday human connections that keeps me going.

</comment><comment><USER41> Please note that the results are not reproducible.

This effectively putting a current the the subject's brain and can be dangerous if not administered by a doctor

<comment><USER42> It can be dangerous even if administered by a doctor, I'd think. Doctors do many things that you'd normally never think to do, e.g. administer substances that are essentially poisons but have certain effects that are thought to be worth the risk compared to doing nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I think the premise for the story - applying magnetism to the brain curing autism tomorrow - seems suspect, and don't really believe it.

<comment><USER44> The guy still writes as if he has autism, too. I think the placebo is just strong, and the confidence he's gained is what changed his life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I had a slightly similar experience while taking antidepressants. The anxiety went completely away. That made me drive more recklessly (my parents and my wife began to dread taking a lift) and I contemplated getting a mistress. Of course, I did compensate for that, once I took note of the effects. But actually a certain level of anxiety is a good tool, and I went out of medication as soon as possible.

I talked about my suspected Asperger syndrome with the psychiatrist, and she said "I could medicate you for that, but are you really sure you want to change?".

</comment><comment><USER46> I often think about how strong the emotions that other people feel are.

Situations can be turned upside down when trying to think from the perspective of a person with stronger emotional responses.

</comment><comment><USER47> "Seeing emotion didn't make my life happy. It scared me, as the fear I felt in others took hold in me, too." Reminded me of an excellent death metal track: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUVPIknZ9ao](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUVPIknZ9ao)

Lyrics include:

The thing that scares me most / Is the fear I see in others / And the thing that really frightens me to the core / is when I see that fear in you

</comment><comment><USER48> > It took me five years to find a new balance and stability. In that time, my > sense that I could see into people's souls faded.

I wondered how that would go, we all go through years of social interaction and have to build walls. Nowadays, I don't know if my walls have become too thick or if I never had the same emotional range as others in the first place.

<comment><USER21> But without those walls you'd be as dysfunctional as the author in his first few years of experiencing emotion.

Having some measure of "thick skin" is part and parcel for existence as a social animal.

<comment><USER22> From a meditator's perspective, developing a thick skin is the wrong direction for practice. That kind of thing creates a kind of contraction. The social mask constrains the natural expression of the person to the point where the social mask becomes confused with the person's identity. That's the stuff of therapy and existential angst.

What this guy is experiencing is not so much different from a meditator who has recently reawakened empathy, or a psychonaut whose psychedelic experiences open up to the world of emotions. "Coping" is no longer authentic, and is seen for the illusion that it is. For such people, the dysfunction is _not_ in the awareness, but in that most people around you lack sufficient awareness -- yet think they are "normal".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Unclear how it made sense to provide such a potential life changing treatment to someone that was likely more than halfway through their adult life. Is this common to perform such potential profound treatment when there's a very real chance of it having a negative impact?

<comment><USER50> As it was experimental, I'd guess they did not know the size of the effect.

If it gets out of the lab, though, I think an adult should always be able to make the informed choice, rather than being denied because he is too old.

Your comment really pissed me off. The idea of having some doctor choose this for him is really a special kind of evil.

<comment><USER49> Medicine is not the Wild West, in my opinion, the best most common example would be that most "medical" grade medicines require the approval of a doctor. To me, the idea that someone that's already well adjusted should literally be allowed to put there life at risk potentially is the very definition of malpractice. Lastly, age was not the factor, but the percentage of the fellows life already lived as "well" adjusted. To me, what's evil is the desire to make everyone the same for the sake of being the same.

<comment><USER50> > To me, what's evil is the desire to make everyone the same for the sake of > being the same.

No such desire here. In fact, I'd not be opposed to a treatment that made people autistic, or, for a (perhaps) more attractive proposition, synesthetic.

As long as there is informed choice by an adult.

You can want neurodiversity, and think it is a good thing. Maybe it is. But imposing it on others, for me, is not defensible.

Now, setting diversity aside for a moment...

> Medicine is not the Wild West...

No. In general, we only allow people treatment when we think they have a disease(1).

This idea has merits: for example, it seems "obviously better" to treat the hypocondriacs hypocondria than to allow them to take unnecessary surgery.

But it also has problems: the definition of disease becomes a matter of consensus (i.e.: a political matter, even if the politics just happens amongst doctors - or worse, philosophers or politicians) and individuals are disallowed choosing what and who they want to be, by themselves.

Perhaps the best way to go is to have a "waiting period", to force you to consider and seek alternative treatment before undergoing procedures that are dangerous. I dont know, and I fear this is one of those "really no good answer" questions.

(1) This might be a circular definition, "disease" being a thing we can treat for

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> > but instead she said matter of factly, "You won't need me anymore."

What? There was no follow up on this. Why would anyone say that - how does this even make sense at a basic level? Was there no follow up question by him?

<comment><USER52> Sounds like something a depressed person would think, no matter how irrational it sounds at face value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Is what he described different from popular view that autistic personal has a problem because they are incapable of handling their sense of emotions from others so they choose to avoid social interaction?

</comment><comment><USER54> Not to be insensitive, but what did he really expect? Experimenting with your brain in order to change your perceptions and though processes are bound to lead to major disruptions in your life.

</comment><comment><USER55> reminds me this sci fi story: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_for_Algernon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_for_Algernon)

``The operation is a success, and within the next three months Charlie's IQ reaches 185. However, as his intelligence, education, and understanding of the world increase, his relationships with people deteriorate''

</comment><comment><USER56> This experiment is similar to what happens in the novel The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon. [http://www.amazon.com/The-Speed-Dark-Elizabeth- Moon/dp/15012...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Speed-Dark-Elizabeth- Moon/dp/1501278843)

<comment><USER57> Is that Brian Griffin's new book?

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Is losing your marriage an acceptable risk to try an autism cure?

</comment><comment><USER59> The perfect story for a movie, amazing, thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER60> I read the entire article. It's better to be emotionless... at least sometimes.</comment>


Consistency and Candy Crush: Don't give up on serializability just yet [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedotpost.com/2015/06/neha-narula-consistency-and-candy-crush

<comment><USER2> I think that this is probably my ignorance, but I was hooked by the title, as intended, and skimmed the slides; and, aside from the fact that it appears on a slide titled "NP-Hard", don't see anything about Candy Crush. Is there some database at the heart of Candy Crush, possibly with an interesting approach to consistency, that is well understood by the audience? Or is the author just drawing the analogy between NP-Hard problems? (I don't know of any proven, or even just believed, NP-Hardness results on Candy Crush, but I'm sure there are some.)</comment>


Show HN: Singer – Simple, Composable Open Source ETL - <AUTHOR> https://www.singer.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm the CEO of Stitch, the company behind Singer. Here's our blog post with more information: [https://blog.stitchdata.com/introducing-singer-simple- compos...](https://blog.stitchdata.com/introducing-singer-simple-composable- open-source-etl-a4a6da7eac19)

Singer is an open-source standard for writing scripts that move data between databases, web APIs, files, queues, and just about anything else you can think of. Lots of companies build ETL scripts to move their data, and there's a huge amount of rework that happens from company to company. We believe that developers should spend less time moving their data and more time using it.

We're open sourcing 12 of our integrations (with more to come) so that they can be used in other applications, and we're excited to see what the community builds. Let me know if I can answer any questions.

<comment><USER2> What's the motivation for the schemas? Are they just verifying that the APIs haven't changed and are still returning what you'd expect them to?

I read through [https://github.com/singer-io/getting- started/blob/master/SPE...](https://github.com/singer-io/getting- started/blob/master/SPEC.md#schema), but I'm trying to better understand why they're necessary.

<comment><USER3> There are a couple reasons why we included schemas in the spec:

\- JSON doesn't have a robust set of data types, and specifically lacks a datetime/timestamp type. With a schema, Taps can, for example, denote fields in the JSON that contain datetimes represented as strings, and then targets can convert those to proper datetimes and handle them accordingly.

\- Dealing with un-structured or flexibly-structured data is _hard_. Requiring a schema forces a Tap author to think about the structure of the data up front. By validating each data point against a schema, the Tap author should be able to more quickly identify nuances in the data set - like missing fields, nullable fields, mixed-type fields, etc - and either decide to clean them out of the data (if appropriate), or provide the right schema to inform downstream applications about them. Identifying and handling these problems requires an understanding of the source data set, so it is best done as close to the data source as possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks very cool and it definitely addresses a problem that not only many organizations have but also many individuals have. I know personally I have struggled with moving my data out of various services many times before.

The question I would have to you is this: if the API (or however a tap extracts information) for a given service changes, who is responsible for updating the tap, and is there any way to verify that a tap will extract the data correctly and that said tap isn't assuming an old version of the API?

(Sorry if I'm misunderstanding the way that Singer or any of its associated services work)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great question. For any Singer integrations that we include in the Stitch product, we (Stitch, Inc.) will ensure they stay up to date with the most current version of the API.

That may not be the case with 100% of the community built/ maintained integrations, but our goal with the Singer Slack community and list serve is to connect people using these taps to so that they can validate which are working well and which need additional work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This has been attempted before by many companies and many standards. No standard is robust enough and no company strong enough to get everyone to use it. I really really hope is gains adoption though!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks nwellinghoff! I'm sure that there will be cases where Singer is not the best tool for the job, but hopefully it will still make a lot of engineers' jobs easier.

I'd love to know which previous standards you're referring to, could you elaborate?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How is it different from logstash for syncing between 2 data sources? Or is Singer primarily meant for data extraction from SaaS sources?

</comment><comment><USER7> Are there similar products on the market? How is ETL typically done today?

<comment><USER8> We are using Apache NiFi[1] to handle a lot of our ETL use cases.

We have HTTP endpoints set up to receive data from our ERP's accounting system to send data to Concur and to update customers' Lawson punchout ordering systems with shipment information. The 'E' is an HTTP post with an XML payload. The 'T' consists of using the payload to query other databases to build the 'L' payload, and the 'L' is an HTTP post to the consumer's endpoints.

Further, we have NiFi handling HL7 messages inside hospitals. The 'T' is the real winner, here. NiFi has built in transformer for HL7 messages which makes them a breeze with which to work.

EDIT: I wanted to add that we've also used the EventHub processor to connect NiFi to Azure's services as well, and it has been rock solid for us.

NiFi's data provenance, flowfile/attribute system, back pressure settings, auto-queueing, retrying capabilities all make it very reliable and robust.

1\. [https://nifi.apache.org/](https://nifi.apache.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> do you plan to opensource all of Stitch integrations?

<comment><AUTHOR> The short answer is yes.

The longer answer is that it may take us a while to get to 100% open source, but that's the direction we're moving. All of our new integration development will be open source and be part of the Singer project. Our original integrations were written in a different framework and couldn't be run independently of Stitch, and it's a nontrivial amount of work to convert them to the Singer format.

We included several of our existing integrations as part of this launch, and we'll definitely be adding more of them as well as new integrations.</comment></comment>


Why "But Wait, There's More" is a bad way to pitch VCs - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@foundercollective/but-wait-there-s-more-is-bad-for-startups-a3cecc196e35#.cz2zop3ju <comment><USER2> This really resonated with the product related challenges I have to deal with at my current startup job. Prior to me joining, they were operating off a Trojan Horse strategy, but all it does is it trick you into a false sense of thinking you achieved market fit.

</comment><comment><USER3> >The more common story is Apple, who dominates hardware...

what hardware market does Apple dominate? None that i can see

<comment><AUTHOR> Phones and Laptops if you look by share of margin.</comment></comment>


Britain's Royal Navy website shut by hacker - <AUTHOR> http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2010/11/08/britains_royal_navy_website_shut_by_hacker/ <comment><USER2> according to the log, it was an Apache 2.2.3/PHP 4.4.9 Red Hat machine -- <http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=M2MUEdv4>

as hacks of military websites go, this one doesn't seem too disastrous. From the OP: "The website is primarily used as a public relations site with details about navy operations, programs, equipment, and career opportunities"</comment>