Mashable's Responsive Redesign - <AUTHOR> http://beta.mashable.com

<comment><USER2> I found the design distracting, and was not sure where to look first. I normally look for the main content on the left side of the screen.

Since "The next big thing" column is in green, I expected that to be the primary section, but then because it was smaller, moved to the right section.

Overall, I prefer blogs to have the more traditional feel.

</comment><comment><USER3> Such a lack of hierarchy... Too many conflicting visuals patterns at the same levels. White space, alignment... It's responsive yes, but is it pleasant for the reader ? I'm not talking about beauty, _de gustibus et coloribus non disputandum_ , just of the whole interaction.

<comment><USER4> We should pitch in and buy the design team at Mashable a few copies of [http://www.amazon.com/Think-Common-Sense-Approach- Usability/...](http://www.amazon.com/Think-Common-Sense-Approach- Usability/dp/0789723107)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Shades of the Gawker redesign here. I just don't see the benefit of having 3 distracting, content-filled columns with the most important information being on the far right (on the desktop and tablet versions, anyway), unless their target audience was using Arabic or Hebrew as their primary language.

<comment><USER6> The reason that the big content is on the right is that it is the most popular content, likely already read. The new stuff is on the left, and we want the eye to move across the page in the natural way to help promote newer and rising content.

<comment><USER5> Why would content that you've already read be the most prominent? Following the convention of 'newest on top' would make more sense.

<comment><USER6> The big content is for the people who jump into the site and want to read just a few articles. It's the "most important". It gets clicks. The people who sit on the site all day are going to appreciate the left column, but it doesn't have the same prominence, because we already have their attention.

By throwing the big stuff on the right, we're also making people who jump into the site for the big stuff move their eyes across the content, which might prompt a click.

We've thought very hard about who our site is designed for and the path their eyes will take. The column hierarchy is designed for different groups of people looking for different content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If the primary goal is discovery of new content then I think it works pretty well. I'd prefer the "Rising" and "Hot" columns swapped, but perhaps I'm not the primary audience. I'd also like to see excerpts in the "Rising" column to help make a decision of whether I want to skim or go into detail.

Also, scrolling seems to lag pretty badly when new content is loading. Using Chrome on a 2011 13" MacBook Pro. Tried InfinityJS? <http://airbnb.github.com/infinity/>

<comment><USER8> The scroll lag is, unfortunately, due to loading in the ad units. We're using all the usual tricks (precompiled template builders, batching builds in a document fragment and doing a single append to the DOM), but the ad iframes are just brutal on performance. We aren't using the "usual" social buttons there for similar reasons; a glut of iframes is performance death. Unfortunately, ads pay the bills, so they're less negotiable.

We're working on it, though, and aren't happy to be content with it just yet. My goal is to be able to achieve smooth scrolling on low-end hardware, and while we're admittedly not there yet, we're gunning for it.

<comment><USER7> Hey, are you calling my MacBook low-end? :p

<comment><USER8> Hah, no. I just mean that when I'm done with it, it'll ideally feel like butter on a Raspberry Pi. :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > " _Use anything from your Nexus 7 to your mom's iPhone 4 to browse > Mashable's new adaptive design._ " (A quote from within the left column > marketing image)

Is it often referred to as "adaptive design", I've only heard it as "Responsive Redesign". Is there a difference between the two in any way? _I doubt so, but I just figured I would ask so I don't miss something with the lingo..._

Also, for the record, my mom actually has an iPhone 5 and I only have an iPhone 4. ;) Ha

<comment><AUTHOR> It's largely a semantics game. Some people use one to refer to device- responsiveness versus screen-resolution-adaptiveness. Under that definition, both apply to our redesign :-)

<comment><USER9> Oh, okay. Awesome. I figured as much, but you never know these days and I didn't want seem like an idiot down the road using the wrong term or something! Haha Great design, by the way. I personally love it! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Am I the only one who doesn't like this trend?

<comment><USER11> YANA. - Just made my day I got to use that!

I too, do not like this trend. Does the average consumer (statistically)?

<comment><USER8> (I'm the tech lead at Mashable and on this project)

Our analytics and testing have indicated that there's a direct correlation between how visual (versus textual) our presentation is and how well it performs. Personally, I prefer a much more linear and text-heavy presentation (I spend all day on HN!), but our core audience is apparently different from me. Over the past couple of years, our audience has grown to be much more general and less tech-oriented (as I'm sure many HN readers have noticed), and the new design was done with that in mind.

I didn't like it at first, but it's grown on me. The article pages are much more "traditional" in terms of presentation, as well, which helps (and yes, I know you can't see them right now; sorry!)

<comment><USER4> Keep an eye on your ad revenue because you have a serious case of information overload at this point and the well-padded banner advertisement went almost entirely unnoticed for me. Advertisers will see that consumers never click nor react to their ads (Unless it's a CPM media buy and they don't get to see stats...) any longer and will eventually seek higher performing placement.

<comment><USER8> We absolutely will be. We're trying to find ways to integrate advertising in ways that are less obtrusive than normal; we're readers, too, and hate obnoxious ads as much as the next guy. We do direct ad sales rather than through a middleman, so we have some leeway in how stuff is presented, and we work with our advertisers to make sure that everyone is happy.

At the end of the day, advertising pays the bills, so we have to figure out the right balance there. Initial feedback from our advertising partners has been very good, though, and we'll be watching it closely, because...well, we like being able to pay rent. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting that you can't look at any of the articles without signing up. No thanks.

<comment><USER8> It's a technical measure, not a marketing one. We're going to open up pieces of the product to general use as we smoketest and validate their performance. The join page is more or less there to be served Very Very Fast (and still let people be notified when stuff opens up) more than it is to lock people out of content.

This iteration is a ground-up custom build rather than an iteration on Wordpress, so we're being conservative with our testing. It won't be that way for too long.

<comment><USER13> Are you guys moving away from WordPress or will the new design be ported over? Anyhow, I actually think it looks fantastic.

<comment><USER8> We're moving off of Wordpress with this redesign, and don't have any plans to port it at this time.

<comment><USER14> Should we expect a tech stack overview blog post?

<comment><USER8> Yes! We're going to let it simmer in production a bit before we do a writeup on it, but at some point we'll definitely do a breakdown of what we're doing and why we did it.

It's been a fun build, so we're looking forward to that. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's not so bad when my browser is small enough to keep it at one column, but I find two or more columns disjointed, distracting, and hard to read.

I'm all for responsive but readable is good too.

</comment><comment><USER16> Why on Earth they would not let me see anything else? I understand e-mail harvesting, but that just drove me away after one click.

<comment><USER8> Load control. We're keeping it gated for a short period while we make sure that we don't have any major performance issues that fall over under load. We'll be opening it up once we've smoketested it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> When I hear about responsive design I always try to resize the window and see how the things rearrange. This one feels really slow during the resize, almost freezes the browser.

And just a couple of clicks have caused redirect loop.

<comment><USER8> Yikes, you definitely shouldn't be seeing redirect loops. Do you happen to still have the URL you got it on? We're doing some muckery with Varnish that may be causing that issue; I'd like to track it down and kill it!

We're working on minimizing reflows and improving the speed of any given reflow, as well. It's not where we want it to be yet, especially on lower-spec hardware.

Thanks for the feedback!

<comment><USER17> Unfortunately, I don't have the URL as I have erased browser history since then. But I tried again and didn't see this issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> After "The Next Big Thing"'s bulletin: _Internet Eats Up Guy Fieri's Awesomely Bad NYT Restaurant Review_ it just stops, leaving me to scroll just two columns, with a blank in the middle.

Is this an error?

</comment><comment><USER6> Why was this changed from "Show HN"? gisikw worked pretty hard on this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep. Filled out that title box and the URL box and everything.

...oh, oh, you mean the redesign. Yeah, that too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's a write up of it here: <http://mashable.com/2012/11/14/introducing- the-new-mashable/>

</comment><comment><USER19> Really horrible! They should adopt the HN design philosophy -- less is more!

</comment><comment><USER20> Wouldn't it be cool if all three of the columns would scroll independently?

<comment><USER21> No.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Content...overload...

</comment><comment><USER23> The site is overwhelming.

<comment><USER24> My first impression as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Great work ! the UI looks great and very appable ;) I would though if it would be better to have a big headline with a photo at the top then as many columns as you want at the bottom of the headline. The page needs its element to have a clear hierarchy. Good luck.</comment>


Nicotine Normalizes Brain Activity Deficits That Are Key to Schizophrenia - <AUTHOR> http://neurosciencenews.com/schizophrenia-nicotine-brain-activity-5995/ <comment><USER2> Tangential self experimentation anecdote:

I was intrigued by reports that nicotine can improve cognition in otherwise healthy people so I read through as many studies/articles I could find online. After deciding that I'd done enough research I took the plunge and began self experimenting with 2mg gum. I took it daily throughout the day at regular-ish intervals for around 2-3 months.

The affects I experienced were as follows:

* it had a positive impact on my focus

* it provided a boost to my wakefulness if I had a bad night's sleep

* my brain felt like it would "tighten up" while I was taking it

* my body felt like it was experiencing higher blood pressure

Short term I was happy with the results.

I am a fit and healthy, non-smoking, cognitively normal (afaik) middle aged male.

After almost 3 months of taking nicotine gum I developed a cyst in one of my retinas brought on by "high pressure damage to the blood vessels".

When I measured my blood pressure, my base pressure had increased by ~10% (as compared to pre-experiment, measured over several days). The real problem would happen if I was under stress, my BP would spike to dangerous levels when it never had done before. I also felt that I would get stressed more easily.

My blood pressure took a few weeks to drop back to normal. I didn't have any withdrawal symptoms save for the sensation of chewing gum.

I won't be repeating this experiment.

Sharing this story in case you're considering long term usage, whether for medical or experimental purposes.

Medical literature seems to support this experience (although supposedly the effect is smaller in women, sorry couldn't find the source for this particular point):

[0] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12356338](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12356338)

edit: spelling

<comment><USER3> Take-away from that is to look up the literature /before/ carrying out the self-experimentation. It could have saved the nasty experience with the retina cyst which sounds very nasty.

I guess we normally only get to hear of the self-experiments with great results and advances for science and medicine. The not-so-good results can tend to get buried both figuratively and literally.

Hope you're fully recovered.

<comment><USER4> I'm sure someone who's never exercised before could die of cardiac arrest as soon as they step on a treadmill.

I think it's slightly disingenuous to suggest that one should never take risks because there are possible downsides.

Nicotine exists in tomatoes, potatoes, etc. Should I remove these from my diet because they contain nicotine, which might possibly cause a cyst in my retina? Surely, we would both agree that argument is nonsensical.

<comment><USER5> > Surely, we would both agree that argument is nonsensical.

It's nonsensical because the dose of nicotine in either is basically zero, unless you're eating pounds of raw tomato leaves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm convinced that if it were suddenly discovered today, nicotine would be hailed as a miracle drug.

It has several properties. It's both a stimulant and a relaxant. It helps you focus without burning out your neurons and inducing psychosis like amphetamines.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Psychoactive_effects](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Psychoactive_effects)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Enhancing_performance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Enhancing_performance)

While there is some risk to it, the actual danger (cancer, heart attack, stroke) from smoking is due to the tar content and other products of combustion from burning tobacco. While nicotine doesn't help blood pressure, it's not the killer that smoking is. It's also somewhat carcinogenic -- again, not as much as tobacco smoke and tar itself. You can find 80 and 90 year old smoking, but you can't really find elderly using cocaine, for example. As far as drugs go, it's relatively safe, for the benefits that it provides.

Also, there are several MAOIs in tobacco smoke. MAOIs are used as last-line anti-depressants, because of their side-effects when taken in large doses. But with tobacco products, a user basically gets a tritrateable MAOI.

If we suddenly discovered nicotine today, I'm convinced that either it or a close chemical cousin would be a the next miracle drug for anxiety and depression.

Perhaps there is a molecular relative of nicotine that could be employed as such, perhaps with less side-effects.

<comment><USER7> > Also, there are several MAOIs in tobacco smoke. MAOIs are used as last-line > anti-depressants, because of their side-effects when taken in large doses. > But with tobacco products, a user basically gets a tritrateable MAOI.

Reversible MAOIs are safer than the irreversible ones: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoamine_oxidase_inhibitor#Re...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoamine_oxidase_inhibitor#Reversibility)

There were some articles in the Boston Globe in 2000 that pointed out that the SSRI Prozac was known to contribute to suicides. I think it was a mistake to allow this drug onto the market.

> If we suddenly discovered nicotine today, I'm convinced that either it or a > close chemical cousin would be a the next miracle drug for anxiety and > depression.

Niacinamide (Nicotinamide) is somewhat similar to Nicotine.

      Considering these striking homologies, the craving for
      nicotine might be due, in part, to a misplaced "hunger"
      for the nutrient, vitamin B3, [...]

-[http://www.highfiber.com/~galenvtp/vtlnctnc.htm](http://www.highfiber.com/~galenvtp/vtlnctnc.htm)

<comment><USER8> I've always wondered: how do they establish a drug causes suicide? I mean they're not literally giving people suicidal thoughts. How do they make people more prone to suicide?

<comment><USER9> As far as I'm aware, the currently prevailing theory is that many deeply depressed people may be be having suicidal thoughts, but their depression is also so strong that they don't have the energy and/or motivation to actually go through with it. Apathy is winning. As the drugs start to lift you out of the hole of apathy, you suddenly start to have more energy and motivation, but you're still depressed. So you still are suicidal but now you have the ability to go through with it.

<comment><USER7> This sounds like an apologist's explanation for an inconvenient truth. Sounds reasonable, but falls apart when confronted with actual data.

(Edit: I'm sure you were paraphrasing what you'd read somewhere.)

Here's a quote from the Boston Globe's 5/7/2000 article:

>> Three years before Prozac received approval by the US Food and Drug Administration in late 1987, the German BGA, that country's FDA equivalent, had such serious reservations about Prozac's safety that it refused to approve the antidepressant based on Lilly's studies showing that previously nonsuicidal patients who took the drug had a fivefold higher rate of suicides and suicide attempts than those on older antidepressants, and a threefold higher rate than those taking placebos.

>> Lilly's own figures, in reports made available to the Globe, indicate that 1 in 100 previously nonsuicidal patients who took the drug in early clinical trials developed a severe form of anxiety and agitation called akathisia, causing them to attempt or commit suicide during the studies.

\-- [http://ahrp.org/prozac-revisited-concerns-about-suicides- sur...](http://ahrp.org/prozac-revisited-concerns-about-suicides-surface- boston-globe/) (I don't know anything about this site, but I've read the quote elsewhere so I'm sure it's a true copy of what the Globe actually printed).

<comment><USER9> Oh yeah, it was definitely just something I've heard a bunch of times, and not something I'd personally looked up the research on. Thank you for the links.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This makes me wonder what the modern world would look like if all "recreational drugs" suddenly disappeared, and so all the people who were implicitly, unknowingly self-medicating for a mental illness by using recreational drugs, suddenly weren't. What percentage of the population would go from seemingly neurotypical, to perceivably mentally ill? How much more common would conditions like schizophrenia be?

<comment><USER11> Alcohol: Anxiety disorders

Marijuana: OCD

Caffeine: ADHD

<comment><USER12> Or just MJ for everything

<comment><USER13> If you can recommend a strain that helps with ADHD while still allowing you to be alert and cognizant, I would really like to know. I've been looking for years.

<comment><USER12> [https://www.leafly.com/news/strains-products/best- cannabis-s...](https://www.leafly.com/news/strains-products/best-cannabis- strains-for-focus-and-addadhd)

I have had the most success with vaping green crack at 210C. Oil concentrates also work, but I tend to overshoot the functional sweet spot and end up recreationally high.

Smoking was much harder to nail down. It worked occasionally, enough to justify buying the vape... But the vape is way better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _"This defines a completely novel strategy for medication development," says lead author_

As someone with schizoaffective problems and raging ADHD, I find quotes like this acutely annoying. I've _told_ every psychiatrist I'eve ever dealt with about the experiential costs/benefits of smoking (and consuming various other recreational drugs). They all nod sagely and say things like 'but smoking is bad' (no shit Sherlock!) while making absolutely zero effort to measure or help me track any of this. Every mentally ill person I've known has said much the same thing. Of all the medical professionals I've ever dealt with, psychiatrists are the laziest and least imaginative.

Edited to add that I quit tobacco ~7 years ago using chantix, which I _totally_ recommend. Unfortunately my mental ilnesses have become harder to deal with over the same period. The last time I reached out to my psychiatrist he said he hadn't seen me in so long that he didn't have room in his practice for me any more. What an asshole.

<comment><USER15> I have never been addicted to cigarettes and do not smoke but I do chew nicotine gum all the time for ADD (and yes there is a difference between ADHD and ADD).

I took me a while to figure out that nicotine is a superior stimulant over caffeine, adderall, ritalin and even chocolate extract (albeit chocolate was surprisingly effective).

The big plus with nicotine is that it doesn't have the after downer that the above stimulants have. Particularly adderall.. it honestly shocks me that I was given that drug as a child.

The jury still seems to be out on how dangerous nicotine is (the actual substance and not all the crap you get with tobacco products).

<comment><USER16> >The big plus with nicotine is that it doesn't have the after downer that the above stimulants have.

What do you mean by this? Caffeine withdrawal over nicotine withdrawal seems like a no brainer to me with what I've seen from smokers, but I don't smoke so I can't say first hand.

<comment><USER15> As another commenter alluded to I was referring to the crash or hangover.

As for withdrawal I don't think I have ever felt it with nicotine but it might be because I just don't ever do enough (the most pieces of gum I have had in one day is 40mg of nicotine.. ie 10 pieces). I have had a nicotine hangover with cigars but this is usually because alcohol is involved as well as I believe cigars lower intake of oxygen (just a theory.. probably wrong).

Caffeine withdrawal is awful.. absolutely awful for me. Headaches for days. I usually give up and pound 4 ibuprofen with a large cup of coffee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> For those who have seen severe mental illness up close, this is not surprising in the least. Many, many people with schizophrenia or other disorders characterized by psychosis self-medicate heavily with cigarettes. Huddled masses of patients smoking outside are fixtures of most psychiatric treatment facilities.

<comment><USER18> Well, its the same thing in prisons, so I always assumed its boredom/stress relief as the explanation for chain smoking.

<comment><USER19> Or it indicates that prisons also contain many mentally ill inmates...

<comment><USER20> Which they do, but it is really tough to unwind the correlation/causation factors here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Original DOI link:

[http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nm.4274](http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nm.4274)

Edit: Please read abandonliberty's comment below before reading mine. I didn't properly elucidate the position on the harms v. benefits tradeoff (net harm) the way abandonliberty did.

My own opinion: it wouldn't be terribly surprising to see many harmful substances only be harmful to a majority subset of a population space, though that's why the scheduling system (theoretically) exists -- to allow drugs to be classified based on harm v. benefit to various populations. Whether Nicotine should be scheduled is... well, given the number of people addicted to it, probably not the easiest conversation to have. I originally thought it was Schedule II (high abuse potential but with some medical benefit, which would certainly fit our potential future understanding of nicotine based on studies like this), but it turns out my original hunch was faulty googling.

<comment><USER22> Clarifying: Nicotine harms everyone. Net harm to a schizophrenic may be negative, but they are still harmed.

"Self-medication hypotheses" exist for many abused substances. Rather than accusing the addicted of poor education, self control, or intelligence it argues (with mounting evidence) that there is a structural or genetic issue that contributes for some addictions.

Ideally we would figure out the mechanism of action and design something with less negative life altering side-effects.

There's always an opportunity to examine freedom of choice/free will for the more philosophic among us :)

<comment><USER23> Bullshit. Nicotine in itself doesn't harm anyone, that's completely made up. On the contrary, a lot of people would be helped by getting more Nicotine into their system, preferably from eating veggies rather than smoking it.

<comment><USER22> The burden of proof is on you here. If you're going to argue something at odds with the medical profession and most published research, you better have some solid facts from reliable sources.

<comment><USER24> Keep in mind that most of this published research is about smoking cigarettes (using "nicotine" as a metonymy).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> That Schizophrenia patients smoke a _lot_ is well known. I guess this explains it.

The other weird Schizophrenia fact is that blind people are never Schizophrenic. Congenital Blindness, that is. Poking your eyes out won't cure Schizophrenia once you have it.

<comment><USER26> > blind people are never Schizophrenic

That is an interesting observation. Do you have a source?

<comment><USER25> [https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-imprinted- brain/201...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-imprinted- brain/201302/why-early-blindness-prevents-schizophrenia)

<comment> angry-hacker Thank you, very exciting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Until the site recovers from the hug of death, here's a cache: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http:/...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://neurosciencenews.com/schizophrenia- nicotine-brain-activity-5995/)

<comment><USER28> thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia_and_smoking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia_and_smoking)

</comment><comment><USER30> It won't really be a surprise, when science learns that _most_ "harmful addictive" substances can improve aspects of brain function for many people.

<comment><USER31> Isn't it more the delivery mechanism than the drug itself?

<comment><USER32> After lung disease, the second largest consequence of tobacco smoking is heart disease, which is due to the nicotine itself.

<comment><USER33> It looks like about 1/3 of smoking-related deaths are due more to the nicotine than the smoke: [https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/heal...](https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/health_effects/tobacco_related_mortality/)

That's much higher than I'd assumed, and bad news for those who want to claim that e-cigarettes are essentially safe.

EDIT: DanBC points out below[1] that it's wrong to assume the cardiovascular disease is caused primarily by nicotine, which is how I came to think it was about 1/3\. So I retract this interpretation, but leave it up for posterity :)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13467235](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13467235)

<comment><USER34> I couldn't find that evidence anywhere in your link. A report by Public Health England estimated e-cigarettes to be at least 95% less harmful than combustible tobacco.

[https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...](https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/457102/Ecigarettes_an_evidence_update_A_report_commissioned_by_Public_Health_England_FINAL.pdf)

<comment><USER33> The report you linked does not explain the 95% number, and following their citations bottomed out in articles that don't contain that number either. I'd need to spend more time looking through those before I'd feel comfortable saying _that no existence for the 95% harm reduction claim can be found in the tree of citations spinning out from the PHE report_ , but please be aware that as of now you have not provided evidence for that claim. I'd be pleased if you would, since it would probably save me a lot of time later.

<comment><USER34> [https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...](https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/456704/McNeill- Hajek_report_authors_note_on_evidence_for_95_estimate.pdf)

<comment><USER33> Thanks, this is more clear and straightforward about where they got that number, though the relevant citation ends up being the same as in the longer document.

The evidence cited in that summary is the study 'Estimating the Harms of Nicotine-Containing Products Using the MCDA Approach'[1]. If you read that paper, I guarantee you will find yourself much less confident in the 95% harm reduction claim. Briefly, here's the method they employed:

* Convene a panel of "international experts" in a two day workshop. * Ask each participant to separately rate how harmful they believe each type of nicotine-containing product is, on a scale of 0 (no harm) - 100 (cigarettes). * Weight/average the scores and publish the results

In case anyone is inclined to think that counts as "evidence", be aware that the authors of that study _don 't_:

"A limitation of this study is the lack of hard evidence for the harms of most products on most of the criteria"

They fail to mention in particular the lack of long-term evidence for some of the products, which have not been available long enough to properly measure.

In any case, I am aware that vaping nicotine is much safer than combusting tobacco (though I think the latter is a lot yummier). However, I found this to be an interesting case study in how a report can pull out precise and scientific-looking numbers like 95% and trust that people for the most part will take that at face value without looking into the scientific validity of the claim.

[1] [http://www.karger.com/article/FullText/360220](http://www.karger.com/article/FullText/360220)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Relevant SSC post on the topic: [http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/11/schizophrenia-no- smokin...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/11/schizophrenia-no-smoking- gun/).

</comment><comment><USER36> Might be because of niacin too, here is the informative article:

[http://www.orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v13n05.shtml](http://www.orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v13n05.shtml)

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm surprised that no one has pointed out that tobacco absorbs lithium from the ground can be found in smoking tobacco [1]. Lithium is also used as an anti-psychotic medication.

1: [http://www.europsy- journal.com/article/S0924-9338(16)00128-0...](http://www.europsy- journal.com/article/S0924-9338\(16\)00128-0/abstract?cc=y=)

</comment><comment><USER38> Targacept was a biotech company that spun off from RJ Reynolds [1] with the goal of making drugs related to nicotine that would help with schizophrenia and other psychiatric/neurological disorders. They tried really hard, and it didn't work [2].

[1] [http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/rj-reynolds- tobacco-...](http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/rj-reynolds-tobacco- company-announces-spin-off-of-targacept-73013932.html)

[2] [http://www.journalnow.com/opinion/editorials/editorial- targa...](http://www.journalnow.com/opinion/editorials/editorial-targacept-a- success-story-comes-to-an- end/article_a7664424-c993-11e4-8005-6b7b4e23f8da.html)

</comment><comment><USER39> Maybe the movie Sleeper wasn't just a comedy:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2fYguIX17Q&t=208](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2fYguIX17Q&t=208)

</comment><comment><USER40> I've been thinking this for some time, nicotine is the only thing that make me feel normal. You wouldn't think it would take so long to figure this out

</comment><comment><USER41> Can anyone with access to the paper give a few technical details? The abstract mentions "Chronic nicotine administration" does this mean the nicotine dosage is high enough to not be a viable basis for treatment?

The linked article claims that this could be a basis for new drug research, which sounds exciting, but how much do we already know about drugs that affect the nicotinic receptors?

<comment><USER42> I'm sure that means "smoking or equivalent".

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Ok, early days, but does this mean nicotine gum or vaping with an E-liquid with nicotine could be used for Schizophrenia treatment?

</comment><comment><USER44> This is at the intersection of several of my interests.

The idea that nicotine improves cognition in schizophrenia is not new and, indeed, several drugs inspired by this idea (nicotinic agonists) are currently in the pipeline for the treatment of ADHD, schizophrenia, and depression. [1]

In this paper, the researchers are focused on a polymorphism in the CHRNA5 gene. Pulling up my 23andme data, this mutation (rs16969968) looks common, listed at 45% of the population. I have one of the "bad" alleles and, personally, use nicotine as a stimulant every once in a while and find it more effective than coffee but less effective than adderall.

If you are interested in this sort of research, I recommend getting part of your genome sequenced with 23andme [2] and then running your data through Promethease [3]. But, remember, don't take anything _too_ seriously -- most of this isn't settled science.

There is also some evidence that nicotine may function as a "nootropic," i.e. a drug that enhances cognition even in the healthy. Nick Bostrom mentions using nicotine and caffeine to aid writing his book _Superintelligence_.

Contrary to what you might believe, nicotine is probably not all that bad for you, or even that addictive when not used in combination with an MAOI. The best review of this is, as usual, by Gwern. [4]

Finally, I want to mention a few other interesting properties of nicotine:

\- The drug seems to more strongly reinforce behaviors done while under the influence of it than it reinforces "taking nicotine" (addiction). This may make it useful for implementing positive habits. e.g. I often chew half a piece of nicotine gum while running in an attempt to solidify my exercise routine.

\- One study suggests that, at least in mice, nicotine administration results in long-term upregulation of reward sensitivity. [5]

Huge disclaimer here at the bottom: if this post convinces you to experiment with nicotine, please do not start with vaping. The near-instant reinforcement of inhaling a stimulant makes it much more addictive. Stick with gum, or a tincture. [6]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotinic_agonist#Current_stat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotinic_agonist#Current_status) [2] [https://www.23andme.com/](https://www.23andme.com/) [3] [https://promethease.com/](https://promethease.com/) [4] [https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine](https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine) [5] [http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/v31/n6/full/1300905a.html](http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/v31/n6/full/1300905a.html) [6] [https://www.reddit.com/r/Nootropics/comments/3lvkmc/nicotine...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Nootropics/comments/3lvkmc/nicotine_as_nootropic_the_cheap_and_safe_way/)

<comment><USER45> If I'm reading it correctly, the 'A' genotype is bad, for those who want to check for themselves:

[https://you.23andme.com/tools/data/?query=rs16969968](https://you.23andme.com/tools/data/?query=rs16969968)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Cached page:

[https://archive.is/riIDg](https://archive.is/riIDg)

</comment><comment><USER47> I wonder if this could be related [https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/155/8/732/65654/Parkins...](https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/155/8/732/65654/Parkinson- s-Disease-Risks-Associated-with)

</comment><comment><USER4> I've long suspected that nicotine has a net benefit effect on cognition.

I'm curious to see if there will be a new line of nACHr drugs that can potentially enhance cognition.</comment>


Akka and the Java Memory Model - <AUTHOR> http://blog.typesafe.com/akka-and-the-java-memory-model <comment><USER2> Something went wrong in machine architecture. If the intent is to produce and ship a fully initialized object graph from core P to core C for immediate consumption, well, why can't core P just write dirty lines straight into core C's cache? Right now core P generally has to completely flush its write buffer and broadcast invalidations to all other cores, even the ones with no references to that memory and no reason to care about its contents. Memory barriers are seeming more like manual allocation to me, one of those things that humans just shouldn't need to be involved with, because it's nothing more than an opportunity to make subtle mistakes which are agonizing to troubleshoot.

<comment><USER3> _Right now core P generally has to completely flush its write buffer and broadcast invalidations to all other cores, even the ones with no references to that memory and no reason to care about its contents._

That's not strictly true. Modern CPUs have snoop filters and other mechanisms to reduce cache communication. If they didn't, the buses would be horrendously congested (you can indeed render the snoop filter ineffective by writing bad code).

In any case, it's not clear to me what alternative you're suggesting. x86 is about the easiest architecture for the programmer to reason about in terms of cache coherency, and CPU designers seem to run into scalability problems at every doubling of x86 core count. I fail to see how making even more coherency guarantees at the hardware level will improve matters. Yes, you can make it very easy to reason about (even in software, at the VM level), but you'll end up with terrible performance.</comment></comment>


Ruby Internals - <AUTHOR> http://dev-logger.blogspot.com/2008/06/ruby-internals-by-patrick-farley.html <comment><USER2> I saw his talk at MtWest RubyConf. One of the few presentations worth paying attention to.

Basically, people learning Ruby need to watch this video, spend a bit of time getting accustomed to how Ruby classes and metaclasses/eigenclasses and such work (really not all that complex), and never be spooked by the idea of metaprogramming (least in Ruby) again.

</comment><comment><USER3> I highly recommend checking out the Ruby source code.. it's some of the best C code I've seen. It's not all that big, and it's pretty easy to follow.

I've even seen people use it as a kind of framework for writing C code in a ruby style. :)

<comment><USER4> I remember looking at the Ruby source code about a year ago, so it may have drastically improved since then, but I remember it being a bit of a mess. But it is quite fun to step through the code in gdb and you can learn quite a lot by hacking on it or implementing a DLL extension.

If trolling through language implementations is your kind of thing, I'd suggest having a look at Lua or Python as well (I never got Perl to configure, let alone compile) - then you can compare and contrast with the way things are done in Ruby.

<comment><USER5> Let me second that. A few months ago I was looking at Ruby, Python, and MzScheme's GCs, and I found that Ruby code was hardest to read and badly commented. Python, on the other hand, was very nicely written _and_ commented.

Lua too, but Lua also has the advantage of being so tiny it's easier to read.</comment></comment></comment>


Earth Primer - <AUTHOR> http://www.earthprimer.com/

<comment><USER3> This is very cool indead. Reminds me of my time as an undergrad at uni, where one of our projects revolved around making a game/sim like this. Everybody else was trying to make 3D adventure games, but we were interested in "good quality" (I put that in quotes because I just went back to look at the code and shuddered) 2D games, that were more polished.

Our game was called "Land of Life" [0] (or Geco, according to the source code, not sure why). It was a basic, fixed size, isometric tile game. To start with, you are presented with a desert. The only thing you can do is add mountains, and then hit play and watch clouds form and move over the mountains. If you constructed your mountains well, you'd get nice oasis' with rivers flowing out of the mountains, and greenery around it. If, you probably wouldn't get any rivers, but would get some small shrubs.

From memory, the only heuristics about adding mountains were: You can only make a mountain bigger if there are a certain number of mountains of a certain size adjacent to it. It was a bit like game-of-life in that way, hence the name "land of life". This worked surprisingly well for constructing mountain ranges.

One main difference from our approach and the one linked to here is that theirs looks absolutely amazing and educational, whereas ours used heuristics that we dreamed up via trial and error.

[0] Screenshot (missing assets for river tiles, because I couldn't find the final source code) - [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pserwylo/land-of- life/mast...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pserwylo/land-of- life/master/screenshot.png)

EDIT:

Here is a screencast [1]. I still think it is nice how the first river which heads off to the top right (rendered in black due to no river assets) gets surrounded by trees because it is a source of water in the desert. This is not based on any geological/ecological/climate knowledge on our part, but was still fun to tinker with.

[1] [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pserwylo/land-of- life/mast...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pserwylo/land-of- life/master/screencast.webm)

</comment><comment><USER4> This looks pretty great.

Getting closer to a world where The Young Lady's Primer is possible :)

<comment><USER5> I don't think the name similarity was a coincidence.

For context, The Young Lady's Primer is a fictional book in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age sci-fi novel. It's a electronic choose-your-own-adventure book that tailors itself to the user, and is narrated by anonymized actors on the background (think mechanical turkey). It's highly interactive, in much the same way as Earth's Primer.

<comment><USER6> Is there any other fiction that explores the idea?

 _The Diamond Age_ spoilers follow.

One of many disappointments[1] for me past about 1/3 of the way in to the _The Diamond Age_ was that the Primer didn't continue to exhibit new, interesting behavior. It seemed like the promise of the Primer at the beginning was that it would be a companion that grew with Nell and continued to react to what was going on around her, but past a certain point it's just a smarter-than-average interactive fiction edutainment game, so that the in-the-book scenes increasingly felt like digressions in to World-of-Warcraft-plus-math than anything really innovative (or narratively interesting for that matter), as they have less and less to do with Nell's immediate environment and don't change as she grows older, aside from the material getting more difficult. Even Nell often seems bored by it in the later chapters.

Maybe that's a subtle nod to how some video games have more resources put in to the first few levels to generate good reviews, then phone it in for the rest :-)

I'd love to see the idea of the nanotech educational book-companion (or similar) explored more fully. Those early scenes are _so_ powerful.

[1] Oh man, that pages-long part near the end that exists solely for one character to tell us what another's motivations had been for the second half of the book, since there'd have been no way for the reader to guess otherwise. Closest I've ever come to punching a book.

<comment><USER7> Sounds like a Peter Molyneux game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That's really awesome. I'd love an app like that for the human body, electronics and more subjects.

</comment><comment><USER9> Any plans for Android?

<comment><USER10> Depending on how the iPad reception goes, I will entertain the possibility of translations to other languages and ports to other platforms. I'm a one man show (despite having an excellent illustrator and composer and video producer), and have been working on this for over four years. This isn't a full time project for me right now, so I would have to enlist help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Chaim Gingold the creator of this is pretty awesome. Here's some more of his work [http://levitylab.com/cog/](http://levitylab.com/cog/)

<comment><USER12> There's an interesting post on the motivation for this here, [http://www.levitylab.com/blog/2011/06/geology-an- interactive...](http://www.levitylab.com/blog/2011/06/geology-an-interactive- primer/) (note the post date).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looks like the site is having some weird DNS problems (I'm getting a 'host not found' from the nameserver. Direct link to the video for anyone else having problems getting to it - [http://vimeo.com/116182914](http://vimeo.com/116182914)

</comment><comment><USER14> Bought this yesterday. My kindergarten son has been asking a lot about volcanoes, islands, and continents recently so this is a perfect fit. Good mix of learning with interactivity.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is what the future should look like when it comes to learning materials in k-12 schools. $9.99 is worth it. Please keep it up and make other resources like this for other areas of science!

</comment><comment><USER16> Great job! My child is going to love this. He spends time just tooling around Google Earth for fun. To be able to create volcanos and shape land is going to delight him.

Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER17> The author has chosen some really great examples of engaging phenomena - <USER2> shadows, plate tectonics. Very nice work.

</comment><comment><USER18> That video is very elegant. Can you say what software/techniques you used to create it?

<comment><USER10> The trailer video was produced by Laura Kaltman. We scripted/wrote it together, and iterated it many times. Laura wanted to make a 16:9 HD video, but the iPad is 4:3, so many of the video captures were done with a special developer Mac version of the app configured to output at a much higher resolution and with custom screen layouts. (The Mac version, otherwise, looks identical—all the same GLSL shaders and GL code.) This enabled us to get big, high quality video for use in the trailer. Storyboards were vital for conceiving, refining, and communicating about the script. These were made in illustration programs.

<comment><USER10> Developing this video was one of the most important parts of explaining the project; from this effort came the web site and other materials. I've uploaded some storyboard PDFs to give some insight into this process. If there's enough interest I could share the 1st revision of the trailer—which didn't work in all kinds of interesting ways.

1st major revision notes: [http://www.earthprimer.com/misc/Movie%20Rough%20notes%20v1.1...](http://www.earthprimer.com/misc/Movie%20Rough%20notes%20v1.1.pdf)

2nd major revision notes: [http://www.earthprimer.com/misc/Movie%20Rough%20notes%20v2.p...](http://www.earthprimer.com/misc/Movie%20Rough%20notes%20v2.pdf)

Trying to figure out why 1st take wasn't working: [http://www.earthprimer.com/misc/Trailer%20Notes%20Meta.pdf](http://www.earthprimer.com/misc/Trailer%20Notes%20Meta.pdf)

<comment><USER19> Please do share the 1st version of the trailer. Seeing intermediate steps is always more insightful than the trying to back out the decision behind a final product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is super cool. I can see this idea being used for other specialties.

</comment><comment><USER21> _So earth works by being controlled by a god?_

Was my first though. I don't know if this is more in support of science or religion.

<comment><USER22> One could also think that while playing SimCity. It haven't gone through my mind though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Well, there goes my afternoon.

</comment><comment><USER24> I like to see how the Earth works but it doesn't run on the most popular mobile OS in the world. Sigh...

<comment><USER25> HN is probably not the place that can change it.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8984253](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8984253)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Benchmark survey for lean startups - <AUTHOR> http://io99.tiny.hn/?view=webpage

<comment><USER2> When are you going to release the results? I'd really like to understand different local startup scenes around Europe better and your survive could shed some light to that aspect.

<comment><AUTHOR> the results are all live updated @ <http://io99.tiny.hn/replies/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> We're trying to see how startups around the world compare - so that the local scene can work out how to improve itself and be more successful.</comment>


Herman Hesse: Outside Man - the-enemy https://www.weeklystandard.com/christoph-irmscher/herman-hesse-outside-man <comment><AUTHOR> I've discovered Hermann Hesse comparatively late in my life, given that many of his novels are seen as "coming of age" topics. Still I can recommend them to anyone with an open mind or willing to open their mind or change perspectives. For instance if you are into eastern thinking there's the famous "Siddharta".

One of my personal favourites is "Narcissus and Goldmund", which sketches the relationship between two young men who represent an "artistic" and a "scientific" way of thinking and life.

<comment><USER2> Siddhartha is an amazing story, at least for me. So much wisdom if it comes at the right time in your life.

"His goal attracts him, because he doesn't let anything enter his soul which might oppose the goal. This is what Siddhartha has learned among the Samanas. This is what fools call magic and of which they think it would be effected by means of the daemons. Nothing is effected by daemons, there are no daemons. Everyone can perform magic, everyone can reach his goals, if he is able to think, if he is able to wait, if he is able to fast."

<comment><USER3> One of the few Herman Hesse translations that's PD in the US:

[https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2500](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2500)

[https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/hermann- hesse/siddhartha/g...](https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/hermann- hesse/siddhartha/gunther-olesch_anke-dreher_amy-coulter_stefan-langer_semyon- chaichenets)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems like being raised in, and rejecting, a pietist environment can result in some fantastic literature and philosophy. Hesse was raised in a pietist household and smoked cigarettes to protest. Kant was brought up the same and wrote "Critique of Pure Reason".

I don't necessarily regard Hesse's work as necessarily being directed towards a 'coming of age' readership; but, I discovered him at a time when I was struggling with my own "private battles of adolescence" and am grateful in finding his work.

<comment><USER5> I, too, am lucky to have found him a few years ago in my late teens. It feels like I've just been in an internal existential crisis these past few years and his words always keep me grounded. Along with Rilke's and Camus's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've come across dozens of copies Siddhartha in thrift shops and garage sales, bought them all and given them to friends and colleagues to read.

I am surprised nobody mentions Hesse's book of short stories[1] which i highly recommend. They are quite different from his novels and offer a different insight into his world. It's the one book that I am going to to take with me wherever I move.

[0] The Fairy Tales of Herman Hesse [https://www.amazon.com/Fairy-Tales- Herman-Hesse/dp/B0000544O...](https://www.amazon.com/Fairy-Tales-Herman- Hesse/dp/B0000544OY/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1541779289&sr=8-7&keywords=herman+hesse+short+stories)

<comment><USER7> Thank you to you also. I had read Hesse only because someone gave me the used books too. A fine gift it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Herman Hesse is my Tesla, my Einstein, my guru. I first read "Siddhartha" quite young, and by my early teens I'd read both "The Glass Bead Game" and "Magister Ludi" \- a different translation a bit harder to read - I'd read them both multiple times.

Hesse's philosophy is so comprehensive, there is no trite summary. Perhaps simply viewing life as a series of symphonic movements, with competing harmonies and melodies is as short as one can get.

<comment><USER9> The closest I can get to describing his philosophy is that he is focused on the tension between book learning and experiential learning (particularly as manifest in the outdoors). The other theme that comes up repeatedly is the relationship between students and teachers (both those that are in the official role of teacher, and more often those that are teachers because a student, often the protagonist, chooses to follow them and learn from them).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm currently reading Steppenwolf by Hesse and it has me thinking a lot. Main character (Harry Haller) seems to portray being in one of those "be careful what you wish for" situations. One aiming for individuality and independence at the cost of alienating people close to him. It is his desire, his goal in the beginning and ends up being his punishment, his prison. Maybe I found the book at the right time of my life (25).

<comment><USER11> "Ah, Harry, we have to stumble, through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Those were the days. When Hess wrote The Glass Bead Game, Mann gave us The Magic Mountain, Camus had The Plague, and Kafka ...

Yet what remain closest to me from my days of enjoying their writings is just an essay by Herman Hess titled "Thou Shalt not Kill". Hess, the man and his times, seems to unravel its depth and mystery here. (And Mann's short story, "A Man and his Dog" has a similar staying power for me)</comment>


The Times tech columnist 'unplugged' from the internet, except he didn't - <AUTHOR> https://www.cjr.org/analysis/farhad-manjoo-nyt-unplug.php <comment><USER2> FWIW, his last 3,200 tweets (as pulled from the API) and a graph of his daily tweeting rate: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nFHsiPWvYwUmopXWbx6T...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nFHsiPWvYwUmopXWbx6TbCyqvjI61aTR5QnCqirwdrs/edit#gid=1366541661)

After the second week in January, he definitely tweeted far less than he usually does. But it's still far from being "unplugged". It's not just whether or not his original column claimed to have completely cut off Twitter, but how it omitted any mention of the relevant fact that he continued to tweet during this time. You can tweet without getting your news from Twitter. OTOH, you can read a lot of Twitter without tweeting very much, and it's clear he was reading and tweeting about the kind of bullshit that he claims newspapers don't get to printing.

To me, it's comical/sad how Manjoo couldn't simply quit Twitter for a few weeks after coming up with the idea to make this a big feature. It's as if social media is a basic life necessity for him and he could only do the equivalent of fasting.

<comment><USER3> Were any of the tweets automated?

<comment><USER4> My first thought was well. It's quite likely that the times as a full time social media manager that makes sure none of their columnists feeds ever goes too quiet. That probably takes the form of either a robot automatically posting snippets under the names of journalists in the right departments or an intern/entry level position handling 40 accounts at once.

It may be that he really did go offline, and forgot that if you take his twitter account at face value it looks like he lied.

<comment><USER5> Your hypothesis is contradicted by the article:

> Manjoo objects to that characterization. "I think it's clear that I meant I > 'unplugged' from Twitter as a source of news, not that I didn't tweet at > all," he wrote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I felt bad about upvoting this, because the writer is so nasty about it. His style of writing feels like long-form Twitter trolling. But I upvoted it because the information in it is important. It shows how addictive Twitter is. It also shows how plugged in you can be and still feel yourself to be unplugged.

Farhad ends up seeming like an alcoholic talking about how he's on the wagon, and then you look down and there's a bottle in his hand. The important point though is not that he's some sort of hypocrite, but that it could be any of us.

<comment><USER7> This doesn't have anything to do with social media "addiction". It just shows plainly how bad the NYT has gotten when even the simplest most trivially checkable assertions of its reporters turn out to be slimy and weaselly. How can you trust anything they write when things that you can verify turn out to be "true" only with the most absurd definitions of "true"?

The NYT 20+ years ago wouldn't have let this happen and would have taken action. The NYT of today isn't the same.

<comment><USER8> I read both the Times and the WSJ for years now, and can say the opinion and lifestyle pieces on both have chronically suffered from a lack of "journalistic integrity"... because they're intended to be biased from the get go.

IMO, this has been a pretty consistent feature of lifestyle/opinion pieces across the history of newspapers. It just used to be buried away in its proper section. Unfortunately, these types of fluff/garbage pieces can "trend" and blend in with proper journalism making you feel like they're to be held to some standard of journalism or science.

Unfortunately, people have a lot of difficulty distinguishing between the two, which is probably why people consider things like conservative talk radio and the Huffington Post and this lifestyle piece rigorous journalism.

<comment><USER9> There's a difference between _being biased_ (= expressing your personal non- objective opinion) and _lying_.

<comment><USER8> I was just addressing OPs statement about paper quality as it has existed across "rigorous" papers (conservative and liberal) for decades. Op-ed has always been a steaming pile thats thankfully not reflective of the actual news published.

As to your point, I agree completely--this guy just needs to be fired, and the NYT should post a correction. He was a trusted writer who made false claims about his own behavior.

Should the NYT have surveilled Manjoo's "experiment" for a fluff piece? Should it monitor their writers to make sure they actually went and tried that new cupcake place on 5th avenue?

Maybe. But I feel like the issue here is that this staff member blatantly lied to both the paper and the public, which feels akin to a doctor violating his hippocratic oath.

As for the rest of op-ed, I honestly feel like cherry-picking facts and figures to form a one-sided opinion is tantamount to a lie--perhaps an even more sinister one. And just like we don't have op-eds on Wikipedia, we should be damn sure to isolate them from what we call "news."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So the takeaway is that he got paid to plug paper-news and created a narrative to support that plug without actually doing any of the "this is how I started feeling better"-dieting. He still was on social, he still followed the news and commented on it. So why lie about avoiding it and feeling better? Because that was an essential part of his paper-news plug that he _had_ to do. Why was he forced to do it? Because he already took the money. If he had actual journalistic integrity he would have written a piece about how hard it can be to actually unplug detailing his own failed attempt.

<comment><USER11> Is there any indication that he was "being paid to plug paper-news" or is this just your conspiracy theory?

Because if it's the latter, it's a decidedly _lame_ conspiracy. And considering the financial pressures, I'm not even sure if the New York Times could afford to bribe someone writing for the New York Times.

<comment><USER12> How is it "lame"? It's common knowledge that media is a significant influencer of those who consume it (pretty much everyone), so it follows that writing an article suggesting that X may be superior to Y (because Y is bad) would influence many into thinking similarly if they hadn't been thinking that already, or further reinforce that feeling if they had.

All it had to take was for anyone at the NY Times to bring up in a meeting "hey, we'd like to try to get our paper subs up a bit, someone write an article about unplugging from the net (something tons of people talk about but never actually do) about how newspapers are actually better".

Worst case scenario it doesn't work out, it was a nice experiment and at least you brought in a lot of clicks and got to bring up fake news and Russian Twitter bots in another story, right?

Media is always biased and always has an agenda one way or another, I'm not sure why in this case it would have to be any different.

<comment> shaki-dora The NYT is a stickler for traditions. Chief among them is a clear separation of their business operations and the newsroom. I'm almost sure the best way to get one of their writers to do A is to have a manager walk through the newsroom and ask everybody not to do A.

This situation is a bit different because it's not a reporter but a columnist. Columnists don't even work at a newspaper's office- this one is in San Francisco, a continent away from New York. They also don't attend meetings. There's nothing to discuss about their job. They simply send in a text file once a week and get a paycheck back.

<comment><USER10> > The NYT is a stickler for traditions

You mean like fact checking? They didn't even glance at the twitter account of the man writing about how he ditched twitter. NYT isn't what it was anymore.

<comment><USER13> The profiles of Neonazis, weekly complaining about college kids protesting hate speech, the "Cletus Safaris". Yeah NYT isn't what it was anymore.

Have you heard about The Most Ignorant Man in America. NYT got it covered.

They literally had to show up at the Whitehouse and sit on the couch and they would have won their awards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I can imagine someone _posting_ to twitter while being 'unplugged' (i.e. not reading social media, email or Web pages &c) by the use of a teletype or typewriter of some kind or an sms gateway. Messages in a bottle sort of thing.

But re-tweeting currently popular pages is something of a giveaway.

I personally found Mr Miller's take on this interesting.

[https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/1/4279674/im-still-here- back...](https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/1/4279674/im-still-here-back-online- after-a-year-without-the-internet)

<comment><USER15> Interesting article. I've been offline for a long time too. There are 2 components to this problem: One is the inherent "disconnected-ness" of reality without the internet (which is both good and bad, depending on the occasion) and the other is that you're going against the flow.

Sure, it was harder to meet new people and communicate 20 years ago, but there was the intent, the understanding and the social norms required for it. People were more talkative. You could drop by somebody's house like it's no big deal. You could call people to chat and catch up. Other people were looking to communicate offline too. Now that just doesn't happen. Unless you manage to find a core/community of people willing to stay offline, disconnecting from the internet just disconnects you from society to a large extent.

What would be ideal, is to "disconnect" from the bad influences of the internet. Had a better, non-addictive, non-brainwashing version of facebook/twitter existed, more people would like to connect and stay connected, feel better about it, and better, more meaningful relationships would form.

<comment><USER16> That's not true, people are more social now than before. Including in real life.

<comment><USER17> Sure, if you consider staring down at your phone in public a social activity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Money quote: " _A Times spokesperson said the paper doesn't view his assertion as a falsehood, and won't be issuing a correction._ "

Really? Completely given up, have they?

<comment><USER19> This is frustrating. NYTimes is supposed to be the paper of record. But you have to do simple fact checking on puff pieces like this one.

Comments like this mean that editors likely knew Manjoo wasn't offline, but allowed the piece because somehow they thought that 15 tweets/day was offline.

So they are either liars who misled, or even more worrisome, aren't able to discern reality enough that saying "I unplugged from Twitter" is compatible with daily tweeting.

It would have been so easy to add some editorial note on what the author meant by unplugging so users weren't misled.

It is frustrating because as a consumer, I would like an objective source of news. Not to pick the best worldview I like and let them filter reality for me.

It's also annoying because the fake news people will constantly point out these frequent inaccuracies in even reputable papers.

<comment><USER20> I'm not sure anyone here is reading the actual articles, or even the titles.

This story has the headline, "The Times tech columnist 'unplugged' from the internet. Except he didn't".

But that's not what Manjoo claimed at all. He never said he was offline. The title of the Times article is "For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here's What I Learned." The story isn't about being disconnected from the internet, it is about getting the news the next day, in print, instead of from nytimes.com, news alerts, twitter posts, etc.

It's not a question of whether he tweeted, it is a question of where he got his news.

<comment><USER2> You and Manjoo are presenting a straw man. No one is accusing him of lying about being disconnected from the Internet. The criticism is that he explicitly used the word "unplugged" in relation to Twitter. Furthermore, there's a paragraph in which he describes what he didn't give up — which included podcasts and email newsletters. It takes an act of willful obfuscation to not have added something about him checking Twitter throughout the day. It doesn't help his case that he tweeted news-related Twitter things, such as telling people to read some thread about Sean Hannity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I thought this was a bit illuminating:

> During the first two weeks of February, he tweeted, on average, more than 15 > times a day. He refrained completely from tweeting on only five days—all on > weekends. That's far from obsessive, but it's even farther from "unplugged." > It is, in fact the opposite of "unplugged."

More than 15 tweets per day is far from obsessive? I'm not much of a Twitter user, but that does seem like a lot.

<comment><USER22> Well, it's not Twitter, but my brother often reaches the limit of 250 sms/day of his cell plan, so 15 doesn't sound much.

I don't think you can measure it in absolute numbers, though; as far as I know, "obsessive behavior" is defined by factors such as the negative effects on the rest of your life.

<comment><USER23> > it's not Twitter

And that's the problem with this comparison. SMS are not used like tweets, they're used like IM messages. So 250 SMS per day should be compared to e.g. 250 Telegram messages per day, not to 250 tweets per day.

<comment><USER22> Yes, that is the problem, that's why I wrote that :) Still, there's back-and- forth in Twitter too. Plus the character limit, which is 14x higher in Telegram (though smaller in SMSs).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Worth pointing out that Manjoo was largely silent over the weekend in response to the OP article -- which definitely did not help his case, but we can chalk up to him maybe wanting to not get worked up over the weekend. He has this afternoon made a few tweets in his defense:

[https://twitter.com/fmanjoo/status/972888102900350976](https://twitter.com/fmanjoo/status/972888102900350976)

I've found his explanation to be unsatisfactory, since his standard seems to be (paraphrased) "Well I didn't _lie_ ", as if leaving out context and facts is a lesser problem -- there's a reason why courts ask you to swear to tell not just "the truth" but "the whole truth".

</comment><comment><USER24> Reading through this article, I was somewhat jarred by this sentence:

"It seems likely that Manjoo isn't lying, and that he really believes he had unplugged, and really believes that his weak-sauce explanations don't belie the point of his column."

Up until that point, the article has been professional, well spoken, and precise. I know it's a small thing, but the inclusion of the term "weak-sauce" instantly dealt a blow to the image of maturity I had constructed of the author. The paragraph itself would be no less compelling (perhaps even more- so) had the term simply been omitted without replacement.

I spent the rest of the article wondering if this was thoughtful journalism or some college kid's essay.

<comment> shaki-dora I think what's far more important about that sentence is something commendable: they're showing good faith in giving the author the benefit of the doubt.

Your objection to the specific phrase is, I believe, an attachment to a somewhat superficial definition of "professionalism". It reminds me of the US President's caricature of the term "presidential", where he seems to believe that "being presidential" would require him to speak in a fake British accent and never make a joke. His predecessor already appeared on comedy shows and threw footballs through the Oval Office, without ever (seriously) being considered "unpresidential". Because the term is far more about content than style.

See also Hunter S Thompson or Tom Wolfe for examples of respected journalists dispensing with unnessary decorum.

<comment><USER24> You're not wrong. I do, however, strongly believe that his use of the phrase did not do him any favors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Can a modern tech journalist even unplug from the Internet if they wanted to? I was under the impression that most journalists have a (contractual) daily "tweet quota" that they have to meet.

<comment><USER2> Plenty of NYT journalists who don't use Twitter, particularly the ones in leadership roles. There is a social media policy but not any type of contractual quota: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/13/reader-center/social- medi...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/13/reader-center/social-media- guidelines.html)

\- Dean Baquet (editor in chief) has just 2 tweets: [https://twitter.com/deanbaquet](https://twitter.com/deanbaquet)

\- James Bennet (editorial page editor) [https://twitter.com/JBennet](https://twitter.com/JBennet)

\- A.G. Sulzberger (publisher, but worked as a bureau reporter for a few years) [https://twitter.com/agsnyt](https://twitter.com/agsnyt)

2014 article about whether it mattered if NYT people knew how to use twitter: [https://gigaom.com/2014/09/29/does-it-matter-that-some- new-y...](https://gigaom.com/2014/09/29/does-it-matter-that-some-new-york- times-editors-and-writers-dont-tweet-yes-and-no/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Unfortunate to see this kind of trivial doublespeak -- "What does unplugged mean, really?" \-- from the purported paper of record.

<comment><USER27> Virtue signaling is what the kids are calling it these days I believe.

<comment> shaki-dora I generally hate these kids and that term of theirs, because it's extremely lazy to use s/o's admittedly virtuous words as an argument against them.

But in this case My problem starts even earlier, b/c I just have no earthly idea how this has anything to do with "virtue signaling".

<comment><USER19> It's funny, there must be an old man internet club that I need to join. I was thrown by the use of virtue signaling. There have been many exchanges that I've observed in confusion not know what it meant other than one group of assholes were using it as an insult and another group of assholes were calling the name callers asshole. This article didn't help me, [https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2017/02/people- who-...](https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2017/02/people-who-accuse- others-virtue-signalling-are-trying-stigmatise-empathy)

But interestingly OP's post finally let me understand that it's someone saying they are doing something virtuous (eg, unplug from internet) while not doing it (still tweeting).

So I guess it's a kind of hypocrisy.

I still don't understand why someone takes offense. If someone accused me of virtue signaling, wouldn't the best response be to present evidence of virtue (eg, corrected logs showing no usage) rather than attacking the accuser?

<comment><USER28> > _But interestingly OP's post finally let me understand that it's someone > saying they are doing something virtuous (eg, unplug from internet) while > not doing it (still tweeting)._

But that's _not_ only what it is.

Originally, it meant any visible expression of virtue that's done with the goal of signaling that to others (and thus increase social standing).

Nowadays, it's mostly used to criticize others actions as empty (e.g. someone posting empty feel-good messages about an issue, but not doing anything to actually help affected people), from both sides: criticizing people you agree with for not actually doing anything to help the cause they claim to support, or for denigrating people's efforts as being done purely to improve their standing, not because they actually care about it.

If someone accuses you of virtue signaling, they accuse you of only wanting to look good, not actually supporting something you publicly represent.

It kind of seems fair to claim that the author espousing the benefits of unplugging while not actually doing it is virtue signaling. The problem is, it can be applied even if they did that: Oh you actually didn't tweet for a month? Well, you only did that so you could claim moral superiority over everyone else because it's fashionable to argue against social media. And surely you were _looking_ at Twitter all the time and just didn't want to break appearances. That's the insidious part about how it's sometimes used nowadays: even if you _did_ do something "good", it's devalued because it's implied you didn't mean it, and why it causes offense.

(E.g. I can take your post [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16564343](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16564343) and from a position that agrees with you accuse you of virtue signaling since you only post it here on HN and aren't doing anything to fix it, e.g. writing an angry letter to the editor, so all it did was show others that you don't agree. Or I can accuse you of virtue signaling from a position disagreeing, since it's obvious that HN would like this argument and you are just saying it to get more Karma and social respect from the stupid masses here, not because you _actually_ care about something so preposterous. The term is pretty much poisoned, especially by the latter use, which is almost impossible to defend against.)

<comment><USER19> Your example with my link was really helpful. I think it's hard to rule in or out without some objective measure. I could show if I wrote a letter to the editor (which I didn't) but it would be hard or impossible for me to verify.

Plus the behavior change would be hard for you to measure since I basically just spend more time vetting articles from NYTimes. Theoretically, it would reduce my likelihood to share news from that source, but I rarely share items anyway.

So the term isn't very useful to me other than just filtering out people who use it. But I would be interested in discounting priority of people who do actually virtue signal since their content is less likely to be useful to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > It seems likely that Manjoo isn't lying, and that he really believes he had > unplugged, and really believes that his weak-sauce explanations don't belie > the point of his column.

Quick speculation-- he made print news the main source of his news-reading time and remained plugged in. Then he _intentionally_ misrepresented that process as "unplugging" to make the process sound less boring, and in the process did in fact lie.

For many reasons the modern world prefers buffoonery to mendacity. So in his response he made the unverifiable claim that his redefinition of "unplugged" was made in good faith and doubled down on buffoonery.

Is there a more likely theory?

</comment><comment><USER30> I think it's important that this information be out there. At the same time I echo some of the other commenters' sentiments about the tone of the piece. What's the point after the initial first few paragraphs? The whole bit after the actual newsworthy part (that he was actually using Twitter for news consumption) regarding his CV framed in a suspicious tone doesn't end in any meaningful conclusion. Just seems like an attempt at a takedown piece.

FWIW, I found the original article in the NYT to be an interesting and thought-provoking read, regardless of whether or not the author was taking sips under the table of what he was arguing against. Where that falls on the spectrum of unethical journalism I'm not sure. Feels pretty tame as compared to some of the other things we see in today's media climate, but that's just one opinion.

<comment><USER19> "FWIW, I found the original article in the NYT to be an interesting and thought-provoking read, regardless of whether or not the author was taking sips under the table of what he was arguing against."

I think this is the danger. I agree with the theme, so I ignore the data. The piece makes claims based on author's direct evidence. That evidence is wrong. We have to have a strict policy of relying on data even if emotionally we support the hypothesis.

Also the fact that news has to have a high standard for objectivity. The standard has to be high for banal stuff like this do we believe the important articles where it matters.

<comment><USER30> Interesting and good points. I guess personally I'm more comfortable agreeing with the theme and ignoring the data for pieces like this, primarily because it's more like a blog post than a serious news piece (the NYT might take issue with my characterization). I hold it to the same standard as conversation with peers about matters of personal choice and lifestyle. There may be fallacies and contradictions, but strict correctness isn't as important to me in those settings, and hence not in a blog-post-like piece like this in the NYT. But, again, I see this as a matter of opinion because I don't see Manjoo as having violated journalistic ethics here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I do believe he thinks he was being truthful and objective, however, fact is he was not unplugged. He is like the addict in denial already posited here to a point that it really makes me wonder about my own assessment of how 'little' I am online. Another crazy thought is how this really feeds into the 'fake news' meme. A Times journalist basically not relaying the truth about a thing he himself is in control of, and not another party. How can you expect objective reporting, if he cannot even be honest about himself or his own actions? He should have wrote the 'I failed at it' story with some deep thoughts on why for him, and for all who seem to be attached to the wire. Good side: he was outed by the CJR practicing good journalism.

</comment><comment><USER22> I don't really give a damn about the issue, but I want to thank the author for showing me the word "avuncular".

</comment><comment><USER32> The article doesn't render with JS disabled, but does render in Firefox's reader mode.

<comment><USER33> I had to close the pop-over, re-open the link, and refresh just to read more than the headline of the article. This is just with uBlock installed. Seriously, WTF is up with web pages these days?

<comment><USER34> It's all about user engagement... In that a lot of websites don't want users to apparently engage with content

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This article is coming from a place of old thinking when it comes to addiction recovery. On top of that, it strikes me as trying to shame Manjoo, which would be a harmful thing to attempt to do toward anyone, but especially toward an addict. The author seems to apply black-and-white thinking in the form of abstinence-only recovery. Also, everyone's point of sufficient disconnection will be different based on the person, as well as what kind of effects they wish to see. Rigid thinking is another sign of addiction, so is OP's author demonstrating their own need for growth through their rigid definition of "disconnection"? To better understand these points, here's a little bit about why I have these views:

I'm a recovering information addict of a little over 2 years and doing so requires changing our definitions of what classic recovery looks like.

Abstinence models (ie. "completely unplugging," which is not what Manjoo did) for recovery are unrealistic and can contribute to shame components of addiction. As well, the common characterizations of lapses/relapses can inhibit growth/learning.

It's not possible to completely disconnect from information and, therefore, it's possible to see great benefits from any dramatic behavioral change around an info source (or multiple ones). OP's author seems to be applying some form of black and white thinking and assumes they know how much disconnection is necessary for Manjoo to see differences. That's not possible, so the underlying premise of OP isn't wrong, but it's moot. The true question is did Manjoo see a shift in their reality/experience. That's the question we need more data to answer and it may only be self-reported qualitative data. That's ok.

The chart in these spreadsheets confirms their behavior shifted dramatically and I know that can lead to effects.

In my case, completely disconnecting wasn't enough. I had to stop looking things up in books before withdrawal symptoms showed up in the form of vivid dreams that woke me up 1-3 times per night. That withdrawal period lasted 9 months and I wasn't completely disconnected throughout the period, but I mostly was. I have device usage data front then and intend to publish it as part of a larger work on addiction recovery, in general.

It took me 9 months to dissect and reprogram my behavior to the point that my mind didn't have to live out in dreams what I was removing. I absolutely believe a sharp, sustained decrease in Twitter usage is enough to spot basic ways in which excessive behavior negatively impacts life.

</comment><comment><USER36> Good article.</comment>


Latvian hackathon winner reinvented Pacman into real life game - <AUTHOR> http://garage48.org/blogger/projects-in-progress-at-garage48-riga

<comment><USER2> Don't know about PacMan, but LoveLock made me think of the following.

Make a bracelet that has a pulse sensor and a couple of tiny LEDs, pair it with the iPhone and the further connect it to another iPhone/bracelet combo over the Internet. Use one LED for the owner's pulse, and another - for that of a better half on the other end.

PS. Deluxe version could also show a distance between the bracelets.

</comment><comment><USER3> See also <http://pacmanhattan.com/> (a 2004 experiment) and <http://cityrace.me/> (signup page - a Warsaw based startup).

</comment><comment><USER4> I think that one of the most interesting projects is <http://groupocracy.org/>

this is much better, honest and at the same time, technical take on the process of democratic elections and 4-5 years that follow after elections. Better than what? Better than <https://www.votizen.com>

<comment><USER5> I too thought this was the most interesting idea coming out of @ G48 Riga. Granted it is just an idea still but imagine the implications of something like this -- especially in the wake of all the uproar from the Occupy Wall Street movement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Dont forget <http://gateme.com> that offers full solution to nightclubs and developed QR payments in garage48.

</comment><comment><USER7> Guys, you were one of the best competitors! We see, there is still lots of work to do to build up great gameficiation and stuff, but thats what we all have to do! Thanks and wish you good luck developing the project!

Keep in touch, www.tweetdeleter.com @tweetdeleter

</comment><comment><USER8> Augmented Reality Pacman: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIX6wJ1Wv90>

</comment><comment><USER9> Cool. I think the "Scotland Yard" board game as an augmented reality mobile game would be a great idea also.

</comment><comment><USER10> This seems dangerous... People are going to walk into cars/people/poles etc

<comment><USER11> The world is a dangerous place, and fortunately there's nothing anyone can do about that. Risk averse people don't typically realize that avoiding risk and avoiding life are synonymous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Maybe I am missing something but lots of these ideas seem pretty poor?

<comment><USER13> This is not an ideas contest, more about networking and having fun while learning new stuff. All about execution. After events like these people are always hugely motivated and in high moods. Hard to describe it if you have not participated yourself.

Still 2 previous Garage48 hackathon teams have won investments from Seedcamp, the leading startup accelerator in Europe.

If even 1-2 teams from each event become real startups, that´s a big win. If not, people meet others and it often happens they start other projects after the event based on new ideas. Everybody wins.</comment></comment>


Advanced Minesweeper - <AUTHOR> http://datagenetics.com/blog/june12012/index.html <comment><USER2> I would say the goal is not to have the highest probability of triggering a cascade, but rather, some combination of:

\- high probability of triggering a cascade

\- high probability of that cascade being "useful", that is, of being able to work outward from the cascade you opened. (Clicking on the empty corner and getting 1-3-1 on its borders means you still have to guess to escape the corner.)

\- high probability of _not_ leaving difficult areas for the end. (Coin flips are most likely to occur in corners and edges; in the middle of the board, you usually have information from multiple directions. It's still possible to be forced to guess in the middle, but it happens far less often.)

As a result, the strategy I've chosen on expert boards (based on experience, without particularly robust statistical backing) is to click the corners sequentially until I get one that allows me to open up more than a few squares. I occasionally lose a game on the second or third click this way, but I don't lose very many on late coin flips.

</comment><comment><USER3> Speaking as someone who has spent WAY too much time playing minesweeper -- Early on I came to a similar conclusion (though without doing the actual math) and started clicking on corners initially. I soon discovered, as most people do, that corners are much more likely to expand out into a tiny opening that you can only follow for a short time before you're forced to make a "coin toss" move. If the goal is to make a _usable_ blob, clicking in the middle is best.

<comment><USER4> Speaking as the same sort of person (96 secs on expert :-) ), I agree that the most useful strategy is to click in the middle. This is because the cost of restarting is practically nothing for your first few clicks (no sunk time costs), so what you should really be optimizing is trying to get the most information about the board as soon as possible. All the more so because _optimally_ your whole game will proceed logically from that first cascade. Bigger cascades are less likely to dead end, meaning you'll be less likely to have to guess at random again later (when you actually will have sunk time costs).

<comment><USER5> Wouldn't bigger cascades be _more_ likely to deadend, due to the average density of what's leftover increasing?

<comment><USER4> My fault for being ambiguous about the word "bigger", thanks for pointing this out. It's true that you're not looking for a large area per se. What you want is a large perimeter. The best starting click would be a whole lot of thin tentacles stretching out across the board, not a giant square-ish clump.

That is, you're trying to maximize _information_. A large rectangular area doesn't give you nearly as much information about the board as a tentacle-y one, because most of the squares don't tell you anything but their own value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Although I have no idea since I have never seen the code, I'm pretty sure there's no way to hit a bomb on your first click. I'm played enough (MS Windows) Minesweeper and have never, ever hit a bomb on the first click.

As a side note, Minesweeper the first game I ever programmed was for my intro C class in college using SRGP[1] as the graphics library. Thinking back, it was a tough project. The Minesweeper logic wasn't so bad but doing the graphics was the most work. In hindsight, it shouldn't have taken more than a couple hours to code but took everyone a fair amount of time. Of course we didn't know what they hell we were doing. Fun stuff.

EDIT: After searching around it appears there is code to prevent the first- click bomb in a rather novel way[2].

[1] <http://www.niksula.cs.hut.fi/~tik86120/X_srgp.html> [2] [http://www.sanchitkarve.com/blog/2009/01/does-minesweeper- ch...](http://www.sanchitkarve.com/blog/2009/01/does-minesweeper-cheat/)

<comment><USER7> As far as I can recall, hitting a bomb on the first click is possible. But, if the source code proves my memory wrong, it certainly wouldn't be the first time.

<comment><USER8> I wonder if this is an enhancement in Vista Minesweeper? I'm almost certain that it used to be possible to land on a mine with your first click in older versions.

<comment><USER9> Yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another priority with the first click is that you won't be entirely surrounded by mines and wires, wires being indeterminate, entangled chains of unrevealed spaces.

I'm pretty sure a probability can be worked out for rate of occurrence and length of a wire - but with the corner strategy, you're minimizing the likely amount of perimeter by 3/4. That's got to make a "coin flip" situation more likely, which has to be weighed against the more likely reveal.

If you don't get a reveal on the first click, you end up just clicking again a few times and restarting if you reveal a mine. Doesn't waste more than a second in any case. Not sure if that's really meaningful unless there's a no restart rule, or you're being graded by the percentage of games finished that are started.

<comment><USER5> Realized people may not know what I'm talking about when I mention wires: <http://web.mat.bham.ac.uk/R.W.Kaye/minesw/minesw.pdf>

Paper on minesweeper configurations being NP-complete. Wires in the paper are wires when approached from all directions, but I'm abusing the term a bit when I also include entangled squares around the perimeter of a minesweeper opening - which have only been approached from one direction.

I think of minesweeper as a bunch of soap bubbles that are popped until you reach wires, which if they connect board boundary to board boundary, or connect to another wire that does that, or connect to themselves, end the skill game and create a probability game. Been meaning to play around with 2D areas that are surrounded by wire rings, but too lazy.

The idea of randomness carved by rules creating stable shapes intrigues me. I play minesweeper too much. Expert: 78, 95 non-flagging, lawl.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This seems totally wrong to me. Of course the probability of surrounding squares being _all_ safe is higher in the corner simply because there are _fewer surrounding squares_!

To make it more fair, calculate the probability that 3+ adjacent squares would be safe, since that's how many you get in the corner. Then the math shows that center is better because there are more neighboring squares that could be potentially blank.

More useful would be the probability of having a cascade continue on past adjacent squares to squares adjacent to those, with the "winner" being whichever location is most likely to make the largest exposed bubble.

My strategy is generally click a few places in the center quickly. If I die, I don't have much invested and just start over. If I find a large bubble, then I can play.

<comment><USER11> Absolutely agree!

..and from my experience, three clicks is about optimum for speed and opening the board. All my sub 80s games have opened 'gashes' across the board, the three clicks gives you the best chance of jumping the 'wire' (as the other guy put it)..

If you are going to have to play the odds at some point anyway, may as well do it at the start before you invest 50s of your life in some pointless activity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think it's nowhere near that simple. You don't just want to open up a cascade, but a _quality_ cascade that gives enough information to work with to identify which cells are mines, or, failing that, won't involve a risky guess. A '1' in the corner means each neighboring cell is a 1 in 3 risk, while a '1' in the middle is only 1 in 8.

shameless plug: a minesweeper solver I wrote [<http://mrgris.com/projects/minesweepr/demo/player/>]

</comment><comment><USER13> Someone ought to write something to empirically test this assertion by clicking on the various possible locations.

<comment><USER14> I'd be willing to bet that in the real world a corner is actually the worst choice. It may be the most likely to get blank spaces, but its probably also more likely to box you in, and only gives you one direction of attack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> My shortest time on the advanced mode of windows version is 62 seconds. I'm sure many of you'd beat that.

</comment><comment><USER16> Would it be possible to make a 3D Minesweeper game inside Minecraft?

<comment><USER17> Inside Minecraft proper, it would be prohibitively difficult. Redstone doesn't really support programming that complex (keeping 3D state, cleared areas, randomizing the board, etc.).

With a couple new blocks, though -- a new game control, the mine blocks themselves -- it would be a moderately easy mod. Putting dynamic textures on the blocks to display numbers wouldn't be (in principle) any harder than some of the grass mods, and there's an onDestroy hook for the block you could use to clear space.

I wonder how hard 3D minecraft would be.

[Edit: Ha! It's been done! <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eV6n0UWJM2Q> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW71giahaLM>

This is why we google things before building them.]

[Edit edit: Oh, nuts. Those are both still 2D. This is why we review google results before deciding not to build something.]

<comment><USER17> _I wonder how hard 3D minecraft would be._

Er, wow. Hard.

<http://egraether.com/mine3d/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There're some gems on DataGenetics' blog. Highly recommended.

<comment><USER19> Yes, especially:

Benford's Law <http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/march52012/index.html>

Hangman <http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/april12012/index.html>

Yahtzee <http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/january42012/index.html>

Risk <http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/november22011/index.html>

Plus others ...</comment></comment>