Tips for the depressed - <AUTHOR> https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/tips-for-the-depressed/ <comment><USER2> One of the biggest force multipliers in overcoming depression is accepting that you _can_ modulate your condition by taking small, deliberate actions.

It's also one of the most difficult and delicate ideas to communicate to a depressed person. Depression notoriously clouds peoples' judgment and makes simple tasks seem impossible. Depression also encourages a lot of binary thinking, where people tend to give up because they can't achieve the optimal solution and can't imagine anything in between optimal and complete failure. And most importantly, depressed people almost never want to hear someone else telling them that they should _do_ something to change their own condition. If you've ever been through a depressive episode, you'll understand how unpalatable this idea is if it's not delivered carefully. Be careful to not make depressed people feel even worse about their condition.

For example, I've known several depressed people who spiraled deeper into depression when they could no longer perform their regular 60 minute gym sessions multiple times per week. It took a while for them to accept that a 5-minute walk around the block is better than no exercise at all. From there, they could push to 10 minute walks on good days, then 20 minutes, then 30 minutes, and eventually work their way back up to gym visits. Taking those tiny steps is a great way to re-learn that you can accomplish things, and it's a great to way to see gradual progress in yourself.

<comment><USER3> I've struggled with this quite a bit in my own life. I find the "No Zero" mentality to work well for me. Treat every weekday as a "No Zero" day. What does that mean? It means if my goal is to go to the gym, even if I literally walk into the gym, do a pushup, and leave, that counts. It's more than Zero. Consistent non-zero days eventually help break me out of my depression. And when I miss a day... well forgive myself and keep going.

All easier said than done of course, and sometimes a no-zero goal is just to get out of bed... but it has helped me.

For anyone interested I got the idea from here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/getdisciplined/comments/1q96b5/i_ju...](https://www.reddit.com/r/getdisciplined/comments/1q96b5/i_just_dont_care_about_myself/cdah4af/) The style and language of the post are not really my cup of tea, but the ideas behind it have really helped me.

<comment><USER4> crazy how the first step is often the most important one

<comment><USER5> And every step is the first since the last one.

<comment><USER6> That sounds inspirational but it just comes across as daunting/insurmountable to those who haven't gotten used to the idea of taking that first step.

<comment><USER5> I meant it as factual rather than inspirational. It is daunting for sure, but every person in this journey will find out about it as soon as they take that first step. And most people around will not understand, and will not be able to help and support appropriately without that understanding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I largely agree with all the advice here. I dropped out of college due to depression, then I torched my tech career with a manic episode that led me straight from a FAANG SWE job to an involuntary psych ward patient for a month, which was followed by a half year brutal depression.

I've done a lot of research and I think psychiatry is pseudoscience and antidepressants are largely placebo.

I'm really on the mindfulness bandwagon but don't believe it's "positive thinking." The opposite, it's less thinking, more acknowledgment of how you feel. If you feel depressed, maybe that's ok, maybe that's part of the human experience. If it endangers your life that's perhaps not ideal, but if it endangers your goals, perhaps that is ok. I think modern society pathologizes feelings and acts like anything that detracts from your ability to be "successful " must be cured. It's ok to feel bad feelings it's how we react to them that's more often a source of frustration. Meditation gets mislabeled as some way to reduce stress and clear your mind when I believe it's training for how to learn to react to difficult thoughts and feelings.

I have many more thoughts on this topic for when the time is right but as much as self-care advice gets responded with "thanks I'm cured" self-care is the foundation to recovery. I have many more strategies to do this even when thoughts/feelings are giving resistance.

<comment><USER2> > I've done a lot of research and I think psychiatry is pseudoscience and > antidepressants are largely placebo.

Please don't spread anti-psychiatry misinformation online. I'm sorry that it didn't work for you, but please don't dissuade others from seeking proper treatment.

Playing devil's advocate: Even if SSRIs are just placebo (they're definitely not, and we have decades of science to explain why that's a false statement), what would be wrong with that? Placebo is remarkably effective, and even placebo is even getting stronger with time: [https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/straight- talk/201803...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/straight- talk/201803/the-curious-case-the-growing-placebo-effect)

This is where people are mistaken when they conclude SSRIs are placebo. SSRIs still diverge from placebo, but placebo is so incredibly powerful in short depression studies that it's hard for SSRIs' superiority to reach a numerically large statistical significance.

> I'm really on the mindfulness bandwagon

Mindfulness is a common therapy technique within professional treatment. I think you'd find that a lot of the mainstream self-care practices are mirrored in professionally-guided therapy. However, some people just can't/won't trust professional institutions, so at least we have mainstream pushes for mindfulness and self-care to slip these techniques in the back door.

<comment><USER8> It's also misinformation to assume SSRI's work the same way for everyone. For my mother, antidepressants made her suicidal.

<comment><USER9> > It's also misinformation to assume SSRI's work the same way for everyone.

the person you replied to didn't say that. the point is to defer to professionals and not your own hunches.

<comment><USER10> Professionals prescribe these long-term to people, even though something like 5/7 cases never get good results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have struggled with "depression" for decades. Now I'm healed. I went to countless psychiatrists, took drugs and everything. I didn't really help much. I told them I feel bad, they labeled me "depressive" without trying to find out what is really going on. In the the end I had to find it out by myself. The depression was just a symptom. The main cause of it was a social phobia. None of the therapists ever addressed this. Other factors: unforgiveness and my own frustration that I wasn't aware of in many situations. So I started peeling off all these layers. I just didn't really know myself, was so full of inhibitions.

Often depression isn't something you should be afraid of. Neither is it something that you just "have" like a sickness. There may be reasons for the depression and maybe you can dig them out.

I just skimmed the article but what I've read seems to be how to cope with depression, not how to address the underlying issues. Better try to find out where it comes from, if possible.

<comment><USER12> How did you discover these facts about yourself?

<comment><USER11> good question. of course I got older which helped in bringing the inhibitions down which made me more aware of myself and of my own feelings. then going after those feelings and trying to figure out what they mean I slowly discovered what was behind them.

for example, one day I was in a course and I felt miserable even before I was there. then suddenly it dawned on me that this is my aversion to the whole thing. it's not rational but irrational. once I knew what was going on the bad feeling went away quite quickly when as before I'd just suffer without end.

before I was helpless, now when a negative feeling comes I try to guess what it could mean and often I find the answer quite quickly. once the source is identified, the bad feeling dissolves and I'm back to normal.

and another important factor was that I started trying to live by the golden rule: "do unto others as you would have them do to you". the problem was that not to do this often caused a lot of the confusion in my life and my feelings. I don't think it would have been possible to figure it out while I was in this chaos caused by not following the golden rule.

oh yeah, and the last thing that helped a lot is that I stopped going to therapists and took on responsibility, not relying on what others say about how I feel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Things that help me when I feel depressed:

\- Listening to upbeat, energetic music and avoiding depressing music, which tends to make me feel worse

\- Walking outside on a clear, sunny day

\- Eating my favorite food

\- Playing a good game to get my mind off whatever it is that I'm obsessing about

\- If I am able to concentrate, reading something by a favorite author, listening to a good podcast, or watching a non-depressing movie (most of my favorite movies are, sadly, pretty depressing, so those tend not to help)

\- Doing exercise

\- Getting enough sleep, but not too much

\- Improving my diet and supplementing to overcome nutritional deficits (this and regular exercise are long-term fixes, and have helped my mood and energy level tremendously)

\- Talking to a good friend, or maybe calling a crisis hotline (though the results vary greatly depending on who you wind up talking to)

\- Journaling (I've been using a voice recorder for years, and this makes journaling much easier, more natural and faster for me than writing... just talking things through, even effectively just to myself, often helps a lot)

\- Talking to a good therapist. They can sometimes provide insights and offer good advice that I otherwise would not have thought of.

\- Looking at the stars on a deeply dark night sky, and thinking about how small and insignificant my self, my problems, and everything else on this earth really are

\- Reading stories of people who've survived ordeals and overcome tremendous adversity. This again helps me put my own relatively trivial problems in perspective.

\- Then, as Nietzsche said, _" The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night."_

\- Finally, I try to remind myself that I've been through this many times before and I always eventually feel better. Time heals all wounds.

<comment><USER14> When you are actually depressed and not just feel a bit down, those things seem unreachable.

<comment><USER15> my uninformed opinion on this is that there are countless way to suggest the same thing and maybe one will resonate with you. this would become a motivation to offer earnest advice and be prepared that likely you will not be that magic person.

in this sense advices like "just do X" are useless, while advices like the one above are not.

for sure serious depression is very unlikely to be treated that way, but for every case of clinical depression there are many less critical ones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Someone here recommended David Burns' "The Feeling Good Handbook" and it was a very, very good read. I'm not going to say it turned my life around, but it taught me how to spot and disarm all kinds of cognitive distortions, defeat laziness, better align my expectations of others, assess my self worth positively...

It's also well written, fast paced, and sometimes even funny. It includes lots of exercises that are practical and easy to do.

<comment><USER17> As far as I'm concerned, this (and its predecessor, "Feeling Good") is the best self help book ever written. It's helped me tremendously with moderate depression and anxiety. For anyone suffering, I'd highly recommend just giving the book and its exercises a try.

<comment><USER18> thework.com is along the same lines and also very good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I like the tip about paying someone else to clean your house.

When you are truely inside of a depressive episode, all those tips probably won't help you. By definition, you cannot think straight.

Think of it more like a computer game: As long as everything is okay, you should make sure to save your progress. While you are feeling good, try to minimize the effect of an episode. This way the episode itself also becomes less bad.

This could be: Getting a cleaning lady (edit: or __cleaning gentleman __), setting up your bills to be paid automatically, saving money. Stuff you should do anyway, whether you have had depressive episodes or have not. Just setting up your life, so it can be slowed down a bit once in a while without catastrophic outcomes.

For me the logical consequence is to adopt minimalism, so there is less stuff potentially dragging you down with it, once things turn bad.

<comment><USER19> yeah, written like someone on the outside looking in but never been in.

Getting a cleaning person to clean your house is often out of the question because you're ashamed of the state your house is in and dont want anyone else to see it until you've done something about it but you never do anything about it because you're in a depression.

Depressions most insidious part is the fact that it re-enforces itself. You get stuck in self defeating loops.

<comment><USER14> I think I can empathize. That's why I wanted to stress the fact, that you do those things when you have a time window of feeling good. Always be on the lookout of how to save a little bit of progress for after things will have inevitably turned bad again.

If you have a little bit of money, you cannot use that to feel happy, but at least you can use it to make yourself not feel bad about a particular problem. Alternatively, if you do not have money to solve it, consider just throwing away the whole thing and be done with the root cause of that problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There's some good stuff here, but it completely skips gratitude.

Focusing on what you're grateful for is one of the more powerful and best proven methods to combat depression. I've been through clinical depression and consider it the key to my recovery.

<comment><USER21> what if you find it difficult to have gratitude? you want to be grateful for what you have, but you're not, and can't explain why.

if you don't care about anything, meaning you have no gratitude, how do you jumpstart this process?

<comment><USER22> There are two options I'm familiar with:

1\. Without wondering if you sincerely mean it, make a point to say "thank you." Typically if you are depressed you will be alone, and so it is possible to recognize situations where you took an action now to make something easier for yourself later: for example, doing the dishes now instead of waiting for them to pile up. When that happens, verbally thank yourself on behalf of your future self. If you're capable of doing this, it jump-starts gratitude after a while.

2\. Instead of feeling gratitude for things you perceive as positive, look for things that you perceive as neutral. The majority of your sensory experience is neutral. If your emotions are very negative, instead of looking for a dichotomy between negative and positive, look for a dichotomy between negative and neutral. You will perceive that neutral is not-negative. Because neutral is not-negative, increased perception of neutral sensations is a positive. If you perceive neutral sensations as positive for long enough, it jump-starts gratitude after a while.

<comment><USER23> The problem with that though is I perceive nuetral as negative. Neutral is registered same as negative because it's not positive. This is why gratitude is hard because people like me can't find the positives nearly enough to start recognizing and changing how I think.

In fact, I find it difficult to think that people are okay with neutral because how is that any better? You arguably still failed at whatever you were trying to do, just the results weren't as harsh. I dont know. I think I might just be really far gone at this point.

<comment><USER22> I'm talking about neutral perceptions, not thoughts. An example would be something like the visual perception of a sidewalk. Presumably you don't get an emotional reaction about the sidewalk one way or the other, it's just a sidewalk.

The majority of your sensory experience is neutral perceptions like that. Once you notice them, negativity seems small in terms of proportion of sensory experience. What actually happens is that negativity occupies the majority of _attention_ , meaning that your mind is latching onto things you perceive as negative. Broadening the scope of awareness to include neutrality means that definitionally the mind is not as latched-onto the negative, therefore negative things seem smaller, therefore they are slightly more tractable to deal with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I suffered from treatment-resistant depression for over ten years. In my case, time definitely did not heal, and psych meds that were tried did not help significantly. Felt like everyone had gotten used to my depression and did not take it seriously. Was convinced that I had "terminal" depression. Until at a low point, when visiting a new doctor (non-psych) for a routine check-up, the doctor who I'd never met before told me that I seemed so low that she wasn't comfortable sending me home alone and sent me to the emergency room. At that point I started intensive therapy, learned DBT (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy) skills, and was started on meds that actually did help. I'm now proud and happy to say that I've been largely free of depression for the 5 years since then. Sure there are low times, but coping skills and closely managing meds have helped greatly.

Mostly here to say: If you're depressed to the point where you're seriously thinking about killing yourself, you have a life-threatening illness. IMO, it should be treated as such.

Some of the contents of this article basically amount to DBT skills (i.e. "Get out of bed even if you don't want to") so I recommend looking into those if these types of suggestions sound helpful to you. But suggesting that somebody who is suffering should binge watch TV to wait it out seems unhelpful and counterproductive to me. Take it seriously, and seek help if you need. Things can get better.

</comment><comment><USER25> I have observed when i am alone for 3 or more days without talking to anyone i get depressed. Even if i have conversation with anonymous people on the internet over text chat, depression gets reduced a lot. Are there any scientific research on human contact over text and depression ?

<comment><USER26> I'm curious as well

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Not mentioned in the article or in the comments thus far, is that massage therapy has an alleviative effect on clinical depression in some people.[1][2]

It's not fully understood why massage (in particular, deep massage) might relieve depression, but it does reduce cortisol and increase general relaxation, countering the stress caused by depression.

Another study suggested that massage therapy can be approximately as effective as pharmaceuticals, but I'm unable to find the reference at the moment.

There's no particular harm to muscular therapy a.k.a. massage, and if you have a good and well trained practitioner, it is very pleasant and relaxing regardless of mental state.

1\. Meta study: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20361919](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20361919)

2\. Women's health (Mass General Hospital): [https://womensmentalhealth.org/posts/massage-therapy-for- dep...](https://womensmentalhealth.org/posts/massage-therapy-for-depression/)

</comment><comment><USER28> I've had severe depression my whole adult life and this is what has worked for me:

1\. Zero alcohol. 2\. ICE cold showers. 3\. Extreme cardio. 4\. Meditation. 5\. Breakfast with a friend. 6\. Play with a big young dog. 7\. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. 7\. Meds. 8\. Get up at 5am. 9\. Journal.

Feeling Good is one of the best books on depression from a scientific perspective.

</comment><comment><USER29> I've dealt with depression and anxiety on and off, and one thing that's missing on the list that helped me a lot is purpose and service.

It may be your job, caring for another person, volunteering for something that has impact, taking responsibility in a community or anything else really as long as it's meaningful. It's a pain if you feel crappy to take on more responsibility but in my opinion, it helps because at least if you feel like crap you're still doing good for others and you can get through a lot of suffering with that in mind.

For me personally mindfulness and talk therapy and exploring your feelings and whatnot is fine but it's also very self-centred and you can do it all day and still be miserable so at some point, I just thought getting out of my head and getting on with life as best as possible is what matters.

</comment><comment><USER30> _AFTER FIFTY YEARS, billions of dollars of intensive marketing campaigns, and tens of billions of dollars of profits for pharmaceutical companies, it is still far from clear that antidepressant drugs are any more effective than placebo. The only group of people who have demonstrably benefited from the widespread use of antidepressants are pharmaceutical executives and investors._

I don't think this is accurate or helpful, and I hope people who benefit from medication don't stop taking them after reading things like this.

<comment><USER31> > I don't think this is accurate

Yes it is accurate. It is very accurate. The garbage studies routinely dumped on us by Big Pharma have been continually debunked, reversed, and retracted after the raw data comes out (often in lawsuits).

Nevermind the complete absence of long-term studies or any studies that reflect the actually usage of these drugs in the real world.

<comment><USER32> > We identified 28 552 citations and of these included 522 trials comprising > 116 477 participants. In terms of efficacy, all antidepressants were more > effective than placebo.

[https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736\(17\)32802-7/fulltext)

I dunno, studies seem to suggest otherwise. I think it's terribly irresponsible to be telling people not to take medications that can help them.

<comment><USER31> You don't know. My brother is a doctor who writes papers on meta-analysis. The Cipriani paper is trash. The actual effect size is LESS than in the paper posted in this thread (Kirch et al) which was featured on 60 minutes about the placebo effect. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6597641/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6597641/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> 2 cents: Get off / moderate your social media, news media, TV show service intake - stop giving in to the comparison game that you can never win. When you play this game, you are living vicariously through the lives of others instead of realizing the incredible opportunity you have in each moment to maximize your own potential and be the best version of yourself.

For a long time a source of my discontent in life came from comparing my small steps towards big goals to the empires and platforms of the top performers in the same field. It made me feel irrelevant and like my efforts were pointless. I got out of that trap by taking extreme ownership of my actions and what I create, and I started viewing my progress solely relative to who I was yesterday, rather than to external benchmarks. I forget the exact quote, but it's similar to something like: "the best way to improve something is to start measuring it." and this really crystallized for me when I read a blog post by James Clear: "The Domino Effect." Momentum is important in our behavior - harnessing it to your own benefit becomes like a super power once you can appreciate how useful it is.

</comment><comment><USER31> I would love to finally see an article that has tips for a society on how to prevent depression, instead of the constant stream of self-help BS that is constantly directed at people who may have real reasons to be depressed.

<comment><USER34> Let's pick something else that isn't as broad as "depression."

How about:

      - "I would love to finally see an article that has tips for a society on how to prevent ADHD..."
      - "I would love to finally see an article that has tips for a society on how to prevent Schizophrenia..."
      - "I would love to finally see an article that has tips for a society on how to prevent Bipolar Disorder..."
      - "I would love to finally see an article that has tips for a society on how to prevent Mania..."

Each and every one of these are somewhat related mental health disorders and can cross over with depression as well. They can exacerbate it or even change how you may respond to various types of therapy (talk, drug, STM, etc).

And "real reasons to be depressed", what would those be; or are you mixing up sad or anxious or morose or frustrated or ... with "clinically depressed." Clinical depression, much like the other mental health issues that I used above, doesn't have to have a reason as proscribed socially.

Unfortunately, most "self help BS" is written from two perspectives, those that have never had a bout of clinical depression; and those that have and found a specific way to get __themselves__ through it. If those that used specific things to get through it presented that information in that manner instead of "this is what everyone should do" it may be understood better overall, but that's a failing of being human; not of the writers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I have very rarely had any issues with depression, my whole life, and when I was depressed there was always a clear reason (e.g. a breakup). Until about a year ago, when I got my first fully remote job, and after 6-8 months I realized I was starting to be depressed a lot, listless, feelings of despair and anxiety, etc.

Just doing more of my work in a coffeeshop or elsewhere with people around, seems to make a big difference. Which implies that perhaps just visiting a depressed friend a lot, might make a difference? Just a thought.

</comment><comment><USER36> Related, but not exactly on topic: what do people make of the word "depressed"? I am unsure whether people use the word to mean "a deep lack of any enjoyment that persists for a long period of time (weeks?)" or something stronger, which adds on " _and whose source is not easily explained_ ".

In my head, depression means the latter, but I'm unsure what the popular conception is.

<comment><USER37> Clinical depression has defined symptoms: [https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases- conditions/depression/ex...](https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases- conditions/depression/expert-answers/clinical-depression/faq-20057770)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I was depressed for sometime till I found I've low T, once I supplemented it depression disappeared. I wonder why doctors don't ask you to get your T level checked when they find you depressed instead of prescribing antidepressants.

<comment><USER18> How are you taking it?

<comment><USER39> I can't answer for him, but typically it is 100mg/wk for testosterone replacement. This can be taken once a week. For body building administration is usually done twice weekly. There is a newer cream that is applied to the scrotum, otherwise it is usually injection.

If you are doing TRT testicular atrophy usually isn't a concern although it could be a cosmetic concern. Taking human chorionic gonadotropin will preserve testicular function but may not return the look of your saggy nads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This came at a good time, thank you OP. I just lost my job -- excuse me, 'parted ways from my employer' or 'joined the gig economy', whatever euphemism is in fashion -- and without a clear place to go in the morning, it's been hard to do simple ADL (Activities of Daily Living) [https://www.care.com/c/stories/15077/activities-of-daily- liv...](https://www.care.com/c/stories/15077/activities-of-daily-liv..). -- I think I will try the alarm clock thing, firts of all.

</comment><comment><USER41> Do _not_ use the snooze function.

First, once you're out of bed at an appropriate time, you want to stay out of bed. Second, the minimum interval of sleep you need to actually rest is 15 minutes. Snooze alarms, even on mobile devices, are currently 9 minutes. Third, tangentially related, do not use an obnoxious-sounding alarm, because you will make a negative association with your necessary tool. Use pleasant or inspiring music.

Source: I am a person with chronic depression who managed to solve this issue for myself.

<comment><USER42> For me, even not depressed, "[d]o _not_ use the snooze function" means "turn the alarm off and sleep in another three hours."

Obviously if it works for you it works for you, but if you don't have the willpower to stay out of bed, as I generally don't, at least the snooze button gives you another chance to wake up at a reasonable time, which puts the day on the right track.

<comment><USER41> I'm not sure why you wouldn't adjust your standard waking time, if you feel the urge to snooze.

Sleeping for me means the same time to bed and to rise as I can make it to avoid disruption.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> A close friend of mine suffered from clinical depression for approximately 8 years and after all conventional medical approaches it was 1 dose of approximately 125 micrograms of LSD that solved that depression within minutes for several months completely. Obviously, he had to continue to work on the underlying issues as well so as not to fall into a negative cycle again.

<comment><USER44> Just don't ever give LSD to somebody borderline schizo, if you don't want them to spiral down the drain. Little life lesson there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I liked this bit personally:

> Depressed people want to open their hearts, to confess their fears and > forbidden urges, to be comforted, reassured, persuaded that life is worth > living despite this intolerable, indescribable pain. They want the other > person to open his or her heart, not recite from a script. The communion of > hearts is healing.

</comment><comment><USER46> One thing on which I have never gotten clarification, only evasion, is ... what if you are faced with something permanent that is a bummer, major, and that affects your mood. A progressive disease, an unfixable disability, and so forth. Are you "depressed" then, or just legitimately sad?

</comment><comment><USER47> How do you report things on HN? This may be the wildest inaccurate information I have ever seen pass here.

I have suffered depression, and nearly all of the points mentioned in the article except for some trivialities are completely of the mark.

<comment><USER48> > How do you report things on HN?

Users with enough karma can click "flag," or you can email firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> The #1 tip for the depressed learnt the hard way: talk to the doctor.

Please. Don't delay. Your brain is playing tricks to you. But it has bad sense of humor. One of the tricks may become the last trick in your life.

Please.

</comment><comment><USER50> This will make a neat self-checkup downward spiral detection checklist. I have one, but it's three items, and I'm not happy with it, I'm still struggling to be aware of how I am on any given day or any given moment.

My current three points are "Feeling sexy?", "Endlessly arguing invisible opponent?", and "Light is fucking annoying?"

</comment><comment><USER51> As Tianeptine wasn't mentioned: it did help me, took it for 7 months (Coaxil, 3x12mg/day), no side effects.

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

<comment><USER52> There's a dead comment mentioning it's addictive potential. This is no joke, there's /r/QuittingTianeptine. There used to be a subreddit for sourcing tianeptine (closed down I think) and the desperation in some of the posts was scary.

<comment><USER42> Do you, or does anyone reading this, have experience with taking it, improving, and quitting it? How does the risk compare to its effects?

<comment><USER52> Yes, I took it for a while. It really helped me get out of bed, like a light stimulant. It wasn't habit forming for me, but I could definitely tell how others might get hooked. It was more effective than the 6 or so other conventional antidepressants I took.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I have a hard time understanding depression, I'm curious about the topic, but I'm afraid to ask the questions I want to ask because I don't want to offend anybody. Is there a safe place somewhere. Does anyone know a depression ama out there?

</comment><comment><USER54> Had minor depression that lasted 2 years, visited a few psychiatrists who wanted to prescribe meds, which I refused. Despite nothing bad happening in my life, I felt depressed, therefore logically I assumed it must be my health. I tested for everything in my blood tests, and I went to every specific parameter and researched very well about it. Turns out, labs have very bad standardized measures about testosterone, which puts 20year olds and 70 year olds in the same bracket. I had the testosterone of a 60 year old. I got on testosterone replacement therapy and literally it helped in a week!

Conclusion: Sometimes its not your environment, or bad stuff happening in your life. Sometimes its just bad doctors and terrible public healthcare that doesnt have a stake in your wellness. Check your testosterone people!

</comment><comment><USER55> The article says acupuncture has no side effects. That is not true.

[http://whatstheharm.net/acupuncture.html](http://whatstheharm.net/acupuncture.html)

</comment><comment><USER56> This is the first article on depression that didn't make me angry. Thank you. For some reason telling people time heals offends them. I only do it because I know from experience.

</comment><comment><USER57> This will be exceedingly unpopular here but a good tip for the depressed is to go to a rural or downtrodden part of Mexico, or a country in Africa, or India, etc.

</comment><comment><USER58> Any recommendations for someone trying to help a depressed friend get their work and health on track? I make a lot of attempts to help but many seem futile.

</comment><comment><USER59> has anyone found that doing math, geometric puzzles or problems helps a lot? i found this out by accident, and it works most of the time. as soon as i realize i'm spiraling down i start doing problems. usually i try to do one or two a day so that i don't have to ramp up during the next "episode".

</comment><comment><USER60> Acupuncture? Closed the tab right away.

</comment><comment><USER61> Biggest game changers for my depression:

* Magnesium glycinate 1200mg/day

* More sunlight

* Expressing Really difficult feelings

* cutting out all caffeine

</comment><comment><USER62> My question is why are people so depressed nowadays?

</comment><comment><USER63> I had some health issues starting from age 40: untreated sleep apnea that I didn't know about for at least 10 years -> led to (combined with?) low thyroid -> led to IBS and something like a food allergy to legumes and nightshades (leaky gut). Which resulted in the worst burnout I've ever had in my life and a falling out with my favorite job I've ever had.

I finally started climbing out of the hole I was in around October or November of last year, and got "back to normal" around February of this year after taking an online survey and realizing that I had most of the symptoms of ADHD. My steps:

* Started eating bacon again and more meat in general, because tryptophan is converted to serotonin in the gut. There are also vegetarian options for this which I've listed below (this was the single biggest factor that led to my recovery).

* Started taking iodine, I immediately had energy again and my eyebrows grew back (for thyroid).

* Started taking syllium husk powder (Metamucil) 1-3 times per day and drinking kefir to feed good bacteria (for gut health).

* Starting keeping todo lists so I could separate the planning and doing of tasks (for ADHD primarily, to overcome task anxiety and executive dysfunction).

* Started saying no and slowing down in general, to provide time for meditation, daydreaming and seeing myself from the outside/being grateful like the visualization exercises of astral projection (for ADHD, depression and anxiety).

I could write at length about this because the journey has been difficult, frustrating, but enjoyable and rewarding as well. I think that western culture discounts mental health to such a degree that we sacrifice our lives for inanimate things like money and responsibility. I also think that a substantial part of mental health issues are physiological and environmental. Carrying a chronically high load of cortisol our entire lives is just not natural.

Here are some products that should help with depression if you don't want to be on medication. I'm not a doctor obviously, nor affiliated with NOW (they just make affordable supplements):

[https://www.amazon.com/NOW-L-Tryptophan-500-Veg- Capsules/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/NOW-L-Tryptophan-500-Veg- Capsules/dp/B000X24T4S)

[https://www.amazon.com/Now-Foods-L-tryptophan-Veg- Capsules-2...](https://www.amazon.com/Now-Foods-L-tryptophan-Veg- Capsules-240-Count/dp/B00L83G7BE)

[https://www.amazon.com/NOW-L- Tryptophan-1000-60-Tablets/dp/B...](https://www.amazon.com/NOW-L- Tryptophan-1000-60-Tablets/dp/B002JNIAQW)

Iodine and supporting minerals, take 1-2 weeks to start, then as needed:

[https://www.amazon.com/NOW-Supplements-Tyrosine-Selenium- Cap...](https://www.amazon.com/NOW-Supplements-Tyrosine-Selenium- Capsules/dp/B002JNEK5M)

I've tried tons of other things like zinc for weightlifting and omega 3, B vitamins, iron, etc to boost mood and the immune system. Everyone should try seeing a few nutritionists and holistic medicine healers to find what works for them. Hope this helps someone.

</comment><comment> uhoh-itsmaciek >It has been said that we are as far advanced in the understanding of depression at this moment as was the European conquest of the Americas when Columbus first set foot in the Bahamas in 1492.

Comparing the fight against mental illness to the genocide of native Americans is unfortunate.

</comment><comment><USER64> I hope they work for some, but for me, SSRI's are frankly, trash. All the downsides with none of the upsides.

The only thing that worked was Imipramine, and I can't get it anymore because it's "old" and "not recommended".

The newer focus on psychedelics and drugs usually used for recreational purposes seems more encouraging.

If you're anti-depressant resistant, I'd recommend you try Gabapentin, a seemingly overlooked drug that works wonders for anxiety and depression. Quick tolerance buildup, do not give in and try to go over ~2g/day.

The somewhat similar Phenibut also works, but it's a direct GABA agonist with terrible withdrawal symptoms and an extremely fast tolerance buildup.

<comment><USER2> > I hope they work for some, but for me, SSRI's are frankly, trash. All the > downsides with none of the upsides.

They absolutely work for many people. Unfortunately, many people deprive themselves of SSRI trials because they read too many negative anecdotes online. If you're seriously depressed for an extended period of time, it's worth a trial of an SSRI medication. If it doesn't work, just taper off and be done with it. At least you'll know.

> The only thing that worked was Imipramine, and I can't get it anymore > because it's "old" and "not recommended".

That's bizarre. Imipramine is still widely prescribed with over a million prescriptions per year in the United States alone. If it works for you and your doctor is withholding it for some reason, please see a different doctor ASAP.

Given your strange and definitely not-normal experience with the medical system, can I suggest that you refrain from giving advice to others? I'm sorry you've had a negative experience with SSRIs and doctors, but it's extremely important that you not dissuade others from seeking proper medical treatment.

> If you're anti-depressant resistant, I'd recommend you try Gabapentin, a > seemingly overlooked drug that works wonders for anxiety and depression. > Quick tolerance buildup, do not give in and try to go over ~2g/day.

I recommend against Gabapentin as a first-line or even a second-line treatment. "Quick tolerance buildup" is not compatible with long term treatment stability. Gabapentin can be prescribed in limited circumstances for anxiety, but it's not a good first choice solution.

> The somewhat similar Phenibut also works, but it's a direct GABA agonist > with terrible withdrawal symptoms and an extremely fast tolerance buildup.

Please don't recommend Phenibut. It's not an antidepressant. It's highly addictive and has severe rebound and withdrawal symptoms. Drugs that make you temporarily feel good should not be confused with antidepressant drugs.

<comment><USER65> >Please don't recommend Phenibut. It's not an antidepressant. It's highly addictive and has severe rebound and withdrawal symptoms. Drugs that make you temporarily feel good should not be confused with antidepressant drugs.

This kinda sounds like drugs like clonazepam or lorazepam. They're also very addictive, and are not antidepressants at all, however they are anti-anxiety drugs and they work very quickly. And anxiety and depression seem to go hand- in-hand for many sufferers, so they do seem to really help some people, at least initially.

I think a big problem is the medical establishment really doesn't have a good handle on what depression really is (biologically) or how to treat it.

<comment><USER2> > This kinda sounds like drugs like clonazepam or lorazepam. They're also very > addictive, and are not antidepressants at all, however they are anti-anxiety > drugs and they work very quickly. And anxiety and depression seem to go > hand-in-hand for many sufferers, so they do seem to really help some people, > at least initially.

Phenibut works through similar pathways as those drugs. A lot of people overestimate their understanding of Phenibut by reducing it to a simple GABA-B agonist, but at the high doses that people take for euphoric effects it's actually doing a lot more.

> I think a big problem is the medical establishment really doesn't have a > good handle on what depression really is (biologically) or how to treat it.

We can always improve, yes, but the standard treatment protocols (therapy, lifestyle changes, therapy + medication) are actually quite decent if you find a provider who cares enough to work with you. Many people find a lot of relief through standard practices. Unfortunately, many people don't have the resources or patience for therapy, and they won't tolerate any side effects from medication (which tend to diminish over time). A lot of those cases are the most vocally negative about depression treatment and "big pharma", skewing the overall perception. Many of the SSRI and therapy success stories don't go broadcasting their depression stories to the world. They just quietly go back to their lives.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


SoftBank invests in Credit Suisse funds that finance its technology bets - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/6995af3b-5f66-4e1b-9143-1e9daccfc9b4 <comment><USER2> Many companies lend money from banks using goodwill but they are not paying back the money to banks like Cafe Coffee Day, kingfisher airlines etc. And we have also come across many frauds related to credit card loans we have also heard that many customers card details are sold in the dark web. One of the most well-known fraud is a fake call that we get from an unknown number asking for the details of your card number along with your four-digit Pin number. As we are adopting the new technology it gives the chance for them to easily access our personal details so it is very important too use the technology and knowledge in the right way and utilise it for right purpose.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Syndicated version, non-paywall:

[https://investmentpreview.com/2020/06/15/softbank-invests- in...](https://investmentpreview.com/2020/06/15/softbank-invests-in-credit- suisse-funds-that-finance-its-technology-bets/)</comment>


Are there any online resume-building tools -- would anyone be interested in one? - <AUTHOR>

I'd love to be able to dump <i>all</i> my past experience on a database somewhere, and have it generate various nicely formatted resumes for picking. <comment><USER2> Many HR systems import resume data from various sources. Some job-posting sites have resume-builders to help facilitate this process.

I'll assume instead that your primary consideration is for easily generating a specific flavor of your resume from a single source. A few years ago there was a flurry of tools that worked with an HR-XML spec that did just that. Check out this microformats page that identifies some of these formats, standard or otherwise: <http://microformats.org/wiki/resume-formats>

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes Please. Entering my resume data is not the problem, making it look nice seems to be the big issue.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone else hit with scraping and spammed by scraping protection SaaS? - <AUTHOR> We recently started suffering from a fairly sophisticated scraper. The attack was sustained, always getting around the simple protections we deployed.
Around a week later several of our employees got sales emails from two companies specializing in scraping prevention, the company names starting with Da… and Pe… (trying to not affect their reputation unless someone else recognizes the names based on a similar experience.)
We ultimately rejected their solicitations and a short while later, in the past few days, the scraping stopped.
We're now suspicious that something shady is going on. They could've been the ones launching the attack, to make us more likely to purchase their services. They could even just stop the attack once we subscribe and act like their software blocked it perfectly, making us satisfied with their purchase.
So I want to know: did anyone else have a similar experience? <comment><USER2> You're right, looks shady and not like a coincidence.</comment>


What Hinton's Google Move Says About the Future of Machine Learning - <AUTHOR> http://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/what-hintons-google-move-says-about-the-future-of-machine-learning/ <comment><USER2> I know HN thinks Google is much cooler than IBM, but is it weird that I like IBM's chances in ML progressing to AI? For one thing, Watson was a very impressive demonstration. For another, it has the old materials science know- how to create neuron-inspired chip architecture. And here's an important one: Fortune 500 companies with lots of valuable data trust IBM to solve their problems. Anybody here with other thoughts, caveats? Other companies with good shots at commercializing ML/AI technology?

<comment><USER3> Great point. As per the author's thesis, we are in phase 2, and phase 3 is going to be initiated by a startup, and not before another 20 years.

But IBM is currently doing (and making good progress at) exactly what the author describes as phase 3.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think what makes Hinton surprising is that he has a long established academic lab and so many current top researchers went through that lab. Yann LeCun (ANNs/Deep Learning), Chris Williams, (GPs), Carl Rasmussen (GPs), Peter Dayan (NeuroScince and TD-Learning), Sam Roweis (RIP). As you note, industrial research labs (with Nobel prize winning researchers) have been around at IBM, NEC, and ATT Bell etc. One thing that I think about, is what happens to the quality of research as top folks who have an established record of producing new researchers are pulled from that role? Also not sure about startups having anything to do with with making technology real. Is Google still a startup?

</comment><comment><USER5> Machine brains are already much "smarter" than human brains. For certain tasks, that is, like calculation. With increased computing power, these tasks will grow more and more. But will machines ever be REALLY smarter than humans? I will only believe that when I see it. This question might be (but does not necessarily have to be) related to the question of all questions: Can machines have consciousness, like we do?

<comment><USER6> There is a growing realization that cognition is fundamentally _embodied_ cognition. If you think of the mind as an ethereal entity removed of its physicality (or at the very least made out of a different substance from the body - that is to say, substance dualism) then it is easy to imagine the following scenarios. Containers are unimportant, so minds can be uploaded and downloaded, whether machine or human the housing is unimportant.

If we come to accept cognition as fundamentally embodied then it becomes less sensible to compare cognition across differing architectures - human cognition will always be quite unlike any other type of cognition except itself. I think machines will have consciousness (why should they not be able to, what is so special about us that would limit this phenomenon to us?) but it will be a machine consciousness and radically different from ours.

I think we're going to have to get a lot more fine-grained about how we talk about features and functions of brains whether human or machine. You've already put "smarter" in quotes which shows that already you're aware of how blunt and crude our terms are.

Does this all seem reasonable?

<comment><USER5> I understand your point of view, which is basically the one shared by many people in CS. But personally, I don't think that machines will ever develop consciousness as we have it. Because I understand how current technology works, and there is no consciousness there. I would have no qualms shutting down a machine, even if it begged me to keep it running.

<comment><USER7> Just like a computer science freshman I imbued computer systems with magic. Oh look I feed this machine numbers and it spits out words (text to speech). Or I search for something and a magic algorithm find me the result. As I learned more about algorithms and data-structures, that magic disappeared. Now I had the same feeling about hardware. This magic black square on the motherboard that can execute a set of couple of hundred or so assembly instructions many billions of times per second. Then I took a hardware architecture class and poof! magic disappeared. We started with transistors and build to designing our own CPU chip.

I am guessing something similar is going on with our understanding of the brain and mind. I think we just haven't figured out a good way to model and represent knowledge. There was terrible optimism at the end of 50s that super human AI will take over in just a decades. But it didn't happen. We have sort of been stomping our feet (I personally don't consider playing chess an AI achievement). I think there will be a breakthrough -- maybe it will be a simple organization of existing ML and knowledge representation methods (neural networks, mixed with evolutionary algorithms) or some new framework - OR - enough of very specific applications (chess playing, image recognition and speech recognition) advanced will slowly chip away at this "magic" AI core until maybe nothing will be left. And we'll look back at that and at our brains and say "ah, it wasn't that complicated after all, it is just all these specific subsystems working together"...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is reading way too much into it. Google happens to have a very nice confluence of money, data, people, and interesting applications at the moment. But there is and always has been back-and-forth of ideas and people between academia and industry in machine learning and all other fields.

</comment><comment><USER9> As an ML researcher, this article isn't persuasive to me for a few reasons:

\- Computing power is getting exponentially cheaper even as computing requirements increase. The resources available to a university lab in the future will be much greater than those available today, even given the same budget. Of course this is also true for industry, but this growth is not a unique advantage of industry.

\- Other scientific fields already have equipment costs that are orders of magnitude larger than CS. Physicists regularly write grant proposals for multimillion-dollar pieces of equipment. If building large clusters is necessary for academic research to stay relevant, academics will start building large clusters. The foundational work done at Bell, IBM, Xerox, etc in the 70s and 80s was not due to resource constraints in academia (academics had expensive computers too, and also did plenty of good work during that time), it was because those companies had the right combination of smart people and an immediate need to find practical solutions to difficult problems.

\- Finally, and most importantly, _even in the age of big data_ almost all fundamental research can be done quite successfully at small scales with modest hardware requirements. Notice that Hinton et. al. have spent 6+ years developing deep learning _in academia_ , and it's only in the past couple of years that it's matured to the point of implementation at scale.

Here's the basic pipeline of most machine learning research: you come up with a new approach for training SVMs, or multilayer perceptrons, or some new type of more interesting model. First you develop your ideas conceptually, with some equations on a whiteboard. If you're a theorist, you might prove some theorems. Next you write a toy implementation in Matlab or Python to show that your method actually works, and that you get improvement over previous work _for the dataset size you're using_. This could mean that your method is faster -- which indicates it'll be able to scale to bigger data -- or that it's smarter / taking advantage of some new type of structure, in which case it still ought to get decent (if not state-of-the-art) results on small data. _Only then_ , usually after publishing a few papers and working out the kinks, does it generally make sense to put in the effort to implement and test a big, efficient distributed version of your algorithm. And while that last part might be best done by industry, the first few steps are easily possible in academia and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.

Case in point: Google Translate is a massive system whose performance rests squarely on exploiting big data, in that they use the Internet as their training set. But academic machine translation research still runs quite effectively with smaller datasets on small clusters. The academics come up with ideas, implement and test them, and some ideas flop while others take off. The idea that take off get picked up by Google and implemented into Translate, where they hopefully end up pushing the envelope. So even though the academics don't have the resources to work at massive scale (which most of them don't want to do anyway -- ML researchers are usually more interested in ML than in building distributed systems) their research still has impact, through transfer to industry. This sort of relationship has been the model for academic/industry research collaboration for quite a while, and I don't think it's dead yet.

<comment><USER10> I attended a talk by Quoc Le at UCSD recently, and he made the case that it is necessary to get the algorithms tested large scale, rather than sending too much time on it at small scale.

He had presented a graph comparing some models and their accuracy as the number of features was scaled up to the tens of thousands, his point being that some models that work best at smaller number of features fall off as the number is scaled up. Unfortunately the slides he has on his web page is outdated, so I haven't been able to find that reference. I'd be very happy if one of you know which paper he was referring to. In the old slides he refers to this paper, which makes something of the same point: [http://ai.stanford.edu/~ang/papers/nipsdlufl10-AnalysisSingl...](http://ai.stanford.edu/~ang/papers/nipsdlufl10-AnalysisSingleLayerUnsupervisedFeatureLearning.pdf) It shows how simple unsupervised models with dense feature extraction reach the state of the art performance of more complex models.

Of course, I can see how it makes sense to at least do some small scale prototyping, to work out kinks like you say - but the lesson is that if you are planning to do large scale machine learning you can't necessarily use the small scale tests as a good guide for large scale performance. It's certainly promising if you get very good accuracy, speed or both at small scale, though neither necessarily will carry over to large scale. On the flip side, if your method is worse than state-of-the-art at smaller scales, that doesn't mean it won't beat state-of-the-art at large scales.

<comment><USER11> Data shows, as you say, that small scale performance is no indicator of large scale performance.

How then do you decide which projects are worth trying on the large scale?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think that ml people should take a look at the AGI field. I also think that more powerful techniques, specialized hardware like qualcomms baby Brain corporation are building, and/or large peer computing networks will make general intelligence accessible for small groups or individuals In fewer than twenty years.

<comment><USER9> AGI has cool ideas, and is in some sense the "right" theoretical framework for AI, but it's not clear that it gives any kind of practical path forward for AI research. The main problem is that its basic idea -- an AI performing Bayesian inference over a hypothesis class of all potential environment-generating computer programs, with a Kolmogorov complexity prior -- is wildly uncomputable, so to make it practical we'd need to find simple, computable approximations that work on real problems. But this is basically what modern ML research is _already trying to do_ \-- finding models that are complex enough to capture interesting structure in the world, but still simple enough for efficient inference to be practical.

<comment><USER12> "an AI performing Bayesian inference over a hypothesis class of all potential environment-generating computer programs, with a Kolmogorov complexity prior, -- is wildly uncomputable, so to make it practical we'd need to find simple, computable approximations that work on real problems"

That's not what AGI is trying to do or how they are trying to do it.

<comment><USER13> It's at least one way which has been advocated by leading researcher of the field. If you think differently, you should give references and explain what your AGI definition is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'd wager human brains to a lot of stuff unrelated to solving problems at hand, like keeping the heart beating. Given that the machines don't need to do all of the underlying biological stuff, you can probably get away with fewer connections.

<comment><USER15> might be the same amount of overhead needed for an OS to keep tabs on it's hardware, cluster, etc. Just like brains need to translate to the physical world via the nervous system, pure software needs to translate to the physical world via an OS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> _by which time (2050s-2060s) we will have machine brains that are orders of magnitude smarter than human ones (!)_

that's a fascinating yet chilling thought (granted, orders of magnitudes _dumber_ than those future thoughts of the machines)

</comment><comment><USER11> Dear Googlers, it would be interesting to know how computational resources are allocated to new ideas (eg. Kurzweil's PRTM-based NLU system) at each stage, from prototype genesis to mature technology. What are the factors that come into play?

</comment><comment><USER13> There is a machine learning that is not related to big data, you know. Many interesting problems in machine learning, and most of the hard ones, have a computational demand for which a single i7 and 16 GB of RAM are more than enough.

</comment><comment><USER17> I've been thinking this _exact_ same trend ever since I saw Hinton's move to Google, but I didn't have the historic background to make these comparisons. Really nice job.</comment>


Journalists are hurt by "balance" requirements, by Robin Hanson - <AUTHOR> http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/12/balance-blocks-news-info.html

<comment><USER2> That's something that has turned me off of using mainstream media for anything other than fact-gathering: There's no consideration for what's actually _true_. Editorials and political blogs give a clearer view of what's going on.</comment>


HTML for Uber's "Godview" - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/jLDCDBQU

<comment><AUTHOR> Apparently, select corporate Uber employees have access to users' location data as referenced in this Buzzfeed article [1]. One of the co-authors tweeted about this view being referenced on a partner page if you Google "Uber God view". The page was taken down but someone saved the HTML on this pastebin. Easter eggs galore [2].

[1] [http://www.buzzfeed.com/johanabhuiyan/uber-is- investigating-...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/johanabhuiyan/uber-is- investigating-its-top-new-york-executive-for-privacy)

[2] [https://mobile.twitter.com/pbump/status/534936361569366017](https://mobile.twitter.com/pbump/status/534936361569366017)</comment>


The Coldest Cold (1929) - <AUTHOR> http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,751945,00.html <comment><USER2> Wait, so at the end of that article it basically said that 200 cubic centimeters of helium ice could be used as an explosive? Dry ice bomb for adults?

"Conversely, when all heat has been driven from a substance, as Professor Keesom almost did last week, it may be that "matter" will explode into those universal waves which man at present can call only "nothingness." What the violence of such an explosion might be, no man can guess but experimenter Keesom may yet find out."

<comment><USER3> Not an explosion. I know nothing of the physics at the quantum level beyond layman stuff. However, "explode" is probably the wrong word.

If you consider during the first nano seconds of the Big Bang when temperatures were at their highest in history (and energy at its most dense), all of the base forces were combined.

As the energy of the early universe expanded and became less dense, the atomic forces (strong, weak, etc) froze and separated out of the dense energy and the unifying parent force. As the atomic forces became separated, quanta of energy started forming into sub-sub-atomic particles which further combined into sub- atomic particles like protons, neutrons, and electrons. These then combined to form mainly hydrogen with trace amounts of helium and lithium.

Its not till later after the first few generations of mega-stars that other elements formed (oxygen, carbon, iron, etc).

So based on all of this, from everything I know particle physics seems to be the result of energy moving into lower states over the time scale of the universe. Because of this, I don't think that if you cool an atom to absolute zero (which is supposed to be impossible but I don't know why), that the atom will disperse. The removal of energy doesn't seem to make the fundamental forces disappear, so all you get is a very cold atom of helium that just doesn't move at all.

<comment><USER4> Temperature is a property of a system, not a single particle. Temperatures of absolute zero are considered impossible to produce because maintaining absolute zero requires a system with zero energy entering.

<comment><USER3> Yup, thanks for the correction.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


One device, 1TB of personal cloud storage - <AUTHOR> https://www.spacemonkey.com/ <comment><USER2> I was one of the kickstarter backers and I am quite disappointed in the product … so far as I have dismembered the SpaceMonkey and the 2TB hard drive now is part of my Synology NAS setup.

SpaceMonkey's features are at best rudimentary and only usable as a personal cloud storage. Don't even think about working in a team (to be fair, the team is working on sharing features).

The device used huge amount of bandwidth and made the network in my coworking space unusable.

So today I can only recommend to look into a different solution …

<comment><USER3> I too was a backer in their Kickstarter campaign. Due to the poor communication, continuous delays, and uncertainty on pricing and ownership, I requested a refund. I then bought a synology NAS, setup it up with raid 10, vpn, and Amazon glacier backup. I couldn't be more happy with the decision.

Since then, SpaceMonkey got acquired... which I find fascinating.

<comment><USER4> Skip the glacier and use crashplan for backup. Cheaper, and better options for restoring your data (like having a drive mailed to your house vs. pulling it over the WAN).

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately, Crashplan doesn't work on a Synology box. Even if you are willing to muck around in Busybox it still won't work because there is no inotify support. The best you can do is sync your Synology to a PC and then upload to Crashplan from there.

Support for S3 and Glacier is built in and very easy to configure. It's not a major issue if you have a RAID setup because it's less likely you will have to restore from backup. I've only had single drives go bad and I hotswapped them. I would feel much differently if I had a single drive unit.

<comment><USER6> That's untrue. Synology devices have supported CrashPlan for a while.

DSM 4: [http://www.hanselman.com/blog/HowToSetUpCrashPlanCloudBackup...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/HowToSetUpCrashPlanCloudBackupHeadlessOnASynologyNASBackupStrategies.aspx)

DSM 5: [http://www.hanselman.com/blog/UPDATED2014HowToSetupCrashPlan...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/UPDATED2014HowToSetupCrashPlanCloudBackupOnASynologyNASRunningDSM50.aspx)

<comment><USER7> To be fair, this isn't a Synology package, it is provided by one guy who works hard to try and get the Java Crashplan code to work on Synology. When Synology upgrades the DSM it stops working. Check out the forums to see the pain points people have to address to keep this headless client working:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=synology+crashplan+not+Worki...](https://www.google.com/search?q=synology+crashplan+not+Working)

It is a hack. There should be an official release from Crashplan or Synology. Same for the other big backup cloud providers. If there was something better and supported on Synology than Amazon S3 or Glacier, I'd personally be prepared to get my wallet out. These companies are missing a big market of Synology owners who are desperate for an alternative, and no I don't want to use HiDrive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So, if it's "Only $49/year" (top of page) but also provides "1TB of personal cloud storage for $10/month" (bottom of page), how many months are there in their years? Do I pay per year, or per month? Is the hardware "free"?

Very confusing, and that took _maybe_ 20 seconds to find.

<comment><USER9> The confusion results from two different plans:

Plan A: buy the device upfront and own it. Price includes 1 year of network backup service. After the first year, if you want to continue the network backup, it's $49/year ($4/month).

Plan B: don't pay anything upfront for the device and lease it plus the service for $10/month for as long as you like.

Plan A is the only service available directly from the website currently, and we need to clarify the copy on the webpage -- thanks for pointing out to confusion.

<comment><USER10> As a Kickstarter backer too, we've pointed out to you guys for _months_ that your pricing scheme was confusing and didn't make any sense. You haven't cleared it up any since.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have been watching Space Monkey for a while... I love the concept of local- to-your-home-network storage made easy to use and easy to share anywhere, even on devices outside your home network. This easily beats any cloud service when it comes to synchronizing speed because I can sync at 1 Gbit/s on my GbE network, vs. the ~10 Mbit/s uplink of my cable Internet.

There is also Pogoplug [1] which is a superior idea IMHO: the user provides his own USB hard drive(s). This reduces the price of the device and gives more space flexibility: you can connect any size and any number(!) of drives via a USB hub. There is another company doing something similar to Pogoplug, but I cannot remember their name at the moment. Of course the downside of Pogoplug is that there is no backup. But for my own needs, I would prefer Pogoplug's trade-off (unlimited storage & no backup & no constant Internet traffic) compared to Space Monkey (1TB limit & automatic backup & constant ~400kbit/s of traffic background to the SpaceMonkey distributed network).

[1] [http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/5/2910802/pogoplug- series-4-r...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/5/2910802/pogoplug- series-4-review) (I link to a review because the company's main website does not do a good job of describing the product: [http://pogoplug.com/devices](http://pogoplug.com/devices))

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Seeing the discussion around disk42 (Saas version of seafile) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8739094](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8739094) I thought it would be a good time to repost the space monkey link (not that I'm affiliated nor a user) to see where we are in terms of distributed storage protocols now.

Some q&a I had with their co-founder: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6996053](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6996053) (parent discussion mostly about an alleged kickstarter scam)

<comment><USER12> Actually Space Monkey was discussed before as well: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5564546](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5564546)

While the fragmented/distributed backup approach is cool and useful some people might not like paying $50 for the privilege of seeding other people's files with their bandwidth.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I hadn't seen this thread before, I was actually thinking that an open protocol would allow you to have a fast/reliable/etc. backup in exchange of a share of your local storage.

Obviously if it's phrased like I'm paying to have other people use my bandwidth, that's a big issue.

<comment><USER13> A few years ago, when Dropbox was starting to get popular, I was thinking of a similar scheme. You would pay for the device, and then you would get X% free cloud storage as long as it was online. Some people would prefer a fixed up front cost and no monthly fee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "So, what a wireless speaker has to do with cloud storage?" — my first thought after opening the website.

"Oh, its not wireless"

"And not a speaker."

</comment><comment><USER15> So, the storage and distribution model is a bit like FreeNet, distributed across other devices, but everything is private, no sharing?

<comment><USER9> Everything is private, every user has a unique key associated with their account, and every object (file and folder) has unique, individual encryption keys generated for it.

Because of the way data is encrypted, the system supports sharing at the file and folder level without granting access to other data in a user's filesystem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I admit to being confused by their security statements. Is the OS and code running on the device open sourced? Given that it looks like the device is handling the encryption, and I got the device from them, I don't see any publicized way for me to verify that any encryption is actually happening.

</comment><comment><USER17> > Whether you use an iPhone, Android, Mac, or Windows, we have you covered.

Does it support Linux?

<comment><USER18> The page [https://www.spacemonkey.com/tour](https://www.spacemonkey.com/tour) mentions under Linux "Alpha access by request".

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I want to try this one. [https://www.lacie.com/ca/products/product.htm?id=10597](https://www.lacie.com/ca/products/product.htm?id=10597)

<comment><USER9> One of the reasons Space Monkey exists: [http://www.infoworld.com/article/2856553/cloud- storage/you-c...](http://www.infoworld.com/article/2856553/cloud-storage/you- cant-buy-a-cloud-at-best-buy.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> People continue to abuse the term "cloud" these days...

</comment><comment><USER21> [http://sherlybox.com/](http://sherlybox.com/)

I'd say sherlybox is a better deal

<comment><USER22> [http://pogoplug.com/devices#pick](http://pogoplug.com/devices#pick)

a top end pogo plug with a 3TB drive would be cheaper and more capable (usb3.0/sd card/user choice in HDD), or you can save fifty bucks if you don't need multi-user support.</comment></comment>


How GPUs Work - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~gfx/papers/paper.php?paper_id=59 <comment><USER2> This overview, while a great start, doesn't really dive into the details of how modern GPUs work. Since 2007, many of the limitations that held GPUs back from being general-purpose computers have been removed (by relentless efforts of NVIDIA and to a lesser extent ATI/AMD, spurred in large part by NVIDIA's traction in the supercomputing space, for example [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_%28supercomputer%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_%28supercomputer%29)). My go-to source for a lot of these developments is AnandTech ([http://www.anandtech.com/tag/cuda](http://www.anandtech.com/tag/cuda)) but I'm sure there are plenty of other resources others can point to.

Another fascinating bit is that NVIDIA and ATI/AMD have developed what are now the largest general-purpose processors in the world (over 5 billion transistors per chip and counting - available in consumer GPUs for under $300, as opposed to Intel's largest Xeons that top out at 4 billion and cost $2000+) but are being held back at the 28nm process because their fab partner (TSMC) is oversubcribed by smaller, higher demand ARM chips that go into phones.

<comment><USER3> What are you meaning by general-purpose here? Do you not have to use a different programming model anymore?

<comment><USER4> The parent is referring to how CUDA's introduction enabled developers to write and compile C-ish code to run on a GPU, while previously programmers could take advantage of the power of GPUs for non-render computations by hacking the pixel shaders and such, bending the graphics hardware to do something it was not designed for.

You still have to write your program in a very different way in order to run efficiently on GPUs as opposed to CPUs.

<comment><USER3> The comparison to a Xeon is what confused me. I didn't think such a development had taken place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If anyone is even marginally interested in GPU internals, you'd do yourself a favor by checking out John Owens' UC Davis class on the topic[1]. I once watched the first lecture just to fill an hour and ended up going through the entire course within the span of a week, following up with my own research later on. Superbly interesting.

[1] [https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/graphics- architecture-w...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/graphics-architecture- winter/id404606990?mt=10)

or on youtube: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4A8BA1C3B38CFCA0](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4A8BA1C3B38CFCA0)

<comment><USER6> Thanks!!

See also [https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/a-trip-through- the-...](https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/a-trip-through-the-graphics- pipeline-2011-index/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anyone interested in how GPUs work should read the series of blog posts by Fabian Giesen "A trip through the graphics pipeline": [https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/a-trip-through- the-...](https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/a-trip-through-the-graphics- pipeline-2011-index/)

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm really sorry I will try to dig up the source myself, but I've read basically the opposite argument in a few technical papers -- that GPU is NOT as fast as claimed for many classic test algorithms (actual speed-up is more like factor of 2 than 10) and that the performance gap between traditional CPUs and GPUs is actually lessening.

I'm going to read this article anyway to hear their take & for the learning experience, but does anyone remember any of the counter-arg articles?

<comment><USER9> disclaimer: I work in this space and have done so for a while, including previously on CUDA and on Titan.

GPUs for general purpose computation were never 100x faster than CPUs like people claimed in 2008 or so. They're just not. That was basically NV marketing mixed with a lot of people publishing some pretty bad early work on GPUs.

Lots of early papers that fanned GPU hype followed the same basic form: "We have this standard algorithm, we tested it on a single CPU core with minimal optimizations and no SIMD (or maybe some terrible MATLAB code with zero optimization), we tested a heavily optimized GPU version, and look the GPU version is faster! By the way, we didn't port any of those optimizations back to the CPU version or measure PCIe transfer time to/from the GPU." It was utterly trivial to get any paper into a conference by porting anything to the GPU and reporting a speedup. Most of the GPU related papers from this time were awful. I remember one in particular that claimed a 1000x speedup by timing just the amount of time it took for the kernel launch to the GPU instead of the actual kernel runtime, and somehow nobody (either the authors or the reviewers) realized that this was utterly impossible.

GPUs have more FLOPs and more memory bandwidth in exchange for requiring PCIe and lots of parallel work. if your algorithm needs those more than anything else (like cache), can minimize PCIe transfer time, and handles the whole massive parallelism thing well, then GPUs are a pretty good bet. If you can't, then they're not going to work particularly well.

(now, if you need to do 2D interpolation and can use the texture fetch hardware on the GPU to do it instead of a bunch of arbitrary math... yeah, that's a _huge_ performance increase because you get that interpolation for free from special-purpose hardware. but that's incredibly rare in practice)

<comment><USER8> ah, yes. :) very nice detailed summary of some of the issues in this sect of "academia" (I put that in quotes only because all the research seems to be co- written by corps).

I am into audio DSP & am planning to port a couple of audio algorithms (lots of FFT & linear algebra) to run on GPU but haven't even gotten to it because I considered it a pre-mature optimization to this point. I'm sure it would improve performance, but nowhere near what GPU advocates would claim.

My biggest reason? "PCIe transfer time to/from GPU", plus it would be unoptimized GPU code. Once you read a few of these papers it becomes painfully obvious that a lot of tuning goes into the GPU algorithms that offer anything more than a low single-digit factor of speedup. It's still very significant (cutting a 3 hour algorithm down to 1 would be huge) but if you're in an early stage of research it may be a toss-up over whether its better to just tune the algorithm itself / run computations overnight rather than going through the trouble of writing a GPU-based POC. Maybe if you have 1 or 2 under your belt its not such a big deal but for most of the researchers I know GPU algorithm rewrites would not be trivial. (I've been doing enterprise Java coding for about 2 years now so the idea isn't so intimidating now, but in a past life of mucking around with Matlab scripts I'm sure it would have been daunting).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One thing that's always put me off from studying GPUs in detail is the proprietariness of everything; with few exceptions (Intel being one of them recently, and surprisingly enough Broadcom for the RPi), there's no detailed datasheet or low-level programming information publicly available for modern GPUs, and what is available is still not all that complete. Contrast this with CPUs where a lot of them have full, highly-detailed information on everything from pinouts to how to get them to boot. People have made their own simple computer systems by wiring up a CPU on a circuit board with some support chips, but I don't think I've seen anything like this done for any reasonably recent or even ancient GPU.

(I know there are VGA reimplementations available, and the VGA is quite well- documented, but that's more of a timing controller/dumb frame-buffer than a real GPU.)

<comment><USER11> Significant part of functionality of moder GPU is in software that abstracts away differences between different models and generations, from this point of view it does not make much sense to document actual interface between software and hardware. Other thing is that complexity of this software abstraction layer is comparable to the GPU itself and manufacturers do not expect that somebody would want to implement all that from scratch (this is similar to e.g. FPGAs, where even when you know bitstream format, you still have to write something non-trivial that generates the bitstream).

<comment><USER12> You could make the same arguments against documenting the machine code of a CPU.

<comment><USER11> For CPU, there is no another processor that can run all the abstraction software so it has to be done in hardware or in software in a way that is transparent to user (microcode, Transmeta-style JIT...).

<comment><USER12> That's an implementation detail: the manufacturer supplies the system software, and by this argument you're not supposed to care where it runs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Maybe off topic, but I'm actually really surprised that monitors and GPUs are still different pieces of hardware.

I'll admit I only know the basics of GPU architecture, so please forgive/correct me if I'm wrong about something. However, I am just too curious not to share.

I'll try to explain. A frame buffer is nothing but a bunch of 1s and 0s in memory, meanwhile a monitor is just a bunch of 1s and 0s in pixels. We currently have the GPU write to memory in parallel and we currently write pixels to a monitor serially (and therefore interlacing). However, given the similarity between memory and pixels, why then can't we optimize a GPU to (parallely) write to pixels instead of memory. To the extreme, you could optimize, your GPU to have 1 shader per pixel, and since the shaders all run on the same clock cycle, the whole monitor would update simultaneously. I think that would be really cool and more importantly efficient. In more practical terms you would probably have 1 GPU shader be responsible for some group of pixels (so you only need 1 shader per 4x3 pixels or per 16x9 pixels).

So, before you say it, I get you might disagree with me when it comes to desktop GPUs, since 1. the GPU memory needs to be close to RAM (you don't want to have the GPU memory be on the other side of a "long" cable) 2. You would like to update the hardware for a GPU separately from your monitor. However, in something like Mobile/Oculus, the form factor is so small/tightly coupled already, I'm surprised optimizations like this aren't being looked into.

Am I just not up to date? Is there something fundamentally wrong in my logic? Does getting rid of the frame buffer/interlacing, not provide as much of a boost to make this worth while?

<comment><USER14> A number of problems. A huge one is wiring. Parallel is really complicated electrically, noise drowns out your signal and things run slow. This is why most of our buses have switched over to serial (e.g. USB, PCIe, etc). Sometimes we run those serial busses in parallel, but that still works out to being easier.

Timing is another huge one. Imagine running 2 million wires (for a 1080p display) that have to all be the exact same length to within some tolerance.

The longer those wires gets the harder this gets. This is also another huge reason why the move to serial buses has happened. You can run 4 wires with really tight timings and the bits will fly, but if you try and run 16 wires all together, speed ends up dropping dramatically. Reality is that circuit boards don't have room for a large number of traces running in parallel of all the exact same length!

RAM is a huge exception to this, but extreme measures have been taken to enable this to happen, a good chunk of your Mobo is taken up getting the RAM connected, and memory controllers moved onboard the CPU in part to get RAM closer to the CPU to simplify traces,

Note this is all the perspective of a software guy who has to listen to the hardware team grumble for most of the day. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm currently taking an introductory course in computer graphics and we've been taught most of the things covered in this article, including the theory of the Phong lighting model and the graphics pipeline with different types of shaders. This is more or less a 25,000-foot overview of how computer graphics works and how the images on your screen came to be. It's highly interesting stuff and knowing a small amount of the math behind how it works really gives me an appreciation for the things I see in video games and 3D animations. I wish this article had gone further to explain how the GPU actually produces results in the highly-parallel way that this articles seems to skim over.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wish there was a good book on GPU architecture and even micro-architecture. I just like reading about this stuff and how they work.

<comment><USER17> There is an excellent slide deck by Kayvon Fatahalian [0] that I consider to be the best high-level introduction into the topic (especially if you have a deeper understanding of how a CPU works). But I agree, more detailed insights would be great.

[0] [http://s08.idav.ucdavis.edu/fatahalian-gpu- architecture.pdf](http://s08.idav.ucdavis.edu/fatahalian-gpu-architecture.pdf)

<comment><USER9> Kayvon teaches at Carnegie Mellon now and his class slides are definitely worth reading:

[http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/courses/15869/fall2014/](http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/courses/15869/fall2014/) [http://15418.courses.cs.cmu.edu/spring2014/](http://15418.courses.cs.cmu.edu/spring2014/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Can't access the link, server overloaded?

"Description: Could not connect to the requested server host. "

Is there any other link for the paper?

<comment><USER19> Try the direct PDF link: [http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~gfx/papers/pdfs/59_HowThingsWork...](http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~gfx/papers/pdfs/59_HowThingsWork.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The title should be changed to reflect that this is from 2007. The graphics that the article praises now look dated.

</comment><comment><USER21> The 8800GTX was the first GPU I every bought back in 2007 (obviously I'm not very old). Now 7 years later, its funny how dated the render on "Figure 2." is.

<comment> semi-extrinsic When I started university I had a laptop with a 80 MHz, 8MB memory discrete GPU ;) I believe it was an ATI Rage LT Pro.</comment></comment>


Should high school seniors go to College or become an Entrepreneur? - <AUTHOR> http://thecollegestartup.com/college-or-entrepreneurship/

<comment><USER2> The insane tuition costs in the US have turned this into a reasonable question, IMHO.

For students in countries with reasonable schooling costs -- I still consider our costs in Canada to be reasonable, as in possible to pay back most of your school costs working summers and mid-school interships -- I'd still recommend going for a CS degree.

As someone who has hired for startups I've founded, I do give a small amount of weight to whether the individual has a relevant degree. But to be honest, the majority of my attention for non-new-grads is focused on work experience (places they've worked and things they've done) and technical chops.</comment>


Ask HN: could you please post any Hacker News associated sites and tools here? - <AUTHOR>

There are many sites that derive content from Hacker News, including the popular, http://searchyc.com
What other HN derived sites or tools do you know about or use?
It'd be great to see a reference post about such derivative sites, just like the feature requests item, and that's why I am posting.
This question may have been posted before as it's important for users, site developers and HN itself.
By not having such a reference freely available, people may be missing out on something that'd really help. <comment><AUTHOR> Hacker News Link To Comments

<http://pipes.yahoo.com/andrewducker/hackernews>

</comment><comment><USER2> Can somebody point me to the site which categorized hacker news links as tech and non-tech???

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> <http://hackernewsfeed.com/></comment>


Ask HN: Who is giving(course/book etc.) free now? - <AUTHOR> Pluralsight is fully free for this one month https://www.pluralsight.com/offer/2020/free-april-month
Currently Unity is giving all the courses free. https://learn.unity.com/
Book Linear Algebra Done Right - Book is free until the end of July.
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-11080-6
Who else is giving free content in this lock down period? <comment><USER2> "We've also decided to continue offering the first halves of our Elixir and Rails 6 courses for free (no signup, no email required). Just jump right in and enjoy!"

[https://twitter.com/pragmaticstudio/status/12460884152858583...](https://twitter.com/pragmaticstudio/status/1246088415285858305)</comment>


Man Who Sold F-35 Secrets to China Pleads Guilty - <AUTHOR> https://news.vice.com/article/man-who-sold-f-35-secrets-to-china-pleads-guilty <comment><USER2> So the plus side is their next gen fighter is shit too?</comment>


When applying for a job at Google don't be a racist asshole - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5924094/when-applying-for-a-job-at-google-dont-be-a-racist-asshole

<comment><USER2> Fake Portfolio of person who sent that stuff: <http://www.chroma9.com/>

Comment from Friend of the person who requested for work: [http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/w57og/a_web_designers_r...](http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/w57og/a_web_designers_racist_response_to_a_prospective/c5ad7cc)

Full email: <http://i.imgur.com/UsrMh.jpg></comment>