The human body's remarkable ability to adapt to the cold - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200226-how-to-survive-in-the-extreme-cold <comment><USER2> > _A man in the cold is not necessarily a cold man," says Tipton. "If you keep > moving and you are reasonably insulated you will produce enough heat to stay > warm. At maximum exercise, it is like you are running a 2kW fire. When you > exercise reasonably hard you can do that in shorts and t-shirt in the > cold..._

I think about this a lot as a runner in the Midwest US. I regularly go out in 20-30F weather in wool socks, running shorts, a long-sleeve shell, and a hat and gloves. I add running tights and a bit of vaseline on my cheekbones and nose if it's under 20. This last weekend it was 45 and blissfully sunny; it felt like spring, I left my hat and gloves at home and did my first shirtless workout of the season.

The article reminds me of the quote from Jack London's "To Build a Fire" (full text at [1]):

> _His idea of running until he arrived at the camp and the boys presented one > problem: he lacked the endurance._

Guðlaugur did have the endurance! Good on him.

It does make me think, however, what would happen if I were to sprain an ankle or break a leg and be unable to run to generate heat. If I could only hobble, would I be able to, say, sit down to do sit-ups and push-ups until I could warm up and resume hobbling? Fortunately, I'm not far from from shore on a dark sea, my routes never take me further than about two miles from civilization.

[1]: [https://americanenglish.state.gov/files/ae/resource_files/to...](https://americanenglish.state.gov/files/ae/resource_files/to- build-a-fire.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Fellow runner here. For God's sake man, carry an emergency blanket with you at least.

[https://www.amazon.com/Emergency- Blanket/s?k=Emergency+Blank...](https://www.amazon.com/Emergency- Blanket/s?k=Emergency+Blanket)

<comment><USER4> The article mentions that plastic bags work better than emergency "space" blankets since they block moisture and thus evaporative cooling. A large industrial trash bag is part of my emergency supplies on cold backpacking trips. It's cheap, weighs almost nothing, and provides protection from both radiative and convective cooling.

<comment><USER5> Related: I used ziploc bags as vapor barriers nested between two pairs of socks while on a multi-month winter hiking trip in trail shoes. It was extremely effective. I could posthole in deep snow all day in my running shoes and not get frostbite.

<comment><USER6> How did you avoid damp-related problems like fungal overgrowth?

<comment><USER5> It didn't end up being a problem. I washed my feet when I could, used thick wool socks, let my feet air out at camp, and that was enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As it happens I'm leaving for a camping trip in the snow tomorrow morning. It's the sierras (relatively warm) and I'm leading a bunch of inexperienced scouts (so not a particularly grueling trip) but still with opportunities for danger. I was surprised how many of these SV kids signed up and were then pulled by their parents -- 50%! Only a few years ago these trips were immediately oversubscribed, with nobody getting pulled even when it turned out to be blizzard conditions. The kids, at least, are enthusiastic.

Winter conditions in the continental US are, by comparison with the Icelandic conditions in this article, rather clement. The worst I've been in here has been -15 F (-26 C) though that was before the wind...oh the wind! But I have friends who camp out and work in northern Canada, Alaska, and Antarctica. _They_ have to deal with real cold! Me, I go out for a week with my dog and a friend and then presto I'm back in toasty civilization. Not really rugged at all. But it is why I drive a dinosaur-burner.

<comment><USER8> Scout trips have been known to go wrong. This discussion brought to mind this very old incident: [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/06/fatal-hike- bec...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/06/fatal-hike-became-nazi- propaganda-coup)

<comment><USER9> That's tragic--but let's keep it in context. It happened before WWII. Some of these young boys were wearing shorts and sandals (without hats) in a blizzard, climbing up a mountain slope with a 70% gradient (black diamond ski slopes start at 40%), without any sort of topological or detailed map, no lights, no ability to communicate with the outside world and one adult to supervise 27 students. I can't imagine any of those things are true for Gumby's trip.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Unable to move far in the deep snow, his plan was to stay put, which under > the circumstances was not a bad one.

It is almost _always_ the correct decision, no matter what the situation. At his home he had access to all sorts of materials, and was clearly visible from the air.

And a shelter in the snow is pretty warm -- regardless of how cold it is outside it will pretty much stay at 0 C. The problem is that you can't be seen from the air (or by someone walking by!) when you're in the shelter and little sound will likely get through either. So you need to make a useful marker, which is slightly touched on in this article.

I have taught numerous people to make these emergency shelters out of material at hand (I'm a wilderness and snow survival instructor) and have been told that it has saved at least one life.

<comment><USER10> What do you think of the V instead of SOS? Is it better? Should someone do both?

<comment><USER11> Should be pretty good as it's one of the distress signals that pilots are taught to look for.

<comment><USER12> > "The SOS signal is what most people know, but the downside is it is very > curvy," says Krebs. "Most of nature is curvy – it is rounded hills and lakes > and streams, so curvy blends in."

> In the military Krebs was taught to use the letter "V" to request general > help or an "X" specifically for medical assistance. The long straight lines > stand out on a hillside. It also takes less time to create two straight > lines 30 feet long compared to two loopy Ss and one O, each 10 feet high.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There is a lot of interesting information. However, is it only me, or the style of writing is chaotic (almost as if every paragraph was shuffled)?

<comment><USER14> This is the current fad in magazine-style journalism. You essentially take two narratives:

* A personal anecdotal account to provide human interest and color.

* A relatively dry scientific narrative that explains the larger context.

And then you weave the two together. The human interest side keeps readers engaged enough to wade through the otherwise tedious sciency part. The sciency part makes readers feel they are learning something more practical than just one person's story. The jumps between the two narratives can be done well but often it's pretty arbitrary.

<comment><USER13> I have an affinity towards the second one. I cannot bear ones, which start as novels... and you need to go through a few sections to understand what it is about, if it is a true or fake story, etc.

In this case, the problem is not with the balance between facts and narration (for my taste, it is fine) but with stories being shattered. I read a paragraph and need to guess if it is a new story, if it relates to the previous one, did it happen before or after, etc.

BTW: I did enjoy Memento the movie. But in this one the order was designed carefully.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Has nobody here done snow sports?

Just a few weeks ago I was snowboarding in deep powder snow with temperatures down to -20 C and I was _overheating_ to the point of being seriously worried about heat stroke. I had just a ski jacket and a thin under-layer.

A few days before that I was "freezing to death" while standing still in a queue outside. It was +3 C and I had three layers on!

The level of exercise makes all the difference...

<comment><USER16> Or how about feeling like you're freezing to death in an office if the AC is set to 19C. Been there, and it gets cold real fast because you're not moving.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Surprisingly, no mention of Wim Hoff - The Ice Man > [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6XKcsm3dKs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6XKcsm3dKs)

<comment><USER18> All the videos I've seen about Wim are incredibly frustrating - none of them are remotely technical and none of them go into any kind of depth as to how to actually practice the method - just a bunch of montages of Wim doing Wim stuff and talking about his magic breathing.

Granted, I haven't searched in a few years now, perhaps things have changed....

I want to believe but I don't have enough information to try anything and I don't want to pay for his retreat to find out.

<comment><USER19> > none of them go into any kind of depth as to how to actually practice the > method

Wim is selling his technique ([https://www.wimhofmethod.com/experience-wim- hof](https://www.wimhofmethod.com/experience-wim-hof)), so that's probably why he doesn't go into much detail. Turns out even the transcendence of human boundaries has a well specified monetary value ;))

<comment><USER20> This is not true, the breathing technique is pretty simple.

You just breathe very deep and just relax and breathe out (not fully, just as much as comfortable). You breathe with a rhythm, faster or slower, anyway you like.

After breathing for a while you'll feel tingles or warm/cold sensations all over and then you breathe out and hold. After about 90-180 seconds (some people do more) you inhale, hold the breath for 15 seconds and start breathing normally.

You can immediatelly start another round of breathing.

That's it.

<comment><USER18> I dunno...I was doubtful at first but I had a thought that perhaps what the doctor said about raising adrenaline while lowering cortisol has something to do with activation of the vagus nerve.

Breathing techniques are of course used in various relaxation techniques, this could be an extremely refined version. Perhaps each person has a particularly optimum frequency of breath that must be discovered.

I've noticed that if I hold my breath and flex my core muscles to send blood pressure to my head, while relaxing my upper body, if I breath out after holding that for a few seconds I get a euphoric light headedness on exhaling. But I feel like I'm going to pass out and it's terrifying every time.

Maybe I should try it while jumping into an ice cold lake.

<comment><USER20> The breathing technique is a no BS technique. You just need to get the air in. You have to keep inhaling until you start feeling the effects of raised blood ph levels (dizziness, passing out, tingles etc.). You can breathe through nose or mouth, you can take as many breaths as you want, they have to be deep inhale, not that much of an exhale and that is it.

Optimum frequency is mostly just finding the breath rhythm that will get you to the state you need. You can experiment and try to go further and see what happens (worst case you pass out or start having some seizures).

I also experience a euphoric light headedness after one round. Sometimes I need to do a second round to experience it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Here is the story about Guðlaugur Friðþórsson. It was an incredible feat of will and strength.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu%C3%B0laugur_Fri%C3%B0%C3%BE...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu%C3%B0laugur_Fri%C3%B0%C3%BE%C3%B3rsson)

I remember watching a program where they interviewed him afterwards and from what I remember he had lost an incredible/insane amount of weight during the ordeal.

<comment><USER22> A well-reviewed movie based on him is available for rent on Amazon: [https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Olafur-Darri- Olafsson/dp/B00CWVE...](https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Olafur-Darri- Olafsson/dp/B00CWVEIY4/ref=sr_1_5)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I do wonder how much of this is genetic.

My ancestry is Celtic (Scottish on one side, Irish the other) and I have a high resistance to cold, until I lived with my partner I'd have the the windows ajar even in winter and rarely put the heating on, I'm rarely cold even when cycling long distances on days with the temperature around zero and I wear t-shirts year around, I find jumpers and shirts stifling in any normal temperature room.

I joke that my ancestors evolved for cold drizzle.

<comment><USER24> You're one of _them_!

"They're almost like normal humans, except they have _no knowledge of what it means to be cold._ "

— [http://absurdnotions.org/F1992.html](http://absurdnotions.org/F1992.html)

Of course, there are those _other_ people as well…

[http://absurdnotions.org/an20020702.gif](http://absurdnotions.org/an20020702.gif)

<comment><USER25> Direct link to the first comic referenced: [http://absurdnotions.org/anc70.gif](http://absurdnotions.org/anc70.gif)

> Comic strip characters have a tendency to wear the same clothes all the > time, for the ease of both artist habit and reader recognition. But with > Jay, there's a reason. He's one of them. You personally know at least one. > They're almost like normal humans, except they have no knowledge of what it > means to be cold. Jay doesn't even own a coat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> You can acclimitize to the cold, up to a point.

I occasionally swim in lakes and don't like to swim below 15C, even with a wetsuit. But some people who swim all year round can handle much colder.

I remember having a BBQ with some British and Brazilians guests here in the UK. The British people were wearing t-shirts and shorts and saying how lovely it was. The Brazilians (who came from the very hot North of Brazil and were only visiting the UK briefly) were wearing jackets and shivering.

<comment><USER27> I was thinking of this, too. I swim in the water here down to 6 or 7°C in a 7mm wetsuit. It's cold, but it's very bearable and I enjoy it comfortably for the first 45 minutes or so. If I'm diving a lot (I'm usually spearfishing down to 20m or so) I'll often extend that quite a while due to generated heat. I'm not sure what it is, but the exertion of diving combined with breath-holding turns my body into a furnace.

When I first started doing this, I found the water in summer (around 6°C warmer) incredibly cold. I'd shiver if I was snorkelling for a while because my activity was too low. I struggled with that because being so cold would ruin breath-holds. Now I kind of prefer winter dives, because in summer I get unbearably hot. I constantly need to let water into my suit, and I can swim without it for around 1.5 hours.

That adjustment only took a year or so. People are awesome at adapting to environments in that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The Gauls would fight naked in the snow against their enemies [0].

"This practice was common to the Gauls Aul Cellius Lib ix cap 13 quotes the account of the Gaul who fought with Manlius whom he describes as _nudus practer soutum et gladi 's duos torque atque armillis decoratus;_ and Plutarch in Mario tells us the Cimbri went naked among the snow of the Alps to shew their enemies how much they defied the cold."

[0] [https://books.google.com/books?id=Wl2jgA9j5UkC&pg=PA800&lpg=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=Wl2jgA9j5UkC&pg=PA800&lpg=PA800&dq=gauls+fighting+naked+%22snow%22&source=bl&ots=-2OdoUM9O_&sig=ACfU3U0bNH8cixCFPy54DPyGlvqhayVAag&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjP0aeovYToAhXimq0KHTH_DFkQ6AEwB3oECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=gauls%20fighting%20naked%20%22snow%22&f=false)

</comment><comment><USER5> I hiked the Appalachian trail during the winter with a very low bodyfat percentage. I learned to adjust layers constantly. Even in temperatures down near 0*F, you can become drenched in sweat while climbing a mountain. But once you stop moving (especially if you don't stay dry), you've got less than 5 minutes before you start to shiver uncontrollably, and complex tasks like pitching a tent start to become difficult. The most challenging part was moisture management, because gear never dries when it's below freezing and you're not wearing it.

</comment><comment><USER29> How much of this is just self-selection bias. Some body's are simply more adapted to the cold. I know people with passive metabolism of furnaces, my smart heater doesn't run as often when the my significant other sleeps over. I've seen steam vaporing off some folks who aren't even working that hard in cold gyms. Me, I sweat profusely when exerting myself, would definitely be one of the first to die in a winter military campaign.

<comment><USER30> When I read self-reported stories on the Internet about cold resistance, I remember that ~40% of people are obese. That's a confounding factor. At that amount of fatness, there's substantial insulation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This isn't really an adaptation thing, but on the topic of human bodies and cold: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/300_Club](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/300_Club)

</comment><comment><USER32> I like to think I can stand the cold relatively well, but what always gets me is my ears. The rest of my body will be fine but my ears start hurting in minutes, which then translates into quite the headache.

<comment><USER33> I have the same issue with my ears in cold weather. They start to hurt pretty quick in cold temps, so I try to always either have some small wrap around ear muffs or a beanie. As long as I keep my ears warm and out of cold wind, I'm able to stay comfortable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> > Gasping and panicking, they inhaled water. Friðþórsson, by contrast, managed > to control his breathing. He later described remaining clear-headed > throughout his swim.

I wish the article had gone into Friðþórsson's breathing a bit more. It seems like this and/or his body fat are what kept him alive.

<comment><USER35> You get used to that cold shock, I take a cold shower every day for many many years, and quite frankly I don't feel a "cold shock" anymore, even in winter. It's really just requires a bit of training to get less sensitive to cold; on the other hand I also have a tendency to get warm a lot quicker, which can be a bit annoying sometimes. I keep my house at 18C and no warmer, when many people I know want 21C or sometime more...

<comment><USER36> What's the idea behind getting cold showers? why is it beneficial?

<comment><USER35> Well, nothing scientific than I'm aware of, strictly speaking, but I love the effect.

Right after the shower, you'll get super warm, even in winter. You're system just gets going to equalise your temperature.

Also, you'll be _woken up_ no dithering about in a stupor until your coffee kicks in, it definitely gives you a kick in the backside to get going, so even just for that, it's worth it in my opinion.

And, I _never_ get cold. I can work outside in a t-shirt in winter (UK winter) without feeling any cold.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I lived in Stockholm at the time.We had a night out in central part and eventually I ended up on a train(underground,if I remember correctly, but not even the right one).Fell asleep.Woke up when train was approaching the last stop.They would usually ask everyone to get off and then after 5-10 minutes the train goes back. It was a very Swedish winter with at least -15C if not more.So here I am, standing with my 'not so winter' jacket and nike shoes. It's open type platform,so no walls.I stare at the information screen that shows 8,6,5,4,3,2,... eventually 1 minute left...And goes again to 9,8,7,etc..The train isn't going anywhere for some reason and I'm stuck in the outskirts of Stockholm.No bar or any other place is open. Eventually I ended up spending about 6 hours waiting for the service to continue,while constantly walking around the station.I haven't swore so much in my entire life.At about 8am, the service was up and running again and I could get on a train back to my place.Turns out, there was so much snow on tracks that they couldn't continue until it was cleared.

</comment><comment><USER38> When I was 14 years old I moved from northern Illinois to Hollywood CA and when I told kids there that on a sunny 40º winter day in Illinois we didn't wear coats because it was "warm out" for us.

They thought for sure I was bullshitting them. To be fair, after living in So. Cal for a few years when it fell to 70º on summer evenings I would get the shivers if I was only wearing a T-shirt.

<comment><USER39> Same effect here. After months of -20c, 0c feels like summer.

Spent a few months in the bay area for an internship and was shivering and adding layers at 15c.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Nice article. Having some years of experience in outdoor activities (first sailing, then many solo week-long hikes in the mountains, mostly french Alps but also once in a caribbean tropical rainforest) I got to learn some vital lessons and guess I could share some of it.

Obviously everyone has its own level of resilience in the face of harsh conditions but once you're in, you have to deal with what you have. > "Clothing or equipment is the first line of defense, shelter is second and third is fire," Preparation is key, for hiking I try to minimize my backpack weight while keeping gear for all kind of weather. During one summer hike with nice weather forecast for the week, I indeed had hot and sunny days but also rain, wind, cold temperatures and even a sudden snowstorm.

\- Staying dry really matters, once wet you get cold much faster. \- Sleep really matters. If you can't find a reasonable place or shelter to rest after an exhausting day, your ability to carry on the next day sharply decreases. Learned that on my caribbean trip where I got stuck above a waterfall one evening, was raining, got wet, cold, no place to lie down and rest and had to admit I wouldn't have the strength to climb back the next day. \- When stuck or in a tough spot, remember that under stress you might not think as straight as you could. Do an inventory of your equipment. My first sleepless night in the rain I used my emergency blanket: such a mild protection, took me a day to realize a had a bigger tarp that proved much more useful as a protection against the elements. \- A bright colored jacket helps rescue teams to locate you. (like a red / orange one) \- Have a map of the terrain, learn to orient / situate yourself. Being lost is not the same as facing a difficult position, better not combine those issues ;) \- Better have some way of communication and people aware of your whereabouts. \- When cold, cover your head, you lose up to half your heat there. Extremities (hands, feet) get cold first, waterproof gloves and shoes can really help.

</comment><comment><USER41> Probably time again to post this old article that makes me _feel_ cold (and a bit terrified) every time I read it:

[https://www.outsideonline.com/2152131/freezing- death](https://www.outsideonline.com/2152131/freezing-death)

</comment><comment><USER42> _" Another paper found that people brought very close to the point of hypothermia (their core body temperature was lowered to 35.5C) suffered no decline in cognitive function at all."_

Never give up. Equally, you may be aware, of what is happening, right up until the end.

</comment><comment><USER43> What's remarkable is how easily the human body will fail when exposed to cold, compared to many other animals.

Ducks for example will sleep on open ice as if it was nothing, then idly waddle over to a hole in the ice to sleep some more swimming on the freezing water, occasionally engaging in a bit of food gathering or social interaction.

But if a human survives those conditions with inadequate or compromised tools for more than a few hours we write long form about their feat! It almost seems as if to a human body deprived of tools (clothing, shelter, fire), a freezing cold environment comes surprisingly close to outer space in terms of deadlyness, hours of survival instead of seconds.

<comment><USER44> Cold kills a huge range of cold blooded or tropical animals. Humans fall into the second category, being well adapted to dissipate heat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> It is possible to generate enough heat to prevent frostbite in mild freezing conditions for some hours using a Tibetan thermoregulation technique. They practice this technique in nearly freezing conditions and are required to dry 3 wet soaked towels. It requires much training, patience, and practice to develop this skill. Furthermore, there is a technique to raise the temperature of the extremities as well.

[https://www.buzzworthy.com/monks-raise-body- temperature/](https://www.buzzworthy.com/monks-raise-body-temperature/)

Deliberate shivering of more muscle groups is another idea but unlikely to raise extremity temperatures.

</comment><comment><USER46> Anyone know the rationale of people that make a room freezing with air- conditioning and then wear a jumper in that room to warm up? I know a few people like this and I've always been curious if it's almost like some kind of glitch in their body temperature regulation, like it might be easier for them to regulate their body warmer or colder but not the other way around or something.

</comment><comment><USER47> Has anyone watched The 12th Man? True story about some insane cold resistance in Norway during WW2. Watch it with subtitles!

</comment><comment><USER48> When traveling Tierra del Fuego (Southern tip of South America) I learned about Yaghan people [1] that survived pretty cold winters not wearing much of an essence.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuegians](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuegians)

<comment><USER49> >Tierra del Fuego

The irony was good on these people.

<comment><USER50> The name is because of volcanic activity.

<comment><USER51> Not much volcanic activity in Tierra del Fuego. AFAIK it was named after the many fires of the natives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Another interesting read about effects of hypothermia is the Dyatlov pass incident:

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

</comment><comment><USER53> I wonder why the body needs to move to stay warm. Seems like a waste of energy. If I were to "design" the body, I'd make automatic heat generation one of my MVP features.

</comment><comment><USER54> That's insane to me. Growing up in sunny California, I've never experienced anything below 40°F. And 68° is freezing cold to me. Maybe I'm just unhealthy.

</comment><comment><USER55> I'm on the other side of the ledger. It's 40C (104F) and I barely blink. Part of living in Texas I suppose...</comment>


What happened to Marc Andressen's past blog postings? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pmarca.com/archives.html

<comment><USER2> He should publish them as a book.

I loved the last chapter of his start-up guide: "Title: how to hire a CEO for your start-up. Body: Just don't. If there's no one among the founders who can be CEO, leave ASAP."

It would be awesome if he started writing again.

<comment><USER3> You think Eric Schmidt has done a bad job leading Google? You really think two guys with zero experience even working for, much less leading, a company wouldn't have slipped up by now? I think it very wise Larry and Serge enabled Schmidt to take the helm.

Andressen got a bum deal with Netscape. Their VC appointed leadership, IMHO, was, uh, lacking. But hey, them's was the early days.

<comment><USER4> In my judgment, Eric joined long after Google was in startup mode.

<comment><USER3> yes, that was my point. He wasn't a founder and has done a great job. My point was simply that I disagree with Andressen in that your job as a founder and to investors is to keep an open mind. If you have what it takes to be CEO, do it. If not, acknowledge it and find someone who can.

<comment><USER5> Then your point is moot. The context is _startup_. Eric does a good job for a _post-startup_ , which is already very profitable with a revenue of $86m in 2001 (<http://investor.google.com/fin_data2003.html>). As a matter of fact, many think that Eric is more "lucky" than "good", given his track record at Novell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It says in the about section: "This blog is on temporary hiatus -- will be back soon with a new design and fresh content!"

<comment><AUTHOR> i think it always said that, but had the articles present. why would he take down those articles?

<comment><USER6> Oh ok, I didn't know it always said that. I thought maybe it's some side effect of redesigning the site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I loved his articles. tried to find them, but realized all of the archives were completely gone. Anyone knows why, or has an archive?

<comment><USER7> <http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://blog.pmarca.com>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> He hasn't taken all of them down:

[http://blog.pmarca.com/2009/07/introducing-our-new- venture-c...](http://blog.pmarca.com/2009/07/introducing-our-new-venture- capital-firm-andreessen-horowitz.html)

Given the inaugural nature of that post and the new design, I'd say the site is being repurposed.</comment>


Are Placebos Really Sugar Pills? - <AUTHOR> http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/01/are-placebos-really-sugar-pills.html <comment><USER2> Having worked in the pharma industry, this article is complete bullshit.

For double and triple blind (the third blind comes from not even the pharma company knowing the blinding details until after the trial) placebo design is an extraordinarily complex undertaking. A placebo must match the drug in physical appearance, taste, texture, density, state (liquid/solid/gas), and anticipated side effects. Any material difference in any of these categories renders the trial _completely and totally meaningless_ , because at a minimum it unblinds the doctors on the ground.

Pointing out a few random oversights out of the thousands of clinical trials that occur every year is not proof of evil on the part of pharma; it is a testament to the care that goes into their design. It represents a defect rate virtually unmatched in any other industry.

But sure, go ahead and advocate irresponsible alarmism over a non-issue, as if though drug trials aren't already expensive enough, retarding scientific progress and costing millions of lives from drugs that would have been otherwise developed.

<comment><USER3> I think you may have missed the point. You have stated that the article 'pointed out a few random oversights', but the actual point of the article is that _there is no data_. How can anyone, including you, know how effective the choice of placebo ingredients are if they aren't disclosed?

It doesn't seem an undue burden to ask that the placebo ingredients be documented so that their effect on the study, which is critical by any measure, can be understood. How can a separate group reproduce the results of a study if they don't have this type of information?

What you seem to have said is - trust us. We won't tell you what's going on, you can't evaluate how well we are doing, but this is a totally hard problem so don't worry about it. This is disingenuous when the drug companies have vested interests in the outcome of these studies.

If the drug companies are truly doing such a great job, then they should be recognized for the excellent work. The only way to do that is to release the ingredients used in the creation of placebos.

<comment><USER4> I don't think he's saying "trust us", he's saying "this is an issue that everyone knows about, thus it's a non-issue".

When you submit a drug for approval at the FDA, you need to list in exacting detail exactly how trials were run, including how they were blinded. The ingredients and form of the placebo are critical for this.

The paper referenced in this blog post examined journal articles to determine if the composition of the placebo was reported. Journal article are notoriously lacking in details and they have to be since no one want to read an article with pages upon pages of details.

If his comment was "Hey, you guys who write papers on clinical trials, it would be awesome if you'd list the placebo composition, since I'd be more likely to believe your findings" I would say "fair point".

But the blog post says "Hey! Drug companies are trying to pull a fast on all of you! Beware of what's in your medicine cabinet" which is a completely ridiculous statement. This "missing information" is available to the people that matter (the FDA).

This is truly an example of making a mountain out of a molehill.

<comment><USER5> > _But the blog post says "Hey! Drug companies are trying to pull a fast on > all of you!…"_

Actually what it says is that placebo ingredients should be documented in studies, and regulated by the FDA. Why is that such heresy? If placebos are sugar pills, they don't need regulation. If they are designed to cause side effects, _they are drugs_. And that will skew the results of the drug tests, too, and as he describes in the olive oil example, not always in favor of the drug company.

<comment><USER6> That's not all the blog post says. Your implicit summary is inaccurate.

The blog overtly implies that drug companies use active placebos to minimize advertised side effects, and later suggests that active placebos be outlawed.

In fact, active placebos are a requirement for drug trials, because without them, the trial can't be effectively blinded.

<comment><USER5> He doesn't simply call for active placebos to be outlawed. He lists several problems with the current system and then says:

 _FDA needs to review its policies on placebos and either outlaw "active placebos" or rigorously define acceptable conditions for their use._

That's like saying "The US Govt either needs to outlaw medicines OR rigorously define acceptable conditions for their use." Which is not a statement most reasonable people would disagree with… hence the FDA. Everybody would obviously choose the second measure. It's a classic persuasion technique: give an extreme choice so the other choice will seem more reasonable. It gets attention. Nobody is going to outlaw active placebos.

As for overtly implying drug companies manipulate their results, he had a small handful of examples and one of them is a _counter example_ where the drug company looks to be _undermining_ its own results by using a too-good placebo (olive oil) that made its drug look _useless_.

Finally he raises the question: If you kick people out of the study when they improve on placebo, are you still actually testing against placebo?

How can you know, if the trials don't document what's _in_ the placebo, and the FDA doesn't regulate it?

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure we read the same article. The one I read said, and this is the whole graf:

 _FDA needs to review its policies on placebos and either outlaw "active placebos" or rigorously define acceptable conditions for their use._

That seems like a profoundly ignorant argument. The article doesn't account for the need to blind studies. Why does it come across as credible to you?

<comment><USER7> Why do blind studies need the regulation on active placebos to be non rigorous?

<comment><USER6> Who are you arguing with? Surely not me. But the case you're making _isn't the case the blog post made_. The blog post suggests, with varying levels of overtness, that there is something shady about active placebos.

<comment><USER7> I'm talking about the quote you used on your comment. That quote _by itself_ does not sound particularly outrageous or ignorant.

You should have chosen a different line to illustrate how shady the author thinks active placebos are.

<comment><USER6> Outlawing active placebos might be a reasonable course of action?

<comment><USER8> Outlawing active placebos would actually be very foolish. Up to 90% of patients and 100% of physicians have been found to have broken blinds in trials of tricyclics, almost certainly because of the side effects. The original article is extremely weak in failing to address this... in fact, drug companies really should be adding ingredients with side effects to their placebos, but won't because it increases the complexity and reduces the statistical power of the trials they run.

<comment><USER9> Agreed, so change advertising requirements. Instead of "compared to a placebo" (which is highly misleading in this case), make the drug companies disclose side effects differently. "In clinical trials, this drug had the following incidents of side effects... An active placebo intended to cause anticipated side effects had the following incidents...."

This preserves all of what you can currently get, but it frames the issue so that the average individual does not assume that an on-par comparison means all side effects are placebo effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This seems like a ridiculous blog post.

Only 6% of clinical studies list what their placebo was, so the conclusion from that is that there is a concerted effort by drug companies to unscrupulously modified the outcomes of their studies by choosing biologically active placebos. That's a bit of a stretch.

Typically what is done for a study is that drug company will manufacture the drug for the study in tablet form, complete with fillers and binders (inert ingredients used to make the pill). Then they will manufacture the same tablet without the active ingredient. The drug has to be identical in shape and color or else the study isn't really blinded, physicians could tell that patients were getting two different drug. That's the reason why drug companies make their own placebos.

Also, the example of using olive oil instead of clofibrate has two possible explanations: 1) clofibrate is soluble in olive oil so they likely gave one set of patients clofibrate +olive oil and the other just olive oil (negating the effect of olive oil) OR the study was just poorly done (yes it happens) and it would be obviously to anyone familiar with clinical trials (including the people at the FDA).

I could go on, but it doesn't really seem necessary. The article speaks for itself.

<comment><USER10> They should list placebo ingredients after the trial is done so it's possible to duplicate the trial and get the same results, right?

If you don't provide enough information in your paper to repeat the experiment (and get the same results!!), then it's not good science. Good scientific studies need to be repeatable and need to provide enough information to do it.

And even if people don't want to repeat the full experiment, being able to review the details of how it was done will help them spot mistakes. You can't have things like "peer review" without saying what you did.

So this is a serious problem, even if the rest is breathless hype.

<comment><USER4> If your argument is that journal article should include more details so that they are reproducible, that's fine but there is no need to pick on the ones published on clinical trials. I would say it's a rare paper that is so exhaustive in detail that you can easily reproduce the results. Many times I've had to contact original authors to get more details. You'd be amazed at what gets left out.

<comment><USER10> Then it's a rare paper that is good science. This would not really shock me but it doesn't make it any better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It appears that a lot of participants on Hacker News are interested in the role of placebos in treatment trials. I have some recommendations for background articles on the use of placebos in clinical trials and the pitfalls sometimes encountered in interpreting results from such trials. The articles are all by expert authors who practice frequently writing on this topic for general readers.

August 2009 "The Rise of Placebo Medicine" by Steven Novella, M.D.

[http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/the-rise-of- pl...](http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/the-rise-of-placebo- medicine/)

December 2010 "Placebo Effects without Deception? Well, Not Exactly" by David Gorski, M.D.

[http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/placebo- effect...](http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/placebo-effects- without-deception-well-not-exactly/)

January 2013 "Is acupuncture as effective as antidepressants? Part 2. Blinding readers who try to get an answer" by James Coyne, Ph.D.

[http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/is- acupuncture...](http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/is-acupuncture- as-effective-as-antidepressants-part-2-blinding-readers-who-try-to-get-an- answer/)

There are many more good articles about placebos and how they are used in clinical trials on the site where these articles come from. The issue the blogger whose post is kindly submitted here seems so upset about is simply an issue of making a placebo (sham) treatment indistinguishable from the treatment under investigation, so that doctors and patients are properly "blinded" during the trial. Another comment already posted here on HN has pointed out that the FDA does oversee what ingredients are put into placebos, whether or not those detailed ingredients are published in a peer-reviewed research study. The blogger's concerns are legitimate, but not proportionate to the actual problem.

Disclosure: I have been a subject of FDA-regulated medical trials. I was very impressed by thoroughness of data collection in those trials, and by my inability to distinguish whether I was receiving placebo or genuine medicine in one of those trials. My oldest son, now a hacker for a start-up, had work experience while in college at a medical device company, and he was impressed that every line of computer code he wrote during his summer job was reviewed line-by-line by FDA computer scientists as part of the review process for the medical device he worked on.

<comment><USER12> It makes no sense that the FDA receives extra information that is not available to peer reviewers. Why would that be?

<comment><USER13> The purpose of the FDA is quite different from that of a journal; why would you expect the information needed for each to perform its function to be the same? Among other issues, how much time to you expect a journal reviewer to spend vetting a study, compared to the amount of effort that the FDA spends reviewing the same study?

<comment><USER14> Because how can you have peer review of a study if an essential and complicated part of the study is not published. If only the pharmaceutical company and the FDA review placebo technique, then the study has not really been peer reviewed and placebo techniques are a mysterious black box.

<comment><USER13> Is placebo design actually complicated? Other posts have indicated that you just have the manufacturer of the drug leave the active ingredient out of the normal formulation (so that all fillers, etc. are identical). If this is an important but well-understood aspect of study design (and ultimately vetted by the FDA), then a reviewer's time is better spent looking at the novel or error-prone aspects of the study.

Is there any evidence that poor placebo design is a problem in practice, or is this a theoretical concern?

<comment><USER14> There is probably not much evidence because that which would constitute evidence is held effectively in secret. There is no way for the scientific community to look for flaws in methodology. Flaws in research methodologies are often found, sometimes years later, so it's to be expected that at least some placebos are making studies inaccurate perhaps dangerously so, and it's also to be expected that we will never know which studies are compromised since the data is not published publicly.

Yes, placebo design is extremely complicated and often involves active ingredients intended to simulate side effects and treatment experience without treatment effects.

There is quite a bit written in the comments here.

For instance, it would be quite easy for a company to fake efficacy accidentally or intentionally by using a placebo that inhibited natural healing or even made the treated condition worse. The control group would fare worse than the treated group, and the drug could advance toward the market. There is a massive economic incentive for this sort of cheating, and I don't think we can presume pharmaceutical companies are above economic incentives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> His cited example of a placebo that could skew data is olive oil, which by reducing heart disease would make the drug appear less effective than it might actually be.

Pointing out a study where the pharma company might have used a placebo that made their drug harder to approve is hardly in keeping with the insinuation that they're using placebos for "disturbing" ends.

Seems more like a case of "throw all the mud and hope some of it sticks" to me. Sorry.

<comment><USER16> More importantly: if the tested drug can't beat olive oil on the very thing that the drug is meant to treat, then why should it be approved at all?

(Drugs should be tested against the best existing alternative treatment, not merely a placebo. We are not interested in whether a new drug has a non-zero effect - but whether it is an improvement on the state of the art in some way.)

<comment><USER17> It might be an improvement on the state of the art in some other way. For example, a new antibiotic might be less effective than existing antibiotics, but have no cross-resistance with them and therefore be useful in treating antibiotic-resistant strains in the future (the magainin case), or a new antipsychotic might be less effective than existing antipsychotics for average patients, but more effective or less damaging for a few. Finally, you might be able to get synergistic effects by combining the drug with the best existing alternative treatment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This blog seems to be rather senselessly hyperbolic and misleading. For example, it attributes an anecdote in which HIV patients are "dropping like flies" due to lactose intolerance to the research paper it cites. According to other sources [1] [2] the paper actually discusses a situation in which cancer patients were administered a lactose placebo in which the author speculates their predisposition towards lactose intolerance could have influenced the study. The gap between the two situations could hardly be larger.

 _Certain placebos, they add, may skew results in favor of the active drug. The researchers referenced a trial for a drug used to treat anorexia linked with cancer in which a lactose placebo was used. Since lactose intolerance is common among cancer patients, the fact that some suffered stomach problems from the placebo may have made the actual drug look more beneficial._

[1] [http://articles.latimes.com/2010/oct/18/news/la-heb- placebo-...](http://articles.latimes.com/2010/oct/18/news/la-heb- placebo-20101018)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo- controlled_studies#Pla...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo- controlled_studies#Placebo_ingredients)

</comment><comment><USER19> This reminded me of a very good Wired article from a couple of years ago, "Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why" - [http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/17-09/ff_placebo...](http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/17-09/ff_placebo_effect?currentPage=all)

</comment><comment><USER20> From the article: _It's inconceivable (to me, at least) that there are no laws requiring drug companies to list placebo ingredients._

From CFR 21 Part 312.23 (a)(7)(iv)(c): _A brief general description of the composition, manufacture, and control of any placebo used in a controlled clinical trial._ [is required to be supplied for an Investigational New Drug Application]

What is the difference? It seems the law clearly states that for new drugs, you must list the composition of your placebo to the FDA. It would seem the article is mistaken. I am not a lawyer nor do I work in the pharmaceutical industry. I just did a google search for "placebo composition site:fda.gov"

</comment><comment><USER21> Ben Goldacre says that testing against placebo is sub-optimal. You're testing that a medication is better than nothing. What you want is a medication that tests better than whatever we're currently using.

I don't know how that fits in with blinding everyone involved. As abtinf and refurb mention, designing placebo is a difficult process.

And you don't need to include anything to create side-effects; people taking sugar pills will happily report having a range of side effects.

<comment><USER22> "What you want is a medication that tests better than whatever we're currently using."

This is also done, depends on the trial. For example, new vaccines are often tested against the existing one(s).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is not by any means my field of study but i do agree that placebo components should always be disclosed in order to turn these kind of tests more transparent.

However, how can we prove that something is 100% biologically inert? We can't account for all the unknown effects, is there any such 'ingredient'? I guess that at least the used placebo should be proven to not affect directly anything directly related to the hypothesis.

<comment><USER24> It doesn't appear that anyone actually knows about the field here as this is really a non-issue for a simple reason (I chose you to reply to because you were at the bottom).

First of all, most immporant studies don't use a placebo because it would unethical when there are standard treatments out there already and you have to show that your new drug is just as good or better than those treatments (the proper terms are supperior vs. non-inferior trials).

But considering trials that do use a placebo - the whole point is to prove that their drug is superior to the placebo. If anything, when they design the placebo, it would have structurally similar molecules that would give the same side effects, and potentially the same results <\-- which is key. A research DOES NOT WANT the placebo to do as well as their drug. The placebo can only hurt their results, not help them cheat.

You could also argue that since it's not regulated, maybe the active component does actual harm to make the test drug look better! No. There are too many studies showing what the controlled group should look like (whether they are on a placebo or on nothing at all).

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> As an aside, sugars aren't biologically inert either.

<comment><USER26> So, is there _anything_ that could be said to be biologically inert in any and every scenario?

<comment><USER27> Chalk?

<comment><USER28> Calcium, surely..

<comment><USER29> Calcium can interact with a number of other chemicals, potentially negatively (for the surrounding organism). Although doses are probably important in judging that.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_metabolism#Interaction_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_metabolism#Interaction_with_other_chemicals)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> What this article leads me to think is that we need to legally protect the word placebo. It seems grossly misleading to use the word placebo to describe non biologically inert ingredients. To do so is to lie and nothing more.

<comment><USER31> Just look for homeopathic remedies then. Guaranteed not to have any active ingredients.

<comment><USER32> That's not strictly true. Homeopathic remedies do often include small amounts of alcohol or sugar.

<comment><USER33> unless it's homeopathic alcohol :P

<http://homeopathicvodka.com/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The blog title is "Are Placebos Really Sugar Pills?". Was "Or Something Worse?" editorialized on? The thrust of the article isn't that placebos are bad, it's that they are inert and not regulated or reported on consistently.

</comment><comment><USER35> It would be interesting to do placebo vs. placebo trials (telling patient A he's getting a specific drug and giving him a placebo instead, and telling patient B he's getting another drug which treats the same condition, and also giving him a placebo).

i.e. would you subjectively report more pain relief when given ibuprofen (placebo) vs. vicodin (placebo).

But, pesky IRBs :(

</comment><comment><USER36> <http://imgur.com/a/7Vfnc>

Here are some Alzheimer placebo samples (pictures) from Pfizer, handed out to doctors in Switzerland. Sorry for the bad quality. Pictures taken with a phone.

</comment><comment><USER37> is this like saying: we use the metric system (small print: but our 0 cm point starts at 50 cm)?

</comment><comment><USER38> Aren't the side effects mimicked so that participants won't see the lack of them and then know that they're taking the placebo which will defeat the double blind study?

For example, if you're testing fish oil, you wouldn't use a sugar pill since it's easy to know what you're taking by looking at it. You would use something like olive oil.

<comment><USER39> Indeed. It is well known that SSRIs studies were biased because of this, because SSRIs have a lot of early side effects, which break the blinding. Knowing that you're in the treatment branch increases the placebo effect.

That being said, the opacity of the manufacture process is concerning.

Studies with active placebos should have a third branch with inert placebos, to assess the incidence of side effects.

<comment><USER40> That presents massive ethical issues. One would have to knowingly _not_ give subjects a drug that we know helps them (i.e., the current standard of care).

<comment><USER41> There are no ethical issues.

1\. Study participants are told that some of them will receive a "sham" (placebo) treatment. Participation is voluntary.

2\. It is not known whether the drug they are testing is effective or comparable to the current standard of care. Determining that is the purpose of the study.

<comment><USER4> This is not correct and not currently accepted policy by the FDA.

Take oncology drugs for example. Let's say you come up with a great new drug to treat Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL). Currently approved drugs already are very effective, pushing overall survival to close to a decade.

If you're a drug company, there is zero chance you'd get approved (by the independent IRB board who monitor ethical considerations) to run an NHL trial using a placebo. Even if patients agreed to take part in the trial, it would be unethical to deny effective treatments for a potentially fatal disease.

Hence, the FDA has softer data and efficacy requirements for oncology therapies. There is no requirement for a placebo arm unless there is no currently effective treatment available.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Text to Photo-Realistic Image Synthesis with Generative Adversarial Networks - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.03242 <comment><USER2> Some interesting limitations here, but overall great work. The output is only 256x256, which doesn't seem useful in the short run. It would be interesting to see if there was another deep learning network that could fill in the pixels and net a higher resolution. It also looks like it uses models specifically trained for that given category (i.e. birds, flowers). I wonder how it would fair trying to visualize a distinct animal / flower that we only have a written description of.

</comment><comment><USER3> The Github page shows a nice overview and some examples: [https://github.com/hanzhanggit/StackGAN](https://github.com/hanzhanggit/StackGAN). Interestingly it seems to struggle with the birds' legs (e.g. merging them with branches, blurring them or just not generating them). Is this is a problem with the size of the feature or the colors or ...? I know very little about this field but I find it fascinating.

<comment><USER4> The Appendix of the pdf - [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1612.03242](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1612.03242) has more examples, including living rooms.</comment></comment>


Don't be stupid: Grasp SOLID - <AUTHOR> http://nikic.github.com/2011/12/27/Dont-be-STUPID-GRASP-SOLID.html <comment><USER2> "But honestly: Most of the code being written around the globe is an unmaintainable, unreusable mess."

Yeah it is, and that's completely fine because most software is written to solve a particular problem and doesn't need to be reused. SOLID and GRASP have great applications but honestly for most software YAGNI is a much better principle to follow. If you're building libraries, or frameworks SOLID and GRASP are essential, if you're building applications your software is likely mostly glue. I don't worry too much about reusing glue.

This is what you get when you folow SOLID and GRASP all the time: [http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/cicsts/v2r3/index.j...](http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/cicsts/v2r3/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.cics.ts23.doc/dfhpj/dfhpj7b.htm)

All you really need to know about GRASP is that it advocates the factory anti- pattern. If you're using the factory pattern you've likely chosen a language that couldn't figure out the separation of concerns between allocation and initialization and has STUPID baked into the core of it.

<comment><USER3> Factories are a perfectly good solution to the problem of "I have numerous possible ways of carrying out task X, and I want to use one of them that will not be specified until the application is running."

So if I want to write some input to a user-defined place then giving the user the list of options and then passing the option to a WriterFactory to give me the correct Writer makes sense. You have to put the choice of which Writer to use in different scenarios somewhere, so why not a class by itself?

<comment><USER2> Factories are a good way to solve the problem of not being able to pass a function that creates an object. They're generally an OO kludge around passing an anonymous function, because for some reason passing a function needs to be insanely difficult. And so another class is created to manage the thing that the constructor was supposed to do in the first place (manage the creation of objects) but if you called it the constructor pattern they'd have to admit the language was broken.

OO languages that support passing functions generally don't have very many instances of the factory pattern, and languages that have abstracted allocation of memory and initialization of memory have even fewer instances of it.

That's why I consider the factory pattern to be an anti-pattern; you've chosen a language that's ill suited to the task you are solving and instead of fixing the real problem (can't pass functions that create objects in a reasonable amount of effort) you're inventing kludges.

I've only seen a handful of cases where accepting a parameter of type () -> T or x -> T doesn't solve the factory pattern issue.

<comment><USER3> I don't understand, I'm afraid. How does function passing negate the need to choose between multiple implementors of an interface?

<comment><USER2> The interface of a factory pattern is generally a single method, so most factory patterns are an interface with a single function.

Normally a factory class looks like this:

      class MyFooFactory : FooFactory {
        Foo createFoo() { return new MyKindOfFoo(); }
      }

createFoo has a type of () -> Foo, that is to say a function that takes no parameters an returns an object of class Foo. Sometimes the pattern is String -> Foo, but the more general case is () -> T

When you need to use a factory you'll create it and then pass it to the object like:

      FooFactory f = new MyFooFactory();
      FooUser fu = new FooUser(f);
      fu.doSomething();

And FooUser will have some method in it that does something like

      public doSomething() {
      Foo foo = fooFactory.createFoo();
      // does something with the foo.
      }

If FooUser took a parameter of () -> Foo instead of FooFactory your code would now look like this:

      FooUser fu = new FooUser(() => new MyKindOfFoo());
      fu.doSomething();

<comment><USER3> Yes, in the case where a Factory class contains one method that takes no parameters and just contains a "new" call, you can get rid of the class and pass in the method.

I was more thinking of the kind of thing I mentioned in my earlier comment, where you have an IWriter interface, a bunch of different classes that implement it, and a Factory class that passes back the correct one for different situations. I completely agree that a whole class that does nothing but call "new" is complete overkill, and almost certainly just there to fit into a pattern because someone thinks that Patterns Are Awesome.

The kind of thing I'm thinking of is this:

[https://github.com/andrewducker/FeedThisToThat/blob/master/F...](https://github.com/andrewducker/FeedThisToThat/blob/master/FeedThisToThat/src/feedthistothat/Writers/WriterFactory.java)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Doing things like avoiding singletons and concrete class references (tight coupling) at all costs IS premature optimization! It's just premature architecture optimization, rather than performance optimization.

Sure, if you know ahead of time that some construct is going to be trouble, don't use it. BUT, if you're writing "Mom's Recipe Book", I don't see the point in avoiding a simple singleton DB class just because you fancy that someday you won't be able to handle the spectacular load that Mom's Recipe Book is sure to generate.

The "avoid singletons and tight coupling always" argument invariably leads to J2EE-esque code and, before you know it, you find yourself writing a DBFactoryConnectionInterfaceProxyFactory or something.

I'm not saying this advice is always bad, just that taken religiously it can lead to code that is over-engineered for the task at hand.

Lastly, let's say Mom's Recipe Book DOES become the next Twitter. What's wrong with removing the singleton then? If you are replacing one bit of boilerplate code with another, grep and replace across the project works just fine, doesn't it?

<comment><USER3> It's about testing. How are you going to write tests for your code when calling the SaveMyLovelyChocolateBrownieRecipe method invokes a database call?

Having the database connection passed in to the RecipeSaver class means that you can pass in a fake one instead, and test it.

<comment><USER5> In my world, we solve the "what if it needs to write to the DB" problem by... having a DB.

Seriously, creating a test database as part of the test run, and populating it from fixtures and letting the code interact with it the way it will in production is actually very, very simple.

This is, essentially, the YAGNI principle; sure, in theory I can come up with a use case where that code needs to talk to something that isn't a database, but A) it's not going to happen in real life and B) re-architecting _everything_ in the name of that possibility is premature architecture astronautics that will cost much more time and effort than just saying "we aren't gonna need that" and moving on.

<comment><USER6> It's not just DB. What about 3rd-party Web Services (Facebook, Amazon, etc).

Also, can you run the whole thing in your continuous integration build? Setting up Database to run on a CI server sometime is problematic (depending on how you setup your CI, if you're using Amazon EC2 instances...). Rails solved this problem to some extend by using SQLite but one needs to install + configure SQLite for various machines.

Speed is another thing. The more you write tests that hits the DB, your automation-test will take a performance hit and you'll have to do something eventually.

What if you have caching by utilizing some sort of caching server? that needs to be installed and configured as well.

What if the only way to test the code is to deploy it to the server and write raw HTTP GET/POST because those are the only entry point?

In 2011, where there are better tools and known practice, I don't think we should labelled some of these practices as YAGNI and Premature Optimization.

First of all, it's not YAGNI if you have to refactor or write another framework, tools, or some sort of patches in order to have an acceptable build time.

Second, it's not Premature Optimization if the tools, the libraries, and the environment provide you with ways to implement them in no time.

I think the excuse of Premature Optimization is used a lot in a context where it doesn't mean what it supposed to mean.

<comment><USER5> _I think the excuse of Premature Optimization is used a lot in a context where it doesn't mean what it supposed to mean._

Which may be why I didn't use the phrase.

In all seriousness, though, I can sit down and come up with dozens -- heck, hundreds -- of "well, what if" cases. And you know what? I don't care about 'em.

I went through the phase of abstractly decoupling everything to the Nth degree because of "what if" cases. And I paid for it; I was overlooking simple and often more elegant solutions to actual problems in favor of complex solutions to hypothetical problems.

Does using a real database instead of decoupled MockableWriteableDataStorageInterface mean my tests take a few extra seconds to run? Yup.

Does the time I'd save running tests by writing and passing in a MockableWriteableDataStorageInterfaceImplementation outweigh the increased complexity and thus mental load of the codebase? Unlikely.

And, importantly: does testing with something that isn't a real database potentially cover up bugs that only happen when I use a real database? Yup, and _that_ happens often enough that the whole mockable thing just goes out the window right there.

Anyway. I think most developers go through this phase, too, and I think it's similar to the way people spend disproportionate amounts of time worrying about dramatic but unlikely things (shark attacks, terrorists, etc.) rather than dealing with the mundane but extremely likely things right in front of them.

<comment><USER6> Those "what ifs" had hit me in a few projects already. This is why spring-test module from Spring Framework is very helpful if you're doing Java projects.

I don't have to deploy "war" to Tomcat or Jetty. I can mock the Request and Response object.

We do have integration-tests that test specifically component that interact with databases. But there are another set of unit-tests that test the business/process workflow and assume the database will return something relevant. We do this because we want to write many tests with focus specifically to business/process workflow related code, not the database layer.

This way we can write more tests without paying the taxes of: performance and setup (when you have a huge database models, it's not fun to prepare the models for each-single-unit-test that has to touch the database even though the purpose of that unit-test is not to test the database).

So far this model has worked well for us (i.e.: no more excuses that build takes too long or writing unit-tests take too long due to the setup both infrastructure and preparing huge model).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have no idea how the 'optimization' example could be considered as such. The advice to not engage in premature optimization is often repeated, but it's not really illustrated here. No comment on the rest of the article.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you have faith in any time estimating system? - <AUTHOR> Is there a good reason to force engineers to estimate how long a ticket will take to complete? Personally, 90% of the time I'm just making things up if I need to estimate how long a feature will take to implement. The only time I'm confident is if I can visualize the line of code that I know is causing a bug. In that case the ticket usually takes 5 - 10 minutes to fix. But sometimes I'm wrong, and that line is causing a problem because of a bigger flaw I didn't realize. Can I just admit I have no idea and just write down random numbers that aren't obviously wrong?<p>Do time estimates truly exist just to make business side employees feel good? Do you see a future where companies can negotiate funding without relying on this inherently flawed (and fraudulent?) tool? <comment><USER2> Stop estimating single points and start estimating ranges. How long will something take in the best case scenario, the typical case, and the worst case. That way your project manager can capture the risk, which is arguably a much more important factor than time. If a task has a high impact on the project and there's a big difference between the best case and worst case times (eg it's a high risk) then it needs more attention and resources.

</comment><comment><USER3> My experience with time estimates is that they generally do not work well. Estimating complexity (as in story points) works to a certain degree, but it's only a very rough measure. Time estimates can work when the project scope and/or budget is flexible. Then you have a chance to make ends meet within the time estimate you provided, but I'd consider that not being within the scope of your question.

In my experience, the desire for a time estimate often stems from an underlying desire for control (mostly over a budget). That desire is understandable. As an example, if you put yourself in the shoes of a customer wanting your car repaired, you will most likely have a strong desire to know what it will cost before the actual repair is carried out. That desire is justified for a number of reasons, the most important one being that you need a basis for a decision for or against the repair. It wouldn't make much sense to invest more than the car is worth, for instance.

Now, it's not always possible to state a price, especially if what you're building (or repairing) is subject to uncertainty. In that case, I'd recommend that you provide your customer (or boss or investor) with another measure of control. In agile development, the easiest thing you can do is shorten your cycles and give them full transparency over your progress and the ability to stop or change direction at each product increment. This would be analogous to the repair shop offering you a phone call after they got a better diagnosis of the problem for which you paid only a small amount and then you get the chance to decide again, maybe with a better estimate of the overall repair cost.

</comment><comment><USER4> In forcing the estimate you must mentally walk through the process to execute. This process alone is believed to improve outcomes (reduce procrastination, identify roadblocks, prioritize among other tasks). I would say the estimate is directional, and serves other purposes.

</comment><comment><USER5> I like the default time tracking that is used in the FogBugz bug tracker. Everyone estimates how long it'll take to finish each bug, and records how long it actually took. Of course these are all self-reported, so they can be wrong in any number of ways.

So when you ask FogBugz when the next milestone will be completed, it doesn't just add up the estimates. Instead, for each ticket it finds similar tickets with similar estimates, and picks from that list one of the actual reported times. It then adds up those reported times to make a guess at a real estimate. It then runs the same simulation 100 times to show you how likely you are to hit various dates.

</comment><comment><USER6> For projects where an estimate is very important (not pointing every story in a sprint), I will do an 80% confidence bounds where on one end everything goes perfectly, and the other where everything goes horribly wrong. For both, it should only be outside the particular bound in 10% of possible worlds. Then I take the geometric mean of the two values.

This has worked with pretty good consistency in the past. I believe that a good deal of the value comes from factoring in the estimate where everything goes wrong. You can also then specifically work to prevent the things you've thought about going wrong from occurring.

</comment><comment><USER7> > Can I just admit I have no idea and just write down random numbers that > aren't obviously wrong?

Seems fair enough to me, probably because thats what I do. At the end of the day nobody knows how long it will take unless they can tell the future.

I think scope is something my estimates are missing, for example if some one says their roof is leaking they may just need a broken tile fixed or they might need a new roof, without a proper scope of what I'm estimating the estimate is too open ended.

</comment><comment><USER8> Would you accept a random number from your car mechanic when you bring your vehicle in the shop for repairs?

<comment><USER9> > Would you accept a random number from your car mechanic when you bring your > vehicle in the shop for repairs?

So are you saying we should amortize the complex cases by overestimating how long the basic tasks take?

That can work for a mechanic because it's 100+ standard cases to every complex case.

<comment><USER8> Are you advocating to simply spout out a random number when asked for an estimate on how long it would take to implement a feature in an application?</comment></comment></comment>


When and How to Use Masks (WHO) - <AUTHOR> https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/advice-for-public/when-and-how-to-use-masks <comment><USER2> They lost me at the first sentence: "If you are healthy, you only need to wear a mask if you are taking care of a person with suspected 2019-nCoV infection."

Without being tested, how can you possibly know if you are healthy?..

What a harmful, irresponsible guidance!</comment>


Ask HN: Where is your favorite place to get custom apparel for your startup? - <AUTHOR> Please list a few if applicable (e.g. best value, best for hoodies, best for t-shirt, etc.) <comment><USER2> Depends, china or bangladesh or even india</comment>


Wanted: Software that helps you make money  - <AUTHOR> http://softwarejim.blogspot.com/2008/01/wanted-software-that-helps-you-make.html

<comment><USER2> That's easy. My wife has PhD in Statistics and works for a large bank. She spends her life building predictive models using archetypes. She has made hundreds of millions in revenue for the bank but now is working with the Australia Federal Police to detect both fraud and money laundering.

According to Mastercard her bank has one of the lowest fraud rates in the world.

Most large companies could increase their revenue by millions if they only knew how to understand the data they already have. It would only take 1 or 2 seriously smart people but the limiting factor is the ___political_ __will to do it.

<comment><AUTHOR> gotta agree - the common problem for any serious BI implementation is getting the executive buy in.

<comment><USER3> Wanted: executives that want software that helps you make money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think that anything that accelerates the product development process would fit into this category: e.g. CAD/CAM, collaboration tools, prototyping or software development tools.

I accept Peter Drucker's thesis that a "firm has only two real functions, marketing and innovation, and everything else is cost," and would broaden the "make money" definition to include innovation.

As a side benefit many of these innovation tools also help to cut costs, although if there is unmet internal demand for a function you may actually get more usage and not affect total cost that much. Lowering the marginal cost of an activity can increase its frequency. In other words, even though the transaction cost is lowered, the total amount of time and dollars spent may stay the same or go up slightly because the firm is consuming more of it. Examples might be the amount of time spent on E-mail vs. hard copy letters, screen views vs. plots or printouts of a complex object, or daily builds of large systems with integrated regression testing vs. weekly builds two decades ago.

</comment><comment><USER5> The key is to provide software that helps business increase customer value :)

</comment><comment><USER6> "However costs are finite."

Probably doesn't seem that way to most business owners.

After all these years of applying IT to business, there is still a long way to go.

And don't forget the incredible effect of margin multipliers. If I'm running at 10%, then I could increase my profitability 2 ways, either by increasing revenue by $10 or decreasing costs by $1.

Say I sell $100 worth of stuff and earn $10. If I want to earn $11, I could either increase my revenue $10 and sell $110 worth of stuff. Or decrease my cost by $1 and earn $11. Without spending anything to increase revenue (people, marketing, fixed expenses, etc.)

The formula: IncrementalRevenueIncreaseNeeded * margin = IncrementalCostDecreaseNeeded. Pretty powerful stuff.

In many cases, it's still much easier to decrease cost than increase revenue. As one wise man once said, "It's all gravy (profit)."

<comment><USER4> "In many cases, it's still much easier to decrease cost than increase revenue."

It's also a more reliable sales focus, especially in an uncertain economy, to attack a cost stream that is real. Future revenues are a possibility, costs, especially recurring costs, are a tangible reality.</comment></comment>


Free news gets scarcer as paywalls tighten - <AUTHOR> https://www.yahoo.com/news/free-news-gets-scarcer-paywalls-tighten-020350136.html <comment><USER2> It's understandable.

With ads revenue decreasing and print editions fading out there is no other way to keep thing profitable.

The alternative is to drown in clickbait galore with zero content.</comment>


Show HN: FlightConnections - <AUTHOR> http://flightconnections.com <comment><USER2> I found a very similar tool, but with advanced functionality. You may see baggage allowance, aircraft model with the tail number on the route and flight schedule [https://flightsmap.org](https://flightsmap.org)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is exactly what I need! I've been using Kayak and Kiwi to compare prices and routes, but it always takes a while to load.

Last month I got bumped from a flight SYD->AUH that was full of Hajj pilgrims, and now I have a 600 USD coupon for Etihad. I'm trying to fly to Auckland before the 19th of November, but I'm totally flexible about dates and transfer points on the way, as long as I can use that coupon.

I'll be making good use of FlightConnections to see where I can transit and how to get to Auckland via somewhere interesting!

</comment><comment><USER4> Knock it off with the pop under windows. Cool site but won't be using it if you implement spam like that.

<comment><USER5> I agree, useful site but the pop under windows are just annoying. They would put me off using the site again and I do think the site has value, just need to back off the spamming

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've enjoyed using this site. Please make it HTTPS by default, though.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is a really useful website! Where do you get the data?

</comment><comment><USER8> Gibraltar has 5 connections! Can anyone find a lower number?</comment>