Jack Dorsey Is Gwyneth Paltrow for Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/fashion/jack-dorsey-influencer.html <comment><USER2> This is really a perfect title.

As somebody who grew up in Michigan not far from Battle Creek, I've always been interested the history of wacky self-improvement regimes. (You may remember "The Road to Wellville" as one look at that. [1]) E.g., the inventor of Graham flour believed in all sorts of self-harshness: "Graham created a theology and diet aimed at keeping individuals, families, and society pure and healthy - drinking pure water and eating a vegetarian diet anchored by bread made at home from flour coarsely ground at home so that it remained wholesome and natural, containing no added spices or other 'stimulants' and a rigorous lifestyle that included sleeping on hard beds and avoiding warm baths." [2]

I know these things are cyclical, so I expected it to come again. And as a someone who's currently trying eTRF [3] I think there's real value in self- experimentation. But it's really weird to see a full-blown health fad complex turn up in the tech industry where we see ourselves as so very rational.

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

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

[3] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29754952](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29754952)

<comment><USER3> Ah, Battle Creek! Also where the Kellogg brothers got up to their weirdness.

John Harvey Kellogg was involved in the weird dietary movements of the era as well. Ran a sort of spa / psych hospital thing, recommended people eat super plain food and chew each bite 45 times, that sort of thing. Tried to make "pre-digested" food which led eventually to Corn Flakes.

Lots of weird health anecdotes out of there. Anything from one of the Kellogg brothers leaving the table during a meal and coming back with a pail of his own fresh shit, inviting others to smell it and describing it as "as if it were a warm loaf of bread," to recommending circumcision in young adults as a preventative measure to masturbation.

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

<comment><USER4> It's not a coincidence that Graham and Kelloggs were both doing weird dietary stuff in Battle Creek. The Seventh Day Adventist Church was - and to an extent still is - a major presence in Battle Creek. They place a great deal of emphasis on health in general and diet in particular. I believe all of those men were Adventists.

<comment><USER5> Can an outsider move into a place like that or anywhere that is heavily influenced by a cult like figure or mentality and avoid being forced into their community/cult?

<comment><USER4> Battle Creek? It's not Salt Lake City or Clearwater. The Adventists don't comprise an overwhelming majority of the town by any means.

Whether you, an outsider, would _want_ to move to a mid-size dying industrial town is also a question worth asking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm firmly of the opinion that a lot of wellness fads spring up fields like tech because its a field where traditional religious views are rarer. People latch on to these new belief systems that are like religion in most ways beside name. They all have a set of rigid rules to follow and rituals to perform, and they all have some type of self-denial or sacrifice as one of their core values. Fasting, temperance, Whole30, gluten free, even modern fitness culture all share elements of denying yourself things you enjoy or putting yourself through unpleasant situations in search of some kind of enlightenment or transcendence.

I often see the same people falling into fad after fad, first telling me how EMFs are poison and will be looked at like cigarettes in a decade, and how singing bowls realign my spirit, and trying to insist on the power of visualization can cure chronic pain. I'm curious what it is that causes this.

<comment><USER7> this is kind of flippant, but I suspect that a big part of it is that remaining rational and skeptical, and trying to be belief-free is exhausting.

Rituals - even things like having morning coffee or an after work walk are things that I can say calm me down because they require little mental effort. The more you aim for variety the more effort it takes.

Beliefs are like the mental equivalent to acclimating to consistent and unvaried exercise. It stops requiring thought and no longer pushes you to improve.

given the breadth of ideas we are always exposed to now, I'd say that these semi-religious tendencies are defense mechanisms.

<comment><USER8> This is very close to the argument Alain de Botton makes in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_for_Atheists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_for_Atheists).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is Jack Dorsey really "tech's biggest manfluencer"? He didn't invent [ed: start a trend in pop culture] keto, cold showers, intermittent fasting, or meditation. There have been (modern, trend-driven) communities around each of these for 10+ years. And there are loads of people who ALL of these together, just like Jack.

I wouldn't be surprised if Dorsey is only 2 degrees removed from Joe Rogan, for example. And in between those 2 degrees there are A LOT of influencers.

My own journey started with leangains (IF) leading into slow carb/keto, Starting Strength, a tourist trip to Iceland, some rabbit hole about xenoestrogens, another one about pesticides (actually that one goes back to Ruth Winter), Joe Rogan, Rhonda Patrick, etc. Something about it lends itself to forming strong opinions, but I know my journey is not very unique and many of you reading can probably relate.

<comment><USER10> An influencer doesn't invent, they promote. They adopt (or appear to adopt) some item, practice, or philosophy and promote it to others (not necessarily explicitly, perhaps just by juxtaposing it with themselves or other artifacts).

<comment><USER11> > They adopt (or appear to adopt)

This is a really good point. I wonder how much of the nonsense extolled by Dorsey & Paltrow is something they've tried more than once, if at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Some of this stuff definitely seems weird to me, but at the same time I think the weird stuff is built on true stuff.

I'm definitely skeptical of people selling home designed cryochambers, but cold stress seems to have real benefits[0], and I've found that a cold shower or a cold jog (15-30 degrees F) seems to have the benefits described by the adherents.

Similarly, I doubt I'll ever go on any sort of meditation retreat, but I really enjoy using Headspace[1] and I find it helps me focus when I'm otherwise scatterbrained.

Finally, intermittent fasting seems to get a lot of flack for being a veiled eating disorder, but so far as I can tell, putting your body in ketosis through calorie restriction is the only way to reduce body fat. You can cook three low-calorie meals everyday, but that's time consuming and expensive and terribly inconvenient for family meal planning. It's much easier to eat one normal-sized meal and skip the extra meal planning, grocery shopping and preparation required to eat healthy.

So have I drank the Kool-Aid on this stuff? Maybe. But at this point I'd need more evidence to push me off of it, because the evidence that pushed me on to it has been validated by my own results.

[0][https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/cold-stress- hormesis](https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/cold-stress-hormesis) [1][https://www.headspace.com/](https://www.headspace.com/)

<comment><USER13> I've been ending my showers with cold, basically washing off a lot of the excess heat from the previously hot shower. It honestly feels pretty good & def makes me happier about stepping out of the shower.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> As someone working on making these health & wellness strategies and protocols more data-driven and evidence based through more structured experiments (see [https://mementolabs.io](https://mementolabs.io)), I'm very much pro on pushing for more people trying these "fringe" strategies in a more informed manner, so take my following thoughts with a grain of salt:

\- Many of our current, preexisting beliefs about food and nutrition are proving to be extremely flawed and contrived, having essentially been pushed by big-food to drive more consumption of sugar and carbs in our meals as opposed to actually being research-based (just look at the USDA Food pyramid, that puts carbs, almost all simple, as a staple). The emerging research around restricted eating, fasting, and autophagy (research that won a Nobel Prize in 2016) is extremely promising albeit still developing.

\- There's real value to proper self-experimentation for helping you discover and build better individual habits and determining what uniquely works for improving your health and wellness, as well as challenge your thinking on your existing beliefs, particularly around nutrition & dieting that tend to be ingrained in you during development. [See gwern's self experiments for some interesting ones]([https://gwern.net](https://gwern.net)).

\- IMO, the core issue at the root of this rise of the "cult-like influencer" is a lack of accessible academic research (i.e the average person will opt to read blogs over a long, hugely technical research paper) which creates more and more noise and proliferation of misinformation and conflicting health advice.

<comment><USER15> I think there's a lot of value of curating the best of "Biohacking" for average people. Then also being data-driven in determining if those hacks are actually improving your sleep, weight or productivity.

I also agree there are too many "gurus" out there, and not enough evidence- based places like www.examine.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I personally find this to be a pretty ridiculous comparison. Paltrow runs a massive organization that makes absurd claims about products she sells and she profits significantly from making these unscientific claims.

Dorsey isn't doing any of this. All he does is have his personal way of living in the world (not that I personally agree with a lot of the things he does). He doesn't sell anything related to his silly behaviors. He doesn't profit from any of his silly behaviors. He's just sharing how he personally lives in the world with other people.

To me, this is VERY different than what Paltrow is doing and the comparison is not a good one.

</comment><comment><USER17> All of these fads center around one fundamental trait: the sense of having control over your life. It doesn't matter whether they work; they sell you on the experience of "I'm successfully doing this hard thing to make myself better".

And it just so happens that Silicon Valley is full of people who are addicted to the sensation of improvement. Eating disorders stem from the same psychological mechanism, just a different definition of "improvement".

<comment><USER18> I also wonder how much of it is people desperately trying to undo the damages of stress. What people might really need is shorter work weeks and more time off (including time away from social media and other non-work related stressors).

But that's not something out culture really allows for or encourages. So we look to miracle cures so we can continue feeling productive.

<comment><USER19> I'd put it even further than "just" attempting to undo the damages of stress.

The local community, where you'd buy your meat from your local butcher that had been in your neighborhood for 15 years, vegetables from the farmers' market where the produce is all from within a 50 miles radius, where you go to church/temple/etc with the same faces every week, where the teachers and doctors that took care of you now take care of your children, etc, is pretty much dead.

What has replaced it? Amazon Prime, precarious contractor jobs, cheap replaceable crap brought in by cargo ship, startups claiming that they are just like "a family". Of course this leaves a gap in people's need for a sense of place and community. Of course it's the perfect opportunity for charlatans who know how to tap into exactly that.

<comment><USER17> I don't really see how saunas, supplements, and fasting stand-in for "a sense of place and community". Maybe meditation retreats, but not most of the things mentioned in the article.

<comment><USER19> You buy the supplements, get on the company's mailing lists, go to the lectures, join Facebook groups with people following the same thing to share experiences, attend meetups, etc. Of course it's a social, shared experience first and foremost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> For some time I've searched a way to define him (that didn't include insults) and this one is quite good.

Can't understand how people can follow this guy and his trivial/dumb advices. To me, he is just like that person that can't stop blabbering about stuff that has been around for decades but that he has just discovered or one of those people that blindly follow every popular trend (see the ones listed in the article) without even thinking if they really should.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm curious how they compare "fasting" \- which people have been doing for thousands of years and has traditions in nearly every major historical + religious culture and cost nothing with "jade eggs."

Doesn't quite seem equivalent...

<comment><USER22> I've been doing some fasting lately, and what has deeply shocked me is precisely that I'm _not_ "staggering about hungry for days". It's surprisingly easy once you get over the initial hump. (Note: I'm not saying it's necessarily easy in an absolute sense; I'm saying it's surprising how easy it is. Based on my upbringing I would have guessed after hour 4 I'd be in constant serious hunger, and it's not like that.)

I've come to understand that what I interpreted as "hunger" in the past was basically a sugar craving. I don't know how long it would take real hunger to get to that level, but even in a two-day fast I'd only gotten up to more-or- less "I could eat, yeah"... still a long ways from the hunger I've had in the past.

(Also, my interest in it has actually been coming from the scientific side, rather than the traditional side or crazywhack theory or any sort of Puritan impulse. I have an autoimmune disease, and there's been a lot of interesting work on those and fasting lately.)

<comment><USER21> For a lot of people - what they think is "hunger" is really just "boredom." That - or a carb addiction.

Once you start reading about autophagy, fasting doesn't really seem _that_ crazy after all.

<comment><USER23> It's almost as if pre-modernity humans didn't have infinite supplies of hyper- palatable food available 24/7...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > "It's such a strange service — who wants to be in the cold? You need to hear > about it from someone you trust," said Michael Garrett, the head of Reboot, > a spa that offers cryotherapy around the Bay Area. (Cryotherapy is when you > make yourself get cold.)

Love the author's snark.

>He said the cold therapy gives him a high, as blood rushes to his head and chest, and he believes practitioners are addicted. "I'm addicted straight up, it's a high and I love it," Mr. Garrett said.

I never understood paying for cryotherapy - can't the same be accomplished by a cold shower? I definitely love a good cold shower occasionally, seems cold enough to get the blood rush effect (recommended to me by my cardiologist for this exact reason).

<comment><USER17> I think it's on a whole other level of cold. People have died from cryotherapy. And of course, not-dying is part of the service (hopefully) being provided.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Fasting, cold showers, and meditation? Can't read the full article but remember another article painting Dorsey as "extreme".

But to be honest, it's a reasonable reaction to stimuli that are unique to human history. The 24 hour propoganda news cycle, density with increased stressors, cognitive fragmentatiom due to the number of distractions, and an absolutely horrible dietary culture that will lead us to squandering trillions on treating entirely preventable diseases. Not merely monetarily but literally reducing the cognitive potential of entire populations!

I don't see the quackery in adopting working strategies against these challenges. Note, working strategies. Personally implementing the above 3 along with with weightlifting has been like feeling a cold mountain breeze after living in a swamp.

Nietzsche's remarks, on how the priests of the world have ignored and (gravely) trivialized the 3 things that give arise to daily moral/cognitive judgement: Climate, Diet, and Habit, have been in my mind years after reading them. And their validity seems to flower the more experience life throws.

<comment><USER25> Absolutely. I think a lot of people are throwing the baby out with the bathwater here.

The infrared bulbs may be gimmicky but the rest of his routine seems pretty standard stuff that if more people adopted would lead to an increase in their quality of life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's sad how people cargo cult imitate the people who inspire them to such a degree it becomes disconnected and degenerate. At least with Steve Jobs there was a certain distance to the admiration. (They admired the accomplishments, rather than his persona —maybe it helped that he was "mercurial" and gruff), but with smooth talkers like Dorsey or Paltrow who look so wholesome, much reason is thrown out the window. At least Paltrow is excusable because she's just taking advantage of a culture centered on "celebrity". But the cargo culting of Jack has little excuse.

<comment><USER2> I'm sorry to say that Jobs had a lot of people throwing reason out the window as well. Elizabeth Holmes is a great example of the cargo cult around his style and management methods. And when he died, people literally built an altar to him: [https://surjgish.com/2011/miscellaneous-fun/dia-de-los- muert...](https://surjgish.com/2011/miscellaneous-fun/dia-de-los-muertos-san- francisco-2011/)

<comment><USER27> I don't believe those are "altars" in the sense that you're implying, as if people are worshipping him.

They are ofrendas [0] which are part of the Day of the Dead celebrations. My understanding is that they are usually reserved for loved ones but beloved public figures are included as well.

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

<comment><USER2> They are also called "altares de muertos" in Spanish, and are generally called altars in English. And yes, I think "worship" is not a bad way to describe how people often treat celebrities, Jobs included. We call it "cult of personality" for a reason, after all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Comparing Jack Dorsey to Gwyneth Paltrow is unfair because she made money by recommending Goop products. Dorsey, on the other hand, is being open about his lifestyle because people ask him about it.

<comment><USER11> I'm glad someone said this. As far as I know Dorsey just discusses his love of pseudo-science while Paltrow actively shills it for profit.

<comment><USER25> Curious which of Dorsey's practices you consider pseudo-science?

Both meditation and fasting have been practiced for thousands of years and have plenty of scientific studies backing up their benefits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Never understood the disdain for people for trying wacky sounding self- improvement techniques. Just like I wouldn't make fun of the 17% of Americans who take antidepressant pills to feel happier, I'm definitely not going to make fun of people fasting or using sauna to feel happy.

<comment><USER30> Antidepressants undergo clinical trials and are prescribed by medical professionals. There is no glamour or publicity in that at all.

The comparison would be closer if you were talking about IG fitness influencers selling 'fit tea' and 'all-day energy BBCAs'.

<comment><USER23> I'm sure the fasting market is really going to take off soon, there's a killing to be made selling absolutely nothing.

<comment><USER30> The "fasting" is the "nothing". The "fasting prep" is where the money will be made:

\- sleep optimization products (white noise machines, blackout curtains, lucid dreaming BS guides)

\- fasting-friendly recipes and nutritional guides

\- branded water flasks

etc. etc.

I've seen college kids on IG sell "workout guides" which are basically a Word doc they converted to PDF. They look like models, so polish and presentation of the final product isn't nearly as important as the polish and presentation the influencer put on themselves before going on camera.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Everyone is looking for a shortcut (even billionaires)

When it comes to health, there isn't one. The solutions aren't glamorous, or easy, nor do they guarantee you'll live to 100.

In general, eat less. Whether it's 1 meal a day, or 20, the amount of food you consume now is probably more than you need. When you do eat, eat more vegetables. Eat less meat. Eat healthy fats, less saturated, and trans fats.

Exercise, sometimes vigorously (as age permits).

Sleep well.

That's it. Lemon salt water and infrared bulbs aren't going to move the needle.

</comment><comment><USER32> Last time I visited my parents I noticed that my mom had Gwyneth Paltrow's cookbook on her shelf. She mentioned how pretentious and crazy it was. I flipped through it and I couldn't identify most of the ingredients.

Yahoo News calculated it would cost you $300/day to feed your family from her cookbook:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20130719034903/http://shine.yaho...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130719034903/http://shine.yahoo.com/shine- food/gwyneth-paltrow%E2%80%99s-300-a-day-it%E2%80%99s-all-good-no-- it%E2%80%99s-not-meal-plan-211506395.html)

And speaking of Dorsey, this is another crazy article about him:

> _Why are Silicon Valley billionaires starving themselves?_

> _Dorsey recently appeared on the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast to explain > his monkish lifestyle in more detail than the 240 character blasts he 's > known for sending out to the less biologically enlightened universe. He says > he eats only one meal a day in the week and doesn't let any foodstuff pass > his lips at the weekend. He also starts every day with an ice bath. "Nothing > has given me more mental confidence than being able to go straight from room > temperature into the cold," he says._

[https://theweek.com/articles/835226/why-are-silicon- valley-b...](https://theweek.com/articles/835226/why-are-silicon-valley- billionaires-starving-themselves)

<comment><USER33> While I hate to defend any of paltrow's nonsense, the numbers in that article are bullshit, unless you're using a full can of olive oil spray for an omelet or 3 pounds of flour for a couple muffins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I feel dumber for having read this article. The journalist is just pointing their finger and shouting, "Hey everybody, look at this weirdo! He does things we don't do--isn't that so WEIRD?!"

I lost interest in that kind of "information" after middle school.

</comment><comment><USER35> This is a cheap hit piece and part of the ongoing NYTs campaign against social media. I am saying this as someone who hates Twitter and thinks Dosey is either a mega-hypocrite or a victim of his own brainwashing. (Talking about his views on human communication here. I utterly don't care what kinds of saunas he uses.)

And "manfluencer"? Really, this is New York Times now? Rhetorical question. Of course it is.

</comment><comment><USER36> This doesn't seem all that different than say typical celebrity culture followers (Paltrow falls into that category) who adapt it to a sort of lifestyle.

I find it a bit weird as I've not found any folks who I want to emulate what they eat or emulate their lifestyle in general. Granted I'd like to be healthier but that's a thing, not a person.

<comment><USER37> Are being healthy and not unhealthy the same thing? For example not smoking is "not unhealthy" in the sense it does not hurt your lungs, but I would not consider standing around not smoking as being healthy. Similarly drinking water is not unhealthy compared to the harms of soda and dehydration.

The traditional form of healthy is avoiding harm; avoiding less than normal health. Ice baths and fasting seem like an attempt to be above the baseline normal healthy. Its an addition instead of avoiding a subtraction.

<comment><USER36> I'm not sure I understand, but I'm also not concerned with the definition of what healthy or "not unhealthy" are either way as far as my comment goes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Well, scratch Twitter off the list of places I'd work. What bizarre behaviour.

<comment><USER36> Humans are weird.

Steve Jobs had some weirdness / bad choices.

I still wouldn't mind working for them. It's not like you have to do those things or are endorsing them by working there.

Weird folks come up with some good ideas sometimes.

I think of myself as very boring and normal, I'm not coming up with great ideas...

<comment><USER39> So long as he isn't forcing his employees to follow that lifestyle, it seems totally fine to me as well.

Now WeWork is a place I would never think about working. All catered lunches are vegetarian only and they won't let you expense any meals unless you can prove they were vegetarian. No thank you.

[https://www.fastcompany.com/90202356/wework-is-a- vegetarian-...](https://www.fastcompany.com/90202356/wework-is-a-vegetarian- now)

<comment><USER36> Humm yeah that's a bit different from WeWork there...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I really did enjoy this framing of Jack Dorsey as a foil for Elon Musk (I mean I didn't think of this prior to the article, but it was an entertaining comparison). I think for the spectacle of it all, Elon really does need some sort of rival that's not the SEC, but a man with a face and a name and a personality and to paint it as Jack Dorsey is just wonderfully entertaining as an idea, despite being from a practical standpoint pretty irrelevant.

</comment><comment><USER41> Hacker News is rapidly becoming the National Enquirer for Silicon Valley.

""" Hacker News Guidelines

What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. """

I guess our collective intellectual curiosity now amounts to shitting on Dorsey's pretty unremarkable diet.

</comment><comment><USER42> If I was worth almost $100,000,000,000 dollars I'd be batshit insane and think the world revolved around me, too.

</comment><comment><USER43> Reminds me of Tom Brady's TB12 idiocy

</comment><comment><USER44> I think this is a story submitted by a PR firm on behalf of HVMN. [http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html) changed how I view the "news"...

</comment><comment><USER30> Where does Tim Ferriss fit into this culture? Wasn't he a SV god at one point for his 4hr work week and workout books?

<comment><USER40> Tim hasn't made enough money or amassed enough power to be on the NYT scale of comparison. He's similar in terms of insanity but more niche in his influence. Similar to Joe Rogan (though less entertaining by an order of magnitude, at least imho).

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> > manfluencer

Was unsure if the article would have any substance after that and, indeed, no substance.

</comment><comment><USER46> Okay, that headline made me laugh out loud.

</comment><comment><USER47> Shows that engineers in Silicon Valley aren't any more skeptical than Hollywood. We may consider ourselves smarter, but we're just as susceptible to bullshit as anyone.

<comment><USER48> I'd had an engineer recently fracture his foot running in a race.

He took a day off, went to a doctor and was told he need to wear a boot, stay off his foot for a while, etc. He proceeds to come into the office, proudly informing everyone how he knows better than the doctor, and that he only needs to rub peppermint oil and wear a compression sock. All while hobbling around the office, clearly in pain. Everyone pleaded with him to heed to the doctor's advice, and I even showed him how I have a messed up arm from a childhood incident that improperly healed and tried explaining the necessity of heeding basic medical guidance.

Didn't matter, this engineer "just knows" better than a doctor.

This is a weird world.

<comment><USER49> This sounds like a delusional person who happens to be an 'engineer', rather than someone who who is 1st & foremost, or archetypally, an engineer.

<comment><USER50> Its so common for engineers to have excessive confidence in their opinions about subjects far beyond their areas of competence that there's a term for it: _engineer 's disease_ (or engineer's syndrome).

<comment><USER51> This is true for the general population though. The only reason why the term exists is because other engineers expect it not to apply to engineers. Really the concept says more about us and our expectations of educated engineers rather than the engineers with bad opinions.

You could even go so far as to say those wielding the term also fall under the term: outside of your expertise, you're assuming engineers shouldn't have bad opinions. There's evidence abound that this is wrong - engineers can have bad opinions just like the general population. Yet some still insist on calling it out as "special" despite presenting no studies showing they're more likely to have these bad opinions.

<comment><USER50> > This is true for the general population though.

Not really. Engineer's disease is specific to engineers, because at its core is the _implicit_ belief that engineering (and science/math) is the ur- discipline whose mindset and techniques are universally applicable to all problems. That often comes with the attitude that other mindsets and techniques are inferior (e.g. those from the humanities in particular) and/or that engineers are more competent and can easily master needed parts of other disciplines when they choose (and thus the practitioners of those disciplines have little authority).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Drugs are hell of a thing.

</comment><comment><USER5> He's rich stop talking about him

</comment><comment><USER53> _As Twitter's head, he spends his days navigating issues around free speech for white supremacists, online abuse and the spread of terrorist propaganda_

The phrasing seems designed to imply that Free Speech is only for bad people and terrorist propaganda.

The reason why Free Speech is a fundamental human right, is that it keeps powerful people and authorities from squashing dissent. We can't just have "Free Speech, so long as we like it and the speaker," precisely because biased parties can then smear their opponents to squash their speech. (Witness the behavior of the SPLC of recent years. Witness the false smearing of Ben Shapiro as a "white supremacist.")

This does mean that we need to let bad people speak as well. No one can be allowed to arbitrate Free Speech. Not only the government, but also powerful people, press conglomerates, and private organizations.

This is precisely why the ACLU in the 20th century often defended the right of (the same) bad people to speak. Because what must be defended is the right of _everyone_ to speak.

<comment><USER54> Agreed.

Unfortunately, it seems freedom of speech has become one of those things a disturbing number of people only seem to see the negative side of. In a certain sense, it's in the same quagmire as capitalism, IP laws, and to some extent privacy; easy to see the negatives and abuses in, but also something that helps or protects everyone else too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Can't read the article without making an account but the first paragraph is a real zinger.

>Young men are staggering around, hungry for days. They are throwing themselves into ice baths and cryotherapy pods. There are not enough beds at the silent vegan meditation centers to accommodate them. They need more near- infrared bulbs.

<comment><USER50> The NYT paywall is far more porous than the WSJ one (you might just need to browse incognito), but here's a bypass anyway: [http://archive.is/HOP4M](http://archive.is/HOP4M)

<comment><USER56> > The NYT paywall is far more porous than the WSJ one (you might just need to > browse incognito)

They started doing something recently that occasionally throws up a popover in incognito mode, so that might not help. I haven't bothered to look into how it works, but clearing cookies or disabling JavaScript still seems to reliably get around the paywall.

I really should subscribe, though, since they do a lot of good reporting, and it would be great if more online publications became less dependent upon ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> As someone with a firmly blue-collar perspective on the world, these weird sacred cows of the city that people elevate to the status of guru are as mysterious for me as they are asinine.

I read up on Gwyneth Paltrow after reading the article, and checked her website where I found idiotic products that made my heart stop with some of their claims. When my heart finally started again I cursed god for letting me live to see things like $300 leather sandals, a $75 candle to "clear my energy" and a $70 crystal drinking straw that radiates heart opening...whatever the hell that means.

Now theres a guy telling people how to eat in Silicon Valley, and I cant help but remember how this ended last time. Steve Jobs was essentially a station of the cross at the holy church of silicon valley who could do no wrong, speak no evil, and walked a path of enlightenment akin to a god of knowledge...

until he died from trying to cure a common cancer with fruit cups and meditation, instead of medical science. Thats the part we dont seem to talk about very much, and I feel like it would do wonders to scale the wind back from the sails of these quacks. Being directly attributed to the cause of death for a diet related disorder would give these self-proclaimed lords of the human body a chance to reconsider their podcast --or at least hire a lawyer-- before they click upload.

<comment><USER58> Hang on. I am the last thing from a Jack Dorsey fan. However, I see nowhere in his somewhat grotesque tweets where he tells me what I should do. As near as I can tell, he is simply telling us what he is doing.

<comment><USER59> That's part of how this all works, if you wield influence it's not necessarily by way of telling people exactly what they should do, rather you convey your vision and others work to make it happen.

And I think that this can yield very effective teams, but it can also result in cult like herd behavior. Two sides of one coin?

<comment><USER60>
       The Master doesn't talk, he acts.
       When his work is done,
       the people say, "Amazing:
       we did it, all by ourselves!"

\-- _Tao Te Ching_ , Chapter 17, Stephen Mitchell translation ([http://taoteching.org.uk/index.php?c=17&a=Stephen+Mitchell](http://taoteching.org.uk/index.php?c=17&a=Stephen+Mitchell))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Calling Elon Musk hyper-masculine is just funny. Masculine is enough.

I suppose it's like how "right" because "far-right."

</comment><comment><USER62> While Dorsey is rather extreme, his lifestyle is a lot healthier than the average American's or most everyone's in the developed world. Eating junk food around the clock is really bad for you. Note that Dorsey isn't fat and diabetic like so many people these days.

<comment><USER63> "Not as bad as", aka The Fallacy of Relative Privation, is a "red herring" fallacy.

It is a distraction, a diversion, and, in so many words, whataboutism.

<comment><USER64> yes its veganism that is the extreme part of this...</comment></comment></comment>


A new asteroid-mining company, Deep Space Industries, Inc., launches Today - <AUTHOR> http://www.space.com/19368-asteroid-mining-deep-space-industries.html?

<comment><USER2> For an interesting look at the impact of the last time a whole load of expensive and rare materials were brought home from a new world, see here[1]. It's also worth looking into the price revolution[2], a 150 year period of time where the import of unheard of masses of gold and silver into European markets had a startlingly unstable effect on the Spanish economy.

[1] - [http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/611/what- happened-t...](http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/611/what-happened-to- all-the-gold-spain-got-from-the-new-world)

[2] - [http://www.p12.nysed.gov/ciai/socst/ghgonline/units/4/docume...](http://www.p12.nysed.gov/ciai/socst/ghgonline/units/4/documents/Lynch1.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> "Deep Space Industries will also focus on extracting asteroid water, which can be split into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen — the chief components of rocket fuel."

To do this, you need a lot of energy, it is essentially charging a battery. If this was really feasible wouldn't we be using solar panels to separate water into hydrogen on Earth? Do solar panels in space have the potential for far greater energy output due to less atmospheric constraints?

<comment><USER4> In space, the atmosphere can't filter out any of the sunlight, nor can clouds/water absorb some of its energy, which results in about 30% more energy[1].

Plus, if you're not near any objects that can block the sun (i.e. Earth/Moon), you get full, intense sunlight 24-hours a day.

And you can use some of that sunlight to just directly heat the water, which makes it easier to split.

Given all that, I'd say that it's very likely you could get enough energy to split water in space.

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

<comment><USER5> Not to mention that if you're in a near-zero gravity environment, you really don't have to do anything to keep the solar panels in place; structures just to keep things upright on Earth are expensive and bulky. Space architecture is so cool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> <pedantic>

'Launches'? they aren't launching, they are unveiling themselves. No Launch yet... that's planned for 2015.

Sorry....

</pedantic>

<comment> mark-r The pun appears to be the work of whoever submitted the link, the proper page title is "Asteroid-Mining Project Aims for Deep-Space Colonies".

<comment><AUTHOR> I submitted the link; the title is from the first sentence of the article: "A new asteroid-mining company launches Tuesday with the goal of helping humanity expand across the solar system by tapping the vast riches of space rocks." I used that instead as the first one is ambiguous, and would likely be referring to Planetary Resources without context.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you want to extract useful materials from asteroids, you should: automatic closed-loop enterprise. Would offer an option:Delivery module. The module is being introduced to the surface. Telemetry control robots to find no need for drilling locations. After finding the robots are already automatically convey the ore to the mill. after remelting and packaging materials, to the launch site and along the orbit of Jupiter to orbit the Earte or or direct route. Earth orbit packing large lot in the descent module. Delivery to the surface and rebounding. True, I have no idea what means does it take to create it in one lifetime. If you have such finance, even with them, it will take about 20 years.Require about 30 programmers, 10-18 engineers metals and alloys, 8 chemists and useful ideas. In addition to the number of staff you still have to pay not only the design, but also materials for assembly. You really possess such means? This is not an idle question. Since this idea was born in the USSR, but has not received strength. However, this is the only way of survival.

</comment><comment><USER8> EVE Online is now EVE IRL, I suppose.</comment>


Is the Pitato why we can't have nice things? - <AUTHOR> http://www.ofnumbers.com/2018/04/18/is-the-pitato-why-we-cant-have-nice-things/ <comment><USER2> yup I have.</comment>


Kickstarter launches in the UK with hundreds of new projects ready for funding - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/uk/2012/10/31/kickstarter-launches-in-the-uk-with-hundreds-of-new-projects-ready-for-funding/

<comment><USER2> I'm kinda-sorta starting to go off the kickstarter model.

They're not a shop, as the things are not ready yet (and may never be), and you're not really investing because you don't get any ownership of the company (however small). So selfishly I've started to wonder what's in it for me. It benefits me if I just wait to see if the thing comes to market, then I can buy it without the possibility of it never surfacing.

As it is I feel a bit torn about the idea of acting as a crowdsourced bank for a business but not getting the returns of an actual investor. I can see why it's appealing for the business though.

<comment> k-mcgrady >> "what's in it for me"

You get more for your pledge than you would just purchasing the product. e.g. the product is offered cheaper to pledgers or comes in a limited edition. Kickstarter will only continue to work if project creators offer something extra to pledgers. A lot of people seem to be using it as a pre-order service to help fund development. They need to offer more, realising that people are taking a risk by funding them.

<comment><USER3> > You get more for your pledge than you would just purchasing the product.

I agree- a pledge is not a purchase. But you need to do the mental math for the project. e.g. I would get 20% more. But I think the project is only 80% likely to ship. And the project founder is cool so I'd give them a few bucks anyway.

<comment><USER4> > A pledge is not a purchase.

They should make this their motto. The Kickstarter model is fine, they just need to better communicate just what that model is to their users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> so who is the mystery "third party payment provider"?

<comment><USER6> I wish I knew. I was hoping that this signaled Amazon was opening payment processing in £'s.

The only reason I don't use S3 is because, as a very small time user, I don't want my foreign transaction fees to be larger than the S3 fees.

However, brilliant news for people who weren't able to circumvent the system. Still surprised (and happy) it came to the UK before Canada.

<comment><USER7> How bad are foreign transaction fees in the UK? For me in the US, it's just 1% flat rate (which I get back in cash back anyway).</comment></comment></comment>


Knack.io Launches Personalized Job Board for Engineers - <AUTHOR> https://knack.io <comment><AUTHOR> Our (free) personalized job board is live! Built BY engineers, FOR engineers -- using Next.js with Serverless Components. We'll be publishing numerous articles and open-source repos soon sharing some of what we've learned about Next.js, Serverless Components, Lambda layers, and more. Thousands of jobs -- including remote ones -- tailored to your skillset. Check it out and send feedback! [https://knack.io](https://knack.io)</comment>


Show HN: Rapid Eye Movement Exercises - <AUTHOR> https://remfulness.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> There are various REM based therapies (with various repeatability in studies). Also anecdotally I find REM relaxing and calming, so I brought together a few REM patterns as it is much easier to focus on actual pictures than tracking imaginary objects.

</comment><comment><USER2> Awesome stuff. This is exactly what I need if I'm spending too much time in front of a screen.</comment>


Nine Things you never know about google! - <AUTHOR> http://www.routermods.com/2007/05/17/nine-things-you-never-know-about-google/ <comment><USER2> Routermods ROcks</comment>


Ask HN: Lala Land Grab? - <AUTHOR>

I just had a thought. Apple bought Lala, and I've spent probably about $50-$100 on Lala for music. This is a pretty big music library since albums are so cheap. I've gotten in the flow of listening to Lala every day and I'm always adding more music. I love it.
Now, the speculation is that Apple is going to turn Lala into a streaming iTunes product. Knowing Apple's iTunes price points, I'm very skeptical that they will keep the prices where they are on Lala. With the inevitable iPhone app, Apple is surely going to position the iTunes streaming service as just as good, if not better than buying the music as it is now. To see them then offer a 10x price cut over buying the track in full would just cannibalize the iTunes store.
It seems clear Apple will be stuck grandfathering in everyone's Lala collection, otherwise they'll alienate all current Lala users from iTunes (myself included.) Nevermind the horrible press they'd get if suddenly hundreds of thousands of dollars of music is ripped from the hands of Lala users. But, they are going to almost certainly have higher prices for future purchases than Lala has now.
My conclusion: it might be time to buy as much cheap Lala music as you can until they can launch the iTunes streaming service. Worst case, you're out $100 or whatever you want to blow. (If its any consolation, if you lose this money because Apple screws everyone over, Apple will probably go down with you!) Best case, you end up with a nice music library you can listen to anywhere that will go up in value tenfold in a few weeks.
Also, if you haven't uploaded your music collection to Lala, you should probably do it now. I'd be shocked if Apple grandfathers in uploaded tracks too, but who knows! <comment><USER2> I think a more likely scenario is they shut it down, give everyone iTunes store credit for the amount they spent on streaming-only songs and if you bought MP3s, you're OK since they don't have DRM. Sounds like a much cheaper solution than trying to run the service. They bought it for the talent, why would they waste that talent maintaining the existing site instead of building something new? Also, lala's contracts with the record companies aren't transferable and there's no way Apple can negotiate the same terms. The record companies don't want iTunes to dominate the market, it's bad for them.

I'm a heavy lala user and LOVE the service, but spend your money elsewhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps, but even this will result in a huge backlash. Today I have 50-100 albums I can listen to anywhere, and Apple is going to take those away from me and say "Oh, but you can now have 10"? Somehow I don't think this will fly.

<comment><USER3> The beautiful thing about shutting down a service is that you don't have to worry about losing clients.

<comment><USER4> It's still not the best way of attracting the existing user base to your new replacement service.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


"I can't stop comparing everything to Black Mirror" - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/31/7471901/i-cant-stop-comparing-everything-to-black-mirror <comment><USER2> Black Mirror is a very good series, it is absolutely brutal but brilliant in the merciless way in which it exposes the potential downsides of the technology we take for granted.

Highly recommended but be prepared to be shocked in unpleasant ways. The entire history of you is imo the best one so far, with 15 million merit points a close second.

<comment><USER3> I thought 15 million points was by far the best. TV shows like Big Brother, X-factor, etc, all pray on the vulnerability that certain people have for wanting to seek out fame and notoriety.

Incidentally, Sony had a recent patent for interactive advertisement, that only disappears after user interaction: [http://fortune.com/2013/04/30/sony- patent-is-hilarious-terri...](http://fortune.com/2013/04/30/sony-patent-is- hilarious-terrifying/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Black Mirror is awesome. My favorite episode is "15 Million Merits", which reminds me of the John Maynard Keynes discussion about digging holes in the desert and putting jars filled with banknotes for people to dig up, or Paul Krugman's suggestion about makework preparing for an alien invasion ([http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/coalmines-and- al...](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/coalmines-and-aliens- again/)). In the future, is any work (even if not that productive, like riding a bike and accumulating points) better than no work and potential social costs?

<comment><USER5> I thought the bike riding was generating electricity and the points were really just dollars.

<comment><USER6> The deeper point being, I think, that money in a sense is no more "real" than points on a screen.

<comment><USER7> Money is a social construct, and therefore not materially real. If all human beings disappeared tomorrow dollars/merits/etc. would cease to have real-world efficacy.

I thought the deeper point was, perhaps, that everyone has their price. That nothing, not even the very things people think are "radical" or "revolutionary", escapes the logic of money. That everything can be commodified and turned to serve the very system they try to escape.

<comment><USER8> > Money is a social construct, and therefore not materially real. If all human > beings disappeared tomorrow dollars/merits/etc. would cease to have real- > world efficacy.

But so would couches. Without humans they're just ... things, without any implied use of being sat on.

<comment><USER9> I think he means not necessarily that it's a social construct but that it is intrinsically valueless and serves no purpose without human existance whereas a couch could be used for at least some other purpose than sitting on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you like this, you might like...

Charlie Brooker has a regular column in The Guardian, which is, I believe, available to non-British people via something called The Internet: [http://www.theguardian.com/profile/charliebrooker](http://www.theguardian.com/profile/charliebrooker)

<comment><USER11> Fans of Black Mirror desperate for more would be better served watching Dead Set, a gory satire of reality television, and perhaps Nathan Barley, the series that "The Waldo Moment" was originally written for, before they head for Charlie Brooker's column in The Guardian. I found the content of the column too mired in British partisan politics for me to enjoy.

<comment><USER12> _Brass Eye_ is very much worth a watch as well, if you're mentioning [the excellent] Nathan Barley. And _Four Lions_.

<comment><USER13> Black Mirror reminds me a lot of Jam, also by Chris Morris.

<comment><USER12> Jam is IMO fantastic, I always hesitate to recommend it due to how brutally black the comedy is, though. The radio original, _Blue Jam_ , is great as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> While we're recommending Charlie Brooker stuff, be sure to watch "2014 Wipe" as well. My favorite part was a thought-provoking bit by Adam Curtis about how we're being bombarded with conflicting messages, which he explains is why a lot of feel so confused these days.

<comment><USER15> I also heartily recommend "How TV Ruined Your Life" which serves as sort of a capstone volume to the entire run of "Screenwipe".

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you like Black Mirror, you might also like Charlie Brooker's Wipe, now a yearly summary of news. A bit UK centric but very good. This year's is just out:

UK [http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04w7ytd/charlie- brooke...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04w7ytd/charlie- brookers-2014-wipe)

World [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3EoNsGHZD0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3EoNsGHZD0)

</comment><comment><USER17> I live in London. My wife being Spanish I get to travel to Spain a lot, at times I stay in Spain for a few weeks.

I'd always notice a certain level of relief whenever I'd set foot in Spain. Like a great weight was being lifted off my shoulders. And then one day I realised what it was... I don't want to sound too doomy but it was the fact that one is constantly under watch in a place like the UK.

On average, you're caught 300 times on camera every day. All my messages and emails go through GCHQ proxies, if anything is left unwatched NSA will make sure it's all on record. HMRC knows every little details of financial information. All my Amazon purchases, my online grocery orders, the games I play on my console, damn I'm not sure Kinect is not somehow recording all the conversations in my house in some server.

The point is, for me the dystopian future I'd always worry about is here. It's creeping into every aspect of my life and already taking away any calm in life I'm left with.

</comment><comment><USER18> There's also Dead Set, a one-off from the same team (or at least writer) which is the contestants on a Big Brother reality show unaware that a zombie apocalypse has started while they are sealed in the house. Available on 4oD I think.

</comment><comment><USER19> Slightly OT but if you have access to iplayer and missed it yesterday, Charlie Brooker's "2014 Wipe" was brilliant (including the sneak preview half way through of Adam Curtis' latest documentary due out next month which looks fantastic).

<comment><USER20> Missed that, thanks. Direct link: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04w7ytd/charlie- brooke...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04w7ytd/charlie- brookers-2014-wipe)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Black Mirror is about the way our current and near-future technologies expose and amplify our psychologies, and it's absolutely brilliant about it.

Brilliant and brutal.

<comment><USER22> If you want more reading along this line, I cannot recommend JG Ballard highly enough.

<comment><USER23> which of his books would you recommend ?

<comment><USER24> "High Rise" is accessible. It was written in 1975 so might be a bit dated.

[http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/underappreciated- masterpieces...](http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/underappreciated-masterpieces- jg-ballards-high-rise-1975)

<comment><USER22> Ben Wheatley's film adaptation is in post-production now, and is getting a lot of hype from people I know in the UK film/TV industry.

Really looking forward to seeing Jeremy Irons in it!

<comment><USER12> Ah wow, that's fantastic news; I didn't know that was coming. Ben Wheatley's great as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Black Mirror is brilliant! I can also recommend Utopia.

<comment><USER26> _Utopia_ is a brilliant show. It's a shame that Channel 4 axed it, though, and I'm anxious that the US remake will butcher its legacy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I feel this way about mobile phones. Everyone's supposed to carry one of those random disruption devices.

</comment><comment><USER28> Since this discussion turned pretty much into a poll of which's your favorite episode, I'll go. Fifteen million merits was by far the best for me, not only that, it is one of the best short stories I've ever seen on TV. The fact that the series was produced and distributed by Endemol it's even more appealing.

</comment><comment><USER29> Spoilers ahead.

"Fifteen Million Merits": This one probably hit the hardest, because that _is_ Corporate America. People are doing work that is fundamentally useless (the energy they'll produce, on these bikes, is less than they'll consume in food) to be kept busy for no clear purpose, and the ultimate conclusion is that those in control just enjoy the exercise of power. (See: the humiliation of Abi Khan.) This is most terrifying and poignant because the in-app-purchase existence is actually a plausible future of corporatized consumer capitalism.

"White Bear" and "White Christmas", two episodes both invoking the concept of human-created hell, are brilliant because they show an overblown sense of mob justice. In White Bear, the woman _doesn 't remember_ the crime and has been tortured and memory-wiped beyond recognition, so she's essentially not the same person who committed it and effectively innocent. In White Christmas, the most disturbing and bizarre thing about the end is that it's not the criminal, but _a copied consciousness that did nothing wrong_ because it didn't exist when the crime occurred, the one created for the interrogation, who suffers in the "1000 years per minute" auto-hell. The actual criminal just spends Christmas in jail.

"National Anthem" is brilliant but hard to evaluate for plausibility because the U.S. doesn't have the same class system. We have severe inequality, but no one would fault a U.S. President for choosing not to fuck a pig at the risk of Kim Kardashian or Paris Hilton. Still brilliant, and an interesting take on the Streisand Effect (if he chooses to fight the publicity, he increases it, and the image of him fucking a pig can't really be erased). I also like the dig at "modern art" because most of it _is_ trolling. [0]

[0] Actually, there's a _lot_ of great art being made, even now. The problem with "modern art" is that there's a weird inversion where the gold remains obscure, and absolute junk sells for millions to rich people, because "making a statement" has taken more value than craftsmanship and aesthetic value in that joke of a scene.

"Entire History of You" kinda defeated its own point, if you ask me. His wife actually _was_ unfaithful and he figured it out. Sure, it was emotionally unpleasant for him-- no news there-- but would he have been better off not knowing and raising that douchebag's kids? The main plot one wasn't really about the perils of technology. The moral was, "Don't marry a cheating harlot", but that one's over 9000 years old.

"Be Right Back" I found to be a luke-warm exploitation of the uncanny valley. I can see why that episode would appeal to people, and I won't say that it wasn't well done because all of these have been excellent; it just didn't hit me.

"The Waldo Moment" I found hilarious because I enjoy crass and obnoxious humor as much as anyone. That said, the ending wasn't plausible. People develop an immunity to that shit over time. It could unseat one political candidate, sure, but Waldo would lose its punch and its extortive capabilities. Mockery has power, for sure, but eventually people learn to tune it out. Not plausible to its full extent, but still poignant, and a bit funny for the sheer obnoxiousness ("breaching experiments") and stupidity of the Waldo character.

<comment><USER6> > "Entire History of You" kinda defeated its own point, if you ask me. His > wife actually was unfaithful and he figured it out...The moral was, "Don't > marry a cheating harlot", but that one's over 9000 years old.

I hear this point of view often from those who don't realize that people (even women!) are human and make mistakes. Sometimes everybody is better off when we can forget momentary transgressions, or perhaps even if the one partner never learns about the past mistakes of the other. The theme of the episode being that this can never happen due to this new technology.

<comment><USER30> The technology allowed him to confirm all of his already-existing suspicions. He'd already noticed that his wife was fawning all over the man that she was apparently really sorry about having slept with - a man who also had dumped her hard in the past and didn't really give much of a shit about her, going so far as to make a joke about their affair in front of her husband. I agree with Michael that following the logic of the episode the technology just sped up what was probably going to happen anyways. (There's also the fact that the main character probably gets obsessed for reasons involving his murky career failure.)

Not sure what you're implying with the "even women!" comment.</comment></comment></comment>


Forget VC Money, Fund Yourself - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/resources/finance/articles/20040801/noVC.html <comment><USER2> A meta-business model that doesn't get discussed enough- and practically never by VCs- is simple revenue based growth. I know business leaders who absolutely swear by it and won't touch anything else. From their perspective, if it's not making money and in the black when it's small, making it 10x that size won't necessarily make it better. It's a well tested and respected business model if you're product and team can pull it off.

<comment><USER3> While I agree that VC funding is not necessarily required to spark a startup, I do however believe that it can serve wonders in terms of building connections and publicity. Prominent bloggers, such as Michael Arrington and Peter Cashmore, hunt for news relating to startup fundings. Moreover, a VC firm brings high level connections from people with real experience in this game (Vinod Khosla, Ram Shriram, etc).

Almost all sufficiently large startups eventually require Venture Capitalists. So there is no hard and fast rule on this; just take the money when it makes sense.

<comment><USER2> True. And to clarify my comment, it is also a _slow_ way of growing in many cases. I've just seen so many people willing to burn through other peoples' money without a thought that the idea often appeals to me.

The real principle here is the golden rule of spending money- no matter what the source is: put yourself in the investor's shoes (even if there isn't one). Pretend it's your $10,000 or $5mil and you're investing in a company that you have little control over- would you be pleased with how it is spent?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you can't get someone else excited about your product, then you might be approaching it the wrong way. But there are many reasons why VCs might not want to get their hands in. They might deem it as a me-too or as a novelty not worth exploring. But there's no way they can completely estimate the web community. If you have a firm belief that you offer something someone else does not, or you implement it better, do it. Fund it yourself. The true reason you should give up on your idea is if you cannot sell it to yourself anymore.

<comment><USER5> I don't understand why so many people think of a "me-too" a bad thing. This way we would have only one automobile brand, only one clothing brand and the list goes on...

<comment><USER6> 1\. Because nobody can start a car company without hard knowledge and expertise, whereas any idiot who can talk can con VCs into funding a me-too and blind them with hype. 2\. Because the Net moves so fast that the me-toos are ready just as the idea is outpaced 3\. Because the people who propose the 'me toos" emanate a vibe of conformity and foolishness.... so if the person is an idiot we say "me too" if the person is smart we say "oh that tech whiz."

<comment><USER5> photo.net was 1999, flickr 2004, zooomr 2006...my point is that the pie is so big the many folks can have their piece, because nobody can have it all. about the car industry comment...most of the folks that made a so called "me-too" car company, was in the beggining of that industry, that is 80-100 years ago. Yes, its hard to make a new brand but Pegani Zonda seems to have done it in 21st century so good that it can compete with Ferrari. With your thinking people shouldn't be programmers because there are too many of them. <br>

I will just aggree that if you can do it better then just do it.

<comment><USER7> Are you sure nobody can have the whole pie? Some domains have significant network effects, which work to prevent competitors from developing a useful service. E.g. eBay.

<comment><USER5> Ebay bought its Chinese clone for hundreds of millions of dollars, which afterwards collapsed because after moving the servers outside China the service's data were going through word filtering (e.g. during login) and there were failures...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Something just felt right when I read, "The best possible way to finance your business is from free cash flow. If you can meet your capital needs without selling equity or without taking on personal debt, do it. It's that simple." Clif Bar, Patagonia and Ben & Jerry's come to mind. Not tech, I know, but it's really cool when a young company can maintain it's mojo, it's buzz, far longer than most people could even dream of. If equity is sold, you're answerable to someone, and you lose control over keeping it's mojo. Whatever it takes to do work you love, with people you love, I'm for always.

</comment><comment><USER9> VC money can be a good thing if you know exactly what to do with it. Google used the funds to buy servers which they couldn't afford before, but in the end it turned out to be money well spent. But if you just raise the money to live up to the convention, then you should think again. The worst thing you could do is to go on a spending spree just to look busy.

</comment><comment><USER10> Some products require scale or critical mass before they can be profitable. This is especially true for many website based on advertising models. Also ventures based around getting big partnerships (e.g. licensing deals) may require the prestige of VC backing before you can get through the door.

Secondly you might have an option of growing organically for 3 years and hoping that no one else enters the market and that its still buoyant in that time or growing fast with VC support. I am not saying it's not possible to grow fast without VCs but I am sure it helps. I think it just comes down to what business it is.

</comment><comment><USER6> I bet YCombinator must feel a bit strange having this as the highest voted story ;)

<comment><USER11> Not at all; we're not VCs. We just do seed funding. That is a very different world.

<comment><USER5> I asked few days ago if its possible for someone to get a green card if I got funded by YC. I read the reply that is not enough. From the US immigration web site they site is possible and on some other sites it sais that 500,000-1,000,000 dollars is required as investment for someone to get green card.

My question is, would you risk to accept someone for funding, and wait until he finds invenstors through you, so that he could use these money as invenstment and also get a green card?

The thread is not available so I thought asking you here...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Forget VC Money, Fund Yourself...well, if you don't believe in your product to put your own money or time into it, how can you expect someone else to invest in it themselves?

<comment><USER13> I think this advice is somewhat misguided. I'm currently on my seventh start up. I started two previously myself with my own money, but my current employer is VC and angel backed. (I am the chief scientist) Relying only on your own resources such as credit card debt or a second mortgage on your home can be a very risky proposition.

Not just because you might lose your investment, but because by using your own money you are creating a situation of immense pressure. The risk of losing your home might lead one to make some bad decisions regarding the business. You have o be very careful here.

My second self funded company eventually did take about $100,000 in angel money. But we started with only $50,000 of the two founders own money and we operated the business for four years with no other investment. We eventually sold it to a public software company for $2 million dollars. This might seem like a pretty decent investment, but at the time (mid 90s) it failed to attract the buzz that seems to feed VC investments.

It also depends on how much capital you really need. Typically entrepreneurs underestimate this, but of course it is also possible to fool yourself the other way. You have to be very realistic about this to make the right decisions. My current venture requires us to installhardware in our customers' facilities, so it is somewhat capital intensive. Only someone who was very wealthy could self fund such an enterprise.

In the end VC money spends the same as any other money, so deciding where you get your funds should be a business decision similar to deciding who to hire or what product to develop. You should interview your investors as they interview you. But few entrepreneurs do this. They act desperate, and this often becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

On another note, in my experience, entrepreneurs shouldn't expect most VCs to deliver anything more than money. Of course they all tell you about the benefits of their strategic connections and so on, but in my experience it is very rare that these bear fruit. One exception would be a venture fund targeting the specific industry you are developing your product for. These funds often do have real valuable connections to bring to bear and can help in ways that vanilla VCs can't.</comment></comment>


Telomere shortening rate predicts species life span - <AUTHOR> https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/07/02/1902452116 <comment><USER2> this makes me think that telomeres are not the main cause of aging-related death. My mental model is: if you run out of telomere before you get old, you start to get disease - and that's maladaptive. So there's evolutionary pressure to slow down your shortening rate, up to a point. Once it becomes unlikely that you'll outlive your telomeres, there's no more pressure. So your telomere length + rate becomes a _measurement_ of your species lifespan.

<comment><USER3> This doesn't really make sense does it? There's only really evolutionary pressure up to the end of your child rearing years, no?

<comment><USER4> Humans are double-viviparous species, meaning average grandparent lives past its grandchild's puberty. Humans are also atricial. These traits are shared by elephants, whales and dolphins too. However, humans are the only animal species those are triple-viviparous in occasions, meaning great-grandparent lives past its great-grandchild's puberty.

<comment><USER5> Human's average lifespans have been a lot shorter throughout history.

<comment><USER6> Average isn't that relevant. It's driven down by early childhood deaths & childbirth deaths (but after a point - menopause - childbirth deaths end).

<comment><USER5> Infectious disease killed many before old age. Antibiotics are a pretty recent invention.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, but the impact isn't _that_ great.

According to _Our World In Data_ [1] a 20-year-old would expect to live to 60 in 1850 (before penicillin), versus to 80 now.

[1] [https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy#it-is-not-only- ab...](https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy#it-is-not-only-about-child- mortality-life-expectancy-by-age)

<comment><USER7> That's still long enough for a person to see their grandchildren reach and cross puberty.

<comment><USER8> Especially in a world where kids were born when the parent was in late teens or early 20s, rather than now when average age is 28 and pushing higher.

This means first grandchildren in early 40s (rather than late 50s), and first great grandchildren by mid 60s (rather than mid 80s)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One of the biggest challenges for studying telomere biology in the context of human aging, is that mice are quite different from humans in terms of their telomere structure.

The shortes mouse telomere is longer than the longest human one

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23956466](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23956466)

<comment><USER10> Sure, but we have way more research on this already, from humans:

[http://doi.wiley.com/10.1002/jez.b.20006](http://doi.wiley.com/10.1002/jez.b.20006) Stindl, Reinhard - Is telomere erosion a mechanism of species extinction? (2004)

[http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00114-014-1152-8](http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00114-014-1152-8) Stindl, Reinhard - The telomeric sync model of speciation: species-wide telomere erosion triggers cycles of transposon-mediated genomic rearrangements, which underlie the saltatory appearance of nonadaptive characters (2014)

[http://molecularcytogenetics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1...](http://molecularcytogenetics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13039-016-0224-1) Stindl, Reinhard - The paradox of longer sperm telomeres in older men's testes: a birth-cohort effect caused by transgenerational telomere erosion in the female germline (2016)

more here: [http://telomere.at/publications.html](http://telomere.at/publications.html)

also some old-as-fuck news coverage (2004): [https://www.theguardian.com/education/2004/apr/08/science.hi...](https://www.theguardian.com/education/2004/apr/08/science.highereducation)

[https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18224421.400-chromoso...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18224421.400-chromosome- clock-ticks-out-our-fate/)

oh and, a letter where Stindl outlines the problem in detail: [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Reinhard_Stindl/publica...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Reinhard_Stindl/publication/280049041_The_reanalysis_of_three_large_datasets_uncovers_progressive_telomere_erosion_between_healthy_human_generations_and_supports_an_11-year- old_model_of_telomere- driven_macroevolution/links/55a5467808ae81aec9134810.pdf) Stindl, Reinhard - The reanalysis of three large datasets uncovers progressive telomere erosion between healthy human generations and supports an 11-year-old model of telomere-driven macroevolution (2015)

I find it EXTREMELY strange that the OP paper cites NONE of these papers. Like, what the hell?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hasn't this been known for a while now? I swear I learned about this in AP Bio a decade ago.

<comment><USER12> You probably learned about the telomere length, not the shortening rate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The total number of heartbeats also predicts lifespan, although apparently not as accurately. So is the heartbeat total just a coincident or still a factor somehow?

<comment><USER14> I've seen this before and get the gist, but at face value, it's ridiculous. A human who runs every day may expend twice the heartbeats of a sedentary person. He or she will not live half as long, or anything close to it.

<comment><USER15> I think the idea is that a frequent runner will have a much lower resting pulse rate, and the "extra" beats they use while exercising will be more than offset by the fewer beats that accumulate during rest?

I haven't done the math though.

<comment><USER16> That's the assumption, but I have never seen or done the math either, which is ridiculous because it shouldn't take more than 5 minutes to get some estimates.

<comment><USER15> Okay, you shamed me into doing it :)

So, this is really rough napkin math, but here goes:

Assuming that...

... a sedentary person (Donald) has a resting BPM of 80.

... an active runner (Justin) has a resting BPM of 60, and a peak BPM of 180 (while running)

If Justin runs for a solid 2 hours, five times a week, he will have

        158*60*60 + 10*60*180 = 676,800 beats per week

While Donald, who doesn't run, but averages 1 hour a week doing strenuous activity, will have

        167*60*80 + 1*60*180 = 812,400 beats per week

Donald's heart beats 20% more often than Justin's. (And that's assuming Donald's heart also peaks at 180.)

 _(Edited to change names and fix math errors)_

<comment><USER17> Thanks for doing the math. I'd say 130-140 would be better than 180 for someone in shape.

Most people can't even hit 180 after their 20s.

<comment><USER16> No wonder I dread going to the gym, I find it really strenuous. I'm 37, unfit, and try to hit 180 while running on a treadmill. I was using the same target BPM that I used in college.

Thanks! I'll try 160 BPM next time. Running 45 mins should be more doable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For humans, about 15 kbp telomere can be reduced to 50% in about 107 years at the rate of about 70 bp per year. That number goes well with the max life spans we observe in humans.

</comment><comment><USER19> The life span of a species can mean at least two things. The lifespan of individuals that belong to the species or how long the entire species can survive without mutating. I believe extinction, species lifespan and the theory of recapitulation (ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny) are intertwined [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recapitulation_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recapitulation_theory)

</comment><comment> alok-g I had read somewhere that telomere length reduces each time a cell divides. Assuming that, telomere shortening rate is directly indicative of the number of times cells have gone through division. Could that not mean that telomere shortening rate is just estimating cell division rates and the latter relate to life span for an entirely different reason? Is this or some other study show that shortening rate is a better predictor of life span than cell division rate?

<comment><USER20> Telomeres eventually end, and that's the difference.

<comment> alok-g It would help if you can explain more.

If telomere's ending were of significance, then their lengths would be a good predictor of life span. The OP is saying that it's not the length but the shorting rate that counts.

<comment><USER20> The length too. We've known that for a while. The rate is this new discovery (though not really, we've known it since 2018).

2017: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5425118/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5425118/)

2012: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3277142/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3277142/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> How do we slow our personal telomere shortening rate?

<comment><USER22> Other than being born with the right genes? Moderate exercise, like 30 min. of cardio 3 times a week, may help increase telomere length just as much as marathon running. Omega 3 and most things associated with a good diet also correlate with longer telomeres. A study showed that processed meat (like bologna with nitrate) has a negative effect on telomeres. Go figure.

There is a very strong negative association between chronic stress and telomeres. The worse the stress is and the longer the episode, the more your telomeres are impaired. If a woman is chronically stressed or had low emotional support in childhood, her kids may get shorter telomeres in utero. Social isolation also seems to be terrible for telomere length.

Disclaimer: Telomeres are a relatively new area of interest. Studies showing the above haven't been replicated enough to be comfortably stated as fact. Of course, telling correlation from causation is difficult.

<comment><USER23> You can actually increase your telomeres? Is there a way to get them measured accurately?

<comment><USER22> Yes there are several companies that do this. TeloYears is one. They use a blood sample to index your telomere length (actual length) against other people your age (expected length). One of the outputs is a percentile rank for cellular age. While this can be useful information, there are a couple issues. One is that you can't reliably predict expected lifespan simply using telomere length. The other is that it is over $100. You already know if you're healthy and have good genes. I guess it could be used for benchmarking to see whether your telomeres are on the right track.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Teloyears.com. I got my telomere length measured and found it quite interesting and useful.</comment>


Closures + Lambda = The key to OOP in Lisp - <AUTHOR> http://lispy.wordpress.com/2007/07/18/closures-lambda-the-key-to-oop-in-lisp/

<comment><USER2> Sheesh.. Why? I don't understand why people keep trying to take something which is inherently non-object-oriented (Lisp) and cram an object-oriented mentality into it. Sure, it's nifty you can make objects without using the Common Lisp Object System, but that's generally not how you'd want to structure an actual application, right? Lisp is so powerful you can build and manipulate your own structures at runtime, so you don't need to make objects which represent a concept. Those concepts are represented through utility functions. Maybe I'm just dumb, but I don't see it.

<comment><USER3> This is an exercise that's being done just for the fun of it to explore what (for me) were cryptic remarks from people like Graham and Norvig.

I wanted to work on something that would force me to write macros. Obviously, to make the code for "classes" that construct object generating functions like the one in the example will be written by... macros. So I successfully put myself in a situation where macros were the natural answer... and saw what I needed to do. My getting to that particular ah-ha moment was the real message of the post. I can now begin to understand what the experts are talking about.

So I can now use closures and macros to make lisp just as crappy as other programming languages... or I can use this knowledge to learn more about doing things "the lispy way." Trust me when I say that the latter option is my preference.

I'm just an amateur that's excited about these ideas... and that you _can_ do this sort of thing. I'm not saying that you _should_.

<comment><USER2> Insightful. Thanks for exploring random things.. Maybe you'll make a discovery that no-one else has made before.

<comment><USER3> ...But more than likely just reinvent something that Guy Steele wrote a paper on in the seventies. ^_^

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _"when it comes to encapsulation, the very foundation is that all state must be accessible only from inside the object's methods."_

Screw encapsulation then. Low tech data abstraction gives you most of the benefits without the hassle. (+)

[http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book- Z-H-14.html...](http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book- Z-H-14.html#%_sec_2.1.2)

(+) Edit: was "The real point is data abstraction."</comment>


Ask HN: (Freelance) Do you host your clients' sites?  Why, or why not? - <AUTHOR>

Whether I'm volunteering some time for a friend or taking on a paying client, I always have two specific quandaries: If they have their own shared hosting at, for example, Dreamhost, or (cringe) NetSol, do I encourage them to keep it?  What if they're not savvy enough to add an SSH account for me to upload things through?  What if they're too nervous to hand out login credentials or create new accounts, and insist on uploading things themselves?  Which of these issues are "I can work with it," and which are "This client is too stubborn to work with?"  I've dealt with folk on both ends of the spectrum, and sometimes I'm really not sure if I'm "bending over backwards," or just "being flexible."
The second quandary ties into the first.  If I'm working on a static site--just HTML, CSS, images, and possibly some JavaScript (no AJAX)--then it's no big deal to zip it up, send it to the client and let them upload it at their leisure.
But, dynamic sites... even if I'm just customizing a codebase I've already written for this customer, things quickly become nontrivial: If they have a shared hosting environment, what if it costs extra to use a database?  What if their host supports MySQL but not Postgres, or vice-versa?  What if I wrote it in PHP5 or Python 2.6, but they only have PHP4 or Python 2.3?  Do you charge more?  Encourage the client to switch hosts?  To you?  Hosting clients has its own class of distressing issues.
Even worse is explaining the difference between "dynamic" and "static" to a layperson.  Sometimes they'll get it if I say, "Basically dynamic is anything that lets users login and save information on the site," but even that is a pretty shaky metric.
How do you articulate these issues to a layperson without overwhelming them? <comment><USER2> I always host clients' sites. In the past it was such a nightmare dealing with all of the various shared hosting companies that I made the decision to only work with clients who agreed to my hosting.

The way I did that is by offering subscription billing for the site, so instead of paying one huge upfront fee, clients pay a setup fee and then a monthly ongoing charge that covers hosting and maintenance. If you want to keep your own hosting, there is an additional charge for setup, and you still pay the same rate, so no one ever opted for that.

Now that I host on The Rackspace Cloud, Rackspace handles technical support for $3/mo/domain (US-based), and basic website maintenance is handled transparently in the Philippines.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have hosted some sites, and I don't mean hosted as in put them on a machine that Rackspace or someone else hosted, I mean hosted as in I put their computer in my closet on the business class cable modem I have.

It all depends on the client and the site. For high traffic sites where the client has money, I direct them toward other hosting, or getting their own internet connection to their office that can host it. I do have a server with a lot of one-off projects on it that never took off and got to the point where the client invested in a real setup, various startups that never proceeded past the web site stage.

</comment><comment><USER4> i've tried both, and i now no longer attempt to host client's sites. i'll do it on request or on certain occasions, but i find that the money you make from hosting doesn't tend to offset the time and the headaches that come from having to deal with it.</comment>


Tesla's big battery paves way for AI to dominate energy trades (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://www.eqmagpro.com/tesla-big-battery-paves-way-for-artificial-intelligence-to-dominate-energy-trades/ <comment><USER2> Til, energy markets still have humans executing trades.

Also, is there anything Musk isn't improving!</comment>