Human Brains Are Wired to Blame Rather Than Praise - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2015/12/04/brain-wired-praise-blame/ <comment><USER2> This looks like a brain mechanism finding to back up the well known psychological phenomenon called The Fundamental Attribution Error,[1] "the tendency to overestimate the effect of disposition or personality and underestimate the effect of the situation in explaining social behavior." Simply put, we observe other people's noticeable behavior in social situations (which is most likely to be their BAD behavior, which gains more notice) as reflecting their (bad) character, while we figure that most of our own behavior toward other people is the best we can do under the circumstances. I've seen plenty of examples of this here on Hacker News, and if I acknowledge the research findings, I have to acknowledge that I've provided more than a few examples of that kind of behavior here on Hacker News over the years.

[1] [https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/real-men-dont-write- blo...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/real-men-dont-write- blogs/201406/why-we-dont-give-each-other-break)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for this, explains my own behaviour too. Only after I reached my thirties I became more thoughtful and analytical before speaking and with that came less blaming. It's still in my brain though but it doesn't come out much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Aristotle dealt quite the challenge to humanity when he issued his moral > philosophy about the 'perfect man,' saying he does not "concern himself that > others should be blamed." Aristotle must have missed the brain scans.

WHat a weak way to finish the article - take a quote from a Greek philosopher you do not understand and look like a smart aleck while you are obviously oblivious to its actual meaning.

<comment><USER5> I blame society for such a weak finish.

<comment><USER6> Blame Aristotle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Making a critical mistake can get you killed but doing anything awesome won't make your lifespan infinite. So, the natural tendency of human brain is to avoid mistakes for betterment of survival chances while not giving too much importance to any positive stuff happening to them.

The downside is too much and the upside is not that much.

</comment><comment><USER8>
      Just as solid rock
      is not shaken by the storm,
      even so the wise are not affected
      by praise or blame.

_Dhammapada 81_

</comment><comment><USER9> Human brains raised in a hierarchical society based on relations of domination.

<comment><USER9> To elaborate: Emotional responses are very plastic. One can deliberately change the brain structures involved in those processes. It stands to reason that the brain structures we have without deliberate practice are not some neutral state of the human brain, but a reflection of our social context.

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2944261/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2944261/)

Abstract: In a recent visit to the United States, the Dalai Lama gave a speech at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting in Washington, D.C. Over the past several years, he has helped recruit Tibetan Buddhist monks for, and directly encouraged research on the brain and meditation in the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. The findings from studies in this unusual sample as well as related research efforts, suggest that, over the course of meditating for tens of thousands of hours, the long-term practitioners had actually altered the structure and function of their brains. In this article we discuss neuroplasticity, which encompasses such alterations, and the findings from these studies. Further, we comment on the associated signal processing (SP) challenges, current status and how SP can contribute to advance these studies.

Choice quote: "Expert meditators also showed less activation than novices in the amygdala during FA meditation in response to emotional sounds. Activation in this affective region correlated negatively with hours of practice in life, as shown in Figure 1(A). This finding may support the idea that, advanced levels of concentration are associated with a significant decrease in emotionally reactive behaviors that are incompatible with stability of concentration."

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22661409](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22661409)

Abstract: The development of social emotions such as compassion is crucial for successful social interactions as well as for the maintenance of mental and physical health, especially when confronted with distressing life events. Yet, the neural mechanisms supporting the training of these emotions are poorly understood. To study affective plasticity in healthy adults, we measured functional neural and subjective responses to witnessing the distress of others in a newly developed task (Socio-affective Video Task). Participants' initial empathic responses to the task were accompanied by negative affect and activations in the anterior insula and anterior medial cingulate cortex--a core neural network underlying empathy for pain. Whereas participants reacted with negative affect before training, compassion training increased positive affective experiences, even in response to witnessing others in distress. On the neural level, we observed that, compared with a memory control group, compassion training elicited activity in a neural network including the medial orbitofrontal cortex, putamen, pallidum, and ventral tegmental area--brain regions previously associated with positive affect and affiliation. Taken together, these findings suggest that the deliberate cultivation of compassion offers a new coping strategy that fosters positive affect even when confronted with the distress of others.

<comment><USER10> Thank you so much for posting this. Are there any good sources for this type of information? I'm specifically interested in psychological/neurological differences between cultures. A similar example is Crazy Like Us [1]. It's fascinating how culture seems to thwart a full comprehension of psychology.

1: [http://www.amazon.com/Crazy-Like-Us-Globalization- American/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Crazy-Like-Us-Globalization- American/dp/1416587098)

<comment><USER8> Check these out:

[http://people.duke.edu/~ojf/DestructiveEmotions.pdf](http://people.duke.edu/~ojf/DestructiveEmotions.pdf)

[http://www.amazon.ca/Destructive-Emotions-Scientific- Dialogu...](http://www.amazon.ca/Destructive-Emotions-Scientific-Dialogue- Dalai/dp/0553381059)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is it correct to draw a comparison between these findings and those revealed by behavior economists such as Daniel Kahneman: blaming as part of system 1 thinking and praising drawn from system 2? It seems to fit nicely (and I like that). If it is acceptable, then perhaps it isn't correct to say that our brains are wired to blame rather than praise but instead that we blame quickly and praise slowly.

</comment><comment><USER12> Whenever my code doesn't work, my first thought is: "The compiler made a mistake." :)

</comment><comment><USER13> My job? lol.. do a hundred great things.. no one remembers. make one mistake... no one ever forgets.

<comment><USER14> This is every aspect of life though.

See: Bill Nguyen

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

<comment><USER15> I don't get it, what am I missing?

<comment><USER16> Bill Nguyen is best known as the founder of Color, a much hyped then subsequently much lampooned photo app that failed rather conspicuously under the weight of its own PR, a la Cuil.

Based on the Wikipedia article, he apparently had a long track record of multiple impressive successes prior to Color, although none are nearly as well known.

Hence the parent's argument that Bill Ngyuen's life is an illustration of the true nature of the world: you can be successful 100 times, but if you fail once, it is only the failure that is remembered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Normally people do more good things to others than bad things. It's hard to estimate what the ratio is but I would say it's closer to 1000:1 than 10:1. If being at good is the baseline, it would make sense to ignore those events most of the time.

</comment><comment><USER18> This wouldn't be to bad if people just put the same critical filters to their own ideas and actions as they put on others.

<comment><USER19> According to Kelly McGonical they put stricter filter on themselves. They appear more critical on your project because they we're so immensely critical of their own project, that it never got started.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> that explains the internet

<comment><USER21> It also explains politics. I'm pretty sure that, if we were facing an extinction event courtesy a rather large and immovable asteroid, they'd spend the time we had left trying to see who they could blame other than themselves for curtailing efforts to expand beyond LEO.

<comment><USER6> That would make a great Sci-fi humorous short story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think 'wired' is the wrong word to use as it implies we're all kind of like that which isn't true. People who judge other people more harshly for their actions generally judge themselves pretty harshly too. The faults we see most in others are the faults we see in ourselves the most. If we were really wired this way than cognitive behavioral therapy wouldn't work, but I guess that depends on your definition of 'wired'. This is more a product of low self esteem than how we are 'wired'. I think the social conditions which are creating a society of low self esteem should be under a microscope instead.

<comment><USER19> >People who judge other people more harshly for their actions generally judge themselves pretty harshly too.

That sounds like the Jungian or MBTI J/P divide. When such person has good self esteem, that same trait makes him/her decisive "natural" leader.

But that theory is not in fashion right now. So take everything I said as speculation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This makes perfect sense. There's a huge evolutionary advantage in calling attention to a bad actor (someone behaving in a way not advantageous to the tribe), because that person will either change, or be expelled from the group, or killed, which helps the group. However praising someone just makes them feel good, and is not a real motivator. Humans evolved to be violent and critical, because the tribes that didn't have that attribute got killed off, conquered, or died of starvation during hard times.

<comment><USER9> Every time someone armchairs evolutionary psychology on the Internet my brainstem tries to curl in on itself.

<comment><USER24> This makes perfect sense. There's a huge evolutionary advantage in calling attention to a bad actor (someone behaving in a way not advantageous to the tribe), because that person will either change, or be expelled from the group, or downvoted until their comment disappears, which helps the group.

<comment><USER9> Making sense is not enough to be scientific. You can make up a plausible evolutionary cause for virtually any behavior. It's almost impossible to test those hypotheses. It's exasperating to even try to hold a conversation when the opening is something as reductionist and anti-scientific as the grandparent post.

<comment><USER24> ... I don't think you caught what I did there.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Hellepoll is a blazingly-fast async HTTP server written in C++ - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/williame/hellepoll This is based on an approach I made for a very high performance message and video multiplexing server.
The project died, but I'm glad I get to share the a basic version with some http test code now.
I admit this is the second time I've tried to show this off here today; I posted earlier but it got lost when no-one was watching :( <comment><USER3> Cool stuff. I assume you wrote this for your own personal gratification and not to compete with Nginx or something. What was the coolest thing you learned in putting this together?

</comment><comment><USER4> You should not be #include-ing headers inside of an extern "C" block. It is up to those headers to:

      #ifdef __cplusplus
      extern "C" {
      #endif

<comment><USER5> And, if those headers do not already wrap themselves in their own extern "C" block, wrapping around the #include is sometimes a quick fix (e.g. until the upstream authors merge your pull request).

<comment><USER6> This.

Windows porters frequently have to do this to deal with the fact Microsoft still refuses to produce a C compiler, and instead just does double duty on their existing C++ compiler.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm curious as to why the author hasn't referenced nginx, which is written also event based (epoll/kqueue) and written in C.

<comment><USER8> Probably because is much slower than nginx, C++ adds extra "fat" that nginx (writen in C) doesn't have.

<comment><USER9> Not sure about C++ overhead there. C++ often edges out C in the alioth benchmarks. More to the point, I highly doubt the author's parser ("parser") in http.cpp is faster than the one in nginx, which really is a thing of beauty.

[http://trac.nginx.org/nginx/browser/nginx/trunk/src/http/ngx...](http://trac.nginx.org/nginx/browser/nginx/trunk/src/http/ngx_http_parse.c)

<comment><USER10> I really love the trick for efficiently reading 4 chars and checking them out of a string. I like it so much I've been working towards making it happen automatically on PyPy so if you write something like:

        if buf[i:i+4] == "POST":

the JIT automatically turns that into a MOVL + CMP + JMP. The magic of high level languages :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I believe you are testing the requests / sec and not replies / sec. While requests / sec matters a bit, you'll most probably be bottle-necking in your context switches. What matters is replies / sec. This is a more accurate measurement of your server performance and not OS bottlenecks. I'd use httperf for this matter.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am confused. What context switches?

<comment><USER11> Measuring requests per second is close to measuring the number of accept system calls you can do. Since it's a system call you have a context switch.

<comment><USER12> I would love to see "someone" do that benchmark; using epoll, accept as many sockets as possible, for the sake of argument let's stuff one byte down them, and then properly shut them down.

I'm curious how close to the limit of the underlying poll technology we're getting, because it seems like everyone is converging in roughly the same area, in an order-of-magnitude sense.

I also find myself wondering about the implications of these artificial benchmarks and the stuff Zed discussed here: <http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1280829388.html>

<comment><USER11> request rate is not influenced much by the polling mechanism (epoll/kqueue/poll/select) when all you're doing is listening to one fd and processing new ones then closing then immediately. These multiplexers matter when you are working on lots of file descriptors.

It matters because select will have to iterate over all the file descriptors you passed to it, while kqueue for example have knotes registered to it when it wakes up and won't need to iterate over everything, but just the knotes it got. Not to mention the data copying from userland to the kernel in case of select/poll.

Back to the request rate limitations, the limitation is mainly coming from the # of system calls you can execute in a sec (accept() in this case) which is heavily influenced by the context switches.

Looking at the application CPU gives you a very good idea of what your bottleneck is. If your CPU is 100% then it's clear your application is hitting the limit, but if the application CPU is at 30% and you cannot process more requests / sec then you've hit the system limit here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, there is indeed a mode switch to read/write from/to the tcp buffer or accept a connection. Luckily mode switches are not context switches - <USER2> are typically massively more expensive - as only one thread is ever involved.

Hellepoll uses 'epoll' which is the Linux equivalent of kqueue. Kqueue is said to be marginally faster still, and I look forward to Hellepoll using kqueue when running on FreeBSD. Epoll/kqueue absolutely affect accept rate incidentally, so its an exercise to the reader to work out why ;)

Hellepoll does use the fanciest features of epoll like 'edge triggering' which is perhaps one of the things making it nudge ahead of Java's NIO-based webservers (as NIO is lowest-common-denominator and lacks ET).

Finally, Hellepoll is really writing meaningful bytes, and it even flushes them in keep-alive connections (obviously; think how it would ever work otherwise?).

So I think, on balance, Hellepoll is the real thing and not just measuring how quickly a big backlog on a listening socket can fill up ;)

On Linux, I've found the new 'perf timechart' a lot of fun.

<comment><USER11> Network IO, Disk IO, scheduling, locks etc.. all trigger context switches and not only mode switch because only the kernel is allowed to manipulate data structures related to mbufs, vfs, and whatnot.

When I said epoll/kqueue doesn't affect the accept rate, I was replying back to a specific request of writing a program to just accept/reply/shutdown. In this case you are passing one fd to the poller which won't matter much what poller you are using.

My original comment is that you are measuring the wrong thing and it's not against hellepoll. requests / sec can be much higher than reply / sec because they get buffered waiting for you to accept them. Once accepted, then a request is counted. What matters though, especially to the http client is how long it takes to serve the connection from start to finish, hence reply rate.

fyi, you can use libev for poller portability.

You can experiment with this command and look at the reply rate.

httperf --num-conns=10000000 -vv --num-calls=1 --port=<your_port>

<comment><AUTHOR> 1) yes I've used libevent and libev and others in the past

2) ab does wait for the requests to complete before sending the next

3) you really are flat wrong when you don't make a distinction between mode switching and context switching

4) conclusion: with a name like yours, you must be trolling

<comment><USER11> I didn't say there is no distinction. I said system calls that require disk io, or network io, or triggers locking/sleeping requires a context switch. Calls like read/write/accept triggers context switches (which starts with a mode switch). The switch is required for the kernel to execute the system calls and operate on it's own data structures. Only the kernel can alter mbufs in this case.

Go read your OS book.

I am not trolling. you just lack experience and this sounds new to you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for making me challenge my assumptions and memory.

I've asked around a bit and am fairly sure of my facts again, and my understanding is:

* kernel mode is cheaper than ever to reach; SYSCALL/SYSENTER etc so its not even an interrupt and there are no hardware threads or anything involved

* in kernel mode, the thread can get straight at the buffer and the locks that protect it; there is nothing that we'd call a 'context switch' in there

* being as this seems to be what is meant by monolithic kernel, surely its the same on freebsd too?

<comment><USER11> I totally agree that SYSCALL/SYSENTER/SYSRET are very cheap to execute. But these instructions only takes care of the ring switch and are not executed alone.

When you make a system call, a trap is issued that causes the hardware switch to kernel mode.

The hardware pushes onto the per-process kernel stack the pc, status word, and the kernel code takes care of saving the registers, esp, etc.. this is called a task context switch. Context switching between processes is much more expensive but task context switching is still considered a context switch.

When you are making a system call, it's still much more expensive then most of the work you are doing in your program hellepoll and hence it's your bottleneck. This is why you don't see your process's CPU at 100%.

On a related note, whenever you have a program doing a lot of network IO, you are essentially causing a lot of process context switches because each time you get data on the wire you cause a context switch because the kernel needs to handle this hardware interrupt.

<comment><AUTHOR> So we only disagree in edge-case terminology. I think your trying to worm out of your missclassification, but no worries.

Yes, to get these numbers i have had to minimise syscalls. Thats the advantage of hellepoll. I wrote the http server just to release it, as before it was an rtmp server but it was commercial and couldn't be released. That had write buffers usr side too which helped even more.

And i understand what ab and httperf test, and yes i am counting served pages.

Finally, i spend a lot pf time staring at linux perf reports and timecharts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> ULib is a mature and well-considered C++ framework for developing high- performance applications that includes a blazingly-fast async HTTP server-- more batteries included.

<https://github.com/stefanocasazza/ULib>

</comment><comment><USER14> How does it compare to libevent evhttp server? Besides being written in C++...

</comment><comment><USER15> I immediately wanted to fork this and have it just return "Allan!" instead of "Hello World".

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaPepCVepCg></comment>


Apple admit Briton did invent iPod, but he's still not getting any money - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1053152/Apple-admit-Briton-DID-invent-iPod-hes-getting-money.html?ITO=1490

<comment><USER2> The article didn't say. Was there ever even a prototype or was this just a 60,000 pound worldwide-wide empire of patents based on that little sketch? Wouldn't they have all expired anyway by the time the Ipod hit the market? (even with extensions)

I drew magical music players that could hold all my tunes when I was 12 too. I even tried to make one with the innards of a vhs tape, reel to reel heads and an MC6800 microcontroller. Locating a specific spot on a big ribbon of tape is damn hard with only 128 bytes of ram...

<comment><USER3> It stated in the article that there was infact a prototype it just could only play 3.5 mins of music.

<comment><USER2> _His invention, called the IXI, stored only 3.5 minutes of music on to a chip – but Mr Kramer rightly believed its capacity would improve.

His sketches at the time showed a credit-card-sized player with a rectangular screen and a central menu button to scroll through a selection of music tracks – very similar to the iPod._

This seems to me that if there had been a prototype, it would have stored only 3.5 minutes on the chips available at the time, but there wasn't. Only sketches. The thing he has in the picture there is most certainly _not_ a 1979 prototype.</comment></comment></comment>


Harvard Takes the Plunge into Crypto with a Token Sale Investment - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-11/harvard-takes-plunge-into-crypto-with-a-token-sale-investment <comment><USER2> Wasted money</comment>


Ask HN - do you face the "security block" ? - <AUTHOR>

I've got an idea of product that would work on top of gmail (via oauth).
I'm going to do it, yet I'm quite concerned about what it would mean to get hacked etc.
Are you sometimes stopping yourself from implementing an idea because you are concerned about security issues ? <comment><USER2> I killed some ideas in my mind, because I felt that nobody would use the end product because of privacy concerns.

It took me a while to learn that the average internet user does not give a shit about privacy.

<comment><USER3> I am in the same boat - almost killed an idea because of this but am going to go through with it any way. There are quite a few opportunities if you break the security best practice rules that will work just fine. Paypal had a similar approach when they started - they just let people make payments and beat the fraudsters and hackers later.</comment></comment>


Getting shot by a handgun - <AUTHOR> http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=467321 <comment><USER3> Speaking from years of experience working as an ER nurse in the Chicago ghetto...

He drew a short straw on the weapon of choice. .22 caliber slugs tend to bounce around inside a person. Anything carrying more energy would likely have shattered his scapula, and gone clean through him. The energy of the slug wouldn't have been used up bouncing around his chest.

I took care of a person shot in the ankle with a .22. The entrance wound was in his ankle and the exit wound was in his groin. Another client had a single hole in his skull with no exit wound. Needless to say, the poor sap didn't do well after having a slug rattle around inside his skull for a while.

But I digress. I just finished watching the first season of The Wire tonight. It reminded me a lot of my stint in Chicago, and I guess I have ballistics on my mind. Back to coding...

<comment><USER4> Aside from the ease of sound suppressing them, and the small size of the weapons, there is a reason some of the best hit squads in the world use the .22lr!

Admittedly, a .22WMR is pretty much a different animal than the .22lr. Out of a rifle, it would have probably been a through and through, assuming a FMJ bullet -- you'd probably get 2000fps for a 40gr. A JSP might not have, and out of a Ruger Single Six, it's a lot closer to a really hot .22lr rifle.

<comment><USER5> Sound suppression is largely a function of relatively slowly bleeding off the gas that results from combustion. There is not much powder in a 22lr (22 long- rifle) round, which is why it is easily suppressible. I can make no particular comment as to the frequency of their use by the best hit squads in the world.

The subject of the article was shot with a 22WMR (Winchester Magnum Rimfire) round. This round can use the same bullet as the 22lr round but contains lots more powder.

The velocity of the bullet leaving the barrel of the firearm depends on how fast the charge contained in the casing wants to push it and how much the barrel wants to slow it down due to friction. Almost all rifles barrels are between 16.5" and 24". For a average 22WMR round shooting an 40-grain (unit of mass) bullet out of a mid-length rifle barrel one would expect the bullet to leave the barrel at around 2000 feet/sec. The deceleration caused by friction can be altered by changing the exterior-most material of the bullet: a full metal jacket (usually lead totally encased by copper) is potentially slicker than a jacketed soft-point (only partially encased, with the tip exposed).

A Ruger Single Six is a type of handgun. The story describes a single-action revolver, which the Single Six is not, but let's ignore that. It comes in barrel lengths of 2.75", 4", and 6". Out of a 4" or 6" barrel, the 22WMR has about 1400-1600 feet/sec of velocity. This is roughly comparable with the upper (or hot) range for a 22lr fired out of a rifle barrel.

<comment><USER6> > There is not much powder in a 22lr (22 long-rifle) round, which is why it is > easily suppressible.

Also, .22LR ammunition is generally subsonic outside of hotter loadings. This avoids the characteristic supersonic crack of higher velocity cartridges.

<comment><USER7> Sorry, but .22 Long Rifle is generally loaded supersonic from the test fixtures, even in the standard loadings. A pistol (assuming a 6" bbl) is really close to supersonic, if not a bit over. It'll vary by weapon and air density.

Now, you could use one of the other rimfire variations (.22 Short, .22 Long, .22 CB) which generally will fire from a .22 LR chamber. These would most likely get you subsonic velocities.

Another thing to consider when shooting a pistol vs a rifle and comparing sound signatures is that a pistol will eject more unburnt powder into the air around the muzzle as its had less barrel length to burn said powder.

As far as suppression goes, there are four main components of the sound signature of a gunshot:

1) muzzle blast - the expansion of deflagrating powder in the atmosphere as it exits the barrel.

2) sonic crack - the bullet creating a shockwave through the air. Can be avoided by using subsonic cartridges/loadings.

3) the weapons action - at the very least the firing pin's impact on the primer. This is louder than you'd expect.

4) the bullet's impact - very much louder than you'd expect. A rifle bullet impacting flesh is a very loud slap. Imagine dropping a large boneless beef roast on a tile floor from a few meters up.

Of these bits of the gunshot, only 1) can be addressed with a suppressor. And it does make shooting much more pleasant. You can generally avoid most ear protection shooting suppressed, even with supersonic ammo (you won't be in the shockwave so no need to worry about it).

I personally have fired rather large rifles without ear protection, and its generally not real pleasant. I really wish that there was no NFA and we could buy suppressors like some countries (New Zealand comes to mind). A .22 suppressor there is something like $40NZ, here you're looking at $4-600, a $200 tax stamp, and a 6month wait for the BATFE to do a background check that the FBI does in less than a week. Oh, and you can't let your wife/kid use it without being in violation of the NFA unless you have it owned by a trust where the family memebers are trustees.

<comment><USER6> I'm just going on chrono numbers I've seen in the past, e.g. [http://www.hipointfirearmsforums.com/Forum/index.php?topic=3...](http://www.hipointfirearmsforums.com/Forum/index.php?topic=32913.0)

The only stuff that's consistently making supersonic out of the list is the high velocity stuff. Even Remington Golden Bullet (which Remington advertises as "high velocity" according to the box I have sitting on my desk) falls short of supersonic from pistol length barrels.

I guess the fairer thing to say would be that .22LR is borderline but it drops below supersonic pretty quickly once you start shaving barrel length.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I strongly advise against getting shot.

My limited first-ass experience: I got hit by a 9mm FMJ ricochet. Someone put a round into a concrete floor near me, and the bullet broke apart and a piece hit me, or a piece of concrete hit me in the back of the thigh; it left a mark, but didn't break the skin; we found the bullet completely deformed with the jacket shredded in several pieces). The worst part was the sound; despite shooting a lot, it was the first time I'd ever been next to a firearm fired inside a 3m x 2m x 3m concrete room without wearing hearing protection. I also had a sore throat from yelling at the guy for the next ~15 minutes. Strangely, I wasn't actually afraid until the next day (when I realized how easy it would have been for the guy to have shot me in the leg instead, or for the ricochet to have hit me somewhere important nearby, etc.)

Temporary deafness (wax basically protects your ear from further damage by blocking the ear canal; I used hydrogen peroxide to clean it out later, and let a medic look at it with an otoscope to make sure the eardrum wasn't too damaged).

The whole experience made me 1) trust people even less and 2) want to become a certified emt or paramedic at some point, mainly to deal with trauma.

<comment><USER8> I have a similar anecdote, and strangely enough, a similar reaction.

A group of us were preparing for an IDPA match at a local gun range. One of our most experienced members got a little too complacent and was joking with a friend after finishing a course of fire. He ignored the range safety officer standing next to him. He didn't clear his weapon before he holstered it, and as he holstered it, his hand slipped and the weapon discharged.

We all thought he was fine, and so did he. The range safety officer was in the middle of yelling at him when one of the other members noticed that the guy was bleeding pretty heavily from his right leg. He'd given himself a nice 9mm through-and-through wound to the calf.

The round didn't hit anything important, and we got the bleeding stopped and him off to a hospital without much problem.

A few weeks later, before our next shoot, our group met with a local paramedic and an ER doctor for an informal crash course in gunshot trauma treatment.

<comment><USER4> Being an RSO is one of the most unpleasant jobs I've ever had. It's even worse on ranges where you're training people who may already want to kill you, or may just shoot you if you try to impart useful training tips like "please maintain muzzle discipline" or "use both hands", which I thankfully have never had to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> About fifteen years ago I read a book summarizing research into the effects of different types and calibers of handguns and handgun ammunition. (Long story short: Clinton was trying to ban semiautomatic handguns or something, so my dad developed a sudden interest in buying a gun, and he borrowed some books from a friend who was quite an enthusiast.) The study was a survey of thousands of police reports on shootings, and it was done by a law enforcement guy to help law enforcement departments make an intelligent decision about what kinds of guns and ammo to standardize on.

He provided a lot of statistics and made some recommendations, but the overriding theme and message of the book was that the result of shooting someone, or being shot, is unpredictable no matter what kind of weapon is involved. Some examples:

A fatal bullet through the heart can leave a guy up and shooting for over ten seconds -- obviously an eternity for a law enforcement officer in a point- blank shootout.

A guy can get shot and not know it. Police officers are trained to check themselves carefully when any shots are fired, because it has happened that officers thought they were unharmed, went home, laid down to rest, and bled to death.

A guy can be in a shootout and THINK he got shot, and it turns out there's not a mark on him. They get knocked over, feel intense pain, cry out, etc. There were enough of these cases that the researchers were able to find some involving officers who were previously decorated for valor and _had in fact been shot before_.

A guy can get shot multiple times with a powerful weapon and get lucky, or he can get shot with a tiny weapon and get unlucky. I still remember the story used to illustrate this: a fight between roommates got ugly, and one guy shot the other six times in the chest with a .45. The second guy went to his attic, found his great-grandfather's Civil War-era relic small caliber revolver (something like a .22), went back downstairs, and shot his roommate through the heart, killing him. Forty-eight hours later, his desire for medical care overcame his aversion to getting caught, and he walked into an emergency room. He recovered completely.

The book had a lot of complicated reasoning about the trade-offs involved in choosing handguns and ammunition and made some strong recommendations, but I don't remember any of the specifics. I just remember the author stressing over and over again not to expect any particular result when you shoot somebody.

<comment><USER10> <http://www.firearmstactical.com/pdf/fbi-hwfe.pdf>

Here's a PDF analyzing the effectiveness of firearms. It was written in 1989 so it is a bit out of date. Perhaps someone with more experience with firearms can check to see if the article is still relevant.

It does confirm that "Even if the heart is instantly destroyed, there is sufficient oxygen in the brain to support full and complete voluntary action for 10-15 seconds".

<comment><USER11> So there might be something to the idea that you stay conscious for a bit after getting beheaded?

<comment><USER8> Supposedly, the chemist Antoine Lavoisier[1], who was beheaded during the French Revolution, asked his assistant to quickly retrieve his head after the blade fell and count how long he could blink his eyes. The head blinked in the range of 12-15 times.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> On a similar note George Orwell got shot once in the Spanish Civil war. This article documents his thoughts on it - [http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/soldiers/george-orwell- shot.h...](http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/soldiers/george-orwell-shot.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> Non-linkjacked version:

<http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=467321>

<comment><USER14> Thanks, the context of the question made this post much clearer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Doc with a degree in physics, previously a weapons and anti-terrorism officer on an aircraft carrier and recently (a year ago) took the combined forces combat casualty care course, and have done a few trauma rotations in inner- city ERs (New Orleans and Norfolk).

Chapter 1 of the Emergency War Surgery Manual (updated in 2006 to collect lessons learned from Iraq and Afghanistan) dedicates Chapter 1 to dispelling misconceptions about injuries. The science comes down on the side of the cop answering in Google: the weapon is of little use in predicting the outcome.

<http://www.bordeninstitute.army.mil/other_pub/ews.html>

<comment><USER16> _"... took the combined forces combat casualty care course, and have done a few trauma rotations in inner-city ERs (New Orleans and Norfolk) ..."_

Interesting read. Knowing _"how"_ to react and _"reacting"_ in a appropriate, timely manner in a chaotic environment is a big jump even with the right kind of practice (as opposed to fake practice: <http://bootload.posterous.com/through-my-eyes-fake-practice> ) especially at the first response end. How do you train for the gap between working in calm controlled environments to chaotic ones?

Cudo's, HM's ~ [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Navy_Hospital_Cor...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Navy_Hospital_Corpsman) are well trained because sometimes they are the closest to medical aid you get and as such are much respected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Fascinating story...

More than the shotgun (I would spect to die and Im not very curious on that matter) what really intrigues me is what would I feel after 10 years of zero sexual activity.

Sexual feelings are really strong, that has to cause real pain through the years, I dont know if being grateful of being alive could easily overcome them

<comment><USER18> Shotgun?

<comment><USER19> Gunshot.

<comment><USER17> Oops, I cant edit now :S Thx for the correction

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I know an ex-intelligence officer. He's been shot multiple times, and says that getting shot really hurts. I assume it was even worse than usual for him since he was in the field and couldn't quite waltz into the nearby hospital for treatment.

He also says getting shot is worse when you're running away from someone than when it takes you by surprise. He said some other things, but I don't really remember them.

</comment><comment><USER21> I've had a pneumothorax - the collapsed lung part of his experience - <USER2> required major surgery and a painful recuperation. That was awful enough on its own but was only a tiny part of what he experienced. Yikes.

<comment><USER22> I've had a pneumomediastinum - similar thing but right next to my heart. Pretty scary just having a massive pain in your chest and not knowing what's wrong. I was lucky though and didn't need any surgery and it just cleared up on its own.

<comment><USER3> You are lucky. Pneumomediasitnum gets particularly nasty if you the reason you have it is a torn esophagus, and you have partially eaten food (along with the air) leaking into the sack around your heart.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> If you do a google search to find out who this guy is you'll discover that this story has been copied in a number of different answer sites and blogs for the last 5 years.

But no info on who this is or the backstory on the context of why he got shot.

</comment><comment><USER24> Maybe I missed that particular point but how did he get shot?

<comment><USER25> He shot himself.

<comment><USER24> If your answer wasn't meant as a joke -> No, it says "I myself was shot" not I shot myself.

<comment><USER25> Joke? I couldn't joke about a deadly situation. I accidentally read "I shot myself".

Now as a side note, I want to say to everyone who downvoted my comment without saying why, I think this is an idiot's move. Yes, I am saying it. At least if you are going to do it, give a feedback. Otherwise you haven't added anything to the conversation. And just so you know, it's not about karma. It's about you not adding anything to the conversation.

<comment><USER26> In response to your sidenote, bullshit. Whining about downvotes without "saying why" is an idiot's move. Replying to that whining (as I am doing now) might possibly be an idiot's move, I'm not sure. But voting is not an idiot's move, and lack of explanation does not make it so.

Upvotes and downvotes add the same thing to the conversation: 1) They're a system by which the collective collectively modifies what comments get seen, and in what order 2) They're a system of feedback about what is a valuable contribution

Neither of those contributions requires "saying why". Of course, it is true that the second function works a lot better if the voter communicates a "why", that's easy to see. But it's easy to see that the first function is served just fine by voting without comments (and indeed, since your downvoted comment was erroneous, the conversation benefited from it being removed via downvoting).

Further, we all already know that some explanations of "why" distract from the conversation more than they contribute. The most-obvious example is "+1 agree" or "+1 this", or even "+1 this comment told me something I didn't know". Or, in your case, people could have commented "-1 unsubstantiated" or "-1 parent post misread FA" or something.

Either way, whining about voting _really_ doesn't add to the conversation. If I had downvote ability, I'd downvoting comments that complain about downvotes.

tl;dr: Downvotes without explanations are just as much a positive contribution to the conversation as upvotes.

<comment><USER25> The last I will say on the subject.

 _Whining about downvotes without "saying why" is an idiot's move_. Thank you. According to your comment I am not an idiot because I "said why" : _if you are going to do it, give a feedback. Otherwise you haven't added anything to the conversation._.

I cannot start to think of a world where giving someone a coin as a way of saying you are adding value is just as effective as taking away a coin from them as a way of saying you are taking away value. The way we communicate online should just be an extension of how we communicate in real life. In practice you should only be able to downvote someone because you upvoted them in the past. So in a sense you would take back what you gave them. Otherwise it is nothing short of robbery.

I have never downvoted anyone, unless it was done by mistake. Maybe we are different, but I just do not see how downvotes are helpful. I respect your point, but I think it doesn't make sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Just have to say, before reading all of this, REALLY glad this many HN readers and posters are into this topic. Thought I was the only nut that loved technology and firearms, guess I was wrong.

 _happy sigh_

<comment><USER28> You surely can't be unaware that Eric Raymond loves both tech and guns?

<comment><USER27> I surely was, but surely am no longer :) He resides in PA too, just like me, where our gun control laws favor freedom over oppression (all you Cali/NJ/NYers out there). But I digress.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I am trying to find an answer here. I was shot by a .22 from some kind of semi auto pistol. It was night on a porch with 1 60watt light on. I rushed to the door after hearing my daughter screaming opened the screen to see a boy on the porch turn toward me with a semi hand gun in his right hand. He was 1-2 feet away.as I saw the gun coming around to shoot me. I knew I had to get the gun and reached for it with intense urgency. I saw a flash and felt something hit my upper chest HARD.and heard a 'pop' I remember thinking I failed horribly and was going to die. The next thing I remember I was chasing him down the street hitting him with the butt of the gun until all I was hitting him with was the barrel. ...much happened.. As I was calling 911 very distressed I told them I had been shot -- but looking down I could see no blood and no hole in my white cotton shirt.. The police recovered a .22 slug a couple feet inside the door to the left (door opens to the right) ..and no I have never owned a .22 and the slug in no way belonged on the floor.

I later found what looked like a lead colored smudge mark above a button hole on my white shirt and my chest was bright red behind that spot.

How the heck did that .22 not enter my chest? I had a thick cotton work shirt on with a tee shirt on beneath it -- But that is not enough to block a .22 in my experience.

?Anyone?

This happened 4 days ago so my recollection is fairly fresh.

</comment><comment><USER30> Maybe I'm missing something, but what kind of units are "foot pounds per square inch"? That's definitely not a pressure...

<comment><USER31> A foot pound is the amount of force required to move a pound of material one foot. By adding a surface area it becomes a measure of pressure.

<comment><USER32> Any amount of material can be moved any distance with an infinitesimal amount of force, given enough time... or maybe I'm missing something.

<comment><USER33> It's the amount of energy required to _lift_ one pound vertically by one foot, or the amount of momentum a one pound object gains by falling one foot in a vacuum.

<comment><USER34> Much of the confusion here comes from the fact that a pound is used both as a unit of force and as a unit of mass.

This is one of the many reasons y'all should use SI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I learned by talking to law enforcement types that used to hang around our computer store that unlike the "violent ballet" in movies most gunfights unfold with both combatants clumsily emptying their weapons in each others general direction, then staggering out to wait for the paramedics.

</comment><comment><USER36> It depends entirely on where they're hit, and how much adrenaline and man-made drugs are in their blood stream. But as a common saying goes, "it's a gun, not a death ray." It's surprising - shocking even - how much damage some people can take and still keep going.

</comment><comment><USER37> Sigh... Amaercians and their second amendment.

There is so much anecdotal evidence in this thread. I thought that the HN community would have a greater adversion to firearms as even their ownership by a community increases the chance of fatal violence.

</comment><comment><USER38> Your heard it here first. Being shot once feels like being shot three times. But is it linear? If I was shot 3 times would it feel like 9 times or even more?

<comment><USER39> He didn't say it 'felt' like being shot three times. He said it was like being shot three times due to the bullet ricocheting inside his chest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Interesting, but I really don't think this belongs here.

<comment><USER41> I think his impassive, detailed, technical description/narrative will chime with a lot of people here, in a way that it wouldn't at other communities.

<comment><USER42> I found this disturbingly fascinating in a similar manner to reading autopsy or accident reports. It was clear and explained a process that I wasn't familiar with even though I shoot a .22 target pistol and .22 target rifle. Between the linked article and some of the comments it gave me a new found respect for my peashooters.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: $500,000 of copyright infringement on Envato, what to do? - <AUTHOR> I have a product that was sold on Envato to 12,000 people for $39 by someone I do not know.
I have contacted Envato about it and they asked me to fill a DMCA claim because they say they are a platform.
I did a bit of my own research and it seems that Envato is not a safe harbour (https://www.pc.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/194744/sub080-intellectual-property.pdf).
What should I do next? Seek legal counsel for statutory damages? <comment><USER2> Here are things you should do -

1\. Fill a DMCA claim

2\. Inform author

3\. File a lawsuit - amount is huge ( 12,000 * 39 = 468000$ ), I don't see any reason, why you should not.

I would like to follow, what are other people opinion on this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You should definitely speak to an attorney. You may well be able to find one who will take the case on contingency since there are statutory damages but unfortunately you probably won't have the carrot of statutory attorney fees to dangle unless you registered the copyrights prior to the infringement.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You should talk with a lawyer to see what your legal options are.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> wow, first of all talk to a lawyer.

Second, how much have your own sales of your product totaled up to?

Just curious if it's a similar amount, more or less and what channels you are selling through.

Third, You might want to try get setup selling it on Envato. Sounds like it would be financially beneficial for both of you.

Congrats on a great product.

<comment><USER5> Clarification both of you, is you and Envato. Interested to hear what success you were having elsewhere vs what the thief was able to do on Envato.

<comment><AUTHOR> The product is making more sales than what was sold on Envato. I don't find Envato a better place to sell my products because of their fees (Non-Exclusive Author Fee 55%): [https://help.author.envato.com/hc/en- us/articles/36000047294...](https://help.author.envato.com/hc/en- us/articles/360000472943-Envato-Author-Fee-Schedule)

<comment><USER5> wow, congrats. follow up here and let us know how this shakes out. That's a lot of sales for someone else's product. I wonder how often this happens.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


UK Labour Leader proposes a publicly-funded alternative to Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/23/uk-labour-leader-jeremy-corbyn-proposes-a-publicly-funded-alternative-to-facebook/ <comment><USER2> He didn't really propose a publicly-funded alternative to Facebook though, at least not in the sense people seem to be inferring. He threw out some vague ideas to create a digitally focused sister organization to the BBC, which "could develop new technology for online decision making and audience-led commissioning of programmes and even a public social media platform".

</comment><comment><USER3> That is one of the worst ideas I've ever heard in my life. It's like saying "Hey, NSA and GCHQ are tired of having to copy your data from Facebook's servers, so let's cut out the middle-man".

Thanks, but NO thanks.

<comment><USER4> If GCHQ access is assumed a common "feature" of both Facebook and "GovBook" then it's irrelevant when choosing between the two.

So assuming all else is equal, if GovBook has a charter to harness data only for the public good (and Facebook certainly does not) then GovBook wins.

<comment><USER5> Except in (most likely) features, people on it (would non-UK people allowed?), support.... but I suppose it would have JC's assistant posting stories about how great the government are on it... what a draw.

<comment><USER4> fair points but different issues entirely to what I was replying to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> While I don't use FB, I absolutely, 100% would not use any government social networks, out of both principal and pragmatism, period.

Money would be better spent on building statues of Ed Miliband. And that's saying something.

<comment><USER7> Would you consume news from the BBC, a government news network?

<comment><USER8> I don't want to get into a political argument, but just for the record, the BBC is not a government news network. It is funded via tax, but it is independent.

<comment><USER4> aside from the fact that for a variety of reasons, the BBC is not truly independent, if it's possible to build such an independent media company "funded via tax" then why isn't it possible to do the same for a social media company?

<comment><USER8> There's a continuum of infrastructure from electricity, telephone, ISP, email, social media and beyond. If we can run national utilities at the start of that scale, not necessarily nationalized, but nationally regulated, I don't see why we can't run them at the other end of the scale.

I think the real problem is that current models of social media are dreadful, although I don't know of anything better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wouldn't expect anything else from him. The man despises private enterprise and had the urge to nationalise everything.

I'd think it would be really funny to see this being attempted, where it not for the huge amount of money that would be wasted.

</comment><comment><USER9> He causes so little outrage because his ideas are mostly from cloud cuckoo land. It's hard to muster a response for something so pathetic. Oh, he also wants Google and others to bankroll investigative journalism or face a hefty tax.

<comment><USER10> That latter story expanded upon [https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/aug/22/jeremy- corb...](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/aug/22/jeremy-corbyn- labour-leader-tax-tech-giants-subsidise-bbc-licence-fee)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is absolutely ridiculous and I must say I cannot be surprised coming from Labour.

What escapes the left completely, is that there is a free market. Which can and always does a better job than central planning.

Nothing is stopping anyone from buying a cheap laptop, an external webcam if need be and a decent microphone and then to start streaming to youTube and other decentralised platforms if they want to do vlogging. Hell, nowadays even a cheap android phone will do to stream live to YouTube to get the message out.

There are also cheaper solutions if they want to startup a blog and then syndicate via medium, wordpress, ghost, tumblr, guest blogs and rss channels.

Bottom line, there is nothing. Absolutely nothing stopping anyone from providing their voice to the internet and crafting an audience. The government doesn't need to be involved and those who value a free press should tell him to butt out in the strongest terms.

Except however and this is what we must be careful of. Is that Labour will want to impose restrictions on what is acceptable. There is a UK firewall coming and I'm sure some Labour and Conservative MPs are licking their lips for the day this comes.

I'm too busy to provide citations but links are out there, go do your own research.

Now there is a ray of hope. It's coming in the form of decentralised networks and also Elon Musk's global satellite network. In fact, I will go so far as to say. In the very near future, space-intranets will come into play. Where crowd-funded projects will elect to launch satellites that are outside of government control and mobile phones will have dual capabilities. The first to connect to the internet and the second to be on the space-internet with no government oversight.

<comment><USER4> "What escapes the left completely, is that there is a free market. Which can and always does a better job than central planning."

It might escape them, or it might not be universally true.

You might not be from the UK but surely you're aware of the BBC, which provides extremely high quality media and raises the bar here for the "free market". Our media companies here are better because of the existence of the BBC.

<comment><USER12> That is true, but there has to be a balance between public and commercial, and "balance" is a lacking feature with most (if not all) political parties, and in particular with Labour at the moment (this idea beggars belief and is an example of that). Come to think of it, Balance is a lacking feature in the world right now in general.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Don't trust politicians.

He's taking advantage of the public's frustrations with their privacy being invaded by FB to propose a tool that would ultimately be made in his image.

The only way a political leader or party should get involved is by popularising existing open and ideally decentralised platforms and suggesting laws where non-governmental semi-randomised working groups review source code to check that privacy and security are being maintained and not coerced.

but of course, its not about democracy it's about rightthink

</comment><comment><USER4> Wasn't there a country that ran an XMPP chat server or similar for it's citizens? I'm trying to find the details but failing. I'm sure I read about it in the last couple of years.

</comment><comment><USER14> "Do you honestly believe that Britain is better off outside of the EU?"

[You have been banned from CorbynBook]

<comment><USER15> 1983 - 2015 : Jeremy would answer yes. 2015 - present : Would answer no, or be evasive.

He spent the vast majority of his political career aligned with the values of his mentor, Tony Benn.

<comment><USER14> He chose evasive.

(See recent Channel 4 News video. Alas, I don't have a link to hand.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if he realizes he's actually proposing a government funded global CDN - or that for it to have a usable low-latency and storage capacity for billions of users would cost billions of pounds in infrastructure cost if it were to actually be at the scale and level of success of Facebook...

Nah... of course not! These are the same idiots who think leaving the EU is a great idea!

<comment><USER4> why would a public UK social network need a global CDN and storage capacity for billions of users?</comment></comment>


Microsoft's Frantic Race for Third Place in Smartphones - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-09-12/microsofts-frantic-race-for-third-place-in-smartphones

<comment><AUTHOR> Essentially ... "Microsoft has quality mobile products to offer but faces an uphill battle to expand its 4 percent share of the smartphone market."</comment>


Should you join a startup or found your own? - <AUTHOR> http://rocket-space.com/should-you-join-an-existing-startup-or-create-your-own/#comment-22366

<comment><USER2> I see where Andre's coming from - with so many startups sprouting up all over the place, I can't help but wonder if everyone's energy would be better spent and more startups would turn out successfully if we took a little more time to look inwards and assess whether our strengths are best lent to starting a company or contributing to its success in another way.</comment>


Drug 'reverses' ageing in animal tests - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/health-39354628 <comment><USER2> > "The use of this peptide in patients is a long way away. It requires careful > consideration about safety, about the appropriate group of patients for whom > this peptide can be beneficial in a reasonable period of time so that > positive effects can be easily measured at an affordable cost."

My bet: this drug will be for sale on the internet illegally within a year (and probably fake half of the time). The demand for this exact thing is just too high. It doesn't even matter if it's shown to not work on humans, people will still try it "just in case".

<comment><USER3> As long as people are aware of the risks and are willing to take the chance, I actually support this.

It doesn't make sense that society doesn't blink an eye when we send our youth off to war to die, but heaven forbid if someone dies in the pursuit of knowledge, everybody goes batshit insane. At least if someone dies taking this stuff, we learn a lot. And if it actually ends up working, it benefits society tremendously.

<comment><USER4> > At least if someone dies taking this stuff, we learn a lot.

We'd learn a lot more if they were being monitored as they took the stuff, though. And yet it's still considered unethical to run human trials without preceding animal trials, even when the alternative is people off doing those same trials to themselves without your assistance.

We understand this problem in other domains—that's why "safe injection sites" for drug-addicts exist. So why has pharmaceutical research not cottoned on and begun offering "safe self-experimentation sites", complete with medical researchers + monitoring equipment to capture data, and nurses to help with bad reactions?

<comment><USER5> Because nobody wants to experiment on themselves and your experiment doesn't follow any scientific protocols?

<comment><USER4> Er, the context of this subthread is about people who already do experiment on themselves. People in the "nootropics community." There are a lot of them.

You could try teaching these individuals experimental protocols if you like, but if you _enforce_ them, that means you're the experimenter. You're not allowed to be the experimenter. You just have to hope they're doing something useful. Probably you'd point a lot of automated instrumentation at each room, rather than having any human observers giving anyone (costly) individual attention, because most of the experiments would be too mired in sources of error to tell you much.

But keep in mind that the point wouldn't be to capture subtle things like drug _efficacy_. The point would be to find out about side-effects that might otherwise not be found, by having people around when they suffer adverse reactions to the drug to help the person not-die, and then being able to pull reports directly from the people who helped the person not-die, to find out (in clear medical terms) what the adverse reaction _was_.

<comment><USER6> > Er, the context of this subthread is about people who already do experiment > on themselves. People in the "nootropics community." There are a lot of them

They are not "experimenting" on themselves, they are simply engaging in a chemically-mediated attempt at wish fulfillment. There are few, if any, actual experimentation protocols being used and whenever I check out the scene to see if it is any better Instill find a random collection of anecdotes and poorly gathered "data points." I see no baseline data, no blinding or controls, the worst sorts of confirmation bias in data gathering and assessment, and people entering these "experiments" with a random selection of pre-exisiting conditions for which they are attempting self-medication. This is just an exercise in generating noise, not data.

<comment><USER7> Yes, that is exactly why it was proposed by ~derefr to

> [offer] "safe self-experimentation sites", complete with medical researchers > + monitoring equipment to capture data, and nurses to help with bad > reactions?

That's what this whole subthread is about.

<comment><USER6> The point is that there would be no useful data captured at such sites beyond 'what is the LD50 of this random shit someone ordered from China?' Such a site would possibly increase safety for individuals, but not much else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "He tested it on _mice that were just old (the equivalent of 90 in mouse years)_ , those genetically programmed to age very rapidly and those aged by chemotherapy."

Great! Too many results have been previously reported just in genetically modified mice that weren't aging normally in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER9> The paper:

[http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(17)30246-5](http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674\(17\)30246-5)

</comment><comment><USER10> Many of the current methods of killing senescent cells hinge on apoptosis in some way.

UNITY Biotechnology: using repurposed chemotherapeutic drugs like navitoclax to selectively drive senescent cells into apoptosis by suppressing on the mechanisms that prevents that fate. They also have antibodies and immunotherapies in their backlog of patents, but if they haven't got it to work by now, not likely to be a direction they take in favor of the drugs.

Oisin Biotechnologies: programmed gene therapy that assesses p16 levels in the cell and then induces caspase expression and apoptosis if it looks senescent.

SIWA Therapeutics: monoclonal antibodies.

Everon Biosciences: small molecule drugs and related immunotherapies.

There is a lot of money sloshing into the field of senescent cell clearance at the moment, and given that the target market is ultimately every adult human for a treatment undertaken every few years, I think there is plenty of room for more players.

<comment><USER11> I'm not clear on exactly what happens once the senescent cells are cleared.

Can an elderly body body replace these cells on its own, or would senescent cell clearing generally need to be paired with a stem-cell replacement protocol of some kind?

<comment><USER10> Yes, the cells can be replaced. In old people, with their declining stem cell populations, that replacement will be slower and less effective. So give them lower doses over longer periods of time.

Stem cell replacement is something that should be developed for use in old people anyway; the more of that going on the better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you're flushing out senescent cells, are they automatically being replaced by new, healthy cells?

<comment> norea-armozel In theory, yes. But that depends on how many healthy cells or stem cells that change to replace them there are. It's a big complex problem really that I think people understate. It's part of why we heal so well up to a certain point in our lives (the ability to remove and kill off faulty or old cells). This wouldn't be a fountain of youth but more like a fountain of "not needing a nurse to wipe your ass when you're 95."

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wish there was a way to search for "miracle cure" articles from 5 or 10 or 15 (or 100) years ago, then find out what actually happened to them.

<comment><USER14> I've probably read a handful of Alzheimer's cures in mice that haven't panned out in human trials the past 5 years.

<comment><USER15> The thing about Alzheimer's is that there's no real good mouse model

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Oh to be a test animal. They need not fear cancer or AIDS or even aging...

<comment><USER17> Perhaps not, but their living conditions pretty much suck.

<comment><USER16> that's the joke. Well that and "works in test animals" clearly means nothing for humans

<comment><USER11> I don't see how that's clear at all. Sounds pretty ignorant, really.

<comment><USER16> You should complain to my medical school

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Are we sure humans have as many aged cells as mice do? We do live a lot longer so maybe we already have a mechanism like this?

<comment> zupa-hu sure, it's called fasting

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> While we're waiting for miracle drugs to become available, how about some high intensity aerobic training to reverse aging: [http://www.kurzweilai.net/mayo- clinic-discovers-high-intensi...](http://www.kurzweilai.net/mayo-clinic- discovers-high-intensity-aerobic-training-can-reverse-aging)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wonder what purpose the old cells serve?

<comment><USER19> I may be misremembering, but I think senescence is often induced as a response to damage -- a protective measure, since damaged cells are liable to become cancerous if allowed to continue to divide.

As for why the cells become senescent rather than merely dying -- well, even senescent cells retain some function. If damaged cells died rather than becoming senescent, it would presumably result in more deaths in situations where a large number of cells are damaged.

It may be that a drug which kills senescent cells results in a decrease in chronic disability but an increase in deaths... an interesting trade-off!

<comment><USER11> Well, all cells convert oxygen and sugar into energy, including old cells and cancer cells.

Like you said, cellular senescence is a trade-off -- the body doesn't want these damaged cells to keep dividing per se, yet they are still useful for continuing to covert sugar and oxygen into energy to use as needed.

We do have a mechanism for getting rid of damaged cells in general: autophagy. However, autophagy seems to be mostly triggered when there is an energy deficit, for instance during fasting or during intense exercise.

This is probably why fasting and exercise are proven over and over to be beneficial to health, they essentially trigger a "cleaning cycle" of cellular autophagy within the body. I'm not sure autophagy typically includes senescent cells, my understanding is that it's primarily targeted towards cells that have damaged mitochondria.

<comment><USER19> Even if autophagy eats cells randomly, it will reduce the proportion of senescent cells, since the removed cells will eventually be replaced by newly divided (and non-senescent) cells.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Could this be the first "real" result in anti-aging? It sounds plausible but we can only hope...I've been expecting something like this at any time for the last ten years at least. There must be at least a little bit of low-hanging fruit in this area!!

</comment><comment><USER21> Target p53 no thanks.

<comment><USER22> Care to amplify that comment a bit for those of us in the cheap seats?

<comment><USER23> Wikipedia has quite a bit of information about p53. [1] It seems to have an important role as a suppressor for cancer. So maybe the comment was referring to that, you probably don't want to mess that up.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TP53](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TP53)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> If someone can synthesize this peptide and sell it as a nutritional supplement right now, they'll make a killing. Do I know any chemists? :-)

</comment><comment><USER25> This sounds like the opening scene of a resident evil movie...

</comment><comment><USER26> Any indication on how much it could affects ones lifespan?

<comment><USER27> It might be the start of the living forever, i.e. where breakthroughs keep coming at a fast enough rate to keep you alive.

Or it might kill you from some weird reaction.

Nobody yet knows. But fasting is meant to be good for you in similar ways.

<comment><USER28> > Or it might kill you from some weird reaction.

Given that the alternative is definitely dying, I'd take my chances with the pill after trials have shown it to be sensibly safe.

<comment><USER27> The point of my answer was to imply that no-one knows the outcomes or if it's safe for humans. After it's been tested in humans for safety I'd give it a go for sure. I suppose if you are 90 it's worth a punt ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> now we just need somewhere to put all the old people, and young people to care for them, am I the only one not excited about this ?

<comment><USER30> There's quite a few societies where old people live great active lives up until the day they die and take care of themselves. They're healthier. So shouldn't we try to be healthier and less reliant on the young people too?

Granted stronger social bonds has often been linked to better health so maybe a bit more relying on each other is a good thing.

<comment><USER29> I was thinking more along resource lines, if the ones alive get to live longer and longer, does that not reduce the opportunity for new lives ?

<comment><USER31> You seem to be assuming that new lives are worth more than old lives. Why?

<comment><USER29> This is a good question, I don't have a tidy answer, it just feels like that is the way of things, born, grow old and die, if we change the die bit I do feel like something is lost, if I could freeze time, no more births, no more deaths, would I, no, I don't think so, and we are still evolving, so perhaps that is a good reason to let things run their 'natural' course?

<comment><USER30> This line of thinking comes up a lot in longevity discussion. Pretty much all medicine is "unnatural" and extending life. People evolve all the time even while being alive, we change our opinions on things, we learn things, and we make impact on our surroundings. Usually the question of social progress comes up, but there are still quite a lot of people alive today who dealt with segregation in schools, it wasn't just the deaths of people with those beliefs that moved that progress forward. I could even argue that the fact that people have to focus so hard on survival is slowing down a lot of progress.

<comment><USER31> I'd also argue that a lot of the reasons people think death is "necessary" are actually symptoms of senescence. Decreased neuroplasticity, for example, is likely one of the reasons that old people tend to get "stuck in their ways" and are unwilling to accept new ideas. Clearly, part of solving the aging problem involves solving that too.

A lot of anti-immortality arguments reduce to this problem. Folks who advocate ending aging do _not_ want us to just live forever as progressively more decrepit and cranky old codgers. The point is not to keep you at 90. It's to keep you at 25 (and put you back there if necessary).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sustainable Indie Software - <AUTHOR> http://blog.helftone.com/sustainable-indie-software/

<comment><USER2> If a lot of top-notch indie devs are abandoning the appstore, where are they going? Back to the Web, Windows, or OS X? It seems there is a catch here that a large number of consumer eyes are pointed at the various app stores and not at more traditional and perhaps more sustainable platforms. So how does an indie pull those eyes back to their platform of choice?

</comment><comment><USER3> Is e.g. indie music sustainable? IMHO the madness will just go on, fueled by new generations.</comment>


How Homeownership Became the Engine of American Inequality - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/09/magazine/how-homeownership-became-the-engine-of-american-inequality.html?action=click&contentCollection=Sports&module=Trending&version=Full&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article <comment><USER2> I suppose I should expect this from the NYT but they really managed to spin this one.

They bemoan that "the rich" "save" money from the deduction. Isn't it relevant that in order to get a significant discount on taxes, they'd have to be taxed a much larger amount too?

Furthermore, an home-owning couple doesn't realize a single dollar of benefit until after the first $12,600 because of the standard deduction. A renting couple gets all $12,600 for free PLUS they benefit from lower rent because their landlord can deduct not only their own interest and property taxes but other expenses which an occupying homeowner could not (association fees, repairs, etc).

I took NYT's examples and plugged them into the tax calculator to see how much they are paying, including the itemized deductions for the wealthier family:

Asare: $7680 per month plus property taxes (assuming 1.5% in Massachusetts, that's another $831 monthly): [https://smartasset.com/taxes/income- taxes#CUgaT4sugl](https://smartasset.com/taxes/income-taxes#CUgaT4sugl)

Diaz: $357 per month: [https://smartasset.com/taxes/income- taxes#XkDyAkz2OK](https://smartasset.com/taxes/income-taxes#XkDyAkz2OK) [also note the $0 in federal income taxes which the NYT article is focused on, rather than State policy]

Unless one supposes Asare's family is using 20+ times more shared resources than Diaz's, one could come up with a different notion of who the beneficiaries of tax policy may be.

</comment><comment> et-al [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=How%20Homeownership%20Became%2...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=How%20Homeownership%20Became%20the%20Engine%20of%20American%20Inequality&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)

<comment><USER3> Nyt has really been spammed here as of late.

<comment> et-al I don't mind the abundance of NYT articles as much as submitters not taking the effort to see if an existing discussion has been occurring.

<comment><AUTHOR> My apologies. I've taken it for granted that if I submit a duplicate link, I'll be redirected the already-existing HN post. I'll be more careful.

<comment> et-al Thank you.

I do wish HN would implement a quick link-checker to help minimise these mistakes.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Saving forums from themselves with shared hierarchical white lists - alan-crowe http://www.cawtech.demon.co.uk/outer-circle/core.html <comment><AUTHOR> Maybe this is why Twitter works. You only see those you follow in your stream. You can't opt to see everything someone else is seeing, mostly because their platform can't really handle that sort of fan-out yet. But the basic idea of whitelisting is the same.

That's why Twitter's still fun for me regardless of how many social media consultants are around. I just don't follow them.

<comment><USER2> Exactly. This problem is why the friending / follower / newsfeed format has won. Everyone's accountable for curating their own feed. Want to expand the universe? Allow friend of friend, or friend of friend of friend views.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Have you considered PGP's web of trust?

PGP's web of trust shows that you can have a decentralized system without going full-blown peer to peer, and has many of the same issues with regard to trusting people and trusting people to trust people. It also shows that even this model - which is simpler than what you propose - has difficulty gaining acceptance.

I also don't see in what context you want to use this protocol, but there are a lot of fora that would be improved if only one had the ability to write Usenet-style killfiles (which can do a lot more than kill by author!). However, NNTP and SMTP clients largely already have these abilities to a sufficient level that you'll have a hard time displacing them, and web fora are very different and hard to script client-side.

<comment> alan-crowe I've heard the phrase "web of trust" and googled it, but found something very different to what I have in mind.

There is a tradition, going back to The Well, of having a serious adult forum invaded by children and their poo, pee, belly, bum posts. The adult forum resists and is destroyed.

My idea is that the different users are all legitimate and that success comes through coexistance. By coexistance I mean obliviousness. Chrome-Dome posts a cerebral contribution of great erudition. Chuckle-Head replies with vulgar mockery. In a traditional forum Chrome-Dome is driven away by this. The traditional response is to try to find a way to drive Chuckle-Head away instead.

The problem is that it is Chuckle-Head who is the popular figure, read and admired by hundreds of lame brains. Chrome-Dome is read and admired by dozens. So systems of voting and karma end up reflecting the fact that the mob greatly out numbers the elite.

The vision driving Outer Circle is that Chrome-Dome is happy with a white list of authors of some intellectual pedigree. If Outer Circle is a success, with millions involved, Chrome-Dome's, err, corner of the circle has thousands of authors, more than he can actually read, so he never gets round to expanding his white list to the point that he sees Chuckle-Head's post. Chrome-Dome is oblivious to the vulgar mockery around him and is not driven away by it.

Simultaneously, no administrator is banning Chuckle-Head, and Chuckle-Head is not retaliating by organising a DDoS of the site. Why would he? He has white listed his mates and is larking about, mocking the occasion boring adult he stumbles across, and enjoying acting his age.

The goal of Outer-Circle is the coexistance of incompatibles through invisibility.

Suppose that Middle-Brow, whom Chrome-Dome reads, comes across Chuckle-Head's vulgar mockery and replies to it, complaining that it is rude. We don't want this making it visible to Chrome-Dome. That would be a failure of invisibility and might drive Chrome-Dome away.

On the other hand, Chrome-Dome isn't reading all the replies to his posts. Ordinarily when Middle-Brow replies to a reply to one of Chrome-Dome's posts, the Outer-Circle software should promote the middle post to Chrome-Dome's attention, least there be a break in the threading. So the fine detail, of letting Middle-Brow control whether his replies do or do not implicitly endorse the comments to which they are attached, is actually essential to the overall plan.

<comment><USER3> I'm not convinced you understood what I was saying in the way I intended it to be understood, so let me clarify.

PGP's web of trust is designed to answer the question "is email@example.com who he says he is". A user is "valid" (in the above sense) if you have marked it as such, or if a sufficient number of users of sound judgement vouch for it. (There are multiple levels of "vouching", and the meanings of "of sound judgement" and "sufficient number" are user-configurable; and "users" are really "keys".)

By default, PGP believes that users who are vouched for as in the above model are valid but not of sound judgement (i.e. we don't let this users vouch for others), but you could easily change that.

The point I was trying to make is that, if you replace "PGP" by "Outer Circle" and define "valid" to be "worth reading", the above sounds a lot like what you want to achieve. It has also been deployed in the real world for quite a while, so you can see to what extent it has worked (it's rather succesful in a very small part of the population).

Additionally, PGP is effectively decentralized, even though day-to-day operation uses keyservers. This model is a lot easier than full peer-to-peer (which, in the presence of NAT, is probably not possible without centralized servers anyway), and a combination of clever crypto and fallback options means that PGP does not _rely_ on keyservers. Look at the documentation for more details.

Notwithstanding the above, which is honestly intended to be good advice, I don't see how your system is ever going to become sufficiently widespread to be worth learning for the average user, and I don't really see the value in keeping a medium that's 99% nonsense usable for the last few erudite users - just let them migrate.

<comment> alan-crowe Thank you for expanding on that. In trying see the relevance of PGP's web of trust to Outer Circle, two things throw me off the scent.

First, identity in Outer Circle is simply a public key used to decode each signed post. When an identity is highly regarded, others will wish to impersonate it, in order to get their writing or advertisements read, but they are unable to do so because they do not know the private key.

Prevention of passing off is the whole of identity in Outer Circle. We do not care if users have multiple accounts nor do we care whether group accounts are acknowledged or pretend to be an individual. Circle jerks, be they conspiracies or sock puppets, do not undermine the Outer Circle system because an identity, even in good standing, has no _right_ of recommendation. If some- one on your direct list starts reading crap you "shallow" him or drop him, and that is part of the normal operation of the system as tastes change (his or yours) or time pressures squeeze.

So it is confusing to me to read about web of trust because Outer Circle has no notion of who somebody really is. Ossian is welcome.

Second is Outer Circles core concept of the coexistence of incompatible through invisibility. Whether somebody is who he says he is is a valid concept that is either true or false. I see the idea that a post is worth reading or not worth reading is a trap. There is no truth of the matter and that is the heart of the reason that traditional forums with moderation and meta- moderation collapse. They are trying to forge a consensus when they should be facilitating disagreement.

You doubt the value in keeping a medium that is 99% nonsense usable for the last few erudite users. That foregrounds the issue of scaling. I picture Outer Circle growing from a thousand elite users to million users, 99% hoi polloi 1% elite. So the proportion of erudite users falls, but the absolute number rises tenfold. I see the endless migration of the nomadic elite as an important problem, preventing them reaching critical mass.

Do you still think that PGP's web of trust is relevant? How do I relate "is email@example.com who he says he is", which has type _boolean_ , to "john is worth readng", which has type _function from users to boolean_?

<comment><USER3> Hmm, you had not previously expanded on the prevention of impersonation, although that is indeed desirable. In fact, piggybacking this whole thing on PGP (with special "is interesting" messages) may work. Somewhat.

I don't see why the web of trust-approach would fail. Certainly, I admit, "is worth reading" is not (intended to be) a global value, while "is really that person" is.

But ultimately the web of trust answers the question "do _I_ trust that person to be who (s)he says (s)he is". For instance, someone who trusts a lot of people is likely able to verify that key D5327CB9 belongs to Wietse Venema, while someone who has just created a key but doesn't yet trust anyone cannot. Therefore, while this key belongs to Wietse or does not belong to Wietse irrespective of who asks this question, the answer may differ.

There are obvious parallels to "do I trust this person to produce interesting content/tag appropriately".

I can understand your desire to bring the elite together, but what is the big added value over, say, Twitter or blogs? These are fairly stable, fairly reliable identifiers of people, with connections between them. Filtering out the nonsense is so easy that it's hard to notice that we're even doing it, and "clusters" of smart people form more or less automatically. (Which is not to say that either Twitter or blogs are the best possible communication medium, especially for small messages like this, but they seem to get this mostly right.)

<comment> alan-crowe What is the big added value? I was prodded into making another attempt to bring coherence to the swirling mass of ideas I call Outer Circle by a recent thread here on Hacker News: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=916448> Other people consider the forum problem important.

When Kuro5hin died, I started reading The Edge, <http://www.edge.org/>. However The Edge is what I call an Inner Circle site. Outsiders get to spectate, but there is no way for outsiders to ask questions or raise objections. The Edge seems introverted to the point of sterility. My dream for Outer Circle is that it should impose a wholesome discipline on outsiders. They are not confined to spectating but can ask questions and raise objection. On the other hand outsiders have to work for access, playing nicely, and earning a place on insider's white lists.

The big win happens when you have people you don't know making unexpected positive contributions. The hard question is how to permit that without suffering the usual forum problem.

<comment><USER3> I understand that people believe this to be important, and I see the value in interesting communities. It's just that I don't consider the forum model something to emulate, but rather a regression from earlier models - I much prefer mailing lists or Usenet groups, both of which allow a user much more control via their client, and both of which seem to, on average, suffer less from "the idiot problem" than their web-related counterparts.

Part of the reason may have been that many web fora try to appeal to the broadest possible audience, while many mailing lists and Usenet groups have a formal or informal charter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is interesting but whitelists/blacklists worry me because newcomers will either see everything or nothing, both of which are pretty unfriendly.

<comment> alan-crowe If it spreads by word of mouth, you can use your friend's white list. If you see everything you can pick the best of a dozen posts and then use the authors white list. Once you have a human written white list to start from you can manage the volume by controlling the depth that you descend the search tree, and start adding authors you like to your direct list. Every time you add an author to your direct list you chose a number to set a search depth with him as the tree root and his direct list as the first level, so I think you quickly take control and adjust the list to your taste.

I'm more worried about how a new author gets read. Nobody sees his comments because he is on nobodies white list. I guess there has to be a slush pile. When people get bored they can turn to the slush pile and maybe find a gem. Alternatively one may wish to see all the replies to ones own posts, not just those from the authors on ones white list. If that is common practice it gives a new author an audience of one simply by replying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't know if I'm just lazy, but there is no way I would use something like this.

<comment><USER6> Yes, but it would save everyone else from having to read your drivel.

<comment><USER5> Can you honestly see yourself ranking people based on how many levels of the people they ranked you want included in your white list? Do most people even use the filtering capabilities available today? I don't think I've ever blacklisted anyone on a forum, even if they drove me absolutely insane.

<comment><USER6> Can you honestly see yourself joining a knitting community?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravelry>

<comment><USER5> That's different. People join knitting communities because they enjoy knitting. Very, very few people enjoy rating things just for the sake of rating them. People join knitting communities, but not rating communities. People rate as a means to an end. The end has to be worth the hassle of the means. This rating system sounds substantially more complicated than anything in popular use today, and for me, even what's in use today isn't worth it. I don't think I'm in the minority in not using blacklists and similar capabilities. If people won't even do that, how will you get them to go through some of the complications of this system?

<comment><USER7> Is there a way that hierarchical whitelisting could be derived from up/down votes like on HN and reddit?

<comment><USER3> For a user of which you have voted on many posts, we can define "interesting" directly. If we use I(you, u) to denote our proxy of the chance that you find user u interesting, we define I(you, u) = (number of upvotes to this user) / (number of total votes on all users).

For any user u on which you have not cast a lot of votes, calculate I(you, u) as the sum of I(you, u') I(u', u) over all users u' (other than you or u), plus the above formula.

There are some issues with this: it'll take some work to make it perform, and it strongly favours established accounts. But if you can solve the first issue, you can probably live with the second - karma has the same problem.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Your next project needs a white-hat jerk - <AUTHOR> http://floate.com.au/2014/10/next-project-needs-white-hat-jerk/ <comment><USER2> No project should ever be released that hasn't been used by a pack of 12yo boys for a week or two. 12yo boys given access to unlimited energy drinks.</comment>


5G could mean less time to flee a deadly hurricane, heads of Nasa and NOAA warn - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/23/18637356/5g-interfere-weather-forecast-24ghz-frequency-band-satellite-predict-hurricane <comment><USER2> Is 77% data loss assuming that _all_ 24GHz observation data is trashed, or just the data near population centers? Presumably 24GHz background noise over the ocean and rural areas would remain very low.</comment>


The Write Stuff: How the Humble Pencil Conquered the World - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a21567/history-of-the-pencil <comment><USER3> > Most American pencils had pink or red erasers at the back by the 1920s. > (Today these erasers are often made of vinyl, a type of plastic.) Almost > everywhere else in the world, erasers have remained separate from pencils.

It is very common for pencils to have a rubber at the end here in the UK - <USER2> can buy pencils with and without in any stationary section.

<comment><USER4> Ireland also. But I wouldn't be able to say what percentage you'd find in a stationery store are enrubbered. By the way, what's the slowest kind of store? Write your answer in pencil on the back of a postcard to the following address:

        "Lame Jokes R Us"
        Graphite Way,
        Borrowdale,
        England, UK.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nabokov's "I Pencil". A rather refreshing riposte to the tired Leonard Read FEE / Mont Pelerin Society / Atlas Networks propaganda version.

[http://crookedtimber.org/2011/04/16/i-pencil-a-product-of- th...](http://crookedtimber.org/2011/04/16/i-pencil-a-product-of-the-mixed- economy/#comment-355445)

See also, "I, Collateralised Debt Obligation": [http://crookedtimber.org/2011/04/16/i-pencil-a-product-of- th...](http://crookedtimber.org/2011/04/16/i-pencil-a-product-of-the-mixed- economy/#comment-355404)

<comment><USER6> That essay seems to shoot entirely past the mark. Yes, you can plan a forest, you can plan several (but so can private actors, in a piece of fun trivia, Nokia started out in that sector). Yes, you can plan a railroad (but so can private actors). Yes, you can plan the implementation of mass education (hard to argue that this wouldn't look very different without government, but also hard to argue that the system is working very well -- and anyway, the pencil predates mass education by several centuries).

But the fundamental point of "I, Pencil" (and the intellectual tradition it's part of) is that you can't plan the economy at large. It's becoming increasingly clear that you probably can't even plan a single company once it's over a certain size (the essay seems to touch on that point, but doesn't really follow through). It's not that private companies or markets are better at planning, it's that the sheer inherent complexity of an economy is so large that any kind of effective planning is impossible.

<comment><USER5> And as I've pointed out at times previous when that claim's been made: there are companies whose annual revenues exceed many nations.

WalMart has an annual income of $482 billion.[1]

That's more than the annual GDP of Poland, as measured by the World Bank, the 25th largest economy in the world, and of Belgium, the Philippines, Thailand, Norway, Iran, Austria, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, South Africa, Hong Kong, Malaysia, ... and 153 other countries (163 total) in the world.[2]

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12163564](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12163564)

<comment><USER6> I think the reason that can work is that (the vast bulk of) Walmart is entirely dedicated to executing on a single, very well defined (and easy to measure) task - their supply chain.

Unfortunately, few problems in the world are like that, and that's why large companies (and governments) fail to address them effectively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pencils are great, but ever since I started using whiteboard notebooks, like this[1] and this[2], I haven't looked back.

1\. [https://www.esquoia.com/](https://www.esquoia.com/)

2\. [https://wipebook.com/](https://wipebook.com/)

<comment><USER8> That's really cool, any downsides from your experience? Like does the semipermanent ink smudge for left handed people? They say it doesn't... but maybe

<comment><USER7> Yes and no. I've used some pens that dry basically instantly and I didn't need to worry about smudging at all. However, I found that those pens were also a bit harder to erase for minor corrections.

The pens I use now take a few seconds to dry, and so would probably be a problem for leftys. For me, they work great, and I only occasionally smudge something.

Here[1] is a scan from today. This page (and the entire notebook it comes from) has been fully erased about 10 times. (I scan in all of the pages, and then wipe 'em clean once I've filled the notebook).

Wiping can be a bit more time consuming than with a normal whiteboard. The manufacturers claim all sorts of things will work to wipe an entire page, but I've found that for best results you need to use cotton balls + pure acetone.

1\. [http://imgbox.com/RgLjEn3W](http://imgbox.com/RgLjEn3W)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Anedoctal remarks:

1 - some people even collect pencils, and most of the collection is from merchandise pencils, not commercial ones (source: one friend)

2 - pens are usually borrowed and never returned, even without knowledge of the owner. Pencils, on the other hand, are hardly borrowed, and are almost everytime returned to the owner (source: 2 unrelated friends)

</comment><comment><USER10> This seems like a rehash of the book Pencil from years ago. A large book about only the pencil. While it was intriguing I could only make it through the first 100 pages or so.</comment>


The word "scanned" used 2600 years ago - <AUTHOR>

"Let sleep not come upon thy languid eyes Before each daily action thou hast scann'd; What's done amiss, what done, what left undone; From first to last examine all, and then Blame what is wrong in what is right rejoice."
This was either a poem or a short saying of Pythogoras. It can be found in the Discourses of Epictetus, Chapter 10, Book 3.
http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/discourses.3.three.html <comment><USER2> You are aware that this is a 19th century _translation_ , right?

<comment><AUTHOR> It never crossed my mind. You are absolutely correct.</comment></comment>