110 N.F.L. Brains - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/07/25/sports/football/nfl-cte.html <comment><USER2> Playing football is almost certainly bad for your brain, but this article does a terrible job of making that case. The doctor in charge of the study says as much:

> The set of players posthumously tested by Dr. McKee is far from a random > sample of N.F.L. retirees. "There's a tremendous selection bias," she has > cautioned, noting that many families have donated brains specifically > because the former player showed symptoms of C.T.E.

This is equivalent to finding NFL players who showed signs of cancer, and then testing them for cancer. Of _course_ you're going to get a rate close to 100%. The article takes 10 paragraphs before pointing out that the rate of CTE among former NFL players is much lower.

This sort of sloppy journalism is counterproductive. It makes it much easier for football fans to discredit and ignore the problem. At best, it causes people to endorse good policies for bad reasons.

<comment><USER3> 9% chance, the best possible case given the current data, of a horrible, slow, lingering death 20 years later is still _unacceptable_. What's the rate for getting mesothelioma after working with asbestos?

<comment><USER4> Unacceptable to whom? Is the US a free country or not?

<comment><USER3> Well, we already ban:

* Selling cigarettes to children

* Building buildings that burn to the ground with everyone trapped inside

* Murder

So... I guess that America _isn 't_ a free country? If everyone was a perfectly informed perfectly rational expectation maximizer we wouldn't have any of these problems. But since none of those things are true, there're all sorts of predatory and greedy-counterproductive practices that are, yes, _unacceptable_ , things that we have to ban for our civilization to continue to improve. I submit that american football, in its current form, is likely one of them. Too much glamour, too much money, too much tradition, too _good at messing with people 's heads_, both in the way it sucks everyone into it (high school football!) and with the brain damage thing.

<comment><USER4> We don't ban selling cigarettes to adults, and tobacco use has plummeted since 1965. Building codes affect the general public. There is a clear and direct link between owner negligence and public harm. Building codes also help to reduce fraud and sheer incompetence among builders. It is easy to describe situations where fraud and criminal negligence leads to death and property damage to other people (not just yourself).

Meanwhile there are plenty of dangerous occupations, truck drivers, for example, that are not deemed unacceptable and banned by authoritarian morality police.

> If everyone was a perfectly informed perfectly rational expectation > maximizer we wouldn't have any of these problems

This standard is hardly necessary. All that is necessary is to have sufficient information to take _responsibility_ for decisions you make and their consequences. That is known as agency. Of course it's different if your decisions affect others. I could certainly see holding certain people or organizations (like the NFL) responsible if there has been some kind of cover- up about the long-term effects of concussions. But that's far different from a crude authoritarian ban.

> I submit that american football, in its current form, is likely one of them. > Too much glamour, too much money, too much tradition, too good at messing > with people's heads, both in the way it sucks everyone into it (high school > football!) and with the brain damage thing.

In other words, you don't like football and you don't like the tradition, so you see no problem banning it. For you there's no downside, only upside.

No, banning is not necessary, at least not some kind of national ban issued from on high. It starts with education. Parents stop letting their children play Pop Warner. High schoolers in most of the country decide not to take the risks of playing football. HS football programs decline. College recruiting pools dry up, leading to a decline in the quality and popularity of College football. From there, it's anyone's guess how the NFL will survive.

Sure, it won't happen overnight. But I can assure you that the consequences of trying to issue an overnight ban of the most popular sport in the US would not be pretty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I want to push back on the "every sport is dangerous" argument I'm seeing in here.

There's a difference between "you might die right in the middle of this very fun activity" and "you might die slowly and horribly years from now when you're retired and in the midst of raising a family."

I ski pretty aggressively, and of course I might die doing that. But every day I go home and know, "well it wasn't today! Today was just great clean fun." If I had a nagging thought of "but today might give me a mental disorder in 20 years" then I'd be much less inclined to participate in the sport.

<comment><USER6> But you have absolutely no idea if aggressive skiing is giving you CTE because no one has ever looked to investigate it.

In football, as in boxing, the original investigation began because head trauma is obvious, but as the study broadened some of the worst cases of CTE were actually offensive linesmen. These are generally not the players who dish or receive hard hits, and many had never had a suspected concussion in their career. That led to the dominant theory that it isn't concussions -- the big hits -- that are the main cause of CTE, but instead many small traumas (in that case the o-line engaging with the d-line) that add up to CTE.

There is every reason to suspect that many other sports yield these sorts of recurring sub trauma, and aggressive skiing seems a probable candidate [edit - note that it does not require that you hit your head, have an accident, etc. If enough of a high-G event is transmitted to the brain, that can be a subconcussion]. It just isn't terribly common to do an intensive brain study of people after death to find these correlations.

<comment><USER7> I don't know about GP, but I'm an aggressive skier and very, very rarely hit my head. I have maybe a dozen falls a season, wear a helmet and am not colliding with anything. This is a silly comparison.

<comment><USER6> A sub-concussion doesn't require that you hit your head. It simply requires a g-force event -- like skiing quickly over rough terrain -- that shakes the brain around, building up the scar tissue that we know as CTE. Offensive linesmen engage with the opponent via their body/arms, seldom hitting with their head, but that rapid g-force of the body stopping is enough.

Again, someone studied football players because the impact is obvious. As it reaches out, players in even relatively low-g sports like soccer are being found with CTE.

<comment><USER8> Having played the game for years, I can assure you the impact being generated on the line is very real. These folks do interact with their body/arms, but head on head contact is a very real part of the game, and that is the part that really affects the brain.

And the part of soccer that seems to cause concern is heading the ball, not the running around part.

Comparing helmet to helmet impacts to skiing over rough terrain feels like a real stretch here.

<comment><USER6> _And the part of soccer that seems to cause concern is heading the ball_

But we don't _know_ what the concern is in soccer. Heading is immediately looked at because it's an impact, but the actual cause may be something altogether different.

I mentioned the g forces measured in skiing elsewhere. They are absolutely in the range of subconcussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think people take for granted now how good the Times is at these interactive, zine-like layouts for their feature articles. I just want to say another job well done on this one. Each one of these I see is a work of art that clearly took a lot of time across the team.

<comment><USER10> You can tell there are many devs and designers on their team that take pride in their work! Have you seen those articles that say, "guess what the rate is for X over the years", and you fill out the graph with your mouse, and once you are done you can see what the actual data looks like? It's refreshing

<comment><USER11> IIRC, they are some the main contributors to D3.js

<comment><USER12> bostock worked there, so that would make sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My dad played both college and professional football. He had early signs of dementia 15 years ago, but it became really bad about 10 years ago. After a long struggle, he died just earlier this year.

It's hard to deal with

<comment><USER14> How old was he when the early signs began?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> (N of 1 anecdote warning)

I started playing football at 6 years old. Tackle football came about two years later. In my junior year of high school, my back problems and knee problems were so bad, I had to quit. It was the best day of my life. In recent years, I've become an ultrarunner and am generally very healthy.

I'm 41 now and about 5 years ago, I passed out after cutting my hand (vagal response to the sight of my blood) and suffered a 10 minute long seizure after passing out. So, I spent the next few days doing EEGs and MRIs on my noggin.

There was nothing definite but the neurologist noticed some lesions on my brain in various places. First thing he asks me, "Did you play football as a child?" I said yes, and he said, "You should have an MRI at least every 5 years to see if these things get any bigger."

Recently, my memory has gotten worse. I've found myself rocking or nodding my head for no discernible reason. Control over my lower legs is variable. As a runner, I'm fairly in tune with my body. I can tell that things are not going as they should.

Who knows if I'll get CTE (or some other neurological problem) and if I do, if it's related to the 10 years of football I played. What I do know is that this experience is not one I'd want my children to have when it's most decidedly not necessary.

All that to say that there might be a LOT of people like me in the US who never even got close to college football or the NFL that could potentially suffer this same fate.

<comment><USER16> Has helmet technology improved in the last 25 years? It will be a few years before my son could play tackle football (and I would probably try to gently steer him towards real football), but the helmets I see at sporting goods stores today look pretty much indiscernible from that which I wore for one fall season in the early 2000s.

<comment><USER17> Helmet technology has improved but not at the rate that humans have improved weightlifting/training. You've got bigger people running faster into collisions (and as we all know, momentum = mass * velocity).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There's always been the possibility of selection bias in finding CTE in football players' brains. Many of the brains are studied at the request of the family of the deceased player, presumably because they had noticed symptoms of mental degeneration. And there are cases where the player themselves requested the scans in their will. Junior Seau didn't leave behind a suicide note, but he did kill himself in a way that left his brain physically intact.

The NYT piece notes that even if _none_ of the other ~1,300 NFL players (who have since died since this research began) have brains affected by CTE, "the minimum C.T.E. prevalence would be close to 9 percent, vastly higher than in the general population.".

<comment><USER19> Isn't that still selection bias? Presumably CTE sufferers have a higher risk of dying — their healthy peers may still be alive and thus not included in that 1,300.

<comment><USER20> The NFL isn't a 10 years old league, there's plenty of players who passed away. If anything there would be more examples since equipment was worse before and there were less rules that protected players, especially top/crown helmet leading tackles which started getting penalized with 15yd only in 2013.

<comment><USER21> I think the prevalence of concussions in football compared to rugby is proof that "better equipment" doesn't prevent concussions. It has the paradoxical effect of causing them. Better shoulder pads allow for people to launch their bodies without fear of separating their shoulders. Conversely, helmets are not designed to protect the brain, only to prevent skull fractures. Thus, I don't think your argument holds water.

<comment><USER20> You are right about the equipment (even though obviously only concussion vs concussion + skull fracture is a step forward!), but the difference between football and rugby goes way beyond the equipment. In the former there's no lateral passing, which means that the ball carrier will always be a target for the whole defense. In rugby you can pass the ball, which makes the defense spread wider and doesn't allow them to overcommit to a single player/tackle.

<comment><USER22> Precisely. In rugby, it is much more stressed and emphasized to make _secure_ tackles.

In football, at any given point and time there is one person with virtually a huge bullseye on them and it is sometimes a valid tactic to lay down a more punishing hit (cause a fumble, make a statement, scare your opponent to make a mistake or drop the ball next time, etc) at the expensive of not making a "secure, form tackle"

Ironically, if I am remembering correctly, the Seahawks and coach Pete Carroll teach more of a "rugby" style tackle, and that's why they consistently have one of the best tackling defenses.

<comment><USER17> I've played both sports, can verify this is 100% correct. Couple other notes.

Football is a game of inches. There is huge incentive to slam someone as hard as you can to stop their forward progress and ultimately deny the first down. There's incentive for the ball carrier fight for the inches and "fall forward" (which makes your head more vulnerable). In rugby you don't care about fighting for the inches and hell, your teammates will shove you down once they're set up to ruck over you. Fighting for inches in rugby is a quick way to start a maul _and nobody wants a maul_.

Furthermore, football is played with greater momentum (mass * velocity). Those breaks between plays equates to six seconds of full blown sprinting followed by forty seconds of rest. In rugby you're running about constantly so you simply don't have the energy most of the time for those massive hits. As for the mass side of the equation, football players are on average bigger than ruggers.

People think rugby is so hardcore for playing without pads (and it still is) but the hardest hits I ever took were in football (and I played defense, for goodness sakes). This is the consensus between everyone I've met that's played both. You can play multiple rugby games in a weekend (happens all the time at fests) but more than one football game a week is unsustainable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Historians will look back at American Football as our analog to the Roman's gladiatorial games. A lot of people don't realize that during the Imperial era of Rome fights to the death had become uncommon.[0] The games were watched in an arena and primarily sold hard-hitting violence between members of the lower castes of society and sometimes people got killed or horribly maimed....sound familiar? I stopped watching American football last year once I could no longer consciously watch men destroy themselves for money and the amusement of a country that largely despises/fears them in any other setting.

0: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladiator#Victory_and_defeat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladiator#Victory_and_defeat)

<comment><USER24> There's a big difference between cheering on people killing each other and a popular sport remaining popular after the long term consequences became known.

<comment><USER23> I don't feel like you read my comment before posting.....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't really know what a normal brain looks like. A sidebar (middlebar?) about halfway through the article describes what we're looking at:

 _The trauma of repetitive blows to the head triggers degeneration in brain tissue, including the buildup of an abnormal protein called tau. Thin slices of tissue are dyed and the tau shows up as these darker areas._

<comment><USER26> Yes. The site needs to show a normal brain. I don't have anything to compare to. Really bad omission.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> So the punter had CTE too? And all the quarterbacks? Obviously these players can get concussions, but don't we expect them to have a much lower rate of repeated, sub-concussive impacts that are supposed to result in CTE?

(They don't say so, but 110 of 111 were diagnosed, and if the only brain tested without it was the punter I can't imagine them not emphasizing that. I don't think this conflicts with the family's request to not identify the player.)

Presumably there is some sort of way to quantify the extent of disease besides yes/no. I'd really like to see the the extent vs. player position. Is there a write up for this, or was it a direct to NY Times deal?

Look, football is a violent sport, and it's certainly plausible that this induces a chronic, difficult-to-detect but serious disease over years of playing, and that the organization making billions from it would fight against that conclusion. But it's hard to square the smugness and outrage in this thread with the observation that NFL players have a lower rate of all-cause mortality than the general population.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/sports/football/nfl- player...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/sports/football/nfl-players-live- longer-than-men-in-general-population-study-says.html)

Obviously that's consistent with the NFL having a significant net-negative impact on the health of athletes, who are a special sub-population that is likely to be of above-average health. (Although note that the average body weight of their pool is also very high, which would almost assuredly still be true even if they hadn't played, and that increases baseline death rates from things like heart disease.) And that impact could be so negative as to outweigh the benefits of playing, possibly necessitating rule changes, compensation, etc. But there is no ghastly epidemic of NFL players dying by the droves.

I don't think there's been a neurological performance test of retired players, but one will probably be done and I'm willing to bet that NFL players again do better than the general population (which, again, does not mean that playing in the NFL doesn't make you dumber). Anyone want to bet against me?

<comment><USER27> Ahh, found the actual paper:

[http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2645104](http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2645104)

Incredibly, they list the number of each position type who have mild and severe CTE (their only degree of gradation) but apparently don't list the total number of players at each position, and hence I can't tell how many brains didn't have CTE by position. Nonetheless, we can confirm that both the punter and placekicker were diagnosed with mild CTE (a placekicker!) and the severe:mild ratio was _higher_ among quarterbacks than lineman (11:2 for QBs vs. 29:8 and 27:8 for offensive and defensive linemen respectively).

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is no one curious about the one brain that didn't get CTE? there could be some insight into how to prevent Alzheimer's for example, since oxidative inflammatory responses are invoked in both conditions as a possible mechanism.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm more interested in what happens to the brain with youth soccer. Bigger problem than a couple hundred pro athletes.

<comment><USER30> I agree. Heading soccer balls is proven to at least temporarily reduce IQ. I've never let my kids play that sport.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your- health/wp/2016/1...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your- health/wp/2016/10/25/heading-a-soccer-ball-causes-instant-brain-changes-study- finds/)

[http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/01/health/soccer-headers- concussi...](http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/01/health/soccer-headers-concussion- study/index.html)

<comment><USER31> So what are the safer competitive team sports for kids to participate in?

<comment><USER32> Ironically, thanks to the potentially lethal weaponry used as equipment, archery and target shooting.

Swimming is also relatively safe. Distance running might result in repetitive stress injury, but it won't kill you.

Slow-pitch softball eliminates most of the risks from baseball. Hit by pitch and RSI from pitching are the dangers there.

Cycling removes some of the RSI risk from distance running, but replaces it with higher-speed impacts, usually into hard surfaces.

Edit: It depends on your definition of "team sport", really. If you define it such that you can't meaningfully separate out any individual performances, you're cutting out all relay-type competitions from the start. If you say archery is not a team sport, then neither is a swimming relay race. Where do you draw the line? What's the minimum number of participants that have to work together to qualify as a team?

<comment><USER33> not really team sports though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The bodies were all donated with the vast majority of them having symptoms of CTE while they were alive.

Essentially, it's not even close to a representative sample of former NFL players.

It would be the same as people who had knee problems, then were found to have arthritis in their knees after an autopsy.

I would be very careful to say that all (or almost all) NFL players will have CTE when they finish football.

I have seen more research on people's brains where they categorize them in two types, ones that recover from brain trauma and others that don't. For me, that seems more likely.

If you are an NFL player with the type of brain that recovers well, you probably will be fine later in life. If you have a brain that just doesn't seem to do well with that, then you could develop CTE. That would be my guess.

</comment><comment><USER35> The JAMA data tables [1] also covered military service, with a high incidence of CTE there (5 mild, 45 severe). Both of the kicker/punters in the study also had mild CTE (did they kick with their heads?). Really leads to wonder about the prevalence in the general population, for sport and laborers at large, in addition to football players. The average years of play was 15.1, which is a _really_ long time to play the sport.

The authors are playing to a theme here, rather than objectively reporting results.

[1] [http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2645104](http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2645104)

</comment><comment><USER36> i wish they would outlaw head slapping, from teammates. when i played hs football, after every play, players would slap teammates on the head (usually the back) to show support - i hated it.

i also think players are too big today, more weight at higher velocities only makes things worse for the head. the only reasonable thing I can think of is a 'salary cap' based on player weight as well.

</comment><comment><USER37> Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in American football has been getting lots of media attention over the past few years, and the counterpoints to whether or not this is a serious issue will rely mostly on emphasizing the survivorship bias of those who enjoyed a high quality of life despite possibly (or assuredly) suffering such injuries, but in many ways almost all athletic sports represent feats of corporeal risk to the player, and I don't think the face of the game, or its popularity will change very much.

In many sports, people face death itself, and pay the ultimate price for competing. CTE, while made plain by studies such as this, might only change youth and amateur level competition. Professional leagues will probably continue apace, even amid full disclosure of well-known hazards.

This particular hazard wasn't previously well understod, but now it is, so, like boxing, it's still an improvement to the sport, to have players enter competition properly informed of the risks they are undertaking, so that they understand the choice they are making when they decide to play this game.

tl;dr The point of any given sport is usually to step into harms way, on some level, in a controlled arena and to test your abilities against other people in a contest of skill and endurance. That's how this works.

<comment><USER38> >might only change youth and amateur level competition. Professional leagues will probably continue apace, even amid full disclosure of well-known hazards.

You don't see a direction link between the grassroots levels to the pro level? If you kill the interest, or participation at the grassroots level, there will never be a compelling pro league to source from.

Good riddance to a lame game of consisting of mostly low skilled athletes

<comment><USER39> Football is only 5th on this list of dangerous sports: [https://www.thetoptens.com/most-dangerous- sports/](https://www.thetoptens.com/most-dangerous-sports/) The real issue is that football trauma has effects over longer time periods and the long term effects are discounted in the near term.

>Good riddance to a lame game of consisting of mostly low skilled athletes

Having played up to college, it's tremendous fun and has roles for a range skillsets. While not necessarily very intelligent, everyone is very skilled.

<comment><USER40> Is there any data behind that clickbait link?

<comment><USER41> User votes. Beyond that? No.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As someone who played 3 years of football in middle school and 3 years in high school and sustained 2 concussions along with tons of sub-concussive hits, I just hope that by there will be a cure for CTE sometime in the next few decades. Crossing my fingers for Johnson's Kernel or Musk's neural lace to succeed.

</comment><comment><USER42> Head gets hit repeatedly. That's the most complex and delecate organ in your body. I don't know live appendages that can take hits repeatedly without any long term side effects. Money talks in the NFL, so as long as that gets passed around, they are not taming it down unless the govt steps in

</comment><comment><USER43> the 110/111 stat is incredibly misleading. The article even says that "many families have donated brains specifically because the former player showed symptoms of C.T.E.". Its unfortunate that the NYTimes sentimentalizes like this. I think it's pretty clear that football causes C.T.E but the title and lead 110/111 statistic is dangerously disingenuous.

</comment><comment><USER15> If we really want to determine how dangerous or unhealthy football is, we should consider the full picture.

As part of this thought exercise, let's take as a given that CTE doesn't exist and brain injuries are unimportant.

After that, let's look at the prevalence of diabetes, heart disease, and other long-term degenerative diseases in the NFL player population.

Then, let's look at the shortened earning potential of the NFL player. Yes, for a year, maybe more, they are highly paid but lifetime earnings might not be what you'd expect. How do the stresses of many men who leave the NFL with no skills and often an abandoned college degree affect them and their families?

Next, let's consider the lifestyle the NFL envisions for its fans. Spending at least a full day each week sitting and eating unhealthy food while consuming alcohol. Spend the rest of the week gambling on the outcomes of the games (or individual players). Much of the time, this fandom is done as a family leading to impacts on children in the home. There's a societal health impact here.

The list goes on if we follow this thinking. So, if we go back and remove our given, we end up with a spectacle that unduly endangers its participants, encourages unhealthy behavior in its fans, and indoctrinates our youth to be accepting of all the above. Meanwhile, a very few wealthy families get even wealthier on the backs of all that.

<comment><USER44> I agree with your early points, but I don't think we need to take the typical Hacker News stance of "everything is killing everybody and people need to start behaving more like me and less like themselves."

> Next, let's consider the lifestyle the NFL envisions for its fans. Spending > at least a full day each week sitting and eating unhealthy food while > consuming alcohol. Spend the rest of the week gambling on the outcomes of > the games (or individual players). Much of the time, this fandom is done as > a family leading to impacts on children in the home. There's a societal > health impact here.

Won't somebody please think of the children! They might grow up to watch FOOTBALL!!

<comment><USER15> That wasn't my stance. My stance was one of examining the full societal cost of any activity. Football is certainly not alone in the impacts it has on families. It's just the one we are talking about in this forum.

But, if one is seriously trying to determine sociological trends, these are the kinds of questions one must examine. It might be a similar line of thought, with different details, for the increased use of digital devices in our society.

Lastly, you're being facetious but their watching football might well be part of the problem. Without participants or an audience, the NFL ceases to exist thereby removing the negatives AND positives that its existence might create.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> As much as I love boxing and other sports, they are terrible for one's brain. The worst thing one can do is cause any damage to your brain as that dramatically effects quality of life.

</comment><comment><USER46> This study was made possible because of autopsies. If autopsies were standard practice in the US this would have been discovered years, if not decades ago.

<comment><USER47> Even if autopsies were standard practice for all Americans you wouldn't see docs running tau-staining tests on every cadaver they received.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Do we have any idea what the baseline incidence of CTE, using the same criteria used in this study, might be in the general population?

<comment><USER27> Apparently not. The criteria for what counts as evidence of CTE is still being fleshed out, at least as of 3 years ago.

> The neuropathology of CTE is increasingly well defined. In 2013, McKee and > colleagues published the largest case report to date of individuals with > neuropathologically confirmed CTE, presenting proposed criteria for four > stages of CTE pathology based on the severity of the findings [9••]. Formal > validation of the reliability of these criteria and the staging system are > currently being performed by a team of nine neuropathologists, funded by a > National Institutes of Health (NIH)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4255271/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4255271/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Well that's a big surprise. But the NFL is a gigantic cult, people are not going to boycott it just to improve the well being of the gods players.

</comment><comment><USER50> The prevalence of CTE in the NFL brains is irrelevant until we can compare it to the prevalence in the general population. And the issue is it's being more closely examined in the NFL brains currently. General population prevalence estimates are likely underestimated.

<comment><USER51> From the article:

"So even if every one of the other 1,200 players would have tested negative — which even the heartiest skeptics would agree could not possibly be the case — the minimum C.T.E. prevalence would be close to 9 percent, vastly higher than in the general population."

Where are you getting your information that estimates of CTE in the general population are low?

<comment><USER50> CTE is a post-mortem phenotype. Dementia related to degenerative brain disease is common but not often measured (autopsies aren't done very often for senile patients with an obvious cause of death, especially for autopsies that disfigure the skull).

The idea that <9% of the general population at death have degenerative brain disease is highly implausible. Especially since we know AD has a prevalence which is multiples of 9%. Of course, I am not claiming CTE is not a problem in contact sports; merely that this headline is ridiculous. It's more important to estimate an odds ratio and confidence interval for the point estimate. My back of the envelope estimate for the OR would be ~3 (still concerning and large!).

There are related common problems in my field of biomedical research. I am a published author in Alzheimer disease, although it is no longer my primary focus. :)

<comment><USER52> "The idea that <9% of the general population at death have degenerative brain disease is highly implausible. " If you consider dementia explicitly, than the epidemiology suggests a potential rate as high as 20-40% - which is much higher than the lowest possible CTE rate.

(In fact, it's possible that all CTEs diagnosed in this report would be classified as purely dementia in the general population).

<comment><USER50> Yes exactly.

I also think the general population prevalence estimates for dementia are too low, for reasons not worth going into here.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


"Silicon Valley..bunch of globalists who've forgotten their fellow Americans" - <AUTHOR> Is this true? <comment><USER2> In connection to my point below, do GLOBALISTS equal....

1\. Globalists= we don't care for anyone or 2\. Globalists= we only care for the people from the country we are from or 3\. Globalists= we care for everyone but the people in America.

Overall I would say that it doesn't really matter which group people are in above (1, 2 or 3) America still benefits from having these people here. A true capitalist would understand this. A mercantilist doesn't. Bannon is a Mercantilist who believe that patriotism defines how much we add value to where we live.

</comment><comment><USER3> Mostly. Or they grew up in places where they never got to understood how Americans in most of America are culturally.

</comment><comment><USER4> This quote comes from a Steve Bannon interview in the Economist: _Bannon also said that Silicon Valley and Wall Street consist of "a bunch of globalists who have forgotten their fellow Americans..."_

Lazyeye asks: Is this true? The answer: no.

</comment><comment><USER5> Can you give some examples that make you think this?

I know you are speaking about SV generally but YC alone is undertaking the basic income project, has funded a number of non-profits, etc.

What is it you think SV should be focusing on that it is not paying proper attention?

</comment><comment><USER2> Are you suggesting that they are remembering their fellow man and forgetting their fellow Americans? Or are they forgetting everyone?

I find it hard to believe their are many in Silicon Valley who remember their fellow man but forget their fellow Americans. Could happen, but I guess it is a small number.</comment>


New York Department of Financial Services: Virtual Currency Regulations [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.dfs.ny.gov/legal/regulations/adoptions/dfsp200t.pdf

<comment><USER2> Very misleading title.

 _Exemption from licensing requirements. The following Persons are exempt from the licensing requirements otherwise applicable under this Part:_

 _(1) Persons that are chartered under the New York Banking Law and are approved by the superintendent to engage in Virtual Currency Business Activity; and_

 _(2) merchants and consumers that utilize Virtual Currency solely for the purchase or sale of goods or services or for investment purposes._

EDIT: Also its not a law but a regulation created by the NYS financial regulatory agency under existing state statutes.

<comment><USER3> So what does that leave? Do you need the licence to mine?

<comment><USER2> I believe Lawsky made statements to the effect that you do not. However I don't think there's anything in the regulation itself that explicitly addresses mining.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This seems to be intended to apply to people operating exchanges like Mt.Gox, not lay consumers and merchants. Of course, it's possible they've drafted it, but this part of page 6 seems pretty clear:

Section 200.3 License... (c) Exemption from licensing requirements. The following Persons are exempt from the licensing requirements otherwise applicable under this Part: (1) Persons that are chartered under the New York Banking Law and are approved by the superintendent to engage in Virtual Currency Business Activity; and (2) merchants and consumers that utilize Virtual Currency solely for the purchase or sale of goods or services or for investment purposes.

We should get an actual lawyer to evaluate this, which I am not.

</comment><comment><USER5> The license fee is only a minor portion of your internal would-be licensing cost; think of it as an agency rate-limiter. This tweet mentions $100K, before insurance bonds, but others have estimated more.

[https://twitter.com/DCGco/status/629703816687038465](https://twitter.com/DCGco/status/629703816687038465)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is more information:

[http://www.coindesk.com/ny-bitcoin-business-45-days- bitlicen...](http://www.coindesk.com/ny-bitcoin-business-45-days-bitlicense/)

[https://act.eff.org/action/stop-the- bitlicense](https://act.eff.org/action/stop-the-bitlicense)

</comment><comment><USER6> Laughable, but not surprising. This is just the kind of thing the Bitcoin community has predicted governments would do in an attempt to stifle/delay/prevent any potential financial revolution; to protect their fiat money printing monopolies.

</comment><comment><USER7> what?? how is that possible?

<comment><USER8> How is it _not_ possible?</comment></comment>


ECMAScript 7 compatibility table - <AUTHOR> http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es7/

<comment><USER2> Even if some of the test just test the existence of a feature, this is a great compatibility table !</comment>


Cloud thing is a fad. I'm building my next thing in a datacenter instead - <AUTHOR> https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1087472201492643840.html?refreshed=yes <comment><USER2> I suggest one RTFM before commenting on this. I.e., don't judge a post by its title.

</comment><comment><USER3> "if literally everything possible goes wrong, a datacenter is worse than the cloud"?</comment>


I Duck Duck Go You - <AUTHOR> http://gwenbell.com/posts/iduckduckgoyou <comment><USER2> Seriously? Why is that on Hacker News?

<comment><USER3> Why is it on the third page? If my fake understanding is correct, a lot of people were clicking on it probably because of the provocative title. The content, much less provocative. "...But her gigantic face," you say.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just found it interesting.</comment></comment></comment>


Exploring the .NET Core Runtime - <AUTHOR> http://www.mattwarren.org/2018/12/13/Exploring-the-.NET-Core-Runtime/ <comment><USER2> C# was the first language after Visual Basic 6 that I learned the most seriously, and after .NET Core I got the most excited about C#. I love that I don't have to reach to Java anymore to go cross platform, or wonder if Mono will support my .NET project or not. In fact, thanks to .NET Core they made .NET Standard so I _know_ if and how my project will run on a modern version of Mono.

I also love that people are doing write ups about the source of .NET Core and it's internals.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I also love that people are doing write ups about the source of .NET Core > and it's internals.

Me too!

BTW, if you want more on the same topic check out [http://mattwarren.org/2018/07/12/Presentations-and-Talks- cov...](http://mattwarren.org/2018/07/12/Presentations-and-Talks- covering-.NET-Internals/) and [http://mattwarren.org/2018/01/22/Resources-for- Learning-abou...](http://mattwarren.org/2018/01/22/Resources-for-Learning- about-.NET-Internals/)

<comment><USER3> thank you for the links, this is amazing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was never impressed with .NET, I always considered it inferior to the JVM and its ecosystem in terms of runtime capabilities, tooling and open source available, however .NET Core moving to an open source model is super exciting, F# looks cool and I'm happy that Java finally has true competition.

Also Matt Warren's blog is super cool.

<comment><USER5> Java is not an example of a forward thinking language anymore. It has lagged behind C# in every major feature pretty much since C# arrived in 2000. The JVM has had solid performance improvements since forever, and may still be faster than the CLR, but the JVM still has some pretty glaring shortcomings coming from the .NET world. For example, Java generics (and their underlying implementation in the JVM) suffer from type erasure which makes for an awful developer experience in many scenarios. Java/JVM's story for asynchronous code is also pretty pathetic. This is stuff I don't even think about anymore when writing C# but I groan every time I have to do any "modern" programming in Java.

<comment><USER4> My opinion is from the other side of the fence ... type erasure is perceived as a weakness of Java, however I believe it is one of JVM's best features, because it didn't cripple its runtime for other languages, this being one of the reasons for why other languages have been flourishing on the JVM (that and the tooling and the open source culture).

To understand why, we need to talk about 2 separate things:

\---

1\. Specialization is important for performance and when speaking of .NET, specialization for value types is subsumed in type erasure, but that's not necessarily the case. You can have compiler-driven or even runtime-driven specialization without reification.

In Scala for example we've had the "@specialize" annotation for a long time, with the compiler being able to specialize generic code just fine. It's not perfect, a better implementation eventually happened in Miniboxing [1] but it withered away due to lack of interest and the ongoing work happening in Dotty / Scala 3 and its newer TASTY distribution format, which should make specialization easier to accomplish.

Also there is on-going work to bring value types to the JVM and it's happening: [http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/valhalla-spec- experts...](http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/valhalla-spec- experts/2018-May/000618.html)

That said having specialization is pretty cool for fine control of the memory layout and Java developers have to resort to a lot of unsafe hacks for achieving the same thing. But if that cost was paid such that languages like Scala or Haskell could happen on top of the JVM, until they figure out how to do it such that everybody benefits, I think it was a cost worth paying.

Also consider that the lack of specialization forced the JVM 's engineers to get creative in other areas. For example the JVM has always been great at inlining code at runtime, even for megamorphic call sites. And the new GraalVM has super impressive abilities to eliminate boxing at runtime, which works for dynamic languages too: [https://www.graalvm.org/](https://www.graalvm.org/)

\---

2\. Reification is in fact about adding info about type parameters at runtime. This aids in using reflection to make a difference between List<int> and List<string>, but people miss the forest from the trees.

As a matter of fact such reflection is only needed because languages like Java or C# have very weak static type systems, compared with other languages in the ML family. With an expressive type system, you never need reflection capabilities.

In Haskell for example the question of whether something is a List<string> or List<int> never, ever happens. In Scala you sometimes need it, but much rarely and you can get it via a compiler-generated `ClassTag`, which is actually a much better approach, because it makes it clear in the signature, this being compile-time reflection. People also like being able to do "new T", however that need completely goes away via proper support for type classes, which both Haskell and Scala have, this being another special purpose band-aid.

And reification is actually a bad feature to have in the runtime, because it makes it hard for languages to support higher-kinded types, or to build dynamic languages.

F# does not do higher-kinded types and is less expressive for that reason than OCaml, Scala or Haskell and the primary reason for why it doesn't do higher- kinded types is because it would have to do type erasure by itself, thus forgoing the performance benefits and the interoperability it has with C#.

Ironically it is support for higher-kinded types in a language that increases its expressive capabilities to the point that you no longer need runtime reflection. In other words ... you're blaming Java for not having a band-aid that happened in C# due to their static type system being basically unsound and thus needing runtime guards and reflection. You quickly get over this once you'll start using a more expressive language ;-)

[1] [http://scala-miniboxing.org/](http://scala-miniboxing.org/)

<comment><USER6> Reflection is the least of the problems this solves.

The majority of the issues and gotchas listed in the generics FAQ for Java do not happen in C# at all. It is liberating.

Reflection is an advanced use case that some people use, but it is rare.

The lack of flourish in. NET overtime more to what happens when a company takes the reins of a stack and later stops working on it.

Microsoft for a while invested and designed JavaScript, Python and Ruby versions for .NET. But when conditions changed, there was no interest to keep the projects going. These are all observations from an outsider at the time the projects were defunded.

Because of the siloed approach to development at the time, and the lack of an external county around those efforts, bootstrapping a community to drive those on their own proved to be very hard. Ruby mostly died, Python is barely surviving.

The mood in the ecosystem went from "we can build these and speed them up" to "this is an ongoing cost, let us rather interop with the real implementations rather than find constant catch up".

Meanwhile, languages that Microsoft did not build did flourish, like PHP

This corporate phenomenon deserves a blog post on its own

<comment><USER7> > The lack of flourish in. NET overtime more to what happens when a company > takes the reins of a stack and later stops working on it.

But couldn't .NET not being a good target for dynamic languages be one of the reasons to stop working on it?

I keep hearing that .NET is a good platform for other languages, but there doesn't seem to be much empirical evidence for it (at least in dynamic languages).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Do people really use .NET core, and if so, why?

We've been a C# house for several years, decades really, and I've always preferred it to JAVA so I'm actually excited for Core.

But we rarely use it. Not because it's not great, rather because we're more productive with flask or Django. For Core to really make sense for us, it'd would have to stop being so damn low level, but I guess that maybe it can't without sacrificing too much efficiency. More importantly it needs better libraries for things that aren't "built-in".

I can certainly see why .NET developers welcome it, because they finally have good cross platform ability. At least until they need to do authentication on a non-standard SAML token, that though easily supported by ADFS but is a bitch in any .NET setup.

I know we aren't most use cases, being the public sector and running a gazillion different tech stacks at once, but .NET has never played well once you stepped outside it's comfortzone and it's always been so low level that writing library extensions were a bitch. And that may have worked out, so far, but I just don't see why people stick with it when there are more productive alternatives.

I say productive, because I don't think .NET core is lacking technically, but delivering solutions on time and with minimum maintenance requirements afterward is just easier in python or JAVA and I'd imagine others as well.

But maybe I'm missing something?

<comment><USER9> What's your definition of "low level"? You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means

<comment><USER8> It's having to explicitly tell the computer what you want. C# is obviously not C, but it's not python either.

By the time we have an app running in Django, we're not even finished with Entity modelling in a Core web-api.

I do think stuff like Blazor.Net is promising, but we're not a technology company, we support thousands of employees who only care about how digitisation can make their lives easier as fast and as stable as possible.

.NET isn't the best at that, at least not for us.

Dont get me wrong, I don't dislike .NET Core, it think it's great, I just don't see how it benefits me.

<comment><USER10> >Do people really use .NET core, and if so, why?

>.NET isn't the best at that, at least not for us.

You're comparing apples and oranges, djanjo is a web framework, for creating websites, .Net core is a cross platform compiler and the standard library that goes with the C# programming language, which includes some stuff for creating websites (along with desktop, CLI, services etc). Django might work best for you but I want to create a bunch of micro services I'm not going to use it, am I? Not to mention Django works well as a general purpose solution for general purpose websites, If you're building anysort of heavyweight, enterprises level web architecture you're going to want a hell of a lot more control that what django provides for you.

<comment><USER8> I specifically said python, flask and Django, the guy I was replying to then asked for an example, where I used only Django, and now you're using that against me?

Obviously we don't use Django for everything. But like with web-applications, a python script or a flask application is always more productive for us than .NET.

<comment><USER10> I don't disagree that django and flask are good general purpose web app frameworks, but theres a mile gap between "Not the best for general purpose web apps" and "not good for anything", which is why I highlighted the following question

>Do people really use .NET core, and if so, why?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How much of the old CLR is in the new .net core runtime /CoreCLR?

I once read CLR via C# and it was difficult but amazing. Is all of the knowledge in that book now worthless? What about the IL, is the IL still the same?

<comment><USER12> They forked the CLR, cleaned it up, added cross platform support and open sourced it, so a lot would still be relevant would be my guess. The IL has remained unchanged other than possibly a tweak or two to support newer features like non nullable references.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting fact, when they forked the CLR, they actually started with the Silverlight code base. See [https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/dotnet/NET- Foundations-2015-...](https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/dotnet/NET- Foundations-2015-03-04) (somewhere near the beginning)

I guess it makes sense. Before .NET Core, Silverlight was the most x-plat version of the Microsoft .NET Runtime(s) (excluding Xamarin/Mono), so it would've been a good starting point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Installing .NET stacks including Runtime, SQL Server is a nightmare to me. When an error occurs during installation process, you got stuck , hopeless and depressed. Hey MS, fix your installation process first.

<comment><USER14> The build scripts (for coreclr, corehost, corefx) are a mess. I worked on getting the build working for Yocto, and there were so many things done differently all over the place. They need a single team to go through their entire build process, top-to-bottom.

Don't get me wrong though, I worked to integrate it into Yocto because I _love_ .NET/C#, but the build system needs a lot of love.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know if it solves your specific scenario, but I do know that there's been some work done in this area.

See [https://github.com/dotnet/source-build#net-core-build- script...](https://github.com/dotnet/source-build#net-core-build-scripts) and [https://github.com/dotnet/arcade#arcade](https://github.com/dotnet/arcade#arcade)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The "two" books mentioned that were written by Serge Lidin are basically the same book, the latter is just an updated version. So really, there's only one book with two editions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, I didn't realise that, thanks for the info</comment></comment>


Facebook Financial Results 2019 Q4 - <AUTHOR> https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2019/q4/FB-12.31.2019-Exhibit-99.1-r61_final.pdf <comment><USER2> 30% of the world is using a Facebook product nearly everyday. What other things do that many people share in their daily routines outside of life's necessities?

<comment><USER3> Google. Chrome is the most popular browser, Gmail the most popular email, Android the most popular mobile OS and Google the most popular search portal. If you go online you are highly likely to use Google, even if you don't want to as AdSense or Analytics are used on many web sites too. I can't think of a more ubiquitous brand.

<comment><USER4> Android is the most popular consumer OS, not just the most popular mobile OS. Few, if any, surpass it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> FB down 7% after-markets, while beating estimates

TSLA up 12% after-markets, with not so perfect numbers

I'm puzzled. Short-Squeeze? Rockstar- vs. Voldemort-CEO? Or did some options-"whale" just sneezed during order execution?

<comment><USER6> Fb seems like a company that's past it's peak. Their brand and public image is garbage and they're just going to extract as much profits from their dwindling user base as they can on the way down.

<comment><USER7> User growth is up, even on Facebook alone. If what you say is true you might expect weekly users to be up-or-flat while daily is declining, as people are locked in to the platform but less engaged with it. But daily users are also up.

<comment><USER8> Are they your numbers, someone else's or theirs ?

Seems like they'd have a vested interest to claim anything as daily users. Bots, trolls, whatever.

<comment><USER9> If they're not removing obvious frauds in these numbers, they'll be the target of shareholder class action lawsuits. In general, numbers published by big corporations tend to be reasonably sourced due to this reason - gotchas tend to more subtle.

Privately held company numbers on the other hand are generally much more suspect (Uber before IPO, Snap before IPO, We work, Theranos...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> FB liabilities nearly tripled last year - Is that from aggressively opening new offices? Data centers?

What is FB buying/using so much of that it hasn't paid for yet?

<comment><USER11> They're hiring thousands and thousands people to moderate content, per public outcry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> They are spending $46 billion a year to keep all that running.

Over a million dollars spent per staff member.

Wow.

<comment><USER13> > Over a million dollars spent per staff member.

Are you saying that's a lot, or not a lot?

At somewhere elite like Facebook many of those staff members are probably being paid about half of that in compensation. And then they have massive server farms to run.

<comment><USER14> Facebook has 30,000+ employees. There's no way even half of them are getting paid $500k.

<comment><USER15> No need to guess, median worker pay is public information. At Facebook it is $228,651.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Headcount 45K. Wow! It'd be interesting to see a breakdown of what they're all working on. (I'm not criticizing)

</comment><comment><USER17> Is there a way to see Facebook's revenue broken down by country?

<comment><USER18> That would raise so many questions like why are they operating in a country where they are generating pennies.</comment></comment>