My interesting experience with the TSA - <AUTHOR> http://madebyloren.com/interesting-experience-with-the-tsa

<comment><USER2> What's troubling here in the article is the implicit assumption that the TSA has any business knowing who is traveling on what planes.

Why don't we allow anybody with a ticket to show up and buy a ticket to anywhere else if they can afford it? Freedom of movement is very important, as is privacy--it seems we've lost sight of this fact.

<comment><USER3> There is still more freedom of movement in the US than there is in any comparably large area of the world; one of the most jarring things about traveling in Europe to me was the extent to which my identity was routinely challenged.

<comment><USER4> _> one of the most jarring things about traveling in Europe to me was the extent to which my identity was routinely challenged._

Could you elaborate on that? There are a lot of countries where no passport control at all is taking place if you're coming in from another EU country.

Granted, as a EU citizen I might have an easier time moving around overall, but in my experience the EU feels more like one big country than a patchwork of smaller ones - and I move around here a lot. Going on a cross-country flight within the US is usually significantly more hassle than hopping from Frankfurt to Oslo. Once you're in the EU you should be able to move freely.

What happened to you?

<comment><USER3> Nothing bad; I was just routinely forced to hand over my passport. And, on a train from Zurich to Prague, my bags were taken off the overhead rack and searched.

Remember, when we Americans want to make the point that we're different from Europe, we say "papers, please!" to make fun of it. The idea is supposed to be that we don't _do_ "papers, please!" here. Unfortunately, we've lost a bit of that in the last 15 years, but we're still only approaching Europe.

<comment><USER4> _> Unfortunately, we've lost a bit of that in the last 15 years, but we're still only approaching Europe._

You say that with a degree of certainty that deserves to be challenged.

You can travel through large swaths of the EU without showing your passport even once. This week I was in France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany all by car, all without needing my passport (except hotels, but they do _that_ everywhere in the world).

Although it has gotten stricter in the last few years, flights from Germany to Norway, Sweden, or Denmark could routinely be boarded without showing any ID until recently. I live near the French border in Germany, but you wouldn't even know when you're crossing it. In "heartland" Europe, there are often no border stations at all. Sometimes you just notice you changed countries because the street signs look slightly different.

Compared to a lot of other countries, including the US, EU police are doing almost no traffic stops or other forms of public "papers, please" checks. The last time I was in a traffic stop was about 5 years ago, and I accrue about 50k kilometers a year.

Compare that to a random Asian country where police are sometimes lying in wait near ambiguous signage in order to catch expensive-looking rental cars passing through, or compare that to a rural sheriff in a southern US state who likes to capture (and throw in jail for a few hours with great fanfare) people passing by in out-of-state cars when they predictably go a little above the draconian speed limit on the completely empty and straight highway. In Cairo, you can't even drive downtown from the airport without being stopped for ID at least twice.

Maybe I'm missing a bit of the picture because I don't like to go by train, but overall movement in Europe seems a lot less restricted than pretty much everywhere else I've been to.

<comment><USER5> I'm sorry, but you both don't understand it. The police has training in identifying persons of interest or suspicious looking people. Tourists are more routinely controlled, but I believe that black persons are more often controlled for their passports (because police suspect them of staying illegal in the country, or it's simply racism, idk). I can say that, because I travel a lot, with all types of public transportation. WIth a car you only have ID- Checks at borders, sometimes.

<comment><USER4> I'm sure both of us understand that. It's just that we're talking from personal experience which in tptacek's case led to him asserting that the EU is a thoroughly "paper's please" region, whereas the US is simply catching up. In response to this I felt compelled to counter that notion as I believe it's not factual. If I was in a polemic mood I'd have asserted that where ever restrictions on freedom are introduced in Europe, it's because they're emulating the US in that regard, not the other way around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> They don't hire for the "id checker" position based on intelligence.

<comment><USER5> That guy isn't stupid or less intelligent, don't underestimate people!

He's just ignorant. Never ever underestimate ignorance, dear pmorici.

Ignorance brought as war, death, mass murder and governments..whoops how did governments slip in here? ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> 'Do better, TSA'?

Please, God, no. Don't do better.

</comment><comment><USER8> Come on now, Security Theater is for your own good.

</comment><comment><USER9> In that photo Loren does look like a girl.

The TSA agent was simply performing her bit role in Security Theater, I'd say that the "transaction" went pretty well. The interaction appears to have taken less than a minute. I fail to see how he "almost didn't make it through security".</comment>


Do you need any permission to add your client's company logo to your website? - <AUTHOR> Hi there! I'm working for a young startup and we already have some bigger brands among our trial users, but I'm not sure if we can already add their logos to our webpage as our client or not. What is the legislation in this situation? Shall we have their permission first to add their logo to the website or it's not necessary? What is the best-practice in this case?
I see many companies (even younger startups) who show their clients' logos on their websites and I just can't imagine they asked every company and each of them approved to use their logo basically as a reference. We're an American company if its help.
Thank you very much for your help! <comment><USER2> The standard process is to reach out to your customers and ask permission. Don't think about legislation here: think about your customers. How do you think they'd feel when they find out you plastered their logo to sell your website, advertising them as a customer, without asking them first?

</comment><comment><USER3> IANAL.

Some logo usage probably falls under fair use, e.g., if you're writing an article about the company, there's a reasonable chance you don't need any permission.

If you're using it as part of promotional material, you're essentially saying "this company publicly endorses me", which would not be fair use. It'd also be kind of a jerk move since you're using somebody else's name for monetary/etc. gain.

Most companies that use client logos as implied endorsements get client's permission, and it's the only honorable thing to do.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot guys for your early comments! I absolutely agree with you ethically, but what's the matter if a company add to their legal terms that they can display the logo of their clients (users) as a reference? Is it a loophole or not?</comment>


Physicists Criticize Stephen Wolfram's 'Theory of Everything' - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-criticize-stephen-wolframs-theory-of-everything <comment><USER2> I'd love to see some great blog posts, talks, etc from people who disagree with this piece of research.

There are lots of people who dislike him, great, I agree, this is common knowledge, but it's not a reason that his research is wrong – the scientific community is better than ad-hominem attacks.

The problem is that he's a pretty good science communicator. As a layperson (but software engineer so I'm somewhat mathematically literate and know what a graph is), I got through the intro talk published by them and came out feeling like I understood what the premise was, roughly how it worked, how it could apply, why it might be a good model.

I then read a physicists "debunking", but because it was basically just references to physics papers saying "ah but you didn't address the something conjecture" I didn't really get anywhere with it.

I'm glad the physics community are discussing it internally, that is ultimately more important, but as a layperson I'd really like to get a good understanding of the other side of the argument.

<comment><USER3> One issue with fundamental theories that I've seen is that it's _really easy_ to come up with a model that reproduces _some_ aspects of relativity or even quantum mechanics, especially in some approximation, such as low energies or weak fields. In that regime, you can wave your hand and pretend that everything is linear or nearly so. The symmetries are common symmetries that a lot of algebras or geometries share, so things just "seem to work" almost magically.

This is like saying you've invented a car from scratch because you've made something with mirror symmetry that can roll forward. Obviously, this is missing more than a few details.

What Stephen Wolfram seems to have done is come up with an extremely generic system that can describe anything, in much the same way that a CAD program can use meshes to describe any piece of machinery you'd like to design. That doesn't mean that meshes are equivalent to metal and concrete. Just because meshes can have various symmetries and can be used to represent circular things doesn't mean that a mesh is a car either.

Similarly, in a _very real sense_ the Universe performs computation, because -- _duh_ \-- it contains computers. And brains. And many things of that nature. Brains and computers run by the same rules of physics that stars and experimental particle beams do. Hence, the Universe computes. It also computes in the trivial sense that if you add 1 hydrogen atom to 1 hydrogen atom you get 2 hydrogen atoms.

So if you come up with a very generic form of computation, such as automata, or substitution rules, or whatever, of _course_ you're going to find many things that "look like" various aspects of the computation the Universe is performing. But analogies are just that: comparisons of vaguely similar features. That doesn't mean they're isomorphic to each other, nor does it mean that some random theory is actually the rules the Universe follows.

Stephen spends a lot of his time jumping up and down and pointing at some trivial aspect of his theories and saying "Look at this! My theory can perform addition! The Universe does addition too! Hence my theory is the theory of the Universe!"

I've been interested in the fundamental theory of everything for two decades now, and I spend about an hour a day on average poking through random arXiv papers looking for ideas or signs of progress.

I've noticed a few things: Much of Wolfram's criticism of academia and modern theoretical physics is correct. It's much the same as Eric Weinstein's criticism. They both say that the _politics_ and _economics_ of academia make it nigh impossible to rock the boat and come up with radical new ideas. I noticed this too. Modern theoretical physics isn't. It's intellectual wankery and dick measuring as a way of getting pieces of paper and tenure. There's zero motivation or incentive to do anything useful, because the system has slowly evolved over time to disincentivize it.

However, this doesn't mean that _their_ particular "rebel" flavour of TOE is correct, just because the models produced by Universities have gone nowhere. Progress in some arbitrary direction is not necessarily better than no progress at all! Progress in the right direction is needed.

Over the years (decades!) I've developed an acid test to quickly sort the wheat from the chaff:

1) Does the theory even _mention_ particle generations? Bonus points if demonstrates at least three and explains why we haven't found four.

2) Is it a truly _local_ theory in that global communication is never required? (Many current theories implicitly involve "solving" something, which is often implicitly a global minimisation.)

3) Can the theory be applied to _single_ systems, or just ensembles? (Most QM theories automatically fail this one. Single particles exist, single electrons go into higher orbits from a single photon, etc... Either you can model this, or your theory is woefully incomplete)

4) Can it explain the _observations_ of Quantum Mechanics without resorting to the "infinite dimensional" mathematical wizardry? Can it produce computable models, or just symbolic gibberish that I guarantee you no particle "computes" as it goes about its business.

5) Nobel prize winning stuff would explain the origins of constants that are currently experimentally determined inputs. (Most theories I've seen don't even have numbers.)

6) The _ultimate_ requirement is for a TOE to "not only" produce the known observable physical behaviour but to also naturally _exclude everything else_. That is, the ideal rules should have some sort of incredibly tight self- consistency that can only happen in one way and can only produce physics. For example, an algebra that can only be used to represent valid combinations of particles and fields, and can never represent any other "invalid state" that makes no sense.

Unfortunately, 99% of the stuff I see fail at all of the above. Wolfram's theory does too. His current graph-based theory and his previous cellular automaton theory _spectacularly_ fail the 6-th requirement. They're both nearly unconstrained computation models with infinite flexibility, the exact opposite of a good TOE.

<comment><USER2> From my understanding of where the research is at, I think you're asking too much of it, and rebutting it on that basis. My understanding is that it is being posited as a category of models, of which one could be the "theory of everything". They haven't said that one of them is, and they know they haven't found the one that is yet if there is one.

I'm interested in discussions about why this type of model can't work, rather than people repeatedly pointing out that they haven't found the exact model yet, which seems to be a strawman argument.

As for your 6 acid test elements, that's exactly the sort of thing I'd like to learn more about, but in the current wording I feel like I'm missing about a Phd's worth of understanding. I think communicating this in a more accessible form would be great!

I understand that theoretical physicists have reasons why they don't like his theories, but I don't understand what those reasons are, whereas I do understand a bit about the theories. This makes it hard (as much as I want to) to be persuaded by physicists.

<comment><USER3> To be a bit more concrete, this is a bit like saying "Computers could be used to simulate/represent physical theories, hence studying computers could lead to a theory of everything."

That's not even wrong! Studying computation, computation systems, or even just mathematics in general almost certainly could _assist_ with progress towards a TOE.

That doesn't mean that pointing at a computer running a few dozen lines of code[1] and saying "A TOE could be in there... somewhere" is materially useful.

[1] I'm paraphrasing Stephen himself here!

Personally, I feel that if Stephen _really_ wanted forward progress towards a TOE, he's uniquely positioned to do so. He controls a company that makes one of the best Computer Algebra Systems. He's in a position of power over a large, highly talented staff of mathematicians, and he could push Mathematica's features towards multiple relatively unexplored areas of computational mathematics where there isn't much available at the moment.

Unfortunately, he's made the decision that the _only_ two such areas worthy of his time and his company's resources are cellular automata and graph rewriting.

Sigh.

Meanwhile, he could have done added all sorts of features for things like handling Einstein summation convention, tensors, Geometric Algebra (and noncommutative algebras in general), topology, etc...

Those would at least have immediate utility to working physicists, and if pushed to the extreme could maybe help uncover some fundamental theory somewhere.

But nope. He likes to play with graphs, like a kid with with a Spirograph only interested in making pretty patterns.

<comment><USER4> > Einstein summation convention, tensors, Geometric Algebra (and > noncommutative algebras in general), topology, etc...

Are python libraries taking up this challenge?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is not Wolfram's first Theory of Everything.

Wolfram published "New Kind of Science" almost 20 years ago. Scott Aaronson was kind enough to review it: [https://scottaaronson.com/papers/nks.pdf](https://scottaaronson.com/papers/nks.pdf) So was Juergen Schmidhuber and many others [http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~wclark/ANKOS_reviews.html](http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~wclark/ANKOS_reviews.html)

Wolfram has now moved from CA to Hypergraphs (essentially sets). They are so generic structures that you get anything physics-like from them if you want.

For example, if you visualize hypergraph that you get from normal execution of numerical simulations for relativistic, quantum or general relativity simulations, they would look cool and you might realize that they are connected to physics. Just like Wolfram's pretty pictures. Would execution graph representation explain more than equations and code? I don't think so.

<comment><USER6> Yeah

At the same time it misses the point of the natural sciences.

Hypergraphs as described are more like Calculus than Physics. Of course, describing gravity with calculus was a brilliant discovery but you can't just have calculus and say "that's gravity". You need the connection between the two.

<comment><USER7> I think Wolfram's claims are even more egregious than that.

His model is inherently computational. It would be like saying "here's a computer that can execute things" and then proving that you'd created the Linux kernel or something.

It's not a very surprising claim to say that a particular fact can be represented in a system which can represent anything. Mathematicians (well, most anyways) don't go around claiming they've discovered the secrets of the universe because math _could_ describe it in principle.

<comment><USER8> That sounds like a lot of string theorists, to be honest.

<comment><USER7> It does.

I've often wondered why they don't get the same vitriol. I think it's mainly because they're still attached to physical formalisms: gauge theories, algebras, known symmetries and conservation laws, etc. It at least has some constraints, even if they're not testable.

Back 20 years ago when Wolfram released A New Kind of Science, my GR teacher said about that book: "Science makes predictions, not press statements." Even Hawking got in a lot of trouble in his later years when he'd announce all those extreme claims and walk them down without ever publishing anything. It really surprises me how much press coverage this guy can get over 2 decades without actually making a theoretically testable prediction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have a pretty high tolerance for personality traits that most people find insufferable. That said I can't get through any of Wolfram's work. The novel information I want to read is hidden like raisins in a bread made of gloating about his own genius.

<comment><USER10> Sounds like my reaction to Taleb and Mandelbrot.

<comment><USER11> Books that should be blog posts, papers that should be tweets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Most of the criticism Stephen gets seems fair. Clearly the guy is a megalomaniac. That being said his ideas are interesting and he is also clearly a genius(just maybe not to the degree he thinks himself) and I'm happy he's working on his crazy ideas. I think they're interesting, and although I wouldn't bet on it, if he comes up with a predictive theory of everything all the better.

<comment><USER13> Suppose I'm not familiar with him or am not convinced he's a megalomaniac. I know this is taken as gospel around here, but what evidence would you present to convince me of that claim? Is it just that he wrote a book about ideas he thinks are very important and interesting?

<comment><USER14> Glassdoor provides some insight: [https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Wolfram- Research-project-m...](https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Wolfram-Research- project-management-Reviews-EI_IE14501.0,16_KH17,35.htm)

<comment><USER15> The ego which is almost essential for success in business makes it almost impossible to succeed in science.

<comment><USER16> He does not generally sound like an amazing CEO either.

<comment><USER17> Reading Glassdoor reviews, he sounds like one of the worst CEOs ever. Why anyone would tolerate working for him is mind boggling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> On a higher level than just Stephen Wolfram, I find the practice of immediately dismissing people who are "outsiders" from academia (or from a field) disturbing. In our history, some of the most insightful work and execution has come from outsiders. Computer science seems to be quite good when it comes to this, but fields like physics seem to be so violently against people who are not doing research at a top tier university that they're preventing their own progress. Looking at the state of physics research, I've personally decided not to go deep into the field on my own, it feels like there is no way I could contribute to progress.

I'm not sure if this is because of the hyper competitive state of getting tenure or if this is just an example of group think against the other, but I don't think it's a coincidence that the field of physics has gone from the most exciting and impactful field in science to being largely stagnant.

<comment><USER19> "Let me tell you my theory!" If you think listening to someone's new app idea is bad, there is nothing worse than an amateur physicist trying to tell you their newest theory.

"Proof? Who needs that! My theory is so elegant!"

"What do you mean my proof doesn't make any sense, maybe I'm just too much of a genius! How can you not see that right away?"

"You have, 1028 emails with frustratingly naive 'What About?' questions from various self-taught physicists."

I think a lot of physicists get kinda jaded about outside work. Then, when a genuinely talented and hardworking non-professional shows up, it's hard to tell the difference.

<comment><USER20> The Exhibit A example is perpetual motion: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_motion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_motion)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is like if John du Pont published a 3,000 page proof of P=NP that made no reference to the well known problems with proving it, circumvented peer-review and appealed directly to the general public.

Remember: no-one ever claimed the prize for disproving the TimeCube guy either.

</comment><comment><USER22> Final sentence is brutal:

And when provided with some of the responses from other physicists regarding his work, Wolfram is singularly unenthused. "I'm disappointed by the naivete of the questions that you're communicating," he grumbles. "I deserve better."

</comment><comment><USER23> >"I think the popular notion that physicists are all in search of the eureka moment in which they will discover the theory of everything is an unfortunate one," says Katie Mack, a cosmologist at North Carolina State University. "We do want to find better, more complete theories. But the way we go about that is to test and refine our models, look for inconsistencies and incrementally work our way toward better, more complete models."

And yet Einstein did just that in developing General Relativity, as have many other scientists and thinkers in producing their novel theories or approaches. Yes, GR made falsifiable predictions, but it still represents a paradigm shift, the sort Katie Mack thinks of as "unfortunate".

I am not endorsing Wolfram's work at all. But the idea that science has to progress in a step by step, gradual, collaborative fashion is naive and historically ignorant.

<comment><USER24> It's not naive and historically ignorant, that is how science generally progresses. Paradigm shifts are rare by definition.

Einstein was an obvious outlier, and Wolfram is no Einstein.

Your argument is used by every crackpot to justify their dismissal of the scientific process - because making progress that way is _much harder_ than simply posting their theory on a primadonna blog and demanding the world come to them.

<comment><USER23> I don't disagree with you that paradigm shifts are rare, but to dismiss then out of hand as simply not being the way we do science is indeed naive.

We need both sorts of thinkers in science: those who want to make the important incremental improvements and those who seek entirely new ways of looking at problems.

<comment><USER24> Yes we do - but it's important that we don't prioritise the rich, famous, connected businessmen and their internet fanboys trumpeting their vanity projects over the obscure patent clerks (and equivalent) doing the actual hard, brave work of letting their theories speak for themselves.

<comment><USER23> Of course Wolfram is rich and famous precisely because he has had a lot of good ideas. That's not to be discounted.

It's also important to not immediately discount Wolfram's work simply because he is wealthy and successful and not a formal member of academia. However it seems that some are personally threatened or dislike Wolfram because of who he is which triggers a knee jerk reaction against his work.

I am not an internet fanboy of Wolfram's, I'm only pushing back a bit against the idea that incremental progress upon the scientific mainstream is the only path forward.

<comment><USER24> No, to be clear, I wasn't including you in the internet fanboys.

I and others are just suggesting Wolfram go through the same process as everybody else instead of using his power to subvert it. That isn't motivated by being threatened, just by a sense of fairness.

As for his good ideas, absolutely - but they are all in business and unconnected to the grand theories he is now promoting - his prior physics experience is junior and long ago, and certainly doesn't warrant special treatment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> He's right and he's wrong: Graphs are wonderful datastructures to mimic/simulate complex phenomena realistically. Also, simple computational rules, especially with feedback-loops, may yield complex output of intriguing complexity. It's very seductive reductionism.

But from most simple observations in nature, there's no direct causal link between the two, . Intuitively, we "know" everything originated from a "Big Bang", but we don't have proof _how or if_ complexity arose over time, or was it always intrinsinct to cosmos, and wether the question itself have any measurable implications..

So graphs and computational feedback remain interesting and time-consuming avenues for research, but it's a big leap from superficial studies of outputs ("how") and finding a graph-formula that would explain all possible universes ie. from a "Big Bang" point ("why").

A solid unchanging theory would need to address enough "why"'s in order to be properly backed up by predictions explaining the observable physical universe, to be relevant. If the theory can include new hypothesis and rules at any time, it's not a theory, but a container for information and rulesets (ie. a Turing-complete system).

Of course, you can "curve fit" anything inside a graph. They're great at it for simulations and games, and are already used everywhere you do computationally interesting complex stuff. There's just no indication or proof that the physical world matches any model created by humans living within the universe. Maybe someone humble will stumble unto some simple explanation, but so far, the deeper we go, it seems even experts get lost in the tough complexities and unintuitive laws we assume govern microcosmos and energy.

It seems to boil down to difference between theory and practice. Pure mathematics and observations are theory, while how to simulate and mimic, is more engineering and providing interesting outputs. If we combine the two, we can build universes.. (ok, off the pipe for now :)

<comment><USER26> > Intuitively, we "know" everything originated from a "Big Bang"

I don't think we have any intuition about this at all, we are however fairly accustomed to this idea with old creation myths that still loudly resonates throughout culture, and of course now that it has been the scientific orthodoxy for 50 years or so.

But yeah I definitly agree with you on the "curve fit" thing. I would not be surprised that, if one day we do find a comprehensive theory of everything (assuming this is even possible or even have a meaning at all), it would be possible to express it in this very general framework of hyper-graph re- writing itself according to some rule. That doesn't mean it's a good idea to so.

And in any case, at the end of the day, like everything else humans do, science is a social process. The goal is to get closer to truth (whatever that means), but you won't get there by ignoring any input, and insist that everyone should drop whatever they are doing and come admire/help you on your work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I will admit to an obsessional CA phase decades ago, but even then it was clear to me that, while the universe probably does operate on repeated application of simple rules, there was no reason why they had to be _cellular_ in nature. Even the development of CA based on floating point numbers, which somewhat clears up the anisotropic nature of the phenomena generated by conventional CA, still has directional preferences.

CA does not seem to be great at replicating conservation principles -- and they are everywhere in physics -- and attempts to graft them on by complex interactions between glider guns or the like only highlights the fragility of the process, as even the slightest misalignment causes chaos. When you run a CA, you get expansion or contraction and are typically left with some stable/oscillating phenomena if it doesn't just keep blowing outward, and those configurations which remain are still ... fragile. In ways particles are not. Particles might come and go, but the quantities they represent linger. Where is that in CA?

As to anyone who suggests they have new physics, bring us testable observations of that which would not be explicable in our current frameworks. Give us a refinement of the numbers, measurable in some fashion, to highlight a deviation from that which is predicted by the old ways. I haven't seen anything like that out of him.

Perhaps a ruleset exists which would have these things, but if so, wouldn't he have mentioned it instead of just doing his usual business about Rule 30 and the like? Or are we -- and here is where, outside of ego, I get the biggest crank feelings from Wolfram -- all expected to drop everything, adopt his approach, and iterate through ever more complex configurations of CA until we find the one that somehow works? Of all of the bits in Baez's crackpot index, this is the one reliable indicator I find missing, although "10 points for each statement along the lines of 'I'm not good at math, but my theory is conceptually right, so all I need is for someone to express it in terms of equations'." is in the ballpark. Everyone, drop everything and do it my way until it works!

<comment><USER28> >ever more complex configurations of CA until we find the one that somehow works

Just gotta keep adding more epicycles, eventually geocentrism will be vindicated! /s

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> In case no one has read it yet, here is a very amusing take down of Wolfram and why he is the classic crank theorist [http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/](http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/)

</comment><comment><USER30> I enjoyed wolframs framing of the problem, yes it wasn't peer reviewed or asserting new claims - but everyone is acting like it was.

I think it's a cool idea that may have results in the future, which is how I felt he presented it.

</comment><comment><USER15> >> "'If we suppose that a rabbit was coming out of the hat, then remarkably, this rabbit would be coming out of the hat,'" Aaronson says. "And then [going] on and on about how remarkable it is."

That has to be one of funniest quotes I ever read.

I did have this thought that Stephen Wolfram may be overrated in the past. He is a good businessman for sure. The amount of attention he gets from the media does appear to be disproportionate to his achievements and perhaps may cause overconfidence.

That said I do understand the view that the scientific community may have become so narrowly focused on rigid scientific review processes that they could be missing out on real innovation and alternative ideas.

For example I can't help but think of what would happen if some random (not PhD) engineer came up with a new and highly innovative mathematical construct and published it on their blog... I doubt their idea would get any attention at all; no matter how useful or impressive it is. It would be lost in the noise because scientists are not going to review it.

Science is still operating on an outdated idea that all scientific knowledge is centralized within universities and that all credible innovations must necessarily come from these universities and all great scientists must be somehow be socially connected to existing great scientists. As if direct social connections are still the only pathways through which cutting-edge knowledge can flow. It completely ignores the existence of the internet.

<comment><USER31> There are a limited number of hours in the day. I guarantee you that >99.99% of all nonexpert blogs on the internet are pure garbage—should they spend 50-100 hours a week reviewing crazy?

My field was an uninteresting sub-field of programming language theory, and _every_ conference, at least 1/2 the papers submitted were borderline batshit insane. The stuff on the internet is _gibberish_.

Screaming into the night & railing that physicists are ignoring you is just sociopathy. Instead, go to them, give presentations, prove your ideas have merit. Make it short to get their attention, build up credit & lead them to what's new.

<comment><USER32> No, it isn't sociopathy. I, for instance, tried to engage with Sabine Hossenfelder on a novel interpretation of electron diffraction which would help demonstrate linear time-invariance of electromagnetic phenomena in an atomic scale (nickel crystal) only to be completely ignored - despite the fact she posts on her blog a "speak to a physicist" button. In fact, the physicist she paired me with failed to appear to two scheduled Skype calls and explained he was too sick after the fact. And no response from her. So here I am, with ignored emails by professors because they don't have the bandwidth and I don't have the branding.

Physicists by trade do not trade on advancing the state of the art. That takes courage and risk of reputation. This is why the natural sciences have progressed outside of vocations. "Lead then to what's new" is better worded as "make it shameful to ignore you". I am acutely aware of that now.

<comment><USER15> I don't understand why this comment was downvoted. It's insightful. If anything, the fact that this comment was downvoted helps to prove its point that people tend to quickly discard contrarian ideas without giving them careful thought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> If Wolfram's got it nailed, let him produce the warp drive.

There's no problem admitting he's forgotten more about science than I'll ever grasp.

The discussion seems more about a Newtonian Ego System than about the fundamental questions of the universe.

</comment><comment><USER34> Is there a good expression in English for something like "throwing it out to the crowd"? As in, you just shout it out to a crowd of cheering fans to strong arm someone instead of actually focusing on making your point.

<comment><USER35> Possibly "grandstanding".

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Gotta love the "usually white and male" jab.

It's ironic how the default virtue signal about racism and sexism right now is to attack white men, because to attack someone's race and gender is the definition of racism and sexism.

</comment><comment><USER37> Something like Wolfram's vision has to be true if materialism has any hope of working. The universe is finite and discrete, so a Turing machine is an upper bound on its capabilities. The original thing that started it all has to be really simple: have a large(ish) probability of occurring by chance and a very high compression to get an orderly universe.

Therefore, if materialism is true, then in the beginning must be some simple, but potentially Turing complete substrate, such as a cellular automata or graph thingamabob.

<comment><USER38> > The universe is finite and discrete,

Well, the universe appears to be close to flat, which would indicate an infinite size. And the discreteness of spacetime in QM hasn't been made to work with Relativity, thus the forays into String Theory and Quantum Loop Gravity.

<comment><USER37> Even if there is an infinite expanse, there are only finite effect ranges. Does anyone seriously think infinity has any sort of physical impact? I've never seen such an idea in all my years of physics exposure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It's interesting how his personality traits affect the discourse around this. Like this quote from the close of the article:

 _"I'm disappointed by the naivete of the questions that you're communicating," [Wolfram] grumbles. "I deserve better."_

And maybe that's actually true. Of course, many will find this manner of speech pushes our buttons; coming across as arrogant, megalomaniacal, almost anti-scientific-process.

But that has NOTHING do to with whether this theory is correct or not. When the most obnoxious person you can imagine says 2 + 2 = 4, that doesn't change the fact that 2 + 2 actually does equal 4.

(Of course, if they claim 2 + 2 = 5, their being obnoxious doesn't make that true either.)

</comment><comment><USER40> Theories that reproduce things we've already observed are a dime a dozen. The test is whether you can predict new things. And Wolfram's theories don't even predict what we already see. And sorry, but complaining about the "corruption" of the peer review system that you refuse to engage with (and it does have problems) is the calling card of the crank. It's just that this crank happens also to be, or have been, a genius of some kind, so he's never completely ignored.

<comment><USER41> Never underestimate the ability of a genius to become a crank the moment they leave their narrow lane.

<comment><USER42> Weve got a genius crank to thank for the vitamin c cures everything craze. Linus pauling was convinced vitamin c megadoses could do pretty much everything under the sun. Lots of examples of geniuses that dont know a lot outside their narrow field, sometimes stunningly narrow

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> It bugs me that a lot of friends who are interested in physics (but themselves are not physicists, or at least - not yet physicists) think that history is happening in their eyes.

I suggest them (even if they are not physicists!) looking at the "The Crackpot Index" by John Baez ([http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html](http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html)) and manually calculating the score for Stephen Wolfram.</comment>


This pill used to cost me 10c/pill, now it's $5/pill. I take it 3x day. - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2289616/ <comment><USER2> I think maybe its about time we set up something life the NSF to conduct these trial for the FDA (in the particular case of orphaned and old drugs) and generally does a much better job of dealing with the mess that drug trails have come to be.

At some point, this knowledge becomes a public good and the conflict of interest presented by those seeking to win approval also being the ones who stand to win a "get a monopoly free card" becomes too great a moral hazard to expect to overcome.

There just seems to be something fundamentally wrong with rent seeking someones pain, no matter what legal process led to that result. It feels like something we should have grown out of by now.

<comment><USER3> _I think maybe its about time we set up something life the NSF to conduct these trial for the FDA_

This would be a disaster. It really is expensive to test drugs, and so pharma companies must carefully consider which ones are worth pursuing. If they no longer need to bear the cost, then they'll just throw everything at the agency. Then the agency will either fall behind, so that good new drugs never get approved, or it will tremendously balloon the costs of testing (and we're already complaining about those costs).

<comment><USER4> I read the comment as proposing only that the NSF (or someone) run the trials for old drugs that are already widely used, in lieu of the current odd system of re-monopolizing drugs that had previously been widely available as generics.

For _new_ drugs hoping to win approval, which are inventions and are already granted monopolies via patents, things could still work the current way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > One can't fault the FDA for the price increases for Makeda and Colcrys; the > agency is doing what it's supposed to do, clearing out old drugs and > improving the standards of the national Pharmacopoeia. (Disclosure: I worked > as a speechwriter for FDA in early 2010 but had no involvement in the > colchicine or 17OHP issues.)

I think anyone will agree that FDA's intentions are good. But sadly, what really matters are consequences, not intentions.

> In 2009, after winning FDA approval, URL Pharma won exclusive rights

Exclusive rights granted by who? Why blame pharmaceuticals for following the incentives they are provided with?

The truth is that FDA and other industry regulations increase costs in addition to destroying competition and innovation in the pharmaceutical industry.

Milton Friedman says it better than I can here: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZL25NSLhEA>

<comment><USER6> "I think anyone will agree that FDA's intentions are good."

I don't entirely, though I'm not claiming malice either. The purpose of drug testing is to make drugs safe. The FDA has mistaken goals for means, and now they are testing drugs for the purposes of testing drugs.

If an untested drug has been used for decades by millions of people to treat a chronic condition that requires each of them to themselves consume the drug for decades at a time, that by itself puts such a sharp, strong bound on the maximum damage the drug may be doing that it is well in excess of what _any_ study could possibly hope to establish. The improved methodology the study may have is simply swamped by the statistical power of a sample five or six orders of magnitude larger (measured in man-years) we have in the real world. In fact you just don't get any statistically more powerful than a "sample" of 100%.

 _Even if_ the study managed to produce some small negative side effect there is no chance in hell that it will exceed the positive value of a drug for gout.

I've actually seen this before. Several children's drugs have been "unrecommended" by the FDA for toddlers, not because they could produce a shred of evidence that they were dangerous but because the studies-for-the- sake-of-studies had not been done. Again, decades of use by millions of people dominates what any study could produce.

(By the way, when I say "dominates what a study would produce" I emphatically do _not_ mean "is perfectly safe". I mean precisely that a study will not be able to find the small damage. Drugs have after all gotten all the way through our stringent approval process and then had to be pulled because it turns out they were still dangerous. If the process couldn't catch the several diet drugs that turn out to give you a heart attack, it isn't going to pick up on something that could escape hundreds of millions of man-years of usage. Studies do not have infinite resolution.)

It's a continuing degradation in the standards of science, as the disease of scientific form replacing scientific substance marches on. That's why I don't claim "malice" in my first paragraph. Malice is not required, merely the raising of form above substance. I do not call "intention to have good form even at the cost of substance" good intentions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Based on previous "investigations", basically nothing will happen to the company and things will continue as usual.

 _The $5-per-pill price URL Pharma set for Colcrys surprised the FDA_

Find the people that were surprised and terminate them immediately. The "FDA" wasn't surprised, it was a few idiots left in charge.

What if they just do a compromise of $2.50 a pill, is that really going to help anyone when it was 10 cents previously? How about $2, or even $1 ? 1000% markup is okay when it comes to people's health? It's okay for the CEO to buy their 2nd or 3rd house with the profits while patients suffer? When as a society are we going to tell corporations they need to be responsible for all their actions and not just help a few charities to do penance afterwards.

<comment><USER8> This is just unbelievably incorrect, absurd, and just shows complete ignorance of the healthcare industry. Profits for healthcare companies are the same as those in any other industry. A quick check on Yahoo Finance will let you compare their respective financial statements. The culprit is in the endless rules and regulations that drive up costs to make the pills, preventing competitors from coming in to drive down the costs.

<comment><USER9> I don't think you understood what he was saying.

In effect the FDA set a ~1 billion dollar bounty from doing 2 study's on this drug. What was not said is there are limited resources in the industry so while this company went after this fairly safe and profitable drug plenty of other companies went after other drugs and there is no incentive to research the same drug as another company. This is a land grab plain and simple and only an idiot would think a company would act any differently.

PS: And when you realize the only thing patents gained from this was higher prices you need to conciser it poor regulation. (1 study of 200 people says next to nothing about a drug regularly taken but 10's of thousands of people for hundreds of years.)

<comment><USER10> It seemed pretty clear that in addition to the FDA he was attacking the company for behaving like a profit seeking entity (which it, of course, is). He questioned whether it is "ok" for them to charge the particular price they wanted and questioned how many homes the CEO should be able to own while there are still suffering people in the world.

We can argue that this particular bit of regulation is wonderful or evil all we want, but to think that any for-profit organization is going to act in your best interest rather than it's own, or that it's even possible to regulate a company or person into doing so, is just plain naive.

<comment><USER11> Relentless profit-seeking tendencies combined with monopolies are fundamentally toxic. Which is why we (generally) outlaw monopolies. The ones we do grant have (in theory) provisions that favor the public interest.

In other words, if your business operates a monopoly granted by the state, you DO have a special set of legal, moral, and ethical obligations that don't apply to less privileged organizations. If a protected company DOES start to behave in an anti-social fashion, opting for pure profit-maximization and short-term shareholder gains, then it's the JOB of the government to attack them, rescind their monopoly, and generally punish the hell out of them for violating the basic contract that accompanied the initial grant.

If they don't like that possibility - or realize that they're just not up to the (admittedly challenging) task of administering an public trust along side a commercial business - then they can retreat to the less complicated, less ethically demanding, and more mercenary ranks of those operating in the free market - which has it's own set of mechanisms from weeding out the truly dishonest and abusive.

<comment><USER10> _In other words, if your business operates a monopoly granted by the state, you DO have a special set of legal, moral, and ethical obligations that don't apply to less privileged organizations._

If there were such obligations, they would be made specific in the regulation. It's pointless to set the rules for the game and then get upset when they are followed. I personally find the price gouging distasteful as well, but those are my ethical beliefs and they in no way compel the behavior of others.

Hence my claim that the regulations should be the subject of the discussion, not whether some particular company is acting in accordance with our personal views.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The FDA has a somewhat scary recourse here:

Makena (aka 17P), a compound used to control preterm labor got similar treatment. KV Pharmaceutical announced plans to multiply the price by x100 and set off a storm.[1]

The FDA has simply decided not to enforce the monopoly that KV legally acquired.

 _Beth Martino, a spokeswoman for the FDA, called the Makena controversy a "unique situation." Martino stressed that the drug agency's enforcement actions are discretionary, and that it has chosen at this time not to take action against other suppliers in order to "support access to this important drug."_ [2]

[1] It appears they spent something between $250,000 and $1m acquiring rights and commissioning studies for the FDA approval or existing practices. They appear to be set to reap 18 times that in monopoly rent.

[2] [http://www.stltoday.com/business/local/article_26f67c9a-5ae9...](http://www.stltoday.com/business/local/article_26f67c9a-5ae9-11e0-bd13-0017a4a78c22.html)

<comment><USER13> "You abuse it, you lose it" actually sounds like a pretty good rule of thumb for enforcement of patent law...

<comment><USER14> Where "abuse" is defined by fiat, rather than clear apriori regulations?

What happened to the rule of law?

<comment><USER13> This is a situation where inconsistent enforcement of law actually works to the consumer's advantage in reducing the number of edge cases where companies make speculative bets on exploiting weaknesses in the formal certification process. Especially with the FDA carefully trying to avoid setting any precendent.

It would be difficult to draft a definition of "abuse" that didn't encompass raising cost of a drug a hundredfold above the market rate in order to recoup costs invested not in research, but in acquiring the company that achieved FDA certification (mostly using existing NIH funded research) for an already widely-available treatment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Drugs are broken in the US. The FDA testing of a drug costs a huge pile of money (I was in Clinical Trials for a while). Most protocols don't work out so your success rate is somewhere around the success of rolling out software. The ones that do, take a long time and allow for a very limited monopoly period. So, you spend a lot of money on advertising to maximize. Plus, the FDA does weird crap and drug producers up the price. It is a very weird cycle. Including, spending a lot of time on stuff that is more lifestyle than cures. Never mind the liability laws, since almost every drug made will react badly with someone.

It is a damn mess, that should have been the first thing addressed in health care legislation, because it is an input cost to health care. I sometimes wonder if separating the research from the producer and guaranteeing royalty for a number of years after approval would have been a good way to go. Much like not allowing film companies to control the theaters back in the day.

<comment><USER16> The way to deal with it is to allow legal consenting adults to take any drugs they want to - provided they sign a contract saying they understand the drug is not approved by the FDA.

But if a drug is approved by the FDA, then the drug company is inured against liability for that drug.

<comment><USER15> The FDA already has rules to allow patients to take drugs being tested if they are on death's door (cannot remember the terminology or exact rule).

Drug companies should not have to worry about lawsuits unless they knowing let a dangerous drug on the market, but people and doctors ignore warnings and nothing is totally safe for everyone.

<comment><USER16> If you've got a chronic/debilitating/painful illness, as long as you're not about to drop dead, no soup for you? I can't see how that is a compassionate, just, or rational policy.

<comment><USER15> With the current court system, it is about as good as it gets. Contracts absolving other parties of responsibility don't hold up in court. Heck, take a look at all the problems around Accutane. If you take it, you are told and sign forms stating it can cause depression. Well, it looks like that won't be good enough. People's love of punishing the big even companies have doomed those that suffer more than the revenge has ever been worth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The FDA gave them a monopoly on something with inelastic demand and then was surprised by a price increase? That takes a special kind of stupid...

</comment><comment><USER18> Just had an epiphany. If it is these old drugs (since 6th century) that are getting monopolized.... It means they don't really need advanced technology to create! Just grind some herbs, measure carefully, sun dry, etc. If they're over-charging by 5000% you might actually save money producing the drugs yourself for self consumption!

Who's up for creating a website to share recipes of these drugs?

<comment><USER19> _> Who's up for creating a website to share recipes of these drugs? _

No, seriously, somebody please figure a pharmaceutics delivery business model that does not depend on FDA for legality & operations.

<comment><USER20> Already done. It's called "base your company in India and mail pills to the U.S.".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> So if I get it right, FDA has enforced a monopoly by not allowing competitors to penetrate the market with the same drug.

<comment><USER22> Exactly, and _this_ is the problem, not the drug manufacturers.

<comment><AUTHOR> The counterpoint to that is if they don't grant the exclusivity, the cos won't be willing to invest money and resources to do the testing because the returns wouldn't be as strong.

In these cases though, the counter-argument to that is the price jump is unjustified relative to the $ invested in doing the testing.

<comment><USER22> At first I was puzzled by the upvotes because pro-monopoly arguments are usually unpopular here, but then I realized that I didn't really express myself clearly and that probably my argument was misunderstood :) So I'm not against drug monopolies, or patents, (or copyright, for that matter) - in fact I'm staunchly pro those things; the problem in this case is the strictness of the FDA, setting an arbitrarily high bar, causing all but one manufacturers to not be able to produce the drug any more.

The point of the article was that the FDA used to approve other manufacturers, but then required higher standards which only one manufacturer can meet. So now there's a de facto monopoly - not because of a patent, but because of the requirements the FDA set (retro-actively). The FDA needs to restrict itself to more basic testing (rather, testing requirements) so that the market can take over in the price setting of the drug through competition.

(I'm not an expert on the chemistry and medical aspects of pharma; actually I don't know anything about it. I don't know if, in the specific case of the article, the additional requirements set by the FDA are really required, or just paranoia. I think the FDA, and similar bodies in general, need to relax on their 'err on the side of caution' principle. To put it extremely - yes it sucks to be harmed by a thus far unknown side effect of a drug or food, but requiring near-100% safety on everything on the market hampers progress, and we can't know if the positive effect outweigh the negative ones. I hypothesize they don't, but until we know, let's lay off the state nannying, and replace it with a clearer mechanism to let consumers know how far something has been tested, so that they can make their own choices on whether or not they want to take/eat the drug/food).

<comment><USER23> You do not seem to understand orphan drugs or this article. Basically every word of your second paragraph is incorrect.

These are drugs that have _never_ been approved by the FDA. No manufacturers were previously approved and no standards have been changed.

The FDA wanted clinical trials on the drugs. There are incentives in place to encourage companies to develop drugs for rare conditions where there are _not enough patients to warrant investing in for economic rewards_ (and yet you envision companies in competition over them). These include grants for the required trials, tax credits for half of the cost of developing the drug, and a seven year monopoly on the drug.

<comment><USER22> It was my understanding from the article that originally there were several versions of the drug, then something changed (the author seemed to blame the FDA) after which there was only 1 left, and then there was a price hike.

Now it's quite possible that I'm wrong - what was the cheap version that the author was taking before then? Wasn't it a product of a competitor? And if so, why isn't it available any more?

<comment><USER24> Whatever the prior sources (IIRC, pharmacists could just whip up a batch), making it was cheap, legal, and unrestricted due to grandfathering. FDA wanted to regulate it, and granted someone exclusive rights to achieve it.

It's not available now because the FDA wanted certain tests done which hadn't been. No company did the tests because it wasn't worth their time/money to do so. The FDA _made_ it worth someone's time and money by offering them exclusive rights for 3 years if they did the tests. One company ran the tests, got approved, and was granted exclusivity as a reward. Supply plummeted (manufacturing went from many sources down to one), demand remained high, and prices increased 50x as a natural consequence.

The Law of Supply and Demand rules. It always does. Screw with it and you'll get hurt. The FDA screwed with it, and people got hurt.

<comment><USER23> It _was not_ legal to make these drugs. However, the FDA did not want to suddenly get rid of drugs people were already taking so focused their efforts on drugs that they thought were harmful first.

Drug testing is designed to prevent _actually harm_. With the manufacturer's plan it seems that the only people that will have to pay significantly more make over $100k/yr and probably have it covered under their health insurance anyways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25>
      The drug maker K-V Pharmaceutical obtained exclusive
      rights to produce an injection for women at high risk of
      delivering prematurely. But the FDA is opening up the
      market to specialty pharmacies after the company raised
      the dosage price from $20 to $1,500.

[http://www.latimes.com/health/la-na-fda-drug- price-20110331,...](http://www.latimes.com/health/la-na-fda-drug- price-20110331,0,992096.story)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hopefully they will do the same for colchicine! So far, no cigar though and we(colchicine consumers) have a pretty active community that's been trying for years now to prevent this from happening with little luck.

<comment><USER26> It's not the same. The previous "drug" was really just mixing two existing drugs together. The company hoped they could legally prevent people from mixing those drugs. But the individual unmixed drugs are widely available. The FDA said they would not prevent people from mixing (compounding) drugs.

In this case it's drug on it's own. I.e. manufactured. And for this they do actually have the legal right to be the only ones making it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The problem doesn't end there. Once these drugs' exclusive rights expire and "generic brand" prescriptions are allowed to compete, most insured patients will still prefer the "name brand" as they are only charged co-pay. Some insurance providers may place restrictions on which drugs are eligible for treatment but this is not the case with traditional U.S. sponsored Medicare/Medicaid (patients are free to choose between "name brand" and "generic brand"). Medicare/Medicaid patients may also be eligible for limited co-pay exemption. ("Why wouldn't I take the 'name brand'? _I'm_ not paying for it./I'm paying the same price anyways.") This further drives up the price of "name brand" medication, simply because the "name brand" _can_ get away with it. "Name brand" suppliers will also cut discounted deals with various insurance companies...no such luck for the uninsured though.

One particularly frustrating example I heard from my sister was about a mother on Medicaid who refused to switch her 19-month old infant from formula to solid food (infants usually make the transition around 7 months), complaining that the child had digestion problems when she tried. (Digestion problems are normal and temporary during the transition.) Formula is more calorie rich than seal milk and nearly as expensive as printer ink, however the patient had to pay for food but didn't have to pay for formula. As a result the infant became obese and developed diabetes - the treatment for which, is also covered by Medicaid.

Meanwhile uninsured/ineligible patients are forced to go for the "generic brand" pills due to a huge price disparity. This wouldn't be so bad as generic brands are generally just as effective, except that suppliers of generic brands can sometimes change who they source their pills from, subtly changing the dosages with them so users must constantly stay on alert to see if their pill changes color or shape as this could be an indication of a shift in supplier and depending on how sensitive the drug is, have mild to severe repercussions.

The Obama health-care reform was seeking to fix this issue by providing a third party government insurance plan which would promote a more transparent market in this arena amongst other things...

<comment><USER28> In Australia, most people have to pay for drugs. There are subsidies available. If a drug company wants the subsidy, it has to offer a fair price. If they don't offer a fair price, then they don't get subsidized, and nobody buys it.

So, patients pay (a bit), so they avoid unnecessary treatment. But they don't have to pay to much. And if the drug companies try to play funny-buggers, they get shut out.

Also, the subsidy process is completely hands-off (it's run by an untouchable board of experts), so while it's a little inefficient (untouchable experts are always inefficient) it's incorruptible.

<comment><USER29> > Also, the subsidy process is completely hands-off (it's run by an > untouchable board of experts), so while it's a little inefficient > (untouchable experts are always inefficient) it's incorruptible.

If they're actually incorruptible, that process can not be used in the US.

Disagree? Then produce a couple of incorruptible groups of experts with comparable powers in related areas.

Hope is not a plan.

As far as the US is concerned, it doesn't matter what works elsewhere, what matters is what will work here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Surely the problem is the insurance industry? If the insurance industry wasn't able to foot the bill, no one would buy the product and market forces would be able to set a reasonable (affordable) price.

As a non-US citizen (I'm from the UK) I can't believe that such an obscene set of symbiotic relationships have been able to be formed between the medical establishment, medical insurance industry and pharmaceutics.

There are some things that benefit all - and some issues that every human holds close to their heart. Medicine and the ability to recover from ill health is too important to let companies hold individuals to ransom.

I'm shocked the situation was ever allowed to get this bad.

</comment><comment><USER31> Haven't these drugs basically gone through extensive human trial already?

</comment><comment><USER32> There is some large cost of doing this drug research, with benefits that will accrue to all the people taking colchicine for decades into the future. The problem here is that congress has decided, through the Orphan Drug Act, to place that cost _just on the patients who take the drug in the next 3 years_ (the length of URL Pharma's monopoly).

This is stupid. It's not the fault of the FDA (they're following the law) and it's certainly not the fault of the manufacturer. It's congress.

</comment><comment><USER33> I would agree with some of the other comments. The burden of testing this historical drugs should not be placed in the industries hands. The FDA should run the testing, either with its own money in the common interest or allow the collection of manufacturers of a certain drug class to divide the total bill. The practice of back dated invention seems archaic.

</comment><comment><USER34> Some good discussion from a blogger in the drug discovery industry:

[http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/03/11/makenas_pric...](http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/03/11/makenas_price_what_to_do.php)

[http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/03/24/more_on_kv_a...](http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/03/24/more_on_kv_and_makenas_pricing.php)

[http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/03/30/kv_pharmaceu...](http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/03/30/kv_pharmaceuticals_and_makena_the_fdas_move.php)

</comment><comment><USER35> Gout may be another disease of civilization which might be preventable with diet. Gary Taubes had a chapter about this that he didn't have room for in his book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, but you can read it online: <http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/10/05/gout/>

</comment><comment><USER36> I'll just endure the gout pain, with crutches to walk and sleep all day so that the pain will pass. (with that price for colchicine)

</comment><comment><USER37> Anyone else feel that there's an overwhelming sense of entitlement to the fruits of the pharmaceutical companies efforts?

</comment><comment><USER38> Pills are _regulated_ in America but in Chindia. I believe there is a business opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER39> I get saddened everytime I see this old story of greed and indifference. I've had a personal run-in with it myself: for years, we Scandinavians with sleeping disorders could enjoy Melatonin from several different producers to a very low price. About two years ago a company called Nycomed managed, with lies and deception, to get a monopoly on selling Melatonin in Scandinavia by convincing our governmental medical products agencies that Melatonin was harmful and had severe side-effects - of course, all Melatonin but their own magic kind, marketed under the name Circadin. Before their "coup", I could purchase 30 tablets á 2mg Melatonin for €5. Nycomed wants €22 for 21 of their 2mg tablets. We're close to a million people here in Scandinavia who rely on Melatonin daily to get our sleep. Why did you let this happen to us, Scandinavian MPAs?

</comment><comment><USER40> As a 'budding' herbalist (sorry bad pun), I'd almost be willing to make my own tincture of this drug. Websites out there are doom and gloom only because you need to talk with a real herbalist about the proper mixture and technique in which to extract the chemicals.

This Google Books link seems to give the appropriate amount of drops per hour, which passes my BS detector. But like I said, you need a real herbalist for guidelines for making the tincture, or buy it from them.

[http://books.google.com/books?id=gDLIrCv26hkC&pg=PA272&#...</a><p><a href="http://www.aminaherbs.com/product.php?id_product=91" rel="nofollow">http://www.aminaherbs.com/product.php?id_product=91</a> Also sells the seed, as do other sites. I just found this one due to the bulk nature that they sell in. I have no clue if this company is good, but just wanted to show that it is easy to buy.<p>Lastly, I thought this was some sort of sick "April Fools". Come to find out that this is normal FDA business with corporate profit extraction.</comment>


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Velocity is a very flexible, powerful way to see how work is being done at your company. Our report builder is inspired by business intelligence applications. It lets you slice your Asana data by assignee, project, team, section, tag, custom field, and just about any other field. You can then share your reports via dashboards, email, CSV, Excel, HTML embeds, TV displays, and more.

We've seen teams use Velocity for project progress reports, sprint tracking, time tracking, marketing campaign tracking, client cost tracking, and hundreds of other use cases. Teams often discover trends that they were completely unaware of. When pairing Velocity with Asana's custom fields, teams can create extremely customized reports.</comment>


How I learned to stop worrying and love working capital - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@EAgarwal/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-working-capital-39917e86041d <comment><USER2> "High growth startups play between 1–3x. In theory, in a world of zero cost of capital, unlimited liquidity, and an infinite market size, any LTV/CAC greater than 0 is perfectly acceptable."

I don't understand how a ratio between 0 and 1 can be acceptable. If it's under 1, aren't you losing money in the long run?

</comment><comment><USER3> This is the sort of startup advice article I wish there were more of (though I've never been a founder myself).

It points out how the "obvious" reaction to an impending cash flow problem at a high-growth startup might be undesirable, but, more importantly, how an alternative is better and how it was implemented.</comment>


Premature Scaling Kills Startups - <AUTHOR> http://bostinnovation.com/2011/09/01/premature-scaling-kills-startups-the-genome-data/

<comment><USER2> One of my favorite Drucker quotes:

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. \- P. Drucker

</comment><comment><USER3> This article is NOT talking about technology. It's talking about growth in team size and expenditure.

<comment><USER4> The original report/research does mention technology though (I've just been referencing it for a section of a book I'm writing) - it talks about "premature scaling" in about five different areas, which includes developing non-essential features and devoting time to technical scalability before the app has evolved to fit the market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is it premature scaling or is it forgetting you are building a product for people, not just giving yourself an excuse to code and play with cool technology.

<comment><USER6> ...except that's not what the author is talking about. He's talking about scaling the company (including the product for people) too early.

<comment><USER5> > 70% of startups scaled prematurely along some dimension. While this number > seemed high, this may go a long way towards explaining the 90% failure rate > of startups

My point was for the younger startups that are surely part of his failure group. They scale their systems instead of their product because it's easier. You're right though, he talks more about larger, more mature startups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> conclusion: never scale before you have a gun pointed at your head

</comment><comment><USER8> It also kills companies who assume that their "next greatest product" is going to be massively successful and start employing every new piece of technology, completely forgetting their core competency.

Bitter, I am.</comment>


Security-Enhanced 24K KryptAll K iPhone - <AUTHOR> https://www.kryptall.com/ <comment><USER2> This has a ton of red flags that are typical of snake-oil crypto.</comment>


Ask HN: Conference room microphone setup for video calls? - <AUTHOR> We have a conference room that fits ~16 people. I wont mention the brand, but the conference audio hardware we use for Hangout/Zoom calls has 2 separate wired microphones at each ends of the large table, with the main unit in the middle. The audio quality isn't great for those outside of the office. We added carpet and we're in the process of adding sound-absorbing panels... but the volume keeps dipping in and out, no matter who is talking.<p>Just curious if anyone has recommendations on high quality microphone setups in 2017 for a larger room? We actually have to turn off the A/C when it comes on, yet we have a hard time hearing people at random times during the calls. <comment><USER2> Don't have experience with hangout and zoom - but other systems that I've used setting the individual mic sensitivity was needed to fix audio issues like that.</comment>


Are Introverted Founders less likely to launch fast? - <AUTHOR> As in Indie developer, I need to build, ship and and also work on Growth. I have found myself constantly being stressed out at the "idea" of sharing blog, posts etc with external audience.
This seems like the digital equivalent of introversion.
Consequently, I have a very very high tendency to stop distribution, and focus on building instead. Every single time I share a post (like this), I flinch. If I could, I would avoid talking, like the last 12 odd months (not good for business ).
I care a lot about this because I also mentor startups on Product, and it's a pattern I have seen - "just one more feature then we'd release".
Interestingly, I always had a team to do most of the outreach earlier - or recruited someone fast enough to do this.  So handling ALL of growth is quite new to me.
--
I am working on LightCat.io - a "Insights to Stories" tool for Product Teams. <comment><USER2> First off - congrats. Your product looks nice! I'm working in a similar area [0] so I look at a lot of products and yours looks like something I'd actually use.

I don't think this is about introversion, it's about comfort zone and the fact that distribution is really REALLY hard, especially in a crowded market. If you're a builder, it's easy to stop the hard thing, which can often be super unfulfilling and feel like banging your head against the wall, and slip back into your comfort zone of building stuff.

Thing is, it's never going to get easy. Your product is never ever going to sell itself. Building a public profile, content marketing, etc. is one affordable way to get the word out. The other way is word of mouth. Both of those require you to get out there.

All that being said, I'm firmly convinced the MVP culture of launching as soon as you've built a UI with Bootstrap and thrown it up on Heroku is bonkers. Take some pride and ship something good (which it looks like you've done).

0: [https://kitemaker.co](https://kitemaker.co)

<comment><AUTHOR> > I'm firmly convinced the MVP culture of launching as soon as you've built a > UI with Bootstrap and thrown it up on Heroku is bonkers

So totally agree with this. All of your growth experiments fail if your product doesn't have the basic stuff right.

It works well though when you are building a tool that lets you do something you cannot otherwise - if that works, even a minimal UI release can get you users. Eg. Stripe (when it released).</comment></comment>


Show HN: Hacker News Post Coloring Extension to Chromium - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lvivtotoro/hackernewspostcoloring <comment><USER2> Actually you can use simple CSS with styling extensions like Stylus to achieve similar effect.

        .ind img {
            height: 100%;
            border-right: 3px solid red;
        }

If you want different color for different level of indent, just use attribute selector, like:

        .ind img {
            height: 100%;
            border-right: 3px solid;
        }
        img[width="40"] {
            border-color: red;
        }
        img[width="80"] {
            border-color: blue;
        }

<comment><AUTHOR> This fails for me, makes the bar a pixel tall. I knew I overcomplicated it, although I like doing that :P, thanks.

<comment><USER2> Sorry, I used these lines a few years back, I'm using other styles now so I didn't know it stopped working.

You are right, it's not working.

Edit: OK, I know what's going on now, you need to add this to the code above:

        .comtr table {
            height: 100%;
        }

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Does this only color the sidebar next to comments or is there more?</comment>


Ryan Werber: Star Wars Traceroute - <AUTHOR> http://rwerber.tumblr.com/post/42707829171/star-wars-traceroute

<comment><USER2> This was a fantastic and creative hack. Would traceroute again. A++++++</comment>


Tools to make your website mobile compatible. - <AUTHOR> http://www.joomlaconvert.com/the-blog/item/13-tools-to-make-your-joomla-website-mobile-compatible.html

<comment><USER2> The title "Tools to make your website mobile compatible" is misleading. Should be retitled to "Tools to make your Joomla website mobile compatible". Don't try to linkbait.</comment>


Tony - <AUTHOR> http://davidsimon.com/tony/ <comment><USER2> _> It wasn't love of food that led Bourdain to the embrace of a shared human experience, of a world merely hiding its great commonalities behind vast and obvious culinary variations. It was the other way around. Tony was intensely political, a man always aware of those at the margins, or those for whom wealth or status always avoided

> He knew everything ... I don't mean he knew everything about food or cuisine > or travel or even world culture. I mean that for having come up in kitchens, > without the formality of any higher education, Tony Bourdain was simply an > autodidact. He read voraciously and widely. He read things that were > relevant to his work and he read things because he simply wanted to know > everything a man could possibly know about a given subject. I don't mean he > read the canon for literature and enough non-fiction to be current or > relevant at parties, I mean he read the obscure, often turgid stuff that > academics wade into when they want to know the last fucking detail about > something. As he was about so many things, he was obsessive about what could > be learned and known._

Thank you to the essay author and HN submitter.</comment>


Airbnb Is Moving Off of React Native (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2018/09/24/show-summary-react-native-at-airbnb/ <comment><USER2> I'm an engineering manager, and made the call to build a new mobile application for our company in React Native in early 2019. I read this article back then and considered various options before picking RN.

I have built apps in native iOS (pre-swift), Android (Java), windows phone (c#), phonegap/Cordova/ionic capacitor (cross platform web w/ native plugins), and Xamarin.

I did a POC of the app in RN before my team started building it, and I fell in love with it. We moved to the beta with Fast Refresh and the experience of building the app was great. Expo is huge too if you don't need custom native like we did (we're building an order processing app for a custom Android scanner).

Overall I feel that React is the best tech for building frontends that we have so far, and TypeScript makes JS quite nice.

Downsides to RN were the entire package dependency tree getting messed up every time we upgraded (could have been our newness to the platform at play), and the first version of the app that was not built with react best practices was really slow and had a lot of bugs. We had to go through a rearchitecture once we learned how to properly use immutable state, redux, selectors, slices, etc. we use redux toolkit and redux saga, and it has full offline support with automatic resyncing when it reconnects. It is a very slick, high performance app now. I'm not sure we saved any time doing RN because of the learning curve, but now that the team is spooled on this architecture, it's paying huge dividends as we build electron desktop apps and websites with React as well.

<comment> wh-uws Your use case is the situation where React Native thrives. You get code sharing across platforms and a leg up with election and stuff like that.

I view Airbnb's failure with it more of a (justified) lack of will.

They already had native apps rolled out and were tacking things on with React Native.

I feel it's best to invest in the largess of the codebase being in React Native and digging into native apis when needed

"A common misconception is that when Airbnb decided to use React Native, that they made a complete switch. This is not only not true, but to this day the React Native code represents only 15-20% of the codebase and developer resources. It was never a majority platform for the company, and part of that was the immense upfront cost to enable even the first set of components for the mobile platforms.

Even though React Native is a framework and vastly simplifies mobile development, it is not trivial to get up and running, particularly if you have an existing codebase. Expect to invest a substantial amount of time and energy to integrating React Native into your existing mobile codebase"

Airbnb decided it wasn't a priority to finish the job.

That's a fine choice I just don't see it as wholesale indictment of React Native as it was originally sold in that article.

<comment><USER3> This topic seems to bring out the worst in programmer religious wars.

Small company, limited resources, greenfield app that needs to be on all platforms: React Native is a no-brainer that'll help you survive and thrive.

Large company, large existing native codebase, no shortage of resources: RN will be an expensive, divisive distraction that doesn't gain you anything. It can make a lot of sense for prototype projects, but that use case is pretty similar to the former.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Airbnb suffers from a problem I call "Too many engineers". All that's really left is scaling issues.

The product is effectively done. It was done years ago. Now you just have engineers inventing problems for the sake of creating work. Same deal with Uber, Netflix, and Facebook. Core competency was dev complete forever ago.

<comment><USER5> Have you ever worked at a large engineering org? Your impression might change unless you've seen dysfunction firsthand.

There is work to be done everywhere!

\- Keeping the lights on

\- Deprecating old and broken systems, finishing migrations

\- Tweaking the product. Small optimizations can create massive windfalls at scale.

\- Maintaining and updating business logic. Imagine the complexity of laws in all 50 states and abroad.

\- Improving product performance so customers don't get a bad impression.

\- Improving support flow so fewer supporters can get more done.

\- Exporting data, doing ETLs, etc. for analysts.

\- Doing greenfield development of new products and features to further growth and deepen the moat so that competitors don't encroach.

Most businesses wouldn't pay for engineers if they didn't think they needed them.

<comment><USER4> \- Open Sourcing an animation library for After Effects ([https://airbnb.design/lottie/](https://airbnb.design/lottie/))

\- Making a plugin for exporting After Effects to JSON ([https://github.com/airbnb/lottie-web](https://github.com/airbnb/lottie-web))

\- Porting their open sourced animation library for iOS ([https://github.com/airbnb/lottie-ios](https://github.com/airbnb/lottie-ios))

\- Porting their open sourced animation library to a mobile framework that another company created that doesn't really have anything to do with its core business. ([https://github.com/react-native-community/lottie-react- nativ...](https://github.com/react-native-community/lottie-react-native))

\- Writing a 5 part blog post on why they're moving away from that technology

Look I love Lottie, but it's hilarious to me how far outside of "Facilitating short term rentals" it is. Facebook has the same thread to pull with React. I get that they're "trying to contribute to the ecosystem" but it's like an extension of the PhD for these coders.

<comment><USER6> That's also recruiting and media as well as retention work for skilled experts due to the competitive space.

<comment><USER4> For sure! Need a skilled expert to port it to Expo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another perspective; Shopify adopts React Native: [https://engineering.shopify.com/blogs/engineering/react- nati...](https://engineering.shopify.com/blogs/engineering/react-native- future-mobile-shopify) and [https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2020/04/15/shopify- reac...](https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2020/04/15/shopify-react-native- with-farhan-thawar/)

</comment><comment><USER8> I worked at Airbnb during this time, and basically it came down to the fact that it just didn't make sense to invest in RN.

The company already had 50-100 native engineers already productive and passionate about iOS/Android with internal tooling, large code base and support from Google and Apple (like you could contact Apple when there was a performance problem on Swift and they would sometimes come over to diagnose). Most native engineers didn't want to do React Native and most web developers didn't want to deal with native mobile both on iOS and Android. There was always some edge cases, navigation quirks or performance problems, where in order to fix it, you had to know the platform somewhat well. Most engineers are not that familiar with both iOS, Android and RN. So who would want to do it? Also just to support RN as a platform, you needed 1-2 engineers full-time just keeping it working and resolving issues with the platform (which is not that different from iOS/Android).

To get it fully adopted, you would have to basically restructure the mobile teams, recruit new people, rewrite the code base and tooling to make the switch. RN was experiment to see if teams would be more productive and make sense for the company but it didn't since the company had already invested so much native.

There is also something to be said about building a new app in RN vs trying to build an performant app that has over 10 years of functionality, runs both Guest and Host experience in the same app, is internationalized to 30 languages/locations (each city in the world has their own regulation which affect taxes, what data needs to be collected etc), is run on wide range of devices and runs hundreds A/B tests and gradual feature rollouts. It's classic "I could build X in a weekend" if you only focus on the very common surface level features.

With many frameworks or languages people often love the experience of building a new app. After maintaining the app over years with several developers, platform upgrades etc the feeling might change. I wonder what are largest, most widely used and longest running RN apps out there?

</comment><comment><USER9> React Native 2020 is far superior to RN of 2017/18.

I built an app in RN in 2017 and it was a real headache actually getting anything to build. I've since built another one, far more complex than the previous one in the last few months and it's been a real surprise as how stable and dare I say, easy, it actually is.

Saying all that, I haven't attempted to upgrade from RN 0.61 to 0.62 and expect issues from this.

</comment><comment><USER10> React Native is "re-architecting" and claims to be significantly improving performance and revisting other architectural choices:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23501780](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23501780)

I've long been curious whether Airbnb was too early adopting or it simply made more sense for such a big company to go native (also factoring in Swift/Kotlin making native mobile dev less-bad in the meantime), from the article:

> Many of these features were built at a time where we simply did not have > enough native engineers to achieve our goals.

> we've grown our team to more than 100 mobile engineers to enable new > experiences and improve existing ones.

Or maybe React Native truly added more baggage than it's worth going cross- platform.

Cross-platform has always been sort of a pipe dream that has haunted programmers since forever, but especially since mobile browsers and non-shitty JS became a thing (Linux and MacOS/OSX are still having their perpetual moment as well).

I plan to revisit the Airbnb series regardless since I forgot most of their reasoning...

<comment><USER11> Or maybe they hired a bunch of engineers to move fast and break things, promoted them, and now those same people are leading their engineering efforts and trying really, really hard to do something they suck at, which is writing maintainable code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> You can read the four part saga directly from Airbnb here: [https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/react-native-at- airbnb...](https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/react-native-at- airbnb-f95aa460be1c)

</comment><comment><USER13> I've always worked in relatively large companies, and I've led several mobile teams. I've always ALWAYS been a native mobile purist. I had iOS people writing Obj-C and Swift, I had Android people writing Kotlin/Java. I had budget to have at least 2 of each and things moved along.

Now I find myself a CTO of a startup where mobile is less crucial (we're building an issue tracker to take on Jira/Trello/etc) and I don't have a big budget anymore. I need to seriously consider something like RN or Flutter.

Anyone else been in this situation where picking a cross-platform toolkit is not a matter of trend or religion but rather one of necessity? Any learnings to share?

<comment><USER14> Is there even any evidence that RN or Flutter are better for smaller budgets? Like actual data that doesn't live in the mind of a RN/Flutter enthusiast?

<comment><USER13> That's a very good question. The reality may be that if one cannot afford at least one native iOS dev and one native android dev (given the size of the app that person could share other duties) then one is not in a place to launch a mobile app

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is from 2018...update the title please.

</comment><comment><USER16> Weird that the site is still as slow as it's always been, how have they not fixed this, it's slow on desktop it's slow on the app it's always the slowest thing. Slower than local news websites. S l o w.

<comment><USER17> I gave up using them when they switched from showing places to stay to showing (by default) all kinds of crap that I didn't care about.

I was a business user, with a business account and business credit card. Why am I being shown "experiences" as the default behavior?

In the end I was forced to quit due to my account being in some weird state that they STILL haven't fixed (I checked today, a year and a half later). All that happens when I log in is I see "We're reviewing your info Someone from our team will review your account and follow up with you soon at <email>"

This is after many years of bookings and absolutely zero disputes or complaints etc. Emailing them gets me nowhere - just no response at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Every time there's a thread about React Native the RN fanboys come in droves, the reality is that RN is an abstraction over Native Mobile and will always be inferior to it.

You will end up debugging issues for supporting multiple platforms via one codebase.

I like React just not for Native Mobile, nowadays stick to native Swift or Kotlin and wait for SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose to make Mobile development seamless

</comment><comment><USER19> I'd love to use a better language like Swift or Kotlin for cross platform development but in reality, between Typescript which is a ubiquitous language with a lot of traction and potential and Dart, a me too language with limited usecases that Google tries so hard to shove down our throat, I know what I prefer.

Dart lost to Typescript before in the javascript war, btw

</comment><comment><USER20> This was an interesting blog series when they originally wrote it, in 2018.</comment>


Why I hate job hunting.  - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/4Fu8Cez3

<comment><USER2> I didn't properly understand this until I was a hiring manager working with a recruiter, but recruiters often send these e-mails without making any effort to verify that the hiring manager is interested in the candidate. If you don't have a profile that the hiring manager finds immediately attractive, putting you through a coding exercise can be the recruiter's way of building a case to the hiring manager for bringing you in to interview.

I find the whole thing frustrating, too, which is my response to all of these canned e-mails (unless I'm totally disinterested or I'm really actively looking) is, "I'd be happy to take a call with the hiring manager to discuss the position." If they're really interested, they'll take the call, and if they're not, I haven't wasted my time.

</comment><comment><USER3> It was really hard comprehending this pastebin, you have to read it from bottom up it seems, and still... what.

Anyway, maybe you are searching for jobs in the wrong places? Hm? Those kind of condescending recruiters, ugh, stay away from them.

Just pass on, man there are greener fields ahead.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks mate, this one came from Careers.stackoverflow.com. I think it was just a bad tomato though. First time I've had someone blatantly lie to me and not show. Overall the experience has been rough but traversable. This is obviously a low, other times I've had highs and come out of interviews that I could convey my abilities and we both agreed I wasn't the right fit.

I thought about re-arranging it, but I didn't want to take away from the structure of the email formatting. I just wanted to remove the identifying- information.

<comment><USER3> I can sympathize with the lows, most people can, fucking job searching sucks ass, ugh.

You'll find what you want to do, dont let these lows bring you down, and its really good you told them off right ahead, should have more people like you, so then these bad recruiters would stop their bad practices, it must mean someeebody is that desperate indeed that theyd fall for "do work for free and as a slave"-trick.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> a github pull request isn't that bad. think about all the whiteboard C++ coding interviews most of the IT companies still do.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, agreed, but unless the OP is a fresh grad (doesnt look like it), it is too much to ask for a code sample before even an initial call.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: HN meetup at SXSWi? - <AUTHOR>

Who'll be in town for SXSWi?<p>Anyone have any talks they're giving/excited about? <comment><USER2> There's a YC/HN meetup: [https://www.facebook.com/events/746658665448279/](https://www.facebook.com/events/746658665448279/)

Comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9154477](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9154477)</comment>