Say No - <AUTHOR> http://boz.com/articles/say-no.html <comment><USER2> A lot of this is culture dependent I believe, but i am under the impression that at least on western countries you cannot do this a lot of times without a high cost, specially if you re not a manager.

If someone comes to your desk directly, you are supposed to stop what you are doing and give your attention to that person, even if you are working on something really urgent.

Refusing meeting requests is also not well seen unless you have another appointment, meetnaping happens all the time.

A lot has to do also with open space offices, where everybody is just sitting there and makes it even more awkward, and you are right there available to be interrupted.

Interruptions from persons on your own team are to be taken with even more priority, the modern open office is just a high-interruption environment and there is nothing to be done about it.

In the end it might be really a good thing, because if a person is blocked it walks to the desk of someone else and sometimes can be unblocked and the company as a whole goes forward.

Doing what his boss did of cutting another person off with a 'not now' is not something that his boss can get away with a lot of times, even if he is under pressure: its demoralizing, it just ends up creating a weird atmosphere.

One solution might be: one or two days of remote work a week for everybody.

<comment><USER3> This is company dependent rather than country. When I was early in my career as a software dev I felt like I could never say no. I would continue to take on additional work which translated to more hours.

Eventually my manager at the time did the best thing he could for me. He asked me into his office for a "talk". Then he told me that he didn't want to lose me because I burned out. He said, "Look, you have to learn to say no to people. If you aren't comfortable doing that then tell them to run it by me; and then I'll say no."

<comment><USER4> This is the solution. Your manager understood his job, and its impact on yours. Everyone should be so lucky. So far, I have been! At my first job, my boss told me right off not to let everyone who comes by add work to my pile. It's hard to do at first. After all, your first reaction is to be helpful. But after a while you see the benefit of being able to to deflect things to your manager and have him prioritize the workload.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's Facebook's culture. They're building a new HQ building. It has one of the world's largest bullpens. Almost everybody is in one huge room.

(Floor plan: [http://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2012/08/dezeen_Frank- Gehry-...](http://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2012/08/dezeen_Frank-Gehry- designs-new-Facebook-headquarters-3_1000.jpg))

Apple is at the other extreme - they keep their groups isolated, often behind locked doors. Microsoft used to run recruiting ads for programmers pointing out that their programmers get offices with doors. Google tends to have medium-sized bullpens surrounded by many small glass conference rooms.

<comment><USER6> That floorplan has got to be what Hell looks like. Holy crap.

<comment><USER7> Apart from what appears to be a slippery slide in the top left :/.

<comment><USER8> That is just how they dispose of the bodies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is also a good reason to make explicit if your "go-to" person in your organization is on the management track or the technical track. This is something I think we struggled with for awhile at Kiva where we didn't make explicit that you could remain technical and still get promoted, so people would become Engineering Mangers only to then expect to still stay in their corner plugging away on code in the zone without interruptions. But when you are the guy tasked to train others and generally help people clear roadblocks (as managers generally are designated to do), then it hurts everyone when you instead try to hang on to a "coder only" mentality. You get frustrated cause you are getting interrupted and the people interrupting you get frustrated by getting brushed off or feeling like they are wasting your time.

Fortunately, we eventually made it clear that you can move up in title, but remain focused on engineering instead of management. This helped tremendously to set it up so we have a set of people who have time set aside specifically for talking about problems, and you can chat with them in order to solve problems while leaving the folks solving code problems alone so they can maintain their productivity.

</comment><comment><USER10> I wish I had a little LED at my desk that would sync with my IM status to show people when I was busy or available to chat online or in person. One of the earliest usability features in the online world but still not replicated in the real world.

<comment><USER11> In my case, that LED is my headphones :)

<comment><USER12> What if I want to listen to music, but I don't mind someone talking to me if they need something? What if I want to concentrate with no interruptions, including no noise/music from headphones?

<comment><USER13> For me - I like having headphones on without music because it's kinda warm and lowers outside noise. If I want to listen to something and still indicate I'm available to chat, I only have one headphone over the ear and the other to the side.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For what it is worth, I do think Dustin could have been a little more gracious in how he approached it and I mention in my note that it isn't meant to be an excuse to be rude. I actually think it was fine for him to do this to me not because he was my boss but because we had a good relationship. Still, when this happens to me, I usually say something like "I'm in the middle of X right now, can this wait until Y?" \-- this tells them what I am doing (and thus allows them to say assert that their topic really is more important) and also gives them a time to follow up.

As a manager of a large organization, I have more respect for people on my team who say no and assert stronger ownership over their time, ideally by being transparent about their priorities. At the end of the day, we just look at impact and managing ones own time is a good sign that someone is focused on impact. Still, I'm sure that isn't the case with every manager in every company (or even every manager in my company)

The open space aspect of the FB offices is usually navigated by people putting headphones on to indicate they are heads down. I do it often even though I'm rarely listening to anything. I agree it isn't for everyone though.

<comment><USER15> I had a similar thing happen to me, where I was on the receiving end of "not now". The colleague was on a phone with their backed turned and head down and I couldn't see that they were on the phone. And they responded with a mean "not now". There's just no excuse for it. Even if it's the end-of-world, you can still just say "not now" without any malice.

I'm sure he didn't mean any harm and was under pressure. People make mistakes. And compensation is called compensation for a reason - (stock) compensation for being yelled at, I'm sure makes it feel better - especially when it's early facebook stock.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I learned this the hard way. Joined a company and was on-site in a different country, for 5 days a week, 8 month and we were doing overtime every. single. day. I'm talking 8am to 1am 3 out of 5 days and the rest wasn't that much better.

I quit. Did something else.

8 years ago I joined that very same company again. I'm still a 'corporate drone', a random developer, but I learned to decline and to say no. Both to your managers and to your coworkers. That single word saved my sanity and allows me to stay with that company to this very day.

I don't agree that it's a matter of culture (at least not in the culture I am roughly familiar with) if you can pull this of. It certainly might be a matter of culture how you need to phrase it.

Fortunately my employer is rather blunt and open internally, so 'No, I really have no patience for that right now' is - while not the friendliest possible answer - acceptable and possible.

Now I need to learn how to walk the fine line between 'saying no' and 'being old and grumpy' :)

<comment><USER17> > Now I need to learn how to walk the fine line between 'saying no' and 'being > old and grumpy' :)

That's the difficult part in my experience. I say no a __lot __. Some people have the impression that I 'm lazy or privileged because they feel they can't say no. They certainly can, but they don't want to feel like they're upsetting anyone.

But sometimes when I say no, I say it in the wrong way, or don't provide enough context for why "no" is right. This doesn't help me at other times, even when I've (mostly) effectively communicated that no is the right decision for the person that's asking me to do something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> While I agree it's important to learn how to say no sometimes in order to keep priorities and deadlines, I feel though that what is missing in this advice is that you should also learn how to say no in a manner that doesn't generate negativity and a tense atmosphere. It really doesn't take that much to add a sincere smile and say you're busy right now, perhaps a bit later.

<comment><USER14> I agree!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> As an east coast transplant, I am still utterly amazed that this sort of thing actually is normal on the west coast: someone is seriously shocked and hurt because someone else "shut you down" by saying "not right now" when you want to interrupt them to draw their attention to yourself.

Not that they don't want to talk to you at all, they just want you to wait till they finish what they're doing first. This is apparently considered "socially awkward" in California.

Not only that, this person then went off and introspected on the broader meaning of this "watershed moment," and concluded that "socially awkward" things like occasionally saying no to someone are sometimes actually OK and good...

</comment><comment><USER20> My previous employer refused to make this culture shift. This was terrible for us engineers because we were supposed to "make ourselves available" to everyone in the company, especially the sales team, when they had questions about the product. The upper management's rationale was that if one of our Account Managers was talking to a prospective customer on the phone and they had a technical question (e.g. "can your solution integrate with Software X?"), being able to answer that question then and there (even if it meant IM'ing one of us engineers) was better for conversion because it gave the customer the impression of competence. On top of that, it was an open-office setup, so there was continuous chatter all the time.

After fighting this culture for years, I couldn't handle the constant interruptions anymore and quit. I have a home office now and I control all the variables in it. I couldn't be happier.

</comment><comment><USER21> The todo-"avoid at all costs"-list is an extension of this same concept (recent post at [http://www.businessinsider.com/warren-buffett- productivity-t...](http://www.businessinsider.com/warren-buffett-productivity- trick-2014-9)).

In essence, whatever is at #6 or #10 at your priority list is not something that's somewhat important and should be tackled from time to time - it's the very thing that's stealing your time and attention away from your #1 and #2 things, a dangerous distraction that you should consciously limit and either avoid or schedule to a specific time.

You don't have to worry about priority #1001 taking your time - you don't want to do it and so you won't; but things that are seemingly good often lead to "yak-shaving" at the cost of what's truly important for you.

</comment><comment><USER22> In my experience Muskovitz was probably three weeks to three months too late in saying no. It's a really hard thing, culturally, socially shutting down people face to face like that is something we are all wired not to do, on top of which he probably derived a lot of personal identity and kudos from being the goto guy - hard to turn off.

But the pressure had to be immense to react like that - and one suspects that it's only because of good well balanced people around that they could take the social shutdown and come back to work still focused instead of suddenly fostering a poisonous atmosphere - something that can easily happen if the no was taken as "no I don't value you" instead of "no we have to find new ways of working"

Would be interesting to hear others views of this formative time.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is actually pretty important, and actually you can do this (probably in a more polite way) to your manager as well. Not wanting to be interrupted = focused. focused = more progress in development.

If you are interrupted in while working on a very complicated subject, going back to the same focus level takes up to 30 minutes for me. The time I could spent on fixing stuff.

I am happy that most of my employers / managers understood and appreciated this.

You can explain them with this comic as well: [http://heeris.id.au/2013/this- is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt-...](http://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you- shouldnt-interrupt-a-programmer/)

</comment><comment><USER24> At Microsoft we called this "Red Time / Green Time". I had a card on my door that I could flip to either color. If the card was set to the red side people wouldn't interrupt me. If it was green it was fine to just walk in and start talking. We were required to have a certain amount of green time each day.

</comment><comment><USER25> Notice that if your development team uses chat or ticketing or email or some async communication mechanism a lot of these issues go away.

<comment><USER26> Not always. If the people don't understand that someone can't give them immediate attention they are going to email you, send a chat message to say that they emailed you and if you don't reply in 2 minutes they will call you. If you don't answer they walk to your desk, and this was for something that could wait. I have experienced that issue quite a few times already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm willing to give Dustin some sympathy, I don't think any company could ever relate to the amount of rapid growth that was experienced within Facebook back then and is still continuing today. I was put in a similar situation to a much smaller extent and as the team grew it honestly felt like the majority of my job was babysitting rather than accomplishing what I had set out to do.

At the same time it's important to understand that for every no there should also be a yes, and it's just as easy to gently put people down rather than say something that could be construed as rude.

</comment><comment><USER28> In my company we have exactly the opposite. We have a rule called "there are no stupid questions". If you get stuck at what you are doing you should ask for help(this goes for senior resources too).

In fact if you had got stuck but didn't ask for help and for some reason the work got delayed this will get escalated and you will be blamed for not asking for help. I just think thats the way it should be.

</comment><comment><USER29> I think a corollary is that, it's surprising how much you can say no to (if you're polite about it). I notice the dynamics are different in a really big company versus a small one though. Like if you're in a large company, meetings tend to cast a wide net and usually it's impossible to get 100% attendance anyway, so it's a lot easier to hide (metaphorically). Especially if you've sort of built a mystique of having a lot of fish on the fryer. On the other hand, in a small organization people are pretty aware of each others business, so it's a lot harder to pull the "gosh I wanted to attend but I had this other thing come up..." card. Then you have to be a little bit more direct with the "I have things to do and this isn't that important' deal.

If I were to wear my slightly evil hat though, I would say it's useful to occasionally decline meetings. It doesn't hurt to remind people your time is of value.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is why scrum masters were invented. It's there job to say yes, while everyone else says no.

</comment><comment><USER31> I work from home now, but in my days in an office I adopted the following system - a small box on my desk with a green tick on one side and a red cross on the other. Green tick = I can be interrupted at any time, red cross = please interrupt me only for critical emergencies.

In both the old office and my home office I made / make a real effort to set the box to an appropriate value, i.e. don't have the red cross showing all the time or it loses it's meaning. These days it's only my wife who is looking to interrupt me, fortunately, but this system works well. And, hell, one of the benefits of working from home is having your wife 'insist' on taking you away from a 'red cross' task once in a while, heh-heh.

</comment><comment> wh-uws I learned how to say know early on. I've been freelancing since high school. Nothing will teach you to say no when you are over extended faster than failing to deliver well for a client.

</comment><comment><USER32> It depends on the situation but I pretty much agree. For example, sometimes coworkers will come up to me to discuss or ask something that'll take less than a minute. These minutes can add up to suck all the productivity out of your day, especially with the context switching.

On the other hand, something that could take a minute for me to answer could take someone an hour to figure out, thus thwarting productivity on the other end.

</comment><comment><USER33> "People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things." \- Steve Jobs

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm rather surprised at some of the responses here.

For many people, especially when they're working on difficult or complex tasks, an interruption will cause them to feel a bit angry or frustrated. This is completely 100% normal.

They don't mean to hurt your feelings. They just need some space to focus. Give them a bit of space, and think nothing else of it.

</comment><comment><USER35> I like this:

> Look back on your past week and assemble an honest accounting of your > attention. Does the time you spent in each area mirror the importance of > that area? This exercise is the true test of your ability to prioritize. It > will tell you whether you are able to maintain focus on the important or > whether you get distracted by the urgent.

</comment><comment><USER36> _> Look back on your past week and assemble an honest accounting of your attention. Does the time you spent in each area mirror the importance of that area? This exercise is the true test of your ability to prioritize._

And when you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

</comment><comment><USER37> Dan Kennedy already summed up time management in several of his books. Saying no is another way of staying focused but I can tell you it's much harder to implement in real life if you don't have the right habits in place to do so.

</comment><comment><USER38> Isn't this Covey's quadrants all over again?!

[http://www.eitanbirshan.com/blog/time-management- covey%E2%80...](http://www.eitanbirshan.com/blog/time-management- covey%E2%80%99s-4-quadrants/)

</comment><comment><USER39> This article has inspired me to say no to Hacker News for the rest of day... :-)

</comment><comment><USER40> That's just rude. A short and polite "I'm a little busy, can we talk later" would require no more effort or concentration than just saying no.

<comment><USER41> We don't quite agree. It is upon the person who is taking it wrongly - that is negative on their part. Everyone should practice saying 'no' without having to explain themselves.

<comment><USER42> Unlearning your advice is probably the single most beneficial thing I've done during my career as a programmer. While I at my core tend to think exactly the way you do about this, it's a righteous stance that only did me a disservice before I decided to take more responsibility for how I'm heard.

As the person delivering information, you by definition have more context than the person or people you're delivering it to. Asking the world to figure-it- out and expecting them to do so correctly is a path that I think is likely to net-cost you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> > they would simply edit files live on the Harvard server and shout out what > file they were changing to avoid conflicts

That's awesome.

</comment><comment><USER44> "Say No to things that are urgent but not important."

This captures the essence of the post, and is almost universally applicable.

<comment><USER45> Yep. If the article would have been linked under this sentence instead of the clickbaity "Say No" I would've saved time and energy today by not reading about this annoyingly simple notion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Not right now, I'm going to hit this blunt and hang out with my girlfriend instead of mercilessly chasing the dollar via software ventures.

</comment><comment><USER47> I wonder how you say 'no' to HN.

<comment><USER48> You can't say 'no' on HM without being downvoted by the hivemind for not having an agreeable opinion.

Then the "why is everyone being so negative and critical?" comment rises to the top.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Learning to say No and learning better about _what_ to say No to is definitely a helpful life strategy, in my experience.

For example, saying no to PHP -- whatever it's merits -- means being able to say yes to Java, Python, C, Go, Clojure, whatever. Saying no to Windows means being able to say yes, more, to Linux. Saying no to meetings means saying yes to writing a new feature or fixing a bug. Saying no to interruptions means saying yes to focus. And so on.

You have only so much time in the day, week, year, rest of your life. It's not that there's no value, benefit or use to the thing you're saying no to, it's that the alternative will often give you _more_ of those things, or otherwise help make your life better in some strategic long-term way, or in some non- tangible way like making you happier.

</comment><comment><USER50> I have a different theory of what was going on in the early days of FB in regards to the author's claims.

Dustin probably started saying "No" not so much because his time was being monopolized by technical issues, but because other engineers (including the author) were trying to curry favor with him as they saw the status of the social network start to rise.

</comment><comment><USER51> nice!</comment>


Divergent Thinking Will Make You More Creative - <AUTHOR> https://nickwignall.com/divergent-thinking/ <comment><USER2> I have a natural tendency towards divergent thinking and often it is making me nuts. Where other are barely able to come up with one solution for a problem and then go implement it, I generate many solutions and often cannot decide which is the best. Often, I have a hard time explaining the solutions as people are not used to thinking in solutions and think that the solution they have found is the only one. Also, solutions, often lead to other questions, with more solutions, and before I know it, I find myself daydreaming about all kinds of hypothetical problems and their possible solutions, not making any progress at all at finishing the task I have set my mind to.</comment>


Yes, You Can Catch Insanity - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/23/dominoes/yes-you-can-catch-insanity <comment><USER2> I find it odd that medical treatment insists on being so _causal_ —diagnosing a specific illness, and then treating for that illness, but never, ever treating if you don't have evidence of a particular illness.

It makes sense if you're dealing with hypochondriacs or drug-seekers, and it makes epidemiological sense to withhold some treatments from prophylactic use (like antibiotics) to preserve their efficacy. But if you're dealing with an idiopathic illness for over _four years_ , I would think there would come a time where you'd ask the doctor, "can I just try some antibiotics to see what happens? And how about some antiretrovirals, antiparasitics, and antifungals while you're at it?"

Just methodically working through the safe, first-line treatments to the major disease classes, taking each for a month or so and seeing what happens, would probably fix 90% of people's chronic illnesses. Even if it didn't, paying attention to people's reactions to being on various medications are some of the best diagnostic tools there are—which second-line treatment regime to pursue would likely become rapidly apparent.

But instead, people can go years slowly dying from something that they could fix with a few pills from the corner pharmacy, if a doctor would deign to "tinker" rather than working from theory.

<comment><USER3> > people can go years slowly dying from something that they could fix with a > few pills from the corner pharmacy, if a doctor would deign to "tinker" > rather than working from theory.

This is a principal-agent problem. Doctors don't have much incentive to cure you. They have a strong incentive to avoid malpractice lawsuits. Thus they are extremely risk-averse.

<comment><USER4> The past week's Medicare physician payment reform in the U.S. should help with that. It's an outcomes-based system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I completely agree with this article, based on my own experiences.

My wife acquired Bipolar 2 after a prolonged systemic infection at 30 years old. After years of hospitals, tests, virtual bankruptcy and little to no progress, I decided to do something.

I started by looking at human population studies which showed lower incidences of her mental illness, and based on differences in diet, exercise, and medicines I discovered a possible difference in India from WHO publications and .

After reviewing several PubMed and other academic papers on the subject, I thought perhaps that dietary difference may account for disease incidence differences. So, comparing the most common Indian food ingredients versus US diets, I came across turmeric.

Turmeric has shown strong anti-inflammatory properties, positive effects on astocyte cell regrowth, and may improve neural myelination. It is used in many Indian dishes but relatively few American dishes. It's used throughout the middle east and asia, but mostly for grilling.

So I purchased imported Indian turmeric, and started cooking it into all that I could every day, especially soups and other combinations with pepper and oil as it's done in India.

Inside two months and she started to sleep less than her typical 16 hours a day. She quit listening to music all her waking hours. Her mood made positive strides. She played with the children. It was a small, however exceptionally positive change.

Following five years of improvements, the outcomes have been great. She is again driving, teaching, and just needs her single medication at the most minimal measurement essential. She now has clear thinking, great memory, and no longer experiences the symptoms of side effects.

She has not been hospitalized since.

Take it as quackery, miracle, or however you like. Perhaps it may help someone, someday. I know studies are in being proposed, and perhaps it may improve the lives of others.

<comment><USER6> I've actually heard good things about turmeric. If you don't mind me asking, why imported Indian turmeric though? Is it different from what you would get in the States (aka what I've got in my pantry)?

<comment><USER7> I've had the opportunity to play around with turmeric in a medical/biological setting. Turns out, the compound most likely responsible for a lot of turmeric's biologically active properties (basically inflammation reduction/anti-tumor effects) is curcumin[1].

A lot of the spices used for cooking (especially ones sold cheaply and in bulk) may contain less curcumin[absolutely no citation here] because:

1\. Spices and herbs grown for bulk may be grown in poorer conditions with higher stressors in the environment and growth accelerants added to the feed. This may result in a (non-processed) spice with a lower amount of nutrition relative to a spice grown with TLC. Empirically, there is a fairly significant gulf between the flavor (to me) of plants grown organically vs agriindustrial techniques. However, the community seems to be divided as to if the nutritional content significantly differs[2].

2\. Industrial processing techniques may destroy or modify many of the taste- inactive compounds in an attempt to optimize for maximum flavor. It's interesting to note here that curcumin's coloration is what gives turmeric it's golden sheen. At home, my Safeway turmeric contains dyes. I sort of assume that the processing that the spice goes though removes/destroys some of the coloration compounds (curcumin likely included).

In conclusion, it's possible that the imported turmeric has come from a location where the plant is grown with more TLC, processed less harshly, and is more fresh.

However, to be perfectly honest, it's likely far more efficient to consume curcumin pills. Like most alternative medication (unregulated pills), it's fairly difficult to actually get any sort of guarantee. And though you can purchase lab-grade curcumin from Sigma Aldrich, it's fairly pricey (approximately 6 $/g). Also...it's lab grade so I'm very unsure if I'd be bold enough to try eating it. As a pure powder, it's also a pretty severe irritant. When was working with it, I worked with it wearing a full mask on.

Also, I'd also like to point out that while the compound itself has been shown to do a bunch of neat things, it's biologically tricky for it to actually become absorbed by the human body. (Side note, since my research, there has been apparently further work done documenting delivery mechanisms and bioavailibility of curcumin. It's actually pretty neat.[3])

1: [http://www.hindawi.com/journals/bmri/2014/186864/](http://www.hindawi.com/journals/bmri/2014/186864/) Also, see the entire class of diarylheptanoids.

2: [http://ucanr.edu/datastoreFiles/608-787.pdf](http://ucanr.edu/datastoreFiles/608-787.pdf)

3: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3918523/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3918523/)

<comment><USER5> Thank you, I appreciate the info. I'm glad to see the science progress, and perhaps we'll discover better treatments in the process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I thought this was going to be an article about Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron, notoriously associated with Project MKUltra, and his curious hypothesis of contagious mental illnesses and how psychiatric conditions might possibly be transmitted by way of the mere interactions of differing personalities, and institutional social norms:

      Cameron stated, "Get it understood how dangerous these
      damaged, sick personalities are to ourselves - and above
      all, to our children, whose traits are taking form and
      we shall find ways to put an end to them." [1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Ewen_Cameron#Mental_ill...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Ewen_Cameron#Mental_illness_as_a_social_contagion)

</comment><comment><USER9> I believe it's the stranglehold of the pharmaceutical industry on psychology that prevents research like this from going forward. Instances like Isak's ordeal with PANDAS and Susannah Cahalan's battle with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis show that more research should go into how infections and autoimmune response can cause some forms of mental illness.

I was particuarly appalled when I read that doctors gave Isak anti-depressants to treat his mental illness. These are the medicines the pharmaceutical industry have been pushing on us for decades to treat any malady of the mind, and they have been proven to be barely more effective than placebo treatments.

Their first priority is pushing pills, not our well-being.

<comment><USER10> From the article:

>They didn't give it much thought. Periodic strep tests on Isak had always come back negative. And his symptoms seemed too dramatic to be the result of a simple, common childhood infection.

I don't think there's any institutional stranglehold stopping research in this direction, just standard human reasoning. As a scientist, there are enticing hypotheses to follow that pop up every single day, and it's hard to judge what should get the investment of time and money.

>Their first priority is pushing pills, not our well-being.

These were doctors prescribing these, not the pharmaceutical industry, and I believe that the doctors were trying, something, anything, that they believed might work. What's more risky, using a drug that's been proven to help adults (barely better than placebo or not), or going after an as-yet-untested hypothesis about streptococci, that doesn't fit our current understanding of the problems? There are certainly issues where pharmaceutical interests are not aligned with our health and well being, but I don't really see this child's unfortunate trajectory as part of that. The failure rests more on the science just not being there, and us not having a great understanding of the mind.

<comment><USER11> It really bugs me when people talk about Big Pharma pushing pills, cause really, 8-9 times out of 10, it's patients begging for pills. Are pharmaceutical companies angels? Fuck no, neither are doctors, but if nobody was buying, they wouldn't be selling.

There's a great post on reddit from a doctor who wrote about a typical patient-doctor interaction (which I'm too lazy to find right now):

Patient comes in with elevated blood pressure, about 30 lb overweight, sedentary lifestyle. Doctors talks about blood pressure, possible future issues with it, recommends patient start getting some exercise, portion control, lose some weight, maybe a dietary consult.

Patient comes in a month or three later for a follow up visit. No weight loss, no drop in blood pressure. Doctor writes a script.

Hell, when I was checking out doctor review sites for a podiatrist, one of the negative opinions he had said, "He didn't even prescribe me anything!

<comment><USER12> _It really bugs me when people talk about Big Pharma pushing pills, cause really, 8-9 times out of 10, it 's patients begging for pills. Are pharmaceutical companies angels? Fuck no, neither are doctors, but if nobody was buying, they wouldn't be selling._

In this trio, I blame the doctors far more than anyone. Patients have no clue, they just want to be cured. It's the responsibility of the doctors to only prescribe what is necessary.

Every time I hear my father say he got antibiotics for his cold I cringe, and wonder WTF the Dr. he saw was thinking. I think the count is up to a dozen times he's received them in the last 10 years.

<comment><USER13> > _In this trio, I blame the doctors far more than anyone. Patients have no > clue, they just want to be cured. It 's the responsibility of the doctors to > only prescribe what is necessary._

That's a bit naive. Many patients practically demand pills, and if you displease them all you'll take a hit on your "patient satisfaction" metrics, which in turn displeases the hospital administration as things like Medicare funding are tied to these metrics. So unfortunately, doing what's best for the patient doesn't always correspond with what's best for the doctor keeping their job.[1]

Blaming the doctor for having to make an impossible choice is not entirely fair. I think the federal government (Medicare) and hospital administrators need to reevaluate the weight they put on patient satisfaction and the pressure it puts on physicians as well as patient outcomes.

[1]: [http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/821288](http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/821288)

<comment><USER10> I completely agree with this, but also think that it's important for patients who are sick to leave their doctor experience somewhat soothed.

I think that if a patient listens to explanations about how antibiotics won't help with their viral infection, but still wants something to be done, that perhaps doctors should be allowed to prescribe cheap placebos of some sort. Though this is in some ways incredibly disrespectful to the patient, perhaps if it wasn't a sugar pill and something truly soothing, like bed rest and warm soup, it may pass ethical muster.

There's a reason that unsound treatments like homeopathy gain traction. Some people just want to be cared for and told that they are in good hands and will get better faster than if they were on their own.

<comment><USER14> I like this idea. Just have a can of ready-made soup - store-bought if necessary - and just add something somewhat odd-but-good-tasting. A patient with half a brain will understand they're being fooled, but whoever seeks homeopathy wants to be fooled anyway, so that won't be an issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Poor kid. Glad the ordeal is over.

Mind/body. It's one system. Of course issues with one impact the other.

However--Not all mental disease is caused by infection. Schizophrenia, for example, is associated with a number of abnormalities in brain structure.

<comment><USER16> Recent research is showing a link forming between Schizophrenia and Toxoplasmosis infections.

[http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/9/11/03-0143_article](http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/9/11/03-0143_article)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just two days ago I found this article:

 _Do Bartonella Infections Cause Agitation, Panic Disorder, and Treatment- Resistant Depression?_

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2100128/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2100128/)

</comment><comment><USER18> I find it interesting because strep is very easy to test for and very easy to cure (for the most part - although the test failed in this case), but I've seen such a wide variety of responses to it.

When I was young, the doctors would always test and almost always prescribe antibiotics. Initially they gave shots, which of course I hated as a kid, but they were effective and very fast - within a few days I'd be better. Then they switched to multiple week courses of pills, which also worked but left you sick a lot longer. (Now I wish they'd go back to shots.)

Then something weird happened - they quit testing and started guessing. A quick glance down the throat followed by either "May be strep, here's a prescription." or "Might go away on its own. Come back in a couple weeks if it hasn't gone away." I know people who ended up hospitalized because of this. Even if it might not get worse, why make them suffer extra weeks, miss school/work, and risk it getting worse when it could so easily be tested and treated with a cheap, readily-available cure?

I wonder why testing and applying an appropriate response to test results fell out of fashion in general. How much more advanced might psychiatric medicine be if doctors generally did test like scientists (not just for strep, but whatever) instead of guessing like astrologers? There's probably a lot that could have already been discovered.

</comment><comment><USER19> Here is a related story about a urinary tract infection causing psychotic symptoms and some additional thoughts on immune system, psychosis, and evolution.

 _Infection and Psychosis in Schizophrenia_ [http://evolutionarypsychiatry.blogspot.com.tr/2013/06/infect...](http://evolutionarypsychiatry.blogspot.com.tr/2013/06/infection- and-psychosis-in-schizophrenia.html)

</comment><comment><USER20> Interesting synchronicity with this result that pain killers / anti- inflamatories seem to have psychological effects:

[https://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases...](https://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/acetaminophen- may-reduce-both-pain-and-pleasure.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> It's fascinating and makes sense.

It's just personally horrifying to think, an infection could one day slowly drive me insane.

I really hope we start getting everyone their personalized genome, so we can start working on targeted cures based on an individuals genome.

</comment><comment><USER22> An aside (and trying not to be snide with it) but you can certainly be indoctrinated into Insanity (or perhaps Brainwashed might be a better term).

Just look at Religion and/or Cults.

To be sure, not the same cause, but debatably a variant on the theme of 'insanity'

<comment><USER23> Insanity is an outdated term that usually refers to psychosis type illnesses.

When a person has a conversation with their God figure this happens in (roughly) one of two ways.

1) they say a prayer and spend some introspective time thinking

2) they have an actual conversation with a real voice. Is someone in the room with you? Ask them to say something. An auditory hallucination voice is as real as that voice; it just happens to come from something that isn't there.

EDIT {this second one is what we would call"insane" or "ill" or "pathalogical". But the vast majority of religious people do not experience this, ever, no matter how religious they are.}

Describing religious behaviour as insanity isn't helpful. It shows a lack of understanding of mental illness. It's not an effective attack on the harms that some forms of religion can do.

<comment><USER24> Whether you want to call it mental illness or insanity _(I am neither a doctor nor a lawyer, do I don 't have any preference for either term..)_, I cannot fathom how the second possibility that you list does not qualify. People who are experiencing auditory hallucinations while fully awake and rested should seek professional help.

The first possibility would not be so worrying if people were not attributing their own introspective thoughts to a flawless perfect benevolent supernatural being. Nobody should ever be _that_ confident of their own ideas.

I think the attribution of the introspective thought to a supernatural being ( _not_ the introspective thought itself) can reasonably be thought of as "crazy". I'm not saying it is in DSM, that there is some sort of recognized illness that it can be attributed to, but it certainly isn't rational thinking.

<comment><USER23> Yes! Sorry, i hadn't finished. You're quite right, the second one is insanity. But most religious people don't have that experience. I'll edit my comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The 1st/top comment on this article by Steve C is very interesting.

</comment><comment><USER26> No, you can't catch insanity, seeing as "insanity" is strictly a legal term; "insanity" is not a vaild diagnosis per any psychological standard that I'm aware of (most notably the DSM-IV).

</comment><comment><USER27> There are some people who argue anti-fungal and anti-bacterial activity are actually behind the effectiveness of a variety drugs that are not thought of as such. Statins, for one example, clearly do save people from having a second heart attack, even though the official cholesterol story justifying the drug is problematic. Some say the statins are actually killing off a fungal infection.

The article didn't even mention toxoplasmosis infection and links to mental illness and other behaviors.

I don't think it's crazy to predict we're going to see more and more health and behavior problems directly linked to infectious agents over time. People bought this simple story that antibiotics saved us from all the infections 60 years ago.

<comment><USER2> Huh. Similarly, I have managed to "cure" a number of infections in my own body, both fungal and bacterial—and even, apparently, a few cavities—purely with a course of extra-strength expectorants and mucosal-membrane rinses containing biologically-safe surfactants (e.g. baby shampoo.)

Basically, we think of diseases as things we have to fight with drugs—but our immune systems are perfectly adequate at fighting blood-borne diseases, most of the time. The only thing the body really struggles with is plaques/biofilms—whether in the heart, in the liver, in the tonsils, in the teeth, in the appendix, etc.

And we've invented tons of things that break up plaques/biofilms: surfactants, mucosal thinners, ultrasound, etc. But we only apply them in very specific cases (ultrasound only for free-floating stones, mucosal thinners only for lung problems, scraping for arterial plaque, etc.) instead of thinking that this is a class of problems, that will have a class of solutions that all apply to any instance of the problem.

I bring this up because, by your statement, statins sound like yet another item in that "biofilm-reducing" class of treatments that all happen to have some miraculous and mysterious effect on both chronic fungal/bacterial infections and inflammatory disease (Chron's, IBS, etc.)

<comment><USER28> You're one of the few people I've seen mention the usage of baby shampoo.

I saw it mentioned as a treatment for chronic sinus infections. [http://blog.sethroberts.net/2014/01/19/journal-of- personal-s...](http://blog.sethroberts.net/2014/01/19/journal-of-personal- science-how-i-cured-my-sinusitis/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Sounds like this kid was a super evolved humanoid whose special powers were tamed by pharmaceuticals

<comment><USER30> > "He would smash his head into windows and glass whenever the word 'dead' > came into his head."

Yep, that totally makes _me_ think super-evolved humanoid with special powers. 100%.

<comment><USER31> (Warning: long screed tangent to the article.)

To be fair, Superman locks himself in a closet because his powers are too scary, but yeah, this is totally a different case.

There's this trope that people with mental illnesses—like John Nash, or Rain Man, or Sheldon Cooper, or all of these people who can paint perfect landscapes because they're on the autism spectrum or have brain trauma—are more advanced than people who aren't. And yeah, these people can do things that the rest of us would have a much harder time doing. But it also comes with the fact that the world is going to be a much harder place for them. For people who do have brain quirks that they can take advantage of, it can be a really empowering narrative. It can also be harmful for people whose brain quirks don't fit well into a role that's valued by society.

There's a difficult line to find there; what kind of neuroatypical behaviour should or shouldn't be treated? Most people can agree that depression needs to be treated, because it's harmful to the sufferer with no benefit. Or if someone is hearing messages from aliens and running away from home and wandering about alone in altered mental states, it's fairly uncontroversial to put them on antipsychotics, even with the negative side-effects.

But on the other hand, the idea of medicating ADHD kids is massively controversial, because the argument can be made that for many people diagnosed with it are either misdiagnosed, or are just bored or learn differently. But I also know ADHD people who legitimately cannot function if they don't take their medicine. What should be medicated or what shouldn't?

Or here's an even more borderline case: what if someone is convinced that they're hearing messages from the beyond, and decides to spend the next ten years writing a book about how to live at peace with the world? What if the book doesn't make sense? Should they be medicated, because they've clearly broken with reality? Or should they be let alone, because there's a remote outside chance that maybe we're all wrong and they're on to something? Should they see a psychiatrist or a counsellor, who they can talk to and can keep track of how well they're doing? If so, should that person take an authority role, or should they be someone to be worked with to reach a mutually agreeable course of medication (which may be none at all)?

Hence movements centred around neuroatypical people, and this narrative that they're potentially a next stage in human evolution. Certainly, there are plenty of neuroatypical people who have desirable traits because of it that could very well become the norm, but there are also plenty of people whose traits are simply going to be selected against. It's an incredibly attractive narrative for those people, though, because society doesn't tend to value them as people as much as 'neurotypical' people, which is absolutely terrible.

I personally think that there are three big takeaways for this:

1\. People are people, and should be valued as such. 2\. Not everyone has a special talent that is valued by society, and that's okay. See #1. 3\. Medication isn't fire-and-forget. It's something that needs to be constantly re-evaluated and carefully managed.

<comment><USER23> > There's a difficult line to find there; what kind of neuroatypical behaviour > should or shouldn't be treated?

Does it cause you to pose a risk of harm to other people or yourself? If yes then treatment is strongly suggested and sometimes forced.

Does it interfere with your day to day life? Does it stop you from living an independant life or from being part of society (usually defined on your terms, not someone elses)? If yes then treatment is offered and the plan should be to help you achieve what you realistically want.

> There's this trope that people with mental illnesses—like John Nash, or Rain > Man, or Sheldon Cooper,

A minor point but only one of those people has a mental illness. John Nash has a psychosis type mental illness. The fictional character Sheldon Cooper will probably be thought to have Asperger's Syndrome by most of the audience (although the writers haven't declared any diagnosis and shift between others). Asperger's isn't a mental illness, it's (in the US) a learning disability (learning difficulty in the UK). Rain Man probably has Autism which again is a learning disability (in US and UK).

> Or here's an even more borderline case: what if someone is convinced that > they're hearing messages from the beyond, and decides to spend the next ten > years writing a book about how to live at peace with the world? What if the > book doesn't make sense? Should they be medicated, because they've clearly > broken with reality? Or should they be let alone, because there's a remote > outside chance that maybe we're all wrong and they're on to something? > Should they see a psychiatrist or a counsellor, who they can talk to and can > keep track of how well they're doing? If so, should that person take an > authority role, or should they be someone to be worked with to reach a > mutually agreeable course of medication (which may be none at all)?

You've posed this as if it's some big question but it really isn't. At least, in England. Maybe it used to be different or it's different over there. People who hear voices are provided support for that if they want it, but medication is reserved for times when the voices are intrusive or distressing. Anti- psychotic medication isn't fun and has considerable side effects.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Australia's Digital Transformation Stumbles Badly - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/computing/it/australias-digital-transformation-stumbles-badly <comment><USER2> No surprises here. The LNP have done absolutely nothing of substance in like 6-7 years. Basically a zombie government only interested in corporate welfare and giving a pass to xenophobia.

The biggest issue is that they keep paying really shitty consultancies (IBM, Fujitsu, etc) massive amounts of money for really poor quality work.

They need to learn some lessons from the USDS, the UK Gov, and other European equivalents and start hiring good developers internally to work on these projects. Most of them could be done at 10% of the cost without lining the pockets of the friends of the LNP.

There are a tonne of amazing Australian developers who end up in SF/Seattle. Start hiring them. Maybe create a CTO role for someone who knows what code is. Stop wasting tax payer money.</comment>


US military leak exposes "holy grail" of security clearance files - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/leaked-us-military-files-exposed/ <comment><USER2> It doesn't seem to be any worse than the OPM hack, as it's on a much smaller scale. It's still bad for the 4,000 military employees, though, but their SF86 forms were probably already leaked in the OPM hack to begin with. I'm still surprised the OPM hack didn't receive much more attention. I wonder if it had anything to do with the previous administration's unhealthily tight relationship with the media.

[http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2015/06/second-opm- hack...](http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2015/06/second-opm-hack- compromised-information-military-intelligence-workers/115213/)

<comment><USER3> Federal, state and local agencies (including DMDC and OPM) need HIPAA-like data controls to gate access, collection and processing of identifiable personnel information. Copies to mobile devices should also be expressly prohibited.</comment></comment>


Vinod Khosla: Maintain the Silicon Valley Vision - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/13/khosla-the-silicon-valley-vision/

<comment><USER2> If you want this kind of company, come to Boston. The start-up culture in Boston is much more "change the world" than "make a buck." This results in fewer, deeper start-ups, as well as more not-for-profits.

</comment><comment><USER3> One should be endowed with the ambition, vision and mission type of qualities on his/her own and not because someone like Vinod Kohsla said that is the only way to live in this world. There are ordinary people who want to just do something nice and productive and make a good living and contribute in their own small way. I would strongly advise all to follow their heart and not take advice from people who like to pontificate. At the end of the day you want to follow your passion and your instinct rather than blindly follow advise from people who are mostly pretenders. Figure out your own trip in life rather than have Vinod Koshla types define it for you.

Sekar

</comment><comment><USER4> Fav Quote "You want missionaries, not mercenaries –passionate, maniacally- focused founders who believe in a vision. "

</comment><comment><USER5> Here are the problems:

1\. If you "complete an exit", even a mediocre one, your stock goes up in a major way. You'll have no problem getting funding off the bat (i.e. you don't have to tap savings) and the most qualified co-founders once you join Those Who Have Completed An Exit. You can play again, and you've established the ability to maintain an upper-middle-class lifestyle (even if you got chewed up by preferences, earnouts, and shit like that) indefinitely while being a career-long founder. Most people don't do another startup when they get to this point, though. They either become EIR, swing into a larger company as a mid-level executive, or move into VC wholesale. Once these people are at the the point where VCs will fund you on a handshake and let you take a $200k per year salary as CEO, they're generally no longer happy with $200k. They want the $500k per year jobs, and after working 90 hours per week to make the last startup work, they're not interested in trying that again. Long hours are a one-shot pistol for most people; you do a few months at 100 hours per week, only to discover that it takes a decade to regain the ability to do that again (and it becomes worse as you get older, because you're increasingly cognizant of the incompetence that follows from overwork).

That goal of "completing exits" is the source of a lot of this mediocrity. Now, many people think they can slap something mediocre and flip it, and then later be able to do something genuinely interesting once they've earned the respect and presumed competence associated with "completing an exit". (The East Coast counterpart is the person who thinks he'll work on Wall Street for 5 years and then support himself as a writer or philosopher for the rest of his life.) It rarely works out that way. Once people join "The Club" they lose all interestingness and ingenuity. The same thing happens to writers and artists; they start out poor but genuinely interesting, have a hit, get invited into the cocktail party scene, and become deathly boring. That's also why most of these Manhattan "artistes" produce pure shit (some intentionally, and one or two literally).

A lot of people start out with genuinely productive ambitions (write a great novel, build new technology) that seem to require social climbing, and they believe that as they rise, they'll encounter more connected, productive, and interesting people. Only the first of these ("connected") turns out to be true; what they find, instead, is that they're surrounded by increasingly competent, effective and brazen parasites. After all, the U.S. upper class in 2012 and the French aristocracy in 1785 are possibly the most effective sets of parasites in world history.

2\. High house prices, in addition to destroying culture, produce mediocrity. When that much of an area's wealth is tied up in real estate, it's a cultural disaster. They result in mediocre people (by causing a wealth transfer to the wrong sorts) mediocre ideas, and the wrong kind of aspirations. The aspiration is no longer doing something great and far reaching; it's being able to afford a fucking house. People tend to believe otherwise, because the most interesting places are expensive, but they're interesting _in spite of_ the expensiveness and all else being equal, the expensive real estate is a negative. In the long term (decades) this leads to urban decay due to the sticky nature of house prices ($500,000 houses in dangerous slums). It happened once and, unchecked, it will happen again.

The solution is to have a saner policy toward new development (instead of giving a say to rich NIMBY fuckers who shouldn't really be listened to be cause they don't add anything to anything cultural; in fact, their interests should be deliberately trampled for fun and sport because they are useless assholes) but also to keep prices sane by setting up a culture test, and capping what people can spend on real estate (rent or purchase) based on their culture test scores, because _uncultured_ money (think real estate new money) is the bane of everything good and societies must do everything possible to keep such barbarism out. There's good elitism and bad elitism, and culture testing is the good kind.

</comment><comment><USER6> Everybody on Hacker News should give me a dollar.</comment>


Google solved Android fragmentation and forgot to tell everybody - <AUTHOR> http://ishouldhaveknownthisbefore.wordpress.com/2013/05/16/google-solved-android-fragmentation-and-forgot-to-tell-everybody/

<comment><USER2> I chuckled when I got to the bottom of the post and saw the Windows Phone fighting wedding commercial.

It seemed like every time Google announced something yesterday they mentioned that it was part of Play Services and would be updated by Google instead of OEMs. Every time they said that I kept thinking "BRILLIANT"!</comment>


SexpCode: Towards a Better BBCode/Markdown (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://koen.readsicp.org/misc/sexpcode.html <comment><USER2> Why not use regular parenthesis instead of curly braces?</comment>


Patreon ups its revenue cut, but grandfathers in old creators - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/19/patreon-ups-its-revenue-cut-but-grandfathers-in-old-creators/ <comment><USER3> Patreon is a classic VC tragedy. They are already a monopoly. They could be fantastically profitable right now. All the growth that is there to get in their market segment, they are already getting.

Instead of realizing just one of these things, they are escalating headcount, exploding costs, manufacturing imaginary growth and squeezing their captive audience for absurd "revenue cuts". Only to wake up one day and realize their audience has left, pivot, straggle and fail.

<comment><USER4> Not to mention the fact that the product is objectively terrible.

It's unbelievable how slow Patreon is, given that "website that shows images" is a well-solved problem. Couple that with the all-dynamic-all-the-time, continuous-scroll-all-the-things UX, and it's one of the worst websites I use. There must be serious network effects, if nobody has risen to eat their lunch.

<comment><USER5> Complaining that their service is terrible while also complaining that they are trying to generate more money to further invest in that service....riiiighhht!

<comment><USER6> It isn't linear, they could have spent less to have a more usable service. Just look at the self inflicted mess that is AirBNB, the front end basically crashes if you type too fast on a slow connection.

The complaint is about forced inefficiencies that Patreon then foists onto its customers. They are balancing their books by upping their fees, not streamlining their business and they can only do this (in the short term) because they have a fairly captive audience.

We are about to see a whole sea of Patreon competitors.

<comment><USER7> _We are about to see a whole sea of Patreon competitors._

I really hope so! I had been using Patreon as a "poor man's microtransactions" with $1 subscriptions (contingent on actually producing content, if possible) on something like 40 creators. I moved over to SubscribeStar, but they don't have the default $1 option.

<comment><USER8> The default cost of a transaction is typically ~$.30 cents. Thats just payment processing. Not alot of margin there.

<comment><USER3> He has $40 subscriptions and presumably none of the creators only have his $1 subscription. At no point are they actually eating the fixed cost on a $1 transaction.

<comment><USER7> Actually, while Patreon did such aggregation, SubscribeStar seems to do each transaction individually. I wonder if they aren't over a barrel because insiders in the payment processing industry are locking them out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's stunning, that over 20 years of building the Web, we still do not have the equivalent of cash.

Most creators that make big bucks on Patreon do not use it for donations. They simply use it to sell stuff. Like [https://www.patreon.com/PokeGo20](https://www.patreon.com/PokeGo20) who have 62k "patreons" paying for a "fake my Pokemon Go position" software. Or [https://www.patreon.com/chapotraphouse](https://www.patreon.com/chapotraphouse) who make over $100k/month by selling access to their premium content.

Patreon is needed because selling on the net is such a hassle. Nobody wants to fiddle with their credit card unless it is important. Nobody wants to give it to "someone on the internet".

It's funny, because it would be so totally easy to create something like cash on the web. It just needs someone to start a business of selling tokens for $1.10 and buying them back from whoever comes first for $1. Voila - <USER2> cash. Sell sealed tokens in stores (over the counter or via a machine that eats coins) - voila! anonymous internet cash.

<comment><USER10> What you describe is basically a gift card. But there are restrictions on them because they could easily used for money laundering.

The reason we can't have nice abstractions involving money is basically because it attracts criminals. Any business dealing with money has to figure out how to deal with fraud or they don't last long.

<comment><USER9>
        figure out how to deal with fraud

The token issuer would just has to stoically do two things and two things only:

1: Sell tokens for $1.10 each 2: Buy them back for $1.00 each

Done. No fraud issues.

<comment><USER11> What does your token issuer do when the purchase of a token is revoked?

That could be from a charge back, bounced check, or because the cash was determined to be counterfeit when deposited.

A big problem is the costs involved may be 10% at scale, but are certainly more than ten cents per transaction, so you need to get a deposit, but I'm not buying $50 worth of flooz to pay someone $1, because I don't know when flooz is going to stop working. Anyway, it's not that hard for someone to run a PayPal shop, as long as the product fits PayPal's tos and doesn't look suspicious.

<comment><USER9>
        What does your token issuer do
        when the purchase of a token is revoked?

Nothing. The token issuer is not involved in that. He just sells and buys tokens.

When Joe buys an apple from you with a dollar note and you bring that note to your bank - what does the bank do when Joe returns the apple to you? Nothing.

<comment><USER11> If you give me a token when I give you a fake note, and then you give me a real note when I give you a token, how do you stay in business? And how do you not have to deal with fraud issues?

<comment><USER9> That is not related to tokens. You could ask those question to any merchant. No matter if they sell chewing gum or tokens. A merchant better watches out to not take fake notes.

The token issuer sells a box of 100 tokens to a store. And charges the store $110. Just like a chewing gum merchant sells a box of 100 chewing gums to a store.

Last time I checked, there _was_ chewing gum in stores.

<comment><USER12> ...what?

So now all you're proposing is just a different currency with these tokens. This solves absolutely nothing. Nobody needs to use tokens when they already have real currency to use along with various transfer services to move money physically and digitally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Frankly I am pretty happy about this.

Patreon has over leveraged themselves via VC investment and they have nowhere to go but up.

Creators are not wedded to middlemen, especially those who provide little value.

Other companies such as BitPatreon, SubscribeStar, etc have recently started to gain marketshare, albeit a small one. It continues to grow.

Princess Leia said it best: "The more you tighten your grip, Patreon, the more creators will slip through your fingers."

<comment><USER14> Speaking of slipping through fingers. I signed up for Patreon and started donating $5 a month to the Godot game engine which I'm interested in. Soon afterwards I got a message from Patreon saying that my account was suspended for suspicious activity, and support told me I had to show a lot of personal documentation to get my account reinstated. "You must go out of your way to be our customer" they told me (in effect), I hope that works out for them. I just donate to Godot directly now.

<comment><USER15> What you're describing there sounds like normal anti-money laundering regulations that they are required to fulfill. Due to the nature of their business there will always be a certain number of cases where they have to investigate and seek documentation to show they're not just mindlessly laundering money, as they scale up those processes will scale up to. In the UK you basically can't deposit money into an online gambling website without submitting a photographic ID - it's just regulation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Patreon somehow has _90 engineers and product managers_ [1]. This is a ridiculously bloated payroll for a simple website serving ~1 million active users. In a sane universe, they would be fine with a core engineering team of 3-5 and a couple of dozen staff to handle support, compliance, and stock the office vending machine with snacks.

I conjecture the reason for the ridiculous headcount is that outside investment requires it, in order to be able to continue to sell a story of explosive growth.

I've seen this dynamic with rivals in the bookmarking space, where a project that would have killed Pinboard dead with 3-5 engineers safely bloats itself into failure by taking ambitious outside funding. Patreon is a good example of an excellent mid-sized idea crippled by grandiosity, a recurring dynamic in computerland.

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/12/patreon- product/](https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/12/patreon-product/)

<comment><USER17> Do you mind sharing examples of overfunded rivals? I'd be interested in reading about their trajectories.

I'm also working on helping creators monetize their audiences (but bootstrapped), and it often feels like Patreon is either going to vacuum up all the creators or explode in a VC-funded blaze of glory.

<comment><USER16> My favorite example is Kippt, who decided that dominating bookmarking was not enough, and that they needed to compete with email. I had a beer with the developers and came away quite worried, because they seemed energetic and capable. Luckily, they took VC funding instead of focusing on the narrower bookmarking space, and soon enough were drafting an "incredible journey" blog post.

Start: [https://techcrunch.com/2012/06/14/yc-backed-kippt-goes- colla...](https://techcrunch.com/2012/06/14/yc-backed-kippt-goes- collaborative/)

Finish: [http://blog.kippt.com/next-chapter/](http://blog.kippt.com/next- chapter/)

Something similar happened to trunk.ly, which had a lot of momentum and then got harmlessly acquihired away by a lavishly funded competitor, AVOS systems, who cratered so hard a few years later that I was able to buy the remains of Delicious, my original VC-funded competitor, from them with my Pinboard profits. Sic transit gloria fundi.

Compare both to historio.us, which has been chugging along for about as long as Pinboard without VC funding and hopefully makes StavrosK some money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The worst part: the plans are fine! It's fine. I understand the need to fund what they do.

But, once again, they spin. From the FAQ: "Why the new plans?[...]The new plans better serve new creators by offering options, including more powerful tools for those that are ready for them. And they allow us to develop new features like Team Accounts and Merch for creators who really want them. We want to be around serving creators for decades to come. These changes set us on a solid path toward that goal, and will fuel investments in core product quality to improve the experience for all creators."

But this is nonsense. None of this is new save for team accounts and merchandise. They keep trying to pretend nothing has changed, but _everything_ has. They want to become a full-service membership site tool while acting like they're still the tip jar/bonus content thing it started as. Just own what you want to be and _become it_ without this corporate spin every time you make a small change in this direction.

Pivot or get off the gimbal.

<comment><USER19> The whole situation reminds me of the opposite of BaseCamp. They got rid of all tiers and went unlimited to simplify the product. And they still rake in the dough. You fundamentally make your business more complex and costly with all this non-sense. The difference is BaseCamp doesn't have VC influence. So the cult of growth and squeezing people for every penny isn't in their DNA.

I think the VC and Silicon Valley influence on Patreon may kill it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I dont understand how these middleman services can charge even 1%. What is the value added?

edit: Also, why is it always a percentage? A transaction is a transaction, independent of the amount. A fixed cost. I'm probably ignorant, but sounds like greed.

<comment><USER21> The single biggest factor is that credit card processors charge flat fees per transaction, which makes donating $1 to a creator in isolation unreasonable - the entire donation will be eaten by processing fees.

Patreon allows you to support 20 creators at $1 each, and only make a single transaction of $20. Not to mention ease of use - it's a lot easier to click "pledge $1" for someone whose content you're enjoying than it is to go sign up for some new service or enter your credit card info. Paypal could offer something similar but they don't. Effectively, the value add is network effects.

As for the flat fee vs % cut, you're probably right - in terms of costs to the business, transaction costs are a flat fee. That said, a crucial part of their model is making it easy to sign up and get a couple of people backing you for a few dollars each. And it therefore makes sense to effectively subsidise your small users by charging more to your large users who can most afford it (and who are getting the most value out of your service).

<comment><USER22> They're going to stop doing that. From the FAQ at the bottom of their page about the new plans:

> Is Patreon still using shared patronage between creators to combine > transactions and give creators a break on transaction fees?

> Founding creators will still experience the same reduction in payment > processing fees from shared patronage. For future creators we will no longer > offer savings for shared patronage because it lacks transparency and it's > not equitable. Some creators save money and some don't, depending on a > number of factors including how many patrons you share with others. As a new > way to create savings for creators that is more fair and transparent, we are > introducing the new low micro-transaction rate for pledges under $3.

<comment><USER21> Well, shit.

I don't understand why they're so bullish on this. They've tried to get rid of the single-transaction model before. I just don't get it. All they're going to do is give more money to paypal, at the expense of the creators _and themselves_.

<comment><USER23> I always assumed they pocketed that extra revenue themselves (why not, it's the advantage of their platform and how I assumed they made money). I'm a little surprised to hear they handed it back, but I also thought they subsumed that cost within their own fees (like I assume the App/Play stores do). I imagine they probably spend a lot of time explaining why the fees don't line up exactly month to month because if this, since it can lead to different numbers month to month even if your patrons and what they've pledged to _you_ doesn't change.

How many support requests about this, and arguments that have to get into very specific details on accounts which bring in $40 a month in donations does it take before any gains are lost? Or if not lost, highly variable and cause support personnel staff needs to fluctuate (which I imagine is harder to plan for and scale quickly than hardware/servers)?

<comment><USER24> It's really easy to explain, though. Especially when they can do a trivial calculation to show how much less money a creator would get with predictable non-shared fees. It's one of the less confusing parts about the site, really. And it's one of the _biggest reasons people choose patreon_ , which they keep trying to forget.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'd be concerned if I was Patreon: they're a somewhat classic example of a "feature" rather than a standalone service.

We're already seeing services like YouTube implementing these low cost, support a creator type subscriptions natively.

<comment><USER26> Content creators have been burned by YouTube more than once or twice. I subscribed to several premium YouTube channels, then YouTube discontinued paid service and caused me to lose access to my paid content, then it introduced new paid service much later.

Patreon's appeal is being independent of YouTube's whims. Of course, now content creators are subject to Patreon's whims.

Companies really should strive on being focused on stability for users. My own product is modeled more on Salesforce API that has multiple versions available concurrently. Users will not lose features even if they are no longer profitable to support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is selling a patreon account now valuable? Ie if a company holds a patreon account, sell the company with just that asset to someone making similar content with a small transition period to fool any possible rules >:)

<comment><USER28> Maybe, but I expect you'd rarely ever see it due to the personal element. Podcasts are similarly valuable once they have a regular roster of advertisers but you almost never see them getting bought/sold because they're too associated with the hosts.

<comment><USER29> I've registered a patreon account years ago that has no sentimental value to me, and I assume many others are in the same boat.

Much like social media accounts, which are bought and sold regularly, there's now a market for patreon accounts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> There are times when companies really do need to experiment with their pricing model because they are bringing something new to the market and the early rates which were subsidized through venture capital no longer work.

A good example of a company doing this and finding it's footing is classpass. The initial plans were quite the value to consumers, but also many studios that were part of ClassPass felt the extra burden without really getting much revenue. So they needed to update their pricing and they made some hard decisions and saw that users fell into two camps. Those that barely went, and those that went a lot so they ended up with a new pricing structure which raised rates to consumers, caused a huge public outcry, but ultimately allowed the company to settle into a good footing.

Here Patreon seems to definitely be raising rates as a response to the VC dollars raised and the need to continue to grow their revenue. The challenge for them was that when the initially raised, their valuation was far outrunning their actual revenue. While the platform had many users, the actual revenue that ended up in their company after paying creators didn't justify the valuation or anything close to it.

So now they have to raise rates a second time, after going through this process in late 2017. At the time there was a huge out cry publicly and the company stated that they would not make such large moves without consulting with their creators first, but obviously with something like this unless a ton of creators are publicly saying, wow this is great, exactly what I needed, it means going to the creators wouldn't work as they don't need these new plans.

Certainly getting on the VC train is a huge decision and one that ties your business to ever increasing returns and a scale that is challenging for many companies to meet.

They could have raised a smaller round, from more long term investors, that weren't only interested in the VC cycle, given themselves some extra cash, built out features, and continued to support their community, but obviously they chose a different route.

Very likely that if this doesn't go well there will be another large announcement in a 12-18 month window.

</comment><comment><USER31> I had been considering setting up a Partreon for a while now, and seeing this headline was what pushed me to convert my existing account to a creator one just now:

[https://www.patreon.com/RobertElderSoftware](https://www.patreon.com/RobertElderSoftware)

If you've ever seen my blog posts show up here on hn and you'd like to see more of them, then this is one way to make that happen more often :)

</comment><comment><USER32> just switch to something else. [https://gumroad.com](https://gumroad.com) seems fine. It might be hard to monopolize this business because patrons care more for the content creators than where they keep their home base.

</comment><comment><USER33> What is stopping someone like Twitch to have their own "Patreon" service that allows donations?

<comment><USER34> They do, it's not as robust Patreon's is but it does allow for tiered subscriptions ie 5$ per month which is standard, and say tier 2 being 10$ and tier 3 being 25$. The perks are getting badges and emotes which people seem to accept well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> They are absolutely desperate.

I give them 2 years.

</comment><comment><USER36> If Patreon is providing a similar service to twitch or YouTube, then then 8% is pretty low. I have never used Patreon so I don't know what their premium content platform is like. Is it mostly just like a blog that requires readers to be logged in?

<comment><USER37> Patreon doesn't provide a service similar to Twitch or Youtube. You can post links to videos hosted on those services, but you can't host videos on patreon itself. You can only post text and images.

Patreon is basically a blog that requires readers to be logged in and pay for access to each blog. Creators usually use Patreon in conjunction with another public content distribution platform, like YouTube.

<comment><USER38> Patreon also hosts mp3s and provides RSS feeds for podcasters, whom of which are among some of their largest users. It wouldn't be inconceivable for them to start hosting video content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is effectively a price increase and a good move for the future of Patreon. This is a fat cat capitalist opinion but they should increase the cut for all existing customers too. Grandfathering is a nice gesture but the additional revenue generated from applying this change their current customers would allow Patreon to grow faster and roll out new benefits to all customers.

<comment><USER40> As someone who is only a consumer and not a creator, what benefits am I waiting on Patreon to grow in order to reap?

<comment><USER41> "commerce tools like CRMs and merchandise to try to stay ahead of Twitch, YouTube and Google" apparently. I had no idea that Patreon was competing with Twitch, YouTube, and Google, though… are they also competing with General Electric and Proctor-Gamble?

Is the idea that everyone competes with everyone for every dollar and the ultimately capitalism will be a pile of dead bodies with a confused Taco Bell employee sitting on top?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Is this designed to push video creators towards YouTube's channel memberships?

<comment><USER43> Doesn't YouTube take a 30% cut? That's drastically higher than the 8% Patreon is pushing

<comment><USER44> While true, for many creators it's also closer to where the content is actually created/hosted.</comment></comment></comment>


A Google side project evolved into a $4B company - sahin-boydas https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/29/how-a-google-side-project-evolved-into-a-4b-company/ <comment><AUTHOR> I first heard of Niantic when a friend mentioned in 2010 that they were thinking of transferring to them to become their ~3rd employee. They didn't end up doing it (went to Chrome instead). I went to the launch party for their first product (Field Trip, early 2012) and still wear the T-shirt from it.

I think what many people don't understand is how many base-hits you typically need to pull before getting a home run. Field Trip was a bust; it was mildly interesting, but ultimately more annoying (basically, it would pop up notifications on your phone detailing the history of various landmarks you were walking past). Field Trip begat the location-aware game Ingress, which was wildly popular within Google (though I never played - was wary of addictions) but largely a niche success outside. Ingress begat Pokemon Go, which is basically Ingress re-skinned with Pokemon characters and with some extra AR features. Everybody knows Pokemon Go.

That's 3 major pivots from a guy who was already an experienced founder - Intrinsic Graphics to Keyhole to a VP in Geo.

The story of many other recent hits is similar. Fortnite came out of nowhere - except it didn't, their founder has been making games since 1991 and had a string of base hits like Gears of War and Unreal Tournament. Bitcoin came out of nowhere - except it didn't, [assuming Satoshi is Hal Finney] he'd previously developed the first reusable proof-of-work system, was the second developer at PGP, and had been working on crypto his whole life. Medium's the culmination of Evan Williams's 4 startups (Blogger, Odeo, Twitter, Medium) to bring publishing to the masses.

<comment><USER2> Well ya the more times you roll the dice the more likely you are to land on the numbers you want. But lets not pretend its about just rolling the dice as much as possible...

Be a tenured serial entrepreneur with rubber stamps from popular VCs and tech firms that will set you up on easy street to get funding, hire, or acquired. From there not only is it easier to exit, but you can just use the funding to buy some (or all) of the success you're after. Finally your risk tolerance is massive because you can just stumble into a very well-payed engineering/executive position even if you shit the bed.

There's no doubt been a lot of note-worthy tech created by Niantic BUT how much of Pokemon GO's success is attributable to its ability to purchase and/or network-into via Google connections the Pokemon IP? You know that internationally viral brand that was already itching for a new game?

I think its disingenuous to push entrepreneurs to burnout BEFORE they learn the inner-workings of a heavily slanted system. Arguably suffering is the best way to learn it, but having gone through it myself I think there should be a better way.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's neither entirely about rolling the dice nor about connections & rubber stamps, though those are _part_ of the story.

Rather, the lesson I got from watching Niantic's story unfold is the importance of _uncovering_ and _correcting_ errors. You don't know the shape of the problem you're solving when you first venture off to become an entrepreneur. You'll discover that a lot of your assumptions were wrong. But when you discover that, if you're resourceful enough, you'll figure out an avenue for overcoming them.

In Niantic's case - the problem with Field Trip was that there wasn't really a _point_ to it. The landmark histories were mildly interesting, but they didn't fit into what I was doing with my phone at any given time. So Ingress _created_ a point by adding teams and game mechanics; they made the landmarks interesting by making visiting them the whole point of the game. And then the big problem with Ingress was the lack of that branding, and so they partnered with Nintendo to get the needed IP to make it a success.

Money certainly helps, but money alone doesn't create a successful startup unless deployed in an area that's preventing you from attaining success.

<comment><USER2> My comment was a little cynical I just want to say thank you for the interesting context on Niantic and agree that the ability to repeatedly overcome obstacles and pivot/adapt a product is critical to most successful start-ups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Only the first couple pages are visible, the rest is hidden behind the "Extra Crunch" paywall.

<comment><USER4> And, it's only available in a few countries (US, Canada, UK, France, Germany and Spain). People from other countries can't pay even if they want to.

This is not how I imagined the web would end up :(</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which productivity tools do you use? - <AUTHOR>

What are the most common and effective productivity tools used by you? <comment><USER2> Off my mind.. [http://www.Trello.com](http://www.Trello.com) [http://www.Dropbox.com](http://www.Dropbox.com) [http://www.Teamgum.com](http://www.Teamgum.com)</comment>


Toyblocks: A toy blockchain implementation in Python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/daneah/toyblocks <comment><USER2> Thanks Daneah! I saw lhartikk's implementation earlier ([https://github.com/lhartikk/naivechain](https://github.com/lhartikk/naivechain)). Could you help us understand in what ways is the implementation by anders and yours different. I am trying to gauge the similarities and differences.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wrote this tiny toy blockchain code to help myself understand blockchains, based largely on the UI at [https://anders.com/blockchain/](https://anders.com/blockchain/) by Anders Brownworth.</comment>


The non-glamorous side of disrupting an industry - <AUTHOR>

My name's Brian. I'm doing a PhD in Sociology at the University of Chicago. Academia is a mess of contradictions. It's a fantastic place with brilliant, quick witted people, and at the same time chock-full of irrationality. Here's an example: academic produce work, give it to publishers for free, and then have it sold back to them at a huge markup. How does this work? Academics do a lot of work for free. They serve as journal editors for free. They peer review knowledge for free. They copyedit and improve collections of articles to publish...for free. These collections of articles are then handed off to huge corporate entities that sell this research back to university libraries for billions. Yep, effing billions. The disgust with the current system has even made it to the popular media: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/science/researchers-boycott-elsevier-journal-publisher.html, http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/23/2969913/harvard-library-advisory-council-journal-open-access, and http://www.economist.com/node/18744177/.
About a year ago two colleagues of mine and I decided to do something about it - fight the good fight, disrupt an industry, rah-rah-rah. While our backgrounds are in Sociology, Political Philosophy, and History, we also happen to have the know-how to develop web apps. So we created Scholastica (www.ScholasticaHQ.com), a platform that allows any scholar to create, manage, and publish their own academic journals. We give scholars the infrastructure to accept submissions, find reviewers, get articles reviewed, get decisions made on these articles, and then get them published online. You can see an example of what a journal running on Scholastica looks like, here: http://scholasticahq.com/the-scholastica-example-journal
While our app isn't perfect by any means and there are still problems to solve, you would think it'd be easy to get people to notice us, especially in that academics are complaining ad nauseum that they hate the current system, right? Wrong. While we're enabling any scholar to set up their own journal and manage it how scholars want, sites like PeerJ (which is only a single journal and not even out yet) have gotten into every publication imaginable. I guess that's what it's like to have Tim O'Reilly in your corner. Academics who aren't even in the bio/medical sciences are talking about PeerJ though it doesn't affect their field. The mind boggles.
The moral of this story is you should find a need, try to solve it, and realize you still have to knock on every door in order to get the people you want to help to realize you've spent a great deal of time trying to provide a solution to the thing they're always complaining about. We've had some great feedback and some early adopters which have made a difference, but our experience reiterates the tech startup heuristic "If you build it, they won't come" – at least not in droves, and not until some big names adopt the platform first. <comment><USER2> You don't disrupt an industry without lots of hussle! I think "hostile takeover" is a fitting synonym for "disrupting an industry".

</comment><comment><USER3> I am sympathetic. I have cystic fibrosis, as does my 25 year old son. Came up with a new mental model and treatment paradigm. Got us both off all medication and healthier than is supposed to be possible. I get called a liar, charlatan and snake oil salesman. I occasionally say to my kids "You would think they would be more receptive to one of their own. They act like nearly dying was a publicity stunt on my part, some diabolical plot to get rich." (And I am not rich. In fact, I am deeply in debt and homeless.)

I wish I had some words of wisdom for you. But that would no doubt grow out of solving this piece of the issue, and I haven't done that.

Best of luck.</comment>