What if the Placebo Effect Isn't a Trick? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/07/magazine/placebo-effect-medicine.html <comment><USER2> I listened to an episode about the placebo effect on the "Only Human" Podcast awhile back. Its truly fascinating, and has made me question the power of the mind in a way I hadn't before. It also has some really interesting ethical problems, is it okay for doctors to lie about placebo treatments if it actually helps?

> Kallmes performs vertebroplasty, a surgery he has helped to develop and > standardize, that involves injecting medical cement into the fractured bone > to stabilize the fractured area and relieve pain. He says he gets great > results from his patients, and teaches the method to other doctors at > conferences.

> But here's the thing: he has no idea why vertebroplasty works. So a few > years ago, he decided to test it against a placebo. Kallmes found that > pretending to perform vertebroplasty – making it seem like he was injecting > a needle into the spine but without the cement – had similar effects. About > 40 percent of both groups experienced immediate relief from pain after the > surgery. He published his results in the New England Journal of Medicine.

[https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/real-doctors-fake- medicine...](https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/real-doctors-fake-medicine- placebos)

<comment><USER3> > _is it okay for doctors to lie about placebo treatments if it actually > helps?_

Let's sharpen the question: What if the lie _is_ the treatment?

It sounds to me like the 40% who the placebo helps for have a different, mainly mental, problem than the 60% for whom it doesn't.

<comment><USER4> Nope. Placebos can work _even when you know it 's a placebo_: [https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/placebo-can-work-even- kn...](https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/placebo-can-work-even-know- placebo-201607079926)

<comment><USER5> I wonder how much of that effect is due to subjects not understanding what a placebo. Would the effect remain if the study population was other physicians or scientists?

<comment><USER4> I think it's relatively unreasonable to assume that when the study says that participants are informed that they're taking a sugar pill that the participants don't understand what that means, nevermind assuming that no effort at all was made by the administrators to address this fairly obvious issue. If the entire point of the study is testing whether or not patients still benefit when they understand that they're not taking any medication, it seems self-evident that they would be required to ensure their test subjects understand that they're not taking any medication!

<comment><USER6> From the article, the guy who ran the study apparently still has reservations on this point: "And he can even be disparaging of his own work, wondering, for instance, whether the study in which placebos were openly given to irritable bowel syndrome patients succeeded only because it convinced the subjects that the sugar was really a drug."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Joe-Z To counter some off the off-the-cuff comments here:

These researchers (specifically molecular biologist Kathryn Hall) seem to have found a link between an enzyme called COMT and response to placebo treatments. That is, people with a genetic pre-disposition for lower COMT-production will respond less to placebo effects and MORE to actual drugs whereas for people with higher COMT-levels the opposite holds true.

I think this is a fascinating finding and does a lot to do away with hand- waving explanations of the placebo-effect as 'it's all psychology' (just look in the comments here).

Unfortunately the article ends with a kind of esoteric tone of one of the researchers, in that he believes it would be unfortunate if we did away with the rituals and warmth and caring involved in more esoteric practices completely. I don't really get that: If we figured out why the placebo effect works and we can very effectively treat patients depending on their genetic pre-disposition that's awesome!

<comment><USER7> The patients that respond to the placebo are the bane of pharma companies developing a new drug. More than one drug trial has failed because the placebo arm has responded. It is so bad that in some trials they will run a pre-trial where everyone gets the placebo and the responders are excluded before the main trial starts.

It would be interesting to see what else COMT levels are correlated with especial religious and social beliefs.

<comment> Joe-Z >It would be interesting to see what else COMT levels are correlated with especial religious and social beliefs.

Very interesting indeed! Maybe it's my 'I'm such a rational thinker'-pride, but I guess I'm in the group that doesn't respond strongly to placebo effects. I'd be more than happy to pop a social-wellbeing pill in combination with whatever pill I need to treat my condition. As opposed to Mr. Kaptchuk's view that it would be a shame if we lost this dependency on other humans and their empathy for healing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Whoever thought the placebo effect was a 'trick'?

It's well established that the mind controls the brain which controls the body. (And the other way around, too). A physiological problem in the mind can cause a chemical problem in the brain which can cause a 'physical' problem in the body. Or heal a problem in the body.

Quotes around physical because mind and body are both physical. If doctors are surprised by this it must be because they are still clinging to some form Cartesian dualism.

<comment><USER9> The placebo is based on belief. You give a sugar pill to someone and they believe it is something more. That's "tricking them."

And yes, I do think most doctors in Western medicine cling to a form of Cartesian dualism. It's somewhat tempered, but the mind body connection is vastly underexplored.

<comment><USER10> From the article:

>You don't even have to deceive the patients. You can hand a patient with irritable bowel syndrome a sugar pill, identify it as such and tell her that sugar pills are known to be effective when used as placebos, and she will get better

<comment><USER11> I can't point to a source but I remember reading somewhere that the effect is significantly weakened if you tell patients it's just a placebo, although it doesn't vanish.

<comment><USER12> FWIR it's more about their expectation of effectiveness, if they believe the placebo will be effective then the placebo will be more effective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I find it unusual that many people will dismiss the placebo effect yet will happily accept that stress can cause lots of negative reactions physiologically. They seem like two sides of the same coin to me.

</comment><comment><USER14> > the rituals embedded in the doctor-patient encounter that he thinks are > fundamental to the placebo effect

> "Medical care is a moral act," he says, in which a suffering person puts his > or her fate in the hands of a trusted healer.

I have a friend who is a naturopath, and this is basically what she believes her job to be. Almost more of a therapist at times, a friendly ear to confide in.

The average experience with doctors isn't always that pleasant. It feels clinical and rushed, and very non personal. They are concerned with symptoms, not the actual person in front of them. They don't really listen, as a therapist would. And it's not their job too.

Contrast that with an alternative healer. They will sit and talk and listen and empathize with you for an hour. For a person in pain, it might be the first time they have ever felt like someone actually understands and cares. It's not surprising that they feel better afterwards. I think that goes a long way to explain the popularity of fake medicine.

<comment><USER15> How does that explain the popularity of shelves full of fake pills at GNC and Walgreen's?

<comment><USER16> I imagine those are popular because for many problems there are not yet any real solutions.

Got a cold? A muscle tear, connective tissue damage? weird back pain?

There are no definite solutions to those. And ever smart HN person who think they know the solution to that, only knows a thing that they believed worked for THEM and won't necessarily work for ME and may not even have worked for them, it just got better with time and they think it was their special cross fit routine because of chronological fallacy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The 'placebo effect' seems to be wholly the effect of the sum of biases and psychological effects on reported outcomes in the placebo (non-treatment) arm of medical trials. It doesn't mean there is an 'actual' effect, it is just that reported benefits by patients is affected by the situation. 'The nice doctor gave you pills, and trying to be helpful you might respond more positively when asked if you are any better.' Or 'patients with a temporary flare up in their condition were invited onto a trial, and - lo - they got better even without the active treatment.'

Placebo just refers to the bundled biases and other uncontrolled-for influences. It is not a real thing that can be used to make anyone actually better. Whenever there is a physical measurement that can be made about some affected body function, the placebo effect mysteriously disappears.

<comment><USER18> I don't know about that. There's also the nocebo effect [1] that is rather well known. You make it sound like "placebo" is purely a bias thing, but AFAIK both placebo & nocebo effects, though presumably psychogenic, can sometimes induce measurable changes in the body.

[1][https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3401955/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3401955/)

<comment><USER17> Don't you think it is intriguing that the placebo effect only gets reported for non-specific subjective complaints, and not physically measurable ones?

<comment><USER16> This article lists a few physically measurable changes caused by placebo:

[https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/306437.php](https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/306437.php)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It gets quite strange:

 _A prominent placebo researcher, Dr. Fabrizio Benedetti, was able to show just how peculiar the placebo effect really is. After inducing pain in participants for seven days whilst treating them with morphine, Benedetti secretly switched the pain medication to salt water. Luckily for him, the participants' reports of pain went unchanged. Then things got weirder. Benedetti didn't want to stop there, so he [secretively] gave the participants a morphine blocker and, bizarrely, the participants found that their pain returned, suggesting a form of biochemical reaction to the salt water placebo._

So you give people morphine and it works (to block pain). Switch it secretly with salt water and it still works. Secretly add a real morphine blocker and it no longer works. Bizarre.

<comment><USER20> > suggesting a form of biochemical reaction to the salt water placebo.

I know this was a quote from the article, but... Does it really suggest that? Isn't it possible something else is going on?

<comment><USER21> Could it be that this morphine blocker is blocking endorphins?

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The headline reminds me of my high school math teacher that would say that the difference between _tricks_ and _methods_ is that _methods_ are _tricks_ that have been used more than three times.

By the same token, it's only a _trick_ as long as the underlying mechanism is unknown.

</comment><comment><USER23> I had a really hard time with medical anxiety after my dad almost died from pancreatitis suddenly. Stomach pains, heart palpitations, numbness in various places. I was convinced I had 10 different fatal diseases. I wasn't making up symptoms. I had real pain, a chronic cough, and real pvcs that showed up on ekgs. It took a lot of doctors and a lot of tests to convince me that I was okay. And then i started to understand that all of my symptoms matched a single disease— "anxiety". And I started focusing on letting things go and not thinking about it and avoiding triggers like caffeine and all of my symptoms just ... stopped. A miraculous cure of like 10 different things I was utterly convinced I was dying from. Even the pvcs and my non-stop post nasal drip stopped almost entirely.

The body is fucking weird.

<comment><USER24> "Scared to death" is not just an expression, as your case perfectly illustrates.

There's a general tendancy to discount the matters of the mind when treating the body, but both are very much connected and usually for a good reason—at least from an evolutionary perspective. In the US, there's often a stigma associated with just admitting weakness. Support exists but it's not always easy to come by.

It helps a lot if you can find a Primary Care Physician who has at least some notions of psychology and can help bridge that gap—and if needed, recommend the help of specialists regarding our thought processes. (In your case, it sounds like you were on your own to figure this out: glad it worked out, though!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> What's the most impressive placebo effect recorded in a study? Is it always limited to mild pain relief?

For stories like this, people always predictably discuss how ethical it is for doctors to knowingly prescribe placebos for stories and how different interventions have different impacts.

If placebo alone can't cure anything and only gives mild pain relief, I'm surprised nobody mentions it's overhyped.

<comment><USER26> I'm still reading the submitted article, but with the many relevant useful comments of `tokenadult in mind: [https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=...](https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=author:tokenadult%20placebo)

> Placebo effects are strongest for patient self-reported subjective symptoms > (classically, pain) and weakest for objective clinical signs measured by > experienced observers.

<comment><USER25> Do you have a specific example of a very strong placebo effect though that's beyond patients reporting mild pain relief?

My point is people seem to discuss placebo with an implied assumption that the effect is so big it's worth e.g. discussing the ethics of prescribing it. If it's only giving mild pain relief I don't see why it's that interesting.

<comment><USER27> All of Homeopathy? It operates on the principle that a cold when untreated will last 2 weeks, but with placebos will only take 14 days.

<comment><USER28> Ugh. It's so disappointing to see this comment from someone who clearly didn't read the article.

And you're misrepresenting Homeopathy--that's not the principle on which it operates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I believe that placebo-like effects extend to other areas of life, outside of health. Tell people that they are victims of some historical injustice or discrimination and such, and these victim's beliefs will keep people from advancement to their best capacity. They genuinely can't advance. Similarly, in situations of domestic abuse or sexual abuse: whatever happens on psychological or biochemical level, keeps these people down, genuinely unable to properly recover or move on.

Seems to me that attitude is 90% of success in this world...

</comment><comment> 08-15 Does anyone know of a study that finds an _actual_ placebo effect?

As far as I can tell, there are two distinct effects, and both are meaningless. The first "placebo effect" is observed everywhere, and is simply reversion to the mean. Nobody studies a treatment on healthy people, because treating people for a condition they don't have makes for a very expensive study. But some of those people get better spontaneously, and some weren't even sick, but had the right symptoms. Their improvement without actually being treated was originally called the placebo effect.

The other "placebo effect" is the one where treatment with a placebo (preferable an expensive placebo labelled "forte" and administered by the chief of medicine) is more effective than no treatment. But that effect only happens where the only way to measure the outcome is by asking the patient. A human is a very unreliable instrument. A human may report that the irritable bowel is gone because he doesn't take the symptoms as seriously anymore after the treatment, or maybe because he just wanted attention and there had never been an irritable bowel.

So, does anyone know of a study that finds a placebo effect that isn't explained by "bad instrument" aka. self reporting?

<comment><USER30> Reversion to the mean is _not_ the placebo effect. The placebo effect is what you're calling the "actual" placebo effect, and in many cases produces objectively measurable results, which is why they need to account for it in drug trials: you compare both the drug and the placebo to the control group and see if the drug exceeds the placebo. As far as I know, practically every such drug trial validates that the placebo effect is real.

<comment> 08-15 You're wrong, at least according to Wikipedia. But I don't want to argue semantics, I just want _one_ study that shows a measurable (not self-reported) effect. Just one. Please?

<comment><USER31> [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/1286471/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/1286471/)

Retrospectively analyzes patients who got placebo, vs natural course patients. Placebo group fared better in physical exercise compared to the natural course group.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Has anyone studied whether there is an opposite anti-placebo effect? Like if a patient lacks confidence in their doctor and doesn't believe that a real medicine will actually work, is it less likely to be effective?

<comment><USER33> That sounds like the _nocebo_ effect maybe? From the Wikipedia page [1]:

> A nocebo effect is said to occur when negative expectations of the patient > regarding a treatment cause the treatment to have a more negative effect > than it otherwise would have.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> _" Open label placebo: can honestly prescribed placebos evoke meaningful therapeutic benefits?"_

 _" Results from small clinical trials suggesting that placebos can be ethically and effectively used in clinical practice warrant further study, argue Ted Kaptchuk and Franklin Miller"_

BMJ 2018;363:k3889 doi: 10.1136/bmj.k3889 (Published 1 October 2018)

[http://media.virbcdn.com/files/01/147bb1aea3d8c05b-Kaptchuk-...](http://media.virbcdn.com/files/01/147bb1aea3d8c05b-Kaptchuk- MillerBMJOLP2018.pdf)

"Key messages:

\- Placebo pills in randomised trials can significantly benefit patients' subjective symptoms

\- Using placebo pills clinically is an ethical challenge as prevailing wisdom asserts that deception or concealment is required

\- Recent small randomised trials suggest that openly prescribing placebo can evoke meaningful therapeutic benefits

\- More research is required to determine the role for open label placebo and the conditions in which it is effective.

"

</comment><comment><USER35> From what I have understood, the Placebo effect is the most thoroughly studied medicine, with millions of real test cases.

<comment><USER36> Nobody investigated the why like this - the two scientists followed most prominently in the article possibly found a genetic marker for high and low responders to placebos, partly because those two had the background and experience with placebos working in acupuncture from professional work and treatment and the expertise to investigate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> It isn't a trick. It's why pharmaceutical trials have a placebo control, not a nothing-control.

There's been studies done on the effect of different placebos: bigger pills, with bigger markings, administered by professionals in professional settings etc work better.

My pet theory is that, since almost all medicine merely assists the body's own healing (e.g. a plaster cast doesn't heal the bone), the belief of safety and being looked after is enough for your body to switch resources away from dealing with a threat towards healing. (You can't afford to heal while your attacker is still around.)

A placebo signals safety.

<comment><USER38> IIRC, it was more or less the idea developed by Dylan Evans in "Placebo: Mind over Matter in Modern Medicine".

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I would love to see some more advanced psychological manipulation experimental results for medicine ... "I proscribe you to not take this pill twice a day. By that I mean, here's a bottle of pills which have been shown to alleviate your ailment, however I believe your case is best addressed by you deciding not to take this medicine. Therefore, twice a day, please follow these directions: remove a pill from the bottle, place it in your hand, look in the mirror and then put back in the bottle and close the lid."

Many Trippy effects are possible.

</comment><comment><USER40> I'm currently reading "The Biology of Belief" by Dr. Bruce Lipton and feels very relevant.

</comment><comment><USER41> Can anyone help me figure out if I'm of the variant of the rs4680 allele that is most placebo respondent if I have my 23andme results (I am variant G)?

<comment><USER42> A;A = placebo more effective G;G = placebo less effective

<comment><USER41> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I had a psychologist tell me about a case once where a person had a condition (I forget which, I think it was mild diabetes) but only when they were living at home with their family.

They tested positive for this condition. It wasn't all in their head. But then again it was in some sense. They spent time away from their family and their condition would stabilize to the point that they'd no longer test positive. I asked about things like diet and sleep and the guy telling me the story said that this was of course the first thing they checked and the person's diet and sleep habits hadn't changed.

The psychologist who told me this story wasn't particularly "woo-woo" and was personally blown away by it. He said you can find other cases like this in the literature.

Anecdotes like that aren't proof, but they're interesting in that they agree with some of this placebo effect research. It looks as if the brain has more influence over the body than we realize or understand.

<comment><USER44> VS Ramachandran's _Phantoms in Brain_ (p.224): "A second example of a genuine anomaly is multiple personality dis order or MPD, which in my view may turn out to be just as important for medicine as continental drift was for geology. To this day MPD continues to be ignored by the medical community even though it provides a valuable testing ground for the claims of mind-body medicine. In this syndrome-immortalized by Robert Louis Stevenson in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde-a person can assume two or more distinct personalities, each of which is completely unaware, or only dimly aware, of the others. Again, there have been occasional reports in the clinical literature that one personality can be diabetic while the other is not, or that various vital signs and hormone profiles can be different in the two personalities. There is even a claim that one personality can be allergic to a substance while the other is not and that one might be myopic-or nearsighted whereas the other has 20/20 vision."

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Something interesting is that numerous studies have shown that a number of psychotropics, including the monstrosity that's fluoxetine/prozac, perform at levels that is hardly better than placebo. In many cases the difference is not statistically significant. This [1] paper/article provides an overview of a variety of data. It also goes into how these sort of drugs manage to get approved in spite of negligible performance. The paper gives the example of vilazodone/viibryd. That drug went through 5 trials. They showed absolutely 0 effect. In some of the trials the placebo outperformed the drug. Undeterred, the company continued running trials. In the next two they managed to show a very small effect, probably similarly to how if you flip a fair coin enough eventually you'll get heads 10 times in a row 'proving' the coin isn't fair. Anyhow those two trials showing a minuscule effect were enough for the FDA which now states, _" The efficacy of VIIBRYD was established in two 8-week, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials."._

I find this just completely fascinating. That prozac shows a negligible effect over placebo in blind studies is even more interesting to me because of the side effects. It has some really serious side effects - you'd know if you were getting the 'real' stuff, at least if you were allowed to communicate with the others who were. And the prozac brand alone was, at its peak, reaching profits of $2.6 billion a year. This creates a nasty incentive for pharmaceutical companies to target 'drugs' at conditions that can be treated by placebo. Because in these cases, you can always prove the drug works, without actually having to go through all that nasty work involved in creating a drug that actually works.

[1] - [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4172306/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4172306/)

</comment><comment><USER46> It's important to note that placebo effect does not work at all on stuff like infectious diseases. There are clear categories of diseases where your psychological state will have absolutely close to no influence on the outcome.

<comment><USER47> You also can't use a placebo for euthanasia, it doesn't work. You also can't suicide by overdose with a placebo. (plot point in a short story I drafted a while ago).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> FDA Approves Sale Of Prescription Placebo

[https://www.theonion.com/fda-approves-sale-of- prescription-p...](https://www.theonion.com/fda-approves-sale-of-prescription- placebo-1819567087)

</comment><comment><USER48> It's important to understand that if a clinical trial shows some improvement in the control group that received placebo, this does not need to be due to some placebo 'effect' at all.

The status of patients usually changes all the time. If the control group had some minor improvement in some endpoint, this might be due to wide variety of reasons. For example, the disease might just get somewhat better by itself. This does not necessarily imply that this was due to patients that were given placebo experiencing a placebo effect. They might just as well have gotten better without the placebo.

</comment><comment><USER49> A hundred and thirty comments and zero uses of the words "gene" or "genetic." Nobody else thinks evidence connecting the presence of a gene with susceptibility to the placebo effect is interesting?

</comment><comment><USER50> I believe that the placebo effect is significant enough that I have told my wife that if I ever become ill then she should discuss the possibility of giving me a placebo treatment with a doctor without my knowledge. Although it works when people know it is a placebo it seems to work better if people don't know. So for example, if I get ill and they aren't sure what to do, give me a placebo and tell me it is medicine for my illness, whatever it is, and see how that goes. If it works dont ever tell me it was a placebo. Its got to be worth a shot.

<comment><USER51> So basically homeopathy?

<comment><USER50> No. If you don't understand the difference between placebo and homeopathy I suggest you do some reading into them both.

<comment><USER51> /s is apparently non optional these days...

They both have non working components (or no working components whatsoever) and solely rely on the placebo effect for providing any form of relief (if any).

A proper placebo is on the other hand only used in medical testing.

So please explain to me what you think I should read about? Since you are suggesting I read something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It seems to me that the medical profession already has enough bias to defend the fruits of their own research and claim ownership over a capacity to offer that which cannot be achieved through other means.

The idea that a placebo is as effective as some intervention is not evidence of efficacy of placebo — it's evidence of lack of efficacy of the interventions ... if what you have to offer can't beat doing nothing, then you shouldn't be charging for it ...

<comment><USER52> It makes sense, but is it always true? Especially with antidepressant drugs. There are lots of studies like 'Placebo patients had the same result as patients on drug X', but how do we find out if X is not needed for everyone? How do we get our minds to cope with the thought of X being useless? I am not really sure. Only my feeling says that i would love to get lied to in this situation

<comment><USER39> Could we use a range of placebos in order to better control for the effect of statistical outliers? I feel like the uniformity implied by "placebo=sugar pill" might not be rich enough to account for the range of effects that might be at work ... I actually agree that the belief that something effective is being done could play a real role in actual healing — but I don't think it's been shown by any of these studies that this manner of belief can be meaningfully packaged into a one size fits all sugar pill...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I'm surprised no one is commenting on how poorly this article is written. It lost me at paragraph four.

Paragraphs three and four completely misrepresent the placebo effect. They suggest that it cures problems. That's not what it is. It changes _perception_. Mental effects, like pain, are what placebo changes. It never cures underlying physical problems.

<comment><USER54> I'm surprised you blame your lack of reading skills on the New York Times.

Because a problem that isn't perceived is, almost by definition, no longer a problem.

Look: this is basically the tree-in-forest-noise debate. And your chosen interpretation actually isn't completely without merit.

But what _is_ illegitimate is to deny even the existence of other interpretations, and then use that ignorance for yet another tiresome and shallow attack that does not even have the self-awareness to recognise how preposterous it is to believe two dozen words could somehow expose this writer as a complete fraud while the entirety of the _Time 's_ editorial leadership missed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> A great book on this topic is Suggestible You by Erik Vance. He addresses some of the scientific basis of the placebo effect.

<comment><USER56> This book was so effective on changing my views about placebo effect. I very much recommend it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> For anyone interested in further reading on the topic of the placebo effect, I'd recommend the book 'Cure'[0] by Jo Marchant

[0]:[https://www.amazon.com/Cure-Journey-into-Science- Mind/dp/038...](https://www.amazon.com/Cure-Journey-into-Science- Mind/dp/0385348177)

</comment><comment><USER58> From The Secrets of Consulting by Gerald M. Weinberg

> _The First Great Secret of the Medical Profession: 90% of all illness cures > itself with absolutely no intervention from the doctor. Each of us, after > all, is the direct descendant of innumerable unbroken lines of survivors_

</comment><comment><USER42> For anybody curious, the placebo gene + variation is COMT (A;A). I build a gene reporting tool to help with this if you have 23andme it should work:

[https://gene.meports.com](https://gene.meports.com)

</comment><comment><USER59> I am amazed by this.

I've also read if a parent gives some home treatment (e.g. a warm cup of milk) to a kid and caringly says that it'll cure his cold, the immunity of the kid actually increases, effectively curing the cold with love.

</comment><comment><USER60> Is there some way for us to administer a mind-altering drug that induces suggestibility and alter the way we think about our diseases as a way to combat them?

</comment><comment><USER61> That was one good read.

Scanning the comments, surprised no one has brought up religion.

Specifically why religions, all religions, need rituals. Not just narratives/imagery/a priest class etc.

Rituals, to the scientist or non believer look totally meaningless and crazy even, but to the believer it's a fundamental part of the dance that renews faith. Faith in what? Faith in the fact that tomorrow will be a better day.

Visit a cancer hospital and for a lot people that is still the best medicine on offer. I like this Ted Kaptchuk dude and it's good to see the work he has done.

<comment><USER62> Some scientists are religious, so ritual may be meaningful and sensible to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Something else that could make the placebo effect seem real: Only publishing positive results. There seems to be this unspoken agreement that once the efficacy of a treatment is shown in scientific studies there is no placebo "factor" contributing to it helping people. But of course after a successful study the placebo effect of that treatment is _stronger,_ because it convinces even more people (doctors, sceptics) that it's effective.

Consider umpteen variants of the same treatment being tested, and one of them showing strong results ([https://www.xkcd.com/882/](https://www.xkcd.com/882/)). That medicine then surfs on its own placebo effect until its efficacy is refuted (if that ever happens) by another study or it's replaced by something with a stronger result.

</comment><comment><USER64> Isn't meditation exploiting the placebo effect since it is merely an exercise of the will that distinguishes it from non-meditating?

</comment><comment><USER65> [https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/placebo-myths- debunked/](https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/placebo-myths-debunked/) 'nuff said.

</comment><comment><USER66> I'd be curious to hear HN's thoughts about this in relation to the chronically ill, such as those featured on Netflix's Afflicted series ([https://www.netflix.com/title/80188953](https://www.netflix.com/title/80188953)).

> Wi-Fi and electricity trigger Carmen's strange symptoms. Jamison hasn't left > his room in two years. Bekah lives in a van in the desert to avoid mold. > Star has been diagnosed with a dozen different conditions.

How much of it is real, how much of it is the mind making it real?

</comment><comment><USER67> The placebo effect isn't a trick.

</comment><comment><USER68> "What if the placebo effect isn't a trick?" \- then it will surely be patented.

<comment><USER69> Nice idea - Those who is paying a royalty for it is literally paying for nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> The beauty of placebo effects is that like weight loss or quitting smoking, the health benefits are pleitropic, suggesting that we are impinging on fundamental health-promoting biological pathways.</comment>


School's Laptop Spying Software Exploitable from Anywhere - <AUTHOR> http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/jhalderm/schools-laptop-spying-software-exploitable-anywhere

<comment><USER2> This is an excellent piece in the first place. But the following quote (from towards the end of the article):

 _Remote administration products like Absolute Manage carry large risks because they intentionally create a mechanism for a remote third party to take control of the machine. This can be powerful in the right hands but devastating if exploited by attackers. There will always be a risk of abuse by authorized parties, as alleged in the students' lawsuit against Lower Merion School District, but correctly designed technology should at least prevent unauthorized third-party attacks by making sure only authorized parties can issue commands. This requires getting authentication right--exactly what Absolute Manage failed to do._

is superb.

</comment><comment><USER3> "since the same, easy-to-discover key is used in every client"

OH, COME ON! Seriously? Like even beyond some external attacker, if the key is the same on every client, students could wreck havoc pretty easily if they find it. That's like setting every locker in the school to the same combo and hoping no-one notices.

"If the attacker knows the IP address of the server a client is trying to contact, he can just impersonate a freshly-booted client and ask the server to send him the correct SeedValue."

OK, no. If you have to have it like this, at least install the SeedValue when you set up the computer.

"If the server is unreachable from outside the firewall, clients that are rebooted away from the local network will be unable to obtain a SeedValue. In this situation, the clients insecurely default to accepting arbitrary commands without even the protection of a SeedValue."

:HeadDesk:

<comment><USER4> I have invented a new metal for locks. It is impervious to all attempts to cut or melt it... unless you wrap it in aluminum foil, in which case, it behaves just like butter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cargo Cult Cryptography.

</comment><comment><USER6> lol. apparently it's hard to hire competent hackers to make super evil software?</comment>


HN Review My Startup: Nitriq Code Analysis - <AUTHOR> After having two products fail before launch, and working on this project for over a year, I've finally made it past the launch stage. I released my first product to the public last night - www.nitriq.com. It is a Code Analysis tool for .Net developers.
I know that .Net isn't the most popular technology stack on HN, but I hope that you guys can give my site a quick once over and give some feedback. It definitely feels a little rough mostly because I did the site design and copy myself, so pointers will be very appreciated. I'll probably end up hiring a designer and a copywriter, but I've been itching to release for far too long.
I'd like to take a similar path to Balsamiq and be really open about my decisions, traffic and sales. Hopefully you'll find my thoughts interesting and will subscribe to the blog.
Thanks for being a part of HN. <comment><USER2> As I understand, you are in the same market as the NCover [<http://www.ncover.com>] guys.

As I compare your site and NCover site, NCover site clearly stands out. Not because it is beautifully designed (it is drop dead gorgeous) but it clearly conveys why I would want the product in the first place.

The first attention grabbing line (in big, bold letters) on your page is, 'Analyze and Query Your .Net Code Using Linq'. My question, 'why would I want to do code analysis using LINQ? How does it benefit me?

Compare this to NCover site:

'Code Quality Matters and NCover helps you improve the code quality.'

As they say, don't tell me what your product can do, tell me what I can do with your product.

Your product looks interesting enough, I will download it and give it a whirl.

EDIT: You plan to charge 25$ for this product? Really? I would not set a price less than 100$ if you want to be taken seriously. Excuse me, but MS Developer landscape is nothing like the Linux land, and people will pay money if your product is good. [And if it is no good, they won't buy it at even 25$]. For comparison, NCover charges 480$ per user + 1 year subscription at 180$.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, I'll be doing a lot of modification of the next month or so.

As far as the pricing goes, I did this because I'm hoping that it is low enough that your standard developer will just open up their wallet and buy the software without worrying about getting their boss's approval. In other words I want the price to evoke a "why the hell wouldn't I buy this" response.

My competitors charge several hundred dollars per seat, but I think most companies end up just buying one or two licenses for their architects. I'm hoping I can make near the same amount of money because a company would look at the price and buy a license for all their developers.

I do hope I'll be able to squeeze more money out of the corporate overlords by having an edition meant to run on a build server, that edition will run $200/server.

I know this might sound crazy, but at least for the time being it is more important for me maximize my number of users instead of maximizing my profits. I want to pay back the .Net community by providing reasonably priced software. I'm not saying I'll never bump my prices, but not in the foreseeable future.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable links:

<http://www.nitriq.com>

<http://www.nitriq.com/images/largeScreenShot.jpg>

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks promising. You might want to add a "Loading" splash screen (The first load of your app takes awhile on my old computer). Also, when I try to load an .NET assembly, I click "My Computer" and none of the drives appear.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the splash screen suggestion.

The open file dialog bug sounds odd. Does it repeatedly do this? What OS are you running?

Thanks for trying it out

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't live in Visual Studio much these days but from a brief look at your website your tool looks great.

Have you spoke to the Jetbrains guys at all? Nitriq looks like it could be the perfect complement to Resharper.

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't really talked to anyone outside a few friends. It would be great to get acquired though :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd say you need to do some things: Hire a good designer. Offer some licenses to OS projects. Offer some more licenses to famous .NET people so they can rate you product.

</comment><comment><USER6> You should charge a lot more than $25 per seat. Would you consider NDepend and NCover competitors? Don't charge 10% of what they're charging. Maybe 50%.

</comment><comment><USER7> Do you support C++? There is a lot more C++ code than C# code in the wild.

</comment><comment><USER8> Seems like a nice catchy tech name. I like the logo! :-) Looks like an interesting product. I looked at your pages in 3 different browsers.

1\. I'm looking at your index.html in IE 7:

(a) The content below the red and black header is sitting on the left margin of the page, I think it will have more impact on the reader if it is in the center of the page.

(b) The whitespace between the red and black at the top and between the paragraphs is non-existent in this browser. There should be some.

(c) Very small amount of whitespace below the footer in this browser. With my large monitor I think it would look better with about 1.5 inches of whitespace below the footer.

(d) I noticed your comment in the html code "Hi There! Sorry for the slopply HTML, I haven't done web development in 4-5 years, I hope you'll be able to forgive me ;)" I would scrap that comment for 2 reasons:

(i) Your selling a code analysis tool, expect some people (like me, lol) to look at your code behind the page, it seems unprofessional and probably will not help you make any additional sales of the product.

(ii) You have a coding (spelling) error in this comment. It should be "sloppy" vs. "slopply". I'm not trying to be cute with this, but it just looks sloppy. A code analysis tool should not associate itself with anything that could be viewed by a potential customer as sloppy. No one like sloppy code.

2\. I'm looking at your index.html in Chrome 3.0. Same justification and whitespace comments as above, except there is a 1px grey box around the "Analyze and Query Your .Net Code Using Linq" code sample that makes it standout better in this browser.

3\. I'm looking at your index.html in Firefox 3.5.1. Looks the same as in Chrome 3.0.

The website needs some layout work. I would recommend making this sales tool look very slick and professional. It will make the product seem more desirable to the potential customer.

Rather than try to make the web pages yourself with FrontPage or hand code them in notepad, you should give this product the maximum chance of success by presenting it on a first class website. To do this I would recommend getting together with a "good" graphic designer and having him or her produce a Photoshop image of every one of your pages and then give these images to a "good" "professional" html coder who can duplicate the images in code using Dreamweaver.

What might it cost to have the site professionally done? Maybe budgeting $2,500 for this would work. Could be more, could be less. I think this product might have a pretty good chance at success with a little better looking site! If it were my product I would spend the money on this site improvement immediately—even if I had to eat ramen for a couple of months, lol. The reason is I think it will give the product a much better first impression and therefore generate additional sales.

Congratulations on your release! :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, thanks for all the feedback, I'll certainly take it under consideration. I wish I could give you another upvote :)</comment></comment>


How to balance a startup, family and a full time job - <AUTHOR> http://endorseyou.wordpress.com/2008/01/22/how-to-balance-a-startup-family-and-a-full-time-job/

<comment><USER2> I too have a startup, family, and a full time job. I found limiting the job to 8 hours 5 days a week has been the most important thing.

I make enough money to make sure my wife does not work so she can take the kids to school, pick them up, and help them with there homework. One important thing I do is to make sure our kids are in activities Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, piano, guitar, church group, and a few other things. I believe these things help make a person capable of fitting in (unlike myself!). I spend time with the kids before they go to school, before they go to bed, and I put them to bed every night talking over there day and motivating them for tomorrow.

I skipped the partners part but at the sake of speed of development. If I had a partner I would be making money now. I am winding down how much I am working at the job I have and focusing on making money from my startup.

</comment><comment><USER3> Unfortunately, the phrase "startup" has two meanings. Generally, it means the big, world-changing, swing for the fences type of startups that consume all of your time (and then some). Fail fast or prove your idea so you can get investment to grow it rapidly. It would not be a good idea to try and do one of these while you have a full time job and family.

The other meaning is sometimes called a "lifestyle business" (I dislike this term). The scope is something you can handle in nights and weekends which limits your ceiling somewhat. There's a full-time job providing income which takes away some of the hunger for success that comes with working for free. But the time constraint and income requirement means that you will probably seek profitability sooner and have that in mind from the outset. If it can be comfortably run on the side, then a home run isn't necessary (an extra 40K/yr would be a welcome success for this type of startup). This kind can be done with a family and day job, and I think this is the type of startup he is talking about.

</comment><comment><USER4> I want to ask a slightly separate question along these lines.

/rant

As a hacker/startup junkie, do you find yourself becoming judgmental of others and their work habits? A friend of mine was talking about their 'long workday' since they had to stay half an hour late, and I ended up ranting about how thats not a long work day. I felt a bit like a jerk after, since I hardly want to tell people how to live their lives, but it seemed like this talented individual is wasting their skills and lacks motivation.

I suppose what I am asking is does anyone else find that most people they know seem relatively unmotivated? Another situation I find common is a friend and my brother both talk about quitting work and starting their own thing, but when I actually worked briefly with both they seemed to average only a few hours of work a week into the project. How do you politely suggest that with that level of effort that they may not be suited to a startup?

I like to think of myself as open minded and non-judgmental, but for people I care for that seems to get thrown out the window.

/end rant

<comment><USER5> My girlfriend works 90+ hour weeks in the hospital, when she's limited by law to 80 per week.

I don't get to complain.

<comment><USER4> I suppose there is another side of the coin where people work a lot and then you want to complain they work too much too :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't have kids, but I do have a fiancee.

The trick has been that she goes to bed early. So I work 9-7, hang out with her 7-10, hack 10-2, rinse and repeat.

It's definitely forced me to improve my work habits. I say as I'm procrastinating on it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Many people are encouraged to just "go for it" because if they fail they can always go back to an ordinary job and try again. However the risk equation changes when you have young children you care about since (in most cases) you're the only parents they have and they are only young once. Even if your startup is successful you'll never be able to get back the time you miss with them.

<comment><AUTHOR> True - but what I'm saying is that there is still time to balance it. Only if you try hard enough ....

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think what you outline is the steps that would maximize one's chances of continuing to be in the situation that you're in. Your actual "success" would depend on how fast you get out of this situation. It seems in general it would be really heavy on one to deal with all three at at time and would prevent him from focusing on any of them.

</comment><comment><USER8> In a nutshell, don't.

<comment><AUTHOR> In fact, exactly the opposite. Do it - just be aware of how to handle it.

Don't be afraid. Go for it. I did.

<comment><USER9> Makes sense to me. Know what you're getting into, discuss it and get the approval of your partner, but if it's what you're set on doing, you can probably find a way. Tim O'Reilly started his company after the birth of his first child, if I'm not mistaken. I don't suppose it qualifies as a "startup" in the sense of Google but he seems quite successful to me.

<comment><USER8> Did Tim O'Reilly also have a full time job? And even if so, does one data point show anything?

I've nothing against startup + family. It's startup + full time job that I think is a bad idea, and adding a family makes it worse.

<comment><USER9> I would agree that startup, family and full time job is untenable in the long term, but everyone's situation is different. I think it's pretty evident to most people that it's not an easy road, but what I disagree with is your blanket "don't". I'd simply say "it's rough, and you're not going to be able to do it for long without cutting corners somewhere".

Here's the article about O'Reilly:

<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.10/oreilly.html>

It's fuzzy on the timing, and I guess my memory is off, but it seems as if his company was his job at that point, but it still hadn't hit the big time.

<comment><USER8> I tend to think in terms of EV. Your hours would probably be better spent working at Wal-Mart. And there are much better ways to attack the problem, such as saving enough to not have to work, then starting up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As soon as I read the word "cannot", I stopped reading. I get that word from everyone else. I don't need it here.</comment>


5 Lessons Developers Can Take from Apple's Walled Garden - <AUTHOR> https://www.reaktor.com/blog/lessons-developers-can-take-from-apple/ <comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Apple has been getting slammed in the tech news lately and I thought it might be a good time to discuss some of the long-term positive aspects of their approach to software design. Happy to field any questions about the post.</comment>


Show HN: DealScoopr - A better way to discover travel deals - <AUTHOR> http://www.dealscoopr.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Check out DealScoopr and find great flight deals to visit your friends and family. We'd love to hear your feedback. We're a startup based in Seattle,WA.</comment>


Memoirs of a Bullied Kid - <AUTHOR> http://www.danoah.com/2010/10/memoirs-of-bullied-kid.html <comment><USER2> This article means a great deal to me. It's good to see I wasn't alone. I was lucky in high school, because our school wrestling coach saw the rage I carried and convinced me to come out for the team. I lost 30 lbs the first year and got the skills to defend myself. Because I was just a weird guy, I still was a target, but I could protect myself and my friends who were also targets.

I still carry it like a massive chip on my shoulder. I feel that it's the reason I've driven forward into endeavors with intensity. It's made me who I am today; but I still can't forgive the kids (and teachers) who made my life a hell, also in 5th grade.

When I see a picture of myself as a little kid (>4 years) I get really sad for the life that kid will have a few years after taking it. That's why I bust my tail - to tell my little 4 year old self that it's worth it.

<comment><USER3> You weren't alone - I was bullied, as was my close family. Unlike you, it ended earlier but only because the teachers finally realized how bad it had gotten.

I disagree with his idea that those who are bullied needs to learn that they are loved though - I never for a moment had any doubts about my parents feelings for me, but that didn't help me end it. I have even less sympathy for the idea of telling bullies that you love them.

Bullying will stop the day you hit back, they day you show them that you are no longer a safe target - one way or the other (hint it has to show them that _they_ are the small, weak person). Even showing you are under the protection of somebody more powerful (used that trick in kindergarden) will only work for so long.

<comment><USER4> "Hitting Back"

This only works in the burbs or small towns. And only if you're white or non- gangster asian.

In city schools when you hit back, you get ambushed and your ass kicked, and the cycle continues until someone ends up in the hospital or dead.

<comment><USER5> Then the solution in those situations is to leave that environment.

Loving the bullies is equivalent to doing nothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I remember being in these spots. Growing up different isn't fun. For me, I just didn't care that much about the things other kids valued. I wanted to build things, read, learn about science and do experiments. For whatever reason, the fact that I didn't care about sports at all made me as good as an alien to my peers.

The fact that my mom is a lesbian, and that I didn't know any reason why anyone should have a problem with that, didn't help things, either.

So, there were school hiking trips where I had prickly pear cactus fruit pelted at me. I was pantsed at recess a couple of times. Once a little knife was held on me. More often than not, people just said unkind things to me. Getting into middle school was worse, just as the author said. There's some special vein of cruelty that emerges at that age.

I happened to get lucky. Teachers noticed me, convinced my mom to let me be tested for special classes, and I found friendship in people who were more like me. At home, having a computer and learning about all I could do with it gave me _extraordinary_ self worth that would have been wrung out of me at school.

Eventually I learned to relate to people. By high school, I even got along with the jocks and other popular types, though by choice I never fell into any specific group.

Looking back, the author is right. I had it bad but my bullies had it worse. My parents, at least, loved and prioritized me. I can't imagine the miserable home lives these many of these kids must have had. (edit: Although, giving it some thought, I don't know how much my kindness would have earned me from these kids.)

All I know is this: my life was saved – _saved_ – by technology. I'm not sure I'd have made it into adulthood without all the growth I gained thanks to my good ol' Performa 6100.

</comment><comment><USER7> I disagree strongly with the sentiment that bullies just need love, that they're only doing it because they are hurting too. People are diverse, so I won't deny that perhaps that's sometimes true. But I think it would be more accurate to say that bullies do it because it's _fun_ and above all because they _can_.

In short, bullies need to face punishments with teeth. And the bullied need to have access to a justice system they can trust to actually work. Something like this: <http://www.sudval.org/05_onepersononevote.html> (scroll down about halfway to "When you were young", A True Story).

Look, our justice system as adults distinguishes between aggression and self defense. But for some reason, we treat conflict between kids as if it's everybody's fault, and everything's okay once it stops. That's unjust, and is the root cause: adults that treat order and convenience as more important than justice.

When I was a kid, I remember complaining that my (three years younger) sister hit me. The first thing my mom asked? "What did you do to make her do that?" Well, of course I answered, "Nothing," but it plainly wasn't true. Who picks a fight with someone twice their size? And over the course of the discussion it came out that I had taken her toy and teased her, and you know what? My sister got a free pass. _I_ got in trouble.

How about that old fashioned rule, "If you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all?" How about, if I catch you insulting or belittling someone, you have to be their servant for half an hour -- get their water, sharpen their pencils, that sort of thing?

How about a justice system that treats allegations of teasing and insulting as serious matters, and _investigates_ to get to the bottom of things? How about a system that is concerned about kids' antisocial behavior, not because it is currently bothering the adults, but because of the effects it has on both victim and aggressor?

How about a system that punished physical violence harshly if it was _aggressive_ , and leniently or not at all if it's _defensive_? How about a system that says, "If you hit back with the aim of making the other kid stop, and you stop as soon as he does, we'll hold you blameless?" You know, the same deal adults get. (By popular judgement, anyway, if not always in court.)

How about a system that responded to kids' experiments in evil with love and affection and attention, encouraging them to delve deeper and teaching them that behaving cruelly toward others is a _great_ way to get all the stuff they want?

Never mind on that last one.

<comment><USER8> That's the best post in this entire thread. People don't get bullied in adulthood because there is a working police and judicial entity. People get bullied as kids because there isn't one.

Currently kids grow up for 18 years in a everyone-for-himself, in-order-to-be- successfull-you-need-physical-strength-and-iron-will world, and just then they switch to the much better and fairer world where being sucessful is not dependant on being able to defend your own flesh.

That adult system of self-fulfillment while not having to mind fighting bad guys all the time is the basis of our scientific and economic progress of the past 200 years. The big question: why do we put our kids into a different, unnecessery, dangerous and toxic environment for their first 18 years?

<comment><USER9> "People don't get bullied in adulthood because there is a working police and judicial entity."

Unfortunately while adults may be largely free from the physical violence, workplace bullying does occur. Usually it is more subtle than the outright taunting and physical violence of schoolyard bullies, which means its harder to retaliate against but it can be very stressful - and HR is not on your side.

"Currently kids grow up for 18 years in a everyone-for-himself, in-order-to- be-successfull-you-need-physical-strength-and-iron-will world,.."

Sadly, the only other system I can think of that shares these traits is one called "prison".

<comment><USER8> Bogus. Forget HR, if you're bullied your options are 1) switch department 2) file a police report 3) sue 4) switch company 5) move to a different town.

If you're a kid, there is no option to switch 1) class 2) file a police a police report 3) sue 4) switch school or 5) move to a different town if your parents don't cooperate. You're completely dependent on them.

If you don't get the difference between being a free agent in state governed by rule of law, and being a dependent person in a defacto unpoliced area, you should reconsider your way of thinking.

<comment><USER9> I'm not saying that there are no options to workplace bullying, I am saying that it happens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I guess this place has higher percentage of the bullied than other communities, so let me share my bits:

I was the little kid with a big head and glasses which was the equivalent of "bully magnet". I got beaten up during kindergarten (by kids smaller than me), got beaten up in elementary school, secondary school, high school. Bullying kind of stopped in university because bullies couldn't pass the entrance tests heh.

And the funny thing is, I asked my family for help while I was getting bullied. I told my father that "These kids at school ganged up on me and while one was holding my arms the other one punched me". His response was "You shouldn't respond to them, they'll be gone soon". Unfortunately, "not responding" while you're getting punched is not a very efficient defense technique.

So my dad didn't teach me how to defend myself, he didn't contact school managers, he didn't do anything. And unfortunately this happened more than once. It is very depressing for a small kid to lose his trust in his father. And that happened to me when I was 9.

I knew no way to stop the bullying so naturally I focused my frustration on my poor little sister. I made her cry a lot. I tortured animals. Anything weaker than me received my wrath. And all this time my father was thinking I was a bad naughty boy who should have learned some manners.

Every parent should know that they won't be able to protect their kids from every harm. But they can prepare them, teach them, educate them about the potential dangers they may ever face and support them if such situation arises. I never had that kind of support, but my kids will have that. Oh and they'll learn how to land a flying headbutt onto a bully's nose if they get close enough.

<comment><USER11> > I knew no way to stop the bullying so naturally I focused my frustration on > my poor little sister. I made her cry a lot. I tortured animals. Anything > weaker than me received my wrath. And all this time my father was thinking I > was a bad naughty boy who should have learned some manners.

You probably also know why bullies did that to you. Never met one bully who hasn't some shit going on home.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I say this not as a kid who was bullied, but who had many friends who were bullied. And being a guy, this really applies to guys, girl bullying is a different dynamic.

The best way to overcome a childhood bully is to get in an old fashioned schoolyard fistfight with them. It doesn't matter if you loose, just don't loose badly. Fight them until your face is bloodied and your nose is broken, until your knuckles hurt, and you can barely move. Cheat, use blunt objects (no biting or weirdness), sucker punch, tackle, throw dirt in their eyes, whatever. No sharp weapons or anything that'll do permanent damage. You aren't fighting for honor here, this isn't feudal Japan. You're fighting for street credit.

If you're winning, stop when he stops. Make the exchange free of emotion and a cold business negotiation.

If he tries to fight you with a bunch of buddies, do whatever you can to move it in front of a neutral crowd.

9 times out of 10, they won't even show for the fight. When they do, put on a good show.

If you make it so troublesome to be a target, no matter how weird you are, they'll leave you alone. You have to make it a bad equation for them to pick on you. They pick on you because something is bad in their lives and they have to pick on somebody and by not fighting back you make it easy for them to use you as the outlet for their problems. Make it not easy, introduce friction into that equation.

If you do fight, 9 times out of 10, you'll end up being their friend and most of the time you'll find out that the bullies really have shitty life stories and need a friend.

Treat the bully like an angry dog, don't turn your back, don't run. Slow movements. He's not bullying you out of a rational decision, he's doing it out of instinct. He's a dumb and dangerous animal you should treat that way.

In my experience one fight is generally enough.

</comment><comment><USER13> God damn, is childhood a tough time. Life seems really easy these days. Grade five felt about 10 years long.

Maybe I don't remember how bad it was, but I find myself thinking of the kids who were doing the bullying. The one guy became an alcoholic in High School because his dad needed someone to drink with during the day. School wasn't good, but when I got home I was mostly in the clear. It's hard to imagine how a child who felt constant fear and violence at home could do anything but impose those things on others.

I hope that I can instill in my children both the skills to resist bullying for themselves, but also the sense of justice to fight it when it's done to others.

</comment><comment><USER14> This comment will be controversial, especially for North Americans and Western Europeans. I ask you to read it and think about it a moment before reacting, and comment if you disagree. I believe what I'm about to say is true, and I'm not trying to get a rise out of people - I want to fix some problems with society.

I feel for the author. I also moved around a lot as a kid. No, wasn't a military family. Just coincidences, reorganizations at work a few times in a row, changing jobs, family circumstances. Sometimes things went great and I fell into a group of good kids right away, sometimes they weren't so good. It's normal that sometimes the new kid gets shit. I understand.

A little teasing is nasty, but kids can cross the line. Something like this:

> John and Mike never stopped. They never gave me a day off. And while their > bullying hit maximum levels within a few days of school starting, the self > loathing grew until I actually hated myself. ... they started in on new > bullying tactics like sneaking up and cramming food from the floor into my > mouth, knocking my lunch tray to the ground, throwing dangerous objects at > me, tripping me, shoving me, and pushing me.

That's crossing the line. Those John and Mike kids are way past any acceptable teasing/jockeying line.

What's the author advise?

> And so, I will ask you now to not hate the bullies. Experience tells me that > hating them, or being angry with them, will always make it worse. Instead, > put your arm around them. Love them. Tell them that they are valuable. Tell > them that you expect great things from them. They will stop the bullying.

 _No, they won't._

This is where I'll offend polite society. I'm not doing it to get a rise out of you. I'll tell you - this is the mainstream advice you hear growing up these days. "Love the bullies, talk it out, and they'll stop."

No, that's false. That's how we got into this mess in the first place.

I remember I changed schools mid-year in seventh grade when we moved. I was born in August which is the cut-off date, so I was effectively a year younger than everyone else. I was 11 years old. The middle school I transferred to was 7th, 8th, and 9th grade. Just how that district was laid out.

A ninth grader - 14 or 15 years old, much bigger than me - pushed me into the lockers the third day at school. Hard.

He then laughed with his friends and started to walk off.

I ran after him, tackled him, and started hitting him in the face.

We both got suspended. No one caused problems with me after that. I found a nice group of friends and was respected. The older kid didn't cause me any problems after that either. He didn't really acknowledge me one way or the other, we were just strangers after that, which suited me fine.

And that's how you've got to do. This love the bullies thing - it's wrong. It ignores our animal nature.

I've got some sets of names I'd name my sons as they're born. They're unconventional names - Cosimo Marshall or Aurelius Marshall if the boy's mother was Italian, Zhuge Marshall if he was Chinese. The boy will likely get teased.

That's fine, tease back.

But son, as soon as someone puts their hands on you, they've crossed a line. _Fuck them up._ It's the only thing these vicious freaks understand. They're wild animals. They make violence on you, you need to show them that you're the stronger, bigger animal. When someone attacks you maliciously for no reason, you need to impose your will on them.

Even if you lose, lose swinging. They respect it. Be a tough fight.

This "talk it out" shit doesn't work... it's been the dogma for the last 30-50 years, it assumes the nobility of human nature will win out. It doesn't. It's nonsense. It just simply doesn't work.

If you're not strong enough to impose your will on someone making violence on you, then train and get stronger. If you're intelligent, it doesn't matter if the other guy is bigger than you. Take up boxing or martial arts. Brain beats brawn. Fight dirty if you have to. They shove food down your pants or whatever? As soon as he turns around, hit him in the back of the head as hard as you can. If you're much smaller, pick up a hard object and do it.

My Mom is awesome. She picked up from school when I was suspended. We sat in the principal's office and she was very serious, saying yes, my son is serious about school, he never gets into problems, I don't know what happened with the fight. After we left, she took me out to lunch and said good job.

I wished I'd learned that lesson earlier. Some people are animals. The ones that want to hurt you for no reason. Show them that you'll go to self- destructive lengths to defend yourself and avenge yourself upon them, and they'll stop. Also, protect others. I got into a shouting match protecting some McDonald's employees from a mob boss in Hong Kong. A riot cop came to break it up, I was almost in a fight with three mafia guys.

I had two guys try to mug me the other day in a dangerous area. Bad mistake, doubled one of them over with a kick the stomach and shouted at the other one, "YOU WANT TO DIE? BACK DOWN, STAY BACK." He did, he let me walk away while his criminal buddy was doubled over.

Should I have "talked" with them, "loved" them, these vicious criminals? No, they're animals. They don't understand.

Teach your kid to fight back and fight smart. Protect the weak. Be hell and misery to bad people. Pacifism only works if there's someone else that's strong around to keep things together - someone who'll stick up for you. If everyone goes pacifist except the bad people, eventually one bad person with no conscience winds up ruling.

No. It doesn't work. Teach your kids to fight back, fight smart, defend and assert themselves, and protect others in trouble. There's legitimately bad people in the world, barely above animals, and strength is the only thing they respect. Assert yourself.

<comment><USER15> Both your post and the original overgeneralize, treating bullies as a monolithic entity with a single motivation and a single response.

Bullies are not "wild animals" bullying for "no reason", they're people with unique intellects and desires and motivations that you, or they, may not understand. They may want others to see them as tough, or to feel powerful or in control, or for laughs, or because they have something to gain, or because everyone else does it and they think it's normal.

Effective responses have to be targeted based on the motivation. I'm not saying you need to send bullies to the psychiatrist and "talk it out" to understand their motivations, mind you, just that you can't expect the right response to bully A to be the right response to bully B.

Sometimes the right response to a bully is to be a credible physical threat to him. Other times it may be to get to know him and make him feel respected, improving his self esteem, or to involve adults who will hand down more severe punishment, or to laugh it off, or to make fun of him, or for someone else to tell him "that's not cool". The right response might even be multi-tiered, trying to change his underlying motivations, increasing the cost of bullying, and decreasing the perceived benefits all at the same time.

Don't leave tools out of your arsenal by mistakenly thinking you should _only_ "love on them" or _only_ "fuck them up".

<comment><USER14> Good comment, thanks for the reply. To clarify, you only "fuck them up" when they make violence on you. After they put their hands on you or someone innocent, they're in the wrong and they've forfeited their moral right.

Also, something to think about -

> Bullies are not "wild animals" bullying for "no reason", they're people with > unique intellects and desires and motivations that you, or they, may not > understand.

I don't know what part of society you run in, but some people _are_ wild animals. Probably not on Hacker News. Probably not in the suburbs. But some people are born without a conscience, literally - I've looked into it, I've studied criminology and crime and things like that a little bit. I'm not expert, but when you look into it, something like 3% of people don't have consciences, and some percent of those get off on hurting people... it's not a big number, but those people are really wild animals to a large extent. I know this isn't polite to say, but consider it. You may never have come across one of those people, and God willing you never will. But they do exist. Hitler type people, y'know? They only respect strength. They can't be talked or loved or negotiated with.

Not many people. By all means, try a peaceful way if it works in the situation. But once they put their hands on you or someone innocent, all bets are off, and defend yourself fully.

<comment><USER15> I had a teen in a Sunday School class I taught who didn't have a conscience. He didn't have any sense of right and wrong, or of consequences for actions. He was a major bully; two other kids in my class of seven actually changed schools to get away from him (which made Sunday mornings interesting, to say the least!) He only respected strength -- but he _also needed to be loved_.

Like I said, don't limit your arsenal. Not even for the "wild" ones (even if they're animals to a large extent, they're still people to some extent.) Defend yourself and the innocent fully, but don't think that means you can't also _love your enemy_.

<comment><USER16> >Defend yourself and the innocent fully, but don't think that means you can't also love your enemy

Let me add the rationale: if you don't try to love your enemy, or try see something good in him, then you _will_ hate him.

His hold over you will last as long as you hate him. Bullies feed off hate and fear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I am in my thirties now and it still utterly astonishes me the degree to which the school administrators, teachers and parents in my high school viewed bullying with blithe ignorance. I was never bullied myself and I was never a bully, but I witnessed atrocities that would land any adult perpetrator behind bars for several years. Sexual assaults of mentally handicapped kids, kids having their heads forced into the water of a dirty toilet, kids shot with pellet guns during class, on-going intimidation, beatings, etc. Amazingly, this is just the stuff that I personally witnessed...I'm sure worse things happened that I never saw. All of this transpired with virtually zero repercussions for the bullies involved. It was truly sad. What is even more sad is that the adults at the school essentially turned a blind eye to this behaviour. I sure hope things have changed since then.

</comment><comment><USER18> As a fellow bullied child, I can empathize with the treatment, but I could not disagree more with the proposed solutions.

You simply can not treat children as adults nor can all family situations be adapted to yield the necessary love & care required to raise a non-bully. Biologically, children also don't have the same ability to morally reason and weigh present actions against future consequences. There's also a good deal of evidence which suggests some personalities and brains have a preternatural inclination towards aggressive actions and violence.

Children also learn, nearly from birth, how to please their parents and will often, as the author did, shield their "shame" at being bullied.

I was taught by my father, quite simply, to "always stand up for your rights" and that "dignity itself is worth fighting for".

As a kid, I never started a fight, but I ALWAYS responded to violence with violence. For many bullies, violence is really is the only social interchange they understand and the attention they receive from the public physical domination of others is their main source of self-esteem.

I got into my fair share of physical altercations (which I lost more than I won) and subsequent interactions with school disciplinary actions.

Nevertheless, win or lose, I never regretted any fight as they were 100% effective at preventing future bullying.

If a bully "gets bullied back", they back down. If a bully "wins a fight", they know you're always ready to throw-down and take the full measure of consequences so they move on to easier "prey".

School systems are different, but at least in my case, it always helped out with the school authorities to have the higher GPA and be recognized socially as the "good kid that got in trouble".

Finally, one learns at a visceral level, the numerous costs and few benefits of violence. Violence becomes a viable option, internalized very concretely, as the option of absolute last resort.

</comment><comment><USER19> Honestly, I can't imagine what the solution is these days. Fight back? maybe. Maybe not. For my son I can say the most important thing is to assess your enemy effectively.

I've lost a few friends through school violence. One was shot in the head at a Christmas party, the other was ambushed, beaten into unconsciousness, and never woke up. When I was a young kid the worse you could expect was to beaten badly, by the time I finished high school clear, PVC backpacks and metal detectors at the entrances were the rule.

My high school wasn't in the best neighborhood and my first experience with a gun (9mm) was some kid showing it off and pointing it at random students.

The point is just know what's at stake before jumping into MAD mode. You may find out the other guy is really ready to go nuclear. In primary school, bullies are easy to figure out, they are little sociopaths that use violence. By high school their little brains have developed and some may be full on psycho.

</comment><comment><USER20> It's nice reading an article like this once in a while. I like to forget how horrible my life had been. I eventually moved away from the town I grew up in with no money and no prospects just to get away from the violence and constant humiliation. I struggled every day since for everything I have today.

It's good to be reminded of where you came from.

<comment><USER21> Reading it definitely brought up a lot of repressed memories. Life seems so simple right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> If I ever have kids, they get martial arts training. From someone who emphasizes self-awareness and a productive discipline, but who does not skimp on the full range of effective techniques and the physical training to achieve them.

They may like it more or less. Regardless, it will be a part of their schooling.

Bullying ends when you end it. There may be more than one way to accomplish this, but when you're outnumbered and out of reach of any help, you need to be able to manage the physical situation. (This does not necessarily mean the ability to defeat an arbitrary number of opponents; it also means being able to reason ways to extricate oneself, etc.)

And, sooner or later, you'll be there. This is true throughout society and throughout its various situations; cooperation is limited, and you're going to end up facing difficult situations on your own. "Civility" is a luxury that is not always available.

Being persistently without control can become a self-fulfilling situation. Those neural pathways get burned in -- just as they do with everything else we learn particularly through repeated experience.

I don't want my kids to be placed psychologically in that corner. I also don't want them to place other in that corner, which is why the physical aspects are not sufficient.

P.S. I've also learned that some physical injuries can be irreversible. It doesn't do you much good to know that a bully will eventually "go away" or "one day learn", if in the meantime you have permanent scars and worse to deal with.

<comment> DifE-Q As somebody who knows...skip the traditional martial arts and get them into wrestling and Brazilian Jui Jitsu. Anything else will just turn into an embarrassing situation.

<comment><USER23> As with anything, YMMV. I've taken Karate lessons (specifically shaolin kempo) since I was 4 years old, and I couldn't be happier. Just pick something that makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think my friend said it best during a conversation we were having a few weeks ago:

Him: "So, what was high school like for you?" Me: "It was pretty shitty. I didn't really fit in anywhere." Him: "That makes sense - this sense of being the outcast always seems to carry over to anyone's next endeavor."

And I can see that, too. I never really fit in anywhere, not even with the nerds nor the AP kids. While everyone was postering and bullying me around, I worked on Linux machines in the back area of an IT office in our school. Then after school, I would usually go home and hacked on Linux and played video games all day.

It was pretty soul crushing, though I'm better for it - now I work on UNIX systems all day, and I couldn't have asked for a better job than this. However, I still struggle with depression and feeling like an "outcast" no matter where I go. Maybe my friend is right - this sense of ennui was a bit of a carry over from my high school (and even college) days. (for those wondering, one of my old alma maters, Seattle University, was a hell hole. It was high school extended to another four years. I didn't want any more of that shit.)

</comment><comment><USER25> There's a lot of good information on this site:

<http://www.bullyonline.org/>

It's poorly-organized, but it's worth digging around.

I gave a printout of the profile of a workplace bully (<http://www.bullyonline.org/workbully/serial.htm>) to a woman I work with who was facing severe bullying from her boss, and she said she got so engrossed in it that she missed her stop on the train. I knew the bully as well and it was _uncanny_ how well the description matched him. It was like he had a well- known disease and we were reading a textbook description of its symptoms.

That was workplace bullying, but the site also has information on bullying in schools.

</comment><comment><USER26> The saddest element of this story, for me, is that so many children internalize their rage and frustration and turn it against themselves. Just imagine what would be possible if everyone that was bullied could turn that anger around and use it to improve themselves, to make a difference in their world and in their community.

I have to wonder how many great ideas were crushed because someone couldn't believe in themselves to see their project from conception to completion.

</comment><comment><USER27> Here in the UK, many schools have a zero tolerance policy to bullying, but this is nothing more than an empty gesture. As soon as a kid tells a teacher about their bullying problems, the bullying will most certainly not stop as the school as no power over what goes on beyond the school gates.

Bullies are never punished for their actions, which is why this problem always perpetuates.

<comment><USER28> There's no point in having a zero-tolerance policy if you don't have any useful punishments to dole out. Some kids are afraid of getting detention, but the ones who aren't are the ones who are causing problems.

This is why I believe in bringing back corporal punishment in schools. It shouldn't be used too regularly, but it's important that for every child there is a punishment which they _really_ fear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I went to school in India and while there was some mild bullying now and again it was nowhere near as bad as this. I find it surprising how big a problem it is here in the US especially at the junior and high school level. In India the problem is with hazing (called "ragging") at the college level. Why do teachers stand by and let bullying continue unabated ?

</comment><comment><USER30> When I was a kid I got a lot of this; the administration only really stepped in when they started stoning me (yes, throwing rocks) but otherwise it was just continuous misery. I suspect this guy probably had it worse, but there are some very eerie similarities.

</comment><comment><USER31> In some cultures - especially England - insults are a friendship overture. (Yes, it's stupid, but it's the way things are.) What that means, is that the optimal response is to insult back - laughing. _not_ to ignore it and _not_ to take umbrage.

No, I'm not saying that all bullies are 'just trying to make friends'. They're not, some of them are vicious shits. But if you live in such a culture, your kid needs to know about it or he will never make friends (I'm not sure if this applies to girls). It will seem like every other kid is out to get them.

Laughingly insulting back says 'I have respect for myself, and I am willing to be friends'.

I didn't learn this while I was a kid.

</comment><comment><USER32> PG's essay along similar lines: <http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html>

<comment><USER33> Wow great article thanks for the link. I don't know if I agree with the statement that nerds are separated from the pack by some sort of seperate value system. I remember all the middle-upper class kids that were attractive were automatically popular unless there was something very abnormal about them. Life is pretty harsh, if you are awkward or funny looking you START off placed in a box, which makes it much more likely over time to find comfort in a book/computer rather than "being like everybody else."

I think that a large component of feeling like you ended up with a different mindset due to "innate desire" is rationalization after being kicked out of the herd.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> One aspect of home educating our four kids is that none of them have ever been bullied.

<comment><USER35> Right, but unfortunately bullying is a part of life and learning how to deal with it is an important life skill. How will you teach your children to deal with this kind of aggressive confrontation? School isn't just about academic education, it's about social education, I'm genuinely curious how you can achieve this in a home school setting

<comment> DifE-Q I know many home school children, and the common idea that they are not socially educated, or well adjusted, is a myth. Most home schooled children do not sit at home all day - cordoned away from the world. They are usually involved in as much, if not more, activities outside of the home as public schooled children. They have friends in their neighborhoods, and friends they meet in home school groups and their home school activities. As a matter of fact the home schooled children I know are not only generally smarter, and the adults (home schooled) more successful and happier in life, but the kids are far more socially adjusted than the kids that go to public schools.

Public schools by in large create social constructs that do not exist in the adult world. The home schooled children can converse and interact in a healthy way with both young and old - instead of their exclusive peer group.

I home school my children. Yet we have an active church social life, they take piano, wrestling, archery and numerous other peer group events. Plus, on beautiful fall and spring days - when most public school kids are shut up behind brick walls wasting their time in classes with 30+ children learning all of nothing - my kids are outside riding their bikes, exploring the neighborhood, etc.

The other advantage is that if I see other children mistreating my children, or if I see my children mistreating other children (or adults) - I can provide the proper discipline and education in the matter; whereas a teacher wouldn't even think to take the time and deal with the problem. This is not to say I helicopter my children - but I am more aware of issues than a single teacher might that has to keep track of 30 to a 100 or more students at a time and I care more than a teacher would. And thus we come to why we are having this discussion in the first place. The article was written by a guy who had a teacher that was not really connected to him, and his parents were not aware enough of the problem to notice and do anything about it. And the bully's parents the same...

What could have happened with this guy? Had something not turned in his life, he, like many others may have committed suicide and our world would be at a loss for whatever service and good he has thus far rendered.

I think the question really should be this: How is it possible that public school education can teach PROPER socialization - when the evidence and or track record is that these schools produce anti-social behavior and dysfunctional children at such a high level?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Dan's open some seriously deep wounds.....

Am a 31 year old and this is a throw away account.

I have asked many questions here on HN and some, read correctly, clearly showed my level of self-belief.

Since the age of 13 I was bullied, very little physical, mainly regarding my appearence and colour. I am Indian, a little darker than my fellow indian school mates. As I grew up, the the name calling and the playground bullying started. This got worse as I got in to my teens. The same people got the opportunity to bully me for around 12 hours of the day. This serious torment has rendered me to the point of taking the suicide option on a daily basis.

You would be correct in assuming "he wrote the last sentence as present and not in the past.".

You see, as a fellow HN'er, I can bearly program. I have not been able to concentrate on anything. I scraped through a degree, blagged my way in to jobs. My life has always been about planning, planing the escape from classmates, planing how to get out of school without being noticed, planning how to walk past some classmates on the pavement on the opposite side. This, without realising, has had a dramatic effect on my life. I left my family, I left everyone I knew to "get away". I planned to do this and planned to do that, but nothing materialised because the constant bullying has lead me to be down and depressed every step of the way.

Today, I earn over $60K+ working in Telecoms. I am shy, dont have the confidence to approach women and yet, managed to somehow marry a beautiful, kind hearted women but she has never known this about me. I hate myself. I still feel, ugly, fat and black (this is not in the black/white way racial way, but in a dark skinned highly unattactive way)....all those thing I got called years ago still affect me today and I am 31 years old.

I am qualifed, experianced and confident in walking in to an interview and getting the job, but my level of confidence ends there. Once in the job, am subdued in to the corner by my own doing, loose all motivation, feel depressed and just want to leave....all that after 2 weeks of starting a new job, yet I love technology, I love neworking, programming and love being a techie!

What is wrong with me? How do I 'snap' out of this? Is it even possible? am I depressed??? My doctor came to this conclusion 2 months ago. He died recently so nothing was done about it.

I have been involved in some small startup here in the UK. I have buried myself in them and throughly enjoyed it, albeit, with the constant nagging from within of failure, unattractivenessno, no self-love etc etc. None have been successful for their own reasons.

I long to do a startup, I long to make a successful product. I dont have any love for designer clothes, fancy cars or big houses. Is simply wish to learn to code and create a much loved and successful product.

I long to learn how to program correctly, effiecently but at each step, I fail with lack of concentration (even basic CSS is not happening), pressure from within and just wanting to get away from it all therefore loosing time and forgeting what I learnt.

I wish I could go back and stand up to those bullies, I wish I didnt let them get to me, I wish myself to be dead to this day. I have my religious beliefs which stop me from commiting suicide, but god knows I have been close. I am 31, and I still cry myself to sleep for being a failure, all this, without my wife of 10 years, knowing a single thing I've wrote above.

Bullies...Please Please Stop It.

Any advice would be helpful.

<comment><USER37> You are clinically depressed; lack of concentration and motivation, and morbidity are key indicators, as is the sense of failure. The correct drugs will help the morbidity and motivation; counselling, particularly CBT, will help the sense of failure. Combined, they will treat the disease.

See a doctor straight away. You have had these symptoms for more than a few months so start treating it seriously.</comment></comment>


Monitoring Cassandra at Scale - <AUTHOR> http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2016/06/monitoring-cassandra-at-scale.html <comment><AUTHOR> A deep dive into how data is stored on Cassandra rings and how to use this knowledge to give your operators notice before cluster issues become site issues.

Any feedback is super welcome. If folks like this we may consider working on upstreaming the approach into nodetool.

<comment><USER2> Have you seen RethinkDB and what you think about it (replacing cassandra?)?

RethinkDB seems to have everything from Cassandra, without the complexity.

<comment><AUTHOR> To be honest most of my exposure to RethinkDB is from Aphyr's article on it. We already run basically every alternative he mentions as superior for particular use cases. For example we run Zookeeper / replicated SQL for inter- key consistent actions and Cassandra for an AP store. When we need document semantics we have a pretty robust Elasticsearch setup. It didn't seem like RethinkDB would do all of those things better than those special purpose databases so I didn't really look into it too much.

Replacing Cassandra at Yelp would be a lot of effort, so we'd have to be sure that it's worth it. That being said, RethinkDB definitely looks interesting and I'll make sure it's on my list of datastores to evaluate.

<comment><USER3> Do you have a link to this article from Aphyr?

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://aphyr.com/posts/329-jepsen- rethinkdb-2-1-5](https://aphyr.com/posts/329-jepsen-rethinkdb-2-1-5)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks for posting this, it's an interesting approach. Monitoring the availability of replicas instead of individual nodes probably makes sense. However, I'm wondering how this information is actionable for your team. How would you act differently in case your monitoring reports certain consistency levels becoming unavailable, compared to just reporting 2 unavailable nodes in your cluster?

<comment><AUTHOR> It mostly came down to flexibility. The original form of our monitoring did do basically what you suggest, "one node failure is ok, two is not", but we found that was not good enough. That approach in our experience was:

1\. Noisy. We had a lot of large deployments where they had high replication factors (e.g. RF=5 or 7) and they very much didn't care if 2 nodes failed, or 3, or even 4. They had the high replication factor for resilience to multiple rack failures and didn't want to get paged by a few racks failing.

2\. Hard to generalize, especially with multi-tenant clusters. Size of cluster != replication of keyspaces. For example if we had a 50 node cluster, but had a keyspace with RF=1, a single node failure should be a pageable event. Why is there a RF=1 keyspace ... because devops means that developers sometimes do things like that.

3\. Had poor attribution. If you have a large cluster with many keyspaces, one of which has a lower RF than the rest or a higher consistency level, then only the owner of those keyspaces care if we lose a node or two. When we're dealing with an incident we can rope in the teams owning specifically the keyspaces that are under-replicated so they can take appropriate action.

To be totally honest, mostly it just helps us find keyspaces that have low RF ... The number of times we found out the new Cassandra version we just deployed added another system table that had a SimpleReplicationStrategy with default replication of 2 ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thank you for posting this, and in particular for the pointer to Jolokia. Just what a Python shop needs to monitor Java infrastructure.</comment>