Is Sunscreen the New Margarine? - <AUTHOR> https://www.outsideonline.com/2380751/sunscreen-sun-exposure-skin-cancer-science <comment><USER2> Summary:

1\. Research shows the most popular vitamin supplements aren't useful. This turns out to include D supplements.

2\. This is strange because "People with low levels of vitamin D in their blood have significantly higher rates of virtually every disease and disorder you can think of"

3\. One theory to explain this is that Vitamin D was acting as simply a marker for sun-exposure. This is put forth by Richard Weller.

4\. To add evidence, Weller found that exposing people to sunlight for 30 minutes reduced blood pressure and increased nitric oxide levels.

5\. Article dispells concerns about sun exposure by pointing that the type of skin cancer one is likely to get from the sun is actually very safe (carcinomas) as compared to melanoma (1-3% of cases).

6\. Cites a study 30,000 Swedish sunbathing women and found greater health and decreased odds of dying from a melanoma.

7\. Observes the counter-intuitive nature of sun-exposure being harmful to a species that evolved outdoors.

8\. Questions the validity of SPF recommendations when they don't factor in race / skin-tone.

9\. Observes an example of "common knowledge" being wrong with margarine which was wrongly perceived to be healthier than butter for a long time. Suggests the very thing may be happening here.

<comment><USER3> As a general principle, 7 does not seem valid (consider the case of sugar consumption). Life expectancy has increased and causes of death have changed. Cancer is now a much greater issue, while diseases of malnutrition are rare in the developed world.

Given that melanoma is so rare, it might be valid in this particular case, but it absolutely makes sense that sun exposure could have a mixture of positive/negative effects in prehistoric times, but a different mix today.

Another factor that's relevant to some of us: as someone of Northern European descent living in the southern US, I'm not in the environment that selected for my pale skin (and my ancestors didn't wear t-shirts in February). This effect might go in the opposite direction for dark-skinned folks living in Northern Europe.

<comment><USER4> > 7 does not seem valid (consider the case of sugar consumption)

How much refined sugar do you think people were eating in the environment of evolutionary adaptation?

(Although, I agree that causes of death change as life expectancy changes, and things that didn't matter before start to matter now that the low-hanging fruit has been picked)

<comment><USER5> The issue is that people nowadays may live in a place with a lot more UV than their ancestors adapted to -- consider an Irish family that moved to Arizona, for example. The same principle of "more available than evolution prepared you for" seems also to apply.

<comment><USER6> And vice versa - consider migration from Central America to Chicago or North Africa to Stockholm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This article is based on the work of Richard Weller who is trying to monetize them at Relaxsol[relaxsol.com]. I didn't find any disclosure of this in the article.

The mainstream view is in a paragraph buried deep: ""I don't argue with their data," says David Fisher, chair of the dermatology department at Massachusetts General Hospital. "But I do disagree with the implications." The risks of skin cancer, he believes, far outweigh the benefits of sun exposure. "Somebody might take these conclusions to mean that the skin-cancer risk is worth it to lower all-cause mortality or to get a benefit in blood pressure," he says. "I strongly disagree with that." It is not worth it, he says, unless all other options for lowering blood pressure are exhausted. Instead he recommends vitamin D pills and hypertension drugs as safer approaches."

<comment><USER8> The mainstream view amongst whom and where?

There are quotes from organizations that advocate sun exposure which are not linked to Weller:

Cancer Council Australia's official-position paper (endorsed by the Australasian College of Dermatologists) states, "Ultraviolet radiation from the sun has both beneficial and harmful effects on human health.... A balance is required between excessive sun exposure which increases the risk of skin cancer and enough sun exposure to maintain adequate vitamin D levels.... It should be noted that the benefits of sun exposure may extend beyond the production of vitamin D. Other possible beneficial effects of sun exposure… include reduction in blood pressure, suppression of autoimmune disease, and improvements in mood."

Australia's official advice? When the UV index is below 3 (which is true for most of the continental U.S. in the winter), "Sun protection is not recommended unless near snow or other reflective surfaces. To support vitamin D production, spend some time outdoors in the middle of the day with some skin uncovered."

New Zealand signed on to similar recommendations, and the British Association of Dermatologists went even further in a statement, directly contradicting the position of its American counterpart: "Enjoying the sun safely, while taking care not to burn, can help to provide the benefits of vitamin D without unduly raising the risk of skin cancer."

<comment><USER9> Is it strange that I get some level of measurable joy out of reading something official that contains a rational and balanced take on a subject such as:

"... A balance is required between excessive sun exposure which increases the risk of skin cancer and enough sun exposure to maintain adequate vitamin D levels..." ?

I'm not used to seeing articles / stories / write-ups / or even paragraphs that seem to contain acknowledgement of both sides (or all sides, depending) of a situation. Everything seems like an advertisement or a paid / sponsored article these days so it's almost like a balanced write-up / an author projecting a rational and honest viewpoint is this rare and refreshing change- of-pace for me? Maybe it's not that weird but I've never really taken the time to consider it so I've definitely never asked any friends, family, or co- workers about it. Any thoughts?

<comment><USER10> > Is it strange that I get some level of measurable joy out of reading > something official that contains a rational and balanced take on a subject

I got joy reading the article because it basically tells you _not to worry_ about moderate sun exposure.

How many articles tell you not to worry? Now that's a really rare animal in the news media.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder about the effects of breathing sunscreen.

In affluent, white, suburban United States it is very common to see the religious application of sunblock to children in the specific form of aerosol spray delivery.

Every day at the park stand still for a big cloud of aerosolized sunblock all over your face and arms, etc.

Speaking more generally, my wife and I often discuss this or that _terrible_ practice of health or habit or child-rearing from our own parents' generation and I am always inclined to extrapolate forward: "what are _we doing right now_ that our kids are going to look back on with horror and amazement?" For a long time the sunblock regime has been near the top of the list ...

<comment><USER12> Had a long conversation with a skin cancer specialist about the harmful effects of sunscreen.

While he agreed that there can be some nasty chemicals found in sunscreen he ended the discussion with the parting words "At the end of the day it's the people that _don't_ use sunscreen that we see here in the clinic, not the people that do"

<comment><USER13> Is it a skin cancer clinic? Maybe the people that _do_ use sunscreen go to another clinic (where they don't ask about sunscreen usage)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > How did we get through the Neolithic Era without sunscreen? Actually, > perfectly well.

It's modern times. We optimize for long individual lives, not propagation of the species. As lifespans increase, so should efforts to avoid cumulative, damaging radiation.

Similarly, heavy meat consumption gave early humans an advantage, but you shouldn't adopt that caveman behavior for a 100-year lifespan - it doesn't "work" at that scale.

<comment><USER15> Most of the average lifespan increases we've seen have come from reduced infant and childbirth mortality, not from making the elderly live to be even more elderly. There has certainly been some of that, but it's far less significant than the infant and childbirth mortality improvements.

> _Rowbotham and Clayton (JRSM 2008;101:454–62) make a very important point > when they draw attention to the life expectancy at birth compared to life > expectancy at 5+ years of age.1 They state '… life expectancy in the mid- > Victorian period was not markedly different from what it is today. Once > infant mortality is stripped out, life expectancy at 5 years was 75 for men > and 73 for women.' In 1995 Griffin2 produced a comparison of life expectancy > of mature men (15+years of age) at different points in history over the last > 3000 years_

> _The change in life expectancy of mature men^ has not changed as > dramatically over 3000 years as might be expected, although this data must > of necessity refer to privileged members of society._

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2625386/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2625386/)

Note also that being economically or socially privileged would have given these men better access to nutrition, however it would have also given them better access to contemporary 'medicine' which may very well have been more hazardous to their health than no medical intervention at all. How many wealthy people in the past were poisoned by their well-meaning doctors? I'd wager more than were saved.

^ (The numbers for women are very different, because women used to frequently die during childbirth, but this is comparatively rare today.)

<comment><USER14> > Most of the average lifespan increases we've seen have come from reduced > infant and childbirth mortality, not from making the elderly live to be even > more elderly.

You're missing my point.

Lifespans are increasing. The reason why is irrelevant.

Regardless, the result is that you have more time to accumulate irreversible damage than your ancestors did, so their habits re: the sources of that damage are not necessarily prescriptive.

There's probably a hard limit on radiation exposure, and that means you'll have to spread it out more than your ancestors did to enjoy the same risk of cancer - ex: same number of hours in the sun but over a longer lifespan = shorter individual trips under the sun, but (inevitably) more of them.

<comment><USER15> You've missed my point, the increases in human lifespans have come from greater success at reproduction (surviving childbirth, and surviving being a child long enough to reach sexual maturity), which is rather contrary to what you've suggested.

Furthermore:

> _" As lifespans increase, so should efforts to avoid cumulative, damaging > radiation."_

The elderly are not living _much_ longer than they ever did before, so this is basically nonsense. It makes sense if you assume that 200 years ago men were dropping dead in their 40s like those naive life expectancy statistics would lead to to believe, but that's not what was going on. The life expectancy of a mature male has barely changed at all in the past few thousand years, so the relative importance of avoiding cumulative damage like radiation has not increased either.

<comment><USER14> > naive life expectancy statistics

Yes, we all know about that. You're getting too hung up on me saying "lifespans increase." Forget that I said that. Imagine I instead said, "we are optimizing for health in old age more than the ancients did."

> the relative importance of avoiding cumulative damage like radiation has not > increased either

It wasn't important at all back then because they didn't know about it.

Do you want to die in agony in your 70s from metastasized skin cancer, or peacefully in your sleep at 80?

My point is that propagation of the species, old age, and rampant melanoma can all exist simultaneously - so what people did in the past re: sun exposure isn't necessarily good advice for us today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Interesting news almost completely buried in overpolarized nonsense: sunlight is beneficial beyond vitamin D.

Of course, sun burns are still bad for you, and excessive tanning will make you look old at a young age. So yes do use sunscreen in moderation but don't avoid the sun.

<comment><USER17> > sunlight is beneficial beyond vitamin D.

Is it though? Do we actually have the data that says so, or do we have data that has tons of other factors mixed in, where sunlight exposure _happens to be correlated_ with better health?

> So yes do use sunscreen in moderation but don't avoid the sun.

Using sunscreen (according to the article) is equivalent to avoiding the sun, as it blocks production of Vitamin D.

<comment><USER18> > Is it though? Do we actually have the data that says so, or do we have data > that has tons of other factors mixed in, where sunlight exposure happens to > be correlated with better health?

What other kind of data would you need, or expect to see?

Shouldn't the onus be on people claiming that, given the reality of human evolution and existence, blocking sun exposure is the way to go?

The article points out risks mitigated by sun exposure (and their corresponding mortality rates), and the main negative (Melanoma) and its lower incidence. On net I think the "minimize sun exposure" advocates have a weaker argument.

As article points out this is eerily similar to low-fat, cholesterol fear mongering from decades ago. Funny a similar recommendation (blood pressure pills) is given by doctors here.

<comment><USER19> What I'd hope to see is randomized studies or studies that exploit some random variation for identification. The studies mentioned in the article all appear to rely on regressions controlling for observables. But of course there could be plenty of unobservable factors that are driving the result: the type of people that spend a lot of time in the sun are healthier for other reasons. I haven't read Weller's work though so maybe he has some RCTs too or maybe someone else does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The article they cite claims that people who were less exposed to sun had higher disease risk [1]. As far as I saw, the cited article does not include sunscreen use in the analysis. So it might very well be that sun exposure while wearing sunscreen might have the same benefit, minus the increased skin cancer risk and accelerated skin aging.

EDIT: Besides that, there is very likely a huge confounding effect that was probably not properly corrected for. The persons in the "high sun exposure" group were much healthier than in the "avoiding sun exposure" group right from the start (Table 1)!

[1] [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/joim.12496](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/joim.12496)

</comment><comment><USER21> It's remarkable how much attention is given to the quantity of the desirable Sun exposure, and how little thought is spent on the _quality_ of the light.

Absent sunscreen the UV-heavy mid-day Sun in the tropics gives me a sunburn in 15 minutes, while a morning exposure at the same locale remains perfectly safe for all the three hours that the morning lasts. The turning point is when the Sun crosses 45% boundary (when a match stuck in the sand becomes taller than its shadow), so my schedule is beach-time 6-9am and 3-6pm, while the rest of the time is spent sleeping, eating, working, and sightseeing.

I wish I could sell you some dietary supplement with this fantastic advice, but none is needed. Well, maybe a branded box of matches is in order?..

<comment><USER22> Interesting stuff. What country is this? What skin complexion?

<comment><USER21> Typical caucasian skin - not pale, not dark. The places were Hawaii and Costa Rica, but it should work the same anywhere in the tropics - just make use of the match-sand trick to adjust for the local timezone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> There are obviously some biological processes that depend on sunlight, but it also seems likely that sun exposure is a signal for "is active outside."

<comment><USER24> Or even more broadly, is active in general terms, not necessarily just outdoors and not necessarily just physically.

I think it's likely that being active is positively correlated with good health. probably for two reasons. One is it is probably good for you to keep active. Too, if you have health issues, you probably are more likely to just stick around the house and not do as much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Long-term (3+ years) supplementation of vitamin D significantly decreases all- cause mortality [1]. So yeah, take the supps if you don't get enough sunlight. But personally I am convinced that sunlight exposure, and additional near- infrared "supplementation" are preferable. Nitric oxide release is a double whammy because it reduces stress within cells, and promotes endothelial health (as mentioned in the article).

1: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24349197](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24349197)

<comment><USER26> Recent long study results (5.3 years follow up) show no benefit on vitamin D supplement: [https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1811403](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1811403)

<comment><USER27> Only 2000IU per day. I'd like to see one with 10000IU.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Rebuking one point in the article.

This article confuses treating vitamin D deficiency to taking high doses of vitamin D.

1) Studies show that excess amount of vitamin D provides no benefits against cancer, heart disease and stroke.

2) Studies also show that vitamin D deficiency is related to many illness. Taking supplement protects against them.

You can determine if you have vitamin D deficiency with simple blood test.

<comment><USER29> > 2) Studies also show that vitamin D deficiency is related to many illness. > Taking supplement protects against them.

That's hardly a "rebuke". First, I'll note that you carefully used the word "related" instead of "causing" or "a major factor". Then again, you omitted "Studies show that..." from your second sentence, probably because there are no studies showing that people with Vitamin D deficiency, taking supplements, are doing any better than the ones that don't.

In fact there is a meta-study, quoted by the article, that suggests they don't:

[https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8...](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8587\(13\)70165-7/fulltext)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Health wise , so much we are told turns out to be upside down.

Say, chlosterol. In 1977 the Framingham Study told us higher HDL levels and lower LDL levels are associated with a reduced risk of coronary heart disease. Not to mention later studies showing statin lowers LDL not only coronaries but other cardiovascular diseases and even stroke (10.1002/14651858.CD004816.pub5). Well, turns out higher cholesterol only correlates with heart disease under 50 years old. Damning it all is a 2016 study showing above 60 actually higher LDL correlates with longer life... And then it turns out though niacin brings down your cholesterol but has no effects on cardiovascular events. And then Pfizer abandoned a drug which raised HDL -- but actually raised the risk of such events. Whopsie! [https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/health/03pfizer.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/health/03pfizer.html) The whole good/bad cholesterol thing is total, absolute bunk science proven wrong multiple times from multiple angles. (Hope I didn't get wrong the various lower/higher things.)

Also, in general, evidence is mounting that _all_ food related studies are useless simply because humans with different genomes (surprise!) react differently to food and we do not understand yet which genes correlate with which food causing what. I mean, this makes so much sense, imagine that someone asserted that seven billion beings with different genetic composition reacts the same to all foods. That's absolutely laughable and yet, you are getting these advices of what to eat and what not to eat in general. What is beginning to become clear is that we do not know _anything_ at all about how humans react to the food they intake. First we started with trying to see how they react to "fats", "carbohydrates", "proteins" and so on. But turns out foods are not just those but also vitamins and then it turns out no matter how you put together fats, carbohydrates, proteins and vitamins it still won't resemble anything food like. We go to smaller and smaller components trying to find the composition of food -- but it just doesn't work. So you have an unknown on the food end and another unknown on the human end and yet we are told to follow certain diets. Which of course change every decade or so when it all falls apart.

</comment><comment><USER31> So for those of us in the winter (like right now in NYC), what are we supposed to do for health, to protect against the diseases whose rates are increased by lack of sufficient sunlight?

If vitamin D supplements aren't the solution, are we supposed to get UV lamps for daily exposure at home after getting out of the shower? Totally serious question -- anyone got any ideas? I'm actually surprised the article didn't cover it.

<comment><USER32> Vitamin D supplements do help your immune system, reducing respiratory tract infections, and seem to help with some autoimmune diseases. There have also been some positive findings regarding clinical depression, and improved bone health.

Currently there is no evidence that they help with cancer or cardiovascular disease, but that doesn't mean that someone who is deficient should not try to solve that deficiency with supplements.

Dosing the supplements is the difficult part, ingested Vitamin D absorption is different from person to person, and it's further complicated by variable sun exposure and skin production. 4000 IU per day should be a safe dose, but it's probably not enough with zero sun exposure during winter...

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> So TLDR;

\- a bunch of studies have shown Vitamin D strongly correlates with health

\- however more studies show supplementation of Vitamin D does not give the same outcomes

\- Thus probably Vitamin D is not the cause, rather just an indicator for sun exposure, and sun exposure is what's good for you

\- lots of research showing sun exposure has many befits and avoiding it has high risks

\- as for melanoma, it's less common than you think and the risk is mostly sunburn not sun exposure in general

\- this is more serious for people with darker skin whose bodies are better adapted to more sunlight and have much lower risk of skin cancer but need more sunlight to get the health benefits

Conclusion: go outside a lot and get sun, just do it gradually and don't shock your system with sunburn. If you're not getting sunburn then your melanoma risk is very low while the other benefits are very high.

That is interesting to read, and it also feels really common-sense to me. I definitely feel better when I'm getting good sun exposure, and I can feel it in the winter when I'm not. Most interesting to me is the studies showing Vitamin D supplementation is not effective for health benefits. That's too bad because my D levels tend to be low and I have supplemented in the past, but not shocking because it's never really felt different to me when supplementing.

<comment><USER18> One other point to highlight: Many of the doctors quoted in the article couldn't dispute the data (reminiscent of nutrition conventional wisdom) but inexplicably advocated _not_ to get benefits mentioned from sun, but instead take statins/blood pressure drugs.

This is ridiculous, and if one looks into the criticisms of these drugs, mirrors the terrible advice peddled by same doctors as nutrition advice, to the detriment of millions. Why does this mentality persist, always and everywhere take blood pressure drugs? Madness.

<comment><USER33> Well, I've come to see it that western primary care doctors main job is to try and match your symptoms to a pill that can help.

I'm not trying to disparage all the doctors or say they do nothing else.

But if you look at it like that, then a lot of the behavior makes sense. "I don't know about sun exposure, but I'm confident this pill will help you, so avoid the sun and take the pill."

<comment><USER34> A more charitable view would be, "Currently I have better evidence in the literature that this medication would be more helpful than sun exposure, which in large quantities has more evidence of harm than benefit."

That's not an indictment of physicians, that's a recognition that our evidence base is skewed (for a variety of reasons). But there is good evidence that at least for some people, sun exposure above some level does more harm than benefit. You're saying the average primary care doctor should just toss that out. Who says this isn't the latest whim to be disproven in 20 years?

The evidence base for lifestyle interventions sucks because it's much harder to measure and pharma has certainly been able to tip the scales, no question. That should change and I hope it does. But when I have a patient come in and ask, we go with what we've got.

<comment><USER29> > A more charitable view would be, "Currently I have better evidence in the > literature that this medication would be more helpful than sun exposure, > which in large quantities has more evidence of harm than benefit."

That's indeed a _very_ charitable view. The more realistic view, in my experience is "I just go with the mainstream as nobody got fired or sued for going with the mainstream and I don't really have the time, nor the inclination to keep up with the latest studies".

> Who says this isn't the latest whim to be disproven in 20 years?

A million years of evolution, spent in extreme sun exposure, without sunblock?

I've long suspected that the "Always put on sunblock" advice is bollocks and have never used the substance. Partly because of common sense (evolution of human species) and partly because of simple observation. All my grandparents and their relatives were raised in villages (and quite a few still live or lived there till they passed away), with serious sun exposure, working on the field, long before the age of sunblock. Yet, none of them had skin cancer. Other cancers, diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, yes. Skin cancer - not a single one of them. Why is that, if the sun is so dangerous?

And while you may dismiss my anecdata, note that the article says "outdoor workers have half the melanoma rate of indoor workers"!! So, for me this isn't the "latest whim", we're just going back to common sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I always thought there should have been an enormous evolutionary pressure for humans to have different skin tones in different geographies. If sunlight is bad for skin than we should all be black or tanned all the time. However, if you don't live in a sunny area and you have a tan you might not getting enough Vitamin D. Vitamin D must be very important in order to make us evolve to have different skin tones and to tan according to the seasons.

<comment><USER10> The article mentions we store vitamin D for use in the winter.

It also suggests pale skin may have evolved to allow us to produce way more vitamin D in the summer to compensate for cloudy winters.

So, the advice would seem to be, go outside in the sun during the summer if you have pale skin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I have a small blacklight installed in my home, and I turn it on a couple of hours a week when I watch TV. It definitely makes me feel more relaxed, though I'm unsure of the actual mechanism. Vitamin d is not the problem since I take plenty of it in the form of supplements and fatty fish. Recently I discovered that blue light can help break down bilirubin in the blood, and since I have Gilbert's syndrome, that might be one explanation.

<comment><USER33> According to this article, Vitamin D supplementation is showing not to "work," and the theory is that the correlation with health is actually as a marker for UVB exposure. If your black light is putting out UVB then maybe that's what's helping you?

<comment><USER37> Pretty sure they mostly (entirely?) put out UVA.

<comment><USER33> Interesting. According to the article that's the "bad" UV. I wonder if there's a market for UVB lights?

<comment><USER38> Sure! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UV- B_lamps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UV-B_lamps)

Or do you mean market as in "consumer market"?

<comment><USER31> Is there a consumer market?

A quick search on Amazon reveals UVB lamps are mainly either expensive ($250) and for people with skin problems, or else cheap and low-powered ($30) for reptiles.

There doesn't seem to be anything for a kind of full-body health use?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I found the tabloid-style writing very difficult to read, and it did not inspire confidence in the content of the article.

</comment><comment><USER40> I find it odd that Examine.com[0] hasn't been mentioned yet.

There have been studies of vitamin D supplementation; these have been specifically about supplementation and not just correlation with blood levels of vitamin D.

I'm sure that sun exposure has additional effects past vitamin D production given how messy biology is, but it's not clear to me that unprotected sun exposure is the best way to get those additional effects. For example, if blocking UVA and letting in some amount of UVB gets the benefits of both sunscreen and sun exposure, then I'm all for it. However, it doesn't seem like we have enough information to make an informed decision yet.

[0] [https://examine.com/supplements/vitamin-d/](https://examine.com/supplements/vitamin-d/)

</comment><comment><USER41> Dr. Greger has a different take on the data. From [https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-risks-and-benefits- of-s...](https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-risks-and-benefits-of-sensible- sun-exposure/) (transcript and sources cited are below the video)

Concerning the Swedish study: Why would those that run around outside enough to get skin cancer live longer? Maybe it's because they're running around outside. More exercise may explain why they live longer. And here in the U.S., more UV exposure was associated with a shorter, not longer, lifespan.

Estimates about vitamin D preventing internal cancers are from intervention studies involving giving people vitamin D supplements (not exposing people to UV rays).

</comment><comment><USER42> Related: many of the components of sunscreen break down into free radicals in the process of absorbing UV, which are in effect (but perhaps not in practice) more damaging than UV exposure itself.

Quick source I dug up, but there's many more (and the industry appears to be aware of this issue and is doing R&D): "Sunscreens Inadequately Protect Against Ultraviolet-A-Induced Free Radicals in Skin: Implications for Skin Aging and Melanoma" [1]

[1] [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022202X1...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022202X15304437)

</comment><comment><USER43> According to another research[1] vitamin D supplementation actually changes a lot of taken in adequate (by orders of magnitude higher than the official RDA) doses regularly (and it also affects mood). So I conclude that what we need is to also supplement nitric oxide, not just vitamin D alone.

I had never feared sun and don't even use sunscreens but I neither live in a particularly sunny area nor have enough spare time for regular sunbathing so supplements still are the only way to get enough.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15867918](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15867918)

</comment><comment><USER44> I was really enjoying this article, which is intelligently written (even though it's obvious the author has made up their mind and is trying to convince me, I happen to agree with them). That is until this line:

> _From its inception in the mid-1800s, margarine had always been considered > creepers, a freakish substitute for people who couldn't afford real butter._

When did "creepers" become a word journalists can use in a non-ironic way?

</comment><comment><USER45> Wanna share my experience, the TL;DR is that if you feel well you shouldn't expose yourself to the sun or use parasol or sunscreen, because only narrow UV spectrum is good, and sun doesn't care.

I've had a severe form of psoriasis, majorly on scalp. Over 1/3 scalp looked like it had been rubbed with a sandpaper to near-bleeding sores. I tried to different docs, nobody told me what it is, I had no option but to do my own research.

I found that it can be treated with ultraviolet, but not all of UVs are good for you, there are UVA, UVB and their sub-spectrums. The only good for health UV is UVB with a narrow peak at 310nm wavelength. Those tanning beds for bronze effect are wide band UVA+UVB and not good at all neither for vitamin D, nor for your health in general.

So I had bought a UVB 310nm medical lamp, shaved my head, and started using UVB since june, it's been a half year experiment on myself. I started with long, over 10 minute sessions to figure out a limit where I do get burned (>10 minutes). Later I reduced down to 5 min, two times a week, and almost haven't used UVB recently. I don't have vitamin D blood meter, my criteria is a state of my skin, i.e. absence of pain on palpation, less itching, no bleeding sores, no reddening. Looks like UVB works for me, what I can tell from my experiment.

In comparison with sun, UVB lamp with timer showed to be more safe, IMO. Three hours outdoors w/o sunscreen gives a sunburn very likely; but a 5 min/day UVB lamp exposure seems to be safe.

I have a few tiny colored skin patches over body, didn't cover them or anything, just ignored them; they have become less distinguishable after UV. However, if you have patches like birthmarks, you must track their borders. When borders become blurred, that's a not good sign, you gotta them checked by your dermatologist. I think there could be some app to track colored skin patches, there is a bunch of open source libs for that[1].

[1] [https://github.com/search?q=skin+cancer](https://github.com/search?q=skin+cancer)

</comment><comment><USER46> if this turns out to have weight im going to need to switch my routine, but i'll probably continue to use sunscreen on my face (but maybe not my arms anymore). the anti-aging effects are important to me, but particularly on the face, so there might be a nice middle ground here, as long as you're wearing a t-shirt.

<comment><USER47> Protecting the face is rational, for many people it gets the most sun exposure of any part of your body. Heard from my dermatologist two of the most common skin cancer locations in our community are the lower lip and lower eyelid, which of course are two facets of your face that are most perpendicular to the sun at peak UV hours.

I figure, and this is just me, that if you want to get sun exposure, it's probably best to expose more skin for less time. If the risk is LNT, it's all the same. If it's not, you lower the total risk.

<comment><USER46> what does LNT mean?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> There was a similar article in Australia a few months back [https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/health-and-wellness/here- co...](https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/health-and-wellness/here-comes-the- sun-defending-our-summer-rays-20181120-p50h2j.html)

</comment><comment><USER49> How much are UVA and UVB blocked by the atmosphere in higher latitudes during winter months? UVB is blocked by the ozone layer, so I would expect in winter even less reaches the Earth's surface.

</comment><comment><USER50> Whilst I understood the analogy, a part of my brain that dislikes poorly worded headlines thought to itself, "But sunscreen tastes terrible on toast."

</comment><comment><USER51> So everything in moderation, including sun.

Are there any sensible exceptions to that rule?

<comment><USER52> There are no exceptions because it's a tautology. What's moderation is defined by what's good for you. Nobody recommends fentanyl in moderation.

<comment><USER51> Not necessarily.

Its potentially true that consuming more of a veg increases health, without an upper bound, or at least an upper bound above 'moderation'.

That doesn't fit in with your definition of moderation, but I would say moderation has both an upper and lower bound.

<comment><USER52> That's exactly the tautology: "Moderation" is "the amount that is good for you." So there are no exceptions to "moderation is good for you." How else would you define "moderation" in this context without a reference to the amount of something that is beneficial? It's not as if "moderate" is an amount that exists out of context that can be applied to both donuts and broccoli without knowing which one of those is good for you.

<comment><USER51> Moderation: 1. the quality of being moderate; restraint; avoidance of extremes or excesses; temperance. [1]

A 10kg portion of broccoli might be better for you than the usual recommended portion. I would not say that's a moderate amount of broccoli though.

[1] [https://www.dictionary.com/browse/moderation](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/moderation)

Edit: Also there isn't really a healthy amount of doughnuts you can eat, so by your definition, a moderate amount would be zero. Which isn't really what the 'everything in moderation' rule means.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I have osteomalacia, and I take Vitamin D, Calcium and Alendronate for it. I have suffered multiple spontaneous bone fractures.

There is not enough sun where I live (Seattle), so unless I go to a tanning bed, I need to get my vitamin D through supplements.

Survey of literature:

[0] [https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-rise-and-inevitable- fal...](https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-rise-and-inevitable-fall-of- vitamin-d/)

[1] [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11606-016-3645-...](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11606-016-3645-y)

[2] [https://www.jabfm.org/content/22/6/698.long](https://www.jabfm.org/content/22/6/698.long)

[3] [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290490087_Evaluatio...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290490087_Evaluation_of_knowledge_practices_of_vitamin_d_and_attitude_toward_sunlight_among_Indian_students)

[4] [https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8...](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8587\(18\)30265-1/fulltext)

[5] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5986441/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5986441/)

[6] [https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k3225](https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k3225)

[7] [https://www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i6201](https://www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i6201)

</comment><comment><USER54> The human evolution argument is interesting to think about because humans are the only fur-less mammals so any advantages to sun exposure are unique to us.

<comment><USER55> >humans are the only fur-less mammals

Naked mole-rats beg to differ. Although yeah, I don't think they get much sun exposure. But apparently they never get cancer, maybe we could learn from them.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_mole- rat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_mole-rat)

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> This is worse than pseudo science, it is complete mumbo jumbo, totally misrepesenting and misquoting sources.

To think that the author has been selected as an MIT Science Journalism fellow is truly mind boggling.

[https://ksj.mit.edu/dispatches/2017/12/07/this-years- fellows...](https://ksj.mit.edu/dispatches/2017/12/07/this-years-fellows- rowan-jacobsen/)

I can truly say that I look forward to reading of the author's death from melanoma.

<comment><USER57> You're living up to your user name, but I dislike reading someone wishing death on someone else, particularly on HN, from which I expect better. Like the other reply, I would also be interested in a more thoughtful rebuttal rather than this kind of vicious ad-hominem attack.

<comment><USER56> When you live in a culture that used to worship the sun and many friends and relatives have died and or been scarred by skin cancer, you lose tolerance for people pooh poohing UV exposure. Blatantly misrepresenting advice as he does (saying sun exposure is recommended) is absolutely ghastly.

I rate him just a tad less awful than Andrew Wakefield, the anti-vaxxer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> To;Dr: As with anything, balance is needed. Use your judgement wisely.

<comment><USER17> That's not the takeaway at all.

The article basically insinuates that you shouldn't use sunscreen, that you should expose yourself to the sun for health reasons and that Vitamin D supplements are actually useless.

<comment><USER59> Insinuates is the correct word here, as the article dances around the point without providing much evidence. I can believe that people with sun exposure tend to be healthier. But at no point does the author make the case that these people would be even healthier if they didn't use sunscreen. The link is tenuous at best, and the whole sunscreen part seems thrown in to genrerate a headline.

<comment><USER60> Eh, the author did give some examples of bad chemicals in some sunscreens, so it's possible that there are negatives to using them.

Here's what I took away:

\- don't use sunscreen most of the time (though if you care about aging effects, go for it on your face) \- avoid getting sunburns, and use sunscreen as necessary given your desired time in the sun \- check labels of sunscreen and get familiar with the common active ingredients

That's basically what I do already, though I'm going to make an effort to spend more time in the sun because I work at home, and therefore get minimal sun exposure normally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> This article breaks Betteridge's law. The answer is not "no", but it might not be "yes". In fact, the article promotes the viewpoint that sun exposure is actually good for you, whereas butter is probably not essential.

If the sunscreen recommendations turn out to be too strong, this would be good news for me, as I have never liked having to apply sunscreen and dislike the scolds who push it on me when I don't feel I need it. But the article glosses over the fact that people who tend to burn rather than tan get more melanomas, and that melanoma can be a very insidious cancer. So, if I know I'm going to get a lot of exposure (beach, air show, whatever) I am going to use sunscreen to prevent burns.

<comment><USER62> I propose mrfusions law: in any discussion of an article with a headline ending in a question, someone will mention Betteridge's law.

<comment><USER61> I find it helpful to know if the answer is no. Betteridge's law suggests you can avoid reading the article because the headline writer is trumping up the findings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> The new margarine? Nah. No one was ever a fan of margarine. Feels more like the new sugar. Public was told to give up X (fat) in favor of Y (sugar) only to find said recommendation was paid for by Industry Y.

The species has survived this long for a reason. What Mother Nature has to offer us is good for us. Why do we keep believing we can get it more better?

</comment><comment><USER64> Everything is the new smoking. Ambien. Deli meats. Roasted things. Now sunscreen. Are we supposed to live in a hobbit hole and eat boiled roots?</comment>


Aging Canadian government computer systems at risk of 'critical failure' - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/federal-it-systems-critical-failure-1.5448871 <comment><USER2> About 15 years ago, I became a full time employee of the Canadian Government. I was part of a team that was rebuilding a pretty huge and critical system. It was a disaster. I left after a year. The gun registry before it and the Phoenix pay system since, and many other failures in between..it seems pretty hopeless.

I initially put all of the blame on the expensive consultants, that were doing most of the work, for being technically awful (writing software like Fowler's Analysis Pattern book was a holy grail).

While I still think they bear the brunt of the blame, in retrospect everything was awful. The project was both a business and technical transformation at once. There were too many managers, too many business experts and overall poor leadership. Rather than breaking it down into manageable chunks, it just kept growing and growing. There was no concern or accountability for waste.

Sometimes replacing a legacy system with a new system is difficult. But most of the time, it can be done as a slow and steady transition...so long as egos and ambitions stay out of it.

<comment><USER3> Canadian here, but left 20 years ago, but I read CBC news daily.

That Phoenix pay system was a total cluster that lasted for years. I remember reading headlines and thinking "they haven't fix it yet?".

Made the ACA website in the US look like a resounding success. People were literally not getting paid for months (years?) and the gov'ts was like "working on it!".

<comment> Harvey-Specter They still haven't fixed it. My partner works for the federal government. She was bumped up to a new pay scale and suddenly stopped being paid for 2 months. When she did start getting paid it was at the old level and she hasn't received the missing 2 months salary yet. She had to open three separate cases to 1) receive the missing pay, 2) have her pay scale updated in the system, and 3) receive the difference between her old salary and new salary for however long they continue to pay her at the old rate.

One of her coworkers hasn't been paid in almost 6 months.

<comment><USER3> Nuts! You'd think after a few weeks they'd hire a ton of folks and do it by paper until it could be fixed.

How many people can go months without a paycheck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I work on one of the systems called out in the article. It's a fabulous disaster. I don't think it'll keel over and die anytime soon, but it absolutely should be phased out.

The problem is these big projects, like modernizing core social service systems, are given big budgets and big expectations. Then they start a big team to work on it, with short deadlines and not enough direction. At some point it is discovered that the legacy systems business logic is mostly undocumented/baked into a mainframe/functioning through sheer luck/nothing but PL/SQL and DB triggers. Then the several contacting companies are brought in to try and sort out the mess, solutions are purchased from billion dollar private companies (all of which have screwed over the Government of Canada one way or another), and project management is shuffled around as fast as HR can fill out the forms. After three years the money runs out, the project dies, and then we try again in two years.

The solution is never a slow and steady modernization. It's never small, focused teams working on improving or rebuilding individual components. It's never upgrading infrastructure, or moving to modern best practices.

It's always all or nothing. Solve the problems, without fixing them.

<comment><USER5> whats wrong with pl/sql... and what do you think modernization entails?

<comment><USER4> Another commenter summed up my feelings on PL/SQL. It's not that it's inherently bad, it's the bad practices that seem to follow.

Modernization to me (specifically in the context of the GC) means refactoring/rewriting systems to follow modern industry standards and practices. Things like proper version control, automated testing, automated/semi-automated deployments, and monitoring and logging.

I think there are major benefits in adopting these practices for both the Canadian public and the developers building/maintaining the solutions. Unfortunately, getting a budget to move the source code from a shared network drive to Git is next to impossible. And God forbid you want to spend time adding any sort of testing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I work for a digital services agency currently working with several provincial governments, and have some perspective on this. I call it "the IBM hangover".

At some point, someone gives IBM or various consultants millions of dollars to implement some IBM software--Powerbuilder, Java, Domino, etc.--which they do, following RUP, which means a pile of UML docs on top of it. It actually works, the gov't says "great, we can stop funding ongoing dev for a couple decades."

Two decades later, CGI has taken over the IBM project for half the maintenance fees because they know how to do RUP, and thus meet the piles of NFRs IBM left behind (such as "all metadata changes must be auditable", meaning all UML diagrams must have a documented review/approval chain separate from source control").

I sat in a meeting where a stakeholder showed us the report generation page, and said "if we click on this link, it crashes the server, and we have to open a ticket to restart it".

Software does rot, and gov't procurement processes and requirements are those left behind by IBM to prevent smaller, "agile" agencies from doing meaningful work. To my mind, there are two flaws here: one is letting IBM in, in the first place, to set the ongoing standard; two is refusing to acknowledge that every organization needs an organic software dev capability that can use outsourcing as a resource multiplier, not as an IT replacement.

</comment><comment><USER7> Does anyone have any idea what outdated technologies they're using (notably the the ones that are sixty years old)? It would be interesting to learn which software has managed to stick around for so long and what it does.

Two anecdotes:

1) I know someone who deals with legal documents for the Canadian federal government and she has multiple word processors (of various versions) for these documents. Since minor changes can affect the meaning of these agreements, they are only edited or amended in the software in which they were originally created. She is understandably very excited for when the ones created in old versions of Word Perfect expire and a new agreement is created in newer software.

2) Only in 2019 did the US Nuclear Command transition away from their own 50 year old technology: floppy discs from the '70s. [1]

It always fascinates me to see what sticks around, for what reasons, and how it affects people's work. I've heard stories of developers creating fancy UIs to cover up ancient Fortran software, so that it's less painful to work with, but they don't need to replace the underlying software.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons- floppy...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons-floppy- disks.html)

<comment><USER8> > 2) Only in 2019 did the US Nuclear Command transition away from their own 50 > year old technology: floppy discs from the '70s. [1]

From my reading of the article, it appears they are still using 1970s era IBM Series/1 minicomputers. It sounds like all they've done, is replaced the physical floppy drive with a floppy emulator. This is a device which attaches to the legacy IO bus, and appears as a floppy disk drive to the minicomputer, but the actual data is stored in flash memory instead of magnetic media.

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

<comment><USER9> You need to think of things like that like a low-scale industrial system. It needs to do what it does.

If you go to a candy-store at the beach and see a 150 year old saltwater taffy machine, you say "ooh, cool". The thing that makes a missile go up is essentially the same thing, it needs perform it's function to spec, period.

<comment><USER10> Yup. In tons of industrial settings it's common to have machines that are a century or more old.

I know someone who works for an industrial gear company and routinely reconditions things like draw bridge mechanisms or a rubber rolling mill (do they call it a mill?) and most customers just want things to keep on working like they've always been working since they've built their process around them and machine throughput is rarely the bottle neck. The improvements customers go for are modern bearings (quiet and cheaply serviceable) and if they have to have gears made they generally opt for a more modern tooth profile (potentially stronger, quieter and more efficient).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> On a much different scale, I ran into a similar problem once. Not for me, but for a customer. About 10 years ago I did a PC breakfix job onsite at a small business that made trophies. Their main business was bowling leagues and other local sports. The computer I was there to fix was fine. But the computer that ran the engraving machine- the one that they made all their money with- was an IBM PC/XT from the early 1980's. No hard drive, everything was on 5.25" floppies.

I mentioned that they should replace that thing sooner rather than later, but their objection made sense for their use case: The replacement would be many thousands of dollars and this old setup _still worked_. The computer had one job, and it did it. Who knows, maybe it's still there, still mashing away on its floppies every day. It wouldn't surprise me. If it is, it's being held together by nicotine deposits and luck.

<comment><USER12> When the time comes, they could just order a cheap machine from China to replace it.

<comment><USER11> Indeed. At the time, that wouldn't have been an option. And, given their technical abilities (I was there to fix a _really_ minor problem) I doubt they could piece together something that your average maker-type such as us could.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> IT might kill government. It has just the right mix of difficult to predict, measure and evaluate technical competency etc. wherein a small project can blow up to $1 Billion dollars.

This is where Western Governments are actually corrupt, but it doesn't show up in Corruption Transparency Index.

I'm not ideologically a 'small government' person, but I have absolutely no faith in our government's ability to do anything reasonable in IT.

Sometimes I think we need 'government in a box' IT solutions. Sadly, even if we did, they'd still labour over them in some way and make it expensive: the whole point is for vast cadres of the civil services, and consultant/lawyers etc. to suck money out of the system.

<comment><USER14> You hear this attitude all the time on HN, but never see any kind of disruption happening. After working with big companies (in many ways not so different from governments) and also a few government agencies I feel like "this is all corrupt, so we cannot do anything" is mostly a cop out, so people don't have to accept that maybe they were a bit naive when they ran around "this is all needlessly complicated, it could all be so much better and more simple!" and maybe the complexity is there for a reason.

<comment><USER13> No. The Canadian government spent $1B on a simple gun registry, a basic CRUD app that barely worked. US 'healthcare.gov' doesn't need to be that complicated, but it was $2B, screwed up by a Canadian contractor, CGI. A small team of Google devs had to come in and fix it.

Most companies that screw things up that bad, will fail. If they don't, it's still their right to waste money on dumb projects - it's their money.

Government failures (at least in Canada) generally exceed those in the private sector for that reason, exposing the dire systematic problem if 'no competition, no oversight, lack of competency' on a scale rarely seen elsewhere.

Not only is there 'no incentive' to fix problems, often there's also a negative incentive.

It's 2020. The technology to put my medical history online has been available for 20 years. Ontario, Quebec etc. have still completely failed to do this. I still have no easy way of finding out which clinics are available for me, and when I do go to a new one, they have to open an entirely new file, totally unaware of my historical medical issues. To make matters worse, it's literally illegal for me to pay anyone to provide me with medical services. It's kafkaesque.

A very basic medical history system, that merely documented doctors notes etc. could be done 'on the cheap' (relatively speaking) - but it's far from happening.

Even an intelligent regulatory mandate could solve the medical records issue, i.e. providers must participate in XYZ system, with ABC components, designated by the government. But we can't even have that.

It's really bad and I don't see any path to getting better until government develops a whole new attitude towards IT.

<comment><USER9> Replace government with large, complex organization. There is litle difference. I've worked in government and large companies, and they are pretty much the same.

The only difference is the governance structure. In .gov, you tend to have professional / civil service people at the senior director level who know their business inside and out, with a political layer of management who drive change and vary in competence.

Medical records are a great example of how .gov/.com doesn't matter. When stuff gets complex, IT sucks.

<comment><USER13> "Replace government with large, complex organization. There is litle difference. I've worked in government and large companies, and they are pretty much the same."

I don't agree at all.

Big corporations can fail to do many things where it's not really important, so it might seem like 'failure' but mostly it's a function of market conditions. Other big failures (say Boeing 777) are understandable due to complexity.

Very few groups on earth can build such airplanes.

Anyone can build a gun registry.

I loathe how long it takes my bank teller to speak to me, but my banking services are in the end, amazingly cheap for what they provide.

Governments do a reasonable job at things like contract allocation for road maintenance, some kinds of construction, but they generally do a bad job operationalizing anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The way businesses solve this, just about every time, is to run an emulator of the old system on current hardware.

I have heard of systems with five layers of emulation, yet still quite a lot faster than the original machine.

I gather Bloomberg has begun to do this, emulating SPARC user-space on Intel so they can stop paying Oracle to support long-since EOL'd 32-bit equipment and OS. (Or maybe some sort of hybrid.)

I can understand why no expensive consultant would suggest it; it is very cheap, and quick to set up. No fat contracts there.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wish we'd develop a similar agency to the US Digital Service. I think any modern government should have a digital/IT branch... a MIO (Minster of Informatics) etc. I know it's idealistic but I think we could pragmatically solve Canada's digital issues carefully without costing us billions in consultant-overloaded failures.

<comment> frosted-flakes There's the Canadian Digital Service, modelled after the UK's Government Digital Service (GDS). Provinces like Ontario are also creating their own Digital Services groups, and Ontario's online services have improved tremendously because of it.

[https://digital.canada.ca](https://digital.canada.ca)

[https://www.ontario.ca/page/ontario-digital- service](https://www.ontario.ca/page/ontario-digital-service)

<comment><USER17> The pay is _terrible_ for the skills required; I interviewed some time ago and would've taken an 50% cut in compensation to work there.

<comment> frosted-flakes That's good to know. I was/am interested in working there. I might apply anyway just for the experience (currently not working in software development, but I'd like to get back into it).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Consultants in Canada are usually friends of the government in power and their contracts are usually narrowly specified to make the selection process converge to their group. We had a useless proprietary educational computer system in the 80's and 90's that failed The ICON - note the last three letters of the name!!!. They appeared visionary to the public in press releases, but they were proprietary Kludges that endured, and froze their state of technology while the field raced ahead. They never worked.[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICON_(microcomputer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICON_\(microcomputer\)) But the consultants were all over it, like ticks on a steer, they grew fat. The Ontario Archives refused to accept the donation of hardware and SW for saving = dead as a doornail

</comment><comment><USER19> I recently got a visa to Canada. The J2EE applications for the visa applications didn't work for a full weekend. I've opened some tickets, and found cookie-clearing as a fix for some issues.

Finally went there for a sofware event and people in Canada are sweet, calm, happy and non-stressed.

</comment><comment><USER20> I feel that one of the issues that's never talked about is how government contracts are awarded. 'Analysts' and 'Architect' prepare a document outlining the spec of the program. Once the document is out, every consulting firm is free to access it and place a bid on how much they would charge to implement what was outlined in the procurement document. The government is then forced to pick the lowest bidder. It doesn't matter if what's asked by the government doesn't make any sense, the engineers on the contractor's side are forbidden from contacting government employees (for anti-corruption reasons).

I've heard many stories where the contractor knew the job would have to be done twice the moment they read the procurement documents. But they couldn't voice their concerns. And if they suggested doing what they knew was the right thing that would have made them ineligible for the contract as it wasn't what was required. Future-proofing the bid or trying to deliver something closer to what they ended-up shipping was also not possible because this would have made them more expensive than the bidders following exactly the request. In the end they ended-up rewriting most of the code at their usual billing rate on top of the original fixed cost contract.

In the case of Phoenix, I've read a lot of media articles outlining how bad of a job IBM did but despite all this it seems the contract itself was never challenged in court. What I heard from internal sources is that IBM did ship correctly all what was asked for in the contract, it's just that the government workers drafting the requirements didn't understand their own payroll needs enough to properly articulate them.

Of course CBC, the state-funded media where everyone is on the government's payroll, won't outright blame their bosses. But they would get sued and lose pretty bad in court if they claimed the contractors didn't deliver what was in the contract. So you get articles with a weird spin where they try to blame the contractors without going too far and paint the government as a victim.

<comment><USER21> I also read that the project was pushed live prematurely for political reasons, despite the warnings from IBM that it wasn't production ready.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I believe that in Ottawa, there's a negative stigma with those who are in tech and part of government because of so many of these systems. Although it's sad to see, it's not completely unwarranted. I'm about to get an early start on my taxes and Canada's tax website is a slug and spits out errors, timeouts, etc. It's been like this for years. Pressing refresh for the 4th time and it manages to load the page I want slowly becomes the tech variant of Stockholm Syndrome. I am biased, yes, and that comes from countless frustrations dealing with government tech.

Years ago, I had a past employer that would immediately toss resumes from applicants that had recent employment with the government. Yikes.

</comment><comment><USER23> Thankfully non-government industry is exempt from this kind of thing. For example, the airline ticketing industry has kept up with modern technology and paradigms with its corruption-free SABRE system. Banks these days exchange trillions daily through modern full-stack phone apps.

<comment><USER24> That full-stack phone app probably puts an item on a queue for a COBOL mainframe :)

<comment><USER25> This is for the old timer banks, the ones that had their HQs built around that mainframe. Take newer fintech banks and you're in for a treat. Some of the backends are so janky it's only a matter of time before one screws up badly. Most of the effort goes into the app-polish because that's the visible part that makes it into the media.

<comment><USER21> Which fintechs have their own banking system? I thought they were all riding on someone else's banking license and infra.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Taleb on Black Swans, Fragility, and Mistakes - <AUTHOR> http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/05/taleb_on_black_1.html <comment><USER2> My favorite quote on Nassim Taleb's writings:

 _Taleb's writings are filled with certainty, anger, and immodesty, having the Godelian impossibility of someone shouting 'I am the most humble!'_

Spot on. From [http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/review-of-talebs- blac...](http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/review-of-talebs-black- swan.html).

<comment><USER3> From the linked article:

 _Taleb's style is to severely criticize experts and authorities--lots of 'morons', 'idiots', and 'fools' out there--while implying that both he and his reader or listener are exempt from their many biases._

A _third_ of Fooled By Randomness (published before Black Swan) is about accepting that you are biased, there's nothing you can do about it, your rationality is limited. And then trying to deal with it - accepting your biases in the small and spending your precious rational thinking on the big stuff (e.g. where you invest your money).

I only skimmed the rest of that article, but that was enough to spot at least two other sentences which show that the author didn't really spend time trying to understand Taleb's ideas and is being ticked off by Taleb's irreverence and love of opinionated aphorisms.

<comment><USER4> I agree: so much of the criticism regarding Taleb's books seems to be that he's arrogant. However, I don't understand how it's arrogant to say that people are bad at predicting the future, which I think is his main point.

<comment><USER5> Having spent last two year working prediction of properties of drugs from their structure (Machine Learning), Taleb's book was the real eye opener.

It made total sense. However the hoi polloi is in search of a charismatic Messiah who has answer to all questions. And when someone mocks their expectation by presenting statistical evidence, the general argument is how arrogant that person is.

The idea of something can be predicted by using mathematical formulas (F=MA) is extremely attractive, however in Chaos filled practice one finds it more of an exception rather than a rule. The worst part being our inability to choose a proper null model.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Did I hear correctly? Taleb is betting on _hyperinflation_?

Talk about burying the lede.

</comment><comment><USER7> The book is simply great. The arrogance people refér to is called skepticism towards bs</comment>


Compile-Time Evaluation in the Zig System Programming Language - <AUTHOR> http://andrewkelley.me/post/zig-programming-language-blurs-line-compile-time-run-time.html <comment><USER2> Nice, interesting. Reminds me a bit of Terra, which is the most impressing programming language concept I've ever seen (if only it were ready for prime time usage). [http://terralang.org/](http://terralang.org/)

<comment><USER3> Yeah I really like Terra. One thing I've been wondering is if it can be done with C or C++.

In other words, could you replace the C preprocessor / C++ metaprogramming with something like Lua? That is, have Lua/C instead of Lua/Terra.

That would be adopted a lot faster than a brand new language. I think one problem as always is parsing C++, but that should be doable with Clang now.

EDIT: Also, what about it is not ready for prime time?

<comment><USER4> Not convinced... the C preprocessor is tolerated because it is so small.

Lua + C would really confuse at least me. But nothing's really stopping you I guess. Lua, or any script-ish language could be used instead of the C preprocessor. Why not Python? Perl?

<comment><USER5> You already answered the question: Because it's small.

<comment><USER4> Yes I agree

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That compile-time concept is great. I've wanted C++ to have something like that for a long time. The only problem is that there is no way to debug this compile-time code the same way one can debug run-time code. If there is an error, it produces static message which is hard to understand in more complicated stuff. You can see this in complicated C++ templates.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure about Zig, but in Nim compile-time code produces a stack trace just like run-time code. But perhaps you are talking about debugging using a debugger like GDB? That is indeed not supported. But using a simple `print` statement is enough in most cases for debugging.

<comment><USER8> Yeah he's definitely talking about a full fledged debugger like GDB. For the most part yeah, some print statements will get the job done, but that's a serious pain in the ass if you've got a ton of variables that you need to look at. Significantly simpler to just be able to look at everything at once. Also, I'm unfamiliar with Zig, but is it even possible to print anything from your code during compilation? Seems like you wouldn't be able to do that.

<comment><USER9> In libbug you can do anything at compile time. Open and write to files, run a test suite, anything. [http://billsix.github.io/cac.html](http://billsix.github.io/cac.html)

<comment><USER8> Very cool!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Two remarks:

\- sadly, nobody mentions BET MetaOCaml [http://okmij.org/ftp/ML/MetaOCaml.html](http://okmij.org/ftp/ML/MetaOCaml.html) which is probably first place you want to look before you try to build this yourself.

\- in Lisp, this is trivial (as explained here : [http://www.ymeme.com/hackers-introduction-partial- evaluation...](http://www.ymeme.com/hackers-introduction-partial- evaluation.html) )

<comment><USER11> Aside: as the author of the second link I'd rather you pointed to [http://wry.me/~darius/writings/peval/](http://wry.me/~darius/writings/peval/) (though I'm grateful to ymeme for posting it without permission, since the original host fell off the web.)

Of course, Lisp isn't really a systems language like Zig -- I think it's great that it's tackling the problem its own way.

<comment><USER12> Yes; rather, a systems language like Zig is an activity you can do in Lisp.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why does the function declare which parameters are "comptime"?

Recently, I was thinking about a language, where the user could decide which parameters to make comptime. Examples:

Normal function call: foo(a, b)

Function call with comptime: foo(comptime 42, b)

What actually happens at runtime: fooVariant(b)

The compiler makes a duplicate of foo, where the first parameter is removed and the constant 42 used instead. Compiler writers may know this as the transparent "procedure cloning" optimization.

This increases flexibility, because the writer of a function does not have to decide which parameters are comptime and which are not. This sometimes leads to duplications, for example with regular expressions, where the pattern is very often comptime, but not always.

<comment><USER14> One issue I see is how far to propagate the comptime?

If I have one complex function which calls 50 other functions, do I clone all of them too? And what about functions called indirectly? The amount of cloning could become massive, and it might lead to worse performance (e.g. so much code is cloned that the code no longer fits in the CPU caches.)

Conversely, if I am only cloning the function I am calling, then that might not be a very useful feature, because the function I am calling might do very little – it might just be a thin wrapper around another function.

The advantage of doing it on the function parameter declaration is the function author has to work out the propagation aspect themselves (by deciding whether to make the arguments of the indirectly called functions comptime or not.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I like the simplicity of the website and the authors dedication to releasing both updates & informative articles.

My question (I'm not a systems coder), is how is this really better than C? How can it be even remotely as efficient as a compiler with decades of optimization witchcraft and sorcery? Is it really that much easier to write? I'd be curious in seeing a small 1/2 page code sample difference and seeing benchmarks on performance, compile times...etc. Nim normally jumps to mind as an easy to write language that transpiles to C and is therefore usually fairly equivalent, but is almost as easy to write as python. How does Zig fit in? Also, good luck on the project!

<comment><USER16> Obviously, we should not compare small personal project languages with decades-old industry languages by factors determined by the sheer amount of work thrown in. We compare them mostly by fundamental design principles.

In this case, partial evaluation is a massively more principled and efficient way of doing metaprogramming than preprocessing or macros. There are limitations compared to Lisp-style unrestricted untyped metaprogramming, but not any that I would much miss in practice.

With partial evaluation, we automatically get type and scope safety, and also only need one language instead of several. Optimizations also cascade in a principled way: we can compile code-generating code to fast machine code, which we then use to generate faster code or generate it faster, but the then- resulting code can be also used to generate code, and so on.

<comment><AUTHOR> At the same time, Zig is basically only a thin layer on top of LLVM. Since it's a low-level language itself, it can get away with having close to no static flow analysis beyond this partial evaluation (and maybe types?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's refreshing to see another attempt at a systems language that sheds the verbosity of C++, D and Rust.

Nim, C++, D (and Rust in a very limited fashion) all have compile time function evaluation, but not remotely with such a low overhead syntax.

<comment><USER7> What do you mean by "low overhead syntax"? I would call Nim's syntax simple and consider it to be "low overhead" so I'm not sure it belongs in your list.

<comment><USER15> Agreed from at least a beginners' perspective. I think there are 70 reserved keywords, but I can't imagine using 1/2 in practice. Most of those are just things like int8, int16, uint8...etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was wondering why `inline if` would be necessary. Apparently it's already been removed: [https://github.com/andrewrk/zig/commit/b78c91951a1db34c615a0...](https://github.com/andrewrk/zig/commit/b78c91951a1db34c615a011e0444608285f1a74c)

<comment> a-nikolaev Explicit `inline if` could give a compile-time error if the condition was not comptime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Regarding C's printf example, "__attribute__ ((format (printf, x, y)))" is gcc idiom, a C compliant compiler is not required to provide any kind of support against format string errors.

</comment><comment><USER19> Very cool. But the more I see of compile-time code the more I think it's a bad idea. The presented "toy" function with the inline while loop is essentially a macro that's doing compile-time code generation. I can easily see myself calling that function with a non-constant value and expecting it to compile (after all, functions are functions and they take in values regardless of their token type). Conflating the two runtimes seems like it could be frustrating. In a lot of cases you also get the same benefits (in this case, monomorphization) automatically due to compiler optimizations. Also I think most people working in production environments would have some sort of expectation about the time it takes to compile a library in Zig, but allowing arbitrary compile-time computation means that they cannot even guarantee that the compilation will halt!

<comment><USER20> I think the right model for compile-time evaluation is to have an interpreter and phases, making the full language available at compile-time but clearly distinguishing between compile-time, macro-expansion, module elaboration and runtime phases. Scheme dialects generally do that, although they should maybe define module visiting and elaboration orders in general more clearly like e.g. Ada does.

I don't know if Zig does that. Anyway, having different phases is not conceptually hard, although it can bite you a bit with Macros in Scheme.

<comment><USER9> In my project, [http://billsix.github.io/cac.html](http://billsix.github.io/cac.html), the Compile-Time language is the same as the runtime language. Tests are collocated with procedure definitions, but evaluate only at Compile-Time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is a very interesting language, but the documentation on its main page is sparse. The highlighted features leave a lot open. I wonder how exactly it compares to C, and what's it's relation in terms of safety to Ada and Rust. More importantly, what kind of memory management does it use? Does it have a GC?

If it has a GC, I'd find it even more interesting...

<comment><USER21> I wondered about memory management too considering this language is supposed to "prioritize safety". Memory is manually managed though, which you can see from their HashMap example on the website.

The description indeed leaves a lot open to interpretation. They should have a brief overview that uses some standard terminology to describe Zig.

<comment><USER22> That's when using a custom allocator though, browsing through the other examples it doesn't look like there's any manual memory management going on but that could just be the examples chosen.

<comment><USER21> But it does an explicit free operation, and no mention of preventing double- frees, which to me implies it's unsafe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Regarding Rust:

> There is another thing I noticed, and I hope someone from the Rust community > can correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like Rust also special cased > format_args! in the compiler by making it a built-in. If my understanding is > correct, this would make Zig stand out as the only language of the three > mentioned here which does not special case string formatting in the compiler > and instead exposes enough power to accomplish this task in userland.

It depends what you mean by "userland". Rust has long supported procedural macros, albeit not on stable compiler versions until recently (and still only hackily there). Procedural macros, a.k.a. compiler plugins, are written in Rust, but work differently from compile-time function evaluation. With CTFE, the code running at compile time lives in the same "world" as the rest of the code being compiled, in a sort of pretend version of the target environment where you can't do things like call external functions. Rust compiler plugins are just separate libraries that get compiled for the host architecture and loaded into the compiler process (which is less scary than it sounds; the build process "just works" thanks to Cargo, and Rust's safety ensures you don't stomp on random compiler state). You have access to the full language and can call whatever you want, even do things like file I/O if needed; on the other hand, you're in a separate environment and can't just name variables, functions, etc. from the runtime world.

Currently, Rust compiler plugins are purely syntactic: you can look at the tokens of the macro invocation and that's it. You can't, say, ask the compiler for the definition of a type or the value of a named constant; plugins are executed too early for that. I think it'd be nice if that changed in the future, but it would be hard to implement without giving up the ability to emit arbitrary syntax as the output of the macro; there would be trouble with circular dependencies (think type inference).

But what currently exists is enough to implement safe printf, in conjunction with Rust's type system. format_args! is built into the compiler, so it could cheat, but it doesn't; like user-defined macros it's purely syntactic. The following Rust code:

        println!("a={} b={}", a, b);

expands to something like this (I've simplified it a bit):

        _print(Arguments::new_v1(&["a=", " b=", "\n"],
                                 &[ArgumentV1::new(&a, Display::fmt),
                                   ArgumentV1::new(&b, Display::fmt)]));

format_args! parses the format string and splits it up, and separates the arguments into a series of calls, without needing to know the types of a and b. ArgumentV1::new is just a regular generic function that can be called with any type implementing the Display trait. (Actually, it depends on the second argument, which is a function, but the details aren't important; there's nothing particularly special happening.)

Arguably it's nicer to be able to know the types of the arguments within the format parsing routine, and other use cases require that kind of feedback, but Rust's approach works pretty well here.

By the way, Rust _also_ has a Turing-complete type system and a rudimentary form of compile-time function evaluation, which in the future might be powerful enough to express code similar to the Zig implementation, but for now it's not really designed for that sort of thing.

Sidenote: While C's metaprogramming is rather limited, C++14 CTFE is pretty powerful and you can parse format strings at compile time there too:

[https://akrzemi1.wordpress.com/2011/05/11/parsing-strings- at...](https://akrzemi1.wordpress.com/2011/05/11/parsing-strings-at-compile- time-part-i/)

</comment><comment><USER24> How did andrewrk disable allowing people to follow him on github? :-o

<comment><USER25> It doesn't look like he disabled it, I can follow him.</comment></comment>


Buy somebody lunch - <AUTHOR> http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/08/buy-somebody-lu.php <comment><USER2> This can backfire in a big way...I will post this in the hopes the person I'm talking about doesn't read this website (I find it unlikely that she does).

I met a girl who seemed very cool. She was really smart, into computers (she's a programmer), funny, etc. etc. Basically everything that I look for in a good friend.

SO I invited her out to grab some beer one night.

Now, the thing is...I'm a bit of a beer snob. I invited her to go to my favorite beer drinking place...a place which features nearly 500 varieties of imported and microbrewed beer...all really great stuff.

Well, when we got there, I ordered a beer that is ~$20 a bottle (it is a very very limited run that new belgium did, and is quite good).

Her, not being a beer nerd at all, found a beer she liked, and ordered 3-4 of them...(it was a lambic from Belgium).

Now, because I'm a nice guy, near the end of the evening, I got up and talked to one of the bartenders and paid the check... The reason I did this was mostly because this girl was not a beer snob in any way, and probably had no clue how expensive what she was drinking was.

This girl decided that this gesture was me in some way trying to hit on her, and now refuses to talk to me. :(.

Some people get really weirded out when you try and do nice things for them, so be careful. Some people even go so far as thinking that you're offering to buy them lunch because you think they can't afford it.

Tread lightly, that's all I'm saying...

<comment><USER3> Even from this angle it sounds like you were trying to hit on this person. For some reason paying for food with the opposite sex is seen as courtship behavior. Try it with a (straight) man and see if he thinks that you are hitting on him. With amusing exceptions, its unlikely that he'll take offense.

<comment><USER2> Well...the thing is that I normally _DO_ pay for my male friends.

If I call them up and say ask them to go out, they're usually all broke (mostly students). I'll pay because, to me, its worth the extra few bucks to have somebody to drink with...

(or are you saying that people are just being irrational? Your last sentence makes me believe so.)

<comment><USER3> _Well...the thing is that I normally DO pay for my male friends._

Then you know exaclty what I'm talking about. My point is that gestures can mean different things when performed for men and for women. There's nothing irrational about it.

<comment><USER4> I was once friend-zoned by a young lady I was interested in, and got to listen to a whole lot of talk about other guys. In particular, there was one gentleman that got upset with her because he thought she was, quote, leading him on.

"Mary, what do you do with him?"

"Oh, movies, dinner, that sort of thing."

"Who pays for these?"

"He does."

"And he says you're leading him on?"

"Yeah, what's up with that?"

"That's because you're leading him on."

Some time later I realized that Mary (not her real name) had a persistent habit of using people, and I began spending my time with people who did not value me solely for what I could do for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When I used to have a lot more disposable income I used to do this kind of thing all the time. If I would go out to eat with friends, I would very frequently make a habit of paying for everything.

I'm not sure why I did it, honestly. I think I just wanted to do something nice. I also figured it would just be a nice gesture to "take care of the bill" so that everyone else wouldn't have to worry about it and could maybe relax and enjoy the rest of their evening without the possibility of them being concerned about how much money they had spent. I think on some level I felt guilty about other people spending money. And when I would buy someone a meal or buy them a few drinks I wouldn't want or expect anything out of it. To be honest, it made me a little uncomfortable if people made a big deal about it or even said anything more than "Thanks".

I've had times in my life when I've had extra money to spend and had times when money has been tight. And I know I've experienced occasions where money is tight and you go out for a meal with friends and spend a portion of the night feeling guilty that you're spending money. I think that when I had extra money, I just wanted to make sure that no one was feeling that way. I just wanted to give them the opportunity to enjoy the night, or enjoy lunch, or whatever it was we were doing.

<comment><USER6> I generally don't pick up the tab when going as a group. For one thing it gets expensive really fast, and secondly you just don't get the same "mileage" from it.

The amount of good will you receive when paying for a 1v1 meal is a lot greater than the good will you receive when paying for the whole table. It's the personal touch I suppose, the feeling that you did it for him/her, as opposed to "them".

<comment><USER5> This goes back to the issue of, 'Why are you doing it?'.

In my situation I wasn't doing it to receive any "amount of good". I was just doing it to do my friends a small gesture. And if I could do 5 friends a small gesture, that's probably more gratifying to me than doing only 1 of my friends a small gesture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's interesting to read the responses here from a population that tend to be more technically focused than people focused. (I'm included)

We're all trying to reverse engineer the intent of the acquaintance. The lunch-buyers out there are much less calculating; they just like hanging out with people at lunch!

</comment><comment><USER8> "Instead of buying things, we should buy memories...Money spent on experiences - vacations or theater tickets or meals out - makes you happier than money spent on material goods"

It's funny, because my intuitions always ran the other way--you should spend money on something you'll enjoy over and over again, not just a single experience that ends soon. The fallacy, of course, is that a sufficiently good experience is remembered again and again, and that is often more valuable than a durable good you've grown tired of (or a higher number on your online banking site for you to look at).

<comment><USER9> For me, a good compromise is to buy supplies for making stuff. Then I have the experience of creation, which I love, and I also have the finished product. When I visit art shows, I often think "I want to learn how to do that." I'd much rather make art than buy it (with some exceptions that are beyond my budget for the present).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's a fine line between doing a nice gesture for a friend simply because you want to and doing it for an acquaintance in order to earn favor. If you're the least bit phony, it will show and it will backfire. Sounds like your friend was the real deal. Good for him and good for you!

<comment><USER11> If I am going to be around a phony person I'd rather get a sandwich out of it than not. Since the act of buying lunch doesn't actually make someone phony, I don't see a downside.

<comment><USER12> In this case, how do you know the act isn't phony? If you know that person is sometimes phony, you'll be left wondering whether anything they do for you is insincere, including buying lunch. I couldn't accept it if I smell something off about their intentions.

<comment><USER11> I think there are worse things than a lunch paid for someone who is insincere (such as having to pay for lunch with someone who is insincere). It's not really worth worrying about to me actually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have known someone like this. In his case he was doing it for two reasons (1) he's a genuinely nice person and enjoys doing things for people and (2) he knows that it can sometimes "grease the wheels:" that is, it leaves the other person with a positive memory of him that can be useful later.

The take home message though is that his primary motivation is just his good nature; the benefit is a side effect.

</comment><comment><USER14> Why did him buying the lunch make any difference? If he didn't buy the lunch would he be less of a good guy?

<comment><USER15> I feel like a real jerk for even mentioning this, so first let me say it sounds like this guy was a really good guy.

But this is a researched social phenomenon known as the reciprocity effect. He's done something for you, so now you feel like you somehow owe him something in return. Often that's "paid back" by positive social feelings. I really hoped I could find a solid citation for you, but the basis of it is found in Robert Cialdini's excellent book "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion".

[This is as close as I could get for sourcing, I apologize for the lack of quality on the subject: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm_of_reciprocity>]

<comment><USER16> There's also the effect that when you do a favor for someone, you feel better about them.

 _If you want to make a friend, let someone do you a favor._ \-- Benjamin Franklin

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think the main point here doesn't even have to do with the money. Everyone feel appreciation differently. Many people would think fondly of you if you just take the time to ask how they are doing, and really care to hear the answer. It doesn't even have to be of monetary value at all.

</comment><comment><USER18> Anyone want to buy me lunch?

<comment><USER19> If you go near Seattle, write me and I'll buy you a lunch :)

<comment><USER20> A frozen one ? :)

<comment><USER19> A frozen two!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I do this all the time! Yet, I am not sure if the close friendship with these people is a cause or effect of the lunch. But looking back, I think I get this cool fun friend vibe from these people at our very first meeting.

I don't use this as a technique. I don't know if it scales:)

</comment><comment><USER22> I wonder if paying for someone's lunch might, in some cases, might make them feel less friendly towards you. For example, if they feel as if they owe you something and are not in a position to return the favor. They may start avoiding you in that case.

</comment><comment><USER23> continuing the fine tradition of blogs extrapolating general principles from anecdotes...

</comment><comment><USER20> This just goes on to prove that "The way to a man's heart is through his stomach" :)

As a side note I got to say that I would've stopped going to the lunch with a person who'd kept insisting on paying all the time. If not for any other reason, but for the fact that I just feel plain uncomfortable with this kind of arrangement as it clearly puts me in debt to that person. Paying back with a friendship feels wrong and "He is that kind of person" is not an excuse enough.

<comment><USER24> Agreed. Although it's entirely possible that we aren't normal; I despise debt in any form, which clearly is not an attitude shared by large portions of the population.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> That guy must have a killer network.

</comment><comment><USER26> I thought you were referring to pay lunch to hungry people...

</comment><comment><USER27> Any hackers in Cincinnati? I'll buy lunch sometime :)

</comment><comment><USER28> I like the fact that the guy's obviously overweight. I'm still giggling, in fact.</comment>