Anonymous Israeli blogger Eishton offers a deal to the Israel Defense Forces - <AUTHOR> http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/diplomania/anonymous-israeli-blogger-eishton-offers-a-deal-to-the-idf-1.489869 <comment><USER2> Exposing the IDF propaganda is going to get this guy in a lot of hot water. I wish him strength, he's going to need it.

One thing I don't get is that he clearly isn't anonymous to the IDF anymore, so why continue the secrecy towards the public?

<comment><USER3> Propaganda that appears to be effective, since simply mentioning it brought your comment several steps into the grey.

<comment><USER4> The reason this is done is mostly to avoid attaching social stigma to the dead person's family, and for the country to give the parents something, because, you know, their son is dead.

There was a story about a soldier who had deserted, and when MPs found him, he ran away, was hit by a car crossing the street and died. He was considered to have died in the line of duty. You can call that propaganda, or being kind to people who just lost their son.

People here in Israel don't care that much about the global number of dead in the IDF per year as a metric of how bad things are here, and you might see how calling something most people see as kindness granted to grieving people 'propaganda', which is a loaded word, is offensive.

This is, of course, not to say that I think the IDF is right here - I think they're both totally in the wrong and being idiots here at the same time.

<comment><USER5> People have a right to truth that affects them, even if it makes them unhappy or angry. It is utterly patronizing to lie about the cause of death. Yes it's unfortunate. So? Have you ever lost someone to something stupid? Would you prefer having been lied to? BS. Also, if the IDF cared so much, why not let people who don't want to be in it go? "They found him, he ran away" kinda sounds like they saw him, but didn't move, and he just leaped into traffic. Not having been there I wouldn't know either way, but couldn't you just as well have said "they chased him into traffic"? But that would make it rather obvious that the motivations for not giving out the facts is to save the face of the IDF, not to protect anyone. To me it just adds insult to injury.

<comment><USER6> I think you misunderstood. The family knows the circumstances. Its just that 'committed suicide' isn't published to the public.

<comment><USER5> Yes, I was kinda rambling more than responding to anything actually related this story.. sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm Israeli, former IDF soldier and unfortunately had a family member KIA a few years back. I feel I have some idea of how the IDF treats families of KIA and have followed the story since Barak Ravid's first report. Here's my feeble attempt at hindering the redditization of HN:

1\. Eishton story concerned fatality figures in the IDF's yearly Memorial Day press release. It has no relevance to KIA numbers in a specific conflict, as AlexMuir seems to think. Neither Eishton nor Ravid claim that.

2\. Eishton's main claim is that the IDF didn't publish the fact that some of the soldiers actually committed suicide or died in car accidents etc. It's actually already known the IDF leaves the cause of death empty in case of suicide in order to spare the families' feelings (again, remember it's a press release rather than actual statistics).

3\. Eishton was questioned about the source of the leak, which was apparently a soldier in active service. He refused to answer and basically that was the end of that (though I assume the IDF is still trying to find the leak on its end).

4\. Eishton's original blog post had very little publicity. What initiated the investigation were complaints by families of soldiers who committed suicide, which were upset their sons' names and cause of death were now exposed.

5\. Contrary to jacquesm's assertion, in reality Eishton faces exactly zero risk (even if he was "exposing propaganda"). He enjoys his newfound celebrity status and now gives the IDF "a 24 hour ultimatum" to release data and says he'd "proudly go to jail" if he was, but knows full well - as does everyone else - that he doesn't face any meaningful penalty. As a bonus exercise, you might want to google "Anat Kamm" and "Bradley Manning", or perhaps "Uri Blau" and "Judith Miller". Compare and contrast.

6\. Nivertech's comment re: Judaism and suicide is correct, but only effective for the Orthodox (most of whom don't serve in the IDF anyway). It is not applicable for most Israelis - unfortunately, I speak from personal experience.

PS. Incidentally, the number of soldiers committing suicide has been shown to be within the average for men aged 18-21, and declining. There's a reason for this: In today's IDF it's enough to tell a military Psychiatric Officer you're contemplating suicide to be relieved from service almost instantly.

<comment><USER8> Thank you for your intelligent comment. It's a hard topic and even questions with easy answers end up descending into a moral and historical quagmire.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I personally knew of one of these 126 people, and there was no conspiracy behind it. Please leave these people alone, their families are having enough of a hard time as it is.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's possible that the families themselves ask IDF to not disclose that their children committed suicide.

The reason is that they can't be buried in Jewish cemetery together with other Jews, instead they buried in an area of the cemetery removed from all others. Nor do they have to sit shivah.

[http://www.askmoses.com/en/article/165,1311/Can-a-suicide- vi...](http://www.askmoses.com/en/article/165,1311/Can-a-suicide-victim-be- buried-in-a-Jewish-cemetery.html)

<comment><USER7> That's in fact exactly what happened (but not because of the religious reason - that's only really applicable the orthodox, who don't serve in the IDF to begin with)

<comment><USER10> The Orthodox are the ones who decided who and how can be buried, it's called Chevra kadisha [1].

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevra_kadisha>

<comment><USER7> I know Hevra Kadisha, I've lived in Israel all my life :)

In reality, they're not too interested in inflicting religious laws on those who don't follow them, and the occasional overzealous rabbi is easily dismissed by going to another provider, such as the secular burial services now growing in popularity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm unclear what crime this blogger committed? Is the blogger even in Israel? Using my American mindset, isn't a reporter relatively immune from prosecution as a publisher of stuff as long as they didn't break into computer systems themselves? The NYT isn't being prosecuted for publishing Wikileaks stuff, etc...

<comment><USER12> Here's the explanation: [http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/diplomania/idf-probe-of- anonymo...](http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/diplomania/idf-probe-of-anonymous- blogger-isn-t-about-security-it-s-about-sources.premium-1.485145)

This blogger, eishton, investigates suicides in general and in the IDF in particular. He claims that suicides are more common in the military than among civilians.

Anyway, Haaretz reports that the police has begun investigating him after receiving complaints from families of soldiers who had committed suicide that the blogger obtained private records pertaining to their loved ones' death. The military police wants to find out who the soldiers who leaked that sensitive, personal information are.

Because this is not an issue of national security, Haaretz chastises the IDF for using the police to exert pressure on a journalist so that they could find the leak.

<comment><USER13> > This blogger, eishton, investigates suicides in general and in the IDF in > particular. He claims that suicides are more common in the military than > among civilians.

This seems unsurprising. Aren't there more suicides in general in high-stress places?

<comment><USER5> Of course it's not surprising, it's just not helpful to obfusctate it; how can you try to prevent/improve something you deny to exist in the first place?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I hate when news sites publish an article that mentions a blog or website but then almost never give a link for it. Anyone know why?

Anyway, here is Google's English translated version of Eishton's blog--> [http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=iw&tl...](http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=iw&tl=en&u=eishton.wordpress.com)

</comment><comment><USER8> Comment deleted.

Fuck it, I can't even be arsed. There's so much bullshit and so many wankers that come out of the woodwork when this sort of topic gets raised. I've flagged the whole story. HN is better without this sort of shit.

<comment><USER15> This is a pretty strong allegation, and requires evidence. Do you have any? For example, can you quote any IDF KIA stats that seem to include suicides?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> That's the problem when you live in a state with permanent martial law. You get tortured/jailed/killed for doing nothing wrong.

<comment><USER7> As an Israeli, it's news to me I live under permanent martial law. You might want to read up on this.

<comment><USER16> When engaged in war a country does not need explicit martial law as it is under no law at all.</comment></comment></comment>


Anger Management - <AUTHOR> https://genevievefiles.blogspot.com/2020/04/anger-management.html <comment><USER3> I appreciate the article, OP.

I have a similar relationship with album "The '59 Sound" by The Gaslight Anthem and especially with the title track. My younger sister took her own life on Memorial Day weekend of 2014. If you've never had the misfortune of losing a loved one to suicide, everyone around you will speak about it in a way that erases their agency as much as possible ("they were sick, they weren't perceiving reality," etc). And this is helpful, to avoid blaming oneself, and also in a wider, civic-duty sense, to help people view suicidal ideation as a syndrome that responds to treatment, since it so often does.

This did not help me grieve her, though, since the young woman I lost was not demented, as my grandparents were before they passed, but sensitive and insightful. Fallon's lyrics (written in response to the passing of a loved one of his own) are so respectful of the deceased, expressing only his hope that the moment of death was peaceful and not regretful, contextualized through their shared experience. I really needed this perspective at the time, and six years later listening to the song without crying my eyes out is still touch- and-go for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad you found a way to grieve.

There are a lot of problems with how we discuss suicide. It's a tough subject and it's often not done well. It's something I sometimes comment on because I have attempted suicide and I still wrestle with suicidal ideation at times and I'm pretty dissatisfied with the way the subject is typically handled.

Thank you for commenting.

(I'm the author, in case that isn't obvious.)

<comment><USER4> > There are a lot of problems with how we discuss suicide

I used to be heavily suicidal, and occasionally have bouts of suicidal ideation to this day. I found that most of the time when I spoke to other people about how I was feeling, I was treated like I was some kind of fragile human being who needed wrapping in cotton wool. It really didn't help at all, it was demeaning, I felt like I was broken goods. I've never experienced that kind of treatment or feeling when talking about other mental health issues like ADHD or anxiety.

The worst was when people told me "things will get better", as things progressively got worse. It wasn't until I realised that it might not get better and accepted it that I was able to move forward.

I guess it's hard if you've never felt suicidal to empathise, and people get worried that something they say or do might push you over the edge, nobody wants to be responsible for someone killing themselves.

I generally don't talk to people about suicide these days, I don't think anything good comes from it, I try to talk about what I think it causing my negative emotions instead. I think it's borderline emotionally abusive to tell someone you're thinking of killing yourself, it makes people feel responsible for you and your actions. I had a former friend try to kill herself because of me, and it's the most narcissistic, emotionally abusive thing I've ever been subjected to, luckily I was in a state of mind at the time that I understood it wasn't at all my fault and that I wasn't responsible for her actions.

I do think it's something that we should be able to talk to our friends about, but education and awareness surrounding suicide is fucking lacking for most people. I find that it's only useful to talk to mental health practitioner and within support groups (I attend a general mens' mental health group). The message seems to be "you're a selfish bastard if you kill yourself", which really doesn't help. It just invalidated my emotions, I wanted to kill myself and now I felt guilty about it too. Something like 75% of men who kill themselves never seek help and I completely understand why.

<comment><USER5> I'm so sorry you experienced this. I have had the same reactions from people, and the actions you mentioned people take in the first paragraph has been especially hurtful. In addition to whatever you're trying to heal yourself of, you get start to feel broken, as you said. This discourages people even more from seeking help, and people in this mental state need to ask for help, because mental health conditions limit your brain from really thinking straight on how to get the best help.

In regards to your comment about men's suicide rate--this is horrible and believed to be the result of men socially being discouraged by other men from discussing suicide or deep emotional issues (not to blame other men--their response, even though they need to take responsibility for it, is likely shaped by the cultural standards we put on men and women).

The belief, btw, comes from the fact that women actually have a much higher rate of depression than men do, but a much lower suicide rate. Idk if a study was done, but the theory is it's more accepted and expected in strong female friendships to share deep emotional struggles and expect support than it is in strong male friendships.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Def Leppard "Behind the Music" talks about the drummer's car accident and recovery.

His seatbelt cut off his arm, and the family living at a nearby farmhouse included a nurse, who initially responded.

When recovering from limb injuries, there's some surprising possible side effects:

1) infection or circulation problems can kill other limbs. People with kidney damage or sepsis often lose all four limbs.

2) Overexerting during recovery (or even later) can cause an overuse injury to the healthy limb. For example, climbing out of a bathtub with one arm can cause nerve or muscle damage that effectively kills the good arm.

3) The embedded Time reporter during the Iraq war who threw the sticky bomb out of his team's Humvee lost his hand. He initially tried a modern prosthetic, but changed to a hook since it was 100% reliable (strong, waterproof, certain), and the fake hand wasn't.

For One Reporter, Embedding Is Journalistic Folly

[https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=642278...](https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6422782)

<comment><USER7> AIUI by some convention people in war are divided into combatants and noncombatants. To remain in the latter group you have to maintain a non- hostile position. By using a bomb (which sounds very weird for an experienced reporter to do) they'd be becoming combatants and so reasonable targets for the other side. If the NPR story covers this, I can't read it, blocked.

<comment><USER8> Although you have completely misinterpreted the situation the article does touch on the issues you have raised. Perhaps if you adopted an attitude of engagement rather than reflexively blocking and avoiding things which you feel go against your worldview, you'd learn something.

<comment><USER7> I should not have posted because I did not read the article. However I did not read it not from laziness but because it was blocked. No text = no read.

<comment><USER8> Ah I see, I thought you meant you blocked the poster which would be a very odd thing to see on HN! Apologies. Where are you that NPR is blocked? I'm in the UK, and even if I decline their data protection stuff they take me to a plaintext site. I suspect they do it to annoy people but I actually really love it

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you clicked on this article because you wanted to read about anger management, you may be disappointed. In the event you were, I highly recommend the book, "Feeling Good" by David Burns: [https://www.amazon.com/David-M-D- Burns-Feeling-Good/dp/B00GY...](https://www.amazon.com/David-M-D-Burns- Feeling-Good/dp/B00GYUBBRG)

Burns turned his practice into a platform, featuring a very active podcast. He's working with people on a mobile app and is publishing the sequel to "Feeling Good" (Feeling Great), scheduled for publication Sept 2020: [https://feelinggood.com/](https://feelinggood.com/)

The podcast is a treasure trove of information. If you can tolerate the slow pace of the show, you can learn a lot.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm the author. It absolutely is about anger management.

Sorry it doesn't seem to be your cup of tea, but it wasn't misnamed or something.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for writing the article. Fortunately, I can't relate, but it gave me some insight into the inner lives of people I know and love who probably could relate. It will help me more effectively empathize with them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In the 90s in the USA, the grunge movement ruled rock music. We were told, by the music critics of the day, that this was for the greatest good, that rock music was finally returning to authenticity after the excesses of 1980s hair metal.

But closer examination of 1980s metal reveals that it doesn't want for genuine, heartfelt angst, boiling below the surface. I realized this upon relistening to a song from the dusk of hair metal's golden era: "Heaven" by Warrant, and realizing that it was the blue-collar lament of an aging factory worker who had been put out of a job, and hadn't much to look forward to except the grave -- and the continued love of his wife, for whom he would make every effort no matter how meager.

It seems this author came to a similar conclusion, and that's heartening.

<comment><USER6> I'm involved in the online music biz.

What's going on is this:

\- current Top 40 rarely has guitar. Basically Taylor Swift and Lil Wayne use one as a prop, and that's it.

\- but Youtube is teeming with young adult virtuoso electric guitarists. Check out Polyphia (Tim Henson), Covet (Yvette Young, San Jose!), Periphery, Mel.

\- Grunge is misunderstood. Kurt Cobain was a good guitar player, and he made his band practise for months before their first album. Same with Soundgarden, etc. Those bands didn't need autotune.

\- Metal fans ate their own: no loyalty. So 70s and 80s rock bands still tour, and 90s and oughts are scraping by. See the Youtube "Punk Rock MBA" channel for detailed analysis.

\- 70s and 80s rock bands have tremendous respect online now. View counts on Skid Row, Metallica, Bonjovi, etc. are huge. Their musicianship is acknowledged, and the niche each band occupied is now understood and appreciated.

<comment><USER12> I don't play the guitar: I'm a keyboard person. But I'm very concerned about the future of the guitar market.

Over the last three years there have been numerous articles about how the guitar industry is in serious trouble. Electric guitar sales have dropped by a third over the last decade, and profits are way down. Guitar Center is in trouble. Gibson is bankrupt. On the other hand, Rolling Stone put out an article about how Guitars are Doing Just Fine Thank You Very Much. ([https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/guitars-are- ge...](https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/guitars-are-getting-more- popular-so-why-do-we-think-theyre-dying-630446/)). It feels very... apologetic. So I don't know what to think.

Here's what I know: DAWs, electronic production tools, synthesizers, etc., are doing very well. Today's underground seems to have a lot of rap, synth metal (NiN, industrial, whatnot), EDM, even pop. [I'm none of those things]. Is the garage band going away, to be replaced with the bedroom producer?

<comment><USER13> As a guitarist and hobbyist bedroom producer for 15+ years, here's what I think is happening to the guitar market: the middle is falling out.

Cheap guitars were previously way too expensive. I'm talking about things like the no-name starter packs you'd get from Frys, or even the equivalents from Squire. They were riding on lack of competition and brand clout, and they'd been disrupted by companies that are happy to sell guitars of similar quality for half the price. It has never been more affordable to start playing guitar. I think that's great.

The high-end guitar market has some fascinating and innovative entrants. Strandberg stands out as king here. They build absolutely stunning guitars and IMO they've got an impressive adoption rate for something so expensive (2-3K). There are a surprisingly large number of high end guitar manufacturers targeting this market.

The 500-850$ market feels like it's got a ton of options, but it's flooded with noise. Some dead wood needs to burn off, I think.

I think amp companies are at much greater risk. First, the processing you can get out of the box now is just unreal. $100 for a preamp, and something like neural/toneforge (or even impulse responses + free amp sims) will get tones that compete with very expensive gear. A distant second but interesting: millenials are all broke and living in apartments / cities. You can't really have a giant loud amp in that environment. If you're not gigging, you no longer need to own one at all.

> Is the garage band going away, to be replaced with the bedroom producer?

At least partially, and for the best: the demand for being in a garage band _should_ fall. Lots of people were in only in bands because they couldn't self-serve across as many instruments as they'd like. That's much easier now for a bunch of reasons.

There's a middle ground too. I see a lot of "bedroom bands" – with bedroom production but the multi-member aspect of a garage band.

\----

Another random thought: guitars are one of those products that strongly requires showrooming. Buying a guitar without feeling and hearing it is tough. This is one of the few things keeping guitar center alive. If a company figures out how to be warby parker for guitars, letting me pick five and mail four back, they could stand to make a bunch of money. This pairs really well with all the up and coming guitar brands trying to break into the market via youtubers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Thank you for this article.

I don't have the words to express how this article so accurately reflects my experience, other than gratitude that you have put this into words for me.

During Kavanaugh I told my partner that I would never stop being angry. He was shocked and eventually understood what I meant, which was that violent anger would evolve into the kind of stewing anger that would ultimately protect me, and us.

Thank you for caring. Thank you for caring for my soul. I wish I had the words to express to you how meaningful this post was to me.

</comment><comment><USER15> I too (as other commentators did) appreciate this article. My relationship with music has always been less predictable and easy to understand than I'd like it to be. I have always loved music, but as I've gotten older and stabler and healed more from earlier psychological hardships (and maybe just matured from a young adult into an adult), my connection to it and its ability to make me feel have receded. For some reason, it is only in my moments of greatest need that I am able to reach inside and access an extremely strong, resonant connection -- whether it is listening to it, or writing it.

But maybe it's that way for a reason. I still have scars on my arm from putting my fist through a glass window as an angsty teen. They remind me of how I too could be someone who "could have lost his second arm had he lost the battle to his inner demons." I probably would have struggled to articulate this earlier, but as the article states, "...I learned to stop just stewing and being mad and wallowing in that feeling. I learned to do something about things that made me mad and this was the best thing I ever learned." This hits home for me. I was a lot more rootlessly, aimlessly, existentially depressed earlier on in my life and in my career. Depressed in a way that made it very easy for me to have a very strong and particular kind of connection to music, but which served as a stand-in for an inability to do something about my woes. Once I began to get better at solving the root causes of my woes, my life improved, but that very specific kind of connection to music faded. I was never a professional, but perhaps what's true for the drummer is true for me: "The music was still in there. It just needed to be redirected elsewhere."

Thanks again for this article, OP.

</comment><comment><USER16> I appreciate the relationship between anger and depression. I was a very angry child - but angry young boys are not tolerated. I became a depressed young boy instead, and the world seemed much happier with that.

Recognizing that you're saturated in an emotion is definitely important. It is difficult to even notice, but stepping back from it an analyzing it (through therapy, meditation, counseling, friendship) is really all we have. It's a constant task to have moments of self-awareness that the emotion has taken control. That in itself can breed resentment.

I haven't really found a cure for these things, but strangely they are not all negative. I think people who can manage some distance from these types of emotions are extraordinarily empathetic.

<comment><USER17> I feel like I went through a similar experience growing up; Any angry outburst was met with harsh punishment.

I remember reading somewhere that depression can sometimes be the result of repressing anger, which we may have needed to do to survive growing up and is now a bad habit we hang on to.

<comment><USER18> > repressing anger, which we may have needed to do to survive growing up and > is now a bad habit we hang on to

I still think it's a necessity. Many folks in authority have no tolerance for any anger but their own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow. Thank you so much for this. I've struggled with the exact same things and have found the moments when men show me the kindness and respect that I, previous to the rape, had just expected of myself and everyone, are the most healing ones. You can't always afford to wait for those though. And I appreciate you sharing your experience on how to heal when no one else is around.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for commenting.

 _I 've struggled with the exact same things and have found the moments when men show me the kindness and respect that I, previous to the rape, had just expected of myself and everyone, are the most healing ones._

I wanted to pull this out and emphasize it. This is a mostly male forum and decent men often feel helpless and like there isn't anything they can do to counterbalance the atrocities done by other men.

Humans generally tend to feel like "nuke it from orbit" is the only useful response to really bad things and if they can't do something akin to that, they feel they aren't making any difference at all. But just being kind and respectful and decent to someone stressed out who doesn't trust you because you are male or white or rich or whatever and someone like you burned them really badly at one time is the most powerful thing you can do to help them heal, help them put down their baggage and foster a more civil world in which atrocities are less likely to be the norm.

We currently have things like the #MeToo movement, so there is currently a lot of visibility for the fact that a lot of men behave really badly towards women and it's actually pretty problematic because decent guys are scared to be kind for fear of being accused of being a rapist or something. So I wanted to emphasize that I'm not the only woman who was raped who feels like the best thing a man can do is just be kind and respectful and decent to me and act like "that's normal" and not anything special.

And maybe that will empower some of the men here to feel like they are making a meaningful difference to just be decent and that's it. No war paint or chest beating or grand standing or the like required.

<comment><USER18> > Humans generally tend to feel like "nuke it from orbit" is the only useful > response to really bad things and if they can't do something akin to that, > they feel they aren't making any difference at all.

This is a massively useful observation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have similar, extreme anger issues due to how I was mistreated in my childhood (both physical and mental abuse + abandonment). I get better, from time to time, and then I get worse, like a yoyo for half a century. I have made my peace with the thought that I'll never get out of it, because when my anger boils up it instantly burns every fibre of my mind and body. I worry that my children are unwittingly absorbing my anger. Thank you for writing this, and sharing with us.

<comment><USER20> I don't know how to write it well but hang in there! The fact that you worry about your children means you are a great person. Take care.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I deeply sympathize with the OP.

One thing I've found to help is to channel that anger in productive ways.

I have in the past worked on things like increasing the usability of censorship circumvention technologies, advocated for strong encryption, pushed for the decriminalization of activities between consenting adults, and advocated for tech being more inclusive.

Anyways, I did not advocate these things because of an abstract ideology.

I advocated these things I want children and adults who are failed by the authority figures in their lives to be able to find resources, take legal action, and if the courts fail them to be able to be able exercise their 1st Amendement rights. (Truth is an absolute defense against libel in the USA)

I've seen many an op-eds lately noting that it is OK that you may not be as productive during this crisis, and that it is normal to have trouble focusing during a traumatic situation.

That is a wonderful sentiment, and I hope that when we emerge from this crisis, we will emerge with more sympathy for those who have suffered trauma and value the unique perspective they bring to the table, especially in the privacy and security spaces. (People who've faced threats are very good at threat modeling.)

Also, I hate to network in such a serious topic, but if anyone reading this is looking for a privacy and security expert with additional experience in policy and UX, my twitter handle is the same as my HN username (@dontbenebby) and has open DMs. I was recently laid off, and am happy to forward a CV.

(Also feel free to DM if you just need to talk. We're all in this together)

<comment><AUTHOR> I run r/GigWorks. You could check the Welcome message there for some links to online platforms where you may be able to find some short term work while looking for a more permanent position.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is great OP. I shared with my SO who also struggles with anger. I thought a lot of this mirrored things she has expressed and she could relate.

A very different cause for sure but it's been a long road for her to become aware of the anger and ultimately how interested she is in finding a more effective shield. I think she doesn't trust deep down there is anything more effective, even at the high emotional cost.

</comment><comment><USER23> I loved this article. She nails it.

I've had that anger before. It even extends to ruminating about the events - <USER2> assume that's protective too, as maybe I think that if I think about things long enough it cant happen to me again?

Medication sometimes seems to be the only thing that can pull me out of that rabbit hole of rumination.

More recently, I've had some success with magnesium l-threonate, as it's the only form of magnesium that crosses the blood brain barrier (magtein it's sometimes labeled as). It's quite calming and increases mental endurance.

 _Effects of Elevation of Brain Magnesium on Fear Conditioning, Fear Extinction, and Synaptic Plasticity in the Infralimbic Prefrontal Cortex and Lateral Amygdala_ [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6623582/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6623582/)

<comment><AUTHOR> _I've had that anger before. It even extends to ruminating about the events - I assume that's protective too, as maybe I think that if I think about things long enough it cant happen to me again?_

I'm prone to rumination and at some point I learned to turn that into a positive. When I was younger, I would get stuck in mental loops of imagining some negative outcome, but I started asking myself "What outcome do you want?" and trying to use rumination as a problem-solving tool to try to imagine how you get there from here.

So I imagine X social problem -- argument with a friend, for example -- and instead of getting into a ball of fury about how I'm sure this will go badly, stop at that point where I am imagining it going south and ask "What reply would move it in a better direction?" basically. Then iterate from there until it goes from reliving some nightmare scenario over and over to imagining various potential solutions.

It's been wonderfully life changing.

 _More recently, I've had some success with magnesium l-threonate_

Working on my health has been enormously helpful in improving my ability to manage my mood. When I'm under the weather, I'm much more prone to stewing for various reasons. Magnesium deficiency is one of the things I'm prone to and have to work at combating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I have learned anger management the hard way. In my past, We a had team who approves most of the deployments for our team and it was annoying because they used to take a crazy amount of time to respond even for small requests, I was angry because I had caught them on Youtube and chilling on the day when I was worried about my deployment for 6 hours. So, I used to get really annoyed and had to fight with them often. Then I learned to correct myself and learned ways around to fix the problem rather than make the situation worse. Not only on the professional front but also personally I had to deal with a lot of anger issues, so I believe it all comes down to how supportive you are to yourself and how effectively you tackle any problem.

</comment><comment><USER25> Another angle which might help someone is introspection: observing and understanding how your thoughts, physical sensations, and emotional states are all tied together and feeding each other. Meditation helped me through some rough spots. Here's one explicit resource on anger but it's really a more general tool.

[https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/290963/anger-by- thi...](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/290963/anger-by-thich-nhat- hanh/)

</comment><comment><USER26> "I think hurt people tend to cling to their anger because they hope to use it as a shield. They hope to not be made a fool of again. They think being mad as hell will serve as protection from bad things." This way of thinking about it resonated with me. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER27> Nice insights in the later half of the article; thanks!

</comment><comment><USER28> Crying helps. I remember reading about the different kinds of tears.A photographer made some kind of art project out of Microscopic slides made from slides. Anger crying and stress crying had markers for cortisol in them.

</comment><comment><USER29> "38 Years Old", The Tragically Hip.

<comment><AUTHOR> I had never heard of that before and I had no idea what on earth you meant until I googled it:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/38_Years_Old](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/38_Years_Old)

[https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/tragicallyhip/38yearsold.htm...](https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/tragicallyhip/38yearsold.html)

<comment><USER30> Me neither, but I find it is a perfect description for that age (38): you are tragically hip.

You are young enough to be hip to everything that is going on. Tragically though, you are too old for being 20 again, to do everything "the right why" now that you have discernment.

But you are not there yet, where the 50 year old dude is, squeezing the lemon for all that's still left and not giving a function key f1.

<comment><USER31> I must be missing some hidden meaning in these wikipedia link/lyrics because what I'm getting from them is a song about a guy who broke out of prison for killing a guy who raped his sister when he was 20 and was in jail for 18 years..

I guess the point is he was gone from society for 18 years? Am I the only mid-30s person who doesn't feel like they're unhip?

<comment><USER32> I'm older, but I'd wager hip is to knowledge as authentic is to wisdom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> _"...when I was trying hard to figure out how to put down my anger instead of continuing to cling to it."_

McKay's book When Anger Hurts got me onto the right path. [https://www.amazon.com/When-Anger-Hurts-Quieting- Within/dp/1...](https://www.amazon.com/When-Anger-Hurts-Quieting- Within/dp/1572243449) TLDR: Anger starts with expectations. Which leads to disappointment, resentment, blame, and then lands on anger. I keep hoping for followups; surely the state of the art has progressed since.

The next plateau for me was figuring out how to unlearn my anger habit. I heard that habits can only be replaced. So I decided to pretend being happy, positive. Why not? Nothing else worked and I was out ideas.

I was really surprised that it worked.

Next plateau for me was dealing with anxiety. Maybe half of my symptoms had a physiological origin. Only discovered after a lumbar fusion and my anxiety was mostly gone. In retrospect, I'm grumpy for all the wasted effort and misc treatments endured (eg SSRIs).

I still don't have much clue about dealing with trauma, PTSD. I'd like to try psychotropics (shrooms, MDMA), but have had trouble finding trustworthy suppliers.

\--

Thanks to u/Dowwie for Bone's Feeling Good tip. Somehow hadn't seen that before. Will try it.

</comment><comment><USER34> I dont have thoughts of suicide at all, but I constantly have thoughts of leaving everything - the job, family, friends, etc and go to a place i dont know anyone.

Is there a name for this?

<comment><AUTHOR> I would probably call that "escapist fantasies."

It's probably not at all uncommon and you might enjoy this article:

[https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/when-wanderlust- was-a-...](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/when-wanderlust-was-a- disease)

<comment><USER34> thanks, that was an interesting article.

however, this is not me at all. I have never wandered, am very conscious all the time, and thats why i have not left family, kids, job etc

my favorite ad would the SouthWest 'wanna get away'? I think the failures in life, and how i think others perceive them, and how my family perceives me make me have thoughts (consciously)

but the fact that i am unable to act on it makes me very sad.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wasn't suggesting you did that.

I have both suicidal ideation and escapist fantasies. I spent years fantasizing about moving to a small coastal town, which I more or less basically did about 2.5 years ago. (I'm on a river coast, not an ocean coast, 20 minutes or so from the ocean and we get tidal surge here and brackish waters.)

When I first got here, my life was still frustrating and I would have escapist fantasies of just leaving and moving to a small coastal town somewhere and then realize I already live in a small coastal town. I never quite knew how to feel about that. Like "Um, I win? I guess. At least I don't need to pack my bags and move. I'm here already."

With living here, my life is slowly coming together and I much less often have that fantasy of "I'm just going to up and leave and move to a small coastal town, damn it!" But it wasn't immediate. Arriving here didn't promptly fix everything about my life, even though it was immediately a huge improvement over what I had been experiencing.

I think it's pretty normal to want immediate relief of some kind and to, on some level, recognize that "These people and this place and yadda -- that's a big part of the problem." and the logical inference is that if you could just get away from these people and this place, things would be immediately better.

So it's kind of like wishing for an "easy button" for life when life is frustrating.

But there's also truth to the saying "Wherever you go, there you are." Not all problems are cured by just getting away from these people or this place.

It took me a lot of years to resolve some of my problems. I persisted because I didn't feel I really had another option. I could work on it or I could kill myself, basically. It certainly wasn't acceptable to just accept the problems I had and make my peace with simply living with those issues. Something had to change, so I just kept at it, even though it took a long time to make changes happen.

For me, my idea of "I would like to live in a small coastal town" is something I was eventually able to arrange and it is proving to be better than anything else I've ever had. But it still is something that is growing on me, so to speak.

And that's just my personal story. It's not advice and I'm not telling you what you should do.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Should Twitter be concern about Google+? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a possibility.

</comment><comment><USER2> If everything fails with G.+, they still can buy Twitter.</comment>


John Perkins: America's Secret Empire - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0JCJ4pIFEw&feature=channel <comment><AUTHOR> This is just a five minute excerpt of his book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. A must read for every American IMO.

<comment><USER2> Long interview here: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luMpyS3mmLY></comment></comment>


Browser Version Numbers Have Become Irrelevant - <AUTHOR> http://siliconfilter.com/browser-version-numbers-are-now-irrelevant-and-thats-a-good-thing/

<comment><USER2> _There really isn't any good reason why your average mainstream user should have to worry about which browser version is installed on a given machine._

Unless you have plugins that may break, or happen to like this or that UI feature that tend to come and go as browser developers see fit.

I like the idea of getting rapid updates for bug fixes and such, but don't like that an app I like can be replaced by a behaviorally different app that happens to have the same name.

I'm sure there are a number of users who do not want automatic updates, and since browser changes can break Web site or plug-in behavior developers of sites and plug-ins are going to want to know some details about browsers that are giving people trouble.</comment>


Someone Who Wants To Kill Your Company Worked Harder Than You Did Today - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/someone-who-wants-to-kill-your-company-worked-harder-than-you-did-today-2010-10?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

<comment><USER2> Boy, I'm tired of the war/sports/kill-or-be-killed rhetoric. Haven't seen this at all in my business.

Sounds like a good guy to go to war with. Not the best guy to work with though.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm heading to the gym right now</comment>


How Google Is Making Us Smarter  - <AUTHOR> http://discovermagazine.com/2009/feb/15-how-google-is-making-us-smarter <comment><USER2> _This concept of the extended mind was first raised in 1998_

I wonder if a Google search would turn up an earlier example.

Yep, there are definitely earlier examples of much the same concept with the same wording to be found in a date-restricted Google Books search.</comment>


The Steam Holiday Sale - <AUTHOR> http://store.steampowered.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Thought we could all take a break and buy a couple of games.</comment>


Thomas Edison's 1911 Predictions for 2011 - <AUTHOR> http://www.paleofuture.com/blog/2011/1/18/edisons-predictions-for-the-year-2011-1911.html

<comment><USER3> Ignore the blogspam, original link: [http://www.paleofuture.com/blog/2011/1/18/edisons- prediction...](http://www.paleofuture.com/blog/2011/1/18/edisons-predictions- for-the-year-2011-1911.html)

<comment><USER4> Much better. Let's review the accuracy of his predictions:

1\. _In the year 2011 such railway trains as survive will be driven at incredible speed by electricity (which will also be the motive force of all the world's machinery), generated by "hydraulic" wheels._

Accuracy: Pretty good (please let's not take this as a cue for another thread about the lack of a high-speed rail network in country-of-your-choice though). I'm not sure what "hydraulic wheels" means here.

2\. _He will fly through the air, swifter than any swallow, at a speed of two hundred miles an hour, in colossal machines, which will enable him to breakfast in London, transact business in Paris and eat his luncheon in Cheapside_

Accuracy: Very good, though too slow by a factor of three (yes yes, airport security sucks, blah blah blah, I love pre-empting threads).

3\. _The house of the next century will be furnished from basement to attic with steel, at a sixth of the present cost -- of steel so light that it will be as easy to move a sideboard as it is today to lift a drawing room chair. The baby of the twenty-first century will be rocked in a steel cradlehis father will sit in a steel chair at a steel dining table, and his mother's boudoir will be sumptuously equipped with steel furnishings, converted by cunning varnishes to the semblance of rosewood, or mahogany, or any other wood her ladyship fancies._

Accuracy: Yes and no. We _could_ have steel furniture, but we generally don't, because it tends to be ugly. I could build a lightweight sideboard out of sheet metal if I wanted to, but I'm not sure why I'd bother. In any case, chipboard turns out to have been the best option for low-cost furniture (hello Ikea).

4\. _Books of the coming century will all be printed leaves of nickel, so light to hold that the reader can enjoy a small library in a single volume. A book two inches thick will contain forty thousand pages, the equivalent of a hundred volumes; six inches in aggregate thickness, it would suffice for all the contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica. And each volume would weigh less than a pound_

I have no idea where this comes from. Maybe we could make a book with ultra- thin metal pages, but wouldn't they be so insanely delicate that you'd rip the pages when you tried to turn them? Of course we have better ways to carry around an encyclopaedia in a tiny volume.

5\. _"Gold," he says, "has even now but a few years to live. The day is near when bars of it will be as common and as cheap as bars of iron or blocks of steel. We are already on the verge of discovering the secret of transmuting metals, which are all substantially the same in matter, though combined in different proportions."_

This falls into the category "lolwut"? Was this really widely believed in 1911?

6\. _In the magical days to come there is no reason why our great liners should not be of solid gold from stem to stern_

Except that gold is really heavy and extremely soft and as a result one of the worst possible materials for shipbuilding?

<comment><USER5> If you replace "steel" with "plastic" it would be pretty accurate.

But I'm really surprised at the suggestion to use gold structurally - <USER2> then he had to have known it's too soft for that. Plus anything common is no longer luxurious, so if we did have cheap gold no one would want it.

<comment><USER4> The only real advantage of gold, once it's cheap, is that it doesn't corrode. In a world before (?) galvanised iron and stainless steel and aluminium and titanium and even before the sort of high-quality steel paint we have nowadays, this was a bigger deal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's interesting to see in the excerpt that he seems to have an "engineer's" concept of the future with respect to the all steel household. It's an ideal material from an engineer's perspective as he describes it: light, strong, long-lasting, rust-proof... the only problem is that it's also uncomfortable and doesn't any warmth.

Edison was a bit off on the books, but he gets credit for predicting the direction of the technology -- miniaturization of data. Six inches of DVDs would more than suffice for all the contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica and several Libraries of Congress.

</comment><comment><USER7> He was pretty much on the dot about steel houses and electric trains and flying machines. Fairly accurate about the 'small library in a single volume' but grossly off the mark with:

'Before long it will be an easy matter to convert a truck load of iron bars into as many bars of virgin gold'

Apparently, the greatest inventor of all time had a pretty strong belief in chemical transmutation of metals.

<comment><USER8> Eh? Not only are houses and furniture still made of wood, but a large portion of the wood houses from 1911 are still being lived in.

<comment><USER7> Some furniture and houses are still made of wood. I was referring to massive skyscrapers made with steel skeletons. In much of the world (where wood is expensive or hard to find), reinforced concrete (with steel) is a popular choice instead. Furniture is often steel/iron skeleton with a fabric/wood layer over it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The future is rarely the present with the volume cranked up to 11, it's a shift in focus and direction.</comment>


Gödel and the limits of logic - <AUTHOR> http://plus.maths.org/content/goumldel-and-limits-logic <comment><USER2> As an aside, if you look at the photo credit on that great color photo of Einstein and Gödel, it was snapped by Oskar Morgenstern, one of the fathers of game theory.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Morgenstern>

Morgenstern and Einstein were Gödel's closest friends, I've just now learned. It gives me goosebumps looking at that photo and imagining the three of them on that lawn.

Semi-related, here's an account of Gödel's "pent-up lecture" about the inconsistencies in the American constitution that he told to his citizenship examiner: <http://morgenstern.jeffreykegler.com/>

<comment> why-el Thanks for the links. I read the account. I was surprised to see that Morgenstern didn't mention Gödel's arguments. It only made a reference to the steps leading up to Gödel's own findings, like what he read on and how much time it took him, but never mentioned the substantial argument, which is what I wanted to read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> When I first became fascinated with incompleteness (following initial coursework in theory of computation), it kind of became my "religion" of sorts for a while. But as many mathematicians lament, the Incompleteness Theorem is one of the most popularly abused proofs of all time - used for non-experts to assert their own half-baked pseudo-philosophy (of course, the same goes for quantum mechanics as well).

These are a few books I recommend:

"Incompleteness - The proof and paradox of Kurt Gödel" by Rebecca Goldstein

"Gödel's Proof" by Ernst Nagel (it's a tiny book, not too technical, but technical enough for anyone with a solid CS background to appreciate and understand)

<comment><USER4> I have no background in CS or Math, but a lot of philosophy. In other words, I'm a highly interested layman. What's my best plan of action to understanding Godel's theory? Maybe the best approach would be an entry level book on CS?

<comment><USER3> At the very least a good course in discrete mathematics is a good start (it's also a good start for anything technical as well - one of the most valuable math classes anyone can ever take, as far as I'm concerned)

Following that, a good class in the theory of computing: understanding what exactly a generative grammar is, properties of classes of languages (e.g., understanding what "regular languages are closed under complimentation" means), pumping lemma, diagnalization proofs, halting problem. The incompleteness theorem is intimately tied to this. This is the "CS-route" to getting a good understanding in Incompleteness, I'm sure math or physics majors come to approach it in each their own way.

Being a little blunt, a background in philosophy (whether it's academic or not) without a solid discrete math background, doesn't help you out at all. This isn't philosophy, it's just a fact about properties of formal systems of sufficient complexity. If you're looking for philosophy you won't find anything too deep in the proof of Incompleteness. The philosophical implications are not clear.

However, I do recommend Rebecca Goldstein's book. It's not technical, and she's a Princeton philosopher who will indulge you with possible philosophical ramifications of the theorem (along with a good narrative). I also recommend her other books as well, especially her first novella "The Mind-Body Problem". From a philosophical perspective, the dispute between Goedel and Wittgenstein who never accepted the Incompleteness Theorem "whereof we cannot speak we must pass over in silence", which, ironically, speaks of something of which we cannot speak.

<comment><USER5> > At the very least a good course in discrete mathematics is a good start

I believe that the best starting point to get to incompleteness is formal logic. This is the basic set of concepts that lets us make terms, statements and finally proofs the subject of formal mathematical study, thus tying the loop (formally mathematically defined reasoning about formally mathematically defined reasoning :-) ) that leads to Goedels proof.

Discrete mathematics is helpful but it is rather low level, the core concepts in incompleteness come from formal logic.

<comment><USER3> I consider a solid discrete math curriculum to provide a reasonable background in first and second order logic

<comment><USER6> I would be surprised to find second order logic discussed in an introductory discrete math curriculum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Related: Logicomix

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3991687>

<http://www.logicomix.com/en/>

Mentioned in glowing terms here on HN many times:

[http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=logicomix](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=logicomix)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846451>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=870762>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=874471>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3690254>

It was my present for proofing an early draft of "Here's Looking at Euclid" / "Alex's Adventures in Numberland"

</comment><comment><USER7> "It's like an ill-designed jigsaw puzzle. No matter how you arrange the pieces, you'll always end up with some that won't fit in the end."

I really don't understand this analogy. The first incompleteness theorem shows that there are statements true of the natural numbers which aren't provable from any sufficiently strong recursive theory. It's more like Th(N) (the set of statements true of the natural numbers) being a jigsaw puzzle from which many pieces will always be missing if you start with a recursive set of pieces and try to lay down only those pieces which a provable from your initial set. Nothing "won't fit": there aren't inconsistencies or incompatibilities at work here, but _incompleteness_.

<comment><USER8> I think the point is that if you try to add those unprovable theorems to the system to try to make it complete it becomes inconsistent.

See for example:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consistency_proof#Consistency_a...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consistency_proof#Consistency_and_completeness_in_arithmetic)

 _Moreover, Gödel's second incompleteness theorem shows that the consistency of sufficiently strong effective theories of arithmetic can be tested in a particular way. Such a theory is consistent if and only if it does not prove a particular sentence, called the Gödel sentence of the theory, which is a formalized statement of the claim that the theory is indeed consistent._

<comment><USER7> "I think the point is that if you try to add those unprovable theorems to the system to try to make it complete it becomes inconsistent."

Eh? No it doesn't! If you add Con(PA) to the axioms of Peano arithmetic you obtain a stronger system. That system can't prove its own consistency, of course, but if you have a proof that the system PA + Con(PA) is inconsistent then you're probably in line for a Fields Medal.

Alan Turing worked on precisely this issue, developing ordinal logics in his PhD thesis (with Alonzo Church) to try to overcome incompleteness. Soloman Feferman, who in the 1960s proved a stronger result than Turing obtained, has written about this extensively. An accessible paper is this one:

<http://math.stanford.edu/~feferman/papers/turingnotices.pdf>

<comment><USER8> Yes, but in your example the system is still incomplete and the moment you would add an axiom that would make it complete, it would become inconsistent (so either you never finish your puzzles or you finish them and exactly the same moment they fall apart).

From Wikipedia again: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_t...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems)

 _Gödel's theorem shows that, in theories that include a small portion of number theory, a complete and consistent finite list of axioms can never be created, nor even an infinite list that can be enumerated by a computer program. Each time a new statement is added as an axiom, there are other true statements that still cannot be proved, even with the new axiom. If an axiom is ever added that makes the system complete, it does so at the cost of making the system inconsistent._

<comment><USER7> Right, but the point here is that we're not just talking about extensions of the system, we're talking about true but unprovable statements—that is, statements that are true in the standard model of arithmetic but not provable in PA (or whatever other arithmetic theory strikes your fancy). This is why Turing looked not at single formal theories but at a hierarchy of consistency extensions of the initial theory. In other words, the game changes from formal provability to _informal_ provability, and from provability relative to a set of axioms to absolute provability. Turing showed (very roughly) that given a tree of consistency extensions (which branches only at limit stages) every Pi_1 sentence was decided at some point a with |a| = ω + 1. Feferman then proved in the 1960s that there is a path through the tree of ordinal notations that decides every Pi_2 sentence. These are completeness results, albeit for progressions of formal systems rather than individual systems. So certainly the puzzle can never be completed _within a single formal system_ , but by restricting to sentences of limited complexity, there is an ordinal-time operation which decides each sentence (obviously there are numerous philosophical problems with this, although I'm afraid my expertise in this area is extremely limited so I can only give a sketch of the issues involved).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> On a related note, does anyone know where I would look to understand reducibility of formal systems to one another?

I'm really interested by questions like:

Why is second order logic irreducible to first order logic if I could use first order logic to reason about the behavior of a turing machine running a second order logic theorem prover with whatever inputs I like?

How do I get something that can do what I can do, which is to say take _any_ formal system and prove theorems with it? How do you determine what formal systems are "valid" logics? (Leading to sensible conclusions rather than nonsense like A & ~A)

<comment><USER7> 'Reducibility' in general is an informal notion, and as such there are many different technically precise ways of capturing aspects of it. Mutual interpretability and bi-interpretability are two of these, but they apply to formal systems with the same underlying logic (that is, the same semantics and proof theory). There are also many other notions of translation between different logics like Gödel–Gentzen negative translation between classical logic and intuitionistic logic. I'm not sure if there is a good introduction to _all_ of these different ways of capturing reducibility, but you could try asking on math.stackexchange.com, there are usually helpful responses to reference requests there.

Second order logic does not have a complete proof theory, so your Turing machine will not be able to compute the consequences of a theory formulated in second order logic. This can be avoided by employing Henkin semantics, but then you're not working with full second order logic anymore. Stewart Shapiro's 2000 book, _Foundations without Foundationalism: A Case for Second- Order Logic_ has the technical details should you be interested.

<comment><USER9> > Second order logic does not have a complete proof theory

Is this different from saying that second order logic contains unprovable true statements / that the incompleteness theorem applies?

Also thanks for the really well informed response!

<comment><USER7> One of the features of first order logic is that the provability relation is _recursively enumerable_ : given any recursive first order theory, there is a Turing machine that can list every theorem of that theory (although of course it will run forever).

Additionally, first order logic is _complete_ : for every statement true in all models of a theory, there is a proof of the statement from the theory.

These two constraints cannot both be satisfied in a sound deductive system for second order logic. To see that this is so, consider that in second order logic we can prove Dedekind's categoricity theorem: there is only one model (up to isomorphism) of the second order Peano axioms (PA2). Let's assume that the provability relation for second order logic is recursively enumerable. We know from Gödel's incompleteness theorem that the set of first order sentences true of the natural numbers is not recursively enumerable. So take a sentence of the form "If PA2 then _" for some sentence _ which is in that set but not in the extension of the provability relation (this is a legitimate statement since the PA2 axioms are finite so we can just take their conjunction). This should be a logical truth of second order logic, but it's not provable (by the argument just given), so second order logic is incomplete: there are statements which are logical consequences yet are unprovable. So in other words, yes, the incompleteness theorem is very much at play in this limitation of second order logic.

For the technical details I very much recommend chapters 3 and 4 of Shapiro's book; it's not terribly expensive, and any decent university library should have a copy.

(A small footnote to my earlier post: Shapiro's book originally came out in 1991, not 2000—that's just the date of the paperback edition, and I'm unsure as to whether there are any substantial differences between the two.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Stephen Hawking «Gödel and the end of physics»

<http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/events/strings02/dirac/hawking/>

</comment><comment><USER11> GEB sits on my nightstand with too little time to be read. It might have to get bumped up the priority queue a bit.

<comment><USER12> Same here. Got through most of the foreword, but haven't found time to continue.

<comment><USER13> I read it a long time ago (late teens/early twenties) but it changed my intellectual world and gave me an insight into things that I might never have been introduced to. Hard to know whether it would have the same impact now or the same impact for others but I rate it very highly for personal reasons. Also - Rudy Rucker's 'Infinity and the Mind'...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Another result that derives from Gödel's ideas is the demonstration that no program that does not alter a computer's operating system can detect all programs that do. In other words, no program can find all the viruses on your computer, unless it interferes with and alters the operating system."

I think I just heard a 'pop'ping sound.. but really, writers try too hard sometimes to make this stuff accessible to people. I don't think someone who is going to get a whole half-way into the article is going to need such reductionism to catch their interest; I'd honestly be more excited if the actual symbolic definition of the theorem was shown to me at that point.

</comment><comment><USER15> _In 1949 he demonstrated that universes in which time travel into the past is possible were compatible with Einstein's equations._

Wait, what?! Anyone have a ref?

Edit: Thanks to andyjohnson and vbtemp. TIA for others too.

<comment><USER16> He discovered a solution to Einstein's field equations that permits closed timelike curves if the universe is rotating.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godel_metric>

"This solution has many strange properties, discussed below, in particular the existence of closed timelike curves which would allow for a form of time travel in the type of universe described by the solution. Its definition is somewhat artificial (the value of the cosmological constant must be carefully chosen to match the density of the dust grains), but this spacetime is regarded as an important pedagogical example"

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> For people interested in the original from 1931: <http://www.w-k- essler.de/pdfs/goedel.pdf> (in German). Work of art IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER18> While that's biographically interesting, you really don't get off the hook from understanding that he used basically the same approach of Cantor's diagonalization.

</comment><comment><USER19> Its always fascinating to read about Gödel. I have not read GEB, yet reading about his findings has really changed the way I think about things.

Thanks for posting this article.

<comment><USER20> You may find the Reddit discussion about GEB of interest. <http://www.reddit.com/r/geb>

<comment><USER19> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What I get out of Goedel is this: There are some things that are true that cannot be proved.

<comment><USER3> Be careful. That's a naive view, and drawing more conclusion than I think you mean.

This it more like it: For any consistent, finite axiomatized formal system that is sufficiently expressive (such as the Principia Mathematica), you can construct a sentence in the language of that formal system that asserts its own un-provability. Therefore, there _does not exist a mechanistic method for enumerating over all true statements in the language of that formal system_.

By stating "there are some true things that cannot be proved" goes too philosophy deep, and is outside of our pay-grade. Just consider: humans don't reason based on mechanistic principles - and there's no proof as to the expressability of natural language (though we can be sure it's aggravatingly inconsistent)

EDIT: I just want to say that in general, if someone does not really grasp the technical notion of a formal system, consistency, expressiveness, provability, soundness, or recursive enumeration, then it is basically impossible for them to appreciate the incompleteness theorems, and they are very likely to grossly misrepresent it.

<comment><USER9> > humans don't reason based on mechanistic principles

Do you support an empiricist view of logic then (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is_logic_empirical%3F>) ? That we justify logical rules because they so strongly correspond with our own experiences?

<comment><USER3> Not really. I'm just saying we don't go around all day doing logic-algebra in our head and saying _only_ true, consistent things :)

<comment><USER9> Ahh, fair enough. I'd have to agree with you there. My guess is that that plus being able to inductively generate axioms from experience are largely what let us escape that particular weakness of formal systems.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Who's Behind Huawei? - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/whos-behind-huawei-story.html <comment><USER2> When AT&T has so willingly handed over call data to the U.S. intelligence agencies for decades, even assisting in the analysis of said data, I have to question the assault on Huawei by U.S. media.

<comment><USER3> If you equate AT&T's said practices with Huawei's practices, then you just answered your own question. The Chinese Communist Party is not friend of freedom, nor of free journalism.

<comment><USER4> Regarding the "free journalism": we will see if the US lives up to the First Amendment in the Julian Assange case... 25 years ago the US was supporter of "free journalism", but today things are changing rapidly...

<comment><USER5> What about blasting President Trump on front page of NYTimes, almost every day since he was elected? US has a tremendous sense of free press, you can't pick and choose.

Do you see any negative press about Xi Jingpin in China?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Most Americans have never heard of Huawei, in part because it has been > obsessed with secrecy since its founding in 1987

They're not terribly good at this secrecy lark, then. The phone sitting on my desk has got "Huawei" written on the front in big letters and has the word "Huawei" filling the screen every time it boots.

<comment><USER7> Few people heard of them until they were making knockoff Cisco devices 15-20 years ago.

<comment><USER6> Yes but the article used the present tense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Note, there is actually an article in the second half of the page past the photos and graphs.

</comment><comment><USER9> When there's a thread discussing Assange, or the NSA, the top comment is never "but China does it too, this is an unfair attack on the US."

Right now there are millions of people in concentration camps for belonging to the wrong ethnic group and practicing the wrong religion. How bad does it have to get before we can agree that the Chinese government isn't just the victim of US propaganda?

Do they have to start executing Uighurs en masse? If history is any indication, that's the most likely next step in this story.

Edit: I noticed this article just moved from #8 to #38 in under 5 minutes. What's the reasoning behind flagging this.

</comment><comment><USER10> USA is right to fear them. Spying issues aside (for a second) here is this giant company that easily take over the worldwide smartphone market. The very things USA has controlled since Jobs and Gates started. Oh, and they can spy on everyone.

For the "You too" crowd: Yes, NSA spies on whatever they can. But you do not see Apple or Google doing what NSA wants. I have a feeling that Huawei doesn't have the option of going to Federal Court where highly educated and appointed- for-life judges decide. impartially.

<comment><USER5> I really feel that HN has some really unusual behavior when criticizing China. Almost always, HN defends China by throwing rocks at US. It is really baffling.

<comment><USER11> I'm reading this differently. To most Americans, the issue is pretty clear: American geopolitics, industrial espionage and global surveillance benefits them, China doing the same does not.

For Non-Americans, it's different, therefore their reactions aren't as simple as US good, China bad.

<comment><USER5> I don't think so. There can only be the following explanations for this behavior:

-> A) People don't know how bad it is in China

-> B) People support authoritarian government over democracy

-> C) People do not support USA or have some deep rooted hatred for the country which gets channeled through US vs China debate

-> D) There is a large pro-China population on HN, perhaps immigrants to US, perhaps people from China, perhaps folks from other countries who support China

This is tribalism at its most glorified form. Instead of debating _issues_ in isolation, we are engaging in this barbaric form of debate where facts take a back seat and rhetoric and nationalism prevail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have personally decided to avoid buying 'Made in China' products whenever it's possible. It's hard, but I don't want to support their work conditions or predatory geoeconomics in any way.

<comment><USER13> What kind of computer are you posting from?

<comment><USER14> What is your point ? even if its impossible to do it 100%, at least they tried. Its their choice.

<comment><USER15> I think the question is whether it even approaches 1% for anything with electronics in it. Can you buy a car, phone, PC, etc, that has zero made or assembled in China subsystems?

<comment><USER14> The percentages is irrelevant, you have to start from somewhere and keep making incremental progress toward your goal, however tiny it may.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Doctest.js: a humane Javascript test framework - <AUTHOR> http://doctestjs.org/

<comment><USER2> This blog post is essential reading for Python developers who see doctest.js and think "ew, doctest": [http://blog.ianbicking.org/2012/10/02/why-doctest- js-is-bett...](http://blog.ianbicking.org/2012/10/02/why-doctest-js-is-better- than-pythons-doctest/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm impressed. I really thought I'd seen all approaches to unit testing, but apparently I hadn't. This really appeals to me!

Is there anyone here who's been using DocTest and has some experiences to share?

I love how, as a side effect, this approach to unit testing encourages implementing a good toString / __str__ on each class. In those languages that have that, of course.

<comment><USER4> jashkenas touches on it, but here's my rule of thumb for doctests:

Test your documentation, but tests aren't documentation.

In other words, it's great practice to ensure that code snippets inside your documentation execute correctly. Your primary benefit is that your documentation is correct, complete and up to date. Any testing benefit is purely secondary; you need a complete test suite regardless. You can use a doctest framework to create this test suite for convenience, but recognize that your doctests are going to be either illustrative or complete, but cannot be both.

Examples:

Here's a tutorial written in git comments so that each step is fully executable: <http://cookbook.hobocentral.net/tutorials/agility>

Here's a manual page written in rubydoctest: <http://cookbook.hobocentral.net/manual/scopes>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you could combine this with a Literate Programming approach like Literate CoffeeScript[1], then the examples in your API documentation could also become the executable tests.

1: <https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/issues/1786>

<comment><USER6> We've actually talked about adding this to CoffeeScript in the past, as a regular language feature. (You've probably already read the ticket.)

The reason we don't is because _good_ tests are very rarely the same thing as good examples. Good examples often elide bits of code that aren't pertinent to the API function being demonstrated ... and good tests often involve the edge cases that are poorly suited to learning examples.

While testing your examples is all well and good, it's also limiting -- you can no longer write:

        makeRequest({
          url: 'http://example.com/endpoint',
          data: ...,
        })

... unless, come to think of it, you had some sort of Yada-yada operator that served as a silent no-op.

<comment><USER5> I'm waiting eagerly for the Literate CoffeeScript support to land.

My main concern with it is that it forces you to write the document in the same order you want the code to be extracted, which may not be the best order for explaining things. That is why classic Literate Programming tools like noweb[1] allow you to name the chunks of code and then arrange them into the generated files as you wish. You can see an example of this in action when I'm assembling noweb.php[2].

Also, agreed on the point that not every piece of example code is suitable for running as a test, so you'd optimally want some sort of annotation for that. Github-flavored Markdown[3] has the code block fencing syntax that would allow metadata like this. Something like:

      ```coffeescript
      # Just a regular, non-testable example
      ```

      ```coffeescript;test
      # Example that is also a test
      ```

Actually, this same approach could be used for working with named chunks like noweb does.

1: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noweb>

2: [https://github.com/bergie/noweb.php/blob/master/README.txt#L...](https://github.com/bergie/noweb.php/blob/master/README.txt#L324)

3: <http://github.github.com/github-flavored-markdown/>

<comment><USER6>
        > My main concern with it is that it forces you to write the document
        > in the same order you want the code to be extracted, which may not
        > be the best order for explaining things.

... Yep -- this is probably the main complaint raised when talking about tools like Docco or Markdown-as-source-code as "literate programming". But, it's a concern that I believe is entirely outdated. Modern dynamic languages make it easy to sequence your code as you like. The methods in a class may be listed in any logical order, helper functions can be listed in an appendix after the functions that make use of them, and so on. I find it hard to imagine an example where changing the order of the codebase would make the prose version more readable -- and wouldn't _also_ make the code version more readable as well.

I think that, unfortunately, the tangle/weave paradigm is a large part of why literate programming is barely used -- it introduces an entire level of build- time complexity that doesn't have any direct effect or benefit on your code. Here's hoping that the simplicity of having a file that is at once both executable code and publishable markdown is something that feels more usable to more programmers.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


RFC 1925 – The Twelve Networking Truths (1996) - <AUTHOR> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1925

<comment><USER2> Thanks for posting this. This is an April Fool's day RFC. Similar hilarious RFCs are posted almost every year on 1st of April.

Check out the list here [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools%27_Day_Request_for_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools%27_Day_Request_for_Comments)

</comment><comment><USER3> #12 seems particularly relevant to the all the recent Angular 2.0 discussion.</comment>


Studies that linked specific genes to intelligence were largely wrong - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120224140506.htm <comment><USER2> Here's the full prepublication text of the article, "Most Reported Genetic Associations with General Intelligence Are Probably False Positives," mentioned in this story:

[http://www.arts.cornell.edu/econ/dbenjamin/IQ-SNPs- PsychSci-...](http://www.arts.cornell.edu/econ/dbenjamin/IQ-SNPs- PsychSci-20111205-accepted.pdf)

Psychologists are getting to be reasonably good about sharing full text of their papers on their faculty websites.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you feel about current events? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Feeling: That media-fueled leftism is finally making progress on destroying the quality of life for everyone in America. That millennials in America are bored enough, and deluded enough, to willingly participate in their own demise by promoting faux-activism to the exclusion of possibly any/all virtuous activities.</comment>


Experimenting with CouchDb as a mail store. - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/806797

<comment><AUTHOR> Why? Well, in my case, I want something better than 20k files in one nnmh directory.

On my test Maildir (copy of my INBOX from a few weeks ago), `du -s ~/Maildir` reported 81MB and the CouchDb database is 76.3MB.

There's lots to be done:

* handle MIME as binary objects where possible. That should use less storage space than the uuencoded message parts.

* store seen and other Maildir flags

* write (non-web) frontends, preferably gnus.</comment>


Show HN: Slides as map tiles, featuring an intro to Distributism (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://youmightbe.pressbin.com <comment><AUTHOR> I had built this page in 2012 while experimenting with novel ways to present slides online.

On the plus side, the novelty of the mechanism by which you advance through the slides is likely to keep people's attention, at least for small presentations.

On the down side, for longer presentations it becomes tedious, and there's no real significance to how the slides are mapped, so the user has no intuition about how to get back to a previous section. (It's almost like you're stuck in Ikea and have no choice but to keep following the arrows to retrace your steps.) Plus, because the slides are represented as map tiles, there's no easy way to select/copy/paste the content.

Still, it was a fun exercise -- and a cool way to share a little bit about Distributism, a "third way" economic philosophy.</comment>


20-person online meeting that works - <AUTHOR> https://softwaremill.com/online-meeting-that-works/

<comment><USER2> Google Hangout works pretty well too!

<comment><USER3> But has 10 persons limit ;-)</comment></comment>


Patents and innovation in economic history [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.gwern.net/docs/2016-moser.pdf <comment><USER2> TL;DR: politicians and lazy academics typically consider patents to be the driver of new inventions. Turns out that research doesn't bear that out -- who knew?! In fact when patent laws are too strong or too broad, development slows down. Shocker!

(Actually it's good to have someone actually look into the data and challenge the dominant assumptions. And someone from the existing power structure, like the NBER in this case.)

<comment><USER3> That is a rather misleading and incomplete TL;DR. The paper actually references a number of other papers from the author (Petra Moser) and presents a number of salient conclusions. Here's one important point: Patents encourage innovation in industries where other methods of maintaining advantage, such as secrecy, are not available.

 _> If patents are important in some industries (such as manufacturing machinery) but not in others (such as scientific instruments or chemicals in the 19th century), changes in patent laws may influence the direction if not the level of technical change (Moser 2005). These patterns are borne out in exhibition data: Countries without patent laws contribute as many exhibits and prize winners as countries with patent law. But their innovations are disproportionately focused on industries in which secrecy is effective, so that inventors are less dependent on patents._

Moser 2005 also points out that as the efficacy of reverse engineering increased (today you can reverse engineer almost anything pretty cost- effectively), more exhibitions started to focus on industries with stronger patent protection.

This is a curious point, however: it almost suggests that the proportion of innovators in a given population is (was) fixed, and they would innovate where the promise of rewards is highest.

Another important point: Cheaper patents meant "democratization of invention". There were more exhibitions with patents from people in rural areas in the US, where patents were cheaper, compared to UK, where patents were more expensive and almost all inventors were based in London.

One problem with this paper is that it makes broad generalizations based on narrow data: The fact that plant patents didn't increase the number of new rose varieties registered gets the headline "Intellectual Property Rights for Living Organisms Have Not Encouraged Innovation". It draws conclusions about innovation based on exhibit data where, by the author's own admission (Moser 2005), exhibitions may have significantly discouraged the inclusion of exhibits that were easy to copy.

Also, it's important to look through the other cited studies, because they almost always present data that is different from other papers. Some data can be more compelling than others.

Nonetheless Moser provides a fascinating view into how innovation may be influenced by incentives and policies.

<comment><USER4> > "This is a curious point, however: it almost suggests that the proportion of > innovators in a given population is (was) fixed, and they would innovate > where the promise of rewards is highest."

True but I'll add that often for individuals to quit their jobs and focus on innovating requires more than just "the promise of rewards". Immediate funding often trumps the promise - and that funding comes from some kind of investor. Many investors view patents as: 1) a way to recoup at least some their investment dollars if the innovator can't monetize, 2) prevent competitors from simply copying the results of the R&D.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if there have been any attempts to quantify the economic fruits of government-funded research, e.g. by ARPA (especially before being limited to narrowly defense-related projects) or NSF, or research directly undertaken by executive agencies like NASA, etc.

Government-sponsored basic research and scholarship often comes under fire from asshole lawmakers claiming to have the interests of "taxpayers" in mind (cf. e.g. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Fleece_Award](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Fleece_Award), or more recently [https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house- bill/3293...](https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house- bill/3293/text)), but as far as I can tell, such research has been one of the primary drivers of "innovation" and economic growth in the US over the past 70+ years.

<comment><USER6> Thats the fallacy of the seen: You don't know what would have been discovered otherwise. Non-government funded discoveries include salk and Sabin polio vaccines and the chemiosmotic effect.

<comment><USER7> Discovered in what otherwise?

It's not like public research funding comes at the expense of private research. Public research funding allows there to be a higher total number of scientists doing research than there would be, all else equal, without it.

And there are clearly things patents don't provide the right incentives for. Anything that benefits all of humanity is very difficult to recover the value of as a patent because engaging in licensing transactions with every single person everywhere is prohibitively expensive. And then the license fees artificially reduce adoption of the invention until the patent expires due to supply and demand (price goes up, demand goes down), making it _even harder_ to recover the full value of the invention. Which would imply that patents necessarily result in under-investment in research.

<comment><USER4> > "Anything that benefits all of humanity is very difficult to recover the > value of as a patent because engaging in licensing transactions"

"Anything that benefits all of humanity" should be recognized as inherently valuable to fund and therefore would be useful to look at reducing the costs of "engaging in licensing transactions". In other words, society may benefit by making it easier (or less costly) for the researcher or innovator to be rewarded - thereby increasing the incentive to create something to benefit humanity.

<comment><USER7> What are you actually proposing? Some abstract means of reducing licensing transaction costs? How?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This seems not to reference one of the strongest and most thorough recent reviews of this whole topic, "The Case Against Patents": [https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.27.1.3](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.27.1.3)</comment>


People Who Photograph Food and Display the Pictures Online - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/dining/07camera.html <comment><USER2> I don't photograph every meal but I do this occasionally, especially when I cook something. The weird thing is, pictures of food are compelling. One of my most popular pictures on flickr is of an avocado pizza a friend and I made in 2006. And counting advertising, you probably see about ten to twenty meals depicted in the course of a typical day.

There's an opportunity here, someone could make the hotornot / chatroulette of food photography and done right it would be a monster hit.

<comment><USER3> Your hotornot idea is great, so much potential to expand it... Might have just found a weekend project :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Paul Buchheit - GMail creator and FriendFeed founder maintained a nice blog on this at posterous <http://100meals.posterous.com/>

<comment><USER5> Those are big meals to be eating every day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> lol, I'm one

[http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=10437&id=142983457...](http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=10437&id=1429834573&l=10e5b8aa13)</comment>


AskYC: YC Result Tracker - <AUTHOR>

How about an unofficial poll of who submitted and who got the OK.<p>Would be interesting to see how many people submitted and how many was invited? Submitters, please post your results here in this thread. <comment><USER2> YC has stated several times that they aren't releasing their statistics from now on because they don't want to get into a numbers war with competitors. They've released them for every past cycle; GIYF.

It seems to be a good rule-of-thumb that 10% of applicants will get interviews, and 50% of those interviewed will get funding. I assume that the number of companies funded will still be disclosed (or at least, it will be hard to keep secret), so you can work backward from there.

</comment><comment><USER3> Do you think it's a good idea for people to publicly announce their failure/success, when their comments are connected to their usernames?

Personally, I would rather keep that kind of information private. This isn't a radio station contest.

</comment><comment><USER4> On the other hand, I'd love to network with people who've applied at all in the area, whether they get accepted or not...

Anyone interested in a meet up? :)

<comment><USER5> We are in Milwaukee, WI

We would be happy to meet anyone in a couple hundred mile range.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> right.. sorry maybe this should be rephrased as unofficial poll from the submitters.</comment>