Silicon Valley's Ultimate Exit (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://genius.com/Balaji-srinivasan-silicon-valleys-ultimate-exit-annotated <comment><USER5> > Build an opt-in society, ultimately outside the US, run by technology.

Balaji Srinivasan is being considered to run the FDA. If chosen, he is expected to radically weaken its regulatory power, purportedly in the interests of promoting innovation in the pharma space. He's described it as the big enemy for any biotech innovator to overcome.

When we have an opt-in healthcare system, people who are in perfectly good health will opt into favorable plans only they qualify for. Those born with expensive conditions or who develop a chronic illness won't be able to opt in, and will find themselves in a high risk pool paying hardship-tier premiums.

When we have pharmaceutical companies opting into less stringent regulatory structures, even the most dangerous drugs will make it to clinical trials - <USER3> be tested by people who lack the ability to choose any other way of making a living. Pharma manufacturers will then base their prices on what they believe the highest tier of wealth will bear, ignoring the long tail of underinsured Americans.

The problem with an opt-in society is that only some people get the privilege of opting in. It's an almost self-contradicting concept. Societies only hold together if their members _don 't_ favor exit. Members collectively recognize they're all on the same side, by way of the social contract they've entered into, and they know the rules need to be the same for everyone. A modicum of loyalty - in Hirschman's sense - is an absolute prerequisite for a group to be called a society.

When it comes to our health, let's show some loyalty to our fellow Americans and use our voices, instead of fleeing the inconveniently poor and sick. The veil of ignorance hasn't come off yet, after all: if you get cancer tomorrow, you might well become one of them.

<comment><USER6> _When we have an opt-in healthcare system, people who are in perfectly good health will opt into favorable plans only they qualify for. Those born with expensive conditions or who develop a chronic illness won 't be able to opt in, and will find themselves in a high risk pool paying hardship-tier premiums._

You write as if Srinivasan is being considered to run HHS/Obamacare. He's not. The FDA has nothing to do with health insurance.

 _When we have pharmaceutical companies opting into less stringent regulatory structures, even the most dangerous drugs will make it to clinical trials - <USER3> be tested by people who lack the ability to choose any other way of making a living._

I get the impression you want to remove this option from people, thereby giving them exactly zero ways to make a living. Is that correct?

 _Pharma manufacturers will then base their prices on what they believe the highest tier of wealth will bear, ignoring the long tail of underinsured Americans._

You seem very confused. The FDA does not currently regulate prices. However, FDA regulations do drive prices up and create a lot of monopolies in the pharmaceutical space.

If you want to learn what Srinivasan might actually mean for the FDA, I strongly recommend reading this blog post (written by a Trump hater, FYI): [http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/01/18/watch-new-health- picks/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/01/18/watch-new-health-picks/)

<comment><USER7> Looking at this point and one of the ones below, I think there's a bit of a misunderstanding as to why drugs are expensive and why they take so long to get to market.

The hypothesis Balaji and others here suggest is that the FDA requires drugmakers to pass useless onerous regulations and expensive studies before it'll approve a drug. In so doing, the drugs become more expensive to market.

Having worked a little in the drug discovery area, I'd advance a different hypothesis: the low hanging fruit are gone.

Balaji in his post explicitly mentions insulin coming to market in 2 years. That's a pretty easy thing to approve: you have a molecule that is identical to one produced by your own body, that has known or easily understood physiology and pharmacokinetics. All you have to show is that your preparation isn't toxic, so of course it's going to take nearly no time to get approved.

Contrast with a cancer drug. There you have a really complicated disease, not very good model systems before you get to test the molecule in a human subject, and when you get there most of your patients die anyway because diseases are hard/they're too sick/it doesn't work well enough.

I think the information/silicon technology side of silicon valley doesn't quite understand how hard biochemistry and biotech actually is. In traditional engineering you know a lot about the inputs to your system (code, silicon, plastic, etc.) and you know a lot about how they work. In Biology/Biochemistry/Physiology none of that is true. Your inputs, underlying system and outputs are hugely complex and in many ways completely non- understood.

That's why it takes so long to "innovate" or develop new drugs. Bureaucracy may not help, but it's not the main cause either.

An essential blog to read if interested in drug discovery:

[http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/)

topic relevant post:

[http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2015/08/07/on-...](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2015/08/07/on- the-fda-drug-approvals-and-not-knowing-enough)

Full disclosure: I once met with Balaji for an informal job interview/get to know the company at Counsyl

<comment><USER6> I agree that low hanging fruit being gone is an issue.

However, that doesn't mean bad FDA rules are not also an issue. From the blog post I linked to:

 _Any pharma company that wants their medication approved in both the US and Europe has to spend a billion or so dollars getting it approved by the FDA, and then another billion or so dollars getting it approved by the Europeans. A lot of pharma companies don't want to bother, with the end result that Europe has many good medications that America doesn't, and vice versa. Just in my own field, amisulpride, one of the antipsychotics with the best safety /efficacy balance, has been used successfully in Europe for twenty years and is totally unavailable here despite a real need for better antipsychotic drugs._

<comment><USER8> Here's a fun data point: people in the drug discovery business do not see the FDA as an obstacle to doing business. It's the financing model that's commonly seen as troublesome, with the low-hanging fruit gone coming distant second.

For genuine public health emergencies (anyone remember AIDS?) there's fast- track approval, the first antiretrovirals were at market remarkably quickly.

<comment><USER9> >> "...people in the drug discovery business do not see the FDA as an obstacle to doing business."

Let me play devil's advocate here and suggest that entrenched market participants _love_ high-barrier-to-entry regulatory regimes. The FDA is "people in the drug discovery business'" moat.

<comment><USER8> When you do drug discovery and development safety and efficacy is your concern. Your aims and the FDA's coincide. It's Pharma-Bro Shkreli who uses the FDA as a moat, but I think the general public sees him as an aberration and pharma wishes he would just go away because he draws the wrong kind of attention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I post this now because the author (Balaji Srinivasan) has recently been named as a contender for heading the FDA: [https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/12/fda- trump-oneil-srinivas...](https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/12/fda-trump-oneil- srinivasan/)

Note that "exit" here is not synonymous with "secession", but instead refers to Albert Hirschman's contrast of "exit" and "voice" as two complementary approaches that individuals can use to influence the society around them: [http://peterlevine.ws/?p=11887](http://peterlevine.ws/?p=11887).

In this context, the option of "voice" includes the approach of reforming institutions from within, while "exit" leaves them broken and bypasses them with new alternatives. Given Srinivasan's embrace of "exit", this makes him an intriguing candidate for overhauling a massive federal bureaucracy.

<comment><USER10> Amazing read, thank you! I have no idea what this next government will look like for the US...

Interestingly, the kind of "exit" he's talking about sounds an awful lot like Timothy Leary's "Turn on, tune in, drop out": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_on,_tune_in,_drop_out](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_on,_tune_in,_drop_out)

<comment><USER11> Amazing read. Such thoughtful Writing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One thing a lot of people don't realize about the modern concept of the "social contract" is that it _depends_ on the capacity to exit, which requires the existence of the frontier. John Locke's idea of government wasn't just influential to the development of the United States, it was openly influenced by the existence of America; he wrote a lot about how the "state of nature" that exists independent of government _was_ the American frontier (he didn't care much for/about Native Americans.) Now, the idea that a government is a social contract between citizens and rulers is universal, but we've eliminated its original foundation: an empty space citizens can settle when they decide their government is worse than nothing.

There's no easy solution to this problem. We're out of unclaimed land (seasteading and Mars colonization wouldn't really resolve it, even if they were more plausible.) I don't think Srinivasan has a great concept of why nations work; the problem with a Silicon Valley exit is less that Silicon Valley doesn't have aircraft carriers, and more that it doesn't have, you know, farmland, and I don't think the opt-in society would be allowed: Silicon Valley is rich and prosperous because of the large pool of mainly American consumers it sells to, and it is protected by the auspices of the US government. If they really wanted to _leave_ , they wouldn't be able to take the money-making with them, as the US has no incentive to protect the businesses of a foreign power. I actually think that instead of getting more and more small countries as time goes on, we'll get increasing large blocs caring for things like _defense_ and _very_ general welfare, and increasingly small, atomized communities, either geographically or online, caring for other needs. If we have a large United States government that takes care of the nuclear weapons stockpile, coordinates response to natural disasters, and makes sure people don't die for arbitrary reasons, smaller communities can tax, spend, negotiate as they will. And I expect these communities will increasingly go online; online, Locke's dream can be realized, as there really is infinite space to colonize (if you don't like your current forum, go found a new one.) As long as people have a basic level of security, they'll be free to self-organize and explore new models of society in a virtual world. I can't tell if this vision of the future is utopian or dystopian.

<comment><USER13> > You don't have to actually go and get your own island; you can do the > equivalent of dual-booting or telecommuting. You can opt out, exit at > whatever level you prefer.

And the government will be there to kindly remind us that: "Democracy is asset insurance for the rich"[0] and we may not skimp on the payments.

[0] Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Blyth

<comment><AUTHOR> You are likely referring to Blyth's book by this title[1], but for those desiring a softer introduction, the author also made an excellent 5 minute introductory video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=go2bVGi0ReE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=go2bVGi0ReE)

[1] [http://centredelangues.ens-lyon.fr/anglais/espace- etudiants/...](http://centredelangues.ens-lyon.fr/anglais/espace- etudiants/retire/the-transatlantic-circulation-of-ideas-and- policies/class-10-reinhart-and-rogoff-bolster-transatlantic- austerity/Mark%20Blyth%20-%20Austerity-%20the%20History%20of%20a%20Dangerous%20Idea.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> That reads like a right-wing version of Barlow's Cyberspace Manifesto:[1] _" Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."_

Boy, was he wrong.

[1] [https://www.eff.org/cyberspace- independence](https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence)

</comment><comment><USER15> If the USA is the Microsoft of nations, as the article says.

Then would some current or future president be the Ballmer of the US?

<comment><USER16> The analogy is flawed at the CEO<->President level, obviously. 3 CEOs vs. 44 Presidents?

<comment><USER17> There've been numerous Presidents who are akin to Ballmer though, having presided upon times where things were pretty good for the fortunate segment of society but doing nothing about looming catastrophes which could be seen but weren't critical problems. I'm thinking of Fillmore/Pierce/Buchanan in the run-up to the Civil War and Harding/Coolidge/Hoover in the run-up to the Great Depression. It's fairly likely that historians will view Dubya/Obama/Trump in the same way in reference to some future crisis around the national debt, global warming, or rising inequality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> _That's how we got cell phones from a toy for Wall Street to something that's helping the poorest of the poor all over the world_

I just don't see it, after spending time in third world countries I believe this is a false statement. It's not free to use a cell phone in the third world, the poorest of the poor can't afford "credit" nor phones, nor have anywhere to charge them. If anything I've seen cell phones usually being used by shady characters using them for nefarious purposes, they're often the only "poor" who can afford cell phones in third world.

Let's also not forget who actually produced the cheap cell phones that made them affordable.

God bless this article.

</comment><comment><USER19> I agree with this article on many points. I wish GitHub had a way to remove the "forked from" link in order to give more freedom to developers that want to take a project in a different direction, and properly "exit"

<comment><USER6>
        git clone ....

Create new repo in github.

        git push ....

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The governments will sooner outlaw job automation or implement basic income than allow chaos to take hold.

<comment><USER20> Also, our standards are pretty high right now, so I think chaos would ensue before our quality of living fell too much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Does anybody have a link to Balaji's MOOC? I've heard great reviews about it, and I have an enormous amount of respect for Balaji, but I haven't been able to find it - I can only find his MOOC about Bitcoin. Or is that the MOOC he was referring to?

<comment><USER22> It was called called "Startup Engineering" [1]. This course doesn't exist on coursera anymore, there's a similar syllabus on Stanford's website [2]. The project was something about building a small web app with node.js and accepting enabling donations via bitcoin payment.

I was trying to find the course in the archive.org's backup of coursera [3] but it doesn't appear to be searchable.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5089487](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5089487)

[2] [http://startup.stanford.edu/](http://startup.stanford.edu/)

[3] [https://archive.org/details/archiveteam_coursera](https://archive.org/details/archiveteam_coursera)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I like the way he's thinking and core argument is a good one. But there's one reason it won't work: Taxes. You can't have a new country when every single economic transaction is subject to an extremely onerous 35% income tax - <USER4> still have to pay this tax even if you live in another country.

There's probably still a lot of good stuff you can do though: low cost housing and transportation, just for starters.

</comment><comment><USER24> Why are SV "big shots" so obsessed with making their own little la-la land fiefdoms (Who actually wants AI/tech to run their country? Like, that is literally an apocalyptic nightmare of mine) instead of contributing positively to the country that helped foster their fortunes?

This is some of the most myopic, ego-stroking bullshit I think I've ever read on this site.

Also the sooner ridiculous "code=law" analogy goes away the better. It's clear this person has very little understanding how affairs of state actually work.

<comment><USER25> Did you read the article? It explicitly discusses using 'voice' or 'contributing positively to the country' as option #1, and 'exit' as the backup in case the former is ineffective.

If you think their vision of the future is nightmarish, you don't have to do anything. Just stay where you are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> TLDR: 25k Govts is better than 25 Govts.

And I absolutely agree. Its obvious that noone is going to happy with their Mega Govt all the time. We should work on mechanism that allows creating new, smaller Govts out of a Mega Govt as easy as possible. Let the market innovation/compitition advance Governence too.

</comment><comment><USER27> Yes many people won't understand this article it but there is a strong and subtle point that Balaji makes. It is the power that technology brings to the common people. Technology will one day make food shelter healthcare clothing ie all the basic necessities so automated and so cheap that everyone can be guranteed free access to these basic needs. Already certain countries have started experimenting with annual basic income. This does not stop people from excelling or working hard to do better but will help us to stop worrying about going homeless or going broke just because one loses ones job. This is where technology can take us and this is what we dream about. Thank you.</comment>


Transparency for Congress's Scorekeepers - <AUTHOR> http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/transparency-for-congresss-scorekeepers <comment><AUTHOR> I write based on my experience working on Tax-Calculator and the Open Source Policy Center. Tax-Calculator was used extensively by the NYT, WaPo, CNN, and Senate/House/Administration staff during the tax debates.</comment>


Mobile Carriers Aren't Doing Enough to Fight Robocalls, Senators Say - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/07/mobile-carriers-arent-doing-enough-to-fight-robocalls-senators-say/ <comment><USER2> It's _senators_ who aren't doing enough to fight robocalls. Just make them illegal and require an easy way to report them, and puff! they're gone.</comment>


Deep Learning: A Critical Appraisal (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.00631 <comment><USER2> The weird thing about Gary Marcus's constant critique of deep learning is that the most prominent researchers in the field actually agree with him (and are doing something about it), yet he casts himself as a maverick, and that plays well in the media. Here's an example of real researchers making real progress combining DL with other approaches to AI: [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=rJgMlhRctm](https://openreview.net/pdf?id=rJgMlhRctm)

<comment><USER3> His audience is probably the media, not other researchers. It is a critique to calm down the hype machine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's great to see Marcus's 3.8: "Deep learning presumes a largely stable world, in ways that may be problematic." Most interesting problems in the world don't mirror Go's orderly rules. Players don't always take turns; the size of the board changes, and the pieces' powers mutate.

Marcus cites politics and economics as fields that pose fierce challenges to deep learning. I'd add marriage counseling, stand-up comedy, full-length fiction, and most sustained interactions between multiple people.

<comment> another-one-off > the pieces' powers [don't] mutate [in a Go game]

That comment in particular suggests to me that you havn't spent a lot of time playing Go. The pieces' powers mutate quite spectacularly as the situation around them changes.

> Most interesting problems in the world don't mirror Go's orderly rules

This is true, but it isn't obvious this is going to slow deep learning down. For example, you cite players taking turns which is a _significant_ handicap for a computer. If it comes down to reflexes, robots can win even with worse decision making algorithms than a human.

In the context of deep learning, if the situation mutates in ways that the training regime didn't then an AI will have trouble. However, people love to overestimate both how often exceptional circumstances come up (the correct answer is rarely) and how good humans are at responding to them (correct answer is badly).

My favorite part of learning the training system for artificial neural networks was that it incidentally explains a lot of human failure modes really well. It isn't at all obvious the humans have a sustainable advantage here.

<comment><USER5> "Rarely" over large populations comes out to quite a few people. And humans may very well fail in more predictable ways (that can then be accounted for) than multiple AIs trained on widely varying data sets. In fact AI's advantage, speed of processing ("reflexes") means that it's capable of failing in all sorts of ways that humans physically couldn't.

Deep Learning is great for pure-data problems. I doubt it will be sufficient when interacting with the real world's inherent real-time randomness on large scales.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I agree with much of what Gary Marcus says. Using trained deep models with out of sample data in the real world will cause problems. There is a good reason that self driving car companies want millions of miles of training data: to reduce out of training sample incidents.

For almost four years, my work has been almost 100% development of sometimes novel, sometimes mundane deep learning models so I am a fan but I still wait eagerly for breakthroughs in hybrid AI systems, new Bayesian techniques that can work with less data, handle counter factual conjectures, etc.

</comment><comment><USER7> Discussed last year: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17216536](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17216536).

</comment><comment><USER8> After reading this article I felt like asking the author, 'why havent we built DNNs that can write code?' That seems like a very domain specific problem and for the purposes of research, one could even stick to a single language. I remember being amazed by SHRDLU ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU)) and had a sense of deja vu after reading this paper [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=rJgMlhRctm](https://openreview.net/pdf?id=rJgMlhRctm)

Curiously, I had totally forgotten SHRDLU but had a vague recollection of colored blocks in an AI paper in the 70s. Google pulled the paper as the first hit from the terms('red block, AI, 1970s')

In 40 years it seems we are still doing the same thing. Moore's law has enabled us to build much fancier searching,sorting and filtering algorithms. But there has been no progress in being able to ask a machine if something is good or bad. Fortunately.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why is the idea that the human mind is beyond Turing machines not taken seriously? Seems to make the most sense from the data we do have. E.g. how could we possible write functioning code so consistently if we are limited by the halting problem for Turing machines?

<comment><USER10> Heuristically.

There is no reason to suspect we _solve_ the halting problem or even any restricted variant. In fact, there is no reason to suspect we _solve_ any problem of even modest computational complexity for anything but the tiniest domains.

It is 'not taken seriously' because the only evidence seems to be handwaving and philosophical argument (perhaps with a dollop of quantum weirdness, a la Penrose).

There are a number of models of hypercomputation. Finding any with a physical basis that might credibly match neurobiology is highly dubious. It is not even clear that any of them have any physical basis.

<comment><USER11> Berkeley already uses electricity for finding instant solutions to quadratic optimization problems[1], why do we restrict ourselves to some primitive digital mode in humans? In addition, we already know neurons do some form of protein-based computation, alongside to what looks like spiking/timing-based electric computation. Some neurons can be 1 meter long as well, interfacing with many parts of brain. Can we rule out some super clever electric potential optimization or even something better isn't going on in the background? I am not saying Penrose is right that brain can compute BQP and is using collapses of quantum gravity to solve halting problem, but why can't we keep open mind about it?

Hypercomputation is a cool theoretical device, again the models are way too primitive for now and likely any finding in nature would have super complicated mapping to the current theory. But hey, there might be some graduate student with an idea already...

[1] [http://www.mpc.berkeley.edu/research/analog- optimization](http://www.mpc.berkeley.edu/research/analog-optimization)

<comment><USER9> Exactly. Turing himself left the door open to such ideas with his notion of the oracle machine. It seems odd that we have narrowed the range of possible explanations so dramatically. There are many more oracle machines and even higher order machines on the Turing hierarchy than there are Turing machines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> They are a tool to be used where suitable and not the answer to everything. They are significantly better for detection and classification than what came before but improvement has plateaued. When they fail, how and why is not characterizable. They're good for some things but you have to be careful about how you build the whole system and not just throw a CNN at it unless you really don't mind undefined behavior.</comment>


Asiana Airlines Flight 214: A Pilot's Perspective - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/transport/2013/07/asiana_airlines_crash_stop_blaming_sfo_s_runways_and_korea_s_pilots_for.html <comment><USER2> Off topic but of significant hacker interest:

 _Also in 1985...the crash of a Delta Air Lines L-1011 in Dallas that killed 137._

There's always been a lot of speculation over how IBM gave up an entire industry (the personal computer) to a seemingly insignificant start-up (Microsoft). One theory is that may not have happened if Don Estridge hadn't been killed in that crash. More about him here:

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

and here:

[http://www.nytimes.com/1985/08/05/us/philip-estridge-dies- in...](http://www.nytimes.com/1985/08/05/us/philip-estridge-dies-in-jet-crash- guided-ibm-personal-computer.html)

Of particular note:

"His most revolutionary move was to make the computer's design specifications public, allowing thousands of young people to write programs for the machine."

We take it for granted now, but before Don Estridge and the IBM PC, "proprietary" was the rule and "open" was the exception. RIP

<comment><USER3> Now I understood the policy not to book more than 4 employees on same plane. RIP

<comment><USER4> I'm a former Google employee, they had a similar policy. There were no more than x employees per team allowed on the same plane, above a certain seniority level, only one per plane.

<comment><USER5> The irony is that there's no such policy for buses, which in many ways are _less_ safe than planes. One catastrophic bus crash on the way to Tahoe could conceivably wipe out most of search quality, or any other department.

<comment><USER6> Traveling by bus is surprisingly safe – measures in journeys and travel hours even safer than air travel:

[http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/risks_of_travel.htm](http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/risks_of_travel.htm)

<comment><USER7> Unless you take the notorious chinatown bus[0].

0\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinatown_bus_lines#Safety](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinatown_bus_lines#Safety)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a great article, with one exception:

 _There have been a handful involving regional affiliates, but the majors have been virtually accident-free_

Now, I realize that even including those the stats are still fairly good, but it makes the "virtually accident-free" stats of majors a result of spinning off risk to affiliates, which is not something a consumer should care about. It might be a bit of a nit-pick (as it's still a handful), but moving things into different brands to avoid stigma is a common and, in my opinion, unhealthy practice.

<comment> brown9-2 Could it be that rather than a distinction between the big airlines and the small airlines, the author was attempting to make a distinction between flights with large amounts of passengers (100-200+) and flights of smaller size (50ish)?

I think the point is that there was a streak of 12 years with no fatal incidents of a _large-size_ jet.

<comment><USER9> ...in North America, which is just more fact-twisting by the author.

Lets not forget that 228 people perished when the flight crew of Air France 447 flew the plane straight into the ocean.

<comment><USER10> If by "flew" you mean "stalled", then yes.

<comment><USER11> Well, it wasn't your standard controlled flight into terrain, but since one of the pilots was pulling back on his hand stick for the entire time.... (e.g. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Sullenbe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Sullenberger)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Great and sensible article. Read this because it "pops the bubble" of some of the popular memes floating around, providing details on what it means to have low hours in a type, or whether Korean pilots have "perceived seniority" issues in the cockpit.

I note that checked bags cannot block passengers from escaping an aircraft. Perhaps someone will someday quantify the additional risk airlines forced on passengers when they started charging for every bag.

<comment><USER13> Patrick Smith wrote the "Ask the Pilot" column for Salon.com for 10 years, ending last year. His writing was always very insightful and very entertaining at the same time.

One of my favorites: [http://www.askthepilot.com/essaysandstories/the- exploding-to...](http://www.askthepilot.com/essaysandstories/the-exploding- toilet/)

It seems he came back to slate.com as a one-time thing, but you can read his archived work at Salon and at www.askthepilot.com. He seems to have a book as well now.

<comment><USER14> He also has a new book on Amazon that is basically the book version of his Ask The Pilot column.

I actually just read it the other day and was pretty interesting (and a quick read)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > _But consider for a moment the year 1985, one of the darkest ever for > commercial air travel. By the end of that year, 27 crashes had resulted in > the deaths of almost 2,400 people. These included the Air India bombing over > the North Atlantic, with 329 casualties, and, two months later, the crash of > Japan Airlines Flight 123 outside Tokyo, with 520 dead. (These, the second- > and fifth-deadliest incidents in aviation history, happened 49 days apart.) > Also in 1985 were the Arrow Air disaster in Newfoundland that killed more > than 240 U.S. servicemen, the infamous British Airtours 737 fire, and the > crash of a Delta Air Lines L-1011 in Dallas that killed 137._

Wow, the number of fatalities that year is incomprehensible by today's standards. Yes, this accident has made big news because so few accidents have happened in this decade...but I'd say that today's news cycle has served to amplify just about everything, no matter what their statistical, relative, or absolute significance.

<comment><USER16> So it's ok to forgive Pilots' incompetence just because statistics say it doesn't happen a lot?

<comment><USER17> This is orthogonal to the original argument, but _yes_ , we should forgive pilot error, because mistakes are not necessarily a demonstration of incompetence.

Life, and all subcomponents of life, is one giant ball of probabilities. Training, preparation, and planning all go towards decreasing the probability of undesirable events, but they do not rule them out entirely.

This includes plane crashes, car crashes, or even scraping your knee.

Professional football players don't play perfectly every game. Olympic athletes still make mistakes despite years of daily training. And you still have major bugs in your codebase - would you describe yourself as incompetent?

Mistakes happen. Accidents happen. So long as we can confidently determine that it is accidental rather than systemic (i.e., incompetence), we learn from it and keep going.

But nevermind all that. Let's hang a sign around their necks, parade them in the streets, let people throw things at them, and then execute them publicly.

<comment><USER18> Perhaps more to the point, no single error should ever destroy an aircraft. As the parent points out, people make mistakes. This is not news, and good systems (including aircraft) are designed to allow for that. So, even if pilot error was a contributing factor, I find it very hard to believe that nothing else went wrong. There were at least two people in the cockpit as well as controllers on the ground. No one was worried until a few seconds before the crash.

<comment><USER19> Agree that a single, simple error has little chance to down a modern transport aircraft. It's almost always a chain of errors, each necessary but only jointly sufficient.

I realize that not all the facts are in, and the NTSB full process will take quite some time, but I believe that once all the facts are in, you will find this to be a stunning display of lack of basic airmanship skills.

Why would no one on the ground warn the flight? The altitude transmitted to ATC radar is in hundred foot increments and the high and fast on initial won't trigger an alert, once they pull the power off and try to capture the appropriate vertical profile, ATC radar has no information that anything is wrong, then when they start blowing through the vertical profile, there's not enough resolution to trigger a low altitude alert.

More fundamentally perhaps, it's not ATC's job to fly the plane. ATC keeps planes separated; pilots fly them. On a clear-and-a-million day, and an 11,000 foot runway, the crew couldn't manage a visual approach. There was more than one error, but I think the NTSB findings on probable cause will overhwelminginly find the failures to be in the forward portion of the aircraft, immediately behind the yokes. (It is hard to fathom.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Early theories as to why a plane crashed almost always turn out to be wrong > or incomplete.

In the Air France crash over the Atlantic, the early theories all centered around the loss of airspeed indicators--a mechanical problem. When the flight recorders were finally found (an astounding feat of salvage BTW), it turned out that the airspeed indicators did fail...but then they came back online, and the pilots flew a perfectly good aircraft into the ocean anyway.

So as we look at this SFO crash, the lessons from Air France are mixed. On the one hand it's possible that the early theories of pilot error will be wrong, and it will be some subtle or previously unknown software or hardware error. On the other hand we know that modern highly trained pilots _can_ make enough wrong decisions in a row to crash a sound airplane.

<comment><USER21> The behavior of the co-pilot was so incomprehensibly baffling in this crash. Pulling back on the stick is like an economist mixing up supply and demand curves. I dont think anyone has ever been able to figure out why the co-pilot never thought to stop pulling back.

The depressing part of that transcript is immediately after the co-pilot tells the pilot he's been pulling back on the stick the whole time - the pilot instantly knows it's all over and that he's got a couple seconds to live, and that it was such a stupid error that got them there. It's horrifying.

<comment><USER22> > I dont think anyone has ever been able to figure out why the co-pilot never > thought to stop pulling back.

Under the normal fly-by-wire control law, constant back stick wouldn't stall the aircraft. The computers would stop pitching the aircraft up before it reached the stall angle of attack. But, the system had dropped to Alternate law which is a reversionary measure, in this case caused by the pitot system failing. Under Alternate law, high angle of attack protection is lost and you can pitch up into a stall.

That said, in the AF447 case, the suspicion is that the F/O never even appreciated they were in a stall, irrespective of Alternate law being active.

<comment><USER21> It's still a mystery why they couldn't comprehend that they were in a stall though. The captain did the math when the co-pilot told him he'd be pulling back the whole time: descending rapidly plus nose up = they were in a stall. He recognized this instantly.

The only explanation is that sometimes the brain just goes haywire during incredibly intense moments. Like pedal misapplications in cars, when people frantically try to brake but jam the accelerator instead, it never seeming to click in their heads that they're speeding up, ie pressing the wrong pedal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Single page:

[http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/transport/20...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/transport/2013/07/asiana_airlines_crash_stop_blaming_sfo_s_runways_and_korea_s_pilots_for.single.html)

</comment><comment><USER24> Just like Patrick Smith thinks it's rash to indite the pilots of Flight 214 before we have all the data, I'd ask Pat to do the same for the victims, ahem, passengers.

I don't think the emergency exit was some walk down the isle where a few people stopped to reach under their seats and grab their carry-on to save the inconvenience. From the pictures I saw of the cabin, the seats were torn loose, piled up on top of each other, and there was no 'center isle' left. However, it does seem that the condition of the cabin after the plane came to rest was _highly variable_ depending on where you were sitting.

For all we know, passengers that were seen carrying bags outside the aircraft could have had to throw those bags down the chute to clear the egress. Or maybe they were in a state of panic and shock and were running on autopilot (if only the plane had landed that way).

I do think Patrick is on to something, that the increased level of automation makes it more likely that when the automation isn't there to help that accidents will happen. What I still don't get is flying 30 knots too slow on approach should have been ringing alarms all over the place, including in the tower, and yet no one noticed?

<comment><USER25> I agree - I think a little more than the instrument landing system was offline during that period of time. Surely ATC had them on radar and could have easily seen them coming in way too slow to properly land.

<comment><USER26> That's not ATC's job. A pilot should be able to land the plane himself/herself in visual conditions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> FlightAware has radar data chronicling the crash: [https://flightaware.com/live/flight/AAR214/history/20130706/...](https://flightaware.com/live/flight/AAR214/history/20130706/0730Z/RKSI/KSFO/tracklog)

The NY Times made a nice graph with it: [http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/07/07/us/asiana214-u...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/07/07/us/asiana214-uneven- descent.html?ref=us&_r=2&)

<comment><USER28> The FlightAware data isn't particularly accurate, and the update frequency nowhere near fast enough to get good information (vs. FDR).

For the less sensationalist view of the crash and analysis, see the AVHerald information [1]

[1] [http://avherald.com/h?article=464ef64f&opt=0](http://avherald.com/h?article=464ef64f&opt=0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I have to say I think the conclusion that this isn't related to the Korean Airlines mishap series is mistaken. KAL Cargo Flight 8509 [1] was the last KAL crash, when cultural reasons turned a instrument malfunction into a fatal crash, because a junior FO wouldn't speak up when a Senior Captain(Colonel RoKAF) over-banked the 747, and crashed.

One thing that surprises me is that the same personality trait that crashed 8509, would make them a lousy flight lead as well, not to mention a lousy Squadron CO or Wing CO. If the pilots in the squadron aren't comfortable raising safety issues with their CO, then sooner or later, a crash will happen.

It's not just a foreign issue, poor safety culture lead to the VFMAT-101 crash in San Diego, where 4 people on the ground died[2]. The CO of VR-1 (Fleet Logistics Squadron/VIP transport) got canned for poor command climate [3], which caused a few safety issues, then fudging her NATOPS flight proficiency paperwork. A more "balanced" CO would have realized that flying the checkride, staying fully current would have been easier, and certainly better for safety climate.

IMO(Former pilot): Based on reports, the Pilot Not Flying(PNF/Experienced FO) didn't inform the veteran Captain that he was significantly slow by 500 ft, which could be considered the "waveoff window"[3] for landing a 777 on a runway, even when on a visual approach. Others have pointed out the regulations requiring a go-around for a visual approach are vaguely worded as "when required" without specifying the conditions. Some pilots take that the regulations literally, and believe that a visual approach doesn't require a decision altitude, call-outs or a stabilized approach. It does require to pilots to be safe, and is often required by company Operations Manuals.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Cargo_Flight_8509](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Cargo_Flight_8509)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_San_Diego_F/A-18_crash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_San_Diego_F/A-18_crash)

[3] [http://www.navytimes.com/article/20120916/NEWS/209160317/UAV...](http://www.navytimes.com/article/20120916/NEWS/209160317/UAV- s-longer-wave-off-window-could-pose-threat)

<comment><USER26> I believe it's up to the airline to have a go-around policy for unstabilized approaches. Westjet, for example, requires the approach to be stabilized by 1000 feet. An unstabilized approach is a major causal factor in the majority of landing accidents (according to IATA research). I know which airline I would rather fly on.

<comment><USER29> Yes, Its up to the airlines. 500ft to be stablized is relatively safe. 1000ft is a little safer margin, but not having a stabilized visual approach procedure is definitively risky at best, and sometimes fatal.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_1455](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_1455) is an example of an experienced crew making unstable approach and landed high, then overran the runway and crashed. 500 ft for Southwest pilots to be "in the slot" or go around.

<comment><USER26> I agree 500ft is fine too. The important thing is to have some SOP for a stabilized approach, and for it to be monitored by the company. I suspect Asiana isn't doing this, but I guess we'll find out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > It's not yet clear which Asiana pilot was physically at the controls, the > captain or first officer

That's not true [http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo- way/2013/07/08/200086858/asi...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo- way/2013/07/08/200086858/asiana-crash-plane-was-34-knots-below-target-speed- ntsb-says) We already know that the captain in training was flying. We also already know that a cockpit with 4 experienced pilots let the airspeed fall below vref for 30 seconds before doing anything.

Really good article!

</comment><comment><USER31> Probably the best take-away is that the media is sensationalizing this, primarily because there hasn't been a crash by a major airline in over 10 years.

<comment><USER32> AF447 crashed 2009 on its way from Rio to Paris. Co-Pilot error, wiped out all 228 onboard.

Armchair experts tallyho!

<comment><USER33> The article's statement is more qualified. "the first multiple-fatality crash involving a major airline _in North America_ since November 2001"

<comment><USER34> I feel like if you are following your "first" with that many qualifiers, it starts losing meaning.

<comment><USER35> The first multiple-fatality crash involving a major airline in North America with an airliner carrying over 100 passengers and at least five kosher meals, not arriving on a Tuesday.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I saw another opinion on Philip Greenspun's blog: _My visual approach, and Asiana's_ [http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2013/07/07/my-visual- appr...](http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2013/07/07/my-visual-approach-and- asianas/)

He is an amateur pilot.

</comment><comment><USER37> Perhaps the most favorable indication of the culture of commercial air flight is that the attitude exhibited by this author has been exceedingly rare.

First of all I haven't read or seen any speculation that wasn't qualified as being mere speculation. Second, this is the first instance of reading someone minimizing the accident _because_ of the excellent safety record.

Is it too obvious to say that the safety record comes from not minimizing accidents as flukes? The rigorous/tedious checklists, innovations like removing oxygen from near empty fuel tanks so they're less likely to explode, and flight attendant training for quick exits come from experience and the enormous amounts of attention directed at every past failure.

Such advances come from a combination of the expertise of people with domain knowledge _and_ people outside of the domain having high standards. In 1985, described as an example of a terrible year for air travel, one still could have put the safety record in perspective with other hazards. Surely it was far more dangerous to travel by car. It is easy to imagine pilots and engineers of 1985 wishing that outsiders who knew less than them would just shut up and let them do their jobs without unnecessary distractions. It's even easy to imagine arguments about the meddling not only being costly, but even a dangerous distraction.

Some hysteria, and definitely a lot of lawsuits, aided in the prioritization of problems for people who had the expertise to come up with solutions to minimize fatalities in the future. Outside, unwelcome pressure also disrupts the status quo which, by definition, is part of every failure.

I imagine anyone who has domain specific expertise has at least at some time been incredibly annoyed to have to deal with and attempt to manage the reactions of nonexperts while they're in the midst of solving a problem immediately at hand. And yet, such a reaction is cowardly, and enormously unproductive in the long term.

I'm not sure if I am beating a dead horse over an obvious point, or not making the point very well at all, but I think it is really important to avoid the pitfalls of only talking to experts, or peers, or people within your established hierarchy of influence when attempting to address failures. This article, made me recall students of nuclear physics on Reddit talking about Fukishima, who couldn't decide whether it was irrelevant because it was an older reactor design, or whether it was irrelevant because it occurred after an earthquake and tsunami that were more severe than the models forecast as possible, or whether nuclear disasters in general are irrelevant because their understanding of worst case was the not-that-bad-all-things-considered case of what was only achieved through heroics of people at Chernobyl.

What made the point for me personally was reading about failures at NASA. I highly recommend the long "Columbia's Last Flight" by William Langewiesche in _The Atlantic_ [1] as it had a great influence on me when it came out in 2003, and helped me learn to value input from people without specialty knowledge. Even when special expertise defines who is most likely to develop fixes, the big picture view sometimes only afforded to outsiders is important, or sometimes just enough disruption so different voices within the system are heard.

In the case of NASA, things were humming along for the entire edifice because it had worked before when they squelched concerns by small groups within the enormous operation. As a result, when it failed, it was the system itself that failed, and it would have been reckless to trust that system to determine what went wrong. Perhaps even more famously, with Challenger, Richard Feynman was the gadfly in that investigation, and later had plenty to say about the ability of entire cultures to encourage mistakes specifically as a result of their desire to build in-group consensus.

So, I think the air travel industry deserves an enormous amount of respect for its excellent safety record, and that the shortage of voices trying minimize this failure suggests that they will accurately determine what went wrong. The value of this column is as an example to the rest of us, not in the air flight industry, of what not to do, and what attitudes stand in the way of improvement and finding solutions.

[1] [http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/11/columbia...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/11/columbias- last-flight/304204/?single_page=true)

<comment><USER38> "Even when special expertise defines who is most likely to develop fixes, the big picture view sometimes only afforded to outsiders is important, or sometimes just enough disruption so different voices within the system are heard."

Yes! This is not unlike having a child solve the problem of the 18-wheeler stuck underneath a too-short overpass. Have outsiders review the data, the situation, suggest possible causes and solutions. This extends to so many venues, IMHO, beyond accidents like the Challenger/Feynman, Chernobyl, Fukishima and Asiana Flight 214. Some of the most successful and impressive businesspeople I have know are those that discuss their work with outsiders openly, and _really listen_ to what the outsiders have to say.

<comment><USER39> I'm not familiar with the 18-wheeler anecdote you mentioned. Could you provide a link or details?

<comment><USER40> I was curios about it too. Straight googling was fruitless but guessing at the solution (Something within the common functionality of a truck and which would be "obvious" in hindsight and thus work for a riddle.) The google string that worked brought this up: [http://rawksoup.com/neighborhood/pg/blog/read/1987/brain- tea...](http://rawksoup.com/neighborhood/pg/blog/read/1987/brain-teaser-stuck- truck)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> the article hardly says anything... (more than dont believe what media provides, which again is nothing new)

<comment><USER42> So you would have preferred the pilot author make different uninformed, speculative claims about the cause of the crash? That's the whole point: no one reporting on or writing about this has all the facts yet

<comment><USER41> > no one reporting on or writing about this has all the facts yet

yep, that is implicit in the lack of an official and conclusive report. But I have spent 10 minutes reading the article waiting for something interesting, and he just says nothing apart from wait for the official info, dont speculate. which is the default mindset of many. but yes, there might be a whole lot of other people who needs to read this carefully ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'm finding it a little annoying how people seem to like to defend every aspect of the flight - the pilots were fine, the plane was fine, the runway is fine (two of those I believe, BTW), as if that makes it better. The plane crashed and two people died, something was _definitely_ wrong.

</comment><comment><USER44> The distinction between regional carriers and the majors made in the article stinks. If one chooses lowest cost flights, it's impossible to not end up on a regional carrier on one leg of your flight.

</comment><comment><USER45> Can someone explain to me why humans land these planes?

These airports are fixed. We can easily set up transmitters around them to allow the plane to triangulate its position to less than an inch. Even excluding the tragedy of the loss of human life, you would think the lost of a multi-billion dollar airplane even once every decade would push people to automate the most dangerous part of flying (landing) to machines.

<comment><USER22> Autoland is often used (mandatory in very low visibility) but requires 2 humans to monitor in case of equipment failure. To develop autoland with sufficient redundancies to require no monitoring, and install accompanying ground equipment at every commercially used airfield is way more expensive than training humans to land aircraft. Airframe loss is an insurable risk at market price.

Presently, the numbers favour accepting human error.

<comment><USER46> I wonder how the failure rate for autoland compares to that of human- controlled landings (specifically on the Boeing 777). I'm fine with having the human as a backup, but if autoland on a particular plane has a lower failure rate, I prefer to trust my life to autoland.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Whatever happened on final approach into SFO, I highly suspect that it was in fact related to the culture of Korean air safety in 2013:

[http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/518568-asiana-flight- cras...](http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/518568-asiana-flight-crash-san- francisco-63.html#post7931852)

<comment><USER47> More dribble and speculation

<comment><USER26> Say what? This was a detailed and well-written post by a United check captain who actually worked in Korea. Also the info has been confirmed by another captain who worked there. I'd downvote you if this site would let me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I can't believe I read this article on HN. People died due to some human error (if it's not the weather it must be some human error somewhere) and the public wants to know why. Media is serving that demand, it could be over-speculating but it doesn't mean that a polit should feel obliged to start defending the engineers on the expense of first categorizing it as a non-catastrophe and then blame the passengers.

To me, listing all the past tragedies to make the point that this one doesn't deserve the public attention is at the very least inconsiderate if not offensive.

<comment><USER49> As the article said, stop speculating. You don't know it was caused by human error. Wait for the data to be analyzed.

<comment><USER50> Yeah but he seems to take the liberty to speculate that passengers were being selfish in lugging their carry-ons down the aisle while evacuating and endangering others' lives. Unless anybody actually complained about this being an issue in the evacuation process, he's not sticking to the facts either. So please, let's stop with the "let's not speculate" garbage. Everybody will do it. He's just trying to cover for his industry and the people in his profession.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Yeah, let's give the benefit of doubt to the pilots and only scold the passengers. Typical apologist bullshit.

<comment><USER50> I wish the coward downvoters would actually point out why I'm wrong with my summarization of this article.

<comment><USER51> Well, I haven't earned my downvote wings yet, but I'd wager you did yourself in with "typical apologist bullshit". They're not silencing your opinion, they're disapproving of your tone.</comment></comment></comment>


Fanaticall providing a - <AUTHOR> http://fanaticall.com/

<comment><USER2> My gosh. There are so many buzzwords and acronyms it is impossible to tell what you actually do, much less determine why I should care.</comment>


MacOS Vulnerability Exposes Passwords of Encrypted APFS Volumes in Plain Text - <AUTHOR> https://www.macrumors.com/2017/10/05/macos-high-sierra-disk-utility-vulnerability/ <comment><USER2> This makes me wonder if previous versions of OS X and macOS store encrypted volume passwords in plain text as well or if this flaw is storing the entered password as the hint when setting up the volume, but that doesn't seem likely if unlocking the volume is possible with the password.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you do when you're not working/programming? - <AUTHOR> I am a 23 year old programmer working at a successful Bay Area startup and I spend most of my time at my day job programming and after I get home from I am either continue where I left off at work or watch Netflix. If I am not doing either of those, I am either on Hacker News or on some tech website reading how to conquer the world with the latest programming language.<p>I do not have any hobbies outside of work. What hobbies do programmers/hackers have on this thread? What things do you do outside of work? <comment><USER3> Get started on the classics. As a very strong general rule, they're classics for a reason. Some of them can be read in a single long sitting ("The Great Gatsby" springs to mind for that). Old and modern; the British author David Mitchell has written some fist-bitingly good modern literature. Branch out; some modern Japanese literature is so good it carries through the translation.

If you can, get them in second-hand paperback - carry them, bend them, flick back and forth through them, mark them up with a stub of pencil. They're so good. They really are. Thankfully, they're also something that can't be hacked, pivoted, presented as a service, gameified or whatever other buzz phrases we churn out to make ourselves feel smug. There's no other way to read them than to simply open the book and read.

</comment><comment><USER4> You have some really amazing surfing and bouldering right in your back yard. Both easily accessible for after work sessions. It's one of the few places in the country that has both, so you're making me sad by not doing either of them.

Castle Rock is like a mini Fontainebleau, with really nice sandstone in a pleasant setting. Train up at any of the half dozen local climbing gyms, then start heading up the hill every evening once the days get longer.

Santa Cruz has tons of amazing breaks, but Pleasure Point is my particular favorite, with its easy access, fun waves, and good aprez surf tacos a short walk away.

Both those things will fix any back/wrist issues you might try to inflict upon yourself sitting in that felt cube all day. Both will encourage you to get out travelling, which is an added bonus. You'll one day find there are beaches with tropical warm water where you won't need that 4 mm of rubber anymore, and hillsides with more than seven distinct boulders in a half mile radius.

Good luck!

<comment><USER5> How are the crowds in the SF area lineups? It always looks packed in surf videos. I've been to SF but never had the chance to surf or go to a beach other than Muir Beach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I live in Columbus, OH, and I do far less than what some of these posts do, but haven't seen anyone else from Ohio so I thought I would post.

* Read - Much like the others I'm constantly reading something, not usually programming related

* Learn - Also like others, I'm always teaching myself something new. Cooking something new, knitting, organic chemistry, I'm kind of all over the map

* Archery - [http://www.velocityarcheryrange.com/](http://www.velocityarcheryrange.com/) Sorry for their awful website (not my code, just to throw that out there* but I go out every now and again and shoot a bow and arrow for something physical to do that's eccentric and difficult enough to keep me interested

May update if I think of more things that I do, or if I remember Columbus- based things if people are interested!

</comment><comment><USER7> * Running - I try for 3x a week, usually 5k but sometimes I got 6k or 7k on the weekend.

* Volunteering - I socialize feral and semi-feral cats for 3-4 hours a week at a local animal shelter. I get a lot of cuts and scars from it, but it's great when the scared animal I met becomes someone's loving pet.

* Reading - Right now I'm reading a book on the history of Mexican food in the US ("Taco USA"). It keeps me thinking about things outside the tech scene.

* Gardening - Not as easy now that I'm living in an apartment, but I like getting my hands dirty and you can't beat the taste of food you grew yourself.

</comment><comment><USER8> Flying, biking, walking my dog, swimming, reading.

If I had to make a suggestion, I'd say get a bike and find some interesting trail close to where you live. Cycling is great exercise, very invigorating (mentally and physically). It's a very good way to both reduce stress, give yourself more energy and come up with new ideas and solutions to problems.

</comment><comment><USER9> Building physical objects. Primarily furniture. It's ridiculous how many problems you can solve while using a woodplane.

</comment><comment><USER10> I Don't really have a schedule and i find it really hard to stick to a routine due to problems with getting to bed and waking up the same time every day.

But normally this is what i do.

* wake up between 10:00 and 12:00 take a shower and make coffee.

* Code on a start-up me and my brother are in the making of.

* 3 times a week i hold boxing classes at my dads gym.

* After work i watch a movie or read on hacker news.

Sometime i wish i could get on with a routine and stick with it, it would benefit me in many ways. But my discipline on going to bed and waking up on proper times is none and i have never been able to do that in my whole life, so i don't see it happening in some time.

I have also tried to get back into boxing and marital arts, i used to be really into that and train 5 times a week. But my interest in training and martial arts have almost disappeared as i have been doing it since i was 9 and i have no idea how to reignite the flame i used to have.

</comment><comment><USER11> A few things. It depends when you're asking what my interests are around then.

At the moment these spring to mind:

Chess - casual player, friends and family type thing. Never been competitive enough to want to learn specific openings and counters and so on.

Martial arts - specifically I practice Wadu Ryo karate.

Swimming

Archery - <USER2>

Reading - Mostly fantasy and sci-fi, a few technical and history books or books on whatever my interest happens to be then.

Volunteering - I try to help young people into work.

Music - I play the piano. Well, technically a keyboard at the moment.

Wood work - Pretty rare these days since I got my house the way I want it, but I still make little things from time to time. Really more my boyfriend's thing these days than mine though.

Computer games - I enjoy strategy games, RPGs, and things where you can build stuff.

</comment><comment><USER12> Camping/Backpacking. Chilling with my dog. Gardening. Photography. Painting.

</comment><comment><USER13> I live in Los Angeles. My routine is very routine, but I like it that way.

Morning weekday routine: Get up, exercise, eat breakfast, shoot some arrows (hence the username), go to work

At work hobbies: Table tennis, and we have a crew that does calisthenics at the park below work

Night: Come home, chill with wife, sleep

Weekends: Archery in the morning, gym with the wife in the afternoon, usually go to dinner in the evening.

I used to have more hobbies, but I found that the routine is liberating in a strange way. I don't have to think about what I need to do, I just do the same things week in week out and try to get really good at them.

<comment><USER14> Where do you practice Archery in LA?

<comment><USER13> Pasadena Roving Archers

rovingarchers.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Mapping in OpenStreetMap - goes well with a side order of cycling for fun and transport (and a dose of downloading the planet data and hacking at them, bringing me back to programming in a roundabout way :))

<comment><USER16> me too! where do you edit?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I lift weights. I do weight lifting 6 days a week, Monday through Saturday, as soon as I wake up.

My priories in life are:

\- Fitness.

\- Family.

\- Work.

It sounds a bit rough, but fitness is what keeps me grounded. I'm by no means at my goal, but bodybuilding is something that is incredibly fun and relaxing to do. It requires a ton of energy, but the discipline gives me a great feeling through the rest of the day, and makes me feel -- powerful.

It's been a huge confidence booster, and it's been fun to focus on physical development as well as personal development -- it helps balance out my life.

</comment><comment><USER18> Bouldering (really good for programmers as a prevention of back issues or RSI, imho), sailing, hiking, cycling, figuring out how much beer can I drink in a single night every now and then

</comment><comment><USER19> Find a side project you really like; ideally it should have some kind of goal attached. My recent project were:

1) Build a pair of kevlar canoes and explore the local waterways.

2) Hiking, often just to stay in shape for vacations. My wife isn't a fan of relaxing vacations.

3) Gardening: has the added benefit of producing amazing vegetables for little money.

4) Writing iOS games, or working on the data acquisition system for my "business". This is looking more like a hobby than a home business every day.

</comment><comment><USER20> Spending QT with my kids/wife, working out (MMA), tinkering with Arduino and multirotors, movies, hiking.

</comment><comment><USER21> These days I both work a day job and am a startup founder, and I don't do a whole lot other than work, between the two. But when I find (or make) a small bit of spare time, I like to do things like:

1\. Read - fiction (horror, sci-fi, thriller/suspense, mystery, etc.) and various topics in non-fiction: physics, cosmology, history, economics, biographies, etc.

2\. Mountain bike. I haven't been riding much lately, but this is one of my favorite outdoor activities when the weather is nice.

3\. BMX - I still pull out my old BMX bike from time to time and do a little dorking around, street riding.

4\. Road biking. I mainly only ride my road bike for cross-training purposes, but I like to get in a few miles here and there.

5\. Hike and/or trail run. - I sometimes go hike or run, mostly on some of the same trails I MTB on. Plus a few nearby trails that are open to foot traffic, but not bikes.

6\. Concerts - I love live music, and I try to make it to a concert every now and then. The last one I hit up was Trans-Siberian Orchestra back in November. But I like pretty much anything heavy-metal or hard-rock. From Steel Panther to Motley Crue to Tyr or Anthrax, whatever.

7\. Dining out - I'm not exactly a hardcore "foodie" but I enjoy trying novel cuisine and having a good meal at a nice restaurant. So exploring new places to eat is something I like to do, especially when traveling. This week has been a good example - I've been in San Francisco all week (I live in Chapel Hill, NC) so I've had a chance to sample a Peruvian restaurant, a Czech restaurant, a place that specializes in garlic, etc.

8\. I try to hang out at the local hackerspace[1] a little. Often when I'm there I'm actually working on the startup, but sometimes I like to go in and just tinker and play around a bit. I bought a few microcontroller / SBC boards (Arduino, rPi, BeagleBone) and a bunch of discrete components and shit, and built a monster breadboard with an integrated powersupply using an old PC ATX power supply. Sometimes I just go in and work on learning to build weird electronic circuits and stuff.

Outside of that, I dunno... does reading HN count as a hobby? Or watching TV shows and movies? I squeeze in a couple of "go to the theater" for a new release deals a year, and watch a movie on Netflix or Amazon Prime from time to time, or rewatch one of my old favorites on DVD. _shrug_

[1]: [http://www.splatspace.org/](http://www.splatspace.org/)

</comment><comment><USER22> I also live in the Bay Area (SF). Here's a small sampling of things I do when I'm not working:

* Write. Every weekday morning, I go to a coffee shop downtown and write for 30-60 minutes. I've written two full-length novels and two novellas so far, though they are all as-of-yet unpublished. Someday...

* Run. I run 3-4 nights per week, either along Embarcadero or through Golden Gate Park. I started off with the Couch to 5K program in January 2012 and I've worked up to four half-marathons in the last 12 months.

* Disc golf. There's a disc golf course in Golden Gate Park. Grab a beginner set (20 bucks from Amazon: [http://www.amazon.com/Innova-Disc-Golf-3-Disc-Colors/dp/B000...](http://www.amazon.com/Innova-Disc-Golf-3-Disc-Colors/dp/B000Q838XW/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&tag=wheoftimdat-20)), grab a friend, and go play. It's super fun.

* Nerd Nite. [http://sf.nerdnite.com](http://sf.nerdnite.com) \- 8 bucks. It's like the Discovery Channel -- with beer! (Side note: it's also where I met my girlfriend, and I go every month.)

* Rock climbing - check out Planet Granite ([http://www.planetgranite.com/](http://www.planetgranite.com/)) or Mission Cliffs ([http://www.touchstoneclimbing.com/mission-cliffs](http://www.touchstoneclimbing.com/mission-cliffs))

* Meetups - I've attended a dozen Meetups, including the SF Rust meetup. Very fun way to meet new people.

* Biking - Go to Roaring Mouse bikes in Crissy Field ([http://www.roaringmousecycles.com/](http://www.roaringmousecycles.com/)) and buy a bike. Then bike to work, bike to Golden Gate Park, bike across the GG bridge to Sausalito, to Tiburon, to Marin. There are a million awesome places to bike in the Bay Area, and there are huge communities around it. It's something you can do by yourself or with a group. Super fun.

* Anything from sf.funcheap.com. Like the site says, it's a list of fun, cheap things to do in the Bay Area.

* Take online classes ([http://coursera.org](http://coursera.org)). I'm currently taking the Machine Learning course and the Compilers course. It's very fun to learn new things!

* Become a Stormtroooper ([http://www.goldengategarrison.com](http://www.goldengategarrison.com)) - I'm not a member, but I know a lot of people who build their own Stormtrooper armor and then do volunteer activities with the 501st (the official Stormtrooper organization). Very cool way to give back to the community, especially if you're a Star Wars geek!

* Volunteer! There's a great organization in the city called One Brick ([http://sfbay.onebrick.org/](http://sfbay.onebrick.org/)). You basically pick an event and just show up. It's volunteering a la carte! You're not making long term commitments -- just one event at a time. And you meet TONS of good, kind-hearted people. It's a win/win!

* And being Hacker News, I would be remiss if I didn't mention: __start your own business __. Find a problem domain you know something about, and solve that problem. Get out there, meet some co-founders, crank out some code, save the world, and get the cheerleader. Or maybe it was save the cheerleader? Whatever.

* And so much more. I do all of the above things regularly (sometimes daily, sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly), but there are a huge list of things I just don't have the time or memory to mention. There's a whole world out there. Get outside and explore!

Good luck!

<comment><USER23> This was a really complete answer. Just to not repeat and complete it with a couple of new things:

-You might get some interesting and fun things in here: California Academy of Sciences and The Exploratorium. Every Thursdays they have special events.

-This is another website where you can find something: [http://www.sfweekly.com/](http://www.sfweekly.com/)

If you want to socialize www.meetup.com (already told by Jemaclus) is great. You can also organize or find meetups to programme instead of programme alone for example. There are meetups for whatever think you want to think, so just try some of them until you find something and some people you like!

<comment><USER22> I can't believe I forgot to mention Nightlife at the California Academy of Sciences on Thursday nights! GREAT program!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Sleeping. Netflix, movie. Day dreaming. Learn to be a chef and just staying home browsing interesting things on the Internet (meme, cats, idk). I am not outgoing. I like my home...

</comment><comment><USER25> Teaching high school physics and calculus to neighbourhood kids, play guitar and ukulele, hiking small hill near house and contemplating life once in a while.

</comment><comment><USER26> Exercise, maintain an active dating & social life, other intellectual pursuits (e.g. learning math), waste time on reddit and social media.

</comment><comment><USER27> Taekwondo, Gaming. Hit me up in the bay if you're down for some martial arts, I can give you the whole tour to see if you like it.

</comment><comment><USER28> Playing music (both with a band, and composing/recording by myself at home), photography, play and exercise with a border collie.

</comment><comment><USER29> Writing. Board games. Animé. Occasional club nights (there are a few that I know that seem to attract the right kind of people).

</comment><comment><USER30> You are not alone. I program some more, read HN or some programming books or watch netflix.

</comment><comment><USER31> Writing. Seeing art. Running. Biking. Photography. Chess.

</comment><comment><USER32> Find a significant other.

</comment><comment><USER33> Sailing, hiking.

</comment><comment> bra-ket browsing hn</comment>


The most reliable (and unreliable) blogging services - <AUTHOR> http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/12/17/the-most-reliable-and-unreliable-blogging-services-2/

<comment><USER2> Summary:

First: "There's of course more to choosing a blogging service than mere availability, but it's one factor, and now you have some actual numbers so you don't have to guess."

Second: In order of least downtime: 1\. Blogger 2\. WordPress.com 3\. Typepad 4\. Posterous 5\. Tumblr</comment>


Go-oo: A Lighter, Faster OpenOffice, With Extras - <AUTHOR> http://ostatic.com/176859-blog/go-oo-a-lighter-faster-openoffice-with-extras <comment><USER2> Where is this lighter and faster?

Go-oo is a little more M$ compatible and a litte more a developpers' version of oo. It installs into /opt which smells badly like novell crap.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have no idea if this is or isn't better/smaller/faster -- but, the branding seems awfully flawed. Why hinder your growth by making it hard for people to remember and refer to you?</comment>


Quentin Tarantino is suing Gawker for posting a link to the script of his film - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-25923343 <comment><AUTHOR> Here's a link to the Gawker post: [http://defamer.gawker.com/here-are-plot- details-from-quentin...](http://defamer.gawker.com/here-are-plot-details-from- quentin-tarantinos-leaked-1507675261)

and in case it gets taken down, here is the script they link to: [https://anonfiles.com/file/ba77fe6f664d451a4725fbcca0846f67](https://anonfiles.com/file/ba77fe6f664d451a4725fbcca0846f67)

I'm glad to see Gawker fighting this instead of being intimidated by Tarantino's lawyers.

<comment><USER2> It seems to me Tarantino's case is not _obviously_ without merit, unless you reject the idea of copyright altogether.

<comment><USER3> I'm still not sure what the legal rationale is for treating link publication as copyright violation. When you publish a link, you are not copying anything, the person following the link is.

By analogy, a person who told people that Tarantino's script was under a box behind a grocery store would be violating copyright.

<comment><USER4> I think the biggest deal is the profit aspect of the situation. If there was a person earning money for every person that he tells where Tarantino's script (in some fashion analogous to Gawker's add revenue from site hits) is your analogy sounds a lot worse. Publishing that link wasn't any kind of public service, they were using Tarantino's unreleased work to make a profit and he has grounds to sue for that.

<comment><USER3> But is it illegal, or is this simply a civil thing?

<comment><USER4> As the law stands it looks like it is illegal ([http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html](http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html) section 3 subsection D [or search for link]). It looks like the linker is only protected if they don't have knowledge that the link is infringement and doesn't receive any financial benefit from the action.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The US has had rulings that linking can itself be illegal, notably in Universal v. Reimerdes and Intellectual Reserve v. Utah Lighthouse Ministry.

</comment><comment><USER6> The lawsuit is without merit, but it's a bummer that QT is considering dropping the film altogether:

[http://www.deadline.com/2014/01/quentin-tarantino-hateful- ei...](http://www.deadline.com/2014/01/quentin-tarantino-hateful-eight-leak- novel/)

It sounds like a good concept, and hopefully a better homage to spaghetti Westerns than Django was. I think it's amusingly ironic that he knows for sure that Tim Roth isn't the betrayer, given Roth's history with QT (mild spoiler).

Also worth noting in that Deadline piece: the agency that QT accuses of dispersing the script counters that QT did not do the basic precautionary step of watermarking the script, implying that QT _wanted_ it to be leaked without repercussion (suing Gawker is definitely a way to bring notoriety to the project, though QT has enough notoriety to not resort to stunts)

<comment><USER7> Personally I don't see how referencing Roth's history with QT is a spoiler, but isn't it kind of assumed that you should warn of a spoiler _before_ the reader has already, you know... read it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Anyone counted the "homages" yet? ...

I wish there would be another Jackie Brown.

</comment><comment><USER9> I love this because it should decide once and for all whether _linking_ to "infringing content" is actually a crime or not. Right now it's already being treated like one, so the downside can't be any worse. But the upside could be that MPAA & friends can't get away with using DMCA to takedown _links_ to infringing content anymore, which means Google will be able to reject all the mass-takedown of links in its search engine, too.

<comment><USER10> >I love this because it should decide once and for all whether linking to "infringing content" is actually a crime or not.

That's already been decided, multitudes of times over many cases. Adding indirection to infringing material does not shield you from liability.

<comment><USER11> Did you consider taking that position to its logical end before proposing it?

<comment><USER10> Why should I? Courts don't. As I wrote in another post, courts have a more pragmatic view than you give them credit for and take intent and context into account. This is why torrent files and magnet links and other levels of indirection won't shield piratebay and other such sites from liability, and also why HN linking to a Gawker story (which links to copyrighted material) isn't going to cause problems for HN.

<comment><USER11> Sorry, sarcasm detector fail

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Though experiment: if someone writes on his blog, "this guy's house is at this address, and he has valuables there you can get", can he be sued?

<comment><USER13> As another reply said, context is everything. To elaborate:

If you phrase it exactly as you said, I can imagine a lawsuit being successful. The comment--specifically, the phrase "you can get"\--evidences a reckless disregard for the possible consequences. Arguably, a break-in is a reasonably foreseeable consequence. One might even argue that the commenter _intended_ to cause a break-in.

I suspect there could be multiple theories of liability here, with all or most being torts. Naturally, the available causes of action would be a function of whether anybody acted on the suggestion and broke into the house.

On the other hand, if you phrased it differently, you _might_ be safe. For example, it seems grossly unjust to punish expression along the lines of: "John Smith is internationally famous for the extensive Picasso collection in his home gallery." Almost any fact could conceivably be abused in the wrong hands. If a speaker were unconditionally liable for any subsequent abuse of his/her speech, regardless of the character or intent of the speech, nearly all factual speech would entail extremely burdensome legal risks.

So what determines whether a public comment about someone's valuables is actionable? Again, context. What did you say about the valuables? (Did you suggest stealing them?) Where was the comment published? (Was it on a burglary forum?) What was said elsewhere in the same article or conversation? (Was it part of a discussion about how to become a better burglar?) These are not necessarily the only factors. They're just examples of the types of factors a court might consider.

Check out Eugene Volokh's excellent article on this fascinating topic:

[http://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/facilitating.pdf](http://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/facilitating.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Go quentin!</comment>


Why I Sold My Company and Didn't Tell Anyone for a Year - <AUTHOR> http://amitgupta.com/something-happened <comment><USER3> Thanks for sharing. My wife is a big photography enthusiast, and I think we may have both applied to work for Photojojo in the past. :) Anyway, I wanted to say that I am incredibly impressed by this. It's not every day that I hear the story of someone setting out to build a sustainable company^; and, from what limited perspective I have, you seem to have succeeded.

Bravo, sir; bravo. I wish you all the best.

^edit: So I'm not misinterpreted here, by "sustainable company" I mean one whose goal is to grow slowly and profitably on its own, not quickly in hopes of an IPO or acquisition. Those companies have their place, and it's a good place. I just like to hear the other stories too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words, Evan. Glad to hear you guys are fans of Photojojo (and photography)!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Amit's probability of death [http://tumblr.amitgupta.com/post/85539436331/filed-under- tab...](http://tumblr.amitgupta.com/post/85539436331/filed-under-tabs-i-keep- open-in-my-browser) He's at about year 3 which looks a LOT better than the earlier years.

</comment><comment><USER5> Congrats for making it through the valley of death unscathed. When I finish a massive project I descend into depression for months. I can't move. Then, I come out and am ready to give birth to the next great idea.

Frankly, you landed that plane so gracefully that I'm in awe. You're an inspiration to me.

</comment><comment><USER6> Congrats & Great story ! This level of passion is probably required to start and run a company.

</comment><comment><USER7> Life has a lot of battles, and you just won one of the biggest. :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Maybe I missed something in this article, but did the employees know? Or did they essentially get their labor sold off to another boss a year ago and were none the wiser? Can such a thing even be done, legally speaking (maybe if the poster were the sole owner)?

Is it literally true that he didn't tell _anyone_ for a year?

<comment><AUTHOR> By anyone I meant the general public. Everyone at Photojojo knew as soon as the deal was finalized.

<comment><USER8> Understood! Sorry, my programmer-brain took those words pretty literally. Great story, by the way, and I've always loved Photojojo (and think companies like e.g. Pinterest have a lot to thank it for in the design department).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Glad to see you alive, battling, and bucketlisting, Amit. As a huge fan of Photojojo (considered applying a few times even), I am happy see that it will be in capable hands that you trust.

Make every second count and leave that shutter wide open. :)

</comment><comment><USER10> Great read, thanks for sharing and best of luck with all your future endeavours!

</comment><comment><USER11> Congrats and thanks for sharing Amit.

Glad you have a bucket list and are ticking off items in there. Hope you have the time to get them completed.

You only have one life. Make it count. Tomorrow may never come. Take care of yourself and your family first. Don't keep important things pending if you can help it. Don't leave home in a bad mood or saying things to your SO that you will regret if you don't get the opportunity to remedy.

Also, try and take life insurance when you are young, healthy and are not assailed by chronic ailments. Your family will appreciate the security that you provide after you are gone.

When we are young, we feel invincible and forget the long range picture.

Sorry to sound morbid.

Peace.

<comment><USER12> I know you!

Gluecode.

<comment><USER11> Thats an understatement SK :).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Often lately, I have been hearing many people suffering from cancer especially in US. What might be the reason for this? Why are so many people in US affected by cancer?

<comment><USER14> 1) People aren't dying of other stuff. Stuff that used to cause massive amounts of death just isn't as likely anymore. Infections are now routinely cured with antibiotics. Vaccines prevent deadly disease. Hygiene and health and safety standards across the board reduce death from other causes dramatically - there has been an increase in laws regarding health and safety in every facet of life.

People are living longer. The older you are the more likely you are to have cancer. It is hypothesized that given enough time everyone develops some kind of cancer even if microscopic (more on that later)

Automobile fatalities (the thing most likely to kill young adults) are down dramatically. This is due to safer cars and a decrease of things like DUIs due to public awareness and a huge increase in prosecution. My grandpa told me in the 70s police would routinely pull him over, see he was drunk, and tell him just to go home. New safety features are required almost every year on automobiles. People take infant car seats very seriously nowadays. When I was a kid as soon as I could sit upright by myself I was out of the car seat.

2)There's not a lot we don't know about cancer still. We know that it is a combination of genes and environment that cause it and there are things you can do to lessen your likelihood of getting it such as not smoking... but overall we haven't done a whole lot to prevent most types of cancer and still have a lot to go in completely understanding it. Which specific genes and which specific environmental factors are still somewhat of a mystery, I mean we know some stuff but still not enough. Some types like cervical cancer are largely (but not completely) preventable with routine pap tests but that's the exception.

3) Increased screening leads to an increase in detection of benign and asymptomatic cancer. This turns people into cancer patients who wouldn't have otherwise been cancer patients without screening. This is kinda a new thing. We used to believe that cancer runs one course - that it started at stage 1 and grew continuously until it spread all over your body and killed you - <USER2> catching cancer while it is small and treatable will prevent it from spreading and becoming deadly. We are learning from experience that isn't _always_ the case, some can develop so slowly that there's no way it will cause problems in your lifetime. Take prostate cancer for example - the PSA test is a blood test that was developed to detect asymptomatic prostate cancer. The PSA test is no longer recommended because it lead to an increase in cancer diagnoses but a very modest corresponding decrease in cancer related deaths. That tells us that _some_ men who would be diagnosed with prostate cancer if they had the PSA test wouldn't ever be diagnosed without it. Routine mammograms have detected thousands more very early stage cancer (Ductal Carcinoma In Situ) than ever before. The numbers tell us some of these new diagnoses wouldn't have progressed (and maybe would have regressed). Everything requires treatment though because we don't know which small tumor will become deadly and which one won't. More info on this is here: [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/11/overkill- atul-g...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/11/overkill-atul-gawande)

>we've assumed, he says, that cancers are all like rabbits that you want to catch before they escape the barnyard pen. But some are more like birds—the most aggressive cancers have already taken flight before you can discover them, which is why some people still die from cancer, despite early detection. And lots are more like turtles. They aren't going anywhere. Removing them won't make any difference.

>Over the past two decades, we've tripled the number of thyroid cancers we detect and remove in the United States, but we haven't reduced the death rate at all. In South Korea, widespread ultrasound screening has led to a fifteen- fold increase in detection of small thyroid cancers. Thyroid cancer is now the No. 1 cancer diagnosed and treated in that country. But, as Welch points out, the death rate hasn't dropped one iota there, either. (Meanwhile, the number of people with permanent complications from thyroid surgery has skyrocketed.) It's all over-diagnosis. We're just catching turtles.

The other thing is you may just be hearing about it more or it might just be talked about more than it used to be.

<comment><USER15> Your third point is really interesting. Personally, I'd love to know if I had cancer one way or another. Even if the advice was "let's watch this, and it may not turn into anything" the mere fact that it is known to exist can make sure my doctor is monitoring everything they can to do their best to get ahead of things if it starts going down a bad path.

I'd rather have the knowledge than not, but I know that doesn't always make sense from a large statistical POV.

Simply knowing you have a certain type of cancer though could also prevent misdiagnosis for other things with similar/related symptoms. Beyond that, if I knew I had a certain type of cancer, you can bet your ass I'd do whatever my doctor recommended to reduce my risk for the future. So it could be a great way to convince people to live a healthier lifestyle (albeit out of fear) which I'd be willing to bet would cause them to live longer potentially than if they had not made lifestyle changes.

<comment><USER14> You would think you would _want_ to know but that leads to a lot of overtreatment which is not only bad for you personally it is bad for everyone because it raises healthcare costs.

>So it could be a great way to convince people to live a healthier lifestyle (albeit out of fear)

That fear can't be discounted. Anxiety leads people to have symptoms of anxiety - which are very significant from a medical point of view and a quality of life point of view.

Take a look here:

[https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/a-skeptical-look-at- scr...](https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/a-skeptical-look-at-screening- tests/)

>Another doctor wrote about the opposite experience: his patient had insisted on testing. He was diagnosed with low-grade localized cancer, the kind that can be observed without treating. But he couldn't face living with the knowledge that he was harboring an untreated cancer. He was afraid of surgery and opted for radiation treatment. He developed radiation proctitis and had rectal pain and bleeding for years. He became impotent and lost bladder control. He told his doctor he would rather be dead than live wearing adult diapers.

>Prostate cancer is very common but isn't always harmful. It is found in 80% of autopsies where the men died of something else. Many more men die with prostate cancer than because of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Congrats!

Giant font is giant. Is this some kind of style decision I am unaware of. It is hard to read unless the window is maximized. What is mobile experience like?

<comment><USER17> It's great to read on a 30" work monitor :-).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Congrats, and good read.

Off-topic: referring to the business as "she" comes across as very weird to me. Is this common? I know some women can find that offensive.

<comment><AUTHOR> re: Gender-specific pronouns for inanimates - English is weird. It sounds right to my ear as "she", but the opposite to others. Historically if a gender is required, male is used, but some find that offensive. On the other hand, certain inanimate objects (countries, vehicles of many kinds) are referred to as "she" simply because of tradition.

My girlfriend is learning a little Hindi right now and she finds it maddening that nouns are gendered male or female seemingly at random. I can tell her which is which, but as far as I know there's no system. Some are just male, some are female.

Anyway, "it" sounded weird in that sentence. I should have just rewritten it. :)

<comment><USER19> I grew up in India (admittedly in an English-speaking household), and even today I get my genders mixed up all the time. It makes no sense whatsoever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The amount of times you refer to the business as 'she' or 'her' is a bit off putting to me.

<comment><USER5> He's hetero and women are the object of his intimate love. It's natural for him to attach female gender to the focal points of his love. In other words, if you respect LGBT rights, you also have to respect hetero rights. Not making a political stance here. Just stating the obvious IMO.

<comment><USER21> A woman referring to a company as "he" or "him" is just as weird, in my opinion. This isn't a gender issue, it's an anthropomorphizing issue.

<comment><USER22> Welcome to the English language. Enjoy your stay.</comment></comment></comment></comment>