Ask HN: How do you deal with seasonal affective disorder? - <AUTHOR> I've known I've had this for a few winters now and I can feel it coming back now that it's getting colder. I do all the typical recommendations (Vitamin D3+B12, exercise, staying hydrated, getting 7+ hours of sleep every night) but I'd like to get any other tips on how to deal with it. Did you move somewhere to deal with SAD, and if so where, and did it help? <comment><USER3> Speaking from experience (lived in Alaska for over 20 years), I would suggest investing in an elliptical. A lot of people make the mistake of slacking on their cardio because lifting gets them to where they want to be physically. IMO you shouldn't view cardio as exercise for your body, but as relief for your mind. Keep lifting and eating right, but make sure you get in some vigorous cardio (sweat and make yourself run out of breath). I would suggest doing your cardio in the morning before you start your day. When you get to the point where you're feeling good about yourself, invest in some nice clothes and go show off a little! The attention might help distract you.

<comment><USER4> Totally agree on cardio. This is a must in any weather. Was just jogging this morning and got great ideas popped up in my mind all along.

5 miles flew by quick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some suggestions: \- Try finding a sport you can perform together with others. For me this was climbing/bouldering - if you have a climbing hall near you, I can highly recommend this.

\- Try building a social "net" that will catch you on the days you feel down and motivate you to keep on doing your activities. This helps me immensly, especially with exercising or sports.

\- Think about getting a dog (or another pet). A dog will always motivate you to go outside and be there for you when you dont feel too good. If you are into pets, that is!

\- Patients with "normal" depression are often told to reduce their sleeping hours to 5.5 - 6.5 per day. You should however consult a doctor before integrating this into your schedule. Consulting a doctor on this topic might be a good idea anyway. (In Germany, health insurance covers this - so I do not know if this is applicable to you.)

\- Get some warm and weather-proof clothing (Thermo-pants, long underwear, fleece or softshell jacket). This makes going outside (and subsequently going anywhere) much more bearable.

\- Think about "light therapy". Getting enough light in the morning can change your motivation for the day greatly.

Regardless of aforemnetioned ideas, I'd recommend on taking this issue to a psychiatrist. They are certainly more qualified to give advice than I am - <USER2> can, contrary to popular belief help you in more ways than just getting you medicated.

</comment><comment><USER6> Move to somewhere that has warmth and blue skies. The blue skies help more than the warmth, so if you have to choose between them, take the blue skies.

I feel much better, and I have fewer chest problems.

<comment><USER7> Not everyone can just up and move

<comment><USER8> Or wants to. I live in grey Seattle, but I'd take it any day over sunny SF where vapid cab drivers pitch me their awful startup ideas.

<comment><USER9> Seems humorous to choose the place you live based on regional conversation topics with cab drivers.

<comment><USER8> Seems humorous to think my anecdote representing a larger regional culture was meant to be interpreted as an isolated incident.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It may seem stupid, but putting an extra tee-shirt helps a lot. Even without feeling cold, that extra bit of warmth remove a stressor which can tip the balance.

Slowing down a little helps, and erring towards the more comfortable.

The idea behind, is that if you are pushing to the max during summer when the conditions are favorable, then when the conditions are less favorable, you should allow some slack and not expect to be at the same levels, otherwise you will be burning out trying to compensate. (A car analogy : you wouldn't try to beat your lap time record on a rainy day).

</comment><comment><USER11> Trying to listen to how my circadian rhythms react to the cycle of light and darkness, and not to fight it. That generally means going to bed earlier and getting daylight during the morning commute.

If you can sit by a window in your office and work by natural light, do. Leaving the office every day for lunch and enjoying a few rays of sun on the way to the deli also helps, even if you're bundled up.

</comment><comment><USER4> Moved to CA from Canada.

I still can ski and do winter things here (Tahoe). I love winter-on-demand instead of being forced to misery 4-5 months a year (Eastern Ontario/Quebec).

Nothing else really worked for me and nothing can substitute lots of natural sun.

</comment><comment><USER12> Moving for one or two month to a warmer / more sunny location helps a lot. Doesn't have to be the whole winter to have a very positive effect for me.

Usually living in Austria, spending some time in Winter on the Canary Islands.

</comment><comment><USER13> Make sure you spend enough time outdoor too, especially during sunny hours. I recommend hiking and nordic walking. Once started, I forgot SAD.

Scandinavians say "there's no bad weather, just bad clothing".

Invest in some good termoactive clothing, avoid cotton underwear. Always take some warm drinks and extra cloth for remote trips. Enjoy the season!

</comment><comment><USER14> How much vitamin D are you taking? Do you also add magnesium? Have you tried a sun lamp?

</comment><comment><USER15> I put these lights through the house.

[https://ausmalltech.com.au/products/yeelight-smart-led- ceili...](https://ausmalltech.com.au/products/yeelight-smart-led-ceiling- light)

</comment><comment><USER16> Heat lamps provide a full spectrum of artificial light, including near infrared. The clear bulbs would probably be more appropriate than the red- tinted ones. I have mine on a dimmer.

</comment><comment><USER17> I've found that I have seasonal allergies well into the winter. I was surprised. Allergy meds made a big difference for me.</comment>


The Two Teenagers Who Run the Popular Twitter Feed @HistoryInPics - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/the-2-teenagers-who-run-the-wildly-popular-twitter-feed-historyinpics/283291/?utm_content=buffer32d49&utm_source=twitter.com <comment><USER2> This: "The audiences that Di Petta and Cameron have built are created with the work of photographers _who they don 't pay or even credit_. They don't provide sources for the photographs or the captions that accompany them. Sometimes they get stuff wrong and/or post copyrighted photographs. "

Combined with this: "I'm sure the majority of photographers would be glad to have their work seen by the massives."

Nothing 'new media' about it. Theft plain and simple.

<comment><USER3> > Theft plain and simple.

Well, no, not plain and simple. At the worst, it's copyright infringement.

You may think this is a pedantic correction, and from your point of view, maybe it is. But it isn't for people who see intellectual property as unjust.

<comment><USER4> This trope is getting exceedingly tired, on par with the "taxation is theft", "atheism is a religion" and "Linux should be called GNU/Linux" brigades that often crop up in the appropriate discussions. Theft and "steal" have long been used outside of the OED definitions; I can be a "thief of time", "steal an idea", "steal a base" and so forth. "Theft" and "steal" are appropriate words for the behaviour of people who have decided, in defiance of the laws and remunerative structures society has constructed, that they're entitled to the work of people without giving anything back (apart from some advice like "I'm giving you free advertising", "find a new business model" or "this will actually help you in the long run"). Society has created intellectual property, in the same way it created physical property, and if you can steal the later, you can surely steal the former.

One other angle on this, for the "steal _absolutely must_ deprive someone of something" view, well - something _is_ actually lost, that cannot be replaced. The right of the IP creator to be repaid by the person who grabbed it. Many people say "Well, I'd never have bought it anyway". Whilst true for now, would it still be true in 1 year? 5? 10? Would you have bought it for your kids, or because a sequel came out that you _do_ want to buy? By taking it, you rob the person of the ability to sell it to you in the future.

I think it's incumbent upon anyone who thinks "intellectual property is unjust" and who acts on this belief by just denying its existence, to propose and get support for a viable alternative for supporting the millions of people who depend on it for their livelihood. Otherwise, you're just an anarchist, burning the system down and denying any contribution to the people who have committed to a certain lifestyle on the guarantees _currently_ provided by society.

<comment><USER3> It's not just my distinction; it's a distinction made in courts too. The law is quite clear. Copyright infringement is not theft.

> And, from my perspective, something is actually lost, that cannot be > replaced. The right of the IP creator to be repaid by the person who grabbed > it.

Well, yes... Supposing that IP rights should exist!

Instead of getting dragged into a big long debate, I'll just give you two sources. The first, "Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy?" by Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite chronicles the harm brought by IP with real world examples. The second, "Against Intellectual Property" by Stephan Kinsella is a philosophical/libertarian argument.

(The authors of Information Feudalism don't think IP should be abolished, so you may find it more credible.)

<comment><USER4> I'll have a look at those, thanks. In response to your points, the language used by courts is _exceedingly_ specific, and bears little resemblance to the language used by people in day to day life. For example, in English law, I can "assault" you without ever having touched you. In fact, if I touch you, it's no longer assault. The dictionary definition, and common use, would require that I do more than look menacingly at you, but in the courts, I would have "assaulted" you. I claim the same holds for theft/stealing in an IP situation.

> Well, yes... Supposing that IP rights should exist!

Well, of course. But we could have the same debate about property rights, so I could deny that "theft" exists at all, yet the language used to describe theft wouldn't change.

<comment><USER3> You're basically saying I'm being too pedantic.

I recognized that in my initial comment as a potential criticism. I did so for precisely the reasons you have brought up. Why? Because I understand terms can have colloquial and technical meanings.

But this does not imply that we shouldn't call attention to technicalities, particularly if it's with respect to an issue one thinks is important.

However, you seem to be arguing that even a technical application of theft is applicable to IP. I don't know how to disagree with that without diving into tedious details about what makes "ownership" a viable concept in the first place. Kinsella addresses it in the source I cited in a previous comment. So I defer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Di Petta's flip attitude towards copyright is contemptible. But it's true that it is often impractical to get information about creators and rights. I wonder part of the solution isn't some service that decreased the friction (by a lot) for looking up the relevant information. (As I'm typing this I realize this probably isn't a new thought.)

<comment><USER6> > Di Petta's flip attitude towards copyright is contemptible. But it's true > that it is often impractical to get information about creators and rights.

It _sometimes_ is. Time and again, people have checked the pair's featured pictures and found sources in a few minutes.

<comment><USER5> I totally agree. And again I don't want to excuse their behavior.

But it being inconsistently easy to find a source and copyright information is also a problem that it would be nice to have solved. That there's a lot of variance in this process is itself a disincentive to engaging in it.

It would be beneficial for everyone if, in general, finding sources was as easy as finding the images to begin with. There's no in principle reason (or is there?) why technology has to make content discovery easy and source discovery difficult, it just is that way right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I stopped following accounts like this because of their promotion tactics. They retweet stuff from other accounts and then delete it 15 minutes later. If you look at the feed before subscribing, it looks like it is a bunch of interesting photos. Once you start following them, you see these lower quality retweets at the top of your feed that are deleted as soon as they start to get pushed down on subscriber timelines.

<comment><USER8> If you aren't un-following merely on principle, you can turn off re-tweets per followee. I find the feature very useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think the only difference between these entrepreneurs and big businesses is that big businesses would say "talk to our lawyers" instead of "talk to our lawyers, lol".

That said, if they do get sued I'm not going to feel sorry for them.

</comment><comment><USER10> > Who really deserves the scorn—the two best players in the game or the people > who own the stadium?

Are the two mutually excluded? I'm not sure about the platforms, but the owners of the account are definitely in the wrong. Ignorance doesn't absolve you of your responsibility to play within the bounds of the law.

</comment><comment><USER11> A recent tweet from Kyle Cameron's twitter feed:

"If The Wolf Of Wall Street doesn't inspire you to become successful, nothing will." [1]

Makes me a little sad.

[1] [https://twitter.com/GirlsGoneKyle/status/427666832636403712](https://twitter.com/GirlsGoneKyle/status/427666832636403712)

<comment><USER12> He's a 19 year old making money selling Twitter accounts. I wouldn't spend too much time looking his way for deep life advice and insights.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> So basically to start a successful account all you need to do is find a popular subreddit and upload most upvoted post on Twitter

<comment><USER14> Not just that, the key is to already have followers on a separate account, and then you can cross post them to build up the new one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm not terribly surprised they're run by teens. I've seen them retweet some pretty bad/offensive tweets on both accounts before shortly deleting them (e.g.: misogynistic comments about periods), never mind their cross-promotion and all that. It's as if they mis-judged what they could get away with, because I couldn't work out why someone would want to see a photo of blood- stained pants otherwise.

I briefly followed Earth Pics until they started unrelentingly posting obviously fake photos with no attempt to do research into whether they were real or not. HIP has the same dirty feel to it and so it's no surprised to find out they're related.

They've taken two very possibly interesting topics to run a twitter feed on, and essentially run them in to the ground by not doing even a modicum of work to ensure some sort of integrity behind them. Maybe it's an intentional decision, I don't know, but it just seems like when you're trying to appeal to a semi-academic interest such as geography or history, you'd benefit from doing some fact-checking and verification.

It'd be as if IFLS started posting pseudo-science, for example. In fact, exploring the relative success of both approaches would be a really cool study into new-media or whatever buzzword you want to call it.

</comment><comment><USER16> I think I've seen a lot of the @earthpics photos on the Earthporn sub-reddit. A bot that scrapes that and cross posts the top photos to a twitter account might work.

<comment><USER17> Sssshhhh, I'm working on that now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> >" _They are playing by rules that "old media" and most new media do not. To one way of thinking, they are cheating at the media game, and that's why they're winning. (Which they are.)_" //

It seems fairly often I hear a comment that so-and-so media company (BBC, local paper, RIAA, ...) are using a private individuals media without permission or attribution.

They're it seems serially copyright infringers. Whilst big-media generally correct it after-the-fact when they're caught it seems worth noting that it's not only "young punks" that are profiting by playing fast-and-loose with media available online.

Yes there's a difference in complexion too: which goes both ways - if the images are historic then arguably [morally] the creators have had time to make them pay. The corollary of course is that unlicensed duplication of new images, particularly those used in the news, is more damaging.

This is not to excuse such tortuous infringement but just to shed more light on the context.

</comment><comment><USER19> 1.3 million followers, eh?

Aaannd my headlines-from-1914 bot has 11 followers. tl;dr I suppose.

<comment><USER2> Well, it would help if you added your Twitter handle when saying something like that. Like the idea actually.

<comment><USER19> I posted about it here before. It may be too dry, but I find it quite entertaining. [https://twitter.com/NEWS_XX14](https://twitter.com/NEWS_XX14)

<comment><USER20> On the contrary! You _need_ to post links to these articles.

I want to read all of those articles.

I absolutely love the history leading up to and around the first world war, I've read a good portion of the issues of Punch from those years. But a headline is only enough to arouse my appetite without bedding her back down.

<comment><USER19> Well, you can find the articles by googling the headlines. These are all from the New York Times and you should find the first result is a link to a pdf article there.

<comment><USER21> That's not how Twitter works

<comment><USER19> Yea, how Twitter works is it eats up 24 characters on a URL. No thanks. I figured the headlines were interesting enough on their own 99% of the time.

<comment><USER22> When your plan isn't working, it's time to re-evaluate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Start re-posting their tweets on a halfway-popular account and see how quickly they learn about copyright.

<comment><USER14> But all they care about is the follower count. Once it hits a million, they can sell off this account to someone who wants to monetize it.

I mean, they have no real attraction to "History in Pics" as a constant, or to any particular post. They just care about it as something that people seem to like to follow. If someone else rips off their content, I doubt that would have any impact at all.

<comment><USER24> It's against Twitter's terms to sell an account or username. Does Twitter commonly look the other way on this? Are there public examples of Twitter accounts being sold for a lot of money?

<comment><USER18> How about allowing someone else to post on that account, is that allowed? If not I imagine nearly all corp accounts are in breach of their rules.

They don't need to "sell" it legally to create the same practical result.

Seems it's pretty unenforceable for Twitter?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think we're in some kind of media bubble when a "news" website publishes stories about people who steal content and Tweet it. This feels like a lot of people chasing each other in circles without really producing any new content.

</comment><comment><USER14> The credit thing seems like a red herring. Either you have the license to the photo or you don't.

<comment><USER26> From an ethical perspective I often think credit in these cases is more important than licensing, at least for older stuff. If it's a photo from the 1930s, I honestly don't care if some great-grandnephew technically owns the copyright, but it _would_ be nice to have an accurate caption. The licensing issue gets bigger in my mind the more recent the photos get.

<comment><USER27> I agree. I think that (mis)attribution is a much more fundamental crime than unauthorized reproduction. It's essentially fraud to pass these off as their own works, or with incorrect captions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Follow [https://twitter.com/PicPedant](https://twitter.com/PicPedant) for lolz, and credits :)

</comment><comment><USER29> If you want the source, you can try Google Reverse Image Search</comment>


Question: Resources for online advertising. - <AUTHOR>

Hey all,
I'm trying to learn all about the world of online advertising. I've read the wikipedia articles and all other blog, etc. articles I can find on the subject, but no resource I've found provides a comprehensive in depth look into everything about web ads.
Have you come across any valuable resource, be it web page, book, etc.?
Thanks. <comment><USER2> I read that there's a book PPC (pay-per click) Advertising For Dummies. That might be a good place to start your search.</comment>


To Stop Procrastinating, Look to Science of Mood Repair - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303933104579306664120892036?mod=trending_now_2 <comment><USER2> This is basically a stripped-down article version of The Now Habit [0], without the good bits, such as guilt-free play, the idea that you should set aside time to do whatever without constantly thinking "I should be working", or the Unschedule, where you mark down the times you actually _did_ good work.

[0]: [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Now-Habit-Overcoming- Procrastination...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Now-Habit-Overcoming- Procrastination-Guilt-Free-ebook/dp/B001QNVP7M/)

<comment><USER3> Can you expand on the "Unschedule" bit or link to some reading?

Keeping track of what I've worked on time-wise during a day is something I've attempted many times and it has never taken. Perhaps there is something I am missing.

<comment><USER4> Unschedule is a reverse psychology trick - a schedule where you fill in the play, not work. Being in the gap between periods of play motivates you to start working. Also, google it.

I have not actually tried Unschedule so I cannot really recommend it but I have read "The Now Habit" and it is the most high-level anti-procrastination book. It goes straight to the root causes of procrastination, IMHO.

<comment><USER2> That's actually more like the theory behind guilt-free play. With the Unschedule, you mark any completely unavoidable block of time (meetings, meals, sleep etc). Whenever you happened to have done a half-hour of completely focused work, you mark it. This lets you a) spot patterns in when you work best (e.g. I seem to do my most focused work on a Tuesday morning for no apparent reason), and it gets you thinking "It's 2pm, I have a meeting at 3, I could get this small bit of work done".

I would also recommend Getting Things Done; even if you don't subscribe to the entire method, there are bits that gel quite nicely with the Now Habit; the bit about just _starting_ which this article also touches on falls nicely into place with GTD's "next action" workflow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Motivation isn't an eternal flame waiting to be discovered, it can be a daily practice of reminding similar to showering and eating, if we don't do it, our thoughts and feelings tend to stink.

This article stuck out to me in providing relatively clear and immediately applicable strategies that could be a lot closer to a first principles of addressing procrastination.

Knowledge is not power, acting on knowledge is. Remembering to remind yourself to imagine the future feeling of accomplishment, building momentum with small items, and practicing forgiveness might be a realer challenge for many.

An interesting question that this article leads me to wonder is, how do others here remind themselves of their big picture, their why, that leads them to keep their flywheel spinning?

<comment><USER6> Im only posting this because it annoys me that I thought it.

"Knowledge is not power, acting on knowledge is."

At first, I totally agreed. Thought I'd tuck it away as a keeper, a small pearl of wisdom. A good thing, right?

But then the bloody NSA thing floated in to my my mind and ruined it. They have knowledge in the form of all that data they slurp. They haven't acted on the vast majority of it, but many people, including the sort of people the NSA are unlikely to ever be even vaguely interested in, have changed their behavior as a direct result of knowing what the NSA has and what could be done with it. So, NSA does have power from knowledge they are not acting on.

Shame, because I do know what you are getting at.

<comment><USER7> What they're collecting is information. Their knowledge is in how to collect all of it, and access it. That's where they're taking action.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting.

I have difficulties with procrastination as well. I don't recall having met anyone in our realm who says they don't have some difficulties with it.

Generally, I agree with what the article is saying. I have found my own ties to procrastination and emotion; specifically anxiety, which the article touched on.

I think the suggested approach from the article is missing something that I have found to be important for personal growth and also applicable to startups: _you must be able to measure your progress_. The process of measuring the progress should be easy, if not automatic, and the ability to digest the measured progress should be just as easy.

My blog post from last week[1] shares my personal experience with how I've implemented the approach of measuring (and hopefully defeating) anxiety tied to my procrastination. I go about describing my process to turn those anxieties into actionable and measurable goals that sort of turned into my resolutions for the year.

[1] - [http://randomdrake.com/2014/01/02/destroying-personal- anxiet...](http://randomdrake.com/2014/01/02/destroying-personal-anxiety-from- anxieties-to-actionable-and-measurable-2014-resolutions/)

</comment><comment><USER9> The irony of all these procrastination articles appearing on HN is not lost on me. :-) For better or worse, the "Just get started" approach works best for me.

<comment><USER10> Well, it's a very well targeted group, and easy to reach. What's not to like?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am reminded of a simple diagram a therapist drew for me (on a whiteboard, no less): a triangle connecting "mood" to "thought" to "behavior" illustrating how the human mental state is a feedback system and that you can adjust one thing by applying pressure to another.

Sure, it is simple and obvious, but seeing it visualized that way, coupled with the idea of "mood hygiene" was helpful to me.

<comment><USER12> Sounds interesting. Could anyone please point to more literature along these lines?

<comment><USER13> Feeling good by David Burns is good, but you kind of have to buy in to it. Otherwise the tone and language can seem California fluffy.

<comment><USER14> Did you know that a study was done around the "Feeling Good" book, and that it was shown that _merely reading it_ was _way_ more effective vs. depression than antidepressants?!

(Unfortunately, I don't have the details in front of me and couldn't pull them up quickly via Google. Maybe someone else can provide a link).

<comment><USER13> The claims are noted in the 20th anniversary version of the book.

I believe the biggest difference between medicine and reading was relapse rate rather than a big difference in how much improvement people saw.

I believe them. They're persistent strategies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> One of the causes of procrastination is perfectionism. The fear of not meeting your own high standards probably affects HN readers more than anything else.

<comment><USER16> I just made the same comment. This article may help: [http://coastalcenter.org/overcoming- perfectionism/](http://coastalcenter.org/overcoming-perfectionism/) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Dr. Pychyl advises procrastinators to "just get started, and make the threshold for getting started quite low."

That's like telling a depressed person to just feel better. I've tried a lot of things to help with procrastination but very little works, this is just another thing to try that maybe will or won't work.

Also, personally, I've never had the "suffering" from failing when I put things off, so it's hard to believe that this method would work for me :(

<comment><USER18> That's the problem. I had some suffering from procrastination. Suffering does not exactly helps against it. A self reinforcing feedback loop so to say.

The Now Habit has solid advice. But it takes a lot of effort to implement that advice.

Get yourself together first. Sleep! A minimal Schedule! Rituals! Build a structure for yourself. If you fail here assess yourself and build up a structure for your in small steps from there. This works for me. If it does not work re-examine the situation, adapt. You need a minimal structure before you can even start to working on yourself.

Learn about stress and how it affects your mind and your body.

The basic idea is to switch your mind into a more mindful state so you can act conscious. You don't need meditation for that. That is in my experience too complicated if you have bigger issues. But these mindful moments. Work towards them. Their effects multiply.

Nothing will work without effort. That's a sad truth but a little momentum (even if it is external) can go a long way.

No need to be perfect. No need to aspire some vague world class. Just do the next logical thing that needs to be done. If this thing is to big, divide and conquer. Iterate.

Ah well... honestly would be nice if my words would help. Without being able to act upon it's all just talking and no walking.

<comment><USER17> Thanks nisa, I actually own the Now Habit, but haven't read it... I bet this is common :P

Since getting a Jawbone UP, I'm pretty rigorous about my sleep as I was able to get real data showing when/how sleep affects me and I have been able to optimize the right amount of sleep and when the best windows for waking up are, it's been a great help in building a better structure for my day-to-day.

I'm really self aware, I can tell when I am stressed (though this took work to develop, I wonder if that's generally true, I didn't know what stress was, or rather, I couldn't identify it in myself until I was about 27).

Everything does fall apart when there are strong external stressors that cannot be remedied with even your own hard work, but that's a separate issue I think.

<comment><USER18> > Everything does fall apart when there are strong external stressors that > cannot be remedied with even your own hard work, but that's a separate issue > I think.

For me that's exactly it. I have yet to find something that works. I don't know. Not giving a fuck does not work for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I just took the small comics from the sidebar, and put them as my desktop background image. I find they give particularly short but useful advice as to how to proceed once procrastination attempts to strike.

<comment><USER20> Good idea. I think I'll do the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I was pretty disappointed in this article. Rather than offering any new insight or techniques, it was just a reiteration of well-known techniques, each of which I've personally found to be barely helpful at best, and counter- productive at worst. The "time travel" technique in particular is actually just my default behavior, and only serves to reinforce my ugh fields.

Beyond that, all the article offers is a piece of jargon to name the obvious motivation behind procrastination: doing something to distract you from an unpleasant obligation.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is very primitive advice.

We should meditate on why surfing Facebook is "bad mood repair" but forgiving yourself is "good mood repair." If it's bad to feel good, maybe forgiving yourself is just another way to dodge your responsibilities? The advice presented in the article offers no escape from this psychological tangle, except projecting yourself into an imagined future, where your present work is done -- but you don't feel any more like working (so start now).

The truth is, feeling good only helps. You should feel as good as possible, and make time for the things you enjoy. Be understanding with yourself, and feel free to just watch TV sometimes. At the same time, dial down your anxiety and worry. This is helped by not racing to react when you feel anxious -- to distract or fix or rationalize -- but just breathing deeply and carrying as best you can. Finally, get in touch with who you are helping _now_ , who you are being now, how you are serving your values and what's important to you now, and what progress you can make now -- not in the future. Get in touch with your motivations and what you care about. If you don't care enough about something in your life, try not doing it. You can choose your life and your work (at least, once you get out of school). Don't clean your car, then. Oh, that bothers you? Enough to clean a car? Sit with your anxiety for a bit and observe it without reacting. It will pass if you face it head on.

Time management is also a whole skill unto itself, like math or small talk. It takes practice. There are no bad activities (among the usual ones cited, like surfing the Internet), only bad uses of time. And you're in charge of your time. What do you want to achieve with it? If your ideal life is to sit around all day and you can afford it, go for it.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm so bad with procrastinating, in fact I'm avoiding work right now! I've found virtually all the books and blog posts useless, but this one really made me think differently.. [http://www.amazon.com/Self-Discipline-10-days- Thinking-Doing...](http://www.amazon.com/Self-Discipline-10-days-Thinking- Doing/dp/1880115107)

</comment><comment><USER24> Title should read: "To Stop Procrastinating, Get Off Hacker News"

</comment><comment><USER25> Actually, I had a lot more productive day when HN was down then when I'm reading the wall street journal's 1500 words on the science of mood repair, plus all the comments on it. And participating in writing my own.

<comment><USER26> Smite thee, heretic!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Definitely some good stuff in there, a lot of those are techniques that I've discovered on my own. But the big problem in talking about procrastination is that it's caused by so many different things. It might be anything from small fears to 30,000 foot problems in your life which may intractable in the short term. Assuming no true pathology, the key is really self-awareness and stopping the productivity drumbeat long enough to peel back a few of the top layers of your own psychology.

</comment><comment><USER28> No book has helped me overcome procrastination more than Steven Pressfield's "The War of Art":

[http://www.amazon.com/The-War-Art-Through- Creative/dp/193689...](http://www.amazon.com/The-War-Art-Through- Creative/dp/1936891026)

Instead of overanalyzing procrastination, he identifies the invisible but real force of Resistance and how to deal with it.

EDIT: grammar

<comment><USER29> If you liked that, check out his follow up - Turning Pro. I read the second book first & loved it; thought The War of Art was a liiiittle bit self-helpy.

What I took away from those two books were that the /only thing/ that will help you is sitting your ass in the chair and doing the fucking work.

<comment><USER28> Thanks for the recommendation, I'm reading it now and I'm liking it so far (I've read "Do the Work" and I didn't like it as much). I agree that The War of Art is a little bit self-helpy, but I got a lot of value from the other non-self-helpy part.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In my case procrastination is/was a symptom of perfectionism. This article was an eyeopener for me: [http://coastalcenter.org/overcoming- perfectionism/](http://coastalcenter.org/overcoming-perfectionism/) .

</comment><comment><USER30> I find some of this advice to be really silly.

Telling someone with procrastination issues to "Just get started" or in other words "Stop procrastinating" seems as effective as telling someone with a smoking habit to "Just stop smoking".

<comment><USER31> Putting off a cigarette for ten minutes is better than smoking it right away and surely achievable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> "time-management consultants"

Wow, I wonder what it takes to become one.

<comment><USER33> Time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I put off reading the article for about a day now...

</comment><comment><USER35> What's bizarre about procrastination is how much it derives from irrelevant past experiences (negative ones) that, in truth, have little or nothing to do with the activity being procrastinated. Some failure or embarrassment that is hardly related to the activity at all gets dredged up, not always consciously, and becomes paralytic.

In the process of _doing_ work, people are generally happy and can even get into a flowful state. That's even true for most people with mood problems-- if they can get themselves there. But the anticipation of work or change or even playful activity like exercise is often an anxiety-ridden negativity-fest. Cleaning an apartment isn't so bad; but the anticipation and feeling of having to do it brings forward all those negative emotions like, "how the fuck did I get to age <X> and still have to do my own cleaning? Why can't I get my goddamn shit together and take ownership of my career?" It's much easier to just do the damn cleaning: even high-status, rich people have to do it sometimes, it's not a big deal. But the mental and social prison of "having to" clean makes that menial task 10 times worse than it really deserves to be.

I think that people have to reprogram themselves to "just do" instead of fussing about how their work will be evaluated and how long it will take and what might go wrong. That kind of nonsense makes it hard to do anything.

My suspicion is that procrastination (like depression) was adaptive to our primordial existences as pack animals in hierarchies that were brutally enforced. Depression (low libido, physical lethargy) is an adaptation to low status and scarcity-- inappropriate to modern life, but it probably helped our ancestors survive periods of transient low status. Procrastination also seems to be something that we evolved to defer ambitions (especially while young, and unable to succeed in a physical fight) during periods of low status so we could survive into better times. It's the "I'm not ready to do that" reflex. It's incredibly maladaptive to modern life-- in which social status is mostly undefined and a little _internal_ confidence can go a long way-- but given our "winner-take-all" society in which most people lose, it's not surprising that it's at epidemic levels.

<comment><USER36> But who is going to clean your apartment under an open-allocation world utopia?

I do like your idea about the origins of procrastination, but like almost all evolutionary psychology, it is too easy to make up stories to explain things. Occasionally there is something concrete from the fossil record to work from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Funny how this is the latest research findings. It seems so obvious. I guess we all are so distracted, numb and unconscious we don't even know ourselves anymore.

EDIT: I'm pointing the finger at myself as well.

</comment><comment><USER38> To stop procrastinating, open HN, see article about procrastination, pause, close window and go back to work.

<comment><USER38> ...then come back to HN to post pithy comment, _then_ go back to work.

<comment><USER39> Just add it to the read later queue and then go back to work.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: Why do people value digital goods less? - <AUTHOR>

When I was living in first life, you would do some work, the value would be clear, and when finished you would get paid (real cash). That cycle would continue and the wheel went round.
But since I've gone all digital, I notice there are very different culture. No matter if working for someone else or self-employed, this industry has a unique set of rules, this is quite normal, all sectors have their idiosyncrasies, but there is something peculiar to digital goods. They are not valued the same as 'real products'.
Why do you think this is? and how can this be changed? <comment><USER2> It woudn't change. The marginal cost of digital goods is zero. Simple economics pushes the price to that cost and there's a dead zone of micropayments where the mental cost of just evaluating the price is higher than the $ price.

Cost of finding the goods is not making things easier, they have already spent more than what they're willing to pay to find your product, and now they're expected to pay?

</comment><comment><USER3> Digital goods tend to be inferior goods with inelastic demand curves. As your income rises, your consumption of them doesn't go up after a certain point and people aren't likely to pay more for a digital good once they have something that is "good enough".

The DTrace guy blogged about this here <http://blogs.sun.com/bmc/date/20040828>

</comment><comment><USER4> i think its because it is human nature to require something that is available for our senses in order to see that it exists and assign value to it. as kids we look at, feel, smell, and try and eat pretty much everything in trying to evaluate it. we're not that much different as adults.

if we can only see the product, or only hear the product, i think that by our own distinct human nature, we're going to want to value it much less than something we can hold in our hands and stick in our mouths. even if its the exact same thing, just printed out in tangible media.

it'll take some time to get used to it, but eventually the entire culture will acclimate to it. but thats what it'll take -- the entire culture making a conscious change, and everything appropriately changing with it. as an example, the younger kids and adults now are much more used to it than our parents (and bosses) are.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's surely invevitable - if a "good" can easily be replicated exactly then its value plummets inexorably to zero.

The interesting question is how this will change our concepts when /material/ goods go down the same route. We already have very crude 3-D printers. Eventually we'll have 3-D "photocopiers". Imagine what will happen to, say, the luxury goods market then, when you can say to your friend, "can I copy your Rolex"?</comment>


Elon Musk 'pedo guy' defamation trial to begin - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50641397 <comment><USER2> I love a lot of what Musk does but thought those tweets were just insane, classless, and reprehensible.

Fortunately, he's seemed to have calmed down his social media game since 2018 (thank God), but he should still absolutely have to settle with this guy for a lot of money.

<comment><USER3> The other guy _did_ insult him first. It doesn't really matter which words were used in either direction, they were both trying to engage in public ridicule. But Musk has more money, so he isn't held to the same standard. I think they both look bad and the case should be thrown out.

Some convicted scammer claiming to be a private investigator who could get dirt on Unsworth ended up baiting Musk and offering his services for $50k. He sold him some lies about Unsworth, and Musk thought the guy was legit, so he later doubled down in the private email to a buzzfeed reporter, which was obviously promptly published.

<comment><USER4> Unsworth was pissed because Musk's cave mini-sub white knight PR stunt was a huge, impractical distraction thrust on him at a time when speed and decisive action were of the essence. He used some choice words with an interviewer and, more to the point, never made baseless claims about Musk's background to a Twitter following of millions. To compare the two is just absurd.

<comment><USER3> That's a really bad excuse, and probably not true. If he didn't want to be distracted, he could have simply not looked at twitter. Musk's offer was obviously sincere, and if Unsworth found it unhelpful, the adult response is to politely decline.

If you instead go to the media and pick a fight by using inflammatory claims and insults, you should not be surprised if someone hits back harder. To then go crying to the courts about defamation over a fight you started is just being an opportunistic weasel.

<comment><USER4> Dude, Musk actually showed up _in Thailand_ and was leaning on local officials to insert himself into the rescue planning. Unsworth did not find out about him from Twitter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Pedo guy was a common insult used in South Africa when I was growing up," Mr Musk said in a court filing as part of a failed request to have the case thrown out of court. "It is synonymous with 'creepy old man' and is used to insult a person's appearance and demeanour, not accuse a person of paedophilia."

<comment><USER6> That actually seems like a good defense if true.

<comment><USER7> You know what was used "as a common insult when I was growing up" for black people? And then to hear "oh, she doesn't mean anything by it, it's just how she was raised."

Nope, doesn't let old racists off the hook, nor does it for Musk. Both examples need to quit with excuses and clean up their act.

<comment><USER6> The N word is a great example of an insult for insult sake. If anything comparing "pedo guy" to the N word helps Elon's case by implying it was just a generic insult.

<comment><USER5> You can't even write the insult you're talking about, how can you compare with "pedo guy", who no one has a problem writing anywhere?

Obviously they're a bad comparison.

<comment><USER8> Speaking for myself, the reason I'm not even writing the N word when discussing it isn't because it's more severe. The other term is so loaded that, in the early 2000s close to where I lived in the UK, a gang set about the house of a _paediatrician_ because the mob didn't know the difference — if the N word is more severe than that, then please let me know so that I can apologise for underestimating its effect.

Rather, the reason I'm avoiding the N word is that it targets an innocent group who are essentially my equals and who are only poor because Western Europe happened to go through the industrial revolution first (someone has to be first) and thus conquered around a third of the planet between them.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Countries with the Highest / Lowest Average IQ - <AUTHOR> http://www.statisticbrain.com/countries-with-the-highest-lowest-average-iq/ There are many things wrong with this <comment><USER2> Apparently, the source is a 2002 book on the subject, written by a pair of emeritus professors. Emeritus professors don't normally need to teach or publish.

[http://www.amazon.com/IQ-Wealth-Nations-Richard- Lynn/dp/0275...](http://www.amazon.com/IQ-Wealth-Nations-Richard- Lynn/dp/027597510X) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations></comment>


Show HN: DNS rebinding protection for Express.js - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/brannondorsey/host-validation <comment><USER2> In this line: [https://github.com/brannondorsey/host- validation/blob/2ba467...](https://github.com/brannondorsey/host- validation/blob/2ba4672b82e2d956dd8614c87e2d846505be18d6/index.js#L91) use Array.some rather than iterating through all elements with Array.filter.

Then this: [https://github.com/brannondorsey/host- validation/blob/2ba467...](https://github.com/brannondorsey/host- validation/blob/2ba4672b82e2d956dd8614c87e2d846505be18d6/index.js#L28) is not something I would recommend. Don't try to fix bad input.

<comment><AUTHOR> #1, good call! #2, usually I am 100% in agreement. But referer vs referrer in the HTTP spec is a special case. I chose to do this as referer is misspelled in the spec itself.

<comment><USER2> Does the misspelled version prevailed over the correct version if both are defined?

<comment><AUTHOR> It does as it is the correct header name.

<comment><USER3> If both keys exist, then it's an even bigger signal of user mistake. Are you going to fail then? Distinction becomes pretty arbitrary.

As a user, I'd rather have a failure at boot time if I got it wrong. Just because I had a typo once doesn't mean I always make it. What if I tried to transform my own config? I'd have to follow special case your referers property like you did to keep it consistent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Neat, thanks for raising awareness of this issue. I don't think it makes a lot of sense for the web server case (as you said, using TLS would fix it and that seems like the bigger concern), but if someone is building something like an electron app with a local server component then they ought to use this.

FWIW I think you can check just the Host header, it's always going to be present and can't be set by an attacker - referrer doesn't add anything extra and attackers can force requests with blank referrers.

Also all your example regexes are correctly anchored but I can see a developer shooting themselves in the foot with that - I'd maybe add some warnings around it or even programmatically enforce anchored regexes.

Anyhow thanks for the Show HN!

</comment><comment><USER5> I understand validating the `Host` header but my understanding that the referer field is optional and theres quite a few users who either block referer headers for privacy/anti-tracking purposes. Would this stop those users from accessing the site also?</comment>


They became the industry leader. A decade later, they shut digital off - <AUTHOR> https://blog.altamirano.org/digital-transformation-done-right <comment><USER2> I feel like there is more to the story than I am seeing here.</comment>


Facebook tinkered with users' feeds for a massive psychology experiment - <AUTHOR> http://www.avclub.com/article/facebook-tinkered-users-feeds-massive-psychology-e-206324 <comment><USER2> Great! We should be congratulating Facebook for this, for several reasons:

1\. now Facebook can start designing against this. What design features promote negativity? Where is negativity being inadvertently fostered? 2\. now everyone _else_ can benefit from the research as they chose not to keep it private despite the potential PR ramifications like this 3\. this is not research more than a few entities in the world can or will do.

Ethically, I don't see the problem. Users already rely on Facebook to tinker with user feeds in a variety of ways, and this tinkering causes them no harm, and may benefit them and all future users. (When the users signed up for Facebook, did they sign an agreement saying 'you agree to be mentally poisoned with rage, frustration, anger and disappointment, without recourse, by anyone you are foolish enough to friend and let flood your feed'? I rather doubt it.) Given that users are already buffeted by countless unpredictable random forces beyond their control or comprehension, what is tweaking one factor going to amount to? This is the same as clinical drug trials: the question should not be whether it is moral to run a trial, the question should always be whether it is moral to _not_ run a trial.

The OP shows no sign of understanding any of this.

<comment><USER3> A private corporation is developing the capability to alter the moods of massive populations in a controlled way; unlike mass media, society doesn't (yet?) understand this sort of influence.

Perhaps soon Facebook will understand how to tweak the news feed algorithm to e.g. whip up negative sentiment in response to an attack? Or stop a particular candidate being elected? Etc.

Perhaps they will use this for good, as you mention. But its still huge power for a corporation to wield; effectively in secret - its easy enough for an observer to make a judgement about a bias in e.g. Fox News, and call that out - but it'd be very hard to observe subtle changes to individual news feeds.

I don't really buy your argument that they have a clear moral responsibility to develop this capability. That depends on the potential good of such capability if used for good, the potential bad if used for bad, and the chance it will be used for each. So I don't see this as analogous to a corporation conducting a clinical trial of a drug; this is more analogous to a clinical trial of a drug that could also be used as a weapon, with the more complicated ethical issues that would entail.

I think its absolutely something there should be ethical discussion around.

<comment><USER2> > Perhaps they will use this for good, as you mention. But its still huge > power for a corporation to wield; effectively in secret - its easy enough > for an observer to make a judgement about a bias in e.g. Fox News, and call > that out - but it'd be very hard to observe subtle changes to individual > news feeds.

This is power and capability given to all media organizations. When you permit their existence, you permit both their deliberate use of their capabilities for goals you dislike but also their _accidental unintentional random_ biases. There is no difference in terms of the consequences.

I am reminded of one of the AI Koans [http://catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html](http://catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html) :

> In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat > hacking at the PDP-6. "What are you doing?", asked Minsky. "I am training a > randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe" Sussman replied. "Why is the > net wired randomly?", asked Minsky. "I do not want it to have any > preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said. Minsky then shut his eyes. > "Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher. "So that the room > will be empty." At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

<comment><USER4> Isn't your reference to other media organization an appeal to popularity? Why shouldn't we strive for media that are more concerned about privacy and dignity? Furthermore the interactivity and private data make social networks a whole different beast.

> _There is no difference in terms of the consequences._

Not in terms of consequences, but there is the difference that in a scientific study you need the consent of the experimental subjects. I think it's problematic that they assume this was given when the users clicked the TOS checkbox, since they must know that a large percentage does not know what it entails.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Am I a terrible person for finding this neither surprising nor unethical? If I had the opportunity to do this study I'd definitely do it – where else are you going to have the opportunity to see insights like that?

<comment><USER6> I don't find it surprising or unethical, but I do question the validity of the conclusions drawn and the idea that doing this would actually get them the kind of information they wanted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> (IANAL)

The standard for psychological experimentation would normally be informed medical consent, not the terms and conditions of a commercial contract.

This is the sort of thing that a clinical psychologist could lose their license for.

<comment><USER8> Yes. If your study is done with federal money and at a research institution you need the Institutional Review Board to clear your experiment. One of the requirements is that patients/subjects be given a consent form and the experiment explained to them.

It is possible to perform an experiment, hiding its real purpose, if the results of the experiment require the subject not to understand the design/aim. But usually these are badly designed experiments, because you can never know if a subject has been exposed before to the experiment, and can therefore game it.

I guess FB is arguing that users gave informed consent when they signed up for facebook. I don't know if there is a review board for experiments at FB.

I think, with a good enough lawyer, you can successfully execute a class action lawsuit if you find users whose mood worsened as a result of this (a user under treatment for depression, for example, whose mood is clinically assessed)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Reactions against this sort of research are similar to the reactions against the nudge research. People don't like it because it seems manipulative. But the thing is any order of events a programmer throws against the wall will impact people. Just like any process design will nudge people in some way. Isn't it better to know how people are affected by our designs? Because people are being affected, we just don't know how. It's better to know.

</comment><comment><USER10> According to the paper[1], "[the research] was consistent with Facebook's Data Use Policy, to which all users agree prior to creating an account on Facebook, constituting informed consent for this research."

The Onion AV Club bit quotes "internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement" as part of the FB policy.

If that's really the part they're relying on, informed consent doesn't mean much.

[1] [http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full](http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full)

</comment><comment><USER11> This is gross, but unsurprising. Facebook hasn't cared about their users in a long time. It's their information not yours, it's their network not yours. It's a systematic way for a third party to manipulate you into doing what they want or what whoever is paying them the most wants.

Ugh, what a scourge on the tech community. Shit like this reflects badly on all of us. Users hate this manipulative crap. Their MySpace days can't come fast enough.

<comment><USER12> While I agree with you, I think you'll be hard pressed to find a money-making company that isn't trying their darnedest to manipulate you into doing what they want (buying their stuff, mostly)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Honestly, all I want is:

a) have an option to AUTOMATICALLY have all those stupid games banned, without having to ban a new Farmville version or clone every other week (aka: I just want to view real, user generated content and not be woken out of my sleep due to some retarded friend playing Farmville at night and asking me for crops)

b) make it REMEMBER the "show me the full feed" and not switch to that abomination it calls "top posts"

</comment><comment><USER14> Mostly a dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7956470](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7956470).

</comment><comment><USER15> Wonder if we'll hear from any of the data scientists, whom surely exist in good numbers here.

Also, I wonder how much cognitive dissonance programmers feel, or often they rationalize, or reassign values, when things are done (which are quite typical) in the nature of their profession, to this effect.

</comment><comment><USER16> Fascinating how hard scientists will work, hunkered down in front of their calculators, to discover basic facts about human social experience that regular people have known for thousands of years: emotions are shared.

<comment><USER17> Why would you make this comment? Do you really think it's a waste of time to try to better understand the world? Are you aware that there exist many, many, many examples of experiment showing commonly-held beliefs to be incorrect?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Nobody could have predicted, except Vernor Vinge.

</comment><comment><USER19> So now when the citizens are angry, the government can have a talk with Facebook, to see if they can settle the nation down a tad.

Not creepy at all, nope.

<comment><USER19> Or thinking about it more, get ready to downvote this too, governments are more likely do the exact opposite.

Want to cause a revolution against a dictator? Talk to the social networking sites, see if you can increase unrest. We already know the US government talked to social networking sites to help the Iranian people overthrow their government.

[http://www.cbsnews.com/news/state-dept-asked-twitter-to- dela...](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/state-dept-asked-twitter-to-delay- maintenance/)

A few small steps from that, and you're manipulating the emotions of nations in an attempt to start a revolution, instead of just help one that formed by itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> i cant wait to see facebook to leverage this to condition users into favoring advertisers/products who pay for premium advertising packages

seriously what the fuck is facebook's PR team thinking letting their research staff publish something like this

<comment><USER21> > seriously what the fuck is facebook's PR team thinking letting their > research staff publish something like this

Yes, it'd be so much better to let that research be done in secrecy, and sold to the highest advertising bidder. /s

"Scary" as some of the things Facebook (replace by the bigdata corp of your choice) does may sound, I appreciate a lot when extremely-large-scale real world scientific tests, like this one, can be achieved and I appreciate a thousand times more the results being published. Call me crazy, but to me this is what "advancing the understanding of the human race forward" looks like... rather than "let's do designs on both round AND square watches".

<comment><USER22> Do I have any reason to think they aren't running other experiments in secret and selling it? And considering that the US government already takes bids for "persona management" to influence social media, why shouldn't I think they're not a customer?

Facebook, and all centralized social media platforms, are dangerous. Nobody should have this influencing power.

<comment><USER21> > Facebook, and all centralized social media platforms, are dangerous. Nobody > should have this influencing power.

I couldn't agree more. That also was not my point.

<comment><USER22> Secret or not secret are not mutually exclusive, was all my point. the rest was just an aside. The knowledge is even useful, but for me it's been completely overshadowed by knowing that they are manipulating us to learn, in effect, how to manipulate us better. It's not even theoretical.

I was watching Google I/O, and in the section about Android TV, they showed how the device, if you left your TV on, would show you soothing images that they selected. What kind of power is that! Imagine if suddenly, all the images on every Android TV switched to the same image. How would what that image presented affect the world at that moment?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Strike: Real-Time Options Price Alerts - <AUTHOR> https://testflight.apple.com/join/7WLiiDre <comment><AUTHOR> My friends and I were missing out on some gains during work so we made Strike for tracking options. We've been long time frequenters of r/wallstreetbets. We'd love to get some feedback on our product; we plan to release with a freemium model and have more features in the works. We'd like to validate the product. Thanks for checking it out! :)

<comment><USER2> Hey, thanks for this. Going to check it out</comment></comment>


My Unhappy Life as a Climate Heretic - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/my-unhappy-life-as-a-climate-heretic-1480723518 <comment><USER3> I think the best thing I've read about truth and politics is "Politics is the Mind-Killer" ([http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/)), by Eliezer Yudkowsky back in 2007:

> Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers. Once > you know which side you're on, you must support all arguments of that side, > and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it's > like stabbing your soldiers in the back—providing aid and comfort to the > enemy.

In recent years people seem to be more and more comfortable with this war metaphor, not as a matter for concern and reflection, but as a subject of pride. Well, of course we have to win the battle of ideas; it's a culture war after all!

When you think in this way, the goal of argument isn't to find what's true, but to win. And if you have to advance some shaky ideas on your side or ignore some inconvenient facts on theirs, well, it's all in the service of a greater truth anyway, right?

But how can you fight a war in the service of truth when truth is its first casualty?

<comment><USER4> Indeed, and climate scientists got nowhere for decades being terrible at politics and good at data, which leads us to our current still- probabilistically-hugely-likely (despite this apparent political problem) dire predicament.

<comment><USER5> The problem is that it is almost impossible to be good at politics while maintaining the intellectual distance required by science.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The author's claim is this, and if true there is merit to listening --- Indeed there is rarely merit to not listening. Science is all about observation and probability. EDIT: although clever political framing can skew naive readers away from truths, which is one of the article's meta topics. ---

"I believe climate change is real and that human emissions of greenhouse gases risk justifying action, including a carbon tax. But my research led me to a conclusion that many climate campaigners find unacceptable: There is scant evidence to indicate that hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or drought have become more frequent or intense in the U.S. or globally. In fact we are in an era of good fortune when it comes to extreme weather. This is a topic I've studied and published on as much as anyone over two decades. My conclusion might be wrong, but I think I've earned the right to share this research without risk to my career."

<comment><USER6> In fact this is why I take the fear mongering around climate change with a pinch of salt.

I agree with Popper's definition of science: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability)

A discipline is scientific if it is possible to challenge it, if it _can_ be proven wrong (it doesn't mean it _will_ , but there is a way to prove it wrong).

If the discipline is using political pressure to prevent anyone from doing so, it cannot be called science anymore. A political movement would be a more appropriate term.

And more generally, my profession (finance) is making extensive use of mathematical models to model something too complex to be understood perfectly (financial markets / the economy). But we know our models suck, because we could do experiment on them, we can test them against reality. We know we can build models or investment strategies that do great in back-testing but fall apart as soon as they go live (I have seen that so many times first hand). I give very little credibility to someone who comes up with a complex mathematical model that pretends it will predict the climate in 30 years, knowing that we will only know if his model was reliable in 30 years, we have no way to test it now. Therefore it cannot be falsified and therefore I don't think it is science.

<comment><USER7> Any prediction requires us to wait to see what really happens. I don't think it's fair to say that 30 years is too long to wait and that it's therefore not falsifiable. Science has made claims in the past that took much longer than that to prove false, but we still accept them as falsifiable and that they were valid science at the time.

<comment><USER6> What sort of claim do you have in mind?

I can think of scientific theories that have been proven wrong after a long time, but they haven't been proven wrong because it was impossible to prove them wrong immediately. Only because it took so long to come up with an experiment / better theory which in insight could have been done on day 1.

This is not the same as telling everyone "I have a model, my back-testings are telling me it works, I will only be able to prove it right (or wrong) in 30 years, but you need to take actions now based on what this model says".

<comment><USER8> >What sort of claim do you have in mind?

Gravitational waves. Higgs boson. Relativity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Alternative link: [http://archive.is/iFMxG](http://archive.is/iFMxG)

</comment><comment><USER7> The sad problem with climate change is that otherwise sensible people are willing to put intellectual honesty aside in the name of "we desperately need to convince everyone that a disaster is coming so they'll be scared into preventing it". Saying something that might calm people down and fear less is heretical, no matter if it's true or not.

<comment><USER10> You ignore here the army of lobbyists who are paid to put intellectual honesty aside in the name of convincing everyone not to worry because that protects hundreds of billions in revenue.

it wasn't the people who accept global warming as a reality who started politicizing this. It's unfair to blame them for getting political in response.

<comment><USER5> It's unfair to blame _only_ them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > No Category 3, 4 or 5 hurricane has made landfall in the U.S. since > Hurricane Wilma in 2005

That is true, but highly misleading. Yes, Sandy was a Cat 2 when she made landfall in the U.S., but she was a Cat 3 before that, and she was the largest (in terms of area) Atlantic hurricane in recorded history. She was also (and this is the part that really matters) the second costliest hurricane in U.S. history, second only to Katrina, and dwarfing the #3 slot (Ike, in 2008) by a factor of 2.

</comment><comment><USER12> Look at the top comments on that article and you can easily see why people want to avoid him. He may believe in climate change, but his work is being used to justify climate change denial.

That's like trying to convince people to vaccinate their children, but then giving a bullhorn to a guy standing outside the clinic screaming about possible negative side effects.

Obviously I support his right to publish his findings, but he's misconstruing attempts to stop the spread of misinformation (as in his work is being used to justify misinformation) as censorship.

<comment><USER5> The idea that research should be suppressed because it can be "used to justify denial" (even if it is true) is exactly the problem here.

<comment><USER12> I did not say anything about suppression. Avoidance and dismissal is not suppression.

No one is suggesting suppression or censorship. But we should be free to exclude, dismiss, and ignore information we find harmful or irrelevant.

<comment><USER5> > harmful or irrelevant

Or politically inconvenient?

If you want to say that the research is no good, that it misrepresents the facts, or that journalists handled the material fairly, that would be material.

However, if you say that we should dismiss it because it is being used by people we don't like in ways we don't like, you may as well admit the denialists are right, there is a conspiracy to suppress (oh sorry, just exclude, dismiss, and ignore!) any science that doesn't fit the narrative, and that you don't trust the public to evaluate anything for themselves.

This is the attitude and the behavior that makes people distrust climate science.

If you put a veneer of falsehood and spin on a mountain of truth, don't be surprised when people assume the falsehood goes all the way through.

<comment><USER12> I am not even sure what your argument is.

I am saying he can publish whatever he wants and challenge whatever climate science he wants. That is his absolutely right.

But if people think his work his crap, and want to ignore him, then that's their right.

It's hypocritical to accuse people of being "political" because they disagree with him, when he himself is unfairly accused of being a pawn to the oil industry.

<comment><USER5> I see. It seems we disagree on the substance of what is at issue here.

> But if people think his work his crap, and want to ignore him, then that's > their right.

Of course. That is not at issue.

From the article: "My conclusion might be wrong, but I think I've earned the right to share this research without risk to my career. Instead, my research was under constant attack for years by activists, journalists and politicians."

The allegation is not that people are disagreeing with him in good faith because they think his work was crap. The allegation is that people are shunning him and his research because it is inconvenient. Whether that is true or not, that is what is at issue.

In your top-level comment, you don't take issue with his allegations. Rather, you seem to suggest that whatever happened is acceptable because his research is open to misinterpretation and misuse. You also claim he misconstrued something as censorship, but what he claimed was an attack on his career, which you didn't address.

So, my argument is that you appear to be justifying something that shouldn't be justified (and may or may not have occurred) and you haven't actually engaged with what is being alleged.

<comment><USER12> Yes we disagree. I think people ignore him because they think he's wrong. Not because they are not political. I am sure some are, but not all.

And because his "wrongness" is being used to spread misinformation, people have to actively "attack" him to curtail the spread of that misinformation.

<comment><USER5> > people have to actively "attack" him to curtail the spread of that > misinformation.

This is really where we disagree. If he's wrong, then the people who know better should show that he's wrong, and make the point by point rebuttal easy to find and then point people to it. Don't attack the messenger. If you do that, people will repeat the message and assume that something is being covered up.

The people who claim to be on the side of science should be above playing these kinds of political games, and need to be very cautious about even the appearance of impropriety.

I think the idea that science in all its glorious mess needs to be packaged as neater and cleaner than it is, and minority opinions hidden away from the credulous public, actually does much greater harm to the public understanding of scientific issues than any amount of actual divergent opinions that people might come across.

If climate skeptics want to look for opinions outside the mainstream, correct or not, they will find them. That gives them one data point in support of their beliefs. If the messenger is under attack, that just gives them another.

<comment><USER12> I put "attack" in quotes because those are his own words. Again, I re-iterate my point, he sees them as an "attack". I do not believe people who dismiss his ideas set out to "attack" him.

> The people who claim to be on the side of science should be above playing > these kinds of political games, and need to be very cautious about even the > appearance of impropriety.

You are setting a high bar for them, and that's fine. But doesn't that mean the author of this article should also meet that high bar?

He's accusing people who disagree with him as playing politics, but his article does not provide proof. In essence, he is playing politics himself.

I don't think that's fair.

You are right about the "one data point" part. This article is just another baseless data point for climate change deniers. And that's a problem.

Actually, I went back to research the article a bit more clearly. He really should not have used that wikileak email as evidence. It really discredits him more than anything:

[https://wikileaks.org/podesta- emails/emailid/19569](https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/19569)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> From Wikipedia on Piekle [1]: _" Any conceivable emissions reductions policies, even if successful, cannot have a perceptible impact on the climate for many decades", and from this he concludes that, "In coming decades the only policies that can effectively be used to manage the immediate effects of climate variability and change will be adaptive."_

This sort of do-nothing fatalism is enormously disingenuous and dangerous, and his WSJ op-ed badly understates his criticism as mainly about current weather effects.

The fact that Pielke's dad was also a high-profile climate change denier can't help, given the fact these sort of "decades to take effect!" arguments have themselves now been made for decades as part of a typical corporate/politically-motivated FUD campaign.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_A._Pielke,_Jr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_A._Pielke,_Jr).

<comment><USER14> From his op-ed: "I believe climate change is real and that human emissions of greenhouse gases risk justifying action, including a carbon tax."

<comment><USER15> Big oil WANTS carbon tax as this would create predictability and stability albeit at a cost. What big oil doesn't want is unpredictable policy - <USER2> that Washington think tanks want to put in place. Right wingers are terrified of progressive policies and this Pielkle fella is not doing the world any favors by advocating for useless policies such as a carbon tax. He may have good intentions and may be factually correct in his observations about lack of clear evidence but this doesn't change the fact that his work is being used to hinder climate progress.

<comment><USER14> What's wrong with wanting predictability and stability? Right now oil companies have little incentive to invest in alternate energy given the costs, and a carbon tax would change the cost structure for the future and give them a direct financial incentive to transition to non-carbon energy sources.

Re: carbon tax being useless, how so? Of course the level of the carbon tax matters too, but it doesn't make sense that directly taxing something wouldn't reduce the amount of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Although it is too soon to tell how the Trump administration will engage the scientific community"

I'm gonna go out here on a limb and say Trump hasn't done a good job so far. He's claimed that vaccines cause autism. Something that's been debunked over and over. Skeptism about vaccines has made things much more difficult for immunocompromised kids. My friend's kid had cancer and the low rates of vaccination in town made things much more dicey for them.

The second is Trump has claimed that China is responsible for making up global warming.

Right now you've got the house committee on science tweeting out brietbart links.

The key will be funding. Will he continue to fund science? Science in many ways is the new manufacturing. Research universities are among the largest employers in the Midwest. It's not all white collar jobs. There are many different types of jobs that work towards creating knowledge.

<comment><USER12> I don't think you are going out on any limb at all. That statement is terrible, because of all the reasons you listed.

I think it's pretty dishonest to pretend it's still a "wait and see" kinda thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Fortune's Global 500 top 10 is:

      Walmart $482B in revenue a year
      State Grid $329B
      China Natural Petroleum $299B
      Sinopec $294B
      Shell $272B
      ExxonMobil $246B
      Volkswagen $236B
      Toyota $236B
      Apple $233B
      BP $255B

Six oil companies and two car companies. Trillions of dollars in revenue every year, from oil and other fossil fuels. They have massive think tanks, government lobbyists, media and PR reach etc. They're the center of the world economy and world power.

Yet this climate denier ("I'm not really a climate denier!") writes for the Wall Street Journal (Rupert Murdoch's financial publications are a great place for peer reviewed science - well this guy is a poli-sci major anyhow) about how he is being persecuted by powerful forces.

Please. These people are so out of control they're going to burn up the world. I see someone who mentioned the California droughts, Tennessee etc. was downvoted.

The inertia of these companies at the center of the world economy is to keep doing what they're doing, which is suicidal. Solar etc. has advanced to where changes can be made which are less drastic than expected, but not with this fellow and his supporters here.

As America is going to shit, it's expected that even the silver lining of Silicon Valley's vanguard here are blind to reality and swallow some poli-sci majors climate denial propaganda to Murdoch's paper instead of reading peer- reviewed scientific papers. It goes along with the downward trajectory of the US - the low US growth, crummy unicorns etc. Our incoming pussy-grabbing president used this assessment as his campaign platform, and I agree with him to the limited extent that America is no longer a great country.

I have to cast my eyes to the People's Republic of China to see not only robust growth, but the solar, nuclear and other renewable energy sources. Along with their enormous economic growth over the past few decades, it will be the Chinese who will save things for us, while Americans stumble into the muck of Trump, climate denial and what you can see going on here.

<comment><USER18> Using Hacker News primarily for political, ideological, or religious controversy is an abuse of the site. Those things drown out what we want here, which is thoughtful conversation and intellectual curiosity.

Since we asked you to stop doing this and you didn't, we've banned your account.

We're happy to unban accounts that people give us reason to believe will follow the site rules in the future, so if you'd like to fix this, you're welcome to email email@example.com. But please don't create new accounts to break the site rules with.</comment></comment>


Wikileaks Posts Secret Bomb-Stopper Report - Did They Go Too Far? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/12/warlock-wikilea.html <comment><USER2> No.</comment>


ASK: HN how to deliver machine learning results under startup pressure? - kuro-kuris Hi HN, I just started working for a very early stage startup who want to do mainly intent extraction on email datasets. I thought I would work on the natural language processing. I have worked here for 2 weeks and I am struggling with extreme pressure between sprints. We don't have any data, feature engineering, users nothing. What can I do? I am trying to build up a data processing pipeline but it is difficult with the pressure. How can I keep delivering and build a better machine learning environment in the company?<p>Thanks for your advice HN! <comment><AUTHOR> This may seem like really basic and obvious advice, but I've always found it helpful to think about solving a much smaller problem, solving that, and then going to management with that as a guidepost for building out the larger project. Putting "Build Data+ML Pipeline from scratch" + "In 2 weeks" is a great way to lose all hope and feel like you are drowning.

For example, PaulHoule mentioned Enron emails. Could you build a pipeline to ingest those emails and provide sentiment or some basic text analysis? That would give you a deliverable (so management/the team sees you are working towards something) you can quantify into sprints. Make sure you are building something that could be development into a production ready pipeline, and not just a toy script you can put out in a day or two.

After that is built, I'd use that as a guidepost for what you need to build. Show them the project and then use that to define the different stages you need to build for the production application. Include risks, blocking issues, and what you need from other team members. For example, you can point out that after a certain point in developing the pipeline you simply cannot move forward without data or emails.

Management/The team is going to come back to you with one of the following. 1) That is a good plan and we like/dislike the timeline. 2). That is a bad plan, change it. 3). Leave us alone, we hired you so we don't have to deal with this stuff.

If they do 3) that's bad. If they do 2), you should evaluate who is being unrealistic – you or them. At my last job we lost great data scientists because lots of other people thought Stats/ML was magic that could be done with a simple R/Python script. The end result was severely rushed work done to unrealistic standards, resulting in massive technical debt – some projects were just a house of cards.

</comment><comment><USER2> Many great answers already, but will add my two cents as well. All the tips regarding poker planning, breaking down work in manageable chunks, identifying the critical path to finish the sprint and so on are highly relevant but I also think there is a broader question about how work is planned and the team is managed.

The situation you describe with an ambitious product roadmap and very limited time available (and other resources lacking) is very common in early stage start-ups with very visionary founders that have limited managerial experience (I have been there myself).

In my book the team leader/manger role is to make sure the team performing at its best and can be productive, the personal productivity of the team leader is irrelevant. A common mistake is the underestimate the effects of investing time in creating an productive environment for the team.

If would be in your situation I would make a prioritised plan with time estimates (using the techniques mentioned in other posts) and then sit down with the team leader/manger/founder and refine it and agree on deadlines. This would remove pressure as the timeline is jointly agreed, then it would just be important to be very clear if any deviations come up.

If the team leader/manger/founder is someone can have an open discussion with just share your thoughts as in the post. In my team we aim for brutally transparent culture when it comes to morale and stress levels, it allows us a team to be much more productive in the long run (and we have more fun). Remember that start-ups should be a marathon and not a sprint despite working in "sprints". I hope it helps!

</comment><comment><USER3> You can't do much machine learning without users and data, or at least real world datasets. I would focus on picking off the small problems you can solve today (or this week) for now.

</comment><comment><USER4> I hope this helps...

You might find out like me that there is very little pressure when your goals are well defined and you have a list of all the tasks needed to bring them to completion.

This lets you focus on a set of specific tasks that are ideally ordered by priority, or <effor (to some extent).

Add clocking your work and you get a very clear picture of how your time is spent, and in some cases (:) where it would be wise to lower the amount of time put on certain things.

Sorry, this is as vague as I could explain it.

TL;DR Organization can really make miracles.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a great question! Here is what I think.

Both the ways "data scientists" typically work and the agile methods used in many software development organizations are unsuitable to commercial use of machine learning and other data-rich methods.

In your question I am hearing two themes: (i) how to organize the actual work ("no data", "no features", "no users") and (ii) how to slot the work into the sprint system.

The typical sprint system often introduces risk and uncertainty to data rich projects. Here is an example. I was working on a project where the sprints were typically two weeks, but one part of building the knowledge base was running a batch job that took two days. Of course if you set the batch job up wrong you might have to do it more than once.

When I was doing the batch job I would account for the risk and spend maybe two days getting ready for the batch job and run the batch job at the very beginning of the sprint, then even if things went horribly wrong with the batch job and I had to do it two or three times I was certain the KB would be ready on time. Practically I had a PERT chart in my head that I was using to plan my own work.

Even though I told them what I just told you, the first time some other team members did the batch job, they started it on the last day of the sprint which meant it wasn't ready and the Sprint shipped with an old and inappropriate KB.

As a retrospective it would be good to turn the 2 day batch job into a 2 hour batch job (It started out as a 2 century batch job!) Also the reliability of the batch job is every bit as important as the speed in a situation like that. More fundamentally, I think some thinking about the ordering of work (PERT charts) should have been built into the process.

There are lots of cases there, but note the risk amplifying property of the sprint. If some input to the sprint is a day late, everything that input depends on slips two weeks.

For that project we also did two hour "planning poker" meetings and that was another problem because with two hours we didn't have enough time to make certain decisions. If we'd had two or three people think about things for a day we could have made consistently better decisions about certain things which would mean doing the right work in the next sprint, similarly saving two weeks of calendar time.

It is very easy for little failures of the type described above to cascade and produce a recurring pattern of failure that is awful for productivity, morale, etc.

It is very important to push back on management and address these kinds of problems.

Now this sounds very negative for agile in data-rich projects and that's not the only thing you should take away. In the long run, data rich projects benefit hugely from continuous improvement that is done on a regular cadence.

You meet "data scientists" or "junior programmers" who have started a number of projects and sent deliverables over to other people who get them ready for production. They think they have a great batting average, but when you look it from a wider perspective you see that 4x the man hours they put in the project got spent getting ready to get stuff for production. Had the team "begun with the end in mind", the total cost of the project could be cut in 1/2 or more and the risk greatly reduced.

Big and very capable co's like IBM and Nuance, as well as many smaller ones you have not heard of, have built data-rich systems that turned out to be like building a nuclear reactor. We are not talking something that cost $22,000 when it should have cost $21,000, but rather something that cost $20 billion when it should have cost $5. The people involved will tell you they don't know what they're going to do next but they do know they are never going to do that again.

So your process, technology, everything, has to be designed to control (1) risk and (2) cost to address those things and you've got to communicate that to the people you work with.

What most people don't know/accept/believe is that most teams would control cost best if they tried to control risk first, see:

[https://www.amazon.com/Rapid-Development-Taming-Software- Sch...](https://www.amazon.com/Rapid-Development-Taming-Software- Schedules/dp/1556159005)

As for your other issues, this is what I am going to say.

Short term there are two things that really matter: (1) getting data, and (2) developing the basic interfaces between the ML component and the rest of the system. If you have (2) you can really contribute to the sprints, if you don't, you are cannot. Without (1) any data pipeline stuff, featuring engineering, etc. is going to largely be a waste of time.

For data start out with the Enron emails or your own emails and label enough of it that you can start thinking about the other issues. Your early data set will be nowhere near large enough to get useful results, and that's another issue you'll need to bring up with management once you've reached it.

<comment> kuro-kuris Paul, thanks for your great reply. I am going to bring up your suggestions and hopefully a larger focus on risks can help with our deliverables PERT charts seem a bit over bureaucratic for our team but considering our dependencies and the risks more seems great. Improving the connection between risks and features in the mind of the team will definitely help. I still feel really constrained and over-pressured in the current sprint structure, hopefully bringing the risks out will decrease my personal anxiety as well.

With regards to the work flow, we went down our personal email road initially. Though getting data seems extremely cumbersome from the main backend of our service. With regards to the interface between our ML component and the rest of the system currently we are using simple heuristics to fulfill the ML requirements so the flow of information is there in one direction but not in the other one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yeah, I noticed a trend: startups looking for devs with extensive ml and highload experience to build their first prototype. They plan to grow rapidly, thats why.

<comment><USER3> It's a great optimistic plan, but in practice, most don't. It's probably overkill for most very early stage startups.</comment></comment>