The Alzheimer Pandemic: Is Paracetamol to Blame? (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3921468/ <comment><USER2> I am a programming neuroscientist who studies Alzheimer's, and I would like to say that, while it is not entirely clear whether or not N-acetylcysteine will prove fruitful as a therapeutic for Alzheimer's, PA/tylenol is not the same thing as N-acetylcysteine, so the NSAID link is irrelevant in that regards. The link between these two is that N-acetylcysteine is used as a treatment for overdose of PA - because of a metabolite which is produced following high consumption of PA (NAPQI). Importantly, this link does not indicate that they have inversely correlated mechanisms of action under normal circumstances. PA may not be worth exploring further, but the understanding of N-acetylcysteine is still worth exploring. _Note_ I do not study this myself, just putting in my two cents.

<comment><USER3> Hey, long time HN user here, I'm a software dev.

I have a question for you, could you give me an email I could reach you at?

Hope to talk to you soon,

<comment><USER4> Your email isn't displayed in your profile. You have to put it in the "about" section of your profile if you want people to be able to see it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is from 2013. Why has it seen essentially no news coverage? I can't, for instance, easily find it on sites like Science Based Medicine; you'd think they'd have lit up over this.

<comment><USER6> Because it was debunked back in 1997:

[http://www.neurology.org/content/48/3/626.short](http://www.neurology.org/content/48/3/626.short)

Just another case of HN users clicking on flashy things without stopping to examine the evidence. Some more examples:

\- deep brain stimulation: hundreds of upvotes here on stories about this, but then when studies come out showing that it it no better than placebo that story gets 3 upvotes on HN.

\- fecal transplants for C dificile: again hundreds of upvotes for stories touting this, but then when it is found to be no better than placebo the story gets no upvotes on HN.

These are just a few examples, but I see this all the time on HN. It makes me a little disappointed in the community and thinking that perhaps I should be hanging out somewhere else instead.

<comment><USER7> Not a biologist by any stretch of the imagination, so I am asking purely out of ignorance - how does your study debunk the OP's? Yours is about NSAIDs (i.e. aspirin) decreasing the risk of Alzheimer's, OP's is about paracetamol (not an NSAID) increasing the likelihood of Alzheimers. Correct me if I'm misunderstanding something here...

<comment><USER8> It found aspirin most likely has a protective effect.

It found no strong evidence of any association for acetaminophen, but the 95% confidence interval on the result is pretty wide. So it doesn't entirely rule out the possibility of there being a relationship, and based on its results alone it's entirely plausible that a test with more statistical power could find that it doubles your risk of Alzheimer's disease. But it could also plausibly find that it has a mild protective effect.

Regardless of which is the case, this study still strongly challenges what's being suggested by TFA. Even a doubling of Alzheimer's risk resulting from a lifetime of acetaminophen use is nothing at all like its suggestion that Alzheimer's is a disease that was unheard of before the development of NSAIDs related to Tylenol.

<comment><USER9> > its suggestion that Alzheimer's is a disease that was unheard of before the > development of NSAIDs related to Tylenol.

Minor point: Tylenol isn't an NSAID, nor is the prior drug to which the article links Alzheimer's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I read on Paracetamol's wikipedia page that "Paracetamol also modulates the endogenous cannabinoid system" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracetamol#Society_and_cultur...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracetamol#Society_and_culture)). Given recent studies that indicate Alzheimer's can be treated by THC ([http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25024327](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25024327)), it seems that there's some kind of connection between Alzheimer's and the endogenous cannabinoid system. If that's true, then it could mean paracetamol is not really the "cause" of Alzheimer's, but rather a part of the real cause: disruption or malfunction of our brain's cannabinoid receptors. Perhaps we will finally be able to prove, scientifically and neurologically, that these receptors cannot be ignored, they play a crucial role in our survival.

</comment><comment><USER11> Just so people are clear, paracetamol is Tylenol.

<comment><USER12> Also known as acetaminophen, and a bunch of other trade names[1]

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

<comment><USER13> And it happens to be included in several composite pain killers as well. (Excedrin, Vicodin, ... etc.)

[http://www.knowyourdose.org/common- medicines/](http://www.knowyourdose.org/common-medicines/)

<comment><USER14> For no reason other than to prevent "abuse" by causing the user to destroy their liver with excess dosages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is it just me, or is the "ANALGESICS AS RISK FACTORS FOR F-AD: (2) EPIDEMIOLOGY" section really uncompelling and the epidemiological evidence seems to amount to a few inconsistent cross-sectional studies with no particularly large correlations like implied, and a note that both paracetamol and Alzheimer's have increased over the past two centuries or so?

</comment><comment><USER16> dear correspondents, thank you all for your various comments. much as i would like to engage with you all i fear i cannot. i am in poor health and have short life expectation. i would like to make some general comments. first, science is a serious professional activity, too important to be discussed in a trivial or superficial manner. if you want to join the debate, please read both my papers of 2014. a search engine should find them with jones alzheimer's 2014 allergy. i cannot help it if you find them too hard to follow. i see it as my job to provide new conclusions from known facts and not to give seminars. second, open access cost me good money, in excess of £1000; quite a sum for a pensioner. third, i cannot deal with the many misunderstandings of my work. i never suggested that acetyl cystein is an antidote for Alzheimer [ad]. neither do i accept the findings of stewart et al [1997], whose paper i criticised with good reason in the first of my 2014 papers. fourth, paracetamol is a wholly UNTESTED drug, and for that reason needs special attention. there have been a number of reports of the harm it does to the unborn child. i would like to provide references but my home was raided while i was in hospital in the summer and ALL my notes were stolen. i have never come across a similar incident, which gives some idea of the trenchant opposition to my work. fifth, someone aks why there has been no news coverage? because i am totally isolated here. my emails are read, my mail is often impounded, the telephone is tapped and at least one room is bugged. this is a big operation thought to be on behalf of a huge drug company to keep the whole thing under wraps. thank you for your interest, compliments of the season, sincerely, robert jones.........

</comment><comment><USER17> Published in 2013.

<comment><USER18> So, was Paracetamol to blame?

<comment><USER6> Unlikely:

[http://www.neurology.org/content/48/3/626.short](http://www.neurology.org/content/48/3/626.short)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My comments on this made last year:

\</comment><comment>--

Once you know enough of the basics in a field to get by as a layperson, you'll find that scientific literature is far removed from being dry and uncontroversial. There are always heretics and novel positions being advanced - most of them wrong, but all new fields and new directions start with a few heretics, and the mainstream is consistently overturned with time, to be replaced with the new consensus. Distinguishing a good speculative hypothesis from a work of overreaching fancy can be a challenge wherever you stand in the hierarchy of knowledge, and the good-looking fallacies far outnumber the seeds of tomorrow's scientific mainstream. This is why few researchers bother to spend any time on reviewing this sort of thing when there are so very many other demands on their time.

One of the SENS Research Foundation folk turned up the open access paper on paracetamol and Alzheimer's in the course of ongoing reviews of scientific literature relevant to aging, and thought it heretical enough to share as an item of interest - as a curio well outside the current consensus, not as anything to be acted on. It makes for a good read, and is well-researched, but I think that ultimately the points being made here can be explained away by the coincidence of development of medical technology, increasing longevity, and increasing wealth. When it comes down to the biochemistry, the dots aren't really joined well enough to be very compelling.

So I offer this as an example of the fact that if you go digging around, you'll find very interesting papers that are well-researched, highly speculative, and probably wrong. The author of this paper has been advancing his theory for more than a decade, evidently without gathering much support. That is all part and parcel of the scientific process.

The conclusion of the paper, that Alzheimer's is an artifact of paracetamol use, is something of a bold conclusion, and as I noted above I don't think it stands too well against Occam's razor. It is simpler to point to rising wealth driving the sedentary, high-calorie lifestyle that greatly raises the risk of suffering age-related diseases such as Alzheimer's, and note that this coincides with advances in medical technology that allow for more reliable identification of the condition, progress in other technologies that improve record-keeping and reliability in medicine, and the concurrent trend in rising life spans such that more people survive to ages in which neurodegenerative conditions become a significant risk.

I still suggest you read the paper, as you'll find that a great deal of interesting historical data is referenced therein. You'll probably learn some things that you didn't know about the history of painkillers, for example.

\</comment><comment>--

</comment><comment><USER20> TLDR: Disease Foo has become more common in the past few hundred years. You know what else has become more common in the past few hundred years? Bar! Therefore, Bar causes Foo, QED.

</comment><comment><USER21> Betteridge's law

<comment><USER22> Hacker News law of Betteridge's law of headlines.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4842803](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4842803)

<comment><USER23> Maybe HN should have a Betteridge law bot that operates when the last character of a submission's title is '?'.

<comment><USER24> It's been mturked.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bastion now available in Chrome Web Store - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/oohphhdkahjlioohbalmicpokoefkgid

<comment><USER2> Is this the first Native Client game?

<comment><USER3> I know NetHack[1] has been available for a while. It would be safe to assume that there are others.

[1]: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ladkaalcnedlcimjga...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ladkaalcnedlcimjgaldjoeahnklilnk?hl=en- GB&ct=author)</comment></comment>


AT&T paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to Trump attorney for Net Neutrality - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@fightfortheftr/at-t-paid-200-000-to-trumps-attorney-michael-cohen-and-the-payments-stop-right-after-trump-s-3356687f4827 <comment><USER2> The linked article is a piece of advocacy on Medium. Probably the Reuters story to which they link is a better source for HN:

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-daniels- at-t/at...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-daniels-at-t/att- payments-to-trump-lawyer-more-than-reported-source-idUSKBN1IA2KK)

They also mention a Washington Post story, but there's no link to it.</comment>


Survival of the loudest - <AUTHOR> http://www.management-issues.com/2009/3/20/research/survival-of-the-loudest.asp?mode=print

<comment><USER2> repost.</comment>


Show HN: Verix – Verify anyone's employment with just an email address - <AUTHOR> https://www.verify.verixapi.com/ <comment><USER2> This looks really helpful! How do you do the verification?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for checking it out! We use a number of different data sources (social data, Crunchbase, DNS records, email MX records, etc.) to map domain -> company and email -> individual identity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Pretty cool. What is your information source on the backend and how should we interpret the confidence score?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for checking it out! Our data comes from over 250 public and private data sources, including LinkedIn, Crunchbase, email MX records, company DNS records, and more.

The confidence score is our confidence in the employment verification result—that the email address provided represents a real employee at the company that owns the domain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> :(

Error retrieving company data. Please try again later.

</comment><comment><USER5> Error retrieving company data. Please try again later.

</comment><comment><USER6> interesting does it work for all companies?

<comment><AUTHOR> It works on the vast majority. We have near 100% coverage for large, established companies covering the majority of American employees; tiny startups is an area where we're continuing to add data sources to deliver the best results possible.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What proficiency does one need to start freelancing?  - <AUTHOR> How proficient should one be in a particular subject before starting to take on freelancing jobs?
I have this image in my mind about most freelancers being people who went to their 9-5 software development job for 10 years before they started to freelance.
My company which I have had for a few years have done some (when looking back at it now) very basic php/web-design freelancing for local companies. I was reading the thread about where to find freelance jobs (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1526199) and realized that there are a lot of projects that need coders out there. Having invested a good amount of my education recently into software development, project management and economics I think this would be a really good way to keep learning new things and at the same time get some pressure ( and money ) to motivate and make me prioritize the project at hand. Of course I wouldn't seek out projects that I knew were out of my current or near-future skill-set but this is probably the heart of the problem.
Do potential clients expect a certain level of expertise or are they happy as long as the product works within the boundaries of the spec and deadlines are met? Im thinking that honesty in the bidding and the continuos development process will get me a long way. By that I mean not promising deadlines that im not sure can be met and facing problems head on. But perhaps this is just naive? Also im starting to notice that the more you about something the more you realize that you still have to learn.
Also does the general rule of "work for free or full price, never for cheap" apply in this situation? <comment><USER3> In freelancing, your location doesn't matter. Your skills does. So if you are pretty damn good, you'll get $150/hour. If you suck, you'll get the basic $10/hour and loads of failures and problems with your clients.

I'm 19 and about to hit $1K freelancing (for two months) working around 2 hours a day. The secret is Hacker News. Learn how to talk with the client, how to invoice, how to use a version control, how much to bid.... You can learn these things on your own; but Hacker News discussions can be a valuable short- cut.

English matters a lot and unless you express clearly your ideas and spend time reading requirement and replying, you won't get freelance jobs.

Make sure also that you won't jump to $150/hour overnight. Work on Odesk hundred hours, create a blog with valuable resources, get on HN front-page a handful times, get linked back by other masters in the field, write a book... And you'll get high paying clients. Don't do that, no one will care about your 10 years experience in Amandada Software Packager.

I'm taking off and will be probably making the double (so $1k in one month) next month. Things change quickly on the Internet. Keep reading related topics on HN, some valuable ideas and comments are hidden somewhere in the 34th node. Print the discussion page if you don't bear the screen light.

Good Luck.

</comment><comment><USER4> The fact that you read HN probably means you're more capable than most freelancers out there. We, as people, tend to overestimate the abilities of others and underestimate our own, it's just the way the brain works.

I once did a job where me and a friend had to design a new intranet and website for a client. I claimed that I was quite an expert on usability and intranet design despite the fact that I had never done either before. Basically I winged it. The intranet raised the companys productivity by 60% and the redesigned site ended up in a Jakob Nielsen report on well-done redesigns.

The moral? You're much more capable than you think.

<comment><USER5> _I claimed that I was quite an expert on usability and intranet design despite the fact that I had never done either before. Basically I winged it._

I believe billionaire Mark Cuban said he did this with one of his first companies (MicroSolutions I think). He said people would ask if they did this or that, and he just said yes to everything, even if he had to stay up reading books all night.

Edit: I was trying to remember what his company did. I believe they were one of the first to start networking Macs together. Anyway, I found this quote from his blog which may also be relevant:

 _AT MicroSolutions [reading] gave me a huge advantage. A guy with little computer background could compete with far more experienced guys just because I put in the time to learn all I could.

I learned from magazines and books, but I also learned from watching what some of the up and coming technology companies of the day were doing. Its funny how the companies that I thought were brilliant then, are still racking it up today._

<comment><USER6> Josh James did the same thing. He would go to a client site and read and read on a particular subject. And when they said 'oh that's a stupid idea' - he'd be like 'well, Coke doesn't think so'.

If you have 60 minutes, this talk is inspiring.

[http://byuebusiness.blogspot.com/2009/12/josh-james- december...](http://byuebusiness.blogspot.com/2009/12/josh-james- december-8-2009.html)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1164483>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Usually, the problem for freelancers isn't the actual development part of the job; it's personal/job/client management.

You need to be very disciplined: 1.) Know how to create/hit your goals & estimates 2.) Know when/how to say NO 3.) How to cover-your-ass, etc.

If you can do that, and you're half-decent at the development (and finding development talent you lack), you'll be better than the majority of people out there.

<comment><USER6> Do you have any personal systems/software/client management philosophies you recommend? Basecamp works wonders for me, even though it is simple.

<comment><USER7> Honestly, I'm not freelancer, but I know a lot of them. However, my startup has a lot of the same elements. I use pretty primitive tools: gCal, gTasks, gDoc for a "ghetto-CRM" & other customer/leads lists, etc.

I don't think it's really a tools issue; it's really a personal discipline one. It's very difficult to keep it all straight, but a lot of it is really just being anal and working habits into your lifestyle.

I'm still trying to perfect my habits, but a big part is discipline - <USER2> though it's not as easy as a just changing "tools". However, I'd have to say that having a smartphone changed my life for better this way. I can use my impulsiveness to check my tasks/calendar/docs from anywhere so it's at the front of my mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't mean to toot my own horn, but I wrote a fairly successful blogpost about what I've learned doing full-time freelancing this summer: [http://sealedabstract.com/rants/5-lessons-learned-while- bein...](http://sealedabstract.com/rants/5-lessons-learned-while-being-a- freelance-iphone-developer/)

I think you're on the wrong track focusing on the technical side. If you read HN, you're at least an okay coder. Focus on improving your business skills:

* Figure out where your potential clients hang out. Capturing Google searches is a good place to start

* Filter out the really dumb people in some sort of automated fashion. Every minute you spend figuring out if a client is even serious is a minute where you could be productive.

* Learn to write clearly. Either that or talk on the phone. Master at least one communication skill, and try not to suck at the other.

* Get some pretty templates for doing estimates, invoices and such

* Read a book or two on contracts. Write out your terms in a bulleted list, but hand it to a lawyer to enlegalize.

* You don't need a signed contract on every project--just the ones for which you want to be paid.

* The most important thing is to get 3 projects in your portfolio. Even if you have to be your own client.

* Deals fall through. Always talk to 3x as many people as you can actually do work for. If you're turning away business and people get angry with you, you're doing it right.

</comment><comment><USER9> Here's how I got to $45/HR on oDesk. Its admittedly a low rate, but its about double the average.

\- Be a good communicator. This means speaking and writing well, giving timely updates, and being clear about the spec.

\- Be honest. Buyers are expecting you to blow smoke. If you don't, they'll be shocked. This means sometimes saying, "I don't know how to do that, but I can learn."

\- Follow through. I've had one client pay me to learn something just because he knows I will do what I say I will.

I'm sure there's more tips, and I do a lot wrong (like not say "No"). But doing the basics will put you above the crowd, even if your skills aren't top 10%.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've read a lot of interesting comments on here, but what is everyone's stand point on support. Do you offer free support? Do you charge? Do your clients ask for it? Obviously a change request is chargeable, but what about a bug?

I used to do freelance work face to face, I made a nice chunk of money from it - but in the end the support I had to give was exhausting. Most of it was neither a bug to be fixed or a request requiring a change, often in fact the support query was completely unrelated to my freelance work.

This is one problem with freelancing in general. At the start it is easy, fun, creative and you are printing money. However, the more clients you have, the more work you do and the more money you make, is counter balanced by the increase in support duties.

I decided to join a software consultancy instead, doing roughly the same role as when I was freelancing. The only difference is, now I get paid a salary (which is a lot less) and our support team handle the support of clients. (Something which many clients actually are happy to pay a premium / service fee for).

This said, I see how much money things cost clients compared to my salary (for my work) and get the temptation to just go freelance again.

So HN freelancers, what is your standpoint on ongoing support?

</comment><comment><USER11> I did web design (but no application development) all though high school and college, part time, at from $7 to $15/hr. I got a CS degree, did freelance PHP web development for one client for a year, lived with my parents (don't remember my rate... probably something depressing like $25/hr). Then I went to grad school, got a masters and a couple years of Ph.D. Then I dropped out and screwed around and bootstrapped a startup (great portfolio piece) for two years.

All the while I've been eating up as much web development knowledge as possible, and hacking on silly side projects.

A month ago I put myself on the market as a Rails developer and within a few days landed a $75/hr 20hr/wk job. No one I quoted that rate to blinked an eye. The folks I'm working for are very happy with my work.

Just one data point.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm 20 (almost 21), have about three years of real world experience, one in the niche I'm working in (Rails), and I started freelancing via elance a little over a month ago. I've made, so far, $2350 working 20 or so hours a week, and I've already started getting contacted for work instead of actively seeking it. I also made an extra grand through a personal contact, but those may or may not be an option for you. Freelancing isn't hard, and the barrier to entry is surprisingly low.

I'm honest with clients, and that may or may not have helped me succeed. I have yet to make a promise I was unable to deliver. Make sure you give yourself a little bit of breathing room. If something is probably going to take me a week, I'll tell the client it will take me a week and a half. It might be easy to promise you'll have something done by some date to please the client, but I'd rather have a few repeat clients than a ton of people I've only worked with once.

I'm not charging a lot ($25/hour, which I'll probably raise soon), but I'm still charging double or triple what some foreign providers are charging. I don't know where you're from, but if you're a native English speaker (bonus if you're in the US), you have an advantage already. The people I've worked with are willing to pay extra to have people in a similar timezone that natively speak English.

It's not all roses, though. Some people expect you to work for pennies, or they grossly underestimate what goes into building something. You just have to walk away from those clients. You'll also see a lot of people wanting x for y built, where x is some popular social network and y is some (apparently) under served market. You might have some issue building something you know is likely going to fail, but they're usually happy to pay.

Some people suggest becoming a master of some niche field. Doing so will apparently cause people to seek you out. That might work, but, honestly, I've found it to be unnecessary. I'm already in the top 5% of Rails providers on elance, and I'm not the most experienced Rails developer. Again, the barrier to entry is surprisingly low.

It also makes me feel better to go through a freelancing site. Fixed price jobs on elance, for instance, are usually escrow type where the client sends the funds into escrow and elance hangs on to them until they mark the job complete. At least, that way, you know that the client is good for it.

Edit: To expand on my argument that you don't need to be a master of some niche, I will suggest that you _target_ a niche, even if you aren't a master at it. You'll compete a lot less being a Rails developer than a Ruby developer. It seems me to you'll also have better luck if you pick something that hasn't been commoditized by overseas companies (say, picking Ruby or Python over Java or PHP).

<comment><USER13> Very good advice for such a young person. Your post makes clear that age != experience.

To the OP, I think it depends strongly on your client whether you have to have a big portfolio with big names in it or don't have to have a portfolio at all. My advice: Charge a little less (ahlatimer does this, too), but deliver quality and learn on the go as much as you can. I think every customer is looking for quality & honesty, so when you deliver, you will be able to charge a little more the next time. Good luck!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Expertise is mostly just a way to reassure clients that you will be able to do the work that you promise to do and that after they have cut the check the system will actually function.

The single easiest way to reassure someone that you're capable of doing X is to have done X before. (Or even better, to have someone trusted say you have done X before.)

</comment><comment><USER15> You need to be competent enough to know which jobs you can't manage in a timely manner and turn them down. Practically speaking, that means you should be able to write a simple crud app in your sleep. You should be able to sprinkle some fancy JavaScript ui here and there, and you should be comfortable working with APIs. I'd say you should be familiar with payments, but services like Chargify make that so easy, it's no harder than working with Twitter, for example.

If you can do all that without wasting too much time learning, you're more than qualified to freelance.

Note that I said nothing about scaling and other back end magic. Most clients don't need scale. They need front end development.

Be selective at first, and don't take on anything that you can't do well. Referrals are gold, and you get them by doing a great job, not be stretching yourself. That's what side projects are for.

And I would say, always work for full price - period. Again, free is for side projects.

</comment><comment><USER16> I have been freelancing since I graduated college 8 years ago. I've been self employed so long I wouldn't even know what to do with a fulltime job.

I routinely accept projects that are well outside of my programming abilities or have unreasonable deadlines or budgets and always land on my feet.

In my experience you can get away with a lot less competence as a freelancer. Since clients have no access to your methods, freelancers can sometimes get away with awful code as long as they finish the job to spec and on time. I've seen it done many times.

The big difference here is managing yourself. If you're the kind of person that needs a lot of structure and a manager around, then it will be difficult. If you're pretty independent and can live with occasional cash shortages and work overloads, then you're good to go.

</comment><comment><USER17> The nature of programming jobs is usually not to know in advance everything you have to do. You just need to know how to figure out what to do.

</comment><comment><USER18> Uh, you just need to be able to sell.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok so add to the question that repeat business is something that I want to strive for.

<comment><USER19> Sell, yes. And if you build excellent client relationships (LOTS of communication and honesty is good) then your clients should keep coming back to you for ongoing work.

Additionally you want your clients to be your biggest cheerleaders and talk you up and recommend you to their associates and friends for work.

You can even offer a referral fee, I've done this, but generally if people like you, they're happy to make referrals without even being asked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> You need to know more than the person you're freelancing to...

Since you've had a few years in a related field and built up some contacts you should be good to go (as long as you have a good rep with them). Let them know you are offering a new service, and get some info up. No matter what you're going to be learning new stuff the whole time, so you may as well just start now!

</comment><comment><USER21> _I have this image in my mind about most freelancers being people who went to their 9-5 software development job for 10 years before they started to freelance._

I got my first freelance "project" on rentacoder.com in 9th grade. It earned me a whole $5.00. Few months later, I was winning bigger projects. I know lots of folks who have followed similar paths.

</comment><comment><USER22> Depending on the level of clients you plan to have, you may need to learn to be ruthless.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think there's books written on just answering your question, I'll try and hit the highlights. To give you some background, my biz partners and I started our consulting firm as a side job in college, then when we graduated and basically said to ourselves "why the hell not? it's been working so far." The first 6 months or so were the hardest as we figured out what bootstrapping a full-time business meant, as compared to moonlighting from your dorm room. For example, paying your employees first means your monthly paycheck may need to wait until that next invoice is paid in a few weeks. Within 2 years our rates had increased by 5x (and not from $5->$25 either), there were 10 of us, 2.5 offices, a non-profit in Peru and we got all of our business through client referrals. However, I was also very stressed and constantly working

Overall: Honestly, technical skill is only half of doing good freelancing. Even more so as you become successful and find that you're doing more managing than technical work. And obviously, technical skill is the foundation of your freelance ability. Still, let's assume you have good technical skills.

If there's one thing I wish I'd learned much more about early on in my consulting firm, it is how to manage your client's expectations along the entire way- from quote -> negotiation -> project -> deliverables. I don't have any horror stories, but I feel like that was the biggest squeaky wheel as we were getting started. That, and don't worry about looking too professional. You won't be, it'll probably show in ways you don't know, and instead treat as much as you can as a learning experience rather than trying to hide your lack of knowledge. However, watch out for predatory clients who confuse naivete with lack of business expertise and try to take advantage of you or tell you "how things are done"... to their advantage.

1\. Clients do expect a certain level of expertise, but your rate, portfolio and past referrals should go a long ways in setting your client's expectations. Specs, even highly technical ones imo, are a fickle thing in freelance work- a phrase I've repeatedly heard from very successful freelancers is "under-sell, over deliver." But that's just one approach.

2\. To be honest, there are many freelancers/firms who are not honest about their rates/development process/billable hours and they still pay the bills. On the flip side, my biz partners and I try to run our firm by the Golden Rule* and it's worked exceptionally well for us.

3\. Yes, that is a good general rule, but you should decide early on if you want to do speculative work or not (different from pro bono work). Many firms feel that speculative work is damaging unless you are just starting out and need to establish a portfolio/set of client referrals (in which case, you're still being "compensated" with something of value, just not cash...). Also, you may find that you're willing to work at different rates for different clients.

Hope that helps!</comment>


Robby Walker: The User Is Priority #1 - <AUTHOR> http://www.robbywalker.name/1/post/2007/08/the-user-is-priority-1.html

<comment><USER2> Evidently this guy is smart as shit: <http://www.robbywalker.name/timeline.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> When you say User do you mean the cool kids in Silicon Valley or people outside Silicon Valley?</comment>


Justin.tv has shut down - <AUTHOR> http://www.justin.tv/ <comment><USER2> I recently signed up on twitch and started watching 1-2 hours of streams a day, usually whenever TotalBiscuit, Hafu, or Amaz are on in the evenings CST (which isn't terribly often). I also use Netflix exclusively as opposed to cable or satellite, and this is the unfortunate result:

[http://i.imgur.com/i7MKXWC.png](http://i.imgur.com/i7MKXWC.png)

I used to think I'd have to torrent to hit typical consumer data caps, but that's no longer the case. I didn't do any torrenting whatsoever in July, but I still used over 300GB.

Even if Verizon ever pull their head out of their rear in regards to peering, so long as data caps exist we'll still be artificially throttled in our internet usage.

<comment><USER3> Data caps do suck, but I do have a happy memory of working the system.

Around March of 2011, Verizon Wireless was promoting it's new 4G networking by offering unlimited data plans. I bought an HTC Thunderbolt, the Verizon network's first 4G phone, and promptly started tethering it to my laptop using a program called Easy Tether (purchased through the Amazon's app store).

While I had that phone, I would routinely consume hundreds of gigs of bandwidth each month, mostly from watching streaming videos. I wasn't even torrenting. Before there were a bunch of other people using 4G, I got some pretty good download speeds. One day, I remember downloading the Xcode, a 4 or 5 gig download, within a few minutes. Another day, Speedtest clocked my download speed at something like 33gps, although 9 to 12 gigs per second for the norm.

Today I'm on a cheapo prepaid wireless plan and settle for 2G download speeds of about 50kbs, which is fine most of the time. My cheapo phone plan and cable internet subscription are cheaper than any reasonable plan Verizon Wireless offers. For now, I'll enjoy my reasonably speedy Netflix streaming at home until Comcast throttles my download speeds to that of a 28.8K modem.

<comment><USER4> 33 gbps? Those units seem quite unlikely.

<comment><USER5> Given that the person stated that they are only consuming hundreds of gigabytes I think we can assume that they mean megabits not gagabits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This had been in the cards for a long time now. Justin.tv was a huge liability since there were so many streams running pirated content. They were really smart in acknowledging the success of video game streaming the platform was having and focusing their efforts there. Honestly one of the better pivots I have seen.

I think they are a really smart company, it will be interesting to see what happens post Google.

<comment><USER7> Was re-reading "Why TV Lost" essay by PG ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=501696](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=501696)), which seemed inspired by Justin.tv. A lot of the points in the essay from 5 years ago were really telling, including the role of piracy in the user experience.

One interesting excerpt: "The somewhat more surprising force was one specific type of innovation: social applications... This was what made everyone want computers. Nerds got computers because they liked them. Then gamers got them to play games on. But it was connecting to other people that got everyone else: that's what made even grandmas and 14 year old girls want computers."

<comment><USER8> > Nerds got computers because they liked them. Then gamers got them to play > games on. But it was connecting to other people that got everyone else

I've never seen anyone completely write IBM and Microsoft out of computing history by such absurd degree as this.

<comment><USER9> Or Apple/Aldus/Adobe for that matter.

"Nerds" got them because at the time computers could only do the things nerds wanted them to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Kind of sucks access to old videos is gone. I remember watching a lot of Arab spring and occupy wall street streams live as they happened on the site. It's a shame to lose those videos and the interesting historical info in them.

<comment><USER11> The Archive project has been busy getting these as quickly as possible. [https://archive.org/details/justintv](https://archive.org/details/justintv) You may find a lot of those videos have been saved. I think there was a limit on which videos were actually saved as those with no views or only few were not selected.

<comment><USER12> Videos with more than 10 views were downloaded. In addition, many videos that people asked to be saved were downloaded.

<comment><USER10> Awesome, thanks everyone who helped save the videos!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I feel nostalgic, in a weird way. With Google Glass coming into the world, it's nice to remember there was a time when filming your day required a pioneer spirit and a DIY rig.

I remember this interview when Justin was just getting started...

[http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/06/06/a-conversation- with-j...](http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/06/06/a-conversation-with-justin- kan-of-justintv/)

</comment><comment><USER14> I remember in the first weeks of JTV when the crew would hold a weekly BBQ at their apartment, so that people would have something interesting to watch. It was fun to go up there and joke with Justin about his shenanigans for the week while watching Kyle build ever smaller portable rigs.

I'm glad that that crazy idea ("I'm going to live stream my life and people will watch!") has turned into the best live streaming gaming site on the internet.

</comment><comment><USER15> I used to visit justin.tv a lot in the early days, they used to have more interesting people broadcasting but the quality declined over the last 5 years. A lot of the more premium channels/brands broadcast on other sites.

This is reflected in the traffic, just look at the decline from a peak in late 2009. Looking at this graph, it's no real surprise that they are shutting it down:

[https://www.quantcast.com/justin.tv#!traffic](https://www.quantcast.com/justin.tv#!traffic) (click all below the graph)

They have done really well to develop the gaming side on twitch.

</comment><comment><USER16> Sounds like Twitch is slimming down after Google buy. Smart move. Google cares about the demographics of Twitch a lot more, I'd imagine.

<comment><USER17> Has the acquisition actually been announced yet? All I can find are articles that say it is "confirmed", but with no link to the announcement.

<comment><USER18> No, it's purely rumors at this point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I understand there was lots of pirated content on justin.tv, but I am surprised that focusing on streaming live video games is better in the long term then focusing on live content in general.

I see the live content market with more possibilities ... live events, reality shows ...etc.

I'm not an expert on the subject, can someone enlighten me?

<comment><USER15> Live streaming content has huge potential but the justin.tv brand is pretty tarnished at this point, I can't see many big brands/name choosing to broadcast there. They would need a complete relaunch and name change I think.

With the experiment of streaming Steve Aoki on twitch it wouldn't surprise me if they launched a dedicated branded site for live music at some point. Google may want to keep that stuff on youtube though.

<comment><USER17> By tarnished, do you mean that it is an old brand, or that something bad happened to the brand that tarnished it?

<comment><USER15> It just had a increasingly unprofessional/low quality image that in addition to the many pirated tv streams as other people have mentioned, attracted many teenage girls with low quality cameras and viewers asking them to 'show feet' and other demands. This quote from this fast company article sums it up pretty well:

"By last summer, its once-thriving community had dwindled to a ghost town populated by puppy cams, eccentrics--like the stoner who filmed himself taking bong hits--and a few lonely lifecasters. Mostly young women, they tend to sit, static, in front of a webcam, rambling about their interior lives to a tiny audience of leering commenters."

[http://www.fastcompany.com/1839300/many-pivots-justintv- how-...](http://www.fastcompany.com/1839300/many-pivots-justintv-how-livecam- show-became-home-video-gaming-superstars)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> DNA Lounge used Justin.tv. JWZ's reaction here: [http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2014/08/05.html](http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2014/08/05.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> What are the major, _general-purpose_ livestreaming options now? Ustream? Google Hangouts? What else?

<comment><USER22> What other sites offer similar TV streams like JTV did?

I have used JTV for marathon watching of so many popular TV shows for the past five years.

I may not really be watching, but when working on your latest start-up or idea it was always good to be watching marathons of my favorite show in the background.

<comment><USER22> Why is this being downvoted? This is how I used JTV for the past five years and I'm sure tons of others here did too.

<comment><USER22> Probably, but it was an amazing site due to all the marathon copyrighted TV shows you can just go and tune into.

Where am I supposed to get a similar service now? I'll never pay for cable TV again!

<comment> squeaky-clean You should still pay for the content you consume. This is why these streaming sites get shut down so quickly. Watching a stream is no different than torrenting it or other means of infringing. You're watching a TV show without the rights holders getting any money. If you don't want the rights holders to get any of your money (whether it's because you cannot afford to pay, or do not want to pay), you simply should not watch the show, not find a free way around the system.

<comment><USER22> Well where can I watch and pay for a JTV like service on the INternet.

Answer you can not and copyright does not want to disrupt their horrible cable TV business model.

JTV was awesome and will be sorely missed! Aereo too and hey I paid for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I guess this was inevitable after Twitch was acquired.

</comment><comment><USER24> "Your account is now closed, and you will be unable to access any settings or content"

<comment><USER25> They announced the end of archiving of videos a few months ago. So there's nothing really to get off of your account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> There's a lot of talk about how this is due to the google acquisition, but if you paid any attention to twitch / justin, this is the logical extension of the slow justin.tv sunset that has been going on for the past few years.

</comment><comment><USER27> Removed from TWiT:

* Episode with mention: [http://twit.tv/show/tech-news-2night/144](http://twit.tv/show/tech-news-2night/144)

* Wiki history: [http://wiki.twit.tv/w/index.php?title=Stream_URLs&diff=prev&...](http://wiki.twit.tv/w/index.php?title=Stream_URLs&diff=prev&oldid=59714)

</comment><comment><USER28> This is sad nostalgia. It was 2006-2007 when I was in the process if moving from Miami to San Francisco. I remember finding out about Justin on a cnet interview (I think). He had a setup of some cameras in his hat. I remember quite fondly just watching him walk around the streets of SF and getting a real life view of what my future city looked like.

</comment><comment><USER29> I first heard about Justin.tv in an Amazon EC2 case study. They were one the the pioneers on the platform and laid out a blueprint on elastic scaling to handle their encoding. I found it very interesting and inspirational.

The idea of lifecasting had been around for a while though I think. Josh Harris comes to mind, but maybe even earlier?

</comment><comment><USER18> Not really surprising, considering how outdated their site was (visually, at least).

Edit: Users with accounts can migrate them to Twitch.TV here: [http://link.twitch.tv/switchaccount](http://link.twitch.tv/switchaccount)

</comment><comment><USER30> "Twitch is site for gaming-related content only. "

Just wanted to point out a typo in the copy.

<comment><USER31> Not a typo, their had their Russian PR manager issue this release.

<comment><USER32> So it's not a typo because it was written by a Russian?

<comment><USER31> It's a joke; Russian doesn't have articles like English does. The omission of the article in the sentence that the OP pointed out makes it sound like it could have been spoken by a Russian character out of a Hollywood movie.

<comment><USER33> In my experience, all ESL Russians speak like Russian characters in Hollywood movies. I do find the dropped articles to be quite amusing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I would have never thought when Twitch first was a side project that it would become as big as it is. I don't know if it's luck, skill, or good timing, but it's really amazing what they achieved.

<comment><USER35> All of those. Gaming has been steadily growing for a long time now and has reached a "major player" status, so the timing is good. They're obviously a very skilled group of people. And finally, great achievements require some luck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This one was shocking to read. At first I thought the company is dying, but they basically switch the focus to twitch. I still remember when Justin's stream was all the rage. What a great time!

</comment><comment><USER37> You could see this coming when they gave everyone 7 days to back up their archives before they would be _deleted._ I'm sure most of their employable employees jumped ship since then.

<comment><USER16> Why would they jump ship? Twitch.tv has been booming for the past couple years. If anything, they were just already moved to the twitch team.

This has little to do with the viability of the company/site and more to do with getting rid of what is basically a generalized, predecessor version of their already highly successful specialized streaming site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> _Can I retrieve my videos? Unfortunately, videos on Justin.tv are no longer accessible for download. Video archiving and VODs were removed on June 15, 2014._

Were people given advance notice on this?

<comment><USER39> Yes, one week's notice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Seems abrupt. Would be nice to give users a couple of weeks or a month to download their content.

Edit: never mind, looks like they gave plenty of notice.

<comment><USER41> They made an announcement a while ago as I recall, I think it even made the front page of HN as well.

EDIT: Yep, heres the link [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7826313](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7826313)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I will miss endless repeats of the entire corpus of Stargate episodes. Really a great way to escape and get away for a while.

</comment><comment><USER43> Im gonna miss "The Office" stream.

</comment><comment><USER44> Would've been nice if he gave heads up at YC Hacks or something.

</comment><comment><USER45> End of an era

</comment><comment><USER46> ...My cousins had just bought a membership...

<comment><USER32>
      "I'm an active Pro Account User, will I be refunded?

      Yes. You should have already received an email communicating the cancellation and refund process."

<comment><USER46> great, thanks</comment></comment></comment>


The Lockdown's Lessons for Climate Activism - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-lockdowns-lessons-for-climate-activism-11594440061 <comment><AUTHOR> So Lomburg is publishing a new book "False Alarm". It is a sad move on from "skeptical environmentalist" as far as titles go but maybe that's the world we live in.

I am interested in getting a balanced view on his work - the main argument seems to make sense - I guess it's just how bad will it be in 80 years?</comment>


Time to Panic - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/16/opinion/sunday/fear-panic-climate-change-warming.html <comment><USER2> There's a bit of a prisoners dimemna in the "individual choice" aspect of addressing climate change. Because, a lot of people don't want to give something up (e.g., fly less, eat less meat) if no one else is going to.

But I don't think that means individual choice _can't_ be effective; it's just an unsolved problem as to how we get people to make those choices. (Because if it's time to panic, it's in large part due to the fact that public policy has not budged on the issue. We need every tool available.)

Agriculture really is the thing to address. Some estimates put it as high as a third of greenhouse gas emissions. It's not just methane. It's the soil degradation (healthy soil being an extremely effective carbon sink), the destruction of forests for grazing land, all of the petrochemical inputs, all of the transportation costs to bring that out-of-season fruit from halfway around the world to your plate.

I really believe that in order to address the issue of climate change, in the time frame we have, our diet has to change, and with it our method of farming.

</comment><comment><USER3> coincidentally someone just showed me this doc about Cuba precocious oil crisis [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEF19NV_3SE&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEF19NV_3SE&feature=youtu.be)

worth taking a look</comment>


There are no GAFAs in enterprise - <AUTHOR> http://blairreeves.me/2017/09/25/no-gafas-in-enterprise/ <comment><USER2> I had to look up what "GAFA" meant. Apparently it stands for "Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon," usually used within Europe in the context of legal investigations.</comment>


What is WinC++ and how does it figure in Microsoft's bid to make tools a $2 b... - alok-g http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/what-is-winc-and-how-does-it-figure-in-microsofts-bid-to-make-tools-a-2-billion-business/9359

<comment><AUTHOR> _blink_

Since the introduction of C#, I was under the impression that Microsoft would be more than happy to see C++ die off. But here we have

"It seems from another Microsoft job posting that Microsoft is really pushing the idea that C++ will be key to building applications for the coming version of Windows."

Unsurprisingly, the Delphi developers are coming out in full force in the comments in this article.

To be honest, the idea that Microsoft will make C++ the favored language for development for Windows is surreal to me. What the heck is going on with the C# team?

<comment><USER2> The Windows team never fully bought into the .net strategy. The success of Windows 7 has finally given them the leverage to do what they've wanted all along.

<comment><USER2> Addendum: I don't think this means they're somehow abandoning .net. In fact the early Windows 8 leaks reveal that there's a new "System Language Runtime" which is a lower-overhead subset of the CLR designed to allow you to do things like write shell and IE extensions in managed code.

They are also integrating the new JavaScript engine from IE9/10 into the OS, and probably all OS features will have JavaScript APIs as well as managed/native ones.

However, .net APIs will no longer be emphasized over native and JS ones, the three options will just be treated as peers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It would indeed be interesting if MS rediscovered native code and C++. Might actually make want to develop for Win32 again (at least some time when I have the choice not to).

On second thought...naah.

Just watched a coworker waste half a day because Windows/Microsoft Update quietly installed conflicting versions of the C runtime libraries on his developer box. So the executables he built wouldn't run on some random subset of the target machines.

</comment><comment><USER4> Embarcadero sells modern Delphi compilers; win32 development doesn't need to suck:

<http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi>

<comment><USER5> I still use Borland C++ Builder, Delphi's little brother, on a daily basis.

Both Delphi and C++Builder are powered by VCL under the hood. VCL = Visual Components Library, a very orthogonal application+userinteface kit. Microsoft has tried to imitate it with .Net, both foundations feel the same. But the VCL is less bloated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Greetings MS refugees!

Come to Android, where engineering decisions are made with _taste_ , all the way down.

<comment><USER3> I've bought the phone and installed the developer kit.

Will I be able to use g++ >= 4.6 to code natively to OpenGL at some point?

<comment><USER4> Well, "at some point" being whenever you get around to installing the NDK.

<http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/index.html>

<comment><USER3> Cool! Someone (who ought to know) told me that wasn't possible. Thanks for correcting my misimpression.

<comment><USER4> Trust but verify.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Am I the only one who had to double check that this article was not, in fact, written on April 1?

</comment><comment><USER7> Quite light on content, heavy on speculation and rumor.

<comment><USER3> On the other hand, I thought the article was not too bad at all for ZDNet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Am I the only one who read "WinC++" as "wince"?

<comment><USER9> WinC++ is a pretty average name. What was wrong with Visual C++? Seems like a pointless change which they will probably waste a few million on.

<comment><USER3> I always thought "Visual C++" was a dumb name because there's nothing more or less "visual" about it than the other tools at the time.

C++ is a text-based language, by definition, and a chainsaw by metaphor. If you approach it like it's some kind of drag-and-drop finger paint set, you will surely encounter misery.

But don't listen to me. It's not like _I've_ ever named a $B+ product line. :-)

<comment><USER9> Well that is a fair point. It is a bit annoying how Microsoft tries to fit groups of products under the same umbrella even when they do not necessarily fit together.

I have grave fears for Skype.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Does Your Language Shape How You Think? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?_r=1

<comment><USER2> I get quite suspicious when a linguist claims that there's some language where you can't possibly give directions by reference to your body orientation. What's more likely is that giving directions that way is stigmatised very strongly, so that the linguist never hears anyone do it, and if he accidentally did it himself, it would confuse his interlocutor.

To give an analogy: if a linguist from Mars gathered a corpus of business English conversation, he'd notice that men refer to something 36 inches off the ground as "desk height" rather than "penis height", and call a sphere an inch or so in diameter "ping pong ball size" rather than "testicle size". Similarly a small discus is "penny sized" (adjusting for your local currency) rather than "anus sized", a small stone is "fist-sized" rather than "ballsack- sized", etc. Is this because in English it's linguistically impossible to make comparisons to your genital or excretory organs? No, it's because it's socially unacceptable at work; someone may complain to HR and get you fired if you make that comparison.

Similarly, the reason the egocentric direction system is so dominant in Western (and Chinese, Japanese, etc.) culture is because of habit and custom --- urban civilians don't usually see sunrise or sunset from inside the office buildings and malls in which they're most likely to give these kinds of directions, so they never get instinctively oriented and the habit of giving directions by compass points never takes off. It has nothing to do with linguistics.

And in the right situation, giving east-west-north-south style directions actually can take hold (which is helpful when you've got two sets of elevators and telling someone to "turn left" after getting off will send them walking in a fairly random direction). At certain times in my life, all my colleagues knew their north from their south. Were we all members of a sensitive indigenous tribe with a deep connection to nature due to our special mother tongue? No, we were stock traders; we knew which way was east in the building because our asses were in our seats before dawn and we watched the sun rise through the same window every day and set through the opposite one. Put us in a different building (e.g. due to switching jobs) and we'd be confused for a few days, just like the Bali kid who tried to get dance lessons from a teacher in another village.

<comment><USER3> Your reasoning doesn't work if the language in question really doesn't have a word for 'left' or 'right'. Whether this is the case because they never though of it or because it was strongly stigmatized in the past and as a result these words came out of use and eventually were forgotten, the result is the same: Present day speakers truly have no possible way to say 'left' or 'right' without making up new words or describing it in some way.

<comment><USER4> I was always intrigued by the fact that some languages (especially ancient ones) appear to miss the word for "yes" and "no".

I've heard that gaelic and latin for example don't have a real word for "yes", but instead the answer repeated the affirmative form of the verb or similar.

Many argue that latin did indeed have the word for yes, namely "ita", but all the dictionaries I looked at translate it as "so; thus; indeed; ..."

Other languages like japanese rely much on repetition of the verb but do have words for yes and no (hai to iie).

I wonder if it really makes a difference to think in a language which doesn't have a word for yes and no (for whatever reasons is not present in the language, historical stigma etc).

I see how it can change your way to discuss with people: "don't be tricky! answer simply, ehm uhm" but I feel this doesn't count as a major mind shaping issue.

Don't get me wrong, I was intrigued as anyone with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis but I'm aware that sometimes some intriguing memes get more resonance than they deserve.

<comment><USER5> >I've heard that gaelic and latin for example don't have a real word for "yes", but instead the answer repeated the affirmative form of the verb or similar.

Then they have a way to express affirmation.

<comment><USER4> Yes, the fact that you don't have a specific word for a concept doesn't mean that you don't have a concept

The trick is probably that some concepts are activated when our language center parses more than one word; we don't think about them as separate words. There are plenty of examples in the vocabularies of various languages, one of my favorites is the word 'alarm':

I asked a lot of people in the Italy if they recognize what the word "allarme" comes from. Surprisingly only few recognized the exhortation "all'armi!" (to the weapons!) (<http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=alarm>). Sometimes this effect creates a new word, but sometimes a concept remains indirectly expressed, while the speaker unconsciously extracts the high level meaning of it.

However, I noticed that most of the amateur discussions about linguistics scratch only the surface because mostly only nouns are touched.

For example when I was younger and still living in Croatia. A relative of mine was Macedonian and told me that they have a verb mood that is used when you state something which you are sure that is true, vs only being told that is true.

I'm not really sure what is that, after a bit of research I think it's <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferential_mood>.

"The inferential mood (abbreviated infer or infr) is used to report a nonwitnessed event without confirming it"

Does this shape the way you think?

After all, even English speakers are able to express the fact that they didn't witness an event; I guess they do, didn't check :-)

<comment><USER5> Interesting etymology of alarm - reminds me of the English "Mayday!" from the French "M'Aider!" (Help me!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's been a lot written recently about language and its interaction with thinking processes. Here are a few related references here on HN:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1595991>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1576971>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1556443>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1551052>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1543871>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1505365>

<comment><USER7> And <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1583995> too

<comment><USER6> Thank you - I missed that one (obviously).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a hundred years old.

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

 _Among Whorf's well known examples of linguistic relativity are examples of instances where an indigenous language has several terms for a concept that is only described with one word in English and other European languages (Whorf used the acronym SAE "Standard Average European" to allude to the rather similar grammatical structures of the well-studied European languages in contrast to the greater diversity of the less-studied languages). One of Whorf's examples of this was the supposedly many words for 'snow' in the Inuit language, which has later been shown to be a misrepresentation[13] but also for example how the Hopi language describes water with two different words for drinking water in a container versus a natural body of water. These examples of polysemy served the double purpose of showing that indigenous languages sometimes made more fine grained semantic distinctions than European languages and that direct translation between two languages, even of seemingly basic concepts like snow or water, is not always possible.

Another example in which Whorf attempted to show that language use affects behavior came from his experience in his day job as a chemical engineer working for an insurance company as a fire inspector[13]. On inspecting a chemical plant he once observed that the plant had two storage rooms for gasoline barrels, one for the full barrels and one for the empty ones. He further noticed that while no employees smoked cigarettes in the room for full barrels no-one minded smoking in the room with empty barrels, although this was potentially much more dangerous due to the highly flammable vapors that still existed in the barrels. He concluded that the use of the word 'empty' in connection to the barrels had led the workers to unconsciously regarding them as harmless, although consciously they were probably aware of the risk of explosion from the vapors. This example was later criticized by Lenneberg[14] as not actually demonstrating the causality between the use of the word empty and the action of smoking, but instead being an example of circular reasoning. Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct ridiculed this example, claiming that this was a failing of human sight rather than language.

Whorf's most elaborate argument for the existence of linguistic relativity regarded what he believed to be a fundamental difference in the understanding of time as a conceptual category among the Hopi.[15] He argued that in contrast to English and other SAE languages, the Hopi language does not treat the flow of time as a sequence of distinct, countable instances, like "three days" or "five years" but rather as a single process and consequentially it does not have nouns referring to units of time. He proposed that this view of time was fundamental in all aspects of Hopi culture and explained certain Hopi behavioral patterns._

<comment><USER4> interesting critiques:

<http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/njp0001.html> <http://www.enformy.com/dma-Chap7.htm>

and probably tons of other references

nice book: The language instinct by Steven Pinker

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Single Page:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all)

</comment><comment><USER9> This was one of the main topics of Orwell's 1984 as well as some of his essays.

If you restrict a language, you make it harder to think about certain topics. Making it impossible is _far_ too strong a statement. Even very rudamentary languages can express virtually any concept. But it can certainly make it harder to think about those concepts, especially highly nuanced ones, with precise words fitted for it.

Mathematical history provides a good example of this. There is nothing you can express with Hindu-Arabic numerals that you cannot express with Roman numerals. Yet, the Hindu-Arabic numerals we vastly easier to work with and think about, and their importation into Europe facilitated mathematical development there.

<comment><USER10> Your argument is flawed, but the example is fine. Roman numerals are restricted in comparison with Arabic ones. AFAIK, there is no way to write "zero" or negative numbers in Roman numerals. Zero, in particular, was a major innovation.

<comment><USER4> Roman numerals are now dead, nobody would be taken seriously if he extended the roman numeral system in order to prove that the roman numerals could have a zero (or negatives). Right?

But when cultural systems were alive, they routinely changed, adapted, imported concepts. Sometimes they were replaced, but not simply because they lacked something that could be added

One could simply add "N" as nulla and invent something for negative numbers or spell it as a full word.

The key point in the arabic/hindi zero is not the 'zero' value of the symbol, but the positional feature of the numbering system. The zero just turns out to be useful to express a lot of numbers in a positional system.

Zero by himself is probably less useful and as a concept can be expressed as a full word "nulla" if needed.

Indeed I just found out that medieval extension of the roman numeral system included 'nulla': <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Zero>

If only Romans had to calculate complicated feast dates like Easter, perhaps they'd found the need to include a zero as the medieval computists did.

(honestly I have no idea of either the Ancient Rome festivities nor exactly what they used the numbers for, just guessing)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think it does, and this even extends to programming languages!

I've noticed that C++ developers think differently than Lisp developers, and same with Java and Python developers.

Languages have subtle biases that totally effect the way you look at things.

<comment><USER12> I don't think that's the complete picture with programming languages. People already bring biases with them when they start using a programming language. They're more likely to become an expert in a language that agrees with the way they already think.

So just because c++ developers think alike, it's not necessarily because the language influenced them to think that way.

That doesn't really happen with spoken languages. You're born and have to learn the one (or maybe two) languages your parents speak. So the language influences you at a much earlier age.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Consider:

"Regardless of visibility conditions, regardless of whether they are in thick forest or on an open plain, whether outside or indoors or even in caves, whether stationary or moving, they have a spot-on sense of direction. "

and:

"It was impossible to teach the boy anything, because he simply did not understand any of the instructions. When told to take "three steps east" or "bend southwest," he didn't know what to do. The boy would not have had the least trouble with these directions in his own village"

and then:

"This habit of constant awareness to the geographic direction is inculcated almost from infancy: studies have shown that children in such societies start using geographic directions as early as age 2 and fully master the system by 7 or 8"

That makes me a little skeptical but it's still an interesting article.

</comment><comment><USER14> The bit about specifying the gender of one's neighbor sounds like the work of somebody who knows just enough to be really wrong.

My French and German are weak, but Spanish has vecino/vecina, and you can equivocate easily enough by saying that you spent the evening with "una persona que vive cerca", and I'd be very surprised if you can't do similar in French or German. ("Une personne qu'habite ne pas loin" in French?)

<comment><USER15> Arabic: jaari(m)/jaarati(f)

Somali: ninka dariskeenaa (m)/naagta dariskeenaa(f). Literally, "the man who is our neighbor", "the woman who is our neighbor".

The somali is complicated because "neighbor" is never a singular person, always plural. The concept of a person living alone is unheard of, and people are usually suspicious of bachelors.

<comment><USER14> But in Arabic and Somali is it possible to talk about people who live nearby while obscuring whether they're male or female?

<comment><USER15> Yes, Arabic (juwaar/jiraan) and Somali (daris/jaar/jiraan)

None of those words carry gender because they're plural.

In the singular, Arabic uses the male "jaar" word for both genders. While the same word is plural in northern Somali, since, as mentioned, it has no singular word. Arabic also has the dual (jaaraan/jaarataan) our two neighbors (m/f)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So apparently the Guugu Yimithirr have a pitch-pefect conception of cardinality at all times, because they describe space in north-south-east- west, which probably depends somehow on a periodic synchronization with the position of the sun.

Would be curious to see how they'd thrive in Alaska.

</comment><comment><USER17> What about development languages?

<comment><USER16> a fascinating thought: worth looking into.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Not sure if the article mentions the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis but I completely agree with it and as a polyglot can attest to this theory.

</comment><comment><USER7> so what happens if one of your most used languages is a programming language?

</comment><comment><USER19> Cursing is a good example. Some low level subcultures are using high amount of sex/genital related cursing and word substitutes. (Russian underclass is the most famous example) while other cultures (say, Indian) aren't.

Of course, language usage shapes what you thing and by which chains of associations your mind wanders along.

If you're able to switch your mind's language for at least several minutes (naming and calling things on your second language) you will have a different projection of the same reality and your behavior will also be changed.</comment>


I.B.M. Reports Nanotube Chip Breakthrough - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/i-b-m-reports-nanotube-chip-breakthrough/?hp&pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> Articles like this used to excite me. But now, they are just sort of depressing.

Would it be good to have denser transistor counts? Sure. There are lots of benefits for hardware. Denser transistors can mean (possibly) reduced power consumption from smaller chips. Manufacturing costs are reduced because you get more chips from the same materials. Device production costs are reduced because you can combine functions that used to take two chips into a single chip. Overall devices can be smaller.

But from a software perspective, its a limited blessing. To be sure, there are benefits for cloud computing applications and other "embarrassingly parallel" applications. These chips might be great in data centers, which are power sensitive. And being able to do more things at once can be good, even if its at the same speed - Google can maybe crawl the web more frequently and video games might get improved graphics.

But the thing is, we already have nearly unlimited computing power at our disposal. On a whim, I could spin up a hundred thousand computers on Amazon Web Services to do some desired computation (which would cost a mere $700/hr at the current spot prices). My laptop has a 192 core GPU which, by itself, is more powerful than most super computers that existed up to the mid-1990s.

What we really need are software advances to exploit this hardware. For decades, there has been essentially no progress whatever in software that can take advantage of parallel computing. What techniques we have are either brittle (threads) or forfeit most of the hardware's power (multiple processes combined with relatively slow inter-process communication). Software is in such a backward state that people are amazed when the home-screen icons on an iphone scroll smoothly from page to page.

<comment><USER3> The density numbers in the article are only interesting because they mean that nanotube transistors are practical. A 90nm process node is what we were using for Athalon 64s and Pentium 4s, it won't let you put more cores on a chip than you have now. Maybe someday nanotubes will shrink that small, but that wasn't what the article was about.

The amazing thing about nanotubes is that they have an electron mobility of 100,000 cm2/(V·s) at room temperature, the highest of anything you could think about making a transistor out of. By contrast, silicon has an electron mobility of only 1400 cm2/ (V·s). Since the drive current coming out of transistor is roughly proportional to electron mobilty (or equally high hole mobility) you'd expect that you'd expect that a nanotube based transistor would be able to switch 70 times as fast as a silicon based one. Or a quarter of a terrahertz, in other words. Now, speed of light delays at 90nm will probably be pretty significant at that point, but we should still expect that moving to nanotubes to be a huge win for single threaded performance at the expense of the number of threads available.

<comment> Tuna-Fish > ... a nanotube based transistor would be able to switch 70 times as fast as > a silicon based one. Or a quarter of a terrahertz, in other words.

A transistor switching at 250GHz would _not_ be 70 times faster than a silicon transistor. In fact, it would only be a little over 2x faster. Our best production quality silicon transistors are well over 100GHz now.

The clock frequency of a CPU is _not_ the speed that a single transistor in that CPU switches. It's the speed that the longest path of transistors inside a single pipeline stage in that CPU switches. In contemporary CPUs, these paths are ~20 FO4¹ long.

(¹ since the speed of the transistors depend on the load put on them, you need to normalize for that. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FO4> )

<comment><USER3> You're entirely right that I misspoke there. I meant that the _clockspeed_ for similarly architectured devices would go up to a quarter terrahertz, but I managed to imply something entirely different.

<comment> Tuna-Fish No, it really wouldn't. Clock speed is as much restricted by light speed delays as it is by transistor switching speed.

<comment><USER3> Ok, I'm going to disagree with you here. Speed of light delays cause latency when you're talking about large structures like caches, but they're not even the biggest factor in L3 with current processes. If we were clocking things as fast as nanotubes allow then we probably would find speed of light delays dominating latencies, but increased latencies will only eat a proportion of the gains from higher clock speed, and that's what we have branch predictors, prefetchers, and deep OoO engines for.

Unless you were talking about clock skew between the exit points of your h-tree?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> IBM is fantastic at using their research for PR, but it usually takes a very long time until these breakthrough announcements show up in products. The challenges on the road to competing with established tech for a completely new technology like this are formidable.

An announcement like this is great but it is no reason to get overly excited just yet. Many other technologies have been proposed and have either disappeared or have found employment in niches (GaAs for instance), for now Silicium still holds a formidable edge when it comes to the most important measure of all: economy.

<comment><USER5> This particular breakthrough product probably wouldn't start appearing in chips for at least 8 or 10 years, though. It's fine to get excited! Just don't think we're getting nanotubes in our phones next year. Changing materials is a huuuge step.

<comment><USER3> Right. I expect people to switch over to other materials only after improvements using silicon stop.

<comment><USER4> Even then it will have to make economic sense to switch. After all the equation is not x > y but $n using tech x buys more computing power than $n using tech y.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> article link [http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nnano....](http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nnano.2012.189.html)

also more informative stories [http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57541381-76/ibm-brings- car...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57541381-76/ibm-brings-carbon- nanotube-based-computers-a-step-closer/)

<http://www.nanowerk.com/news2/newsid=27115.php>

</comment><comment><USER7> material scientist here. I've worked on carbon nanotubes (cnt if you want to sound cool) for a few years. Looking at them under the electron microscope, I've always wondered how in the hell we'd ever line them up without having to recourse to nano-tweezers (which of course is impractical if you want to scale to a few billion switches). Looks like IBM finally cracked a decent technique (though I suppose the device yield isn't that great), and it hopefully will be a path toward production. What would be really cool is if we can find economically-viable application for carbon nanotubes outside of semi- conductors. The biggest problem right now is their cost (~$400/gram for good purity [for reference: 20X the price of gold]) and the fact that platinum is used as a destructive catalyst to make them.

<comment><USER8> Let me be nitpicky: the price of gold has gone up recently, it's now over 50$/g.

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28400+%24%2Fg%29+%2F%2...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28400+%24%2Fg%29+%2F%28price+of+gold%29)

<comment><USER7> Ah, good catch! I remember a while back comparing CNT prices per gram versus gold and it was something like $20 a gram for gold. Must have been a low then. Thanks for catching it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> TL;DR: IBM found a way to place nanotubes on silicon chips with some precision. Not yet perfect, but it's the best we got so far.

</comment><comment><USER10> Any know what the theoretical frequency of CPU made of nanotubes would be?

<comment><USER11> The article claims that the transistors were 5x faster than existing transistors. And that is not the top possible performance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If this ever turns into a product, I hope they choose a more efficient design than x64. I'm assuming that ARM would be a good choice.

<comment><USER13> They have they Power series of chips so it would be really weird if they were to choose x86 (even x86_64)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It looks like Warren Buffett's first major investment in a technology company is shaping up nicely.

</comment><comment><USER15> _They have long since shrunk the switches to less than a wavelength of light_

Snort.

<comment><USER16> What? Transistor sizes hit UV wavelengths around 1995, during the Pentium era. That's a reasonable statement to be making to provide context.

<comment><USER17> And there are constructive ways to provide that context, like how you did. "Snort" does not qualify.

<comment><USER18> I think "snort" was a joke so that you wouldn't get angry :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Smalltalk 80 – Blue Book (1983) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/BlueBook/Bluebook.pdf <comment><USER2> I have a copy of this on my bookshelf. I highly recommend reading the portion of the book about the structure of the object memory. An interesting approach that influenced much of what we have today in VMs, with one notable exception.

In Smalltalk there was no filesystem, so the canonical representation of the system was in memory at all times while the system was booted. It dumped and restored this object memory on shutdown and boot. Its structure also allowed for automated refactoring at a semantic level (objects knew who their callers were) which is something no other language I've ever used is capable of.

<comment> man-and-laptop > An interesting approach that influenced much of what we have today in VMs, > with one notable exception.

What's the exception?

<comment><USER3> Maybe the stuff in the endlessvoid94's second paragraph: _Its structure also allowed for automated refactoring at a semantic level (objects knew who their callers were) which is something no other language I 've ever used is capable of._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Any known links to the other books of the series? The green and the red, for instance?

<comment><USER5> You can try archive.org. If no luck I can find my links when I get back to my home computer.

<comment><USER5> Found it. [http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html](http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What's the difference between "Smalltalk-80: The Language and its Implementation" and "Smalltalk-80: The Language"? The latter is more recent (1989 vs 1983) and seems to be a "second edition," but it's shorter (608 vs 714 pages). Did they drop a chapter or something?

<comment><USER7> It's missing the VM implementation description at the end.

<comment><USER8> Specifically, the portion called "The Implementation" is a description of the VM written in Smalltalk itself. This is an attempt to be as complete as McCarthy's Lisp language description and implementation in Lisp.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "<-" as the assignment operator. That's cute.

I have also seen "_" as the assignment operator in some old Squeak code though.

<comment><USER10> In R, <\- is the predominant assignment operator, and until 2003 it supported _ as well, for compatibility with its predecessor, S. Here's a post about it: [https://colinfay.me/r-assignment/](https://colinfay.me/r-assignment/)

Modern ligatures fonts like Fira Code turn the bracket and dash into an actual arrow, which is nice!

<comment><USER11> Nice link!

FWIW, You also see <\- within Haskell's do notation. Apparently F# and OCaml use it in places, too: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assignment_(computer_science)#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assignment_\(computer_science\)#Notation)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Amazing book and admirable work. Need to be shared and read.

</comment><comment><USER13> From the 6th page:

"Copyright © 1983 by Xerox Corporation

All right reserved."

If Xerox had legitimately released this to the public, surely they would have changed the copyright notice.

As far as I can tell, this is simply pirated.

From [http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/](http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/) :

"I started to be fed up to see all the books I like to be out of print, so I started to contact authors and collect their old books. I would like to thanks them all and their publishers as well. If you know an author that is willing to give to the community a book, please give him my email."

I'm not sure that changes anything.

<comment><USER14> I'd rather see it pirated than lost.

<comment><USER13> I'd rather not see Hacker News get in trouble for linking to pirated material.

<comment><USER15> The chances of anyone raising a copyright claim for a 36 year old book relating to obsolete technology are quite low.

<comment><USER16> To me, it's not the chance of somebody getting in trouble that worries me, but rather the blatant disregard and disrespect for intellectual property rights.

<comment><USER15> imho letting more people read this material shows higher respect to it and its creators than letting it be forgotten.

The book is out of print and not available otherwise. No one is making money off this book.

<comment><USER13> Have you talked to your representatives about changing copyright law so that out-of-print books can legally be copied?

<comment><USER17> People can act without representatives too.

Remember Aaron Swartz?

<comment><USER18> It didn't work out too well for him, unfortunately.

<comment><USER17> No, but turned out OK for Rosa Parks...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to cheat almost any Employee Monitoring System - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickidler.com/en/how-to-cheat-time-tracking.html <comment><USER2> Wondering if I can use it as a personal "Where did I spend my time last week?, how much of it was email/documentation/code/browsing etc." I would however quit if any employer wants to watch over my shoulder with this.

<comment><USER3> But if any (or most) companies will implement Employee Monitoring software? Will work as a freelancer?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting information. I could not even think that it was so easy to do.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is illegal in Germany

<comment><AUTHOR> Any proof?

<comment><USER6> Recent ruling about keyloggers which are a feature of kickidler [1] say usage is illegal [2] (Dated 2017-07-27)

[1][https://www.kickidler.com/en/keylogger.html](https://www.kickidler.com/en/keylogger.html)

[2][http://juris.bundesarbeitsgericht.de/cgi- bin/rechtsprechung/...](http://juris.bundesarbeitsgericht.de/cgi- bin/rechtsprechung/document.py?Gericht=bag&Art=pm&nr=19403)

<comment><AUTHOR> 1) Keylogger can be switched off for Germany, 2) Main feature of Kickidler is a video recording for all employees, 3) "unzulässig, wenn kein auf den Arbeitnehmer bezogener, durch konkrete Tatsachen begründeter Verdacht einer Straftat oder einer anderen schwerwiegenden Pflichtverletzung besteht." But concrete facts can exist.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fu-Go Balloon Bomb - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb <comment><USER2> One of the most interesting aspects of this case, IMO, is that USGS geologists figured out that the origin of the balloons was Japan a specific region of the coast that could account for the minerals in the sample of sand. The Army Air Force looked into this area further, and destroyed the hydrogen plants they found there, which helped put an end to the project! [http://web.mst.edu/~rogersda/forensic_geology/Japenese%20ven...](http://web.mst.edu/~rogersda/forensic_geology/Japenese%20vengenance%20bombs%20new.htm)

</comment><comment><USER3> There's an interesting Radiolab episode on this. Highly recommended

[https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/fu- go](https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/fu-go)

</comment><comment><USER4> > On March 10, 1945, one of the last paper balloons descended in the vicinity > of the Manhattan Project's production facility at the Hanford Site. This > balloon caused a short circuit in the power lines supplying electricity for > the nuclear reactor cooling pumps, but backup safety devices restored power > almost immediately.[26]

It would have been quite the win if it had caused a meltdown. That _might_ have delayed the US nuclear attack on Nagasaki. Although perhaps enough plutonium had been produced by then.

As I understand it, Japan didn't surrender until Nagasaki got nuked. And maybe Russia would have invaded before the US managed it.

<comment><USER5> The surrender came after Nagasaki (which is a plausible reason to surrender to the US), but it also came at a time when a Russian invasion was imminent (which is also a good reason to surrender to the US - in Europe, the US army had been much gentler to civilians than the Russian one had).

<comment><USER4> True, surrendering to Russians was a bad idea.

They had quite the grudge over Leningrad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > The Office of Censorship then sent a message to newspapers and radio > stations to ask them to make no mention of balloons and balloon-bomb > incidents. They did not want the enemy to get the idea that the balloons > might be effective weapons or to have the American people start panicking. > Cooperating with the desires of the government, the press did not publish > any balloon bomb incidents.[33] Perhaps as a result, the Japanese only > learned of one bomb's reaching Wyoming, landing and failing to explode.

Find this ironically interesting. The same goes for almost every new cyber attacks out there.

<comment><USER7> > The same goes for almost every new cyber attacks out there.

It does? Back when the press mostly meant a few big companies in your own country it was easier to suppress info. Now for example the US government might be able to ask CNN/Fox/NYT etc but they can't likely ask the BBC or Al Jazeera or the 1000s of news sites, bloggers, tweeters, facebookers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The fires were fought by the all-black 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion [1], acting as on-call firefighters... they "jumped" on many of the fires to get there quickly. I read several personal stories of individual paratroopers, and their courage was impressive!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555th_Parachute_Infantry_Batta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555th_Parachute_Infantry_Battalion_\(United_States\))

</comment><comment><USER9> Coincidence that "fugga" in hindi and "fuggo" in gujarati mean balloon?

<comment><USER9> Apologies. It's actually "fuga" and "fugo", no hard "g"</comment></comment>


Jordan Peterson's year of 'absolute hell' - <AUTHOR> https://nationalpost.com/news/jordan-petersons-year-of-absolute-hell-professor-forced-to-retreat-from-public-life-because-of-tranquilizer-addiction <comment><USER2> Lordy, even with my sweet tooth I can't stomach the amount of sugar they are lathering on Peterson in this article. He is hardly an "intellectual hero" or one of the "most famous authors in the world". He is famous (or infamous) because of political ideology rather than the substance of his arguments. He is the kid who loved playing devil's advocate, but never understood the role.

Edit: Having said this - addiction and mental illness is sad in any case. While I hope never to hear from him again in the public sphere, I wish Jordan a quick recovery.

<comment><USER3> Isn't much of the worst things that happened due to his personal ideology?

<comment><USER2> Addiction and mental illness can hit anyone, no matter their political ideology and bad luck, such as his wife's cancer diagnosis, doesn't descriminate.

<comment><USER3> I agree.

However his addiction was caused by his insomnia which in turn was caused by his all meat diet.

His going to Russia to use a nonstandard treatment for his addiction rather then an evidence based treatment was also something that was not pure happenstance.

<comment><USER4> You have it backwards. His all meat and greens diet resolved his autoimmune disorder and thus _cured_ his insomnia. This has nothing to do with why he was prescribed clonazepam.

Changing your diet to avoid insomnia and crippling pain is not something that reasonable people could call idealogical motivation.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The world's first cocaine bar - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/19/bolivia-cocaine-bar-route-36 <comment><USER2> Putting coca leaves in your mouth before you start your work day is typical in many parts of South America. It's like drinking your cup of coffee.

However... drying and powdering it, cutting it with a handful of chemicals, and illegally distributing it is what gives it a bad name. Same goes for those pushing for more and more potent strands of marijuana. Many people think that "faster", "stronger" and "more" is always an improvement.

<comment><USER3> It's possible that the existance of "more potent strands of marijuana" is intentional scaremongering propaganda:

<http://www.badscience.net/2007/03/reefer-badness/>

 _"And in fact, what's most amazing is that this scare isn't new. In the US, in the mid 1980s, during Reagan's "war on drugs", it was claimed that cannabis was 14 times stronger than in 1970, which rather sets you thinking. If it was 14 times stronger in 1986 than in 1970, and it's 25 times stronger today than the beginning of the 1990s, does that mean it is now, in fact, 350 times stronger than 1970?

That's not even a crystal in a plant pot. That's impossible. That would require more THC to be present in the plant than the total volume of space taken up by the plant itself"_

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you've never seen how cocaine powder is made, watch this video:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_bZZt1zs60>

I saw it a while back, and it provides a pretty unique insight into the source of all that cocaine. Did you know that gasoline is used as a solvent to precipitate the actual cocaine salts out of the leaves?

</comment><comment><USER5> There used to be one down the street from my apartment, and there is a magazine article about it:

[http://www.viceland.com/int/v15n1/htdocs/kokies.php?country=...](http://www.viceland.com/int/v15n1/htdocs/kokies.php?country=us)

The first? Or is that just its name? Could work. I know a chinese place named The New Good One.

</comment><comment><USER6> Ok that was an interesting article but why is it on hacker news?

<comment><AUTHOR> because it's about a business trend =)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Having watched a dear friend lose all his social capital, put his entire savings up his nose and nearly burn us both to death in a house fire, I can safely say that I'm disgusted.

However, from a third world entrepreneurial standpoint, I can see how this is a great business opportunity(?) / disaster waiting to happen. Quick, someone make an iPhone app.

<comment><USER8> If cocaine wasn't illegal and costs $2 a day, would any of that happened? Was it the cocaine or the society at large that caused those consequences.

<comment><USER9> That's what cocaine costs in Brazil and Argentina. $2 a line.

I've read that in Australia there are heroine addicts on whom everyone has given up hope of rehab who have normal, janitorial jobs to pay for their habits. They get the horse from government sanctioned farmacies at low cost.</comment></comment></comment>