Technology Is Taking Jobs Away, But Here's How It Might Give Them Back - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/national/2011/05/27/yes-technology-is-taking-jobs-away-but-heres-how-it-might-give-them-back/

<comment><USER3> His definition for "ephemeralization" is "doing more with less", which is strange since my academic background in economics teaches me the word for this is nothing more than "efficiency".

So many of his claims supporting his "net destroyer of jobs argument" contain no real analysis are amount to fallacies exposed by the history of economic progress. At almost any point in history you could make an almost identical argument about something else where efficiency improvements reduce the number of jobs in one particular industry. People used to also worry that more women getting into the work force would reduce the jobs "available for men". Classic "lump of labor fallacy": <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy>

Even all this aside, and sweeping away any historical parallels (one of which he mentions - Ford) where the ultimate conclusion flatly contradicts his pessimism, there's a healthy dose of "make work bias" implicit in the entire article. It's still puzzling to me why people focus so much on work as being something desirable to per-sue in it's own right. Work is the _price we have to pay for consumption_ : [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter:...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter:_Why_Democracies_Choose_Bad_Policies#Make- work_bias)

This statement alone completely blows away his credibility to speak on economics: "And for all its vaunted technological prowess, the United States hasn't outpaced the rest of the world in GDP growth". It's well understood in growth economics that we wouldn't expect advanced economics such as the United States to outpace growth of 3rd world countries playing "catch up". He could do the same analysis against modern, industrialized countries instead and come to a very different conclusion. Even if this statement was accurate, it's a complete non-sequitur in support of his overall claim.

It's funny that the second part of his article back-tracks from his original claims and contains far more sense than the first part. "Ephemeralization [READ: efficiency] itself might eventually give rise to new types of jobs." That's exactly right, and has been true for centuries without fail.

Finally, it's embarrassing that he chooses to quote Tyler Cowen, a respectable economist who would would surely call out this article more forcefully than I.

</comment><comment><USER4> The problem as I see it (and I've probably said this before) is that not all jobs are equal... or rather that not all people are equal. Increasing technology doesn't take away jobs, it increases the amount of wealth you can create with the same amount of labour, at least up to a certain point. But it also makes the jobs that do exist harder (intellectually speaking), because as the jobs switch from "assembly line worker" to "guy who supervises the robots that work on the assembly line" the brainpower needed to do the job increases.

Roughly half the population has two-digit IQs, half the population has three- digit IQs. Two thousand years ago, 90% of all jobs were in the fields and could easily be done with a two-digit IQ. A hundred years ago, jobs had started to shift to the cities, but probably still 75% of 'em could be done with a two-digit IQ. Nowadays I'm worried that we're reaching the point where 60% of the jobs which actually and economically exist require a three-digit IQ to be done properly, and that this will only continue to increase as the easy jobs get automated away. What, then, do we do with the world's stupid people?

<comment><USER5> Mine them for data after making them share as much about their life as possible.

More seriously, those three-digit IQ jobs will turn to two-digit IQ jobs as technology makes them easier. There's a predictable cycle for technological progress, until a certain point at least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The same "ephemeralization" has also created thousands of jobs for people that produce those devices and people that build applications for them.

</comment><comment><USER7> technology doesn't take jobs away. humans can repurpose, roombas can't.

<comment><USER8> Technology must take jobs away.

Invent something, do something, so you never have to do it again, or any one else. Enjoy life. Meet people, talk about ideas and new inventions, if you like programming all day, do it. If you like singing and dancing all day do it. If you like making movies, giving healthcare to people do it. Unconstrained by employment.

<comment><USER9> Agreed; the (possibly impossible) goal of any sensible government should be full unemployment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You know what else takes jobs away? Free. Free apps. Free website. Free TV shows. Free movies. Free music. Free video games. The customers start to be conditioned to the word 'free', and slowly refuses to pay for anything in those categories. The cumulative market shrinks as result, leading to more companies shutting down and more layoffs.

Oh, but there's advertising, one say. And there's the unlimited amount of venture capital funding these 'free' companies. Well, if we keep losing jobs in valuable sectors because we keep giving things away for free, how will people pay for products that will sustain advertising budgets in those companies? Will we just keep selling advertising to each other? And at a certain point in the economy, consumer is more conscious about price than brand (like now), in which case advertising will start to falter.

So the next time you give away products for free, you should think about whether or not it'll cause you to lose your company/job in the future.

<comment><USER3> Yet another absolutely classic example of both the "lump of labor fallacy" and "make work bias".

When are we going to starting teaching more Economics and less Literature in high school?

<comment><USER10> That's true. We should also teach how to present a valid, explanatory counterargument instead of thoughtless one liner.

<comment><USER3> Wow, you should be embarrassed. Read the rest of the comments and see my real reply to the original article - posted 10 minutes before yours.

It's also hilarious that this comment commits the very fallacy you seek to expose!

<comment><USER10> Your reply was regarding efficiency. My reply has to do with free. Let me put it in an example. Electric cars are more efficient than gas vehicles. So consumers switch to electric cars. Those workers whose jobs were rendered useless transitioned into higher knowledge jobs in the electric cars industry. There might be more jobs in the new industry. And customers will likely pay the same amount for the new electric cars (IMPORTANT: demand, the willingness to pay for said utility, still exists). So net loss is neglible. As for the oil/gas industry, the consumer pays for less oil/gas for their cars, so the oil/gas industry switches market to focus on other utilities for their oil/gas.

On the other hand, if the electric cars were free !? People would not have to buy cars ever anymore. Therefore an existing market was destroyed.

But I don't have to explain this to you, you spent lots of money on your economic classes!

<comment><USER3> I'm not even sure where to begin on your confusion here.

1\. Firstly, efficiency concerns the ability to more with less. Zero is less, and there's no reason why zero is substantively different than paying $0.01 per car - it's on a continuity that affords the same analysis. So saying you reply "has to do with free" speaks absolutely nothing about my initial arguments focused on efficiency.

2\. Money is a veil. Like the discredited mercantilist beliefs century ago, you're confusing output with money. What matters for prosperity is the quantity of goods and services being produced in an economy. You may not realize it, but your argument is essentially granting authority of money over output in estimating prosperity. Output - the actual goods and services produced in an economy - is what matters (and the consumption we enjoy therefrom), not whatever dollar value we assign to them. This by the way is an extremely common confusion among non-economists, so don't feel bad about misunderstanding it.

3\. Since you seem so fixated on this concept of "free" sidestepping my arguments, let me take your analogy and present another similar one. Imagine that it's the year 1910 and the price for buggy whips is $25, with a thriving industry producing them. It's already clear that I'm claiming efficiency improvements resulting in a price reduction is a _good thing_. Now let's introduce your concern: buggy whips are free! "Therefore an existing market was destroyed." Yes, this market would be destroyed. And in fact it was - buggy whips were free in the sense that cars displacing buggies simply did not require them. There is no economic difference here. Yet no one _with the knowledge of hindsight today_ wouldn't even think about arguing that the production of value which is essentially "free" in that case is something "bad", and it's not clear whatsoever that there is some net decline in jobs (in fact all evidence points to this being precisely the opposite - <USER2> upon by your point "There might be more jobs in the new industry").

4\. Speaking of net decline in jobs, I'm disputing this being necessarily a problem at all. To say otherwise is to ignore trade-offs and categorically value one thing over another as a society. Jobs are another thing people routinely confuse with prosperity, and they also tend to believe that they are somehow assets instead of transactions. It's like saying "buying a car" is an asset, instead of the car itself. With labor, the software we produce is the asset, not our job that allows such production to take place via a quid-pro- quo. If I could purchase everything I wanted to live by for $1, I'd only work one hour the entire year doing some freelance, and not have a job. Is "not having a job" bad in that sense? Not really - but the point is it depends on _the amount of consumption I'm able to enjoy_ , and the job is just a transaction that effectively grants me consumption purchasing power. It's the seen vs. the unseen that makes thinking about these issues (and really most things in economics) very difficult.

5\. You made an important point about willingness to pay, but drew the wrong lesson from it. You seem to think that having a high willingness to pay and a low price ($0 in your example) is a bad thing, but this is precisely the opposite of the truth. In fact this is the very definition of "Consumer Surplus", the net increase of which is a good thing. See my point (1) concerning actual output/consumption being what matters.

6\. Really this all boils down to your closing argument, "Therefore an existing market was destroyed", and focusing on some costs and benefits while completely ignoring others. Whether or not destruction of any particular industry is good or bad is not relevant unless you fully account for all costs/benefits. Actual accounting for this empirically is difficult, but axiomatic economics shows that advances in efficiency and producing more with less _is precisely the way growth occurs_ \- a _net_ benefit.

To fully explore all the issues here would require much longer. Hence is the simple fact that making nonsense claims takes one paragraph and carefully explaining the often non-intuitive economists implicit in such claims takes 10x as long. Sounds like some debate asymmetry if there ever was any.

<comment><USER11> 2\. If money doesn't matter, can I have all of yours, because I've found I don't have enough recently.

3\. No, buggy whips were never free. People stopped wanting them. The problem now is that the things in highest demand, and which people want more of, and the same things which are free.

<comment><USER3> 2\. I claimed "money is a veil", not "money doesn't matter". People focus too much on money when discussing macroeconomics and the effects of complex changes in the economy, and not on the true measure of prosperity. As a simple example, if the Fed started printing even more obscene amounts of money than it does not, our GDP next might be twice what it is in 2011. Wow, 100% growth! What an easy way to prosperity!

3\. In the economic analysis I made, I've pointed out that the _effects_ that he is so worried about are identical, in much the same way that the effect of increasing trade patterns and specialization is very similar to the effect of increasing technological efficiency. Sure people stopped wanting them instead of them literally being free, but that doesn't change the analysis regarding the effects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Its good technology is taking away jobs, if it is not, that means we are all doing something really really wrong.

Who in their right minds would like to do things just to do more things? People always come up with new things so they can stop doing what they are doing. Lazy programmers are the best, the ones that dont want to do things when a computer can do it for them.

People should stop working. We have enough technology to feed everyone on the planet, and maintain and develop our current rate of progress, even without aiming for full employment. We have to strive for lesser work days. Why is 8 hours acceptable? We are designed to work only 2 hours per day, maximum. That is why we invent.

<comment><USER12> Not only do we need to reduce working hours, we need to provide a basic income guarantee (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee>). This is what the promise of technological progress is about, and is one of the tenets of Marxian communism. Ironically, the basic income guarantee is also something that is advocated by many liberal and libertarian economists.

These two factors are IMO key to further accelerating the rate of technological innovation. They enable anyone who is interested in science and technology to freely pursue these interests, whereas today many people are driven away from science by huge disincentives (massive student loans and poor career prospects).</comment></comment>


How to balance health issues with being a founder? - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/NQQUu1HU Sorry for the paste-bin, but I crossed the 2000 char limit and was struggling to edit this down.<p>I did not posted on my personal blog because I don't want to potential employers or new co-founders to know how in bad shape my health is. <comment><USER3> If you're capable of being CTO at a mobile games company but have glasses which are an appreciable portion of your net worth, you are not being paid the global market wage for your skill set. Consider quitting and hanging out your shingle as an independent iOS/etc developer. Market rates are $100+ per hour even remotely. You being not exactly a paragon of physical fitness will not be a barrier to getting deals -- there exist many people in the industry who are not. (I disagree that the startup will necessarily fail without your contributions. That being said, if a company can't succeed without the CTO slow-motion killing himself, the company has failed a core test of viability and should be garbage collected before it consumes even more scarce resources in the vain pursuit of a future.)

After you have the money situation managed for the immediate future, I'd concentrate on getting the health situation stabilized. Resist the temptation to overwork -- that makes you sick and sickness doesn't improve your productivity. All the people telling you "eat right and exercise" are actually _not_ blowing smoke about this.

I'd also attempt to cultivate a mindset which is less "I have a bunch of interlocking problems which are a tremendous burden and none can be fixed without fixing the others" and more "Today is Thursday. I will use Thursday to get three things done which I did not have on Wednesday but which will make Friday a bit better." Then you repeat that for as many days as it takes.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not much sure how to do that.

First there is the issue that iOS pay much more, but I don't own a OSX machine, or a iOS device.

And last time I tried I only ended into those freelancing sites where some people from India are offering to do Android and Lua work for 5USD/hour :/ I don't know where I can seek more serious work in that field, neither how to prove I can do it (no github, lots of past jobs was on secret and proprietary stuff).

<comment><USER3> There exist longer answers for building a successful consultancy, but in the short term, you just identify companies which do Android/Lua work, identify people who probably have hiring authority at them, and say "I notice that you do Android games. As it happens, so do I, and I am looking for work. Do you have 15 minutes free next Monday to talk about this?"

Websites are not where contract work exists any more than they are where source code exists. The wee little sample of both those fields which show up on the public Internet are a) tiny and b) disproportionately crappy. It is against the interest of engineers for us to think these are the totality of the market just because interacting with them is easy and doesn't require getting outside our comfort zones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Drop the mobile games startup, it's not going anywhere. People will still play games a year from now.

Find yourself a job. Get a gym membership. Change your diet. Get the medicine you need. Get glasses. Pay off your debt.

Once you're situated, come back to your startup, and you'll find yourself 100% more effective.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am in the startup because of the debt... where I live jobs that I could find don't pay enough to pay the debt.

stupid, stupid, stupid decision to take that debt to do university, I should have started to work without a degree, I would be much, much better now...

<comment><USER5> > where I live

That's something that you may need to consider changing if the job situation is really that drastic.

You have nothing without your health.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Also I am have insane trouble controlling my weight, I am yet to find a safe place to exercise for free (I don't have money to pay a gym), and even with a carefully controlled diet my weight swings around madly (I managed to get 2kg lighter in 4 days, and then 4kg heavier in 2 days for example...) "

I've good news about that. The +/\- 4kg oscillations are just water, but you can fix the weight problem even without exercising much, just eat at a caloric deficit and you'll lose weight and the overall health may improve considerably just because of this.

EDIT: you may get much fitter just doing bodyweight exercises at home if you wish, and for this a great resource is this: [http://www.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/comments/25kxq1/ju...](http://www.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/comments/25kxq1/just_get_started_guide/)

Also google for "reddit fitness". However the bottom line is that you lose weight in the kitchen mostly, by eating at a deficit.

<comment> at-fates-hands >>> just eat at a caloric deficit and you'll lose weight and the overall health may improve considerably.

This is completely true.

I was a D1 athlete through college. Once I graduated and stopped playing, my weight went through the roof. I went from 160lbs to almost 190lbs. I started having back problems and my doctor said I already had some arthritis in my back from both hockey and soccer. I was having a lot of back pain in the morning and during the day.

The doctor told straight up to lose some weight and change my diet. He said taking the additional weight off well help my back a lot; even a few pounds will make a huge difference.

I changed my diet, started doing yoga and stretching before and after my hockey games. Within a few weeks I could tell a huge difference, even though it took me a few more months to get back to around 170. The loss of the weight and stretching made a HUGE difference.

<comment><USER7> If he's legit hypothyroid he's probably not even eating that much. Dropping calories under, say, 2500 will just make the problem worse.

<comment><USER8> Even a thyroid condition will not make you gain weight out of nowhere.

<comment><USER9> A thyroid condition can make the difference between "stable weight at this level of calories" and "weight gain at this level of calories".

Sorting out the thyroid problems will make eating sensibly and getting exercise much easier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> May not be the advice you want to hear, but... you sound like you're in a country with a pretty terrible healthcare system (US? India? Ah, Brazil according to your bio on your site). The first thing I'd do in your position is move to a country with a proper public health care system - probably the UK.

Do it via finding a job or any other method, but somehow do it. The startup itself doesn't matter. You write "I have a great responsability" \- yes, you do, you have a great responsibility to yourself to take care of your health. In terms of order of magnitude, the responsibility to the startup is a 1000x less. Fuck the startup, health comes first. And if fixing your health requires moving to a different country and canning the startup, do it.

Thats perhaps the most important thing you should take away from this: your priorities are all screwed up. Health first, startup a very distant second.

<comment><USER11> Hormone treatment for hypothyroidism is provided free by the NHS in the UK [1]. I'm not sure about the conditions that migrants to the UK have to satisfy to qualify for non-emergency treatment though.

(I am not a doctor, the following does no constitute medical advice, etc)

Hypothyroidism is a life-long condition, so you need to get your medication sorted out asap. Someone close to me has this condition, so I know from their experience that determining the right dose can be difficult, even with the help of blood tests and a doctor / endocrinologist. Be cautious about trying to do this yourself, although I appreciate you may have little choice.

Finally, T4 is not usually prescribed in the UK because it has limited effect. Nevertheless some people claim it helps them in combination and they often obtain it privately from Mexico. The same may be true for synthetic T3, which is the conventional treatment. If you do this then be _extremely careful_.

Good luck.

[1] [http://www.thyroiduk.org.uk/tuk/NHS_Information/prescription...](http://www.thyroiduk.org.uk/tuk/NHS_Information/prescription- info.html)

<comment><USER12> Entitlement to UK public healthcare is, essentially, that you are a current lawful resident. If you got a work visa (and are working - you can't be in breach of visa conditions) and moved here you'd be entitled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The thing to remember about fitting exercise into a demanding schedule is that exercise is a net energy/productivity boost.

You sacrifice some time to exercise, but gain energy and you will feel better and be better able to attack the rest of the things you need to do. You might even wind up with more free time than you began with.[1]

___________

[1] We all know we'll just use it to pack more work into the day. But _theoretically_ you could gain time.

<comment><USER9> Yes! And some people find that they use the time that they're exercising to think differently about challenges they are facing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was diagnosed with Hashimoto's thyroiditis last year, and I can tell you that you won't get your weight issues sorted out until you have the proper treatment.

I am a college athlete who consistently exercises at a high level, and I ballooned uncontrollably last summer. I started using a strict diet, but that wasn't nearly enough. I'm on the right medication now, and the "mental fog" and dreariness, which I couldn't even tell I was going through at the time, is gone.

Right now this is your most important problem, and you should take every necessary step to fix it. I can personally tell you that everything you're going through is closely related to your hypothyroidism. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER15> I've been there, I spent years watching my health fail while I put my work, my startup(which eventually I left anyway) and finances ahead of taking care of myself.

The ultimate result: my life fell apart for about 8 months while I suffered through the culmination of the condition that caused my poor health. I couldn't work anymore, function like a normal human or take care of myself, basically I ended up housebound and bedridden. At that time I thought life was over for me, but, my family and friends rallied, took care of me, and helped me get through it. Now I am re-building my life. Instead of feeling bad that I "lost" so much time due to poor health, I feel that I have a new opportunity to live a different, better life.

After YEARS of saying, I'll deal with my health when I "fill in the blank", my body finally forced me to deal with it. I feel stupid for needing such a terrible thing to teach me a lesson, but now I can proceed in life a bit wiser and more ready to succeed.

Get healthy, you are not doing yourself, or ANYONE in your life service by "half living" while you struggle to find time to "deal with it". I don't know your particular situation, and it might be terribly difficult for you to take the time to heal, but you either deal with it now, or when things take a more serious turn, when it may be too late.

Hope you find the balance you need to get good an Healthy!

</comment><comment><USER16> Can't speak to your specific health issues, but moving to the mountains and getting a German Shepherd worked wonders for me in lowering stress, improving health and fitness, increasing my creative output and minimizing financial worries.

Living in the country is good for the mind, body, soul, and budget. Having a big dog that's with you all day long will improve your mood and motivate you to exercise (because you won't get a damn thing done with an energetic critter that needs attention). And while you're out walking, running or hiking with your new best friend (sans mobile device), you'll stimulate your creative faculties and solve problems you've been "stuck" on in your head.

Internet in Montana is nearly as good as any major city I've ever lived. Sometimes better. What else do you need in order to be productive?

</comment><comment><USER17> Nothing but excuse after excuse. You have 30 minutes a day to exercise. You have the option to buy healthy foods no matter how much you do or do not make. My dad had his thyroid removed after cancer and runs his own business and he found a balance. You have an unhealthy attitude that is realizing itself as an unhealthy life. If you prioritize your business over everything else you are actively making the decision to be unhealthy. Running is free. Basketball at the park is free. Doing a YouTube HIIT is free. Buy groceries and make fresh food. It costs the same or less than fast food. Dont drink soda. etc.

</comment><comment><USER18> Fix the glasses issue first or you'll ruin your eyes and you want to avoid that. Then do the dentist. Ask your parents or ask friends for help and explain your situation.

Fix small steps at a time, ask for help and do it now.

</comment><comment><USER19> The "ladder method" is a simple system designed to take no longer than 15 minutes each day no matter your current level of endurance/health/etc: [https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/exercise.html](https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/exercise.html)

There's a startup I just saw that looks interesting. It's all about simple exercises you can do on your own to stay healthy: [http://hackerbody.com/](http://hackerbody.com/)

</comment><comment><USER20> There is no balancing health with X, everything else balances on health.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is a rather long quote, but it's relevant:

>Finally, many important things are notable for their absence from the cost- density table. Even in the twenty-first century, we still can't buy true love, respect, or fulfillment.

>We can't even buy decent replacements for biological adaptations that go wrong—artificial eyes, brains, hands, or wombs. Our bodily organs are the most value-dense items that we can call our own. They are beyond price, but we take them for granted until we lose them through accident or age.

>Our inherited legacy of adaptations is literally precious. Even the poorest parents give their children vast riches, in the form of senses, emotions, and mental faculties that have been optimized through millions of years of product development. They are so reliable, efficient, intricate, self-growing, and self-repairing that no technology comes anywhere close to matching them. The human genome is the ancestral vault of riches, the secret Swiss account. It is very important for consumerist capitalism to make us forget this, to take for granted what we owe to life itself. Beyond our true necessities and luxuries—our biological adaptations—we get only a little added value from market-traded products.

— Geoffrey Miller (from _Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior_ )

In other words, your health is worth much more than your startup's expected value. Drop everything else and fix it.

Also, you mention that you need new glasses. If you drive, you are endangering others.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is not medical advice: I have no qualifications nor registrations.

Hypothyroidism is full of some really fucking harmful quackery on the Internet. Please avoid those bad websites. You're right that it needs careful monitoring to get the dose right.

A general supplement of vitamins A,C, and D is probably not harmful. (Do not overdose on vitamins. They can be toxic and can kill.)

And now some other stuff:

Work towards getting better food and some exercise into your life. Set small, realistic, achievable goals. Give yourself credit when you meet those. Fresh fruit and veg are not too expensive and will make a difference. Good food will help you feel better. Exercise will help to reduce stress.

Investigate some course of CBT. This can be done by yourself from a book; or online; or you can get some guided course. In the UK it's available free (you ask your GP and say words like "CBT" and "IAPT" and "Primary care mental health services" until you get it; or you can sometimes self refer.) In other countries you'll want to find out who registers therapists and then search for a therapist with that registration.

It is surprising how much difference a short course and hard work can make - <USER2> weeks at 1 hour per week can really help a lot of people.

<comment><AUTHOR> Frankly, I am finding the doctors to be the quakers.

"the internet" helped me there loads more than any medic, this became painfully clear when I started to bother to read official documents that medics should have been reading, for example I saw on internet a study that was about specifically my case, all doctors I went refused to trust the study and said they only trusted the association and the lab numbers... I asked the lab their source, they pointed me a association-made document, I read the document, and behold, the official association document that the lab and doctors claim to follow, cite the study I was citing, and for precisely the same reasons...

I could only conclude that doctors are lazy, and like to take whatever number someone (their teacher, lab, whatever) spoon fed them, instead of reading the source of that number (including the endocrine association guidelines... seriously, I went to 8 or 9 different doctors in the last 12 years, some of them absurdly expensive, and not a single one read the guidelines, despite all of them claiming to follow them!)

What is CBT and IAPT? Google keep throwing me stuff on my own language, despite me using english as default (for example for Google CBT is the brazillian tennis confederation).

<comment><USER22> How certain are you that you understand those documents better than medical professionals?

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem is not of conflicting interpretations, it is of medics claiming that I am saying bullshit, and that the correct thing is the document, when I am quoting said document... So either the medic is a liar (unlikely) or he never read the document.

<comment><USER22> There are most certainly conflicting interpretations: your interpretation of the document and the medical professional's interpretation of the document. It's just like how if both you and, say, a journalist or a firefighter read the same piece of code; you would have two wildly different interpretations.

Look, while I can't claim to know your situation, 9 times out of 10 it is a very bad idea to do self-diagnosis over the internet vs. taking professional advice. Even if you have a pretty good idea of what might be ailing you, there are subtle nuances to all kinds of diseases and conditions that doctors tend to understand. If you've already got second (maybe even third) opinions already, and you've come to the conclusion that none of the doctors in your area know what they're talking about, you should probably move. I don't see what other options you have here, particularly if you require prescribed medications. You might even be able to find other employment that way.

As for the startup, yes, it's unfortunate that it will tank without you, but the way you've described it, you're literally killing yourself slowly. It will end the same way regardless. You are doing NOBODY a favor by continuing on, least of all yourself.

PS Exactly how expensive are your Vitamin D supplements? They're ridiculously cheap in the US, maybe $15 for 90 capsules. International shipping might still come out cheaper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Sometimes the wheels fall off and you have to pause and figure out what to do about it. You're doing that, so you've taken step 1. Step 2 is to aggressively take charge. As JohnBooty noted, exercise is a boost and will actually increase your productivity so you need to view it as such.

You probably don't even realize how bad your diet really is. Become passionate about nutrition - make it something that you're better at than anyone else. What you eat is more important than alcohol, smoking and many other things.

If you've fallen into the trap of taking fist-fulls of vitamins, stop doing that. Get what you need through good nutrition.

Eat on regular schedules - especially breakfast which will help regulate your sleep schedule.

Since you're overweight, buy a cheap bicycle and use that as exercise. You'll find it's low impact therefore low injury risk but high reward in terms of calories burnt and cardio. Also most adults forget how much fun the simple act of riding a bicycle is.

STOP eating all sugar now. No soda, no cakes, no sweets and become aware of the things you eat that contain sugar that you don't even realize, like bread with added sugar. Don't bullshit yourself. Stop sugar.

There are people in much worse shape than you are that are powering through. A friend is in his early 20's and dove into a shallow river where he fractured his C4 vertebrae and is now wheelchair bound hoping that through working his ass off at therapy he can regain at least the use of his hands to become productive. From what I've gathered you have working arms, legs, hands, feet, brain. You have all the opportunity and power in the world. It's going to require hard work, restraint and discipline. Take charge and kick some ass. Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER24> I was recently (am?) in a similar situation. It took 4 hospitalizations before I let go of the startup, and asked my family for help getting back on my feet. I'm on the upswing now, recovered while working less demanding jobs, and after 6 months started another company.

If I learned anything, it's that my priorities had gotten pretty twisted- and that there will always be another startup.

This time, I'm keeping reasonable hours, and doing whatever I can to stay on top of my health. If I can't afford something important to my care, I'll contract on the side to pay for it. The current struggle is that it's "so hard" to exercise as a founder- but that's just a lie we tell ourselves. It doesn't take any more space than you already take up to keep fit. Due to the details of my medical stuff, I can't run anymore, but I can still walk, and do situps, pushups, and wall sits. If you're okay with looking ridiculous, you'll be surprised at how many places you can find to get a couple exercises in.

</comment><comment><USER25> Sorry to hear about your situation - what everyone said: focus on your health first, everything else should come second.

Also, please don't take random advice about diet fads from an internet forum. Many of the health problems you describe, including the weight gain can in fact be caused by the hypothyroidism and you won't fix it by trying random diets or even by various gym regimes (although regular exercise and eating healthily probably doesn't hurt of course).

As someone whose (almost) all family members have thyroid disfunctions, I know it is a problematic disease, but entirely treatable/managable in 2014 in most cases.

I don't know where you happen to be in, but both in my original country (Romania) and my current country (western EU) it has cheap or entirely covered treatments.

In summary, one way to go is via medication: try to find the right mix of medicine, and monitor the thyroid indicators regularly - this is a hit-and- miss approach because the thyroid function has a "lag" \- you change the dosage when you feel it necessary, but then it is usually too late as it swings from hypo to hyper or vice versa. In practice it is almost impossible to find the right dosage on long term and you keep swinging from hypo (brainfog, weight-gain, etc) to hyper (weight-loss, random heartbeat, sweating, etc) and back. Especially the hyper condition is harmful on long term, and some of the medication is also harmful.

Which brings me to the other approach preferred in some countries and in many cases: removal (partial or full) of the gland and/or radioactive iodine applied to it. After this, you need to take pills, but generally the situation is much more managable and the outlook better.

I just wrote this up based on what I know from family members, but please do your own research, get proper treatment and a predictable income (as others suggested, ideally in form of a salary in a country with good healthcare). Take care!

<comment><USER25> Adding as a reply as I couldn't modify it: obvious disclaimer - don't take medical advice from the internet, but try to visit a specialist doctor. The above two ways to go were the choice some of my family members had to make. Also don't experiment with medication on your own, but follow the prescriptions - however, the doctors will also modify the dosage mostly based on how you say you feel and the indicators from blood.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> "The first wealth is health"

I urge you to rethink your priorities. Very little things come before health in this world.

</comment><comment><USER27> Exercising is not gonna help you lose weight long-term, you have to change your diet. I would recommend reading up on ketogenic diets.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/keto](http://www.reddit.com/r/keto)

[http://eatingacademy.com/](http://eatingacademy.com/)

[http://www.artandscienceoflowcarb.com/low-carb- diets/](http://www.artandscienceoflowcarb.com/low-carb-diets/)

</comment><comment><USER28> Your health should always be your number one priority. You can always do another start up. You can always earn more money. What you can't do is get back your time and your health back.

It is a very difficult thing to do but you need to look at yourself and honestly answer this question: If I don't put my health in the number one spot where will I be in a year? 2 years? 5 years? 10 years?

If this were a technical problem with your game you would search for a solution. Do the same for your health!

You did not say where you live other than it is winter so the southern hemisphere. I am going to guess an Asian or South American country from your comments about restricted health care and lack of safe place to exercise. Please correct if I am wrong.

You need to get this shit sorted though. Even if that means ditching your start up and getting a regular job. You said you had a higher paying job before your degree? Can you go back to that job or similar? Do you get any kind of private healthcare with such a job?

I know you are in a financially difficult position but every penny you put into anything but your health is almost certainly a penny wrongly spent at the moment. Yes you might get lucky and hit gold and have all the money you need to get better but you can't bet your health on a hail Mary like that. You said you are young? If so you have a lot of life left (if you sort your health out) to do a start-up. Maybe now is not the right time. A start up is killer even for someone in excellent health so doing one in poor health is almost a guarantee for disaster.

If I were in your position I would do the following

* Research everything you can about your specific thyroid problem. Get as much information as you can about it from your doctor and search the hell out of it. Treat it like a bug and research, research, research!

* Use your research to find the right drugs and then look at how to source them. There is loads of solid, medical advice on free resources online such as the NHS websites which you should be able to access without any problem. Getting the medicine may be the hardest part but thyroid medication should not be all that hard to get as it is not a controlled substance as far as I am aware (I could be wrong where you live obviously).

* Get your diet sorted. Have a consistent meal and exercise plan. Weight loss is more about diet than exercise so eat right. You said you can lose weight but put it back on quickly. That is normal! A solid, prolonged change to your diet will keep the weight coming off and staying off. I know the thyroid problem makes this harder but it has to be done.

* Find somewhere you can exercise. There will be somewhere unless you really do live in an awful place.

* Look online for cheap glasses or contact lenses. You can get very cheap glasses these days.

* How much will a dentist cost? Look at your finances and work out how long it will take you to safe for the treatment.

* Have you got family or friends who can help you? Maybe you could live with friends to reduce rent costs? Do some simple work freelance?

I hope that helps a bit. I really can't stress just how much your health is the most important thing though. Excuse my language but fuck your start up if you are not healthy. There is nothing to gain from having a successful start- up if you are in poor health and cannot enjoy the success. You need to have a seriously look at your priorities and if a start-up is the right thing for you right now.

</comment><comment> Prime-997 Check out the book "It Starts With Food".

I know the description sounds a bit too good to be true, but it really will start you on the road to learning how the foods you're eating are likely causing, or at the very least exacerbating your various ailments, lack of energy, and weight problems, and how you can see astonishing improvement in just a few weeks by making better informed food choices.

BTW - I have no affiliation, just personal experience.

</comment><comment><USER29> There is no secret. You just need to eat better or less, get the correct amount of sleep and exercise! Even if it's only walking- My parents have struggled with weight for years and it took me a long time to convince them to start going for walks. 5 years later, they both have lost significant weight and my mom in particular has recovered from a weight related illness.

</comment><comment><USER30> Nothing ever stops in big picture, no matter who gets hit by a bus. But there is no point in suffering. You should try to raise VC money or get into an incubator. If you cant then quit or put this startup on hold. .Find a salary paying job, get your health back on track before it worsens further. Resume your startup when you feel better.

</comment><comment><USER31> Perhaps a little too much on the advice side for weight loss, but I suggest giving a ketogenic approach a shot.

I helped me drop quite a bit of weight, and after the initial hump of getting used to it didn't take too much effort to stay on track. Theres a lot of bad info about it, and it still breaks down to calories in vs calories out, but replacing the carbs in your meals with fat made me feel full/satisfied so much longer.

The keto subreddit is very good, and quite encouraging to read.

Also, a huge bonus that I never knew about, carbs make your body feel warmer, cutting out sugars and dropping some weight makes sleep in the summer months so much easier and more comfortable. That in itself can make a huge quality of life difference.

</comment><comment><USER32> Commute by bike. Even when I'm tired, have too much to do, it's the way I get to work, so I do it.

Best, cheapest, most reliable form of daily exercise, imo.</comment>


Amazon WS Crypto Sigs v2 Broken (Even Amazon Can't Get Crypto Right) - <AUTHOR> http://rdist.root.org/2009/05/20/amazon-web-services-signature-vulnerability/

<comment><USER2> There's nothing wrong with AWS's signature version 2. Nate is a smart guy, so I can only assume that he's being disingenuous rather than dumb; he should know perfectly well that the purpose of a _message signature_ is to ensure that _messages cannot be forged_ , and that figuring out what to do with the messages after they have been authenticated -- including verifying nonces -- is not the job of the signature scheme.

<comment><AUTHOR> Colin, I chose the wording for this title, not Nate, but you should know this is _Practical Cryptography_, page 108, graf 5, leading to "Design Rule 4, The Horton Principle". I don't think you're going to win this argument.

What you call "disingenuous", I call a "more complete consideration of the AWS security system". Even though I think you're aware of Nate's background, I'll assume good faith and just remind you that when you're reviewing protocols professionally, things like "messages are replayable and the protocol is only secure when run over TLS" get called out.

<comment><USER2> If the application layer cares about replays, sure. But in well-designed distributed systems, the application layer doesn't care about replays, because replays are the only way to ensure that operations succeed given node failures.

<comment><USER3> Isn't that a bit much to be throwing onto the shoulders of the application developer? At the very least I'd expect it to be explicitly documented that the possibility of replays by untrusted parties needs to be considered. I know _you_ took it into account, but I doubt you have very much company.

<comment><USER2> _At the very least I'd expect it to be explicitly documented that the possibility of replays by untrusted parties needs to be considered._

Hmm, good point. The AWS documentation has never been very explicit about these sorts of issues -- I'll email a few people at Amazon and suggest that they improve this.

<comment><USER4> Yes, this is moving toward what I was trying to say. Sorry if that wasn't clear. But I think the answer is not more documentation but handling this for the developer at a lower layer. And instead of Amazon implementing this lower layer themselves, use existing protocols like SSL.

With the exception of identity, SSL provides all the integrity protection, ordering, uniqueness, and even privacy that a developer could want. If you're willing to use client certs or SRP or basic auth, then you have identity covered too.

Amazon is exactly right in recommending SSL primarily. I just think they should stop there and not add "but if you have SSL performance problems, use AWS-Auth".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> So... are you _sure_ you want to try to build crypto into your application based on your dog-eared copy of Applied Cryptography and a couple of Coding Horror blog posts and comment threads?

<comment><USER2> The problem Nate talks about (replaying valid messages) is not a cryptographic problem. It's a distributed systems problem, and Nate's suggested solution (adding a nonce) isn't the right one. The right way to handle replays in a distributed system is by making operations idempotent -- which is exactly what AWS did.

 _So... are you sure you want to try to build crypto into your application_

Yes, I am. :-)

BTW, what do I need to do in order to convince you to start recommending scrypt instead of bcrypt?

<comment><USER4> Hi Colin, I decided to jump in here. Can you point to an AWS doc explaining how every operation is idempotent, including all combinations of them? I have a hard time understanding how something like "ADD USER 1", "DELETE USER 1", "ADD USER 1" can be an idempotent sequence where ordering doesn't matter. BTW, I'm not an AWS user; I just looked at the messaging layer based on your vuln report.

I think the lower layer should handle uniqueness, ordering, etc. in addition to integrity protection. As I said in the blog comments, "At some point in the past, I said the following" is not all that is needed for a secure protocol. If ensuring this kind of property is left to the caller, the chance for implementation mistakes would be much higher.

<comment><USER5> Idempotence only concerns a single function. There are AWS functions like RunInstances (EC2) that are not principally idempotent. They could drop RunInstances requests with the same timestamp, not sure if they do that. In any case, it is worth noting that requests have a timestamp that expires after 5 minutes.

<comment><USER4> Yes, and the whole fact that something this important is being left up to the user is my point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> These things are very difficult to get right, and very hard to check. Sadly the protocol model checking work of people like John Mitchell at Stanford is not close to being a plug in tool implementors can use.

I had the (mis)fortune of having to implement something similar and it took me quite awhile to make sure it was correct in both design and implementation. Do you want to run cryptographic tests for randomness? Do you know how? If not, stay away.

I really agree with tptacek, avoid implementing crypto like the plague.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm really fascinated by all the crypto debate that's been going on lately, but I'm completely green when it comes to cryptography. If Applied Cryptography and Coding Horror aren't enough, where can I go to learn about this? I see a lot of conjecture about how "no one knows how to do crypto right" (except the fellow writing the comment, of course), so I'm interested to know: Where's the right info at? I'd love to learn about this subject.

<comment><USER8> <http://www.schneier.com/blog/>

<comment><USER9> No. Schneier knows his crypto, of course. His blog, however, is much more about security in the broad sense than crypto.

Becoming a cryptography expert these days is not easy, there is much to learn.

<comment><USER7> If I come to a point where I need to implement cryptography in some form, what should I do? I certainly don't have the money to hire someone who knows what they're doing. It seems strange that skills in other aspects of development (protection from sql injection, UI design, etc.) can be cultivated in the wild with so much greater consistency than cryptography skills.

<comment><USER4> I'll be giving a talk at Yahoo Security Week in June entitled "When Crypto Attacks!" I hope to post slides afterward.

If you find yourself needing to implement crypto, it's likely you can avoid it by thinking about the situation differently. For example, many web developers get seduced into designing their own crypto as a way to push state to the client instead of managing it on the server. This opens up a much wider attack surface on the server application since now every part of that blob needs to be considered malicious. As the saying goes, "... now you have two problems."

The reason all this is so hard is that crypto is fundamentally unsafe. People hear that crypto is _strong_ and confuse that with _safe_. Crypto can indeed be very strong but is extremely unsafe.

Have you ever tried to clean up from a root private key compromise? I wrote previously ([http://rdist.root.org/2009/05/17/the-debian-pgp-disaster- tha...](http://rdist.root.org/2009/05/17/the-debian-pgp-disaster-that-almost- was/)) about how a one-line change in the PRNG had compromised every DSA private key _used_ on Debian/Ubuntu. Not generated, used. The properties of DSA make it such that your private key is directly revealed to any attacker who knows some bits of your PRNG output. I hope that emphasizes how dangerous crypto is, because it is so sensitive to its prerequisites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm amazed Amazon did this. Even casually reading the spec, this jumped out as a red flag. Another example of Rule 5, I guess:

<http://cr.yp.to/qmail/guarantee.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> Huh. This is a pretty straightforward vulnerability. The fact that it took anyone this look long to notice makes me skeptical that it's really this simple. I'll make a note to toy with this and see if it's actually exploitable.

<comment><AUTHOR> No assertion is really being made that it's exploitable now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Crypto, in general, is really hard to get right.

With 'normal' code, if it's broken, something doesn't work, and you know to fix it. With crypto, if it's 'broken', all the valid requests still work, and you don't know that anything's wrong.

In fact, as far as I know, the only way to know if your crypto code is 'working', is to prove it ... in the form of, if you can somehow break my crypto, you will also be able to break problem X, where X is a problem the crypto community has generally accepted to be hard to solve.</comment>


Do you resent spending too much time on school/university? - <AUTHOR>

It might seem like a waste of time that could have been better spent on startups. <comment><USER2> Grade school and high school were almost completely negative for me: the only things I learned there were laziness and procrastination (still besetting vices).

</comment><comment><USER3> Why resent having the opportunity to work hard? That's always good for personal development.

I can concede the point that for many learners, there will be more personal satisfaction--because of more learning--from starting a new business than from attending school. I'm quite a skeptic about schooling as an enterprise,

<http://learninfreedom.org/>

but sometimes when you're in school, you just have to make the most of it, and sustain your motivation by thinking about what lies ahead after school. In fact, now that I've just typed that sentence, I remember that that is pg's advice in his essay "What You'll Wish You'd Known,"

<http://paulgraham.com/hs.html>

which I urge a lot of young people to read. School is your day job for a while, perhaps. Do it well, but don't let it define you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Startups aren't easy. They demand your full attention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For me, it turned out to be a waste of time that could have been spent on literally anything else at all. My experiences were sufficiently negative that it probably would have been more constructive for me to sit on my ass and drink beer than go to high school or college.

Temperment matters. You are not me. Your mileage will 100% certainly vary.

Asking us whether we regret our choices should not inform yours.</comment>


David Foster Wallace and the Nature of Fact - <AUTHOR> http://blog.longreads.com/2014/02/15/david-foster-wallace-and-the-nature-of-fact/

<comment><USER2> One thing to add to this discussion— DFW's description of the Federer/Agassi point in _Roger Federer as Religious Experience_ doesn't actually match up all that well with what actually happened.

See for yourself: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDwG5rJVtdc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDwG5rJVtdc)

And note the discussion in the comments about the video not matching up at all with DFW's description, despite key indicators that it is the point DFW was talking about[1].

[1] Key indicators such as Federer's backsteps and McEnroe's commentary.

</comment><comment><USER3> Though I have a great appreciation for DFW's work (the linked article even links to the early essay of his I resurrected from paper), I found he tended to exaggerate, at least when discussing topics I'm knowledgeable about. (In particular I'm thinking about some of the math in IJ, but I know I have this impression from more than just that.)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd like to point out the following paragraph as evidence of a rather hackerly trait in DFW.

"The publication limited him to 1,000 words, which Wallace elided by transgressing the traditional review format. He composed the entire piece as a series of bullet points, each beginning with a dependent clause followed by a colon (which functions as a verb)[ix] and then a predicate. His rhetorical reasoning was both innovative and ironic: "Tactical reason for review form: The words preceding each item's colon technically constitute neither subjective complement nor appositive nor really any recognized grammatical unit at all; hence none of these antecolonic words should count against R.T.'s rigid 1000-word limit." He called this 'new, transgeneric critical form: the Indexical Book Review.' "

<comment><USER5> I've always thought of a lot of DFW's writing as a kind of programming. There's the main narrative thread of whatever he's talking about at a given time-slice, then there are the "worker threads" he spins off from that in the form of random lateral jumps to stream-of-consciousness, the 24-page footnote containing a single run-on sentence, etc. Certainly in IJ, and to a lesser degree in his other works, there are multiple "paths" the thread of execution can take to reach the end of the book. Put another way: are DFW's footnotes intended to be read synchronously or asynchronously? If you read them synchronously, it tends to interrupt the flow of the main narrative (context switches are expensive). If you read them asynchronously, you miss a lot of context and, possibly, the author's intended ordering/synchronization of the ideas. And of course all of this is intentional, and gives his writing a "meta" dimension that standard English don't usually have (usually for good reasons).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Has anyone who possesses the requisite math background read DFW's "Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity"?

When I read it I wasn't equipped with the math to understand the more technical parts, yet I still enjoyed it. Perhaps I was naive though, and to the intended audience it doesn't hold up for one reason or another...?

</comment><comment><USER7> Two David Foster Wallace posts in two days, I can't complain about that.</comment>


jwacs: Javascript With Advanced Continuation Support - <AUTHOR> http://chumsley.org/jwacs/demos.html

<comment><USER2> It's interesting that rather than building a micro-library they've chosen to use a compile time instead. I guess I'd prefer to see this integrated into my usual JS libraries (YUI, jQuery).

That said it's pretty interesting. Even if some of the syntax is slightly jarring.

<comment><USER3> Neil Mix implements similar transformations in Javascript in Narrative JS: <http://www.neilmix.com/narrativejs/doc/>. However, as I recall it aims more to provide some of the main benefits of continuations rather than a complete implementation of continuations on top of Javascript, which is more where I was trying to go with jwacs.

Jwacs introduces very little new syntax to Javascript; I'm curious to hear which bits you find jarring, and what you would have preferred to see.

<comment><AUTHOR> Welcome to news.YC! I'm a big fan of your work (well, jwacs and markdown.el) ... would love to see you as a regular around here :)

Aside: <http://versions.tech.coop/movies/jwacs.mov> server is down... do you have a backup?

<comment><USER3> Thanks very much! For both the welcome and the compliments. :)

Sadly, I do not have a backup of the presentation movie; hopefully Bill Clementson has one.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Shock in the Shower (1997) - <AUTHOR> http://www.esdjournal.com/static/shower/shower.html <comment><USER2> _The first time a bottle was opened resulted in a discharge approximately 1.5 inches in length from the shampoo to the metallized film cap seal._

The dielectric strength of air is ~3kV/mm. That corresponds to roughly a 114kV potential. It's a good thing these bottles didn't contain something flammable like hairspray.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why don't they name the brand of the shampoo, or the manufacturer? The article says this problem was observed by customers, so this ought to be public information... And since this happened 37 years ago, I'm not sure why they would be worried about libel lawsuits or anything....

<comment><USER2> _The new shampoo and conditioner product was contained in a very artistically designed bottle with special graphics on the outside. A national ad campaign had just started and the distinctive bottle was becoming recognizable._

This description sounds like someone in the US in the 70s might be able to recall which brand it was.

A quick search also finds someone with a similar experience many years later, probably different brand since the original manufacturer would've learned to avoid it:

[http://jayderose.blogspot.com/2006/09/my-shampoo-shocked- me....](http://jayderose.blogspot.com/2006/09/my-shampoo-shocked-me.html)

<comment><USER4> There are a couple of problems with pinning it down. First, how much "literary license" is the author using to describe the bottle? It might be much more plain and undistinguished than described. Second, it could have been any number of brands, as funky bottles and labels were not uncommon. Hell, even the syrup for our pancakes came in a glass bottle shaped like a woman.

That said, if I had to guess I'd offer two candidates that stand out in my head. First is Farah Fawcett Shampoo. Full color picture of the woman, though the bottle shape was forgettable. Second is Body on Tap: "made with 33% real beer", or something like that. I mention it only because the bottle was cone- shaped ("artistically designed"?), and if the claim is true maybe the beer adds extra loose electrons, I dunno. Or it very well could have been any number of shampoos that showed up briefly, didn't sell, and was yanked so fast even us olde parts who were there don't remember them.

EDIT: or maybe I should read the whole article, as it mentions at the end that it's still sold, which eliminates my two candidates.

<comment><USER5> They _were_ still sold in 1997 when the article was written. I don't know the shampoos you mention though so I have no idea if your candidates were still being sold back then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Could this be used as a new type of battery? It seems to hold way more energy than a typical capacitor.

<comment><USER2> You've confused energy with potential (voltage). Despite the potential being extremely high, the energy is very low. Otherwise these people would not only be receiving shocks, they'd be burned and/or electrocuted. A capacitor the size of a typical shampoo bottle can definitely hold a lethal amount of energy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> i'm seeing spam links. me thinks this page was hacked

</comment><comment><USER8> Love the 1996-era website design. Loads instantly, no ads, no non-sense.

<comment><USER9> secure as hell too when you are just serving html files.

<comment><USER10> I'm sorry to inform you that line twelve of that html has a script tag. Here's the kicker: it's google analytics.</comment></comment></comment>


Researchers Succeed in 'Growing' a Working Blood-Brain Barrier - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbrfoundation.org/content/using-stem-cell-technology-researchers-succeed-growing-working-blood-brain-barrier <comment><USER2> Ok, I can understand the importance of this milestone. Being able to study a brain analog that is not inside a person opens up lots of avenues for science.

That said, it also takes us down the path a bit for developing technology that can support a working brain that is not currently inside a skull. That leads to brains in jars which I find creepy as heck.

<comment><USER3> What about brains in awesome flying robots</comment></comment>


Show HN: The Trouble with Starting Web Development / My Solution - <AUTHOR> http://vishnumenon.com/2012/05/06/the-trouble-with-starting-web-development--my-solution/ <comment><USER2> This is actually pretty cool. I wish I had this when I started out...

</comment><comment><USER3> Worked for me, not sure if I loved the design.</comment>


Name initials may influence grades (and sports): study - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071116/lf_nm_life/initials_performance_dc <comment><USER2> Hello junk science, my name is David!

I did very well in school and have an IQ of 130+.</comment>


The Launch of Scholrly: new search engine seeks to change how you find research - <AUTHOR> http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/theubiquitouslibrarian/2012/05/30/the-launch-of-scholr-ly-new-search-engine-seeks-to-change-the-way-people-find-research/

<comment><AUTHOR> We've gotten some great pre-launch feedback from academics and librarians, but I'd love to hear HN's take.</comment>


Net Promoter Score (NPS) – a top-level well-known good-enough metric for teams - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/net_promoter_score <comment><AUTHOR> I'm the author and I welcome constructive criticism -- I'm seeking feedback that I can add to the README to improve it, such as if/how you've used NPS, any alternatives, any lessons learned, etc. Thanks!</comment>


Foundation Formed to Marry Open Principles with Job Search Tools - <AUTHOR> http://ostatic.com/blog/foundation-formed-to-marry-open-principles-with-job-search-tools

<comment><AUTHOR> Disclosure: I work at the foundation named in the article. (And we're hiring!)

</comment><comment><USER2> The web site for the job search foundation mentioned in this blog post is <http://directemployersfoundation.org/></comment>


UTorrent To Launch a Paid Version - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/utorrent-to-launch-paid-bittorrent-client-110715/

<comment><USER2> Like it says in the comments, any day now:

        [PRE] [ 0DAY ] [ UTorrent.Plus.x86.WinAll.v3.1.0.Incl.Keymaker-CORE ]

The irony in a scene release of a torrent client is overwhelmingly amusing.

</comment><comment><USER3> μTorrent became popular because it was so lean. I feel uneasy about all these superfluous features they've added and are planning on adding.

 _It's a single solution to find, get and play content anywhere, on any device._ [1]—That's the complete antithesis of μTorrent, and sounds a lot more like Miro and Vuze.

Also, considering the torrenting community, a paid version is a _very_ poor idea—it'll be interesting to see how many people who run it will have actually paid for it.

[1] <http://www.utorrent.com/community/labs/plus></comment>


If you want to test a man's character give him power*point - <AUTHOR> http://www.outoftheborders.com/2009/12/if-you-want-to-test-mans-character-give.html 7 rules for effective presentations from slide:ology <comment><USER3> Terrible. The assumption that powerpoint or any other slideware is an effective way of transmitting information is flawed. See Edward Tufte's "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" for a good analysis of the problems this brings (<http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint> ).

<comment><USER4> I've not read the essay (and, with no obvious way to purchase any version other than dead-tree, I likely will not), but the blurb concludes:

"What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?"

This seems to imply that the opposite assumption you seem to be making -- slides can never effectively transmit information -- is also flawed.

<comment><USER3> On the contrary. A part of the essay is available online, from the linked page. Tufte is very clear that it is possible to have informative presentations - but slideware does not help towards this goal. He argues that slides have a terrible bandwidth, and do not help anyone but the worst 5% of presenters, where they help by imposing structure - any structure at all - <USER2> the presentation. All other presenters, he states, would be better off without slides, and should rather just talk, or, better, give their audience their ideas in written form, as sentences made of words rather than slides made of points, and talk about them once they have been read and understood.

<comment><USER4> The essay you linked is titled "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within". The link from that page is to an excerpt of an essay titled "PowerPoint Does Rocket Science: Assessing the Quality and Credibility of Technical Reports". Given that they have different titles, I suspect they are not the same essay, and the latter essay concludes not with PowerPoint being unable to transmit information, but with a (sensible) recommendation to use technical reports when technical reports are called for.

<comment><USER3> The excerpt is in fact from the essay (I'd know, it's right here in the dead tree version)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Organizing A jQuery Application with JavaScriptMVC - <AUTHOR> http://jupiterjs.com/news/organizing-a-jquery-application

<comment><USER2> The gem from the article: "The secret to building large apps is NEVER build large apps. Break up your applications into small pieces. Then, assemble those testable, bite-sized pieces into your big application."

This is something I have to constantly remind myself. When you have big application to create with tons of things to do you need to have sort of a double think kind of way of going about it. Focusing on the details of each part, all while keeping in mind how that part will fit into the whole at the end.

<comment><USER3> I did a test sometime ago and I found JavaScript MVC a bit heavy. I prefer break my JS application in small modules and do their communication via message passing (custom events), like this: [http://blog.rebeccamurphey.com/code-org- take-2-structuring-j...](http://blog.rebeccamurphey.com/code-org- take-2-structuring-javascript-applic)

<comment><AUTHOR> Why did you find JavaScriptMVC a bit heavy? The Srchr app was 37.8 KB (Gzipped and Compressed). Which is pretty good considering it packages jQuery (24KB) and all of the MVC parts. So JMVC, plus the app only was 13KB.

Further, if you read the article, that is exactly what is happening. It's producing custom search events.

Please re-evaluate JMVC, it's really a bunch of low-level libs that provide just a little more power to jQuery.</comment></comment></comment>


Open source alternative to userstyles.org - <AUTHOR> https://openusercss.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> Also consider donating to keep it running ([https://www.patreon.com/DecentM](https://www.patreon.com/DecentM) or [https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s- xclick&hosted_b...](https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s- xclick&hosted_button_id=NQE35LHY6NKS6)).</comment>


Loophole in Graphene Could Unlock Limitless Energy - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencealert.com/graphene-levy-flights-limitless-power-future-electronic-devices <comment><USER2> or, citing the laws of thermodynamics, it may also decline to do so.</comment>


Pope Benedict XVI to Resign on February 28 - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2013/02/11/pope-benedict-xvi-to-resign-on-february-28/

<comment><USER2> I am shocked! Honestly, I am. I am not catholic, in fact, I am hardly religious, but the Pope abdicating (a pope doesn't resign, he abdicates!)? That's... insane.

Last time that happened was in 1415 when Gregory XII was forced to abdicate because of the Schmism.

Honestly, I am disappointed in these people are supposed to serve as relics of our old institutions (such as monarchies), when they cannot stand up to the basic requirement of a title that last till they die.

What's the point, if they can abdicate on a wimp? One should _only_ abdicate if a war for the throne has been won by a pretender!

<comment><USER3> Retirement is a good idea. That's just it. It would be shocking if there were no popes who are willing to agree with that. The last pope didn't, this one apparently does. That said, both the last and the current pope are the same age when they leave office – 85 – so I could imagine that also factoring into Benedict's decision. Dude wanted to retire eight years ago – and then became pope. I wouldn't be surprised if this wasn't how he imagined spending his last years.

Nowadays old people are merely mentally or physically handicapped by malaises that would have killed them not a century ago. In that context this is a very natural development, proving once again that churches are always willing to change to insure their survival (but not an inch more).

<comment><USER2> I think it is more an indication that we don't need monarchies anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Don't know if you guys heard, but there's buzz around here in the Philippines that the next Pope might be Manila Archbishop Luis Antonio Tagle (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Antonio_Tagle>), or at least the faithfuls believe he has a good chance. The mere thought of it scares me though. The Church has a very strong influence in State affairs, and I can only imagine this being a really bad thing for my country.

</comment><comment><USER5> And now the end is near. [1] On the positive side, the only really hard prediction on that list is, that the next pope is "Petrus Romanus." So we can nicely test the reliability of Malachy's prophecy.

[1]<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prophecy_of_the_Popes>

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting, but not HN material.</comment>


Show HN: EmberGen – Real-time volumetric fluid simulations for games and film - <AUTHOR> https://jangafx.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi Everyone,

I started JangaFX in 2016, and I've dreamed of having a piece of software that creates volumetric fluid simulations like explosions, fire, and smoke in real- time. Over the past few years I've built up a stellar team of like minded programmers and we've poured everything we have into building EmberGen. EmberGen is currently in beta and is being used by a plethora of AAA game and film studios. Our next big steps are to increase the fidelity of our simulations so that we can get much closer to offline quality!

Let me know what you think. :)

PS. Our mobile site kind of sucks and you'll see more of what the software is about on a desktop.</comment>


The Great Climate Migration Has Begun - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/23/magazine/climate-migration.html <comment><USER2> > _In Southeast Asia, where increasingly unpredictable monsoon rainfall and > drought have made farming more difficult, the World Bank points to more than > eight million people who have moved toward the Middle East, Europe and North > America._

Citation needed: as far as I can tell the linked report (below, a giant 260 page, 64MB PDF) says nothing at all about Southeast Asia?

[https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/2...](https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/29461/WBG_ClimateChange_Final.pdf)

The vast majority of Southeast Asia is very consistently wet and humid, which makes it an unlikely candidate to become unlivably hot. The sole major exporter of workers in the region is the Philippines, but that's mostly due to overpopulation encouraged by Catholic dogma, and there's "only" around 2M overseas workers. Where are the other 6M?

Personally, I think India is going to be largest challenge by far. It's soon the largest country in the world, it has massive water and pollution problems, and anybody who has experienced Delhi in May will agree that large parts of it are already virtually uninhabitably hot.

<comment><USER3> > The vast majority of Southeast Asia is very consistently wet and humid, > which makes it an unlikely candidate to become unlivably hot.

unlivealy hot and wet [0]. Some people indeed think that the high humidity combined with a >33C temperature will soon be the leading cause of death in SE Asia, SE india, tropical africa as well as Florida, coastal georgia and SC[1]. I' disagree (or rather, i'm not quite as pestimistic) but the ;ortality in some area indeed get higher with humidity in summer

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet- bulb_temperature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature) [1][https://kevinhester.live/2016/05/21/wet-bulb-temperature- soo...](https://kevinhester.live/2016/05/21/wet-bulb-temperature-soon-to- become-the-leading-cause-of-death/) (i found a way better map some time ago but i can't find it, sorry)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A similar discussion from half a year ago on HN [0]. Everytime I see concerning articles like these on drastic impact of climate change, it is always followed by a discussion on how disheartening and worrisome it is.

However, what I would really like to see is a discussion on what we, as engineers or skilled professionals or converned citizens of the only liveable planet, do to make an impactful difference. I am sure a lot of us do our part by making little changes in our everyday life such as reducing consumption, choosing public transportation, being aware of the source of the goods we consume, so on and so forth. But there is very little hope that these small changes will get us where we need to be.

I found this [1] firm that aims to match you to organizations doing impactful work on a larger scale, in case it is interesting for anyone. Hoping to see more such resources or strategies.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22057576](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22057576)

[1] [https://www.splashwithdolphin.com/](https://www.splashwithdolphin.com/)

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately, I believe there is nothing special we as engineers can do. The best thing we can do is what any other concerned citizen can do. Join climate activists on the streets. Rebel against the status quo. Yes, it's much less comfortable than sitting in front of a screen all day, but it's the most efficient way.

<comment><USER6> > Nothing special we as engieers can do?

Truly you can bring more imagination to the table?

We have almost the entire world connected. Partial solutions to many of todays problems have already been discovered, they just haven't been communicated to the rest. As engineers, we are in a good spot to address this issue.

Amost everyone has a supercomputer in their pocket, networked with the rest. There has to be some way to use this to help enable people to get out of destructive extractive system, and to create new, aligned with nature, systems.

<comment><USER5> > There has to be some way to use this to help enable people to ...

This is what I used to think too. Over the years though (decades really) my belief in pure technological solutions has waned significantly. As the world interconnectedness increases, so do the global GHG emissions. As the number of supercomputers in our pockets increase so does the e-waist and micro-plastic pollution. It looks like no matter what we do (EVs, solar, smart-grids, you name it), somehow, almost inexplicably, the GHG emissions just keep rising. Year after year.

Don't get me wrong. I am not anti technology or something. It's just that it's not a bottleneck anymore. There is no lack of technological solutions, there is a lack of moral courage to implement them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Global population is increasing at a rate of >1% per year. We crossed 6 billion in 1999 and 7 billion in 2011. We're now much closer to 8 billion than 7 billion too.

It is hard to imagine scenarios where this magnitude of growth ends well and wedging 'climate' into everything really is making people miss the real problem. The problem is human population growth - it seems quite likely that the future contains seas of blood and withering famines with or without climate change.

Handing out condoms and the pill will do more to help than curtailing fossil fuel usage (which realistically will just bring the suffering on faster). A world of 1 billion people would be a very comfortable world compared to what people put up with now - about a third of them could have a US-level lifestyle and the rest could put up with European standards of living.

<comment><USER2> Fertility rates are already plummeting across the planet, and most developed countries already need a steady influx of migrants just to keep their populations steady. The issue is that a baby born today will live for 70-ish years, so there's a large "hump" of overpopulation to deal with before world population growth goes into reverse around 2100.

<comment> ur-whale That "hump going into reverse" theory is predicated on there being no large- scale disaster (war, famine, etc...).

The way things are going, that predicate is rather unlikely.

<comment><USER2> War or famine would likely speed up reaching that point, not slow it down. Nevertheless, grim Malthusian predictions have been made since the 1700s, and have yet to come to pass.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do small startups and non-technical founders do data analysis? - <AUTHOR> Is it pretty much still the same as four years ago?<p>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4707903 <comment><USER2> Pretty much but with even more choices depending on the data being analyzed. I will also add that Excel and Access are both heavily used, especially if you don't need to analyze terrabytes of data at the same time. Excel maxes out after a little more than 2 million rows, and Access can handle about 2 gb of data.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was wondering how much have changed, and what you've mentioned is exactly what I've thought. Thanks for that!</comment></comment>


The genius of Stallman - <AUTHOR> http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~prateeks/rms

<comment><USER2> I can't tell if this is meant as sarcasm. I mean code lasting 23+ years untouched could also mean that nobody's been able to understand it. There's a reason GCC has a reputation of people approached the task of improving it by starting from scratch. Then there's surprise that something written in the 80's is "surprisingly advanced" as if the theory of compiler design has made any real improvements since the 70's.

<comment><USER3> It must be sarcasm.</comment></comment>


Twitter Is Betting Everything on Jack Dorsey - <AUTHOR> http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/twitter-is-betting-everything-on-jack-dorsey <comment><USER2> Twitter's product is broken in more ways than I care to recount. End users and developers are constantly complaining about it - and they're the power users who see the value in it! Everybody else is "meh" about Twitter despite the potential.

Add Jack in to that mix, a guy who who has a lot of passion and intelligence but is split across Square and Walt Disney and I have to say the answer is 'no', betting on him to single handedly save Twitter is a bad bet.

Twitter is doomed. I get that shareholders want to see the value they were promised but short of a miracle I don't see a resurgence. All the trendy people have already moved off of Twitter to FB, Insta or SnapChat (and I'm sure there are others I'm not cool enough to use).

This Google Trend graph tells the story in pictures: [https://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F0b2334%2C%2...](https://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F0b2334%2C%20%2Fm%2F0289n8t%2C%20%2Fm%2F0glpjll%2C%20%2Fm%2F0nbtf_n&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT-1)

Note that I had to leave FB out because it has ridiculous numbers that make the other values in the chart almost meaningless.

Edit: Square not Stripe

<comment><USER3> In my microcosmos I am also being followed by a lot of bots and cyborgs (those ones who have ten of thousands of followers and are following other ten of thousands). This makes me think this ecosystem is not working properly, more, because I post original content.

On the other hand, I am followed by a top VC who only follows a few people but is followed by 1/2 million and this "karma" doesn't make any noticeable effect on my twitter account.

<comment><USER2> Totally agree, the weightings on follower/following ratios are non-existent. Would be nice if quality of following/followers could be valued over quantity.

There's also far too many bots on Twitter now. Feels like Twitter is going to be a shit load of bots talking to one another when all the real humans leave.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > And, by nearly every metric, he had achieved remarkable success. Under his > tenure, the company had grown from 300 employees to around 4,100.

Eurgh. I never understand how the number of employees you have can be a success metric. By that logic, becoming more efficient would be a bad thing.

<comment><USER5> What do 4,100 employees even _do_ at Twitter? It's not that complicated.

<comment><USER6> The backend systems for Twitter - advertising, data analysis, spam prevention, infrastructure etc is vastly more complex what you see in a feed of 140 characters.

Plus sales and marketing budgets are huge.

Whether any of these systems or human resource needs are required to be running at that scale is probably the question hitting Jack directly in the face. I think the ballsiest move he could make would be to shrink it all down to core services. But Wall Street would shit itself with that sort of contraction.

<comment><USER7> > spam prevention

Yes, plenty on spam prevention, but seemingly little on bot prevention. Without the bots, there'd be so many less MAUs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> pi-err Twitter has an incredibly powerful brand and appeal. How many companies can say they triggered revolutions?

Yet it's puzzling how much it fails to improve its basic product, 1 year in Dorsey's comeback. On mobile, the search/explore screens are mostly irrelevant. On desktop, they could position themselves as quasi TV channels with live content update.

Yes, they lost the social wars and that's fine. They won the media war: Twitter's mindshare vs its actual engagement rates makes it an amazing opportunity.

Really hope it doesn't fade into a glorified RSS feed and manages to build on the intensity of its content.

<comment><USER8> > Yet it's puzzling how much it fails to improve its basic product.

What's there to improve? As someone else said here on HN "Twitter should have been an RFC."

The only thing that's broken here is not Twitter, it's the economic system that can't just let a useful invention be, but instead forces it into a fight- or-die, conquer-the-world-or-disappear nuclear arm's race.

Facebook was just fine as a place to keep in touch with friends and invite them to events, Uber is just fine as a Taxi service, Candy Crush was just fine as a silly iPhone game...

I wonder what we'll think of it all in a century, because there's no way this insanity can go on for much longer.

<comment><USER9> 140 Character limit that includes url and hash tags which is finally going to get released. Look at increasing the limit later on?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can't companies and products simply hit a natural limit? There are inherent limitations to any given "thing" and perhaps Twitter has found its own terminal velocity.

<comment><USER11> "Can't companies and products simply hit a natural limit?"

I think of craigslist when I read that. It's just a useful thing that works. Nothing else. I wish there were more things like that.

<comment><USER12> > I wish there were more things like that.

Perhaps not coincidentally, craigslist is not a public company.

<comment><USER13> Any idea on how much revenue they bring in? I tried a quick google search but couldn't find any recent numbers.

<comment><USER14> How is this? [http://www.aimgroup.com/store/cirs/2015-craigslist- annual/](http://www.aimgroup.com/store/cirs/2015-craigslist-annual/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Let me quickly summarize every thread about twitter: 1) "Twitter in the old days was great. They are ruining everything now!" 2) "Twitter has 0 revenue! How can they be worth so much? It deserves to die." "Actually, they have 0 <i>profit</i>" "Oops! Point still stands!" 3) "But what do all the employees even DO all day?" 4) "I stopped caring about Twitter when they closed off their API" 5) "The world needs Twitter!" "No it doesn't!"

<comment><USER16> Amusingly, each of those fits in a tweet ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Twitter should grow horizontally now, not vertically. Company keeps a blind eye on its brand strength.

Why not open up new services closely connected to Twitter:

-Video Hosting site - YT and LiveLeak competitor, but without all the noise

-Social Network where Twitter is a core, but social network by itself would be separate product - "wall" could use Twitter feed, this would work perfectly...

-Image hosting company - Imgur competitor

-News distribution and news curation company - its almost already that, worth investing in it

-Social tools company - thats easy...

As long as Twitter would stick to minimalistic design and rule "less is better" it would work and Twitter could become worthy rival to ABC...

</comment><comment><USER18> >Twitter announced what it hoped would be the antidote for its user decline: "Moments"

Yeah, I can't believe anyone thought that would work. It's like thinking that the recent "you can now type 10 more characters because URLs don't count" thing will save Twitter.

<comment><USER19> I've always thought that overtime, gradually, they should've expanded their character limit to something reasonable like 200-300 chars. Are they that Microsoft like tied to being backwards compatible with SMS?

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure about that, but they definitely should have taken a move fast break things style approach a la Facebook. New features on Twitter seem to take forever to be decided upon and rolled out.

I often wonder if their architecture is stifling them in some way. If I were Jack I'd want to set up a large opt in beta group to trial new features.

<comment><USER19> So why can't they integrate Periscope directly with Twitter? Instead of posting a Tweet, just press a button to live stream to my feed with Periscope.

<comment><USER20> That feature actually launched recently for both Android and iOS (Maybe today on iOS?).

[http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/16/twitter-is-testing-a- perisc...](http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/16/twitter-is-testing-a-periscope- live-streaming-button-inside-its-mobile-apps/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The company is still far too bloated, contributing to the fact that it's financials don't remotely support its valuation.

</comment><comment><USER22> Twitter seem to serially fail in understanding their own product and the needs of their users. Jack isn't doing any better.

<comment><USER23> I think they understand the appeal they have, it's just that they're deciding it's not what they want. They're trying to pivot it to make it grow. That's what investors want to hear about, apparently; coverage, not depth.

Unfortunately for them they're trying to widen their appeal by making it less appealing to their _current_ user base. I think we all know how it ends.

It's not a new tale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you replace "Twitter" with "Yahoo" and "Jack" with "Marissa" these stories can be from 3 years ago.

Along those lines you can start taking current stories about "Yahoo" and make them "Twitter" and see the future....

</comment><comment><USER24> > what the company is best at, which is being the platform where people weigh > in on live events.

This is odd to me, since from what I see, the people who are most engaged with twitter don't use it for live events at all. They use it for jokes.

<comment><USER25> Why not both! :)

I know quite a few people who use it for making jokes about live events. The other day my wife's mocking of the new BBC drama got quoted by the Mail's TV reviewer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> _(Note to Jack Dorsey fans: if you want to downvote downvote with arguments)_

Obviously Jack Dorsey is not very capable and is bad at business execution. There is/was a simple way to increase Twitter revenue and profits: giving small and medium companies a way to pay for entry level access to their API in the same way Google AdWords, etc work. I think there is a lot of money there but they only know about wholeselling to companies/agencies with big budgets.

<comment><USER26> You might be copping downvotes because people think _your_ arguments that he's "not very capable" and "is bad at business execution" don't hold up?

<comment><USER27> As a third party I would be interested in hearing why others feel the arguments don't hold up. Just simply clicking the downvote button doesn't make for an interesting discussion.

<comment><USER28> The overwhelming opinion* seems to be that he's brilliant at what he does. The post said it's obvious he's bad at business. If it's really that obvious, how did everyone else get things so wrong?

A more transparent post would have said something like "Based on my world view, assumptions, and preconceptions, he's bad at business. The common narrative of Dorsey is XYZ. Here's why that's wrong."

Saying "it's obvious" when you're expressing an uncommon opinion doesn't set a good tone for a discussion. Makes it seem like "I'm smart they're dumb I don't need to explain my statement that runs counter to conventional wisdom".

* Not saying it's right, just that this is what the Twitter board / media / insiders / VCs /etc. seem to think.

<comment><USER27> That's not actually a response to my statement, even though it may be true. You're just providing an excuse to downvote without bothering to engage in discussion as to why to downvote. I want to hear the reasons for the downvote.

Just thinking I can downvote and not respond because of the "obvious" problems of the statement is just as bad as your example of saying "it's obvious" about an uncommon opinion is not good for discussion. You're just telling me "it's obvious" why the other guy's "it's obvious" is wrong.

<comment><USER28> Back up the bus - I didn't downvote. I start a new HN account well before I ever get that invested.

There really wasn't an argument put forth beyond "he's bad at business, can't you see it's obvious". His tone and lack of content other than an unsubstantiated opinion are why there was no interesting discussion.

I never said "it's obvious" in any way shape or form, but I do believe this is my stop. Have a nice day.

<comment><USER3> > His tone and lack of content other than an unsubstantiated opinion are why > there was no interesting discussion.

It was not unsubstantiated. If I define a good business as a business with profits, this definition has a lot of substance. Jack Dorsey obviously achieved a lot of personal success and money from Twitter, I am not blind about his amazing achievements. Amazing because they are statistically difficult to obtain at this scale. BUT, being a public company is a different stage of the game. As an startup you can be amazing while the finances are hidden but when you are public you need to build a sustainable business and this is not happening.

<comment><USER26> He also has his involvement in Square, Inc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Twitter has been mismanaged over the years. With FB, the buck stops with Zuck, but at Twitter, the politics between the cofounders has meant there has been no long-term strategic leadership. Twitter has got away with a lot of stuff over the years because it was perceived to be cool, but these days, it's more Henry Wrinkler than The Fonz.

</comment><comment><USER30> betting everything on the guy that wanted to 'disrupt receipts?' [http://www.recode.net/2014/1/15/11622364/jack-dorseys- advice...](http://www.recode.net/2014/1/15/11622364/jack-dorseys-advice-to- dying-retailers-disrupt-receipts)

</comment><comment><USER31> I wish they would do something about the expensive Gnip situation. I understand they need to make money, but just getting to know the prices takes 4 phonecalls, interviews etc.

Also, I noticed from few people who worked there that this company is internally a total unstructured chaos. Nobody knows whats going on.

</comment><comment><USER7> The best thing Twitter can say about Jack is that they pay him much less than Yahoo pays Marissa.

Of course, he's only a part-time worker so they should pay him less.

</comment><comment><USER32> Is the issue the product itself, or the perceived relevance? Very hard for fading social networks to regain their former glory. Look at AOL as the best case.

</comment><comment><USER33> No.

<comment><USER34> Perhaps HN should enforce a minimum comment length, like at least 3 words... One word comments clearly don't add value to a discussion.

<comment><USER35> I almost agree, but I suspect it's a reference to previous discussions around Betteridge's Law, for example:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9232419](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9232419)

I'm sure it's come up more than once, and it's a sensible response to clickbaitesque headlines like this one.

<comment><USER33> Yes, I agree.

The best response to a clickbaitesque headline is a short answer (and No Click!). That's why I wrote "No". Everything else would just feed the trolls. But of course, it's much easier to downvote such a comment than to think about the clickbait itself.

Kind regards,</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sex Toy Maker Pays $3.75M to Settle 'Smart' Vibrator Lawsuit - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2017/03/10/sex-toy-maker-settlement-smart-vibrator-lawsuit/ <comment><AUTHOR> Related DEF CON 24 presentation: "Breaking the Internet of Vibrating Things": [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1d0Xa2njVg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1d0Xa2njVg) (Includes more technical details)

Related TEDx presentation: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxRSjC1rPmA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxRSjC1rPmA) (Aims to raise awareness of related IoT privacy issues for a non-technical audience via the concept of a personal "Device Intimacy Spectrum".)

Disclosure: I'm one of the presenters/security researchers referenced in the article.</comment>