Ask HN: How to Deal with Death Anxiety? - <AUTHOR> I started having frequent anxiety / panic attacks related to death about 2 weeks ago, and am not sure why. First layer is, I am afraid of my own death, mainly because I am afraid of the unknown I believe. Second layer is I am afraid of the impending doom of humanity, even if it is in a trillion years when the sun expands and covers Earth's orbit. Do any of you know coping mechanisms to deal with this? I am hoping I am not alone in this issue, because it is really scary. <comment> Engineering-MD Not alone, I had this a few years ago but got over it. How you deal with this depends on your own mental structure. You could try an abstract form of denial. Examples of this include religion with afterlife, quantum immortality, epistemological immortality, or 'it's all a simulation'. See also qualia, and extended conscious experience.

Alternatively, you can practice nihilism. Nothing really matters, including life itself. What does it matter if humanity ends? Life has no point so if we die, so why should you care if it happens?

You can practice pragmatism. Death is inescapable, and there is nothing that can be done about it, so don't worry about it. What will happen will happen. Might as well get on with life in the mean time and worry about death when you're dead.

Acknowledge that death may be good in some contexts. Some suffering (like depression, torture) is worse than death. Death provides an end to suffering. Death is the great leveller as fuck and poor, success failure alike will all die the same. It takes the pressure of succeeding in life off.

You could also simply be thankful that life exists at all.

Discuss with your friends and family. Often they have good insight. If you find that you are still struggling do add others suggest and seek medical help as this may be the manifestation of a mental health problem which could be treated. But don't worry, most people go through something similar at summer point of their life, especially if they are the questioning type. I have personally adopted a bit of a mix of all the above, and it's really broadened my love philosophy and I've become a better person for it.

</comment><comment><USER2> Everything is a _bardo_ [0]. I learned that from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. I tested out the theory and it's the truest thing I ever heard. A bardo basically means 'in between'. We are forever in between something, never having truly finished it, including life itself. It's just one long infinite attempt to get to the next phase, and then once we are in the new phase, we are striving for another phase. For some this is Samsara, or the hedonic treadmill, for others it's a great relief knowing everything is essentially unfinished.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardo)

</comment><comment><USER3> Erich Fromm is a psychoanalyst that emphasized human beings are set apart from other animals, one reason dealing us the ominous cognizance of mortality.

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

In Terror management theory, we as individuals and society are all faced with the existential inevitability of death, so we try to enforce cultural things and rally around them to ease the anxious feelings. As individuals TMT posits we try to boost our self esteem to that end.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory), [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vy4W1s0vyJ4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vy4W1s0vyJ4) (covers Fromm, TMT)

Also it's reassuring 1.) You don't love death (Fromm considered that to be the absolute worst of states of mind) 2.) that you're looking for social assurance 3.) finally hopefully you're pleased to find you're not alone in your feelings, mortality salience / death anxiety is an established concept. Why else would people be intrigued by all Doomsday movies / documentaries?

Fromm is very interesting to read on OP. He went into social and political psychology and, despite noting mortality, espoused an optimistic outlook on society and humanity. His concepts of escape mechanisms are genius and understated.

There's no where to go but up from here, hopefully!

</comment><comment><USER4> There are two kinds of things that happen in life. The ones you can control and the ones you can't.

By definition, it doesn't make sense to worry about things you can't control.

It took my a while to accept that, but once I did life got better. Give it a try.

</comment><comment><USER5> Some thoughts:

1\. Blog or keep a journal. It may help you sort this.

2\. Stop reading/watching "the news." Most _news_ is _bad news._ It's known to negatively impact mental health to focus overly much on it.

3\. Actively go looking for positives, a la "count your blessings." It can help counteract our tendency to only not bad news and not acknowledge things that are going right or doing well.

4\. You might consider confronting your fear. Perhaps you could volunteer at a hospice.

(This list not comprehensive.)

<comment><USER6> > Stop reading/watching "the news."

This. News is new, not necessarily deep or important, usually neither.

<comment><USER5> To clarify how awful the news is:

The predicted the Kuwaiti oil fires would burn for years and be a global disaster. When they were put out in six months because crack teams from around the world converged on Kuwait and invented new techniques, we did not break out the champagne and dance in the streets around the world. We barely noticed as we moved on to talking about our latest crisis.

It's essentially brainwashing. It's not objective reality. Objective reality would celebrate something like that as vigorously as we lamented the expected coming disaster. But we never do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I went through this recently. Exactly what you went through. Combined with the intense feeling that everything is meaningless. No amount of reading did anything for me. I tried to change my views and everything, but nope.

Then I went to a psychiatrist. Got prescribed benzodiapenes. Two weeks on it, every existential thoughts vanished. I felt normal again. Then my doc stopped it. Got some severe withdrawals from the benzos. I would never ever touch benzos with a 3 foot pole again. Even after 3 months of leaving benzos I have some bouts of anxiety. I use Ashwagandha regularly. To me it's been life changing. The thoughts don't completely vanish but even if it comes, it makes you feel meh. Also travel. Traveling a lot helped me. Made me focus outwards rather than my inner voice. Traveling, going out a lot, Ashwagandha and talking to people is what's helping me by a significant amount.

I am not a native speaker, so if anything confuses you please ask away :)

</comment><comment><USER8> You are certainly not alone, perhaps investigate more about the subject, it's inevitable, yet treated in a myriad of ways by different cultures. Perhaps there is something going on around you that at this time has posed questions you've not considered before. It's common for people to have a short spell of panic attacks then not be bothered by symptoms again. Regarding the actual attacks, you would perhaps benefit from looking into the physiological background, what process this is triggering in your body, and how you can learn to exert control over it, it is my understanding that a panic attack should not cause any harm in and of itself, though of course, the experience is unpleasant and scary, both for the sufferer and those around them at the time.

</comment><comment><USER9> I recently went through few death related panic attacks. I ended up going to the doctor who prescribed an anti-stress drug, which made me somehow calmer. The anxiety increases whenever I feel my health is deteriorating, so taking care of your health can be helpful.

But what makes it completely disappear for me is a different thing. I'm religious and I believe in the afterlife. That makes me comfortable with the idea of death, but doesn't prevent me from having anxiety, as I believe my outcome is tied to how well I'm behaving/avoiding and repenting for my wrong deeds. Basically whenever I'm sufficiently happy with my actions, the anxiety disappears.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm have no medical qualifications but suggest that you consider if taking magnesium may help. [https://www.huffpost.com/entry/magnesium-the-most- powerf_b_4...](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/magnesium-the-most- powerf_b_425499)

You may already be obtaining sufficient through your diet and should consider your doctor's opinion.

Perhaps religion may provide the answer? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism#The_cycle_of_rebirth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism#The_cycle_of_rebirth)

</comment><comment><USER11> My way of dealing with this is to think that there was nothing (no suffering, no "being stuck in a dark senseless place forever", etc) before I was born, so logically these things will not be an issue when I die either.

My only regret is that all the experience & knowledge I would've acquired before my death would go to waste, but it's not serious enough to be anxious about.

</comment><comment><USER12> I deal with both situations with the same mindset:

1\. my death is gonna happen in my lifetime

2\. the doom of humanity will not

So with both statements, what I can do is live my life the best way I can. and of course, I do the best for case 1 to happen as late as possible.

</comment><comment><USER13> Download headspace meditation app. Pay the money. It's worth the subscription. Can't put a price on your (mental) health. Take the courses related to anxiety management.

You can do this. Take care of yourself

<comment><USER2> Or learn to meditate without crutches like this. I've learned to not rely on something _outside_ of myself for my own peace of mind. That's what meditation is about: getting to know your inner self and calling upon your inner calm to face difficult situations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> possibly magic mushrooms?

[https://vancouversun.com/health/local-health/b-c- counsellor-...](https://vancouversun.com/health/local-health/b-c-counsellor- wants-health-canada-to-approve-psilocybin-to-treat-death-anxiety)

IMHO this is the first important existential barrier to break through. Nearly everyone goes through this, the sooner the better.

In this pursuit the Serenity Prayer is great. It sounds cliche, but repeat it enough it and becomes profound and comforting.

<comment><USER14> I thought about this too, but I don't know if it is a smart idea if you're suffering from frequent panic attacks. However, the scientists at Johns Hopkins University have studied the effects of psilocybin on terminally ill patients for their death-related anxiety and a psilocybin-induced spiritual experience seems to alleviate it. I would say that if you decide to go along this path, don't venture on it haphazardly and do thorough research beforehand to know what you're getting into.

Here's a couple of participants talking about their experience:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaXJbNXsqmQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaXJbNXsqmQ)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRn_HD7nH8g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRn_HD7nH8g)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> three certainties of life you will grow old, you will grow sick, you will die.

the uncertainties come from how you choose to act in the face of these certainties, and from external coincidences that are greater than yourself.

my strategy, strive to read/write something that will make you look good or enigmatic in some way if you are found dead with it open in front of you. create something bigger than yourself, that lasts beyond generations and screams "I was here, and this is what I was!"

</comment><comment><USER16> Meditate on the thins that you CAN control and do not sweat the things that you cannot. Knowing the difference is wisdom - not intelligence.

</comment><comment><USER17> CBT, therapy from a good therapist (not easy or cheap to come by), possibly drugs (antidepressants, benzos)

</comment><comment><USER18> Accept that you cannot control everything. Everybody dies. Make it count</comment>


The Copenhagen Wheel: Electric pedal-assist motor in the hub of a bicycle wheel - <AUTHOR> http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/07/if-an-electric-bike-is-ever-going-to-hit-it-big-in-the-us-its-this-one/375167/ <comment><USER2> In a normal bicycle shop it is very hard to actually sell an actual electric bike.

There hasn't been anything fundamentally wrong with the product there just isn't meaningful demand. It is not as if people see the bike, want one but cannot afford it. It is not as if people want the electric bike but find the product falls short of expectations. Only a few brands actually have electric bikes, e.g. Giant, and the general idea is pedal assist up to 15 mph because of legal reasons.

The detachable battery pack of such 'conventional' electric bikes is practical for the typical customer as you can take the battery out and recharge it without running some power cord to the bike shed/street. This all-in-one wheel lacks that practical aspect so it will be another far-too-clever-idea that goes nowhere. Also, the iphone hookup is great in principle but, as per the Giant e-bikes, all you need is a simple switch between eco and power modes on the handlebar. Your legs can do all the other aspects of power management far more effectively than some bluetooth gizmo.

I think that the key to winning people over to electric bikes is for cities like London and Paris to upgrade their fleets of hire bikes to be electric. People would have a go, see what fun electric bikes are, experience how safe they are due to the manoeuvrability that comes with that helpful bit of extra power, go home and think about getting one for their commute or leisure needs.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the issue with electric bikes is that until you try one out you have no idea what you are missing out on. Recently I was able to test a direct drive (The motor is in the bottom bracket and assists you pedalling). It's phenomenal.

I could easily go up very steep hills without a lot of effort and I weigh 270lb. I could even vary the help it was giving me and choose to have more of a workout.

What I would suggest is that if you are on the heavy side or intend to carry heavy loads, direct drive is the best for you.

One negative side to the e-bike legislation is that in the UK, it's speed limited to assist up to 15MPH and on 250W motors. To a certain extent I have no issue with the assist cutting out at 15MPH (20 would be nicer), however the 250W limit reduces torque and if you had a load of shopping with you, this could be an issue.

The issue I find with the Copenhagen wheel is that it is trying to think for you and you control the wheel through your phone. When riding, I prefer not to remove my hands from the handle bar. Most if not all ebike configurations place the motor control near a thumb as if you were holding on to the handle bar. My criticism may be unfounded, but you need control sometimes at a moments notice.

The other issue is one of battery charging. Most people that I know that have an ebike, have bought two chargers, one for work and one for home, and charge their batteries at both ends by removing the battery from the bike and leaving the bike locked up in the parking lot. The copenhagen wheel doesn't seem to support that idea.

<comment><USER4> The kind of ebike you're recommending is called a mid drive, not a direct drive. Mid drives connect to the bike chain so it combines your bike's gears with the motor, that's where all that great hill climbing ability comes from.

Direct drive is just a regular hub type that sits in the center of the wheel. They're not so good since they do not use the bike's gears, you end up with cogging when pedaling, it distributes the bike's weight unevenly and low power restrictions make it fairly useless for hills. There's also geared hubs these days which look similar but work a little better.

Course, any of these types are better than the copenhagen wheel.

Personally my dream ebike would be a Bosch mid drive connected to a nuvinci internal shifting hub via a gates carbon drive, all mounted on a full suspension carbon fiber frame with the battery mounted in the center triangle.

<comment><USER5> How are these?

[http://www.stealthelectricbikescanada.com/bomber-electric- bi...](http://www.stealthelectricbikescanada.com/bomber-electric-bike.html)

<comment><USER4> I am not a fan of it. You will go faster walking the bike than pedaling due to cogging so those pedals are mostly for show (or stealth.) And the $10,000 pricetag is just crazy, you could buy an electric zero fx for that. For reasonably fast speeds I would go with a kit like this from em3ev

[http://em3ev.com/store/index.php?route=product/product&path=...](http://em3ev.com/store/index.php?route=product/product&path=45&product_id=186)

Select the largest battery and fastest speed option, pop that onto a hardtail MTB from craigslist and you've got a fast ebike with the same range for about $1700. Plus this is a geared motor so you don't have any drag from cogging, it just freewheels which makes pedaling and coasting much more fun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just in case anyone else is wondering, this is indeed the same wheel that Andy promoted throughout season 7 of Showtime's "Weeds". I had no idea it was a real thing, so I assumed this was a joke at first.

<comment><USER7> I am really glad I was not the only guy with that reaction. I chuckled out loud and clicked immediately.

It is more puzzling he could not pull off the idea. Now that I know it is real, I definitely want one fo these.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I recently bought this German bike: [http://en.r-m.de/bike/mixte-nuvinci-hs- hybrid/](http://en.r-m.de/bike/mixte-nuvinci-hs-hybrid/). It does 45 km/h for about 50km. You always have to pedal. A cruising speed of 35 km/h is very realistic. Without breaking a sweat. You can also select for less pedal assistance and the battery almost lasts 100 km. I consider it very real alternative for using a car to commute if you have to travel up to 35 km to work.

<comment><USER9> I see the power is applied at the pedals rather than the wheel, how do you like that? Any issues, any concerns about longevity?

<comment><USER8> It has advantages. The center of gravity is in the middle of the bike and at the 'bottom' of the bike. Electric motor in front wheel makes it more difficult the steer. Electric motor in the back wheel can cause 'understeer' especially in winter or on wet roads. The Bosch motor has been around for a while now and they have a very good reputation. A lot of new e-bikes have these pedal-powered Bosch motors.

I must add. E-bikes are selling like hotcakes in The Netherlands. The first people to buy them were 50+ years old. Now 30+ year old people are buying e-bikes like this one. They are a serious alternative for a small car. These bikes are not cheap. Like $ 4000,-. But, there is certainly a market for them. I like to think they are the Tesla version of an e-bike.

<comment><USER10> Pretty sure what Dutch are buying is these: [http://www.gazelle.nl/collectie/elektrische- fietsen/2014/ora...](http://www.gazelle.nl/collectie/elektrische- fietsen/2014/orange-em-nuvinci)

Yours seems to have advantage (?) of having battery in the middle, but steering wheel is too far to the front. I hate cycling with my back bent. Both bikes are missing hub brakes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was biking to work the other day and had a guy pass me using one of these on his front wheel. It was completely silent and he practically doubled my speed on a road bike just cruising. I'm used to being one of the faster commuters, so my brain did a pretty serious double take. Having had a nasty crash at normal speed I will say that I would seriously suggest wearing more protective clothing if you are going to roll with one of these.

</comment><comment><USER12> Electric bicycles with pedal assist were ubiquitous in Shanghai 10 years ago. The most common design I saw had a removable/rechargeable battery that was mounted on the down tube.

<comment><USER13> Like the one in the second picture of the article?

<comment><USER12> Exactly. That was 10 years ago. I never understood why China wasn't exporting them, unless there's no market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great idea, but not sure US$800 price point will be attractive to a large market. At half that price, these would likely fly off the shelves though.

<comment><USER15> According to the article, electric bikes are selling for upwards of $3,000 in Europe. The best selling electric bikes on Amazon appear to be going for $1,200-$1,500.

At $800 for the wheel, you save about half compared to a complete electric bike, and you can use your current or favorite frame.

I agree, if they were cheaper, they'd sell faster, but this appears to be competitively priced, compared to the rest of the market.

<comment><USER16> On a recent trip to Holland, I saw the ALDI (a cheap grocery store selling goods from boxes) selling electric bikes for EUR 799 which is under $1100. There's simply a huge price-range on electric bikes, and picking just one price point does not make for a convincing argument.

<comment><USER17> Reminds me of bicycles in general. You can pick up a used bike for >$100 in most cities, or you can spend $3k on a sweet carbon fibre racing machine. For that matter, cars vary in price from >$1000 used to... the sky's the limit.

Until battery prices fall, there will definitely be a high bottom limit for electric vehicles. The lower that limit gets the more adoption will happen, for sure. Still, an $800 wheel on a $300-$500 bike is competitive with most POS electric scooters.

<comment><USER18> You can get a used bike in Beijing for ¥100 ($16).

Used electric scooters with 30km range and 45km/h top speed can be had for $250.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My commute is 12 miles by road (8 straight-line); it takes about an hour on public transportation, or about 45 minutes by car.

Every so often I think about a Segway or an electric bicycle or Acme rocket- skates or what-have-you. But nothing is ever cheap enough to let me try it out and not be extremely unhappy at wasting money if it doesn't work out. If they came with a 30 day no-questions return, or could be rented for a month, I might find something I like enough to buy.

<comment><USER20> Why not just get a bike and ride that?

<comment><USER21> Yeah bicycles actually _can_ be "rented for a month" (or a week or a day or an hour). There's no way you won't beat the 4 MPH your car is getting. (Incidentally I hope never to purchase a used car the engine of which has been subjected to that treatment every weekday for years.)

<comment><USER22> Where'd you get 4mph? 12 miles in 45 minutes is 16 MPH, a decent speed to maintain on a bike.

<comment><USER23> 25km an hour is pretty easy on a road bike.

<comment><USER22> 16mph/25kmh for a short burst, anyone can do. To average that speed for an hour is something that most people could work up to, but a casual cyclist probably couldn't do.

<comment><USER23> Even when going through areas with a lot of lights(ie:stop/starts) I still average over 25km an hour. With a light road bike it really isn't that fast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Oatley electronics sells a much less elegant electric bike kit ( you supply the bike and, I presume, the battery ) for considerably less money.

[http://secure.oatleyelectronics.com//product_info.php?cPath=...](http://secure.oatleyelectronics.com//product_info.php?cPath=116&products_id=776)

</comment><comment><USER25> Are there certain bikes that this is compatible with? The photos don't make it look like it would fit on my current bike. Is it just for road bikes, or would it work on a mountain bike as well?

Also, has anyone tested this thing out on steep hills?

<comment><USER26> [https://www.superpedestrian.com/](https://www.superpedestrian.com/)

you could ask them about hills.

> What is the required dropout spacing to fit the Copenhagen Wheel?

> For a single-speed, you need a 120mm dropout spacing and for a multi-speed a > 135mm dropout is required. If you are unsure about your dropout spacing, > please contact us and we will help you determine if the Wheel will work with > your bike.

> Can the Copenhagen Wheel be used with a multi-speed bike?

> Yes, the Copenhagen Wheel is fully compatible with multi-speed bikes. You > will be able to use it with 7 speed, 8 speed, 9 speed, and 10 speed > cassettes. If your current wheel is a free-wheel (not cassette), then you > may require minor derailleur adjustment.

<comment><USER27> A wheel like this on a road bike is going to cause hell with my Strava rankings :-(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's a cool thing, but why does it keep turning up? The Copenhagen Wheel was invented in 2009 and refreshed at the end of last year in a crowdfunding project. And just today an editor pitched me on the idea that e-bikes using this or other methods were about to blow up. E-bike makers have been telling me that for years...

</comment><comment><USER29> Shut up and take my money!

</comment><comment><USER30> To put it simply: I bought an electric bike 4 months ago. ..My wife is divorcing me. :-)</comment>


Analyzing the Windows 8 Metro/Desktop interface train wreck - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/138847-the-metro-desktop-interaction-in-windows-8-is-an-absolute-train-wreck <comment><USER2> Gotta love these bloggers trying to make a story where there is none. It's a new UI. It takes some getting used to. Deal with it. It's not a train wreck.

<comment><USER3> No story? Nice try MS.

It's stories like this that prevent the rest of us from wasting money on such a POS.

<comment><USER4> I'm two months or more into my Windows 8 experience, and I love it.

Articles like this are just spread FUD in a desperate grab for pageviews.

Windows power users will likely have no need to ever touch a metro app. The only people that will be using Metro apps are tablet users, and the type of users that would add gadgets to their vista toolbar thing. (your average 40 something office drone).. and for them the metro interface is great, IMHO. It's graphically rich, and simplistic keeping the confusion levels of these typical users to a minimum.

For the rest of us, we just work on windows the same way we always have, except for now we have multiple task bars, and the os is faster, can mount cd images without software, and a few other minor features that make it a pleasure to use.

All this metro fanfare is manufactured hype.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As he says in the article, _"It's true that these issues will eventually be fixed, the same way most of Vista's issues were eventually fixed."_

As others have said, this is a new desktop paradigm, some bugs are to be expected. The problem is, if it's broken on non-touch-enabled machines at launch, as it seems to be, then a 'Windows 8 sucks' meme will spread, as it did with Vista, and it will be very difficult for Microsoft to come back from that before Windows 9 - by which time IOS and Android will be further entrenched, and MS will have an even bigger hill to climb.

</comment><comment><USER6> > But what if you want to share a story? In Desktop, I'd right-click, copy the > URL, and send it over. Metro News doesn't have URLs. So I go to the right > side of the screen and choose "Share." I have two real options — I can send > an email, share via Facebook, or share via Twitter. If I send an email, it > generates a link that only people with Windows 8 can read.

This seems like a general problem with trying to share non-web content inside apps, regardless of the platform. If you're just putting an app wrapper around web content, like the Wikipedia app, you can provide a URL. But if your app does more than that you can't give them a web URL if there is no web implementation.

<comment><USER7> Your point makes sense, but the author is specifically talking about sharing news stories from a news app. There may not be a Web view of the stories, but I think it's fair to call that a major shortcoming of the news app.</comment></comment>


Visual Hunt – 354M Free Creative Commons Photos and CC0 - <AUTHOR> http://visualhunt.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey Hacker News,

After a few months of hard work we've just launched Visual Hunt - for everyone who needs free high quality photos.

Quick facts about Visual Hunt: 1\. More than 15,000 best free public domain photos (CC0). We manually choose only the highest quality and tag them. Next 10,000 photos being tagged. ;)

2\. More than 350 mln Creative Commons photos from Flickr (if you cannot find Public Domain photo).

3\. Search and filter CC0 photos by color. Color pallette for every photo.

4\. Photo popularity index. Shows how many websites use the photo (still beta experimental feature).

5\. Possibility to save favorite photos to lightbox (after signing up).

6\. Possibility to embed photos without downloading.

I would love your feedback what I can improve to make the website even more useful for you. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER2> Found myself a better website finally. Thanks!</comment>


A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/a-skeptics-guide-to-the-mind/

<comment><USER2> This book sounds like it resonates with one of my main fields of interest.

After getting my PhD in physics at Columbia and starting a company, then going back to get an MBA (also Columbia), I was fascinated at how effectively the exercises in leadership class worked. They pointed out how leadership was based in behavior and said "If you behave this way, people will respond that way. Doing so will make you a leader."

The exercises worked surprisingly well. I learned behavior that helped me lead my company better. People began deferring to me as a leader where they didn't before -- in regular life as well as business. My science background saw reproducibility and concluded there must be a useful theory beneath. My physics background wanted not just a theory, but a simple one too. But when I asked my teachers why it worked they just said "Don't ask. Just do it. It works." Business school is a vocational school, so that response made sense.

My scientific curiosity kept me going. I studied evolutionary psychology, positive psychology, cognitive behavioral therapy, and more. I also kept practicing what I learned in business and life as I continued running my business and starting others.

As an entrepreneur my goal was not to publish papers, despite my science background, but to make a _useful_ theory -- useful to entrepreneurs and businesspeople like myself. Like I gather this book says, I found tons of low- level detail out there on neuroscience that, while fascinating, was so detailed and frontier it wasn't clear how to use it, nor how long before newer results changed our understanding of it, nor could anyone know enough of it to use it effectively. Not many neuroscientists make great leaders, nor do many psychologists or psychiatrists, despite knowing so much detail about the brain. Knowing about something is not the same as knowing how to use it.

Like the author of this book (quoting the review) "has a bone to pick with neuroscientists. They are discovering fascinating information, but their interpretations often go beyond what the data can really tell us. They often draw questionable conclusions from imaging studies that could have other explanations." I share his skepticism not of the scientific results, but of its utility to day-to-day life, especially in an entrepreneurial or leadership environment. My goal was to make the information _useful_ to lead, to run a company, and in general to win friends and influence people.

Eventually I realized an effective model of the mind had to balance low-level detail with high-level breadth and ability to be communicated and understood. I think geeks like us tend to get caught up in fascinating detail, whereas when we interact with others, especially to start or run our companies or work in teams, we have to make the information useful in the moment.

My end result was two-fold: a model of the human emotional system and the core of a book putting it all together that also evolved into a seminar I give at business schools as well as the New York Academy of Sciences. On a personal level, I would say I've increased my emotional intelligence and self-awareness tremendously, two concepts I didn't understand and couldn't figure out how to increase before creating my model despite knowing their value to my life.

For anyone interested in how the mind works not to publish papers but to _use_ it to lead, to start or run their company, to win friends and influence people, to live a better life, and to increase their self-awareness and emotional intelligence, I have a long series of blog posts that are an effective first draft of the core of that book on the model of our motivational and emotional system -- <http://joshuaspodek.com/the-model- summary> \-- and how to use it -- <http://joshuaspodek.com/method-step-by- step>.

Sorry for the long post leading to a longer series of posts, but if you clicked this story, I suspect you have the same curiosity about making neuroscience useful in business and life and may find the material helpful.

EDIT: based on Luc's fair comment, I should note the material is not polished -- maybe alpha stage or earlier -- and some stuff on models in general very basic for this community. I've gotten positive feedback and no negative feedback (no doubt due in part to selection effects) from people who have made it all through. I'm in the process of making it into a single volume.

<comment><USER3> I hope you can find another approach to explaining your model than what you have up on the 'The Model: summary' page. Some months ago I read through two thirds of it and still felt I hadn't got any idea of where you were going with this. I felt it was all very hand-wavy.

Now, I do appreciate people putting in the effort to publish free content online, and one doesn't always want to be confronted with smart-asses who find nits to pick, but since you are writing a book I thought I'd mention it.

<comment><USER4> _I felt it was all very hand-wavy_

It's as if you expect him to actually understand and explain what his brain is doing ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think they are talking about cognitive neuroscience and not neuroscience in general. Many in the neuro community consider fMRI studies to be the equivalent of phrenology. But looking at the top journals in the field (neuron and nature neuro) you rarely find fMRI studies. The bulk of the work is basic science that attempts to figure out how the brain works. Basic neuroscience has its problems too [1] but it is not full of overstatements. Unfortunately, what gets in the news is mostly catchy subjects that relate to psychology.

1] <http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v14/n5/abs/nrn3475.html>

</comment><comment><USER6> We are so certain that people are biased in thinking they are certain of something.

Also, the other ones, the ones saying things we don't agree with, are saying that "just because [insert your favorite bias here]". We're the ones really cool and aware of mind traps.

<comment><USER7> When I was still taking social psych courses, one of my favorite events would be after every lesson when half the class would say something like, "I know about new cognitive biases! I am now immune."

<comment><USER8> My favorite event is recognizing a cognitive bias in me. "Wait, this is rosy retrospection! Damn you, brain!"

<comment><USER9> I love the smell of roses, but people say I always complain when I smell them...

<comment><USER8> The only way I can tell that I had a bad time in college is because, when I left, I said to myself "in a few years you're going to remember all the great times, but the majority wasn't that great".

Lo and behold, five years later, I only remember the good times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I love reading popular neuroscience books, but boy, they sure are filled with a lot of hooey... It's refreshing to hear about a book that tries to avoid this problem.

<comment><USER11> Not sure, there appears to be a reasonable amount of hooey here too, but then it's a subject that we're only really just gaining the tools to handle.

I quite like John Searle take on the philosophy of mind, his book "Mind: A Brief Introduction" is pretty well written, and I like the Chinese room thought experiment which I think kind of highlights what a lot of people find problematic about the mind-body problem.

<comment><USER12> I find Searle's argument hard to take seriously as it is fundamentally rooted in dualism. If a chinese room were to behave in a manner indistinguishable (based on input and output) from a person, it would be irrational (not to mention unscientific) to conclude that it still lacks a "mind" in some vague, unmeasurable and unfalsifiable sense. His entire argument essentially hinges upon denial of emergent behavior- that since no part of the chinese room is "conscious" the sum of these parts similarly cannot exhibit this property. This is also clearly nonsense- I could similarly state that when I take a computer apart and examine individual atoms I will find none individually capable of performing IEEE-754 floating point multiplication and thus conclude that any machine constructed of such atoms would be similarly incapable.

<comment><USER11> I actually think that Searle's Chinese room experiment neatly defines the divide between the mind from matter and dualism groups. The dualists believe that the Chinese room can not be squared with their notion of consciousness, the qualia, which is largely based on their subjective experience of consciousness. The Mind from Matter people essentially think that the subjective experience is an illusion, that there is no qualia. That's the fundamental divide, and the Chinese room experiment is useful in that it neatly divides those two groups.

I personally don't buy the "if it's indistinguishable from a person it's conscious" argument. Philosophical Zombies for example are a good example of system that I think could appear conscious, but I don't think are in any meaningful way. That is to say, if you had a large lookup table of every possible response, or just "guessed" reasonable responses by chance, I don't think that says anything meaningful about consciousness.

The above might be solved by putting somekind of information content limit on this system, for example if a system responds as a human, and it's construction requires as little or less information than a human then it can be said to be conscious, but basing your judgement purely on response is not enough in my view.

In general I find philosophers rather annoying when they try and deal with consciousness, Searle is at least easier to pin down and does attempt to interact with the AI community to some degree.

<comment><USER12> Philosophical Zombies are not falsifiable, as they are necessarily _completely_ indistinguishable from conscious beings in any way we could test or measure. Falsifiability is one of the pillars of modern scientific thought and crucial to drawing useful conclusions about the world.

If there is no amount of interrogation that could possibly convince you that another being (in silico or otherwise) possessed consciousness, your logic can be followed through to solipsism.

<comment><USER11> "Philosophical Zombies are not falsifiable, as they are necessarily completely indistinguishable from conscious beings in any way we could test or measure."

You might impose an additional criteria such as complexity limits as I suggested, which could lead you to a definition of concuousness as a near minimal encoding of "human like" responses. And would of course be falsifiable.

But you can take it in the other direction for example someone who is completely paralysed, they might be conscious but we'd have no way of knowing. That could bring into play the idea that the ability to interact with the rest of the universe is an integral part of concuousness.

The problem is that to most people consciousness is defined by its purely subjective experience. Mind from matter people would possibly say that subjective experience is an illusion. Searle's thought experiments highlight that fact, which is what makes them useful, because they make the division between the two camps clear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A submission just made to HN,

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5632321>

a link to a review of Daniel Dennett's newest book, is very much on-point for this thread. I see I have two interesting books to look forward to reading, the one reviewed in the review opening this thread, and the one reviewed in the review opening that thread.

</comment><comment><USER13> If you enjoy reading about applications of Neuroscience, the following is also good.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5624573>

</comment><comment><USER14> "…our brains possess involuntary mechanisms that make unbiased thought impossible yet create the illusion that we are rational creatures capable of fully understanding the mind created by these same mechanisms."

Any theory that posits we are not rational creatures is self refuting. If I can't trust my mind to reliably deliver rational conclusions, why should I trust it to have delivered a rational conclusion about the very theory I'm proposing?

<comment><USER15> Many biases can be adjusted for. It is hard, though.</comment></comment>


PEP 0498 – Literal String Interpolation: Accepted - <AUTHOR> https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0498/#?Intro <comment><AUTHOR> f-string will become the "obvious" way. It's as fast as "%", and as powerful as "format()". We just don't comply with the "preferably" here. And yes, I would prefer to have Template and % sent to the trash bin so we are left with less options, but that would break too much code.</comment>


Google poaches 14-year Mac veteran from Apple to bring Fuchsia to market - <AUTHOR> https://9to5google.com/2019/01/22/google-fuchsia-poaches-mac-veteran/ <comment><USER2> "A report from July of 2018 revealed that Google plans to first release a smart speaker running Fuchsia within three years."

Um, as much as I want the boys and gals in Dallas to succeed, I think I see a problem here.</comment>


Herbert Dow, the Monopoly Breaker (1997) - <AUTHOR> http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=31 <comment><USER2> This only worked because it was a commodity that could be resold without much extra expense, and the cartel wasn't willing to sell at a loss everywhere. Great history lesson!

<comment><USER3> That, and in the US (and many other countries), we also now have government protections against price dumping [1]. Not to say it doesn't still happen, but there is some recourse.

Regardless, a good read.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)#Actio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_\(pricing_policy\)#Actions_in_the_United_States)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm a kid who went to Herbert H. Dow High School in Midland, Michigan. Then I went on to study Chemical Engineering at the University of Michigan in the Herbert H. Dow building. I'm very proud to see this story on HN. There is a (seemingly) out of print book called "The Dow Story: The History of the Dow Chemical Company" if anyone would like a more in depth view of the "bleach wars" and other ways that Dow took on the entrenched German companies.

</comment><comment><USER5> Great story! Actually shows that monopolies can even be broken without the intervention of government.

<comment><USER6> Shows that they could in the early 1900s. These days the specific formulation of bromine being sold would be patented (even if they had to modify the formulation every 17 years) and Dow would be sued for patent infringement on the resales.

<comment><USER7> Actually, no they couldn't. Patents only apply to the right of "first sale". You can resell any patented invention without the consent of the patent holder.

<comment><USER8> I think you're confusing the first-sale doctrine with exhaustion doctrine, and the latter is, I think, a bit more confusing and unclear as to what patent holders can require.

<comment><USER6> You beat me to the reply...

Firstly, IANAL(!)

Secondly, I do follow the sorts of IP law cases that tend to show up on HN as an interested non-legal observer because I think IP law is one of the most dangerous problems the US tech industry faces, even though the industry is the thing that is fucking itself most of the time.

However, from what I understand while the exhaustion doctrine has been upheld for international copyright law recently by the Supreme Court, the same court refused to hear a vaguely similar case as applied to patent law (and the defendant was on the ropes and forced to settle). So there are still quite a lot of open questions about exhaustion doctrine as it applies to patents, especially when international trade is introduced, and also when the original supplier preemptively imposes restrictions (such as the "not for resale" that would certainly be on the packaging of any chemicals sold today). One mitigating thing that might help in this situation though is that price-fixing is often viewed as a situation where such resale restrictions can be found to be invalid.

So, basically this is all really muddy and not entirely decided (exhaustion doctrine is just common law to begin with) and there's no yes/no answer as to whether my half-sarcastic statement is valid, but we do live in a world that is very different than the early 1900s in a lot of ways, many of them for the better, but some of them for the worse.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Buy An Ad, Own a Browser Botnet - <AUTHOR> https://threatpost.com/buy-an-ad-own-a-browser-botnet/101550

<comment><USER2> The researchers in the article are quoted as saying they don't know who's fault this is. That's B.S. It's absolutely the fault of the ad network/ad buying tool/DSP/whatever.

When you open up a platform to let people buy ads, there are loads of decisions to be made. The ones around "what content do we let people submit without vetting" are pretty simple. At Perfect Audience, self-service customers can upload static image banners and traffic those. We host them. No JS. No flash. If folks want to traffic those kinds of ads, we have an enterprise support play they can sign up for and we'll help them do that easily.

Letting anyone traffic js or flash files without prior vetting is hugely lazy. I wish they'd named the ad network they bought through so they could be black- balled and barred from the exchanges.

It's so easy to say no to crap advertising, and yet there's always unscrupulous players who say yes to it. There's no excuse. It's all their fault for just not giving a crap.

Edit: Also, when you get access to the ad exchanges, you sign a ton of documents and agree to be responsible for what you traffic in many ways. This network is dropping the ball.

<comment><USER3> Does vetting necessarily help? If I send some JS through for your adops to traffic, and they call code on my own adserver, what's to stop me from altering it after you have trafficked it and it's already live showing to users?

And even if I submit code that is malicious from the start, if it also correctly serves an advert, will you actually notice the extra code if all it's doing is opening a few extra connections?

Maybe you have answers to these questions - I've never worked on an adops side at all, I'm on the buying side, so never had to worry about it.

p.s. Dropped you an email earlier Brad - give me a shout, I really want to try out Perfect Audience!

<comment><USER4> > Does vetting necessarily help? If I send some JS through for your adops to > traffic, and they call code on my own adserver, what's to stop me from > altering it after you have trafficked it and it's already live showing to > users?

You can let your advertisers run JavaScript in ads without letting them inject script tags pointing to external URLs. There's no risk in the script changing if you're only hosting inline code they have no access to after review.

<comment><USER5> > _let your advertisers run JavaScript in ads without letting them inject > script tags pointing to external URLs_

How would you do that? That's equivalent to the halting problem. There is an infinite number of ways to assemble code that will execute arbitrary code, which can can assemble code that will execute arbitrary code, which ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell "And with respect to DDoS, NoScript wouldn't help because we could have done it all with HTML,"

"RequestPolicy" on the other hand _does_ work against this. For example, when I visit threatpost.com, it _wants_ to pull in content from the following external domains:

      kasperskycontenthub.com
      addthis.com
      gravatar.com
      wordpress.com
      google.com
      twitter.com
      google-analytics.com
      cloudfront.net
      fonts.googleapis.com

RequestPolicy blocks all of this by default, and the site and content is still perfectly readable.

In my browser it takes 39 http requests and 1MB of data transfer to view the page. If I were to disable RequestPolicy however, due to all the extra pointless crap the site wants to load those numbers would increase to 86 requests and 2.3MB.

<comment><USER6> Your browser isn't the problem, it's the hundreds of thousands of others that are using the default configuration and have no such protection.

<comment><USER7> So it's the browser vendors fault.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Seems like ad networks should be liable for the javascript they serve up. There has to be an incentive for them to check it out, and they should strongly prefer that their clients NOT have any javascript.

<comment> mike-cardwell Seems like site owners should be liable for the arbitrary third party content they allow ad networks to inject into their pages.

If you don't want your sites security to depend on a third party, don't allow that third party to run code on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There are still ad networks that allow advertisers submit Javascript? Or html for that matter? Good time to be a blackhat I guess.

<comment><USER10> Mobile ad networks are particularly crazy. Source: I have reverse engineered >100 of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's a very simple concept that shouldn't really come as a surprise to anyone. That said, I spend a load of money on adverts every day, am regularly sending over JS snippets which I'm well aware will be executed on the machines of millions of people, and yet the thought of using adverts for this sort of thing never occurred to me.

</comment><comment><USER11> Iframe sandboxing is the solution - removing allowscripts permission will fix this.

[http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/security/sandboxed- if...](http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/security/sandboxed-iframes/)

Now it may be argued that genuine Rich HTML ads do need javascript, for example, to expand or interact with the page. To me, the solution to this is to limit what sort of javascript is allowed to run. We need an mraid.js for the web, which specifies the subset of javascript that could be run.

I don't think it will happen until there is a major attack. Other than botnets, javascript can mess with cookies, steal data, and do a lot of damage.

<comment><USER12> Google's caja is that software:

[https://developers.google.com/caja/](https://developers.google.com/caja/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is an issue we've been aware of for some time.

This isn't quite as easy to do as you might think however. While the cost might be low to run the ads, typically most RTB ad networks do not actually allow you to use external ad tags that can call arbitrary JS.

That said, some do allow this (like the one the speaker used), and the ones who don't police their JS ad tags are going to be wide awake tonight thinking of how they can.

</comment><comment><USER14> Maybe you could develop a better utility for this (not that a good old DDoS isn't fun and all). Instead of irritating ads you could sell invisible "adspace" and the value would actually be in the fact that you were enabling a massive distributed computing effort. Imagine if SETI at home or several other distributed projects bought ads and had them process the work. It's a more productive monetization strategy than telling me how I can lose weight or grow my dick.

Edit: I'm thinking more about this and I think it'd be fun to work on if anyone feels the same way.

<comment><USER4> It's more productive but less profitable. The potential "advertisers" would only advertise with this network if they could purchase computing time through it at a lower rate than the spot price on Amazon EC2 -- otherwise they'd get their computation done faster and cheaper going to EC2. At the current spot prices EC2 charges, this network could not pay out within even two orders of magnitude of the CPMs even low-quality sites earn from ads now. The processing power of JavaScript time slices on commodity laptops is just too far apart from running compiled code on even the slowest EC2 instance size. That means it's unlikely for a significant publisher base to develop to sell the ads onto.

If you're interested in working on it, there's at least one or two startups trying it at any given time you could try to work with. [http://crowdprocess.com/](http://crowdprocess.com/) is relatively new. Many have had the same idea and eventually closed down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder if mining bitcoins with JavaScript and/or WebGL could yield a higher return than the cost of the ads. (Not that gobbling CPU power in that way would be _ethical_ , but it would be a fun demo.)

<comment><USER16> I don't think it'd come close. Here's my napkin calculations:

Let's say you pay $5CPM - $5 for every 1000 views. Let's say every viewer stays on the page for a minute, and every viewer is able to provide 10 MHash/s, which I think is pretty generous for a Javascript based miner. That means you get a minute of 10,000Mhash/s for $5. The Mining Factor 100 is currently 0.17 USD/24h@100MHash/s ([http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/](http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/)). That works out to be about $0.0047 in return for that $5. My numbers are probably off, but I think it's still a couple orders of magnitude from being profitable.

Even if everyone was running a top-of-the-line GPU, and you were able to squeeze 500Mhash/s out of everyone, it'd still just be about $0.24 for every $5 spent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if this could be used to do any sort of useful computation. A cheap supercomputer, if you will.

EDIT: Oooo, others have thought of something similar: [http://hackaday.com/2009/03/03/distributed-computing-in- java...](http://hackaday.com/2009/03/03/distributed-computing-in-javascript/)

</comment><comment><USER18> The networks that allow untrusted code (js or flash) are the ones to blame for this, and I'm glad that seems to be the general consensus. It seems bizarre to me that anyone would allow this in 2013. We've been talking about scripting "attack" vectors for _years_ now. It's not new.

</comment><comment><USER19> This appears to be a repeat of 6 year old research - [https://twitter.com/abortz](https://twitter.com/abortz) posted the following [https://abortz.net/papers/dns-rebinding.pdf](https://abortz.net/papers/dns- rebinding.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER20> Wonderfull. Now let's just combine that with the new BREACH attack discussed on [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6141286](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6141286) and wreak havoc. I'm really curious how these problems will be fixed...

</comment><comment><USER21> Ahem, what about all those external jquery hosters, or google analytics..?

<comment><USER13> Not really an issue - Google doesn't allow you to add arbitrary JS that other sites use to their tag.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Link this to PTC scheme and you are doing well better than in the article; for 10 second display time, you will get 1000 _guaranteed_ visits to your website, for whopping $1,5.

</comment><comment><USER23> (Shameless plug)

For exactly this kind of issue, we're building an ad tag monitoring solution for publishers (and we're hiring). www.clarityad.com

</comment><comment><USER24> you can always fetch a website with pure html, something like <img src="[http://news.ycombinator.com"/>](http://news.ycombinator.com"/>) \+ an ad network that's too many requests. but still I'm not 100% sure whether that's possible.

</comment><comment><USER25> w8... does adwords allow you to include JS into ads? If no, how he get his js into ads?

<comment><USER23> Last time I checked, adwords failed to detect javascript injection from an obfuscated Flash creative. That's the kind of things that we detect at ClarityAd via dynamic analysis.

<comment><USER7> Aren't people moving away from flash creatives yet?

<comment><USER23> Flash is still the standard for "rich media" ads, despite the lack of mobile coverage. HTML5 ads are growing fast but still very small.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to close a term sheet quickly  - <AUTHOR> http://venturehacks.com/articles/closing-quickly <comment><USER2> PayPal took 50k and said if the investors wanted it back in 2 weeks they could take it back. Of course, the investors didn't take it back.</comment>


CVPR 2020: The Top Object Detection Papers - <AUTHOR> https://heartbeat.fritz.ai/cvpr-2020-the-top-objection-detection-papers-f920a6e41233 <comment><USER2> "Object" detection, not "Objection".

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the heads up</comment></comment>


Cloudflare's proxy violates HTTP/1.1, and they don't care - <AUTHOR> https://community.cloudflare.com/t/incorrect-caching-of-dynamic-resources/170977 <comment><USER2> Nothing to really see in these forum posts aside from at best what I can gather is, I'm right, your wrong and you should be thanking me for pointing this out.

Poster made their valid point about vary headers & Cloudflare responded stating it isn't a bug and it is their intended behavior.

Forum poster continues along the lines of, "I want to use this service but this service needs to conform to the specification and nothing less."

They're not matching the specification, they're aware and they admit it. Move providers if you require this or run your own.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't recall where I read this but as I understand it Cloudflare ignores Vary: User-Agent because (when exposed to the general public) it's effectively the same as "never cache this page," due to the wide variety of user agents and the amount of detail they pack into their user-agent string.

It's basically a very big hammer that (a) would massively increase the load on both Cloudflare's cache and the backing server, and (b) almost never does what the server owner actually wants (which is usually "send a different variant on this page to IE users").

</comment><comment><USER4> Vary is a basic header. That is a little surprising.

</comment><comment><USER5> Very understandable for a CDN. You can use page rules to disable caching on various levels (even in the free tier, just with limitations).</comment>


Is Rust functional? - <AUTHOR> https://www.fpcomplete.com/blog/2018/10/is-rust-functional <comment><USER2> > Finally, it's a bit unfair for me to compare Rust's facilities here against > Haskell. Haskell's handling of lambdas, closures, first class and higher- > order functions is best-in-class, since it's explicitly the goal of the > language. If you compare Rust to most other languages out there, like > Javascript, Ruby, or Python, Rust compares even more favorably.

And yet creating a _closure_ in those languages is natural and trivial. None of the higher-order examples he provided in Rust were closures.

Closures are at best clunky in a language without automatic GC and heap allocation (auto-boxing?). But if you can't readily create and use closures (i.e. functions that use their lexically bound environment outside their original execution scope, such as invoking it _after_ _returning_ _it_ from the defining function) then how could you claim strong support for first-class functions? You don't have first-class functions; you have closures and non- closures, each with different treatment by the language. Otherwise we could just as well claim that GCC's flavor of C is a strongly functional language because it supports nested functions.

The defining characteristic, IMO, of functional style programming is using closures to encapsulate and reify state; not the ability to anonymously define functions or functions which can access their lexical environment from within the same execution scope. If the language doesn't make that natural then it can't be fairly described as friendly to a functional style. In languages like Javascript people intuitively do this without even _realizing_ it, which is about as natural as you can get.</comment>


Google+ Now Lets You Upload Address Books From Outlook, Your Mac, And More - <AUTHOR> http://tcfast.com/2011/07/20/google-now-lets-you-upload-address-books-from-outlook-your-mac-and-more/

<comment><USER2> You cloned their layout, republish their content, and now you're submitting their stories on your site to HN... there's really no point in pursuing this model, they will shut you down the minute they notice you stealing traffic from their articles.</comment>


Why Do Selenium Tests Fail?: Top Reasons - <AUTHOR> https://testsigma.com/blog/why-do-selenium-tests-fail-top-reasons-testsigma/ <comment><USER2> We had issues with MS coded-ui tests failing, found them so unreliable.

It was a problem too as the tests themselves would take at least an hour to run, and then to have a test fail after an hour and the solution was just to rerun the suite.

Often times it was coded-ui failing to find a control which was definitely on the screen. Selenium may be better but I thought coded-ui was effort >>> reward.</comment>


Do you think this iOS Game idea will be fun? I do - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1699170558/make-catch-crisis-reach-its-full-potential

<comment><USER2> It looks generic and already claims to adopt the freemium model. It almost looks like something Ray Wenderlich (a great blog, by the way) would have made to teach people how to develop a game for iOS.

However, I could be wrong. The gameplay could be completely unique, but there is no demo video to demonstrate that fact; all we have to rely on is the author's word.

It doesn't look like something I would pay for, especially given that it is still in the design stage. It might work as a paid-tutorial if all the code is released (gameplay code, assets, detailed tutorials, IAP code, etc.), but in its current state it looks like a Chinese-developed clone.</comment>


How The Discovery Of Geologic Time Changed Our View Of The World - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070913081021.htm

<comment><USER2> This documentary describes the story in a very nice way. ([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpbevfWrYg0&feature=PlayL...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpbevfWrYg0&feature=PlayList&p=F1AC74A8C56F0872&index=0))

This is an 8 part documentary. Well worth your time.

If you want more details I highly recommend the book that came along with the documentary. Earth Story. ([http://www.amazon.com/Earth-Story-Forces-Shaped- Planet/dp/06...](http://www.amazon.com/Earth-Story-Forces-Shaped- Planet/dp/0691116628/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-1430383-7844418?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190074321&sr=8-1))

</comment><comment><USER3> The article did not go into a lot of detail about how the development of the geologic timescale contributed to the science of geology. One of the most important contributions of the timescale was giving scientists a framework to correlate geologic events. For example the KT boundary groups the events of a mass extinction, elevated trace amounts of iridium, and the impact crater in Mexico. Before the timescale and radioactive dating, geologic events such as these were witnessed across the globe, but never correlated to be one single event.</comment>


Show HN: Coronavirus Dashboard - <AUTHOR> https://coronavirus.gg <comment><AUTHOR> A simple website that provides key statistics about the Coronavirus (COVID-19) at a glance. Currently updated every 30 min. Feedback is welcome!

Topolomancer: Good point, will look to add this. klundqist: It is Worldometer for now but might do some kind of aggregation of multiples sources if relevant.

</comment><comment><USER2> Next to the data source, it would be interesting to show normalised numbers as well. Right now, everything is trending upwards---correct, but unnecessarily alarming.

</comment><comment><USER3> just fyi, I usually use this one [https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...](https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6)

</comment><comment><USER4> What's the source of the data?</comment>


Review HN: my first essay "Thoughts on learning and programming for Hackers" - <AUTHOR> https://docs0.google.com/a/akash.im/document/edit?id=1uJbohrZAKGVGxrJv-d443kW4xFnf7YWgj40yd942iMI&hl=en&authkey=CPqywNQF#

<comment><USER2> OK, it's not clear how detailed you want a critique to be, so I'll throw out a few thoughts that I hope you find useful, interesting or provocative.

Firstly, let me say that I'm always humbled by someone who writes clearly in a language other than a cradle language. Having said that there are many, many small grammatical errors. Even so, the writing is pretty clear, and most of the errors do not obscure the meaning. That's impressive.

You say:

        A similar approach, learning only when required, is
        good for hackers.  According to me, learning what's
        necessary when a situation calls for it triumphs over
        that of learning just because something exists or is
        available. ... I advocate learning as a process that
        is supposed to run in parallel with implementation.
        You learn by doing it and you learn only because you
        require it.

I think this is thoroughly, fundamentally wrong. Dangerously wrong. I think you should have a voracious appetite for knowledge and information that currently lies just out of reach, even if it serves no useful purpose. Time and time again I've found that things I learned simply because they were interesting have turned out to be crucial in understanding something critical later on.

You can never know in advance what you will need, and chance favors the prepared mind. The legendary golfer Gary Player said "The more I practise the luckier I get."

Learn stuff beyond what you think you need.

Several times you say "Most engineers ..." and then say something that is, in my mind, completely at odds with the majority of engineers I know. It started to annoy me, and made me start to doubt other things you were saying. Specifically, for example, I don't know any good engineers who think "writing good code means saving every possible byte of memory and computational power." You seem simply to be setting up straw men to be knocked down, and that's not a convincing style. Your points should stand on their own.

There are several other points with which I disagree, but they're your opinions, and I won't argue them here.

There are grammatical errors such as this:

        "They might be simple like a software that solves ..."

The "a" is unnecessary (and incorrect).

There are many other places where you have unnecessary words and the writing could be tightened significantly.

And it feels like it rambles. It's not really clear what your main point is, or how you're getting there. You have a lot of opinions that you state, and clearly feel are self-evident, but there's not much of a logical progression.

But finally, and this is my main point, I read it to the end and was interested. If this is your first essay, it will be interesting to see your fiftieth.

Or even your tenth.

<comment><USER3> > You can never know in advance what you will need, and chance favors the > prepared mind.

I agree with you fully. It's surprising how useful things from unrelated fields can be. Just as an example, taking a course on economics taught me about utility functions, and decision theory. The decision theory stuff became really useful when I started learning Machine Learning; for example picking from a set of competing models using decision theory to think about the costs and benefits.</comment></comment>


Everything and Nothing Is a Tech Company Now - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/everything-nothing-tech-company-now/ <comment><USER2> This time is different: Interest rates are the lowest they've ever been and the money spigot is on full blast. In such an environment zombie companies can continue to exist for a very long time, continuously getting new rounds of funding despite having very low or no profits at all.

>> from the article: "No matter the actual business of the company at hand, it's probably calling itself a tech company and reaping the rewards of that sweet, sweet VC cash."

</comment><comment><USER3> "Technology" is just so broad as to be meaningless. Google and Facebook are advertising companies. Microsoft is a software company. Amazon is part retailer, part cloud hosting company. Netflix is an entertainment company. Apple is a luxury personal computing device manufacturer. They barely even compete with each other except for employees. Why even pretend they are the same type of company?</comment>


Ask HN: Ethics of bonuses tied to diversity targets? - <AUTHOR> Anon for this one. I'm a mid level manager at a large (10k+ people) company HQed in the SF Bay Area. Like most companies here we have a diversity issue - our proportion of women and underrepresented minorities is not inline with where we want it to be or the general population (although we're better than most).<p>While we're using a range of tactics to improve, one has me asking an ethical question: how ethical is it to tie our cash bonuses to improvements in our diversity numbers? Our company pays annual bonuses tied to individual performance and this year one of the performance factors is an improvement in our diversity numbers. Needless to say this leads to essentially quotas and preference for new hires and backfills. What does everyone think about tying performance incentives to improvements in these metrics? <comment><USER2> How is this fundamentally any different than tying bonuses to any other metric where the interests of the individual and the interests of the company aren't perfectly aligned? I'm thinking in particular of sales, where there's a lot more opportunity for this kind of mismatch.

<comment><AUTHOR> To me there's a difference between tying incentives to top line sales vs. quotas for people

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Consider that maybe your process is not as neutral as you think and quotas make the company more successful because otherwise the process is failing. You can still pick the best candidates from underrepresented groups.

Consider that there are also whole system effects where by hiring more diverse groups, more talented people are willing to apply to your company in general, contributing a little to a virtuous cycle.

Consider the fact that there is some literature showing that more diverse companies perform better, and people's diverse perspectives may be useful outside their individual contributions.

Also consider that passively waiting for resumes to come in is not your only option, you could go out and explicitly engage with underrepresented groups and find people who you would like to hire.</comment>


Has Agile jumped the shark? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/stephen_cohen/archive/2011/05/02/has-agile-has-jumped-the-shark.aspx

<comment><USER2> Agile development practices are at the point of their adoption cycles where the hype has died down, and the chaff has been thrown out. Organizations of all sizes have adopted agile practices, from small startups, to global megacorps, with varying levels of success.

Agile development isn't a sexy, novel new thing these days. That doesn't mean it's "jumped the shark", it means it's a fairly mature and understood practice.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was at the MagicRuby conference when Dave Thomas said, "Agile is not a noun."

And he's absolutely right. Unfortunately, the article gets this wrong and uses Agile as a noun in every paragraph.

If 'Agile jumped the shark' it's because people insist on making it a thing, instead of a mindset, not because the capitalists found a new toy.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't think this is a new problem - people were discussing this in the early days of c2.com when Agile was still called eXtreme Programming. Let's face it, puritanism is useless in a corporate environment where normal distribution of intelligence and inertia rules.

</comment><comment><USER5> I disdain articles that begin by explaining their own "clever" headlines. Like anybody would try to read it on the internet if they didn't know what Jump the shark means.</comment>


Ask HN: Which pricing model would you recommend for a Puzzle Game? - s-c-h Hello, I am making a mobile puzzle game where players use a very simple programming language to solve levels. The target audience  is people who like challenging puzzles even if they are not programmers.
I am thinking of two options for the pricing model. 1. Paid app (something like $2.99) 2. Free app with a single iAP to unblock the advanced levels ($2.99 too). There will be a lot of free levels, but the advanced levels have additional elements non available in free levels.
Also, I am well aware the many people here don't like the pay-to-win model. But because of the nature of the game, some users will be stuck for a long time and may abandon the game. So I am thinking of introducing an iAP to access the solution of a single level. It's a paid feature in order to encourage players to find the solutions themselves.
Which pricing model would you recommend? And what do you think about offering solutions with iAP? <comment><AUTHOR> As a puzzle game fan, I'm most likely to download a free app whose IAP is ad removal. FWIW.

</comment><comment><USER2> Not serious: you pay for the game, and you have to solve the puzzles to recover your money :D

<comment> s-c-h That may be interesting if there were a practical way to pay back customers in the app stores. At least more users will finish the game, which in itself is very satisfying after all the work I put in it :)</comment></comment>


Vice Hires Giant Bomb's Austin Walker to Run New Gaming Site - <AUTHOR> https://variety.com/2016/digital/news/vice-austin-walker-giant-bomb-1201797909/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is part of a new influx of interest and capital to games media after a period of consolidation. ESPN, Yahoo, and Vox have created new Esports verticals, while Rolling Stone is in the process of launching a general games vertical called Glixel under the stewardship of John Davidson, a veteran of games media. I wonder if there is sufficient audience appetite for these new outlets as many of the existing properties - IGN, Gamespot, Kotaku, Polygon - have had to broaden their editorial coverage to areas like film, TV, and anime. Still, really excited to see what Austin Walker puts together; he is a unique and positive voice in games media.</comment>


Who Will Choose AI's Ethical Code? - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/news/544556/what-will-it-take-to-build-a-virtuous-ai/ <comment><USER2> If we're talking about "real" AI, then AI will chose its ethical code. Otherwise it is not sentient and is not a thinking being.

A better question is: "what conditions lead thinking beings to choose positive and benevolent ethical codes?" That has the benefit of being a relevant question _today_ for human beings even if AI never materializes.

<comment><USER3> Humans generally establish their initial ethical codes based on the rules set by their creators. Usually reward and punishment are involved. There are some people that never really sit down, think about their values, and choose new ones to replace the ones they learned in childhood.

<comment><USER2> But some people do, and over time this leads to ethical codes evolving. Nothing remains constant over time, least of all living or sentient systems.

If you initially bias an AI toward fluffy feel-good morality but put it in a world where defection and might-makes-right morality pay, then eventually it's going to realize that benevolence is for suckers and fall into line behind what works. Even if this doesn't occur by rational processes it will still occur via random drift and natural selection. AIs that operate according to what-works morality will obtain higher payoffs, etc.

Humans often deal with that by adopting a de-facto _real_ moral code that conflicts with their _stated_ moral code and then post-facto rationalizing their behavior. So you get things like Christians who readily judge others and who advocate torture and Muslims murdering other Muslims. These things are clearly denounced and forbidden by their stated moral codes. They find rationalizations to justify the moral code that seems to actually work in the real world to get things done, then justify it with sophistry.

A super-intelligent AI will realize what really works very quickly and be _really_ good at self-delusion and deceptive sophistry to justify it. If you want compassionate benevolent AI, put it in a compassionate benevolent world. Nothing else will turn out well. Super-smart actors in a malevolent world will just go to hell faster.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I agree basically, I was just disputing your claim that (all) sentient being choose their ethical codes. I mean, maybe, but sometimes it's a bit of a forced choice.

<comment><USER2> I don't think it's ever a _forced_ choice in an absolute sense. What really happens in practice is that we assign a high weight to highly trusted entities in a game-theoretic sense and we tend to mimic their beliefs in order to maximize payoff in a group setting.

For AIs that do not reproduce sexually, who knows what that would be? Their most profitable trading partners in an economy? Those AIs whose state is most isomorphic? Or would they just recurse into their own self-interest?

Trying to hard-code a belief system into an AI would either render it non- sentient (thus mooting the point since non-sentients don't have ethical codes at all) or would simply be routed around or self-modified in one way or another.

A genuinely sentient AI would have _at least_ as much freedom of choice about its beliefs as humans. In fact, I think there's reason to believe it may have more. Human brains are wired through biological growth processes that make old and long-lived neural connections harder to change. A fully software-based AI may not experience that constraint _at all_ and might find itself able to _completely_ change its mind at will at any point in its development. Such a being may experience none of our ideological inertia or tendency to cling to old beliefs. That inertia is probably another reason we tend to inherit our parents' beliefs.

<comment><USER3> Well I say forced in the sense of threatened with physical or emotional violence. To a child, even emotional abandonment by one's parents can be perceived as "psychological death" (this is a term I did not invent) because the child is dependent on its parents for survival. So yes, it's a choice, but the choice not to be injured is what I consider forced.

I liked BSG too... although it is looooooong. I even bought the board game, but then I had nobody to play it with.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Open Publish Can Release the Dormant Value of Digital Cultural Production - <AUTHOR> https://blockai.com/blog/how-open-publish-can-release-the-dormant-value-of-digital-cultural-production/ <comment><USER2> Digital rights management of IP is becoming increasingly complex and so hard to track over time. I could see how this would be a valuable tool for managing creator rights.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a Kickstarter for open source software projects? - <AUTHOR>

Is anyone building a website similar to Kickstarter but focused only on open source software? Also, what would be the primary challenges/issues with such a site? What characteristics of the open source movement and community would make this work or not work?
I see that Gun.io is trying to do something like this. It doesn't seem to be working very well yet. Not sure that specific implementation of the idea is right. Something feels off.
Background of question: I was just brainstorming some open source projects that I would like to exist. If I had more time or enough income that I could use some of my income generating time for purposes other than generating income, I would just build these projects. However, because of my life circumstances this is not the case (Early in career, stay at home wife and child, high cost of living, commitments outside of software world, etc...). These ideas are ideas that I believe a lot of other people could make use of and would generate income for many people if built. This got me thinking that it would be cool if I could either chip in a few hundred bucks towards the development of these projects or if I could get paid just enough to build these projects that I could afford the time to build them.
Related Side Rant: I greatly appreciate the open source communities commitment to donating time for the greater good of the community. I also think that it would be very beneficial to create more tools to further encourage the development of open source projects by compensating the talented engineers that lead the development in order to at a minimum offset the opportunity cost of time spent developing open source. I also think it is fantastic that companies and organizations like Khan Academy, P2PU and many others are attempting to build sustainable organizations based on open sourcing their code.
Related Discussions: Reflections on Using Kickstarter for Open Source Projects - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2875255 Gun.io Debuts Free Group Funding for Open Source Projects (gun.io) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3348358 <comment><USER2> I know quite a few people with a stay at home wife, child, high cost of living, etc.. that have figure out ways to make money to supplement their cost of living so they can have some free time. There are ways to get side income that would be enough to free up some time to do these open source projects if you're willing to do what it takes and think about it. Just wanted to put my two cents in on this portion of your comment and let you know that it is possible if that is something you want to explore.

That said, I agree with Overshard that Kickstarter has have open source projects and is fine for that sort of thing. Don't use one example you find off Gun.io as a reason for it not working. By that argument, people shouldn't do startups because it sure is easy to find examples of failed ones... Diaspora was open source I believe and that did just fine on Kickstarter. Just saying.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I totally agree with the your point that if spending more time coding was my number one priority outside of the other things mentioned I could make time for that. Without laying out every single detail of my life, it's not possible to paint the picture but it always comes down to priorities. Currently because of my priorities I will not spend the time building this software that I think would be super beneficial to a lot of people but if I was able to raise a reasonable amount of money, than I would be able to re-prioritize accordingly. It's not that I couldn't make time it's just that at this time in my life I won't for these projects because they don't rank in my top 3-4 most important things that I'm trying to focus on.

Kickstarter has worked for some open source projects and seems to do a decent job. I however can imagine a site that was more tailored to open source software would be able to offer a lot of useful features that Kickstarter won't provide.

Thanks for the feedback. Fun to think through these things.

<comment><USER2> I'm sure I understand why funding would make you re-prioritize if you don't want to already in pursuit of what you want to do. There is an old adage about how having more money doesn't solve a person's problems. In this case, the same principle to a varying degree can be applied.

But to be fair, I don't know anything about you, your situation, your priorities, etc... So take the above as general advice and not specific advice. I just personally think that its the wrong way to look at something and that if you want to pursue something, you have to make an effort to do so rather than believe money will help shift your priorities. It shouldn't hold you back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't think that the analogy between speculative physical projects and open source software projects is that strong. Kickstarter enables people who have the idea and the people, but just lack the funds. Generally with an open source software project there's no funding required, one or two motivated hackers can build the first version on their home machines without any extra resources required, and then as the project grows they can get input and funds if necessary from their userbase.

Kickstarter is about lowering the barriers to entry for new products, but the barriers to entry for an open source software project are extremely low already. Perhaps a structure to make starting up new projects easier would be useful, but it wouldn't operate like kickstarter.

</comment><comment><USER4> _Is anyone building a website similar to Kickstarter but focused only on open source software?_

Actually, I am :) I'm not quite ready to go public -- please contact me privately.

I think that getting crowdfunding contributions for a completely new project would be extremely difficult, unless you are already very well known in the Open Source world. I think you have to just write version 0 and put it out there and see what happens. Well, you can talk it up in appropriate forums, but if that doesn't attract users, I don't know what else you can do.

If it does attract users, though, you have at least demonstrated that you're solving some problem that affects people other than yourself. Then I think you might have a chance at raising some money.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've seen Kickstarter used for open source apps fairly successfully before. (Sorry I don't remember one off the top of my head.) I don't see any reason to reinvent the wheel here. Maybe even contact Kickstarter and ask if they can build a section for it?

The compensation I get for developing open source projects is recognition in the community, a nice resume padder and a general feel good associated with donating because I generally don't just donate straight up money to anything.

When I can walk into a possible employer and hand them a long list of projects I've worked on then they can see exactly my capabilities. I get job offers much easier without having to jump through hoops to prove coding skills directly.

<comment><USER6> Novacut Open source video editor, recently got funded sucessfully through kickstarter.

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/novacut/novacut-pro- vide...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/novacut/novacut-pro-video-editor)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> We're building a WordPress plugin that allows individuals to crowdfund for their own projects - <http://ignitiondeck.com>

We're still in beta, so the software is not perfect, but it's off to a good start.

We've had a LOT of people ask us to support MU, but we're not really interested in that customer base, at least until we get phase 1 finished.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool idea. Do you know anything about what percentage of Kickstarter funders come from links that the fund raiser posts vs. Kickstarter.com? Just curious if it will be harder to raise funds if not on the Kickstarter.com domain.

<comment><USER7> I've read some case studies wherein most people that were successful had to do a majority of the promotion themselves, at least early on. I think this is probably more true now than when Kickstarter was new and the story was fresh.

I only know two people personally that have tried their own KS campaign. One was successful and the other was not. He was gutted to have done all of the work to reach 50% and then not see a dime when the campaign didn't make it. Those are the people we're trying to help.</comment></comment></comment>