Hikikomori: Why are so many Japanese men refusing to leave their rooms? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23182523 <comment><USER3> This is a personal anecdote, but it happened last week seems relevant-ish:

My landlord is a hikikomori. He is around 50-60 years old, and refuses to leave his room in his house; he instead barks orders at his extremely elderly mother (we're talking older than dirt here; I wouldn't be surprised if she was older than 80).

She is a very kind old woman. I was shocked that he sent her to collect water money (we pay to our landlord instead of directly to the utility; they are quite wealthy and generous, so I doubt it is a scheme to extract extra cash from tenants) as I live on the third floor of a building with no elevator.

I found out about he was that way when I went over to their house to pay my water bill; I didn't want to make her walk up all those stairs again for the sake of around twenty dollars. My water heater was kinda-sorta broken from being quite old (probably as old as the building, so 1991).

She thought it was my air conditioner that was broken, and I corrected her. She stood at the open door his dark, shuttered room (this is around noon) and asked him if that was correct. He growled back in an annoyed tone "I TOLD YOU IT WAS THE WATER HEATER!"

Even though I told her it was fine, she apologized profusely, gave me some vegetables, and sent me on my way.

The whole experience was surreal...

<comment><USER4> On a side note:

 _his extremely elderly mother (we 're talking older than dirt here; I wouldn't be surprised if she was older than 80)._

I found your choice of terms interesting :)

Most people in their 80s that I know seem to be doing fine, are physically and intellectually active, and I wouldn't describe them as "older than dirt" \- unless you're talking about somewhat young dirt, here ;).

May I ask how old you are? I am genuinely curious, as I can picture myself thinking of an 80 year-old as "extremely old" when I was in my early twenties, but not nowadays (I'm 35)

<comment><USER5> 80 is the new 60 basically.

Tangent: people think life extension will magically materialize with some singularity type event, but in reality it's a slow creeping thing. The single most powerful life extension technology ever developed is the cardiac bypass, for example.

<comment><USER6> > The single most powerful life extension technology ever developed is the > cardiac bypass, for example.

How do you mean that?

[http://harvardmagazine.com/2013/03/a-cardiac- conundrum](http://harvardmagazine.com/2013/03/a-cardiac-conundrum)

> Angioplasty can save the lives of heart-attack patients. But for patients > with stable coronary disease, who comprise a large share of angioplasty > patients? It has not been shown to extend life expectancy by a day

<comment><USER7> They state "save the lives of heart-attack patients". That (partially) supports the statement, since saving a life is definitely increasing their lifespan.

The rest of the quote is stating the inverse though, that not all angioplasty recipients live longer (converse? meh, you know what I mean). And that it might be over-proscribed. Neither of those have anything to do with it's ability to prolong life in other cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Japanese society and education can be very demanding of young people.

I live in Japan and have never seen so much brainwashing on the topic of the unemployed or uneducated.

Besides the term hikikomori there is also NEET (Not Employed, Educated or in Training).

Another shocking thing is whenever an upstanding pillar of the community is shown on TV they go out of their way to mention he is a "正社員", a full time employee.

But when they discuss a criminal they always trot out that he's either "無職", unemployed or at least "派遣社員", a temporarily staffed person.

Even within companies the treatment temps get from the full timers can be cruel and uncalled for.

Until this society is taught to be less caste based I don't think the hikikomori problem will go away.

<comment><USER9> I've always been startled by the word 社会人 which literally means "member of society" but AFAICS is used by people when describing themselves conveying the meaning of "I'm a full-time employee" (as opposed to student, part-time jobber etc.).

The implication being that people who're not working full-time are not considered do be part of society?

<comment><USER10> _> The implication being that people who're not working full-time are not considered do be part of society?_

If you're not working full time as a formal employee of a company, you are indeed looked down upon.

I have several friends in Japan who earn more from their side gigs (one is an indie musician, another is a designer, another is a programmer) but they all won't quit their day job, saying that it's vital for them to be part of their corporations to be looked upon positively by the rest of society. Hell if you aren't a full employee it's hard to even get married!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's a bit hurtful that they would say "teenage laziness," when it could be depression.

It started when I was 12 (probably). I slowly started losing interest in doing things that I enjoyed, even more so about the things I didn't enjoy doing. By the time I was 15 I stopped caring about my future and from a straight A student I became a C/D student. When I started high school that I wanted (we have similar requirements for HS as you would need for college or university in Croatia) things were better for about a year, but I started to fade and become "numb" again. This continued throughout HS, but since my HS was mostly about sciences (physics, maths, computer science) and linguistics, so my grades didn't suffer because I found the topics interesting.

I am a freshman & 20 years old. I am doing better because I sought help, while everyone I lived with (mum and grandmother) thought I was just a lazy, worthless do-no-good. I should also mention that my mum has an "abusive personality," which probably contributed to my depression (and is hindering recovery, in all fairness).

I was lucky to have a best friend since kindergarten, who was observant enough to notice my mental and physical deterioration and supported me to find help (to paraphrase: "i will beat the fuck out of you if you don't get yourself checked for some shit").

I was diagnosed with MDD (Major depressive disorder). I wouldn't say I am good, yet, but I am better than I was a few years ago and I haven't thought about suicide for almost 2 months now (which I did, for 4/7 days, six months ago).

TL;DR: When you are depressed, it seems like the air is thick and heavy, it seems like every ray of light is trying to push you down onto your shadow, it seems like every movement you do is being countered by an invisible force and requires you to use more energy. All your thoughts are polluted with a dark tint. You have no dreams, no hopes, no desires. You just wish to escape. Maybe they are not lazy? Maybe hiding in their rooms are the early attempts of escape, and nobody is noticing their silent cries for help.

P. S: Sorry for the long&sad post.

<comment><USER12> "Lazy" is also what kids with ADHD are labelled. I think "lazy" is a cop-out explanation, since it doesn't actually explain anything. Often the incentives are aligned so that it's in the kid's best interest to put some effort into homework. If they're not doing it, treat it like a debugging program: why aren't they responding to the incentives? Could be depression, ADHD, perfectionism/fear of failure, or a bunch of other things.

<comment><USER13> Trust me, laziness is a real thing; even when everything in the world points towards doing the work being the best thing for you, you just can't be bothered.

<comment><USER14> Of course it's a real thing. He never said it wasn't. What he said was that it doesn't explain anything, and that's true.

Laziness is a _symptom_ , not a cause. It's like diagnosing someone with a "cough". It may be correct, but it's pointless, because it's obvious and tells you absolutely _nothing_ about what to do.

<comment><USER15> At what point is a personality merely a symptom? If everything about us is a result of our ailments, and all of our ailments have treatments, how does a person know which parts of his personality are him and which aren't? What am "I" then?

<comment><USER16> I would probably say that we can classify our personality as the difference in sets of what anyone with our ability and in the same situation would do, and what we do.

That being said, our ailments could probably be categorized by affecting all aspects of our life equally and in full measure of time (i.e something that doesn't fluctuate across the years is probably an untreated ailment).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Let's look at it from another perspective.

Why are 20 somethings without jobs, with minimal face-to-face social skills, average to poor grades and therefore minimal career prospects, confined to their homes when a hyper-competitive, youth loving, cute/adorable/flashy/shiny-thing loving society awaits them outside?

When the alternative is to be involved in the antithesis of your own persona, I can imagine why the slightly _less_ horrifying self-imposed withdrawal is still more attractive than the slightly _more_ horrifying "outside". Despite the blatantly obvious effect it may have on your life.

Source: 2 Close pals in Shiogama living together (one who had to deal with the other's hikikomori ways).

<comment><USER18> Indeed, the whole flashy/noisy outside world in Japan can become very alienating sometimes. Sometimes in weekends in Japan the only thing I want to do is to stay away from other people.

<comment><USER19> There's a whole other side to Japan than the flashy/noisy side of Tokyo.

One of the start ups who frequents HN lives in Japan's country side and he's written some interesting blogs and comments on here about how he can go days without seeing another human aside his wife.

But sadly the side of Japan that seems to be exported the most is the futuristic, over-populated scenes from Tokyo and thus many foreigners assume that the whole of the nation is like it.

<comment><USER17>
      >Japan that seems to be exported the most is the futuristic, over-populated scenes from Tokyo...

Flashy loving != Flashy itself.

Shiogama, for example, is primarily centered around the fishing industry. You can imagine what my friend was compelled to get into when he had his heart set elsewhere. Since the tsunami cut deep into the family income, he was a little more accepting of their needs and slowly, but surely, he's growing out of it. It may take years for him to fully integrate into society though.

Also, people need to stop thinking of Tokyo as a "city". It's big and varied enough to be a "county" in the Western sense.

<comment><USER19> _> Flashy loving != Flashy itself._

I was only quoting the previous commenter there :)

 _> Shiogama, for example, is primarily centered around the fishing industry. You can imagine what my friend was compelled to get into when he had his heart set elsewhere. Since the tsunami cut deep into the family income, he was a little more accepting of their needs and slowly, but surely, he's growing out of it. It may take years for him to fully integrate into society though._

That was actually my point. That there's a whole side to Japan that isn't like the western culture perceives.

 _> Also, people need to stop thinking of Tokyo as a "city". It's big and varied enough to be a "county" in the Western sense._

To be fair, that's true for many large cities - even in the west.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This isn't only in Japan, it is a phenomenon that is spreading across the globe. Japan is first hit because of the strong disparities between generations. Truth is, the internet brought about a lot of things so one could have a constant "window out" from a single room. Most of us know precisely what I am talking about.

I would like to theorize that this is only one of the things that facilitate such isolation by making it more tolerable. What pushes people IN is the social reflection. Misfits often get shunned for being different. Tack all that on top of the social networks and the compound strength can be overwhelming: This generation is the first generation EVER to get to observe first-hand how their failure compares to their 5th grade friend Jimbo, who's now a doctor. And Suzan has had 2 kids. Meanwhile Jack constantly posts pictures of his new cars on sites X,Y,Z. That doesn't help your self esteem when you see everyone happy and you're lonely. Back in the days, your dad might have messed up for 3 years, but the stigma never stuck because (1) people did not have proof from the network itself and (2) he was able to "snap out of it" because he wasn't constantly reminded of others great lives (and by comparison how miserable he was) - those things would get ushered behind the blinds of hearsay, they'd be on the very periphery of your life. But now all of those haunt you, via Facebook feed and other social medias, where subconsciously we mostly try to advertise our successes. I think it is time for psychiatry to wake up to this. I fear it will take another 50-100 years for this to be understood.

I wish the world would wake up and realize that WE as a society are malfunctioning and that the burden to support each-others falls on all.

<comment><USER21> It doesn't help that a lot of people only post good stuff to Facebook. "Pictures of wife and I celebrating our anniversary!". They don't then say "We both screamed at each other for 3 hours, just after the photo was taken."

<comment><USER20> I have this friend who manages to do just the opposite. He complains that his life sucks, that he needs a job and that he's lonely and wishes he'd meet someone. This of course has the adverse effect on people: it makes them keep their distance because you're "anti-social" or a "downer". Pretty creepy to realize that your whole life can be affected so much by what you see of the world... and what the world sees of you. Television probably had a lesser impact previously, but we're entering a whole new level of social superficiality.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, overshare can work both ways. All your friends are either having a fantastic time, or their life is ruined. Both can be a bit depressing to watch.

<comment><USER22> _All your friends are either having a fantastic time, or their life is ruined. Both can be a bit depressing to watch._

If you find it depressing that they're having a "fantastic time", then they aren't your friends in any meaningful sense.

This isn't directed at you. Envy is a stigmatized but natural human emotion. (I rarely feel direct envy, but who doesn't second-guess the path they've taken? It's very easy to look for greener grass and say, "Man, I could be a _Director_ now instead of a 3-failed-startup wash-out", never mind that the other person is Director of a failing, bland company.) Everyone gets down when they see other people having easy, seemingly unearned success-- and oversharers tend to be the hypersocial people who make their successes look even _more_ unearned (it being better, in their view, to be well-liked and socially successful than talented or hard-working).

My point, rather, is that if these people's successes get you down, they aren't _friends_ in any meaningful sense. And social network "friendship" is anything but in many cases, since many people are trying to incite envy to validate their own choices and results.

Most of my real friends I never check on Facebook.

<comment><USER23> Plenty of people are jealous of our actual friends _sometimes_. There's just still a difference between, "Damn, I wish I had a nice apartment like Miles does" and "Wow, fuck you Miles, posting pics of your snooty-ass new apartment".

You can be jealous of the good experience without letting it poison your liking for the person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Hikikomori might be a Japanese term, but its not a Japanese phenomenon. I know dozens of my American friends who do the same thing -- hide from seemingly unprecedented expectations and similarly daunting odds, hide from society in alcohol, in television, in dual 2560x1600 monitors, even in exercise.

(My room was video games, and I'm glad I found the doorknob.)

<comment><USER25> I understand this completely, having been through much the same during a darker period of my life. Seriously dark. Flat Black.

Sometimes I still can't believe I found the "doorknob", but I'm really glad I did.

Also, reading the term NEET here reminded me of Eden of the East, which is a cool Anime if anyone is into that.

<comment><USER26> Welcome to NHK also explores the NEET phenomenon, complete with a main character who is a complete shut-in at 22.

<comment><USER10> That manga probably takes things too lightheartedly / humorously though so I personally didn't find it particularly informational or revealing.

It makes up for it by being entertaining though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think the simplest explanation is the one always ignored. Japan is a tough place to live and raise a family. It's super expensive, the economy has been in a funk for a long time, the work hours are widely known to be brutally long, people don't know anything but work and sleep over there. When one is confronted by this harsh reality, one wonders, what's the point? So they either commit suicide, which Japan ranks amongst the highest in the world, or they just withdraw from society.

And look at Japan's demographic trends. It's like all of the young people just said to hell with it and are not procreating anymore. I don't blame them either. If all I had to look forward to in life is a meaningless existence of an 80 hr work week to support a small family, I would probably not even go there.

<comment><USER18> I think you ignore the fact that parents accept the phenomenon and don't do anything about it. They let their children become apathetic and do not take action. I see that numerous times in Japan (I live here) where there is a clear detachment between family members and an agreement that they should not influence each other's lives.

<comment><USER28> Maybe they don't really know how to act about it. After all (and I am just guessing here) tradition doesn't teach how to help this people.

<comment><USER29> I don't think any culture really teaches how to help shut-ins, at least once it becomes a legitimate mental health issue.

In the western world, however, parents will very quickly make their newly reclusive child's life miserable (taking away TV, games, computers, etc.), and even kick adult children to the curb if they refuse to support themselves. And because this is done almost from the start, most kids aren't yet so far gone that they can still reintegrate into society themselves, if given enough incentive.

So a lot of potential cases don't develop severe mental health issues like they would if left alone.

<comment><USER30> I think that's a bit of confirmation bias. Most healthy people who start becoming shut-ins get a bunch of chaotic interventions and ultimatums from family, so most of the people that you know of that ended up doing better after being shut-ins did so after a bunch of interventions.

I feel that I've been like this at many times in my life, and it was only when people left me alone and just helped me by _actually helping_ me that I got better. Sometimes I just need people to make sure that I eat, that I don't worry too much, and that I feel that there's a reason not to sleep all day. That people think that the only constructive help is an attacking kind of help, a kind of forceful removal of all supports to make the boat choose to float or sink, I think is a weird cultural thing.

What if the boat has a hole in it? You might want to work on repairing that hole before removing the supports. It's telling that the usual metaphor for describing the ultimatum being given by the people who practice these aggressive interventions is "Sink or Swim." Don't be either too lazy to swim or too stupid to figure out how to swim. A boat with a hole in it, you coddle and fix. You can't incentivize a boat to be fixed, you fix it. Would you torture the flu out of people? Give people enough motivation by torture that they would force their immune system to attack the flu that much harder?

Middle class people used to be sent to _sanitariums_ when they locked themselves in rooms and stopped bathing - to rest out in a peaceful environment, in some fresh mountain/desert/forest air. Working people got sent to _sanatoriums_ with cinder-block walls, and only after they actually fell physically sick. Has our society gotten productive and wealthy enough that we can bring back sanitariums?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Honestly, I don't know if I'd blame them. Japanese society, particularly with regard to sociological structure has a lot to be desired.

Recruiting practice heavily centered to "new graduates" (which means if you don't get hired in the year you are graduating, you are screwed.)

Even if you do land on a job, then unpaid overtime being norm rather than exception.

Across the field, quality of output from any jobs in Japan are insanely high compared to many of countries; and basically workers end up paying the cost of that. (and many of them involving unpaid hours and over the top expectations) And I can certainly understand people exhausted to end up in the state of "Hikikomori."

It is a nice place to visit, but living there can be tough...

</comment><comment><USER32> This hit like a ton of bricks. There are days when I could easily identify with these Japanese men. On the days where I'm more outgoing, confident, and social, I've noticed that feeling productive -- and what I deem to be "happiness" \-- go hand-in-hand. It could be something as simple as helping a friend set up their wireless router or tutoring my niece in math. It's almost as if I _allow_ myself to be a part of society once I feel like I've earned it -- as silly as this may sound to those who haven't experienced this phenomenon. Ultimately, and I'm not saying it's a panacea, but what never fails for me is to attain some feeling of productivity or importance.

When I was a kid, my dad told me something that has always stuck with me: "Pretend like everyone you meet has the following sentence stamped on their forehead: 'I want to feel important'".

<comment><USER33> I wonder what are the implications of introducing Buddhist teachings in school. What is the optimal way to introduce them so that they sink in well ? They directly target that stamp on everyone's forehead(among many other things that are wrong about society) and even though neuroscience is saying basically the same thing nowadays, for some reason most people will listen more to how Buddha expressed.

Obviously, one doesnt necessarily have to introduce them as buddhist teachings but part of some moral or character building course. Parents dont have enough time to look into all this stuff and by the time psychologists come to the scene, its already too late.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Anecdotally, the phenomenon is exacerbated by many people with varying degrees of untreated depression. (A disease which Japan addresses shockingly poorly, even by the standards of Japanese mental health care, which is shockingly poor even considering that mental health care lags treatment of other illnesses virtually everywhere.)

<comment><USER35> It's interesting how quick people are to put a label on things: many put it down to 'depression' (which is somehow now a 'disease' in a fantastic butchering of language). Even the term 'hikikomori' is a nice label to stick on something that nobody really understands, so we can get these nice mental health experts in who can give us a name for something and help the problem go away. The current attempts to understand this, and similar conditions, are in my view flawed, and counter-productive. Before Japan floods itself with mental health care to 'fix the problem', I think the mental health industry needs a major self-diagnosis first.

I see such conditions as a battle between individualism and collectivism. The collective wants us to adapt to the behaviors and emotions of everyone else, which may conflict with the individual desire to be ones self (And thus, alone: the only place where we can be ourselves). Society wants conformity and familiarity out of fear of the unknown, and as such, we are quick to reject individualism, stick a label on it, and attempt to generalize so we can feel like we're back in control. The mental health industry is the embodiment of this collectivist mentality. It starts with a preconceived solution: that of 'normal', and infers the problems, giving names to conditions which lie outside of that considered normal.

If you consider that mental health conditions are never concretely defined: but instead a list of common symptoms is given a label based on statistical probability: you have the condition if 4 out of 6 of these symptoms apply, for example. The truth is this is all we understand - a very macroscopic view of behavior, emotion and chemical response from our bodies. Nobody really knows the fundamental constructs which define our behavior and feelings yet. The mental health industry doesn't let that stop it though, and is so sure of itself that it can easily apply labels and it can 'fix people', based solely on past results (which aren't that great). Ultimately, what defines whether or not an behavioral, emotional or chemical response is part of a condition is that of perspective: The perspective of those defining the labels based mostly on deviation from 'normal human'.

If we contrast the collective against the individual though, we might come to different conclusions about which needs 'treatment'. The collective favors false values like patriotism, piety and loyalty over actual moral values. It's greedy. The collective says one thing and does another. It's a serial liar. It pillages and murders. By any definition of the word, the collective is psychopathic. Yet individually, we have moral values. It's each of our fears that ultimately manifest into the collective, and the rejection of 'non- conformists' is part of that.

That's why we can have leaders, worshiped like gods, calling for the mass murder of innocent humans, and revered with medals of honor. At the other end of the spectrum, seemingly innocent young men and women who choose solitude, harming nobody but themselves and close relatives, are treated like the bane of society. They must be 'fixed'!

Japan is traditionally a very conformist society, and the pressures of the collective on the individual to succeed are massive. It's not surprising that at some point young people choose not to live for others anymore, but to be themselves - and living in the only place where they can be.

"Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes." - W. Gibson

Also, lets not forget how often 'mentally ill' has been used as a pretext for authoritative governments to lock away dissenters for expressing their individuality: alternative views outside those deemed acceptable by the collective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> _" I was very well mentally, but my parents pushed me the way I didn't want to go," he says. "My father is an artist and he runs his own business - he wanted me to do the same." But Matsu wanted to become a computer programmer in a large firm - one of corporate Japan's army of "salarymen. But my father said: 'In the future there won't be a society like that.' He said: 'Don't become a salaryman.'"_

Starting your own SaaS/app/startup isn't that common for Japanese people, but it is starting to pick up more steam over the past few years. Sounds like his father would be happy to know what he can do with his computer skills if he expands out to becoming an entrepreneur.

A bit of a wasted opportunity there, that I wish someone could have explained the opportunities available to him instead of becoming hikikomori.

<comment><USER34> I know a few people in my generation who "opted out" of The Offer (+) who eventually found themselves doing web freelancing. There are social difficulties involved in doing it, but they're successful and MUCH happier with it than they were in their brief forays to salarymandom.

We'll be getting together for our college club annual reunion in September and once more trying to tell kids "Hey guys, if the salaryman thing doesn't pan out, we'll take you out to coffee and tell you about some other options." Many middle class Japanese kids have literally never heard that once in their entire lives.

\+ Roughly 30% of Japanese society, mostly middle class and male, has this life plan in place from birth: You will study extraordinarily hard and test into a good high school. You will then study extraordinarily hard and test into a good university. You will be hired by a large Japanese megacorp along with 200 people from your university. You will then be a salaryman, owned body and soul by your company, and worked in conditions which resemble indentured servitude for roughly your first 20 to 25 years. In return, you will be promoted in lockstep with the rest of your entering class, you will never be fired, and you will be awarded social status and security with the guarantee of neither of them ever being imperiled by virtually anything.

<comment><USER36> There are also people who accept The Offer because they feel they have no other option. And they are not so happy about their job, but they feel they cannot quit for various social reasons ("But everyone would love to have my job at MegaCorp", "If I quit, what if I fail?"). My gentle prodding to test their comfort zone sometimes works, sometimes doesn't.

<comment><USER37> Indeed. I taught English to a mid-30s lady who worked for a subsidiary of JR. Every lesson, it was the same complaining about her job, her boss.. I suggested that she find a new job and her reaction was complete terror. "I can only imagine it will be worse than what I have now".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I have to admit I was frightened when I heard of hikikomori. I am not Japanese, but I have a tendency for staying at home, sometimes for as much as a couple or three days. I thought I might be or end up like them.

I have what you would call a successfull full-time job as a programmer and my tendency for staying home was so that I could hack on things I wanted. The pressure however to try and stay ahead of the curve has always been there. Some of it came from parents and society (I'm not American either) but I would say most of it came from me seeing no future ahead of me if I got stuck at the country I was from. I would have gotten by, but I doubt I'd be happy. I'd be on a grim path. I probably felt I was a bit ahead of this curve to not be affected, but now that I'm getting older (35) I'm starting to wonder if I really fenced it off. I'm still unmarried and like to stay home; just in a different country.

What makes it hard for me to connect is not a presence of pressure to do well, but a lack of authenticity in people or events going around in the several places I've lived in the US. I'm talking about a connection. Even as a teenager I would feel some sort of connection with people around me. Now it seems there isn't enough of a will in people to do the same. Whatever dense ingredient was there has now dissipated or distributed over by time or a larger moving population.

When I read of hikikomori, I ended up writing a blog/site to record such connections. Here it is if you find it useful: hikigo com. I like these small reminders that there's enough beauty if you care enough to observe it. I never posted this site anywhere until now, because the anonymity of it is what i like most about it - as a sort of protest to the social Facebook pressure.

I hope it stays that way.

<comment><USER39> The challenge seems to be in finding or creating friendship circles with similar or compatible values/outlook. In a busy fragmented society, you have to work in a deliberate and persistent way at that. I've concluded that a key thing to do is to pursue my passions and find IRL communities that share them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> If I had the money I would probably stay at home all the time as well. I have no problem socializing and doing stuff. It's just that I prefer being home.

<comment><USER41> You may be surprised by how cheap it is to do. You could retire forever on even just $100,000.

<comment><USER42> Care to elaborate? I presume this figure does not assume you have a spouse or children to support.

<comment><USER41> Correct. It does not account for spouse or children.

<comment><USER43> Please do elaborate though - that figure seems about 10-20x too low.

<comment><USER44> Maybe it assumes you already have housing, and that you live in a country with socialized medicine.

I can see myself retiring with maybe U$ 500.000, though I'd like to have more to afford better healthcare than my country's default (which is MUCH better than the U.S. average, but much worse than what you can buy with money).

What my grandparents did was to rent 3 or 4 properties, and live off that. They did so for about 20 years.

<comment><USER43> What does 'already having housing' mean? It's state provided? Even in a country without property taxes a property you own outright will require maintenance.

500k still seems low but might do it if you don't have rent to pay. I'd still love to hear the original commenter explain his or her reasoning - there might be some useful tips to learn from.

<comment><USER45> > 500k still seems low but might do it if you don't have rent to pay.

As I answered in the sibling thread, it very much depends on where you live; $500k is, as a back-of-the-envelope calculation, about a total amount of money an average denizen of my country will earn during lifetime, so it definitely is more than enough to live there.

<comment><USER43> I guess that assumes your country doesn't develop rapidly and experience the accompanying inflation of the cost of living.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am ignorant of the deep aspects of Japanese culture, but my suspicion is that it's a high-pressure society that uses shame heavily in the false belief that shame is a motivator. In reality excessive shame generally produces withdrawal, demotivation, and depression.

Combine this with the demographics -- it's very hard for young people to work their way up in an elder-dominated culture -- and you have a recipe for irrational expectations followed by shame and withdrawal.

That's my outsider suspicion.

</comment><comment><USER46> There are degrees of isolation. Paul Graham talked about suburbs being a place designed to raise children. He said that as you grow older a suburb starts to seem fake. Another reason suburbs seem fake is their demographics. A place designed to raise children will primarily have children in it. After a certain age it is no longer acceptable to talk to kids as equals. You bite your tongue and talk in a sing song voice or risk the ire of parental suspicion. In their eyes anyone who would _want_ to talk to a child is a pedophile or other bogeyman.

You have friends who grow up with you. A few generations of teens live in your town at best. Should they not enjoy your company you are SOL. Adults are suspicious of your youth, energetic youngsters scare them. They are held to the same sort of rule about talking to children except to them you are a child. That in mind it should not be hard to imagine how you end up a social pariah in the Americas.

You know there is somebody else out there just like you. You will never meet them because they are inside just like you. The large pool of bored kids that hang out on IRC and talk about whatever it is other kids talk about has dried up. Twitter is not a replacement. Facebook is not a replacement. Those services are localist. They focus on the people you know in your town.

When you have nobody to talk to books become your conversation partners. Stacks of them in a sort of personal library. What F. T. Marinetti called "Public dormitories where you sleep side by side for ever with beings you hate or do not know.". You start to hate yourself for not reading them. You start to hate yourself _for_ reading them. You desperately want to talk about what you are reading yet you know it is boring and nobody wants to listen.

The loneliness starts to break you. It eats away at your sanity. You start daydreaming of smashing the monitor that glows against your face in the night. Throwing the books from piles into the walls their pages slamming into drawers and dressers. Pages litter the floor as you step forward to the CRT television and knock it from the stand. Blood trails behind your step as the glass cuts your feet coagulating into a pool around you. Sitting in the fetal position against the wall of that destroyed room looking up at the face of your shocked mother.

"Son, I think you need to see a doctor." she says in an almost whisper.

"I know" you whisper back.

</comment><comment><USER47> I noticed a gender focus : why are so many Japanese MEN refusing to leave their rooms?

I found a research report on the topic which basically seems to say that Hikikomori women are probably labeled as "Parasite Singles" rather than Hikikomori, but if the two sets of youth were considered as one, the distribution by gender would be closer to 50:50 rather than the impression that the media serves to give that is is almost always a man : [http://towakudai.blogs.com/Hikikomori_as_Gendered_Issue.pdf](http://towakudai.blogs.com/Hikikomori_as_Gendered_Issue.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER48> Turning a mental illness into a sub-culture so society doesn't have to deal with it. Very nice.

</comment><comment><USER49> The article states that the expert thinks it's a problem in Korea and Italy, too. I can't speak for Italy as I've never been there, but it is definitely not common in Korea. Yes, Koreans live with their parents until they're married, typically, and yes, some Korean males are kind of shut-ins, but it's definitely not a phenomenon here like it is with our neighbors across the East Sea.

I can't say for certain what caused the differences between Japan and Korea despite the countries have very similar cultural and historical backgrounds, including economically, but for whatever reason that's kind of unheard of here.

<comment><USER50> I agree, I'm definitely familiar with 20-something relatives having trouble entering the workforce in Korea, but I've never heard of _this_ particular phenomenon there. I've heard of _different_ issues, like PC bbang/gaming addictions and the occasional shut-ins.

It feels like all the pieces are in place for a Hikikomori-like phenomenon to hit in Korea, but somehow conditions are just different enough it doesn't happen. It might be that the cultural pressures to get a job and get married (and get out of the house) are just ever so slightly stronger. It also doesn't hurt that it seems more socially acceptable to seek employment outside of salarymanship to Chaebol. Sometimes I think it seems like every person in Korea has tried to start their own business at least once.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> On this topic, I recommend to watch a movie called Tokyo [1]. It's in fact 3 short films. One of them is about Hikikomori. Very well done indie series.

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0976060/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0976060/)

</comment><comment><USER52> It probably doesn't help that news reports like this associate his hobbies with "major sex crimes".

</comment><comment><USER53> They were discouraged and discouraged and discouraged, as if they were conditioned to be discouraged. They've decided to escape the loop altogether, by shutting off the sources of discouragement, or social interactions.

</comment><comment><USER18> There's a good anime/manga about the subject, called "Welcome to NHK" (NHK = Nihon Hikkikomori, not the TV station with the same name). It captures the situation pretty well.

<comment><USER52> I disagree. NHK shows the psychological feelings as more akin to hallucinations, and there isn't really an exploration into the disease. It's more just a story of a happy (but unlikely) sudden recovery.

<comment><USER18> Well, it's just a fiction so you can't expect it to be super realistic either, but it gives insights as to why the main character ended up this way. I don't think it replaces a proper study of the phenomenon but it's a good place to start with to become acquainted with the everyday life of these people.

<comment><USER54> > Well, it's just a fiction so you can't expect it to be super realistic > either

Why not? The author was apparently a hikikomori, so presumably he knows what he's talking about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Asians in general have a high probability of genetically having less Oxytocin receptors. Oxytocin affects levels of self-esteem and optimism. It also has a strong effect on whether stress causes a person to withdraw from social situations or to seek help from others. It also affects empathy in a society.

The withdrawal symptoms shown in this article, and subsequent scorn by Japanese society (rather than sympathy) could be a indicator of this genetic predisposition.

Here is a breakdown of oxytocin receptiveness across some common racial groups. The more G's you have, the more resilient and social you are.

[http://browser.1000genomes.org/Homo_sapiens/Variation/Popula...](http://browser.1000genomes.org/Homo_sapiens/Variation/Population?r=3:8803871-8804871;v=rs53576;vdb=variation;vf=40343)

Also the wikipedia article on oxytocin might be of interest for anyone who has Aspergers or Autistic tendencies.

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

It's interesting to ponder Oxytocin's effect on Asian culture as a whole... confucianism, book smarts, wrote memorization, suffer in silence, etc.

</comment><comment><USER56> From the BBC article: "For a time one company operating in Nagoya could be hired by parents to burst into their children's rooms, give them a big dressing down, and forcibly drag them away to a dormitory to learn the error of their ways."

I was just thinking of starting up something like this in Australia, but just realised the bikies (e.g., Hell's Angels, Nomad, Rebels etc) already do something very similar.

<comment><USER57> That sounds very similar to what my dad would have done. If you have time to be depressed in your room, then you have time to clean the garage. Not saying that this was a great solution and I certainly hated it at the time, but that's how I was raised. I pretty much learned that you do not want to be ever caught moping around the house, lest you be put to work!

<comment><USER58> Similarly, in my house, woe betide you if you told Dad you were bored - <USER2> would give you a _list_ of things to do!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Well, I highly doubt that generational social issues are going to stay confined to Japan, and I would argue that they are already common around the world at large. Here in the West, people ranging from 18 to 30 are seeing higher unemployment and higher debt levels as educational costs rise. A lot of us visiting this site may not see this as unemployment within the IT sector is not as high as other sectors, but many of my friends fit the category of highly educated and unemployed.

A few of my friends have taken to getting 3 part time pink collar jobs to try and make it on their own. They sleep maybe 4 hours each night, a little more on weekends. Some would argue that this problem is related to degrees that are not useful in the job market, but in older generations only 1/3 of the population had attended college... yet those over 60 hold over 3/4 of the USA's wealth.

</comment><comment><USER60> Reminds me of Bartleby the Scriviner.

I'd guess that the widespread "major depression" aspect may be based in an acute perception (may or not be accurate or accurately portrayed) of what life is like for many Nippon men.

Thankless and sweatshop-like work, heavy drinking, the high value of socialization and lack of individuation. Not a surprise, then if "most men lead lives of quiet desperation" as they did when Thoreau recognized the fact.

If this is happening to young teens (sad) maybe they cannot see a "road less travelled". Homogenization of options is not good for everyone's mental health.

</comment><comment><USER61> From a medical perspective, I'd worry that many of these folks suffer from major depressive disorder, social anxiety disorder, or obsessive compulsive disorder.

This is not to pathologize behaviors people choose which don't interfere with quality of life, but my gut reaction is that many of those described in the article would benefit from treatment with psychotherapy and/or medication. However, I'm told that significant stigma is attached to seeking evaluation and treatment for such issues in Japan (and obviously elsewhere, including the west).

<comment><USER62> Granted that applying a layperson's understanding of a DSM category to people I've never met from a completely alien culture is a pointless and possibly crass task, but reading through this I was thinking of avoidant personality disorder: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoidant_personality_disorder#S...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoidant_personality_disorder#Signs_and_symptoms)

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> According to that article it's not just men, only 53% of them are male.

</comment><comment><USER50> So is this distinct enough from regular 'ol depression that it qualifies as a culture-bound syndrome like _Taijin kyofusho_?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture- bound_syndrome](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture-bound_syndrome)

</comment><comment><USER64> The cultural factors mentioned in the article all sound plausible; I wonder if it has anything to do with [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink)

</comment><comment><USER65> In America we call this social phobia.

</comment><comment><USER66> They interviewed someone called "Hide" on the subject of hiding at home. Seriously?

<comment><USER8> Well, it's pronounced "Hee-day" to be fair.

But yeah, ironic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Maybe they are searching for James Halliday's Easter Egg?

</comment><comment><USER22> _The trigger for a boy retreating to his bedroom might be comparatively slight - poor grades or a broken heart, for example - but the withdrawal itself can become a source of trauma. And powerful social forces can conspire to keep him there._

My observation is that mental illness often has a hurricane-like property wherein the storm is bearable but the social fallout (looting, arson, opportunistic crime) afterward is far more destructive. The disease itself is unpleasant but bearable. People are not.

In a high-stress society like corporate life in the U.S. or Japan, everyone will have deviances from perfect mental function. One would wish for them to have negative autocorrelation (self-correction). Instead, those deviations are often pushed _further_ by external forces. Sometimes it's intentional (ambitious rivals want to thin out competition) but normally it's just an artifact of the stupid stigmas around these diseases. ("He's depressed, not a team player.")

People _really_ don't understand these problems. They think a "panic attack" is that time they hit a heart rate of 120 because they drank too much caffeine before a deadline. No, that's not panic (that's mild anxiety). Panic attacks throw about 50 different symptoms (you have to have a few before you see them all) of which any one of them would feel like an acute, life-threatening crisis to a sane person. Almost everyone who has a true panic attack will end up in the ER, the first time. You have to cycle through all of the bizarre symptoms a few times before you realize that the attacks aren't dangerous. Once you've learned this, they're just annoying ("shit, there goes the next 10 minutes") but the first few attacks are devastating because they feel _real_.

I also think that the corporate world _creates_ laziness and depression, not in the blase Dilbert sense, but because people who are conditioned to associate work with subordination turn either into disengaged clock-punchers (steal from the system, because it will steal from you) or useless, delegating executives. We think our society values _work_ , but given the increasing association between work and subordination, isn't that indicative of the opposite?

Society effectively programs people to lose motivation and shut down, then stigmatizes people who do so-- whether because of conditioning or an unrelated biological problem-- even if it's only for a week or two. I think the "test" of the dues-paying grunt work is whether a person can keep going in spite of recurring negative signals (subordination, artificially delayed advancement, repetitive busy-work without the leeway to automate it or render it unnecessary) but the truth is that that's a stupid fucking test.

<comment><USER68> > Panic attacks throw about 50 different symptoms (you have to have a few > before you see them all) of which any one of them would feel like an acute, > life-threatening crisis to a sane person. Almost everyone who has a true > panic attack will end up in the ER, the first time. You have to cycle > through all of the bizarre symptoms a few times before you realize that the > attacks aren't dangerous. Once you've learned this, they're just annoying > ("shit, there goes the next 10 minutes") but the first few attacks are > devastating because they feel real.

I've never suffered from a panic attack, but my wife does, and regularly. This describes our situation almost exactly. The symptoms are diverse enough to be congruent with everything from acid reflux to a full blown heart attack.

The attacks are milder now primarily because she started timing them and now knows going into one that they'll be over in ten to twenty minutes. Not knowing that leads to the spiral of despair, where you become more and more anxious because you don't know how this panic attack is going to end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Hikikomori, momorikiki. Those are usual mental health problems such as depression (probably, around 98%), psychopathy, or mental retardation. Those guys just need to see the doctor, a psychotherapist.

Giving them tags and doing nothing about their problems is just uncivilized, such as in developing countries where most people are uneducated, the people with rare physical diseases who desperately need help get alienated or are made fun of.

</comment><comment><USER70> because they are afraid of z-day :)

</comment><comment><USER70> because they are preparing for the z-day :)</comment>


Looking for cash?  Call on small VCs. - <AUTHOR> http://www.informationarbitrage.com/2008/10/forecast-for-ea.html

<comment><USER2> Very interesting and helpful. Thanks.</comment>


New KITT is a Ford Mustang.  Guess Ford was the highest bidder. - <AUTHOR> http://tv.yahoo.com/show/345/photos/1#goto_1

<comment><USER2> I've made my position clear on this ... endeavour elsewhere: <http://reddit.com/info/2255i/comments/c226il>

I see it's been reduced to a made-for-TV film now.</comment>


Thinking outside the niche: "Proust Was a Neuroscientist" - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/Proust-Was-Neuroscientist-Jonah-Lehrer/dp/0618620109 <comment><AUTHOR> The description reminded me of Hackers and Painters.</comment>


Piet is a programming language, whose programs look like abstract art. - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_(programming_language) <comment><USER2> Quick! Something interesting. Let's mark it for deletion!

(Sadly, it looks like they've already made two attempts on this article)

<comment><USER3> Well, it appears that downvote abuse seems to have somewhat abated after a rash of downvote hordes around the new years (goodness that was annoying)....now they just flag and delete everything in sight when it doesn't fall into their personal concept of "interesting".

<comment><USER4> I might be mistaken but I think davidw was referring to earlier attempts to delete the article on Wikipedia, not Hacker News.

<comment><USER5> See, for example:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Dwm_%282nd_nomination%29)

From the deletion discussion: "Previous AfD was a trainwreck due to offsite activism."

Translation: People from the "rest of the internet" stepped in to clarify how important they thought the article was, so they decided to declare the discussion invalid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The collection of sample programs is fun to look at: <http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet/samples.html>

<comment><USER7> The program for calculating Pi is my favourite. "Naturally, a more accurate value can be obtained by using a bigger program." made my day.

<comment><USER8> There was an obfuscated C program that worked the same way: a circle of code used to get its own area and radius. I can't seem to find it though.

<comment><USER9> The Wikipedia page on the IOCCC has it. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOCCC#Examples>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am so tempted to waste half my day playing with this. One day this will replace 3D barcodes and people will get mobile phone apps from soda cans.

<comment><USER11> The idea of those barcodes is to maximize the reliable, storable information, regardless of format. If you make the information bytecode for a programming language, people would be able to get mobile phone apps from soda cans without needing to program in an esoteric programming language.

Using something like piet doesn't maximize reliability (error correction) and thus isn't good for that domain.

<comment><USER10> yet.

<comment><USER11> No.... Not at all.

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding your reply due to its brevity, but again, error correction is the primary concern of these barcodes, and given that they are good error correctors, you can put what data you want within them, be it an underlying visual programming language or text.

If by "yet" you mean your proposal is to expand on these visual languages by making a programming language + error correction system, you're not adding any value that didn't exist before, it is the same thing as what already exists.

And besides, it's better to just give the user a URI and then they can download the application from a more robust location.

<comment><USER10> By "yet" i meant "at this moment in time you may be correct, who know's what the future will bring".

I agree in principle with your points, but my point was "one day I can see something like this replacing the space where the 3D barcodes are on cans now"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is really cool. Lots of possibilities, and just _imagine_ what the steganography crowd would think if they got ahold of it.

</comment><comment><USER13> Obligatory esolang wiki reference: <http://esolangs.org/wiki/Piet>

</comment><comment><USER14> where can get this stuff the author is smoking ? ;)

<comment><USER15> Although you're being funny - I have to say that when I see things like this programming language that are so outside the box for me, it really does feel like there is some drug induced transcendence going on. I love this stuff, it makes me think - what if we used color as meta information in C what would that look like? The program flow is 2d now instead of just down the screen, what about adding dimensions or layers like in Photoshop. So yeah, for me, mind blown, point taken.

<comment><USER16> Check out Befunge ( <http://esolangs.org/wiki/Befunge> ) and its n-dimensional siblings. It's a favorite of mine.</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook knows when you'll break up - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/11/02/facebook.breakups/index.html

<comment><USER2> CNN's crappy rip of the image cuts off everything past October losing some of the most important data (the lead up to the holidays and Christmas Day). They also cut off the months at the bottom so there's no way to accurately tell what is happening in what month.

Here is their source site which has a better version: <http://www.geekosystem.com/facebook-breakup-graph/>

<comment><USER3> The original source (well, not quite, but I can't find a link to the actual source) has an even better copy: [http://mathiasmikkelsen.com/2010/10/amazing- facts-about-face...](http://mathiasmikkelsen.com/2010/10/amazing-facts-about- facebook-and-breakups/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> While it's possible that more breakups happen on Monday, I postulate that Monday is actually just the day that people are most likely to report a weekend breakup. People who break up aren't rushing to Facebook right away. A breakup can be a hugely emotional event. If it happens on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday morning, it is likely to be followed by spending a lot of time with family, very close friends, or generally being in denial. When Monday comes around, it's back to the daily grind, it's time to face reality, and telling everyone you know is one way to come to grips with the situation.

I would also argue that the pre-Christmas spike likely isn't because people are cheap. I think the main factor is that most people spend the holidays with family. Two possibilities come to mind: 1) one or both of the people in the relationship decide that the relationship is not worthwhile enough to take each other home to Mom and Dad, or 2) meeting the family over Thanksgiving leads to a breakup (it was awkward, the family didn't like the S.O., the S.O. didn't like the family, etc.).

All-in-all, I agree with the sentiment of several comments here that between the poorly-ripped image and the unjustified conclusions they jump to, the article is mostly crap.

<comment><USER5> I don't think that's the conclusion anyone is drawing. Most other articles use the phrase "announced on Monday". The journalist in the TED talk scraped status updates for "break up" or "broken up". This isn't supposed to be taken as hard evidence of anything.

<comment><USER4> _I don't think that's the conclusion anyone is drawing._

From the article: _Mondays, as if they weren't bad enough, are the most likely day to break up._

I was referring specifically to the shoddy article and its crap conclusions, not to the original data. The original data was interesting and potentially insightful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> All this shows is when people are statistically most likely to break up. This cannot be used to predict a specific situation (ie, "when you'll break up"), only to generalize about broad data.

<comment><USER7> Ah but it does tell you when to statistically 'work harder' on your relationship. IE Feb/March and Nov/December.

Although this can be compounded in a different way. The first break-up mountain appears after Christmas and spikes after valentines, translation: he buys crappy Christmas presents _and_ he forgets valentines!

The second mountain is in Nov/Dec, translation: I spend all my money on her, she hasn't bought dinner in three months and now I have to get her a Christmas present too?!

Interestingly Aug/Sep/Oct were the months I noticed this year that I spent a vast majority of my time in doors. I'd gotten over the novelty of hot weather (I work outside) and had been cowering inside, which meant lots of movie theaters and dinners with the wife.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I agree that it would be more interesting to predict.

Has anyone taken Facebook data and seen if they could predict suicide or crime? Do people exhibit certain patterns before committing suicide or commiting some big crime spree?

It would also be interesting to see if it could determine if someone is cheating. Of course its harder to get data on when the cheating began to do a good analysis.

</comment><comment><USER9> Seems flawed. If all that McCandless did was scrape status updates for "break up" and "broken up", he may well have included events referring to bands or other groups breaking up. It would have been better to look at changes in Facebook's relationship status.

Also, I'm not so sure it makes sense to assume, as the author of the article does, that breakups before Christmas have to do with money. If the data is even valid, then it's quite likely that breakups occur before Christmas because people don't want to go through the charade of spending Christmas together and possibly with each others' families if the relationship isn't going anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER10> The spike on April 1st is because people joke _about_ breaking up.

Other than that, the title is total linkbait.

<comment><USER11> was just about to say that! obviously cnn didn't bother thinking about this

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It would be interesting to be able to segment the graph by how long the relationship that was just broken up--mostly as a proxy for how long someone takes to recover from having broken up. Thus, you can find the best times of the year to be looking for singles.

If everyone took the same amount of time to get over the last relationship (which is not true), then we can just start looking for singles just a couple months after the spikes.

</comment><comment><USER13> That's a pretty curious and probably flawed metric to choose. Surely it would be better to find the actual "is no longer in a relationship" updates?

Sample size sucks too. Of only 10,000 status updates, how many would actually include those two phrases? I call bullshit.

<comment><USER14> I've been on Twitter for about 20 months and tweeted 1000 times.

Using that ratio (50 updates/month), we can estimate that their 10,000 status updates cover 16 people over a year.

My first instinct was "why not?" but thinking about this more, that looks kind of thin. Of course, I'm assuming a lot of things away...

<comment><USER3> It sounds to me like the 10,000 "status updates" include only status updates containing the keywords, probably from the Facebook search function.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Originally posted here: [http://mathiasmikkelsen.com/2010/10/amazing-facts- about-face...](http://mathiasmikkelsen.com/2010/10/amazing-facts-about- facebook-and-breakups/)

What are the rules re: reposts of vias?

</comment><comment><USER14> Right, the article examines breakups _ex-post._ That is, they can only identify breakups after they happen.

 _Ex-ante_ , though...I remember hearing somewhere that Zuckerberg used to predict when people were about to split, because they could see whose profiles you were looking at.

If you started checking out potential partners with a high frequency, and you were in a relationship, Zuck et al. knew it wouldn't last long.</comment>


Ask HN: How to explain being sole employee in job title? - <AUTHOR> I'm polishing up my resume and I want to explain one of my recent tech ventures where I was the only person working on it. I accomplished a fairly impressive feat and I want to emphasize the fact that I was the only person responsible. (Whereas, typically, it would be better to make it sound like I was managing tons of people.)<p>How can I do this in the job title I give myself on my resume? Just "Founder" leaves it up to interpretation... <comment><USER3> How about "sole proprietor" and putting a blurb about that in the description. If this achievement was a really big deal and it's relevant to the new job, put it in your cover letter. Be sure to say why it's important and how it relates to the position you're applying for. Don't assume the Hr person will make the connection on why it's relevent unless you explicitly point it out

</comment><comment><USER4> Simply use Founder and highlight the role you're applying for. Indeed, it all depends on what type of jobs you're looking for. Being a one man band in your case would be impressive for an individual contributor. For example, an experienced developer. If you're applying for roles such as manager or product manager, this experience may not cover the major required skills. Building a team, managing people, cross-functional team work, communication or even as simple as team player.

I would personally hire someone like you any day. Having a entrepreneurial spirit and a DIY attitude is awesome and rare in more established companies. It's also a huge plus if you're applying at startups.

So, to answer your question: "Founder - Lead Engineer" or "Founder - <USER2> Manager" for example.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, the only real question that will probably come up is why if that was so great do you want to work here then (and perhaps in a specific role). But that shouldn't usually be an issue to answer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Principal" is a fine title for singular/small efforts where you're the prime mover as well.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is it a real company, or just a website or project? As a hiring manager, nothing gets a resume into the trash faster than someone calling themselves a CEO of some small website or weekend project.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've used Technical Director and I use "owner" as I trade via my own company. I know some bolder people who elevate themselves to CTO, even if they are the only employee - to me that's a bit BS so I stopped at owner. In any case if "Founder" leaves it up to interpretation and leads to a conversation, they you've got your foot in the door already.

</comment><comment><USER9> I like "operator", particularly if you purchased the business (seems like you didn't in this case but you don't rule it out). It also shows your role was doing things, not thinking of the idea ("founder"), delegating ("CEO"), or just getting money from the product ("owner").

</comment><comment><USER10> I think the title of Founder with a little description on the job responsibility would make sense. Having the description more in lines with the new job you're looking for would make it positive.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think "Founder" is the correct job title, and use the description of the role next to the job title to explain that you were working solo and responsible for everything. You don't have to fit it all in the job title.

</comment><comment><USER12> If it's a business, you have a title: founder. Or, technically speaking, "member."

If it's a project then put it in a separate section for projects.

</comment><comment><USER13> "Sole proprietor" is what I've used.

</comment><comment><USER14> "One man army" to Founder.

</comment><comment><USER15> Principal Software Engineer is what I use.

</comment><comment><USER16> "Sole Engineer"?</comment>


An Island within a Lake on an Island within a Lake on an Island (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.geog.ucsb.edu/events/department-news/802/ <comment><USER2> Not an island, but a recursive geo-political region: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahala_Khagrabari](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahala_Khagrabari)

</comment><comment><USER3> There is such a thing in Rhode Island: [https://maps.google.com/maps?q=41.916681,-71.411937&ll=41.91...](https://maps.google.com/maps?q=41.916681,-71.411937&ll=41.916665,-71.411916&spn=0.008638,0.013486&num=1&t=h&gl=us&z=17)

OK, the inner island and lake are man-made (hill in a disused landfill), the middle island is connected by a land bridge, so it's more of a peninsula, the middle lake is really a river and canal, and the outer island is actually North America.

<comment><USER4> You can go pretty crazy with this recursion in the Amazon -- one I found: [https://goo.gl/maps/saJhL](https://goo.gl/maps/saJhL).

Note the river is a few _kilometers_ wide, s.t. there are countless islands within it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of my favorite recursive lakes is quite accessible to many on HN, it's at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.

[http://binged.it/1lLOpk1](http://binged.it/1lLOpk1)

</comment><comment><USER6> See also: Lake Manitou, the largest lake on a lake island in the world.

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

</comment><comment><USER7> Here it is in Google Maps:

[https://goo.gl/maps/be2Mm](https://goo.gl/maps/be2Mm)

</comment><comment><USER8> Another in New Zealand, near Wanaka in the South Island: [https://goo.gl/maps/ehUzh](https://goo.gl/maps/ehUzh) \- there are some photos in the GMaps gallery too. It's a nice boat trip from Wanaka and a 15 minute walk up the hill.

</comment><comment><USER9> Inception island.</comment>


Ask HN: How did you expand your English vocabulary? - <AUTHOR> English not being my primary language I often have problems naming things when coding. I read books and use the dictionary, but are there any other ways to expand my English vocabulary?<p>I would love to be able to do a "reverse dictionary search", something like asking a friend "what's the word for ...". <comment><USER2> Read on Kindle and look up words using the inbuilt dictionary. Then use vocabulary builder app on Kindle. You can quiz yourself. This I think is the best way to improve your vocabulary, learn words in context(just like kids do in real life).

Next, think about the words and where they are useful during the chatter in your head as you go about your day.</comment>


Use a Slack bot to deploy your app - <AUTHOR> https://tech-blog.serenytics.com/deploy-your-saas-with-a-slack-bot-f6d1fc764658#.1l67i0wha <comment><USER2> At my start-up, we use our IoT-enabled office refrigerator for deployments. The 9" LCD is great for catching up on facebook messages, debugging failures in our deployment logs, and seeing when we are low on half and half.</comment>


Here's BB-8, the Adorable Rolling Droid from Star Wars: The Force Awakens - <AUTHOR> http://www.polygon.com/2015/4/16/8431295/star-wars-the-force-awakens-bb-8-puppet-jj-abrams <comment><AUTHOR> Thoughts on how they built this?

<comment><AUTHOR> My guess: a flywheel inside the ball to keep it stabilized, along with a motor and series of magnets to move the "head" around.

<comment><USER2> Sure, but how exactly? If I hadn't seen the video I would have guessed a practical prop impossible.

Mashable has an article about it, but they too have some hand-wavy-magnet explanation.

[http://mashable.com/2015/04/16/star-wars- bb8-technology/](http://mashable.com/2015/04/16/star-wars-bb8-technology/)

Too bad there is no discussion on hn or reddit about the workings.</comment></comment></comment>


PicPlz Python Backup Script - <AUTHOR> http://www.danielandrade.net/2012/06/04/picplz-python-backup-script/

<comment><USER2> This can be quite handy! Thanks for sharing! :)</comment>


Documents from Glenn Greenwald's new book [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://hbpub.vo.llnwd.net/o16/video/olmk/holt/greenwald/NoPlaceToHide-Documents-Compressed.pdf

<comment><USER2> "Beginning on 7 March 2013, PRISM now collects Microsoft Skydrive data as part of PRISM's standard Stored Communications collection package. .... This success is the result of the FBI working for many months with Microsoft to get this tasking and collection solution established"

"Skype stored communications will contain unique data which is not collected via normal real-time surveillance collection. SSO expects to receive buddy lists, credit card info"

"On 31 July, Microsoft began encrypting web-based chat with the introduction of the new outlook.com service. .... MS, working with the FBI, developed a surveillance capability to deal with the new SSL"

As a fan of your tech... fuck you Microsoft. They seemed like the ones screaming the loudest and trying to do the most. After reading this I highly doubt it. You have complying with court orders and "partnering" with them. Clearly Microsoft didn't just comply with them. Personally I feel most of the stuff Greenwald "holds back" has to do with companies and I hope he keeps releasing it.

It also seems if everyone switched to SSL it would significantly screw up their game (except when you give them a back door on the other end).

</comment><comment><USER3> Some interesting things just from flipping through it quickly:

\- Condoleezza Rice appears to have asked the NSA to spy on our allies to help with negotiations in applying sanctions on Iran.

\- The NSA intercepts packages of networking equipment and places 'beacons' in them.

\- Looks like they have access to pretty much every large website, it appears they can easily search by IP or even username.

Edit: Feel free to add more, I certainly missed a lot.

<comment><USER4> I think that's going to be Susan Rice, since it says ambassador. Condoleeza was NatSec Advisor and then SecState. Also it takes place in 2010, long after Condoleeza Rice left government.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Update (x2): The link in the title is to the uncompressed version which is password protected. The correct link is [http://glenngreenwald.net/pdf/NoPlaceToHide-Documents- Compre...](http://glenngreenwald.net/pdf/NoPlaceToHide-Documents- Compressed.pdf). Or the link to the uncompressed version from the CDN: [http://hbpub.vo.llnwd.net/o16/video/olmk/holt/greenwald/NoPl...](http://hbpub.vo.llnwd.net/o16/video/olmk/holt/greenwald/NoPlaceToHide- Documents-Uncompressed.pdf)

Original comment, now redundant: Glenn has chosen to password protect this, yet it is accessible via Scribd. It would be ethical to have it removed from Scribd until Glenn decides to release this to the public.

<comment><USER6> It's a PDF of leaked documents though... If you consider leaking it from the original source to be fine, why do you consider leaking it from Greenwald to be somehow unethical?

<comment><USER7> I'm not going to speak for the parent poster, but on one hand you have: leaking details of controversial secret actions from a powerful government organization to a journalist. On the other hand you have leaking from a journalist "his" scoop that was already in the pipeline to get published without any indication there is an immediate time pressure justifying it.

These two immediately strike me as very qualitatively different, and if we assume that the parent poster is actually talking about ethics it would follow that they do not have an absolutist view on leaking and that the context matters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's a slide here that lists the embassies we've bugged.

<comment><USER9> Only the embassies of friendly/allied countries as far as I can tell. I'm sure the list of bugged embassies is a lot longer - there's a lot of notable omissions there.

<comment><USER10> It sort of makes sense, right?

You know where your enemies stand--it's a last minute defection from an ally or a need to exert a little extra pressure that might be trouble.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> it's on a CDN now - can't update the URL in the submission.

[http://hbpub.vo.llnwd.net/o16/video/olmk/holt/greenwald/NoPl...](http://hbpub.vo.llnwd.net/o16/video/olmk/holt/greenwald/NoPlaceToHide- Documents-Uncompressed.pdf)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Source: [http://www.glenngreenwald.net/](http://www.glenngreenwald.net/) No password.

</comment><comment><USER11> Isn't this just from his own server? [https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/466162717754028032](https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/466162717754028032)

Direct link in the tweet still works, but obviously you don't want to HNammer the guy's site ...

</comment><comment><USER12> I'll be disappointed in the NSA if they're not selling their access to hedge funds and other major corporations. This'd be great to front run mergers and other similar events. C'mon, guys -- let's not be small time with the corruption here. Go big or go home.

Now, how exactly do these companies think that this sort of collaboration will not utterly destroy the trust that non-US companies have had for American IT services? You can only lie so much until people stop listening to anything that you have to say, even if some of it is true.

I also appreciated the clear explanation of the CDN loophole. Good presentation, guys! Good job!

Also, despite increased access to 'intelligence,' the US continues to make poor strategic decisions, blunder into wars that it loses, lurch from financial crisis to crisis, and lose the trust of both its domestic citizens and important foreign allies. Tons and tons of 'data' but negligible intelligence.

<comment><USER13> You know of Snowden because he is the only one who got access to this information and decided to expose it, ruining his own life in the process.

How many other NSA workers, in the same situation, have made the (far more profitable) decision to keep their knowledge secret and use it for personal gain. A dozen? A hundred? A thousand?

<comment><USER14> Well, we know of at least _some_ in government agencies involved doing so, because some of the information that has become public as a consequence of the Snowden leaks (not part of those leaks, necessarily, but information that was released afterwards) has revealed numerous instances of abuse of the surveillance system for personal purposes by people with direct access (not just using the _information about_ the system for personal purpose, but using the _surveillance systems themselves_ for personal purposes.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The clip are used in some of the NSA slides is heinous.

</comment><comment><USER16> The original link has a login screen.

</comment><comment><USER17> It is badly formatted with comic sans and clip art?

<comment><USER18> It's what everybody says: they have all the information in the world and yet they can't use it for anything positive, like promoting world peace or good looking corporate PPT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> So much data, they admit they are not able to catch up with that torrent. I wonder if they could anonymize it and allow the hacker community to come up with better algorithms. It's a more optimistic option rather than expecting that they 'll stop the snooping.

<comment><USER20> Hi! David here!

I decided Goliath was just too big and unstoppable, so I now I just follow him around and sharpen his sword.

Cheers!</comment></comment>


After China Objects, Apple Removes App Used by Hong Kong Protesters - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2019/10/10/768841864/after-china-objects-apple-removes-app-used-by-hong-kong-protesters <comment><USER2> Earlier discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21210678](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21210678)

<comment><USER3> Comments moved thither.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hmmm I still see Waze in the app store and I know tons of people that use it to evade law enforcement...</comment>


Create Your Own Posterous with Jekyll, PHP, Mailgun, and S3 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jazzychad.net/2012/03/12/create-your-own-posterous.html

<comment><USER2> Very cool Chad. Appreciate the post. I'll also add that you could create the Route using the Mailgun Routes API: <http://documentation.mailgun.net/api- routes.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> To validate that the mailgun response actually came from mailgun add this at line 17:

if($_POST['signature'] !== hash_hmac('sha256', $_POST['timestamp'] . $_POST['token'], MAILGUN_KEY)) { exit; }

</comment><comment><USER4> Also possible with Postmarkapp's Inbound hook, and they support image attachments. They even provide PHP, Ruby, Python libraries for saving attachments.

</comment><comment><USER5> Could you not have used Cloudmine instead of a virtual machine slice to handle the email webhooks/content conversion?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think so (though I'm not sure). Cloudmine looks like it is aimed at mobile app backends, and the amount of code used for this project would be too custom for what is afforded on those types of services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> chmod u+w /etc/sudoers # edit file to add new user

This is _not_ how you do this! I stopped reading once I read that line. I can't take anyone serious who does this.

<comment><USER7> show us the way, o wise one.

<comment><USER8> Not the original commenter, but I'm guessing they meant two things:

1) You should technically only be editing /etc/sudoers through visudo.

2) You should also have an admin/root group. All you would need to do then is "sudo adduser <blah> admin/root". This group is the one you specified in /etc/sudoers to have root permissions.</comment></comment></comment>


The dangers of illiberal liberalism - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/08/17/the-dangers-of-illiberal-liberalism <comment><USER2> The author is confused.

He says he is a liberal "in the enlightenment sense." He cites John Locke and John Stuart Mill.

But then he makes a "contrast":

 _> In contrast, today's so-called progressive liberals are often intolerant, calling for official censure against anyone perceived as uttering non- progressive views._

What the author fails to reconcile is that this "progressive liberal" target of his is all but the product of John Stuart Mill's brand of liberalism that includes many wonderful things but has a certain clause that makes all the difference. Mill's liberalism defended democratic ideals predominantly in cultural terms. That is, democracy to the extent that it does not interfere with free market capitalism.

Fast forward 150+ years through 2 world wars, the Great Depression, the federal reserve Vietnam, globalization, corporate takeover, etc., etc. and old Mill's ideas are not looking so spiffy. The instability is anything but defensible, so what can the ole' liberals do now but hunker down on the culturalism? There you have it.

There is nothing new or complicated about this. Mill and Marx defined the terms way back when.

The youngsters in the US are having trouble working through it because their parents skipped the conversation entirely, but they'll figure it out. Fool them once.

So, this is not about free speech. The only problem here is this author's insistence that it's a contention between old and new. It's not, of course. It's a contention between capitalism, it's glories, and messes it makes.

</comment><comment><USER3> Same old tired argument. Free speech is sacred, we are regressing to the middle ages, bu-but _the Enlightenment!_ , etc.

Read some Wittgenstein for a change: [https://daily.jstor.org/wittgenstein- whether-speech-violence...](https://daily.jstor.org/wittgenstein-whether- speech-violence/)

"Why do we describe hurtful words as a punch to the gut or a slap to the face? For so long, the free speech debate has been built upon an incoherent premise: that speech is powerful enough to solve social ills, but can't inflict as much damage as a fist."

<comment><USER4> Speech itself is nothing without actions, power and trust - talk is cheap.

The same insults and threats hurled at you by a person in a position of power have a very different meaning when coming from someone powerless.

Likewise promises from somebody trustworthy are much more powerful than from a stranger.

My point being: it's not the speech that's powerful, it's the person behind it.

<comment><USER5> you seem very certain soft (volume) speech can't harm. okay then you should be fine with this experiment (and confident about its result): let me put you into a room and have people come in for 8 hours a day and call you stupid, ugly, worthless, a disappointment, etc. in perfectly mild tones for exactly one month. we'll perform a mood/outlook/mental health assessment before and after. do you think there will be a difference in the two assessments?

<comment><USER6> Huh? What you're saying does not relate to what he's saying at all. He's talking about people in positions of power, you're talking about volume?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This might be a fair argument, except for the "affirmative action" that conservative/fascist ideas get. Sure, individual reporters probably are liberals. But owners are not: see Sinclair's mandatory statements. Owners near monarchism is going to select for editors that keep their personal beliefs out of it, and give conservative ideas a big boost, way beyond their merit, because they'll catch grief from owners/CEOs if they don't. This is some of the same, The Economist's writers sucking up to owners/plutocrats.

<comment><USER7> Which coward chose to "censor" me by downvoting instead of just answering with logic, reason and good, conservative common sense? By downvoting without a reply, you've played into my argument. Thanks for confirming that conservatives just want affirmative action for their opinions.

<comment><USER8> Please don't let downvotes trigger you into breaking the site guidelines, which ask you specifically not to post like this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

As for the parent comment, possibly it was downvoted because it used ideological tropes. HN is not a place for ideological battle (regardless of what you're battling for/against), because ideological battle tends to burn up everything else.

Edit: looks like you did it again here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17794513](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17794513). Please don't post like that to HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > These key tropes—"we will not tolerate" and "this is not a debate"—are now > frequently deployed to curtail discussion of issues deemed to be taboo, > invariably to "protect" people deemed vulnerable from speech deemed hateful.

The point is that denying trans people (for example, as they're targeted the worst by both rightwingers, "centrists" and some lefties aka trans- exclusionary radical feminists) the right to choosing freedom over their bodies is a direct attack on their basic human right to exist. Either one supports letting trans people live in peace or one does not - and the latter position is directly and actively intolerable in a society that calls itself "civilized" and "respecting human rights".

There is no valid position in any society that denies a group of people the right to exist. We had that already with the Nazi regime and with Stalin's Soviet Union, no need to repeat history again.

<comment><USER10> Pure hyperbole. Nobody is denying their right to _exist_.

<comment><USER9> A couple days ago "concerned parents" literally declared "hunting season" on a 12-year old child: [http://www.towleroad.com/2018/08/hunting- season/](http://www.towleroad.com/2018/08/hunting-season/)

This is reality, there's a reason why suicide and self harm ratios are enormous among LGBT, especially youth.

<comment><USER10> While I find the actions of these parents despicable, they do not constitute "denying the right to exist".

<comment><USER3> What else denies the right of someone to exist, other than threats to physically mutilate and kill?

Do you think the child has a soul separate from the body that the parents won't be able to touch? Do you think the child has a clean innocent soul that's immune to harm?

<comment><USER10> I did not see a threat to kill.

The "knife" comment was a crude, terribly crude, reference to a "transitioning" operation.

Again, I am not condoning the crude language and possible actions, but among those I don't see "denying the right to exist".

Objecting to use of bathrooms is not denying the right to exist.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


US defense intelligence warns of AI-human hybrid soldiers from China - <AUTHOR> https://sociable.co/technology/defense-intelligence-ai-human-hybrid-soldiers/ <comment><USER2> What about a soldier with a cellphone? isn't that a hybrid soldier?

<comment><AUTHOR> Elon Musk would say yes. He alluded to this on the Joe Rogan podcast.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why Facebook is the only company that creates their own cryptocurrency? - <AUTHOR> Why salesforce or Asana or any other big b2b or b2c don't create their crypto? <comment><USER2> Even in the most optimistic case, what's about to happen with Facebook's cryptocurrency will border on a straight up scam. Which is fitting both for their business model, their image and for the broader cryptocurrency space.

<comment><USER3> Why do you expect a scam? Stable Coin on a permissioned blockchain is what it looks to be

<comment><USER2> Because Facebook haven't demonstrated any integrity whatsoever in all of their history as a company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Why salesforce or Asana or any other big b2b or b2c don't create their > crypto?

A better question would be: why would Salesforce or Asana create their own cryptocurrency?

Cryptocurrency (and blockchain) are just tools. They are not needed in every business/product. A new fancy hammer has been invented. It's useless/dangerous if I actually need a screwdriver.

I remember similar posts about Mongo DB a few years ago in web development circles.

</comment><comment><USER5> Because, other than a universal cryptocurrency like Bitcoin which already exists, there is no real use case for the fully distributed blockchain. What FB is making is a centrally controlled digital coin, no different from Beanz, an early attempt at the same thing. This is just a play by FB to get into fintech and try to take away some payments business from PayPal. There isn't really anything decentralized or crypto about it.

<comment><USER3> Agree, getting a pay button on the FB platform will lower friction. Calling it crypto will likely boost adoption, though fortunately it looks to be a stable coin

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Lots if smaller companies have their own coins and did ICOs, Facebook is launching theirs now because they want to. Them wanting to do the thing is pretty much the driving force behind all of this. If it goes well, those other companies might want to as well. Though an asana coin would be the weirdest thing - task management on the blockchain!

</comment><comment><USER7> Crypto for FB is an elaborate tracking system that could contribute to FB ad revenue.

For smaller companies it would be hard to gain any traction.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think you missed JP Coin, by JP Morgan Chase.

Also, they are BS and unnecessary for the most part</comment>


How Seamless, Grubhub, and Yelp are Defrauding us - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/chezpim/status/1221327600284397569 <comment><USER2> The title is .. not great. They're listing restaurants without the restaurant's knowledge, and in this case can never actually fulfill the request (because the restaurant doesn't even do takeaway).

But assuming stupidity over malice, it's not clear to me the restaurant is being defrauded -- more like they're being misrepresented. But if they did have takeaway... everything would be fine? I'm not clear how GrubHub benefits from the few false orders that would come through before the issue is resolved (they'll make a pretty penny from a few people, and trash their reputation and user-trust entirely? It would be _extremely_ short-sighted behavior)

There are some other comments like pricing not being specified correctly, which might turn out more money for grubhub... But even that doesn't seem so clear cut.

This entire thing seems like it's borne out of stupidity, and perhaps a shared poisoned dataset</comment>


IBM wants to use big data to predict heart disease long before it strikes - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2013/10/09/ibm-wants-to-use-big-data-to-predict-heart-disease-long-before-it-strikes/

<comment><USER2> I work at a company that does applied machine learning and health care is the #1 source for prospective business. The hardest part isn't the analysis - it's getting good, valid data. Health care data is so sparsely collected, poorly structured (if at all) and the privacy issues surrounding gaining access are very strict (perhaps rightfully so).

The key, as IBM is doing, if working with a large HMO or health care network who hopefully have switched to a sensible EMR and have built up a good amount of historical data on patients.

I'd add one last key to getting this right isn't only the breadth of the data, but the depth. Knowing some superficial aspects of a person (age, weight, habits) is too naive. You need family history, you need psychosocial aspects (nightmares, trouble at work, marital problems etc.). If you can get _that_ , then you're cooking.

<comment><USER3> I'm also in this field and couldn't agree more. I hate to be a cynic, but the reason IBM is going down this road is almost purely because it allows them to capture a lot of poorly allocated health care resources (in essence, this is all about government rent seeking.)

<comment><USER4> Being a former IBM'er, I can tell you this, there is nothing altruistic in their motives. They invest billions into research with plans to reap the rewards. Health informatics, in Canada is brutal to say the least. See eHealth disaster. IBM employs some really intelligent people who intent to capitalize on this situation.

<comment><USER3> To clarify my remarks, I don't really have a problem with a profit motive... my argument is more that you could make money from (1) coming up with better treatments and selling them or (2) extracting poorly allocated resources from the government. We need fewer health care projects that are the latter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> We need to start using all the big data muscle on basic research of cell chemistry, less on analysis of patient data.

I could probably fit all well-structured data elements in existence for all medical patients in the US for a year on a single DVD. (and even the unstructured non-image data is pretty sparse.)

This is not really a problem where "big data" techniques are the right tool- There's too little data. However, I believe we should be experimenting on cell cultures in laboratories at large scales. None of this is happening, I believe... no laboratory is running hundreds of thousands of cultures in parallel with carefully manipulated chemical environments and generating data from them.

A data set generated from such cell culture analysis could be petabytes in size. With that type of data set I believe it would be possible, using big data techniques, to get a lot of rigorous and causative details of chemical cell pathways relevant to disease formation that we currently lack. This is the direction I think we need to be going.

I certainly would love to be wrong and would love to get news that IBM has cracked heart disease with this new project. However, my guess is that this is a very inefficient way to apply big data techniques to cure diseases.

<comment><USER5> "I could probably fit all well-structured data elements in existence for all medical patients in the US for a year on a single DVD."

As someone who builds and supports a massive "big data" healthcare platform, I have to say you are horribly mistaken. Non-image well structured patient data, even if compressed, across all healthcare, with potentially multiple EMRs and data collection systems per healthcare organization, even if just the last years' worth of data, is "big data" and can benefit from "big data" techniques. Like all "big data" endeavors across any number of problem domains, health care application of "big data" is in its infancy.

Will the use of "big data" techniques over patient data discover disease cures? I don't know. But there is gold in them there hills... what kind? We will have to wait to find out.

<comment><USER3> I agree I might be wrong, but let me try to do the math (so you can improve it with your knowledge.)

Let's say 10 million hospitalized patients a year, 100 data points entered by a nurse, another 300 from lab tests during the visit, 50 entered by a doctor, 50 entered by a pharmacist.

Let's postulate 8 bytes per data element (most are numeric or ordinal.) This leads to:

10,000,000x8x500=4E10 bytes=40GB

Compressed, this would fit on a DVD (8.5 GB)

(I agree the numbers are somewhat larger if unstructured text is added to the mix, but it still seems to fall short of the terabytes of data I would expect for a "big data" approach.)

Usually I thought the "big data" moniker is applied to web sites where every minuscule site interaction is audited from every user across 10mil+ users, leading to much larger data sets. Or, it is used in the context of crawling the entire web where many many petabytes of data become available.

You might have better knowledge of the numbers involved and can correct me, please do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For whose benefit? Speaking generally [1], as a patient in the U.S., I no longer believe it is for my (i.e. the patient's) benefit.

This is the result of both reporting on the health care landscape that I've digested as well as repeated personal experience.

The U.S. system is, at scale, profit-driven. Profit in general serves a purpose; however, in the U.S., it has superseded that of providing effective health care.

In other words, in the U.S., it has become solely about short-term, private profit. Public good and longer term, societal benefit have been relegated to imagery.

\--

1\. meaning not as someone having the specific condition under consideration

</comment><comment><USER7> This, of course, has nothing to do with improving quality of life or preventing heart disease, but will have plenty to do with denying health insurance or increasing premiums.</comment>


Why is American government so against Huewei? - <AUTHOR> What's the real reason US Government don't want Huewei products in their territory?
There are several possible reasons and I'm curious to what the HN crowd believes.
1) US government is actually worried about Chinese products having backdoors in their Chinese chips inside, spying on users.
2) US government has backdoors in American chips (Intel, Amd) and does not want other tech inside territory that they cant spy on since it's a security risk from their point of view.
3) American government doesn't use backdoors and doesn't want other countries to use them either.
4) Other reasons? <comment><USER2> It's #1.

#2 is unreasonable, since the US has _no_ problem with devices from many other countries and manufacturers.</comment>