Python 2 vs. Python 3: A retrospective - <AUTHOR> https://www.dropbox.com/s/83ppa5iykqmr14z/Py2v3Hackers2013.pptx <comment><USER2> I'd really like to see the video for these slides. But here's what caught my interest:

        Set and dict comprehensions
        {x**2 for x in range(10)}
        {x: x**2 for x in range(10)}

        Why reduce() must die:
        ... the applicability of reduce() is pretty much limited
        to associative operators, and in all other cases it's
        better to write out the accumulation loop explicitly.

        int [divided by] int should return float

        nonlocal

Explicit nonlocal variable modifier which (I guess) "promotes" the variable outside its local scope. Kind of the inverse of Java requiring 'final' to bind a variable to a closure.

<comment><USER3> You know what's funny? All of those things could have been done in Python 2.8, apart from the int division change. And the division change does as much harm as good, because lots of people use Python and also use another language where int division works the "old fashioned way"; for them (me) this change is counter-productive because it adds a pointless distinction. It is a great change for programming novices, for sure, but that's only part of Python's audience, and probably won't be the longest-lived part.

<comment><USER4> The division change is good. I have a hard time understanding why you'd want

        3/2 = 1

as the default behaviour.

<comment><USER5> Imagine the following (admittedly bad, minimalistic to make my point) code

        x = int(input(">>> "))
        a = x / 2
        append_int_to_magical_db(a)

If the division does a "naturaL" thing, you suddenly have a float "polluting" your integer algorithm, but it's _not consistent_. If the user enters "4", you get an int back. If they enter 5, you get a float.

<comment><USER6> Users of Python 3 and up will just have to remember that the result of any division will be a float.

It's a breaking change, yes, but in general I think it's a good one.

<comment><USER7> And if they do want integer division, they have to remember // and %.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The one thing I wish they could change in the future is forcing list and dictionary iterable same syntax:

instead of writing

for index, element in enumerate(some_list)

for key, value in my_dict.items()

they should unify and make items and enumerate default behavior. i.e.

for index, element in my_list:

for key, value in my_dict:

I really don't see the benefit of not doing this as default behavior. I always find if I need to loop a list there is a good chance the index can help, and even if I don't need it it doesn't hurt to have one either. Simple is better. And the whole looping dict and get back the key only sucks too because you often need the value as well so you essentially do dict["key"] but why not just default return both key and value?

<comment><USER9> Explicit is better than implicit.

I think you think for is magical and could be modified like this, but really for just iterates over something. It's enumerate and items that are the magic. Enumerate zips a range onto a list, the ``index,element`` unpacks the zip. Items returns a list of (key,value) tuples and the key,value unpacks that.

You couldn't modify the iterators because it would effect EVERYTHING. sum([1,1,1]) would now be sum([(1,1),(2,1),(3,1)]) AHH! And ``key in dict`` wouldn't work any more, since the iterator would return key,values. EEK.

<comment><USER8> I never said it would be easy to implement or whether it would be actually possible. My complain is that what we are doing right now isn't convenient and is counter-intuitive. I don't write programming language so I wouldn't know how difficult it would be to change the grammar and the semantic of for.

Being simple vs explicit is a political debate. I prefer if Python has simpler magical syntax.

<comment><USER10> That's totally against the ethos of python. I think you'll find that very few python developers would side with you on that change. If I'm iterating over something I'd like the elements of the thing I'm iterating over, not some weird results based on the type of iterator. In the (extremely) rare cases I need an index I wrap the list/whatever in the enumerate function.

What are the use cases where you frequently need the index? I write and read a lot of python and I almost never see it. Maybe if you're working in a problem domain where it's a common issue you could create some abstraction to better handle it for you.

<comment><USER8> Whoever downvoted me have some weird negativity here.

It doesn't against ethos of Python. There is a Zens of Python, I don't know Ethos of Python. [http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/](http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/)

Beautiful is better than ugly. Writing .items() or surrounding enumerate() does not make your code look prettier, does it?

Explicit is better than implicit. In fact, my proposal is more explicit than the implicit of for key in my_dict or for item in my list. I think returning both key,value are more explicit than say remembering the default return value in looping a dict is a key, not value, or relying on remembering enumerate or items.

It is simpler to write such code, and if you just need one of the return values, just that one, they are named.

You want a use case. I will give you one: find the location of a specific item in the list. and if you use django, you know your template engine can read your psudeo python template code. And you often need that index.

<comment><USER11> _my proposal is more explicit_

One could just as easily say that your proposal is _less_ explicit, because a sequence is a sequence of items, not (index, item) tuples, yet you're making the "for" iteration yield tuples.

Similarly, a dict is a container of keys, not (key, value) pairs. The reason is that otherwise you would be unable to check to see if a key was in the dict unless you knew the value that went with it: but in that case why would you need the dict? (Technically, you could still iterate over the entire dict looking for your key, but that's extremely slow; the whole point of having a dict is to be able to do _fast_ lookups of keys in order to retrieve their values.)

 _Writing .items() or surrounding enumerate() does not make your code look prettier, does it?_

Neither does having to extract just one item from a tuple when I don't need the index. There's no way around the fact that _one_ of the types of iteration (either just items, or index, item tuples) is going to have to be spelled with something extra. So just saying "I shouldn't have to type something extra" isn't a sufficient argument. You need to justify why your preferred type of iteration should be the one with the shorter spelling: and since your preferred type of iteration has extra baggage attached to it, it seems perfectly legitimate to me that it should have the _longer_ spelling, not the shorter one.

 _find the location of a specific item in the list_

That's what the "index" method is for.

<comment><USER12> I forget if it's Jinja or Django's template, but one of them has a function that only exists inside of for loops that returns the current index. I thought that was a great way to handle it, since it's always available without changing any syntax.

In retrospect, I suppose the .index() method would be fine, since Lists can't hold two of the same object, and Dicts return the key by default.

<comment><USER11> _Lists can 't hold two of the same object_

Yes, they can. Try it! The index method has extra arguments to let you specify a range of indexes in the list to search, so you can find multiple indexes that point to the same object (by picking a range that excludes indexes you've previously found).

 _Dicts return the key by default_

Dicts don't have an index method; dict keys are not ordered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can anyone else not read the last lines of some of the slides?

<comment><USER14> Dropbox's powerpoint viewer isn't perfect. I had to download the pptx. Works fine in Keynote.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for pointing out it's a Dropbox thing--at first I thought it might be a Chrome problem. Specifically the viewer seems not to use the proper font for this presentation. Preview on Mac OS works fine.

<comment><USER15> What was worse for me was the font kerning on some things (supposed to be fixed width?) was _amazingly_ atrocious.

I'm kinda impressed though. I don't think I have a program that will view pptx files, so I was happy to be able to read it online.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "People positively hate incompatible changes – especially bad for dynamic languages", "Never again this way – the future is static analysis and annotations".

Wouldn't it be better to pick a better-suited language then?

John Carmack put it nice way:

"One of the lessons that we took away from Doom 3 was that script interpreters are bad, from a performance, debugging, development standpoint. It's kind of that argument "oh but you want a free-form dynamically typed language here so you can do all of your quick, flexible stuff, and people that aren't really programmers can do this stuff", but you know one of the big lessons of a big project is you don't want people that aren't really programmers programming, you'll suffer for it!"

<comment><USER17> Epic might disagree, the UnrealEngine is heavily scriptable. This was one of its major selling points in the last generation.

I have a huge respect for Carmack but some other people prooved him wrong in the past. His opinions are often taken as gospel but more discreet people (like Sweeney) may have different and a s worthy points of view.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why does Guido think that slices syntax is screwed up? I mean, it's not exactly natural, but at least it's consistent (first bound is included, second is excluded):

      a = '12345'
      a[0:-1] == '1234'
      a[-1:0:-1] == '5432'

Personally, I think that "downcounting" slices are rarely used. For code clarity, I prefer reversing the string/list first.

<comment><USER19> This came up on python-ideas recently, there was a long thread: [https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python- ideas/2013-October/...](https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python- ideas/2013-October/023733.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I would have been more interested in learning Python if there wasn't such a great divide. I read the first chapter of several books that said "Python 3 is out, but we're going to stick with 2.7 because too much shit is broken".

<comment><USER3> As someone who learned Python when 3.2 came out, I completely agree with you. I have only really used Python 2.7!

Because too much shit is broken (NumPy, hello). Because Python 3 has been the default on basically no system ever (OK, maybe this is changing right now, slowly).

As Guido says, it's been five years and it will take another five. This whole experiment has been a huge misstep for Python, an absolutely massive gaffe. Some of Python's peers did it too, roughly around the same time (Perl, and to a lesser extent Ruby).

Python (Guido?) noticed its own maturity a bit too late. The damage is incredible; along with the performance stuff (which is in a way easier to overcome) this may be a key factor leading to the fall of a great language.

<comment><USER21> On the other hand, my experience has been very different: I learned Python when 3.2 was current as well, using Lutz' "Learning Python", which takes the approach of "teach Python 3, and explain how 2 is different whenever necessary". I've followed suit and taken the approach of writing Python 3 code first, and to make it work on 2.7 only when I need to, which I found fairly easy to do, though it can make the code a bit uglier sadly (writing cross- version-compatible metaclass code is the one that annoys me, since it adds some verbosity).

I'm looking forward to 2.x dying out to eliminate that retrofitting step (and it's happening: the improving dependency landscape means I find I have to do it less and less often), but I've not experienced any major pain overall. From where I'm sitting, Python 3 is a better, cleaner language, and as someone new to Python, I'm happier for it.

<comment><USER22> My story is similar, and I learned Python 3.2 _for_ Numpy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Question for the professional Python developers: do you (on a daily/weekly/monthly) basis switch between projects in Python 2 and Python 3? Is that hard to do (e.g. do you have to constantly and consciously remind yourself of syntax/semantic differences), or does your mind sort of automatically adjust to the new/old patterns?

</comment><comment><USER24> This is my problem with Python: "Rename func_name —> __name__, etc Rename .next() —> .__next__()"

Too many ugly renames, too few alternatives of doing things. To be honest the only attractive thing to me is all the libraries that they support but I don't find the language itself interesting.

<comment><USER25> __ is basically a namespace for official language extensions. How would you suggest they do it? Prevent "next()" from being a valid method name?

<comment><USER24> That has been addressed in some many other ways by several languages that goes from the C++ way where you actually have namespaces to the C way where you don't worry about it and pick another name. From all of them I find this the most odd way to address it, specially when python was supposed to improve legibility by design (at least for me those underscores are very distracting)

<comment><USER22> The underscores are distracting on purpose; any method surrounded by double underscores is one that you're virtually never supposed to explicitly call (there's a builtin `next(foo)` in Python 3, for instance)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> whoa did he just say static analysis is the future?

<comment><USER27> yeah, I'd love to understand the reason behind that statement.

<comment><USER28> PyPy?

<comment><USER29> pypy is dynamic analysis.

<comment><USER28> Semantics. Pypy's RPython dialect is "a restricted subset of Python that is amenable to static analysis", to quote the PyPy website.

<comment><USER29> RPython and Pypy are different things.

RPython is a restricted subset of python indeed, but its purpose is to be a toolkit for implementing virtual machines. It is not and does not aim to be a general-purpose programming environment.

PyPy is a JITed Python runtime implemented in RPython.

The relation between PyPy and RPython is more or less the relation between CPython and C.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Could someone create/convert the PDF version? I don't think my computer good enough to open PPT* format

Edit: not really needed, just loaded the dropbox preview, it is still readable

</comment><comment><USER31> Angry noscript user here. Visit URL... almost blank page... with non-working download button. Enable Javascript... Get .pdf named .pptx.

<comment><USER2> > Angry noscript user

Redundant, I think.

<comment><USER32> As a noscript user, I think you're probably right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Does Python 3 fix the import system? Can I import a file from any location in the file system?

<comment><USER34> you always could, see __import__ and imp module.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Now that I get to use Go, I have no desire to go back to python. I think I'm not alone, and that python will soon enough become the new perl.

<comment><USER36> The Python ecosystem is far too diversified to get knocked down by one language. Python has a wealth of production-quality libraries across a ton of domains (Web, scientific computing, data science, NLP, parsing, scripting/automating, etc). Go is a non-entity in most of these domains and isn't even a top-20 programming language on Github (source: [http://sogrady- media.redmonk.com/sogrady/files/2013/07/progr...](http://sogrady- media.redmonk.com/sogrady/files/2013/07/programming-lang-rankings-june13.png))

Python went everywhere Perl did and then expanded the map for "scripting languages". This didn't happen by accident: Python is, by design, very easy comprehend and learn. The Python community also one of the most newbie- friendly around, with mountains of freely available resources for beginners.

A programming language cannot be sustained by uber hackers, PLT nerds, and hipsters alone. You gotta make it reach the world (Like JavaScript, Java) or it'll never be"Tier 1" programming language. I have yet to see the Go's developer or community put forth a strategy to make this happen -- which is completely understandable given how new the language is.

<comment><USER37> The scientific Python community will never leave 2.5 -> 2.7, though...

<comment><USER38> The science community will get there. The problem is that for a long time, NumPy/SciPy/etc. didn't support 3.x. And when you're more interested in end results, why would you rewrite your code (or spend days/weeks/months relearning) when you could use a still perfectly acceptable and supported version?

There's also a lot of reuse and expansion on existing code bases, which would involve a lot of work to migrate to 3.x. There's also the matter that on top of moving to 3.x, you also have the task of making sure there's no hidden bugs that may alter your results in ways you may not notice. A lot of scientific code has been repeatedly vetted to make sure that there's no bias or glitches that may skew your results.

Hell, I know astronomers who are still using Fortran code that was written in the 80's. It still works (though now it requires a long build process, as it is no longer compatible with the latest Fortran compilers), so no reason to try to rewrite it just because the language is dated.

<comment><USER29> > The science community will get there. The problem is that for a long time, > NumPy/SciPy/etc. didn't support 3.x.

They were some of the earliest ported widely-used packages. Numpy was ported in 2010, scipy very early in 2011 (except for weave iirc)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> empty dict: {:} empty set: {}

Ah, the road not taken.

</comment><comment><USER40> It seems like I've been reading about the difficulties of Python V2 -> V3 for awhile. Why is that? Is this Python upgrade unusually difficult/ambitious? Or is the Python community just very reluctant to jump on new things?

<comment><USER41> It's a big, ambitious update. The biggest difference is forcing users to distinguish between strings and byte sequences; essentially programs now _have_ to be encoding-aware (at least if they use any of the standard library functions). Which is a Good Thing, but can require a ton of work for existing codebases.

<comment><USER42> It's not that ambitious- none of the changes are particularly compelling, none of them scream "update now".

It does, on the other hand, break backwards compatibility. Which is why hardly anyone updated.

<comment><USER43> Maybe not in the world of ASCII, but the new Unicode system scream seems pretty loud to me.

When I decided to use pelican for a non-English blog, I thought it would be piece of cake; just changing the theme and plugging a calendar converter and I would be done with it. In reality, I had to fork pelican and the calendar library (which was not well-maintained) and bang my head to the wall for three days to make them work together, all because of the whole string/unicode seperation and the fact that things work automagically as long as you're just using ASCII.

<comment><USER44> Does this get easier or harder in python 3?

I like the explicit separation that Racket has between "here is a buffer of binary data" and "here is a sequence of Unicode characters," and (looking on the outside without working with it), I'm glad that Python 3 began to adopt some of that.

<comment><USER45> smnrchrds's case of fixing someone else's ASCII assumption gets easier, because the code probably would not have been written that way.

In Python 2, it's really easy to write code that confuses bytes and characters, which introduces bugs and crashes when non-ASCII characters show up.

In Python 3, they made it easier to work with Unicode, because it's the default for everything, and _much harder_ to confuse bytes and characters, because of that separation between the data types.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> As a dev that hasn't been able to move to Py3 yet (but will soon), I'm wishing they'd fix the rest of the issues, bundle PyPy, and ship Python 4 instead! Make it a compelling upgrade.

Then Py3 could be nicknamed "Vista," I suppose.</comment>


Google's Call Screen is a new way to thwart telemarketers (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/google-trick-telemarketers-call-screen.html <comment><USER2> > You can also mark spammy incoming calls as "Spam." That way, if you ever get > a call from that number again, it will come with a big red interface > reminding you that you've previously pegged the number as suspicious.

Spam callers often id as fake numbers with your area code and prefix. I've even had a spam caller come up as a friend's phone number. This feature would be all but useless for the spam calls I receive.

> The caller will either hang up--in which case it's probably not important-- > or provide an answer, which will then be transcribed and displayed on your > screen.

I let unknown numbers go to voicemail, which accomplishes the same thing. I don't see how this is useful except you can choose to answer instead of call back. I guess maybe if your friend is calling from jail or a payphone (do those even still exist?).

<comment><USER3> How does phone number spoofing work? Sounds like a leak in the system to me if anyone could just fake anyone's phone number.

<comment><USER4> That's a US only thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's 2018 rather than "just revealed": [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18177145](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18177145)

But since it's back, I'm curious - is anyone using it often? Are you happy with how it works?

<comment><USER6> I got 34 calls before noon a few weeks ago - all of them unknown numbers. I clicked the 'screen call' option or ignored it. One single person left his name and message - an old friend. Everyone else I marked as spam, so the next person may get a warning, and blocked. It works great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems like the more damaging part for Telemarketers is not that they won't be able to reach people—if you're going to fall for their scams, I don't think this will help—it's that the calls that they get nothing out of will take more time, and therefore cost more.

</comment><comment><USER8> This feature has been out for a long time, I've been using it for months...

</comment><comment><USER9> Why does this article have no dateline?

<comment><USER10> Because it's old news, but they don't want you to know that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can we get a less clickbaity headline for something that was announced last year? (It's Call Screen for Pixel devices.)</comment>


How founders can write a quality blog post in 1 hour - <AUTHOR> https://baremetrics.com/blog/founder-writing <comment><USER3> It depends on your audience.

If you're trying to build an audience based on pithy advice in a well-known space, there are a lot of posts like this that apply. Focus your ideas, write about one thing, make it relatable, bold a couple random words, and Bam! Traffic!

If you're writing about something technical, complex, or sophisticated, it's worth spending more time to get it write. If you're writing for developers, include code and make sure it runs. If you're writing about hard topics, find research to back up your conclusions and build a real narrative (Priceonomics does this well).

Especially as a founder, your goal should be to write the definitive piece on whatever your topic is. As somebody starting a company on that topic, you are legitimately one of the foremost experts on this topic, so people want to hear your thoughts! Keep all those other rules in mind, buy don't sell yourself short by writing half-hearted pieces that sort of rehash the same topics.

For example, where I work, we think that traffic management (routing, proxies, service mesh, all that rot) is a better way to do things if you've gone to microservices. One example is releasing software. So we wrote one article on it (in two parts). It's long, it's technical, and it has been so, so successful. We don't try to reinvent the wheel on this topic. We just point people to this post.

[https://blog.turbinelabs.io/deploy-not-equal-release-part- on...](https://blog.turbinelabs.io/deploy-not-equal-release-part- one-4724bc1e726b)

<comment><USER4> > _it 's worth spending more time to get it write_

Was this an intentional pun? :)

<comment><USER3> Jeez, no, but there's no way I'm fixing it now!

<comment><USER5> its only human

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Take it from a very expensive copywriter: you cannot write a _quality_ blog post in 1 hour.

Consider the content of this post:

1\. research

2\. draft

3\. edit

...revolutionary. Maybe there's a reason why Baremetrics writers aren't in the New Yorker ;)

<comment><USER7> Maybe it's because that's not where our customers are? ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

I write most of our posts in ~1 hour and hot dog, here we are on HN and you're reading it. :)

<comment><USER8> _here we are on HN and you 're reading it_

Unless you're in the business of generating blog post views or HN comments the fact that people are discussing it here is irrelevant. Those things are vanity metrics. They don't matter to your business. Your post could get 10,000 upvotes and a million comments, but if you don't get a sale from all that extra "brand awareness" you've still wasted an hour of your time.

<comment><USER9> If you're the business entity sure.

The person who wrote the article though has an ego and people reading, reacting, responding to the article all feed the ego. Vanity metrics are the only reason we do things after the base instincts

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Haha not to bash on the article at all, but I laughed at the title. Here's my take on how founders write a quality blog post in 1 hour: 1) Founder opens iA Writer and types for an hour 2) Founder thinks post is great and publishes immediately!

<comment><USER11> Ha, I came to say the same thing! Add "make it an ordered list with bite-sized instructions based on survivorship bias" as well :)

<comment><USER12> I just use bullet points (unordered list) at the top, for popular buzzwords, to serve as an ad-hoc table of contents.

      - Artificial Intelligence
      - Machine Learning
      - Neural Networks
      - <USER2>

Then just expound and brainstorm freely, in a stream of consciousness, for ~60 minutes, and it practically writes itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I know there are efficiency tips here, but the "one hour" thing seems like click bate. For example, it says writing topics should be limited to topics you already know or have been studying recently to limit research time. Well, that seems like something that requires prerequisite expertise. So it's not really so much you're limiting your research time, as you're overlapping blog writing with your regular work.

Again, the article has generally good advice, but there's no secrets here to make someone a master blogger. It's going to require the same thought, hustle, and persistence as anything else.

</comment><comment><USER14> > It various industry to industry

This should read "It _varies_ industry to industry"

The whole point of the article is kinda moot if the reader finds these small errors like these

</comment><comment><USER15> >>> Hemingway App

>>> Can tell you the reading level of your content (aim for 8th grade or lower)

Fun fact: This blog entry has grade 4 (Good)

</comment><comment><USER16> I think it's interesting that the consensus here is that you can't do quality in an hour.

It's been forever since I blogged, but when I did I always had that block in the back of my mind that I shouldn't publish unless it was well thought out/well written/reviewed into the ground.

But this is a twitter world. People don't spend any time reading and they don't care to retain most material. If you blog, the most important thing is having a regular schedule. People won't come back for one well written article a month. But they'll read regularly if you produce content twice a day even if they aren't particularly interested in half of what you write.

I don't think the ROI value really exists for blogging unless it's an investment in name recognition for an individual in a niche market. It's too much effort for too little reward.

<comment><USER17> Honestly, the sad truth about the world post social media is that most people don't read past the title/thumbnail image. In a lot of cases, you could probably just write a title and neat meta description then stick a thumbnail on it, and if it was 'interesting' enough watch it get a few hundred/thousand shares.

If they do get past the title, then in about 99.999% of cases, they sure as hell won't care how well written the actual content is so long as they find the subject interesting and they agree with the conclusions.

It's especially true of the news world, where 'get anything out the door as long as its trending' seems to be the only way to get popularity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Ernest Hemmingway, not Earnest. Yikes.

<comment><USER19> And Hemi, not Hemmi.

<comment><USER18> What a jackass I am.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Maybe you can write something quickly in one hour but then continuously improve as you go along. That way you can come up with some semi-original content to begin with but over time, if properly maintained, it will flourish into something even better.

</comment><comment><USER21> Another idea is talk about something you've recently learned that you think others would want to know, or interview someone.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'd argue that this is generally useful blog-writing advice, rather than specific to founders.

</comment><comment><USER23> Whew. There's so much I disagree with here. Where to start?

All of these "Lessons from the Greats" have been floating around for a few generations at this point, and they are utter garbage as general writing advice. Twain, Hemingway, Strunk & White all ignore this advice in their own writing. And they do it for very good reasons: it makes for shitty, boring writing with zero personality.

Some domains of writing require this, of course. It's not bad advice for Garner to preach these things in his Legal Writing and Editing books and courses because in legal contexts (briefs, contracts, laws) you don't want interesting writing. You want the clearest, most unambiguous writing possible. Same goes for pure journalism. The writer's voice should be absent and the facts put on display as simply as possible. Academic papers and textbooks should also follow this advice.

But writing a blog post you want other people to read is exactly the place where all of that goes out the window. If the author of this post had spend more than 12 minutes researching good writing advice, he might have noticed the hundreds of writing experts who rail against this kind of guidance all the time. He might also have noticed that every single one of these things like active voice, avoiding adverbs, etc. goes against the only two pieces of good advice he wrote: write what you want to read and write in your own voice.

These specific prohibitions are in the same class of shit advice that shit writing teachers give to shit writing students to get a not-shit grade in a shit writing class. Don't begin a sentence with a conjunction. And don't end a sentence with a preposition. And don't use passive voice. (Most of the people who still troll with this kind critique can't even identify passive voice in non-trivial constructions.) Don't split infinitives. And don't use big words. And on. And on. And on.

Of course people can overuse these patterns. Many people do. Maybe I just did. But telling people to avoid them in general because they can be overused is absurd. It's also lazy. It's a lot easier to tell someone to write according to a safe formula than it is to sit down and analyze why something feels overused and help the writer understand what can be better about it.

Quality writing for a blog post needs personality. Minding these "Lessons" removes that.

Here's my advice for writing a quality blog post in 1 hour:

1\. Don't. It doesn't work. 2\. Don't assume you're an expert on a topic simply because you started a business related to it. You probably aren't. 3\. Don't assume that 12 minutes of research makes you an expert on _anything_. 4\. Don't refer to yourself as a founder or talk about how founders do things differently than other people do. Founders aren't special. 5\. Don't be afraid to write above 8th grade reading comprehension.

6\. Do write things you want to read. 7\. Do write in your own voice. 8\. Do use adverbs, colorful phrases, made up words, and flavoring elements that put your unique voice and personality into your written text. 9\. Do give me a reason to read your blog post on a topic (Trust me, there are thousands of others. You're not the first.) instead of some other blog, a Wikipedia article, an academic journal article, or some other source of information. 10\. Do be kind to yourself when you're writing; be an asshole when editing.

<comment><USER24> I'm no founder, I never found anything. I do have a lot of hats. Safe to say, non of them are very fancy. The article writing hat is, you guessed it, made of paper. I've reduced the rules to a single one (where reduced is a lie that means I don't know any better) Whatever you do, its probably crap enough to alienate some of the audience. Stick with however you did this. Consistency is everything.

An example would be the frequency of posting. If you went with daily posts you have to stick with it. People who don't like daily posts certainly wont start reading you just because you've dropped to 1 post every 2 months. Try stay a few drafts ahead of reality if something new has to happen every day.

A different example would be making dumb jokes or the choice of uhmmm voice? Be humble and polite, be condescending and authoritative - don't mix the 2. If you chose to make some kind of jokes try stick with the theme.

Back in the days when I was half serious about anything one of the things was writing. To avoid the paper hat from self-combusting or blowing away in the wind I made sure I had one person with relevant skills read it to fire proof it and one grammar nazi to huff and puff at it. There is room for unreasonably people in your life here and in our world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The author failed to achieve is own goal...

</comment><comment><USER5> cant one just write a few senteces worth of questions and fish for comments? you know you want to?</comment>


Prey: open source software to recover your stolen laptop - <AUTHOR> http://preyproject.com/ Also check out http://github.com/tomas/prey <comment><USER2> This came to my attention two weeks too late for me :(

Has anyone used it? This is exactly the sort of thing that I'd like to install as soon as my insurance pays out. That and an encrypted FS.

It's a shame that it took someone to steal my stuff for me to realise how necessary this is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Last night I spoke with the creator of Prey, he told me thousands of people are using it and that about two days ago they had an awesome case here in Chile where they got a lot of info about the robber, including name, email, msn account, picture and other relevant data.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> On github: <http://github.com/tomas/prey/></comment>


Potcoin, A New Cryptocurrency To Help Ease The War On Drugs - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/14/help-end-the-war-on-drugs-with-this-new-cryptocurrency/

<comment><USER2> Exchanges where POT is traded:

[https://www.swisscex.com/](https://www.swisscex.com/)

[https://www.mintpal.com/](https://www.mintpal.com/)

[https://cryptorush.in/](https://cryptorush.in/)

[https://bittrex.com/](https://bittrex.com/)</comment>


Homepage that looks like windows - <AUTHOR> https://samy.pl/ <comment><USER2> Tested this on mobile. Looks borked, and is not responsive.

<comment><USER3> so it looks like Windows?

<comment><USER2> No. Just fills the screen with a massive scrollable area which is really hard to navigate on mobile (iOS and Chrome on Android).</comment></comment></comment>


The terrorist inside my husband's brain - <AUTHOR> http://m.neurology.org/content/87/13/1308.full <comment><USER3> I attended this years annual American Academy of Neurology meeting in Vancouver and Susan Schneider Williams talked briefly at one of the plenary sessions. Her speech was shorter than what was in this text and yet had a similar message.

It was pleasant overall as it gave the plenary session that day a more humane feel. It is very easy to get wrapped up in the biochemical underpinnings of diseases and all the hype of the clinical trials being presented. We were reminded briefly of how their is a person behind all those symptoms and how the condition can affect the family as well.

</comment><comment><USER4> This piece was particularly haunting for me, having watched my father go through almost the exact same thing, including the PD diagnosis, lots of confusion about what was wrong with him, etc.

LBD is a horrific - the hallucinations are utterly terrifying to watch someone go through. My father did not commit suicide, however I have often thought that I wish he had, his decline has been so rapid and horrible - <USER2> his fear has been torturous - today he cannot move or talk, and is barely conscious, it is simply a matter of time until something like pneumonia will take his life. His symptoms started at age 58.

<comment><USER5> I don't want to come across as crass, but have you considered euthanasia? My father has lived through brain cancer for 9 years until he opted for that, before that he was waiting for something like a heavy cold to take him. Thing is, if you don't go outside the house anymore you have a very low chance of getting sick.

<comment><USER4> This is not a (legal) option where we live. He was also taken by the state and is under the full control of the nursing home where he is in palliative care.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A common failing I've noticed in complicated multi-symptom diagnoses like this disease is that doctors tend to treat each symptom individually instead of trying to connect the dots of all the symptoms. As a programmer used to debugging complicated systems it makes no sense, my first inclination when multiple things popup at the same time is to look for the underlying root cause.

<comment><USER7> Systems programmed by humans typically have coding standards. The human body on the other hand has been haphazardly developed over billions of years by the principle quick hack on top of quick hack on top of quick hack.

It's a complete mess of spaghetti code where anything that happens is the result of dozens of sub-systems trying to invoke or override each other.

<comment><USER8> And the origin of the original quick hack is still unknown because there was no version control at the time of the Cambrian explosion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is obviously painful for the family and the fans, and I hope my words are not taken in the wrong way.

But I really wish Americans (and yes, I think it's mostly Americans who have this tendency) would choose their words more carefully.

If I am not mistaken, we are talking about a _disease_. What makes the analogy to "terrorism" apt here?

For a while, everything seemed to be a "war" ("war on drugs", "war on crime", "war on bla"…). Now, everything that inflicts pain and trauma, it seems, is "terrorism".

This may not be the right occasion to complain about this. But at the time of reading, it is top of the list at HN and this kind of conflation really bothers me. Words still have meaning, one would hope, the sad _Zeitgeist_ of our time notwithstanding.

<comment><USER10> Have you ever lived with someone with a mental illness? I definitely see the relationship with terrorism. Terrorism thrives on fear - "will they attack today?", "Will they use some horrible method of attack?", "Will I be able to handle it?", etc.

Living with someone with mental illness can strike fear into a person. "When I get home from work, will I get normal spouse, or lunatic spouse?", "Will I need to take my children away from this situation, or will we have a nice normal meal?", "Will I get fired for constantly having to leave work to deal with this shit, or will it calm down for long enough that I can accomplish some of my life goals?"

It can be very terrifying dealing with something like this, and frankly, I find the metaphor extremely apt. I understand your distaste of how the word is used in the media, but please understand that not all of us use these words lightly. These diseases really can be _literally_ terrifying to the people around the disabled. It can _literally_ feel like someone or something is torturing your loved ones when you see what happens to them.

<comment><USER11> Something that is terrifying is not the same as a terrorist.

A terrorist is someone who _deliberately and consciously_ seeks to create fear and terror, usually for political ends.

A disease can not be a terrorist because it is not conscious and has no political agenda (obviously).

<comment><USER12> In the title, the author is using a metaphor, which is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.

<comment><USER13> And the contention here is that it's inappropriate (unless you mean to suggest that diseases are sentient or otherwise capable of intention to foment terror) and overplayed, and it ultimately corrodes the meaning of and devalues the word.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > He never said he had hallucinations. [...] it became evident that most > likely he did have hallucinations, but was keeping that to himself.

I do not know if I would tell people about hallucinations. It is bad enough to be out of control of your function, but to have no trust in your experience is terrifying. I wouldn't be surprised if I convinced myself I didn't have them in order to feel in control.

<comment><USER15> What is the point then going to doctors searching for a reason of your problems if you don't even tell them truth about your symptoms?

<comment><USER14> I would fully expect myself to have convinced myself that I am not experiencing hallucinations - particularly because hallucinations are often incredibly minor.

I am also very mindful about the dangers of telling people things that will alter how they interact with you.

Combining these I find it likely that there be a very high bar for knowing something like that - especially as it is likely a personal suspicion. Not all doctors qualify as over this bar.

Of course I would actively seek a doctor I was comfortable disclosing everything to, yet I understand a reluctance to do so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> When I heard Robin had passed I had assumed it was from depression, but what does that even mean? This essay has really challenged me to go deeper on what mental illness is- a disease just like cancer that has causes which can be mechanical.

It's heart-breaking to think of a person with no way out of rapid decline other than to check out early.

<comment><USER17> It was widely reported that the "comedian" was "suffering from depression"

It fed into an existing trope and nobody was willing to have the conversation that would challenge that, or if they did it was viewed as insensitive and downvoted to the point of censorship

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I didn't know about the Lewy body disease, so here is a link to the Lewy body dementia association [https://www.lbda.org/category/3437/what-is- lbd.htm](https://www.lbda.org/category/3437/what-is-lbd.htm)

</comment><comment><USER19> It is astounding that someone with the resources to pay for the best medical care was unable to arrive at the correct diagnosis. As we move towards AI assisted diagnoses, hopefully such suffering can be mitigated.

Do neurologists follow checklists when diagnosing symptoms? Will this case change their procedures going forward?

<comment><USER20> Speaking from personal experience (I suffer from a rare neuro-muscular) disease. If you have a very common disease it is often somewhat quickly diagnosed and treated. The less common the disease the longer it takes and the more likelihood of early misdiagnosis.

Often times there are symptoms overlap. A patient may not display or disclose the symptoms that makes it stand out from the others.

Many diseases are diagnosed by physical examination only as lab results can't pinpoint many diseases. This makes it difficult as the doctors you are seeing may not have any/enough experience with the disease to properly diagnose.

In my case it took over six years to get a correct diagnosis and treatment. My doctor is quite humble which served me well as other doctors might have misdiagnosed and treated me incorrectly. In my case the doctor said to me after several months of testing and examinations, "There is clearly something serious wrong with you, but I'm not smart enough to figure out what." After that he became more of a puppet master sending me to different specialists until finally, after 6 years I found one who was familiar with my illness.

<comment><USER21> Sorry to pry, but may I ask which neuro-muscular disease you're referring to? A bit fascinated by the inability of many doctors to make proper diagnoses when dealing with neurological issues.

<comment><USER20> Stiff Person Syndrome.

It is extremely rare and occurs in only about 1 in 1 million people.

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

For this particular illness, 6 years is the average amount of time it takes to diagnose. Just to help put it in perspective.

<comment><USER21> Thanks for indulging my curiosity, have heard of it believe it or not.

<comment><USER20> No worries. It's no big secret for me. Most people don't know what it is; I even got a blank stare from an ER doctor once when I was taken in during an extremely bad episode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The problem with diseases like this is doctors having nothing to offer at all. A relative of mine had this condition and they had so much trust in their doctors. They'd go to the doctor regularly and every time the doctor tells them they're sick after giving them a few trivial tests, sends them home and sends them a bill. It's a real farce.

They could try some radical therapy, like stem cells, but they don't. Instead they keep going to the doctor who is happy to take their money and tell them there's nothing they can do.

I feel like the doctor should have a priest on staff to tell them to say their hale mary's and douse them with holy water. At least it would partially justify the cost of the visit.

<comment><USER23> What do you expect? Medical professionals are not witch doctors or snake oil scammers. The first rule is "do no harm". It would be wildly irresponsible to inject a patient with stem cells or whatever just for the sake of trying something. If there's a reason to suspect that stem cells might help then encourage them to conduct a properly controlled clinical trial.

Many hospitals do have chaplains (priests and others) on staff. Some patients find them to be a great source of comfort.

<comment><USER22> A good counterpoint to this is Banting and Best ([https://www.nobelprize.org/educational/medicine/insulin/disc...](https://www.nobelprize.org/educational/medicine/insulin/discovery- insulin.html)). These guys back in the 20s discovered insulin and brought it to market and started using it on patients in widespread distribution in 3 years. As soon as they figured out it would work by injecting a dog, then themselves, then a patient they went into a children's hospital and started injecting kids with it who were in diabetic comas and they started waking up. These days their research would require multi-million dollar clinical trials and take 10 years or longer.

The point being, the drug testing process for terminal illnesses is very very slow. There are also drugs that show some efficacy in curing Parkinsons like Nilotinib, but they won't cure anyone who isn't getting it outside the system for at least another 10 years, even if it works perfectly. I think there should be some more risk tolerance and looser regulation for people with terminal illnesses as long as the research is done on a non-profit basis. Even if you had the cure for a terminal illness right now it wouldn't be on the market for 10 years and a lot of people would die needlessly because of that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Can mods change this mobile website link to [http://neurology.org/content/87/13/1308.full](http://neurology.org/content/87/13/1308.full)?

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm seeing any number of themes in this piece that call out for discussion, only a few of which are being picked up here.

 _Mental health, stigma, betrayal, and volition_

The whole nature of mental health and stimatisation runs deep in contemporary society and this article. Even with acknowledged issues, Williams likely hid the most troublesome symptom, hallucinations, from his wife and others.

Unlike physical disease or injury, which can be considered happening to us or our containers -- bodies -- disease of the mind _fundamentally affects our very ideas of identity and perception._ When a person's responses to the world change, when their recollection of events turns unreliable, when their response to the present becomes chaotic, when they themselves cannot trust the messages of their own sense, you're diving into some very deep, dark waters. Interacting with, caring for, and living with the mentally ill is exceptionally taxing. Norms of social behavior fail to exist, and the least interaction can become both a trial of comprehension and a battle of wills (though not necessarily this). And patterns which were once firmly established change, by the week, sometimes by the day or hour.

This is a reason that the role of primary caregiver is such a tremendously challenging one.

The response of others, including medical professionals, is also taxing. Normal expectations of volition and will simply do not apply. When there's an organic, chemical, or pathological underpinning to behavior, it's not simply a matter of "just try harder" or "you're smart and capable". To the point that comments suggesting this themselves become tremendously painful.

 _Celebrities and disease_

For better or worse, a characteristic of fame and celebrity is that they focus attention. Susan Schneider Williams's essay on her celebrity husban, Robin Williams's encounter with a rare, difficult to diagnose, and profoundly

There's a tension at HN over whether or not authors or personalities matter, are relevant, or should be disclosed. I feel rather strongly that they do. HN management disagree. There's a recent discussion of that here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12573874](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12573874)

The fact that this story concerns Robin Williams, famous and beloved comedian and actor, is salient _if only because it means that he received care, diagnostic, and autopsy attention that few other patients would receive._ If _not_ for his fame and affluence, this would be just another tragic death, likely by suicide and depression. Instead, we've a deeper understanding of the real mechanisms at play.

The story has similarities to the Irvine "PTA mom" story -- a drugs bust turned into a story of framing and false accusations. But for particulars of place and social status, _that_ story could have had a very different ending.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12616118](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12616118)

 _Disease as metaphor_

The inability to rely on established norms, prior patterns, experiences, and personality are where I see the titular concept coming into play. _The condition here violates both the patient 's and the author's fundamental trust in the Universe._ Robin Williams couldn't trust his own senses, and was, literally losing that which was most central to any of us: his mind. Susan was losing the friend, partner, and husband, to something she couldn't see, couldn't name, didn't understand, and couldn't combat. I cannot think of a better description of terror than that: to be threatened by an omnipresent, invisible, awesomely powerful, and hugely destructive enemy, with no sense of when or how it would strike next, and no effective means to defend against it.

 _Systems, understanding, and response_

There's a thread here about the failure of modern medicine, and perhaps the US healthcare system specifically, to address sufficiently complex and systemic conditions. Again I'm disappointed in much of the HN follow-up, which incorrectly interprets the @guelo's comments as being specific to programming. They are not.

The problem is a general one: our perceptions -- both our "five senses"[1] and those extended through technically-mediated, extended, or created sensing capabilities -- only inform us of _very_ topical conditions. It's up to the diagnostician to draw deeper inferences.

As I commented on the linked thread, perversely, the deeper and more complex our understanding and knowledge, the greater the tendency toward _non- systemic_ thinking, or at least of creating a loose flying swarm of individual specialist none of whom have a large-picture view. The roots are numerous (taking a systemic view of non-systemic vision): education, specialisation, compensation, healthcare administration, research, drugs and therapy development, and more. The result is having to run rough herd over providers to ensure that the full patient is being considered, not just some interesting subsystem behavior.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12620044](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12620044)

 _Understanding vs. cure_

There is, finally, the problem that understanding is a _possible route_ to a cure, but is neither sufficient nor necessary. There are treatments which have worked without understanding (salycilic acid, from willow bark, against headache, and citrus, against scurvy, as two historical examples), and there are cases in which additional information remains stubbornly ineffective in promulgating effective treatment.

A good friend of mine died some 25 years ago from a condition which was then rare, poorly understood, difficult to diagnose, and stubbornly resistant to treatment. A quarter century of medical advance has rewritten that sentence only very slightly: the specific chromosomal nature of the condition is now understood, and a genetic test could identify the gene transposition triggering the condition (though not the triggers of that transposition, yet). So to that extent, the condition is better understood.

It remains only poorly treatable, with many cases having a prognosis of 50% to 90% mortality, and the specific therapies date to the 1970s, 1960, and 1950s, or before, with little if any change. One's views of medical advances can be somewhat coloured by such experiences, and what I've observed is that much of what's proclaimed to be improvements in medicine can be broken down two two general mechanisms:

1\. Improvements in baseline medical care available to all.

2\. Specific and frequently very highly targeted advances. These can be tremendously beneficial, within those narrow areas, but as with complex keys, the locks fitted are frequently few in number.

There are exceptions and potential exceptions. Broad-spectrum antibiotics and development of vaccinations both provided tools to address a wide range of threats. Gene sequencing and synthesis, and stem cell treatments, offer some promise of broad new areas of therapeutic mechanism. In large part though, genetic medicine has been more diagnostic than therapeutic.

What understanding of mechanism _does_ allow though is twofold.

First, having a known enemy, one who can be faced and seen, removes a significant element of the dread of the _unknown assailant_ , which can have some comfort.[2] Even if the result is no net curative medical therapy, the path becomes known, and perhaps mechanisms for symptomatic treatment or palliative care.

The hope, of course, is that knowing _cause_ one may focus on _cure_ , or at least, to borrow from the military metaphor, counterattack. That's not certain, but it is a possibility.

Another element, tying in with the notion of systemic approach, above, is the thought when faced with some set of phenomena, a complex of symptoms, of considering "what is the possible common underlying element here?" Again, treatment of independent symptoms by specialists tends to draw away from this, but a reasonable thought, not just in medical circumstances, is: supposing we _did_ have a deeper understanding of this, or more complete diagnostics, what then could we do _or could we hope to achieve_?

________________________________

Notes:

1\. There are actually significantly more than five, though the convention "five senses" of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, persists. A good general text on perceptual psychology makes fascinating reading.

2\. There's a surprisingly relevant concept from Adam Smith's _Wealth of Nations_. Looking up his use of the workd "invisible", I found _two_ mentions. One the greatly misrepresented "invisible hand". The other though refers to the "invisible death" faced by combatants in modern (that is, gunpowder) warfare:

*the noise of firearms, the smoke, and the invisible death to which every man feels himself every moment exposed as soon as he comes within cannon-shot, and frequently a long time before the battle can be well said to be engaged, must render it very difficult to maintain any considerable degree of this regularity, order, and prompt obedience, even in the beginning of a modern battle. In an ancient battle there was no noise but what arose from the human voice; there was no smoke, there was no invisible cause of wounds or death. Every man, till some mortal weapon actually did approach him, saw clearly that no such weapon was near him.... In these circumstances...it must have been a good deal less difficult to preserve some degree regularity and order."

Which is to say, Smith here is addressing specifically the terror of facing an unseen, unpredictable, and deadly threat.

[https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_...](https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_V/Chapter_1)

</comment><comment><USER26> This is a type of dementia, which is in fact an age-related disease. That is not to say that getting old is the main cause, but aging is simply related.

I am convinced that the only truly effective way to tackle most age-related disease (which includes most diseases that kill people) is by comprehensively acting against fundamental aging mechanisms.

[http://www.sens.org/](http://www.sens.org/)

</comment><comment><USER27> I remember all the people ( looking at you Tony Robbins) who put RW's suicide as some failing of character.

this should make it painfully clear to all those with opinions about others on the internet to STFU

</comment><comment><USER28> Big fan of the song Robin Williams by CeeLo Green

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfesrob8hW4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfesrob8hW4)

</comment><comment><USER29> Dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12616007](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12616007)

</comment><comment><USER30> Taking into account his profession you have to wonder to what extent he was shielding his loved ones from how bad it really was. Poor man.

<comment><USER31> This was one of my first thoughts - trying to imagine how he was really feeling while putting up a strong face for everyone, especially his wife.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This reminded me of a "My Beautiful Broken Brain" documentary.

</comment><comment><USER33> O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells; Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills

Seriously, 109 comments and no one said it?

</comment><comment><USER34> Sorry but a medical disease has nothing to do with "terrorism". Is this just a way to grab headlines or clicks?

</comment><comment><USER35> There's a second posting of this link on the second page (at the moment) that has the actual article's title - perhaps the discussion can be merged and the title normalized.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12617586](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12617586)

<comment><USER14> This title is more descriptive and the other, older, discussion has no comments.

Merge may still be useful to remove other link.

<comment><USER36> The title here is editorialized, I'd prefer to keep her original title.

<comment><USER14> Ah yes. Removing "Heartbreaking" is something I would agree with. However I would not have read an article with the other title - it makes it seem like more fluff about terrorists.

<comment><USER37> Yes, exactly. I would not have come across this had the editorialized title not gained more traction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is absolutely heartbreaking. Who is cutting onions here?

I think as time goes on, we will find more and more physiological sources for severe mental health problems, and that is a great step towards proper diagnosis and, hopefully, cure. Before reading this article, I thought he 'just' suffered from depression and thus a condition that cannot be diagnosed physically.

<comment><USER39> As things stand, it's unhelpful to assert that there's a purely biological cause for something like depression or schizophrenia. In fact we know that life circumstances matter in triggering these conditions, and the more honest/sensible psychiatrists use the umbrella term "biopsychosocial" which conveys the systemic and interpersonal nature of the problem.

<comment><USER38> _In fact we know that life circumstances matter in triggering these conditions_

That doesn't mean it's not physiological in nature. Life circumstances can trigger a heart attack.

I think it is not only honest but extremely helpful to search for physiological signs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> To make it a little more readable I drop this is on alot of websites just edit the CSS and drop it on the bottom

body { margin:1em auto; max-width:40em; padding:0 .62em; font:1.2em/1.62em sans-serif; } h1,h2,h3 { line-height:1.2em; }

<comment><USER41> It's because OP linked the mobile site version. Here is the journal's formatted PDF:

[http://m.neurology.org/content/87/13/1308.full.pdf](http://m.neurology.org/content/87/13/1308.full.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Haven't read the article, but the timing is interesting to me: I'm just finishing my honeymoon, and our last waiter in Costa Rica looked and acted in a way where I told my wife he seemed like a robin williams character...and then I got really bummed out realizing we won't get any more of his characters again.

Going to read this on the plane home.</comment>


Super Mario 64 was built with a system written in Lisp - <AUTHOR> http://www.franz.com/success/customer_apps/animation_graphics/nichimen.lhtml <comment><USER2> Mario 64 wasn't itself written in LISP at all. It's models were built in Nichimen graphics, a SGI based 3D design tool written in Allegro CL.

As far as I know, the games we did at Naughty Dog (Crash 1-3, Jak 1-3 + X), and later Uncharted were the only major console games which large amounts of runtime Lisp. The Jak & Daxter series was 99% written in my Scheme dialect GOAL, including all the assembly. The only parts that weren't were libs talking to Sony's libraries (C++).

<http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/category/games/>

<comment><USER3> Much respect!

Reading about GOOL and GOAL is what got me into Lisp.

Working at a previous game company, on a PS2 title, we spent a lot of time oohing and aahing over J&D's beautifully fluid animations.

I'm actually still playing through the game as part of my "PS2 classics" backlog. Very nicely done!

I didn't realize Uncharted used any runtime Lisp -- could you elaborate?

/gush

<comment><USER4> Uncharted uses a DSL for gameplay scripting. The compiler is implemented in Racket. You can see what it looks like in Jason Gregory's 2009 presentation: [http://www.gameenginebook.com/gdc09-statescripting- uncharted...](http://www.gameenginebook.com/gdc09-statescripting- uncharted2.pdf)

The compiler is written on top of the low-level system in Dan Liebgold's 2008 presentation: [http://www.naughtydog.com/docs/Naughty-Dog- GDC08-Adventures-...](http://www.naughtydog.com/docs/Naughty-Dog- GDC08-Adventures-In-Data-Compilation.pdf)

More or less, the sexps that define a state-script get run through a maze of Scheme macros - there's even a pretty decent expression language in there which is compiled to bytecode - and the result is big honking C++ structure which is fed to the Uncharted runtime and interpreted.

In particular, note all those wait-blah-blah calls; those are using call/cc to implement coroutines. Which is something you really really want in a game but which C++ of course doesn't have. (GOAL had native coroutines.)

It's also nice to be able to iterate on the language syntax without having to fool with BNF grammars and so on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In 1983, Rescue on Fractalus and Ballblazer, the first releases from Lucasfilm Games, were built with a system written in Lisp. It was a 6502 assembler with Lisp syntax and a Lisp-style macro facility, written in Portable Standard Lisp, running in Berkeley Unix on a 4MB VAX 11/750. Unfortunately it was eventually abandoned because the developer had left and it was a bit of a strain on the VAX that was shared by the whole development team.

Yes, I wrote it. Yes, it was my first non-academic programming job. Yes, the users complained about the parentheses, and the slowness. But, they also took advantage of the powerful macro facility.

<comment><USER6> Fond memories of Ballblazer. An amazing creation for a ~2 MHz 8 bit cpu.

<comment><USER5> Written by David Levine, <http://grokware.com/dl/resume.html> who credits the Lisp-based Macro Assembler in his resume!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I built an iPhone game with Scheme, and I have to say, it was the best debugging/development environment I've ever had.

<comment><USER8> jlongster I was closely following your blog posts about Gambit-scheme on the iphone and was even inspired to try it myself. However this was shortly before Apple changed the developer agreement to add the "stuff that compiles to objective c is not acceptable" clause.

It appears as you have discontinued this project. Was that clause the reason?

here is his blog for reference: <http://jlongster.com/legacy/scheme-iphone- apps.html>

<comment><USER9> FWIW, Gambit C compiles to C, not to Objective C. I'm not sure that makes a difference, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Doom was built with a system written in Objective-C.

Clairvoyant, those 90s game developers were.

<comment><USER11> Can you describe it? I thought the code was all C? Or were the tools written in Objective-C? Either way, that's very interesting (big Objective-C fan, here).

<comment><USER10> John Romero wrote up a pretty cool post about the use of NeXTSTEP and Objective-C at id Software during the 90s.

<http://rome.ro/2006/12/apple-next-merger-birthday.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's a little disingenuous for Franz to claim any credit for Nichimen. Nichimen N-Graphics was the spinoff of the Symbolics S-Graphics system, written in ZetaLisp. Symbolics ceased new development and there were customers for the graphics system, so it needed to be ported to a Lisp environment that would run on available hardware.

Franz Allegro CL is a further development of Maclisp, developed during Project MAC at MIT. ZetaLisp was also a direct development of Maclisp. I'm guessing this shared ancestry helped in the software porting and made Franz the natural choice for the N-Graphics. But the press release just blows a lot of smoke about the speed and scalability of Franz.

<comment><USER13> > Franz Allegro CL is a further development of Maclisp

You are completely wrong. "Franz Lisp" was written to be compatible with Maclisp so that it could run Vaxima. "Allegro Common Lisp" was written from scratch with no relation to Franz Lisp or Maclisp.

<comment><USER12> I see now after more reading that I was wrong and you are right. Franz Lisp was a new implementation that was compatible with Maclisp and Allegro Lisp was a later new implementation. I'm sorry to have posted bad information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It is cool but I wonder how many customers you get with a story that is 15 years old. The world has moved on.

I did some really early Apple Newton development work in around the same timeframe ('96, '97) and the early Newton development tools were also all written in Lisp. Probably Mac Common Lisp.

Not so strange of course since many people on the Newton team had a strong OODL (Object Oriented Dynamic Language) background. These are mostly the same folks with SmallTalk, Lisp, Scheme and Dylan experience.

Awesome times. But not much of it is left.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've posted the link. I've have no affiliation with the guys from that site. Just wanted to share an interesting story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The Jak and Daxter series (PS2) was also written (almost?) entirely in Lisp, too.

<comment><USER16> Or more specifically, GOAL - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp>

<comment><USER16> ..which incidentally is how one of the villains got his name: <http://jakdaxter.neoseeker.com/wiki/Gol_Acheron> :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Thanks for sharing this link. I'm giving a talk on Lisp and computer games at my university in less that two weeks from today. It's great to have more examples to share.

BTW. Abuse is a half-C, half-Lisp game.

<comment><USER18> Good timing. You can also use the results of the Lisp Game Jam that starts today.

<http://lispgames.org/>

<comment><USER19> > NEW: Lisp Games Development Screencast 1

Oh please, use something like blip.tv, as it handles podcasts properly. This way I can watch it on my TV and hack from the couch. I need to get away from my desk to get the creative juices flowing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've also found this resources talking about Lips in the gaming world:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp> <http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LispInJakAndDaxter> <\-- regarding Jack & Daxter mentioned in the comments.

</comment><comment><USER20> Note that the article seems to be talking about the tools used to build the game, not the game code itself. I'd guess this means things like texture editing, level design, and such.

<comment><USER21> As far as I can tell N.World was a modelling and animation (and rendering) package comparable to Maya. See this press release from 1996: [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_1996_August_6...](http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_1996_August_6/ai_18562821/)

"[... ] our tools were used to model the characters for Super Mario 64".

I bet SM64 was written in C++.

EDIT: ... and possibly large chunks of it in C, too, since the C++ compilers always seemed to lag several months behind the C compilers on new platforms, and SM64 was a launch title.

<comment><USER22> It was written in C and assembly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This seems like pretty old glory to trumpet in 2011.

<comment><USER13> Or, that's been on their website for a long time and someone found and posted it here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Haven't you ever unlocked Lambda Mario? I thought this was pretty clear... ;)</comment>


Launch HN: Mighty Health (YC S19) – Health coaching for people over 50 - <AUTHOR> Hey HN!
We're James, Felipe, and Bernard, founders of Mighty Health (https://mightyhealth.com/gift), a personal coach that helps people over 50 become healthier through exercise, nutrition, and wellness.
With Father's Day coming up, we thought some of you might be in the same position as we are, worrying about our parents and loved ones, wanting to do more to help out in these uncertain times.
A few years ago, my dad was rushed to the hospital for emergency heart surgery. Though he luckily survived, this was quite the wakeup call—he had to change his lifestyle habits immediately, or else he'd have to deal with painful, worsening chronic issues for the rest of his life.
These changes—exercise, nutrition, sleep, and reducing stress—are hard as is, but even more so for folks over 50. Most wellness apps are designed for motivated millennials, making them feel less relatable to older adults. They don't take into account evolving health needs, joint issues, or technical limitations. Personal trainers and nutritionists are expensive long-term and often inaccessible. And because our older loved ones are at higher risk of COVID complications due to their age, they won't be able to return to gyms for the foreseeable future.
That's why we started Mighty Health. Everything is designed intentionally for people over 50:
1. Coaching: A personal coach keeping them motivated through SMS, providing a real human relationship
2. Exercise: At home workout videos that are easy on the joints, led by top-rated certified trainers
3. Nutrition: A personalized plan and grocery list designed by cardiologists for heart health
4. Reminders: Preventative health checkup notifications (based on their age and gender) and medication reminders
5. Celebrations: Texts to family members about milestones in the program so you can celebrate together
Our app is simple to set up and use, accommodating large and high contrast text. We chose SMS (through Twilio/Front) for coaching because it's a more familiar medium, like texting with your family. We integrate with Apple Healthkit and Google Fit, as well as a number of cellular blood pressure cuffs and scales.
Dr. Bernard Chang, our medical co-founder, is the Vice Chair of Research at Columbia University's Department of Emergency Medicine and leads our team of physicians, trainers, and coaches who develop our plans and content.
These plans are optimized for health goals specific to people over 50, such as losing weight to prevent chronic diseases, becoming stronger/decreasing joint pain, or reducing their risk of heart disease. On average, 85% of our users stick to our plans for at least 12 weeks and lose ~10 pounds.
We'd love for you to check out our website at https://mightyhealth.com/gift and are eager to hear your feedback and ideas below. Feel free to reach out directly at email@example.com as well! <comment><USER2> The need for your app is overwhelming. I am 65, female, very fit, and lost 40 pounds since 2014. Daily, I do some type of class, either strength, cardio, yoga, or walking. Here are my concerns with your app as a vehicle to long-term improvement.

1\. The enemy of healthy living is social interaction that is nearly always alcohol and food indulgence. Either your user has to find new friends (like an alcoholic develops a cohort of non-drinking friends,) or they have to acquire the strength of purpose to abstain while still being social. Success here is very dependent on self-esteem....a distinctly non-technical aspect not directly addressed by the app.

2\. Preparing your next meal BEFORE YOU ARE HUNGRY is critical to success. This could be addressed by subscribing to a pre-packaged frozen meal service, or, by consistently doing grocery shopping and meal prep in advance. The latter takes planning, discipline, and effort. Lack of planning is frequently the reason for eating excess or unhealthy food.

3\. Eating to self-soothe is prevalent. Learning other sources of pleasure or gratification is crucial to sustained success. For example, I always want second helpings even though I know I have already had enough. This because my stomach needs an extra 15 minutes to tell my brain that I am satisfied. To cope, I set a 15 minute timer and for that 15 minutes, I walk away from the food area, sit in a comfy chair and do something pleasant with my phone, such as read fashion news or text with a friend. A sine qua non of healthy eating is having a list of other pleasant things to do when you feel the urge to eat when not hungry.

4\. Many overweight people will only succeed in the transition to a healthy life if they have in person contact with others that support and acknowledge their struggle. Either a 12-step meeting or a FaceTime call with their coach is vital so that your user can visualize that person's face when the user is at the moment of decision to binge or not.

5\. If you take away food and drink as the emotional coping tool, you have to replace it with something that is not self-destructive. Your users have to be ready when emotional crisis comes when, then more than ever, they will feel entitled to eat or drink anything within convenient reach. For this reason, I am unable to keep ready-to-eat foods in my house.....cereal, cheese, nut butters, dessert, snacks, bread of any kind. I do keep fresh apples and oranges, but that is it. Your user must develop other methods of dealing with crisis.....journaling, phone a friend, or just giving themselves permission to withdraw, lay down and rest if possible. Since I have momentum on my side, an activity that 100% occupies the mind, like a spin class, is my helper that enables me to muddle through. Meditation is another good tool.

I have come to believe that lack of self-care has much more to do with emotional self-regulation and self esteem than it does with lack of knowledge on sleep, exercise, and nutrition.

However, for those who suddenly get motivated by a health scare, the knowledge and guidance in your app is like a welcome breath of life.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, thank you for sharing your personal experience and such a thoughtful response. We'll definitely take your concerns into account as we continue to improve the product.

100% agreed that the underlying issue is not knowing what to do, but rather more psychological aspects such as who you spend time with, environmental factors, self-esteem, and discipline. Our medical co-founder Dr. Chang is a psychologist by training and constantly emphasizes this. One direction I'd personally like to see our product go in is increasing our sense of community and what it means to be "Mighty." Much like the strong online community you see from apps like Peloton and Strava, but with more of an angle of shared physical and emotional self-care. As you mentioned, this is not necessarily a technological solution, but rather one of how we create the right culture and environment for our members to succeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hey this is awesome. One question, can the coach(es) cater to preexisting conditions/diets? My pops has Parkinson's and is on a pretty tight diet that my mom has put him on for weight loss, so in order to try to get him to try it, Mighty Health would probably need to work within those confines to start. Would something like that be possible? If so, I'd love to gift a subscription to see how it helps him.

Cheers and congrats on the launch! v exciting stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, absolutely! At the start of the program, we ask about nutritional preferences / restrictions, and the coach can also hop on a call to clarify anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Have you considered expanding into ADHD coaching? I feel like it's something I could use. Since I haven't yet tried it, I don't really know how it works. It seems like something that's useful but is in its early stages, with a lot of people just relying on frequent counseling, which can be expensive. I also feel like it's something that could be mostly automated which would be ideal for a tech company.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the idea! Definitely something to consider for the future, though we'll need to bring on a few experts to develop the content and pathways first. We've seen online solutions like [https://donefirst.com/](https://donefirst.com/) but that seems like a more pharmaceutical approach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm pleasantly surprised you went with 50, as opposed to Medicare age. It just shows you aren't going after only the easy Medicare dollars. Of course you can still capture that too (see the Silversneakers program as an example).

Just like economic gap that is growing in the US there is a major health gap growing too. For those with resources 50 is like the new 20 as many of men are now "juiced to the gils" with testosterone provided by their doctors (I see it a lot in Miami, and I'm sure it's proliferated in tech companies/cities too, just something about money and ego I think), then for the have nots it's this age where many are just holding out to become Medicare eligible to begin treating their chronic conditions and they are only suffering and getting worse in the meantime.

One day, if I am ever financially independent (unlikely), I have resolved to dedicate my life to health/wellness for children, with a very specific goal of type 2 diabetes prevention. I really have no idea why, I never got T2D, but it breaks my heart especially in children. If you ever expand in this direction, I'd be the first to apply in any capacity.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing! We've definitely seen a bit of the same. The economic gap leads to an access to care gap, especially in more rural areas. That's before even factoring in lack of access to fresh, non-processed foods, which is a key part of nutrition especially at an older age. We hope that services like ours (and your much-needed T2D concept) can help close that gap!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is fantastic and could be so helpful so many people. A piece of feedback on the sales page: it does a good job of describing the person who would be /gifting/ the service and they (we) need some guidance on how to gently bring it up to the recipients and sell them on investing the time and energy into it.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a fantastic idea - we'll work on adding that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Do you ever plan on adding live video for the coaching or trainers?

Additionally, would preventative health reminders be coordinated with the patient's PCP in some way? For example, you wouldn't want to tell a user to go get blood work for checking lipids when they just had it done the other day.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that's a great idea. Live video would have even more of a community feel --plus, we could probably capture and edit the streams into re-usable workouts for the future.

We'd love to integrate with provider medical records in the future, but sadly there are very few incentives in a fee-for-service environment. For now, members can just check things off or "postpone" if our cadence is off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm glad to see people building for this audience. I have to say I'd be a little reluctant to gift this to someone for fear of offending them. That said, it seems like it would be a great addition to a doctor's available interventions or a workplace wellness program.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! We've been surprised by the number of users who have told us they couldn't relate to other exercise programs. You bring up a great point about potentially offending -- we feel it comes down to how close you are with the person and if they know you're coming from a good place. We just added a 30-day guarantee to the site as well in case they don't end up liking it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is an excellent idea! In the US, there's a culture/mind-set within this age group that going to the doctor is a waste of time or that they're "stronger" for not having to see a doctor, which only allows pain/injuries to linger or grow before they get too far out of hand that a doctor MUST be consulted.

I think there's an interesting angle to attract a wider audience here too – if your claim of losing ~10 pounds in 12 weeks is true, maybe there's an opportunity to be a "weight loss service" masquerading as a "wellness service." The difference being that well-being is a lifelong goal and weight loss is not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed! It's such a struggle encouraging people to take preventative health seriously, even as chronic issues start creeping in. Rising insurance deductibles in the US certainly don't help as well. We've found that the members who are must successful are those who have received some kind of "warning" from their doctor -- "if you don't lose the weight, you're going to need back surgery" \-- or worse yet, people like my dad who had a near brush with death before realizing he needed to take his health into his own hands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is such a great solution in a country where healthcare is so expensive. It helps kids of aging parents, and aging parents themselves take care of their health. I bought this app for my mum on mothers day, and she's been using it!

</comment><comment><USER11> This sounds great. I'm 47, but have physical limitations due to truamas earlier in life. I love the idea of a service tailored to older folk, and may participate.

The one thing from your description that threw me off was " it's a more familiar medium, like texting with your family."

I don't text with my family. Or with anyone, really. It is a running joke that the last way you'd want to get in touch with me is by text. My kids text me just to take bets on how many days will go by before I see it. Maybe I'm the exception... but I'd encourage you to re-visit whether that really is how people who are 50+ would prefer to communicate.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the great feedback. We started with text as it seems more integrated with daily life than in-app chat, but we'd love to expand out channels in the near future. Would love to hear what method you'd prefer instead so I can pass it along to the team!

<comment><USER11> I like emails and video calls. If I need to communicate in real-time, I prefer to just have a call and do it. If not in real-time, email feels the least invasive to me, and is my preference.

<comment><USER12> Isn't part of the idea here to _be invasive_ though? If part of the intent of the service is change behavior then the coach must interject themselves into the clients' lives in order to create action.

How would you see the minimal invasiveness of email aligning with such a call to action?

(hope this doesn't come across as an attack as it is not intended to. Just trying to understand how you see these two ideas as compatible since I see them as opposing and so wanting to know what angle I'm missing)

<comment><USER11> I see your point, but I believe your goal is to be visible, not invasive. You are trying to help people along a path that they want to be on, not force people on a path that doesn't feel right to them.

For me, texting is a path I won't walk. Email is a path I walk multiples time a day. Talk to me there, I'll see it, it will be injected into my life.

<comment><USER12> That makes sense - thank you for your reply!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Really great idea and well executed from what I can see. Just wondering about the business model: how often do your coaches interact with your customers? It seems that at a ~$10/month fee you wouldn't be able to afford too much of their time per customer.. Maybe 5 minutes per month at most (assuming $75/hr and deducting payment fees etc) ? Or am I missing something?

<comment><AUTHOR> Coaches interact with the members every day. The vast majority of our coaching touchpoints are asynchronous -- either checking in or replying to members via SMS, or configuring member's daily plan (step goals, exercise videos, lessons, etc.). As you can imagine, we've spent quite a bit of time building out tooling on our back end to scale the coach to member ratio while still being able to provide personalized, human service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This looks very good! congratulations.

Curious to know - does the Western market adopt solutions like this very easily ? Because atleast in India (or Asia), i see my parents and lot of older folk being highly resistant to adopting management solutions.

And we are a market that's almost entirely mobile-based. I would have guessed this is something one would need to push via doctors ... rather than directly.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great question. We're definitely seeing a large shift toward the consumerization of healthcare in the US -- especially starting with product/services that folks are already accustomed to paying out of pocket for (i.e. therapy, home testing kits, meditation, certain drugs). Similarly, Mighty Health is meant to be aligned with services like personal trainers, nutritionists, and gyms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Excited for your launch! How do your coaches get parents to become motivated? Been a challenge for me to get them to exercise and eat better

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Great question. Our coaches are trained to help members develop habits (using a framework similar to Atomic Habits or The Power of Habit) -- to successfully create or replace a habit, you need a trigger, the routine (in our case, the workout or eating well), and a reward. At first, the coach's SMS prompts serve as the trigger, but over time we help members establish their own triggers in their environment (post it notes around the house, associating a workout with finishing a specific meal). Similarly, the coach is at first the reward (insight on your meals, shoutouts in your support group) but members learn to embrace other intrinsic rewards like the great feeling of accomplishment you have at the end of a well balanced day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Congrats on the launch.

To clarify: Are you guys specifically focused on people over 50? The website makes no mention of the 50+ age focus. I just got a gift for my mom, but the only reason is for an exercise coach who can create a specific routine for someone who is 65 years old. We don't need the nutrition coaching.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we only focus on people over 50! It's in the sub-headline of our site, but we could make it a lot more prominent / repeated throughout -- thanks for the feedback. All of the exercises in our app are specifically designed for that age range. Looking forward to hearing what your mom thinks of our program!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Love the idea! Honestly health is often taken for granted and we need more things in tech pushing health forward

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed! Unfortunately, most people don't think of it as an acute problem until it's too late.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> My first thought was "the clothing brand is doing coaching"? [https://hypebeast.com/tags/mighty-healthy](https://hypebeast.com/tags/mighty- healthy)

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha we haven't seen that! Maybe drop a collaboration in the future...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Just gifted it for my mom. Hoping it kick-starts some better habits for her.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, excited to hear what she thinks about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I was just thinking about how great it would be to have something like this for my mom! Especially the low-impact exercises. Do you have coaches in any other languages outside of English?

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently, we offer coaching in English and Portuguese -- we'd love to add more in the future though! What language would your mom prefer?

<comment><USER20> Vietnamese, although Spanish might be helpful if you had to prioritize. Lots of kids of immigrants in the US where our parents don't read English well enough to participate in things like this.

<comment><USER21> I agree, I would love to get a subscription por my parents but I'm sure they will not stick to it unless Spanish is supported.

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it, we'll be sure to add Spanish and let you know. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is such a great idea in a country where healthcare is so expensive, giving peace of mind for kids of aging parents, and for hopefully parents themselves. Good luck with this app!

<comment><AUTHOR> So true -- deductibles are getting higher every year, and my parents are always facing hard decisions on whether or not they should go in for elective visits. Excited to hear your mom's feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Love this idea and I can totally see my parents using something like this! What's been the most interesting insight you guys have learned so far while building Mighty Health?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our older users have been much more tech-savvy than we anticipated when we first started working on this. Roughly 10k people turn 65 each day, and many of them are in the generation that is used to relying on an iPad every day. That said, we've tried to incorporate tiny UX considerations wherever we can, such as adapting with the phone's text size settings and increasing the size of touch targets.

We've also found that folks are generally overconfident but misinformed about nutrition (probably due to the overwhelming amount of information online and in the media) but anxious and risk-averse when it comes to trying new forms of exercise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This sounds great! I am on my 30s. Maybe I can't join your program right now but I can definitely share this idea with my parents. Is your app running global?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it's available on both iOS and Android in most countries. We'll refund your gift in full if we can't get it to work!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> What did you guys use to build the landing page? Looks nice.

<comment><USER25> Hey! CTO here. First, thanks.

We used a custom design by our great designer, meaning the rest of the landing page is CSS and HTML.

We used a few css libs, for the sake of helping us making it responsive, but that is all.

<comment><USER26> The overall design is nice, but you may want to reconsider the combination of Visuelt and Helvetica Neue. Not only are they just different enough to noticeably clash; what's worse, I thought the Helvetica was (unstyled, fallback-stack) Arial at first, which looked like carelessness. For Helvetica to look sharp, you need to really commit to the Swiss look, headings and all.

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it. Appreciate the feedback and will incorporate into our future iterations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Sounds like sth [http://www.lab4.life/](http://www.lab4.life/) has been working for a while.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm not the target audience right now, but someday I might very well be. This is one of those ventures that I'm glad exists.

Thank you for doing this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate the support. For Father's Day, we've added the ability to gift a membership, in case there's anyone that comes to mind that could benefit!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I hope you succeed. But the people who most need this coaching are also the same ones least likely to engage.

</comment><comment><USER30> Congrats James! This would indeed make a great last-minute father's Day gift. Good timing on the launch!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Jay - always appreciate your support!

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> My mom is one of the first members of the program; it helps her a lot already!

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, glad she's liking it! Let us know if she has any other feedback for how we can improve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Why does your "Contact Us" link just go to the FAQ page?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm... I'm seeing that it links to mailto:email@example.com - are you referring to the "Contact Us" at the very bottom of www.mightyhealth.com/gift, or somewhere else?

<comment><USER32> On [https://www.mightyhealth.com/faq.html](https://www.mightyhealth.com/faq.html) at least.

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it - fixing it now. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Is this worldwide ? Can I gift it to my dad in india ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, available internationally! You can use the country selection dropdown to input an Indian phone number while completing your gift.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Do your trainers specialize in training older clients?

<comment><AUTHOR> We have a couple of trainers that have focused on older clients exclusively (for example, one of our lead trainers Julie Diamond: [https://www.instagram.com/juliediamondfitness/](https://www.instagram.com/juliediamondfitness/)), and all of the rest have had extensive experience training clients up to their 70s. In addition to making sure the workouts are tailored to health goals and easy on the joints, we ask that our trainers offer lots of modifications in the workout videos for those who can't do specific exercises due to joint/back pain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Congratulations to you and the team for the launch!

</comment><comment><USER36> That's amazing, congrats for the launch.

</comment><comment><USER37> Awesome idea!

</comment><comment><USER38> Very cool idea, best of luck!

</comment><comment><USER39> Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER40> Congrats on the Launch! My mom has been using Mighty Health for about a month now, and is very happy with it. She particularly likes the accountability via text message, and nutrition coaching.

<comment><AUTHOR> So glad to hear your mom has been finding it valuable! Will pass that along to the team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I got Mighty Health for my mom as a Mother's Day gift and she loves it! Absolutely worth it and the content the team publishes is especially helpful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We've been working hard on developing our new workout videos, especially since everyone's been stuck at home with little to no equipment recently. Soup can curls look a little funky, but are still effective!</comment></comment>