The Case for Calling Brutalism 'Heroic' Instead (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.citylab.com/design/2015/11/boston-brutalism-heroic-concrete-architecture/415512/ <comment><USER2> It's surprising that the authors put so much time into researching the architectural heritage of the word heroic, but appeared to not do the same for brutalism. There's no mention of the word 'brut' \- a reference to the raw, unfinished appearance used in early works identified by critics as forming a movement. Semantically it has nothing to do with the word brutal (meaning savage, etc.) , but it's a convenient leap for those imposing what they see an the ideology behind it.

In reality it's a very broad movement spanning decades, continents and covering a massive variety of design intentions.

Writing off all of it is as closed minded as writing off all of impressionism, etc. There are fantastic achievements and also-rans in any group.

I personally have a fondness for many of them, as I find the majority of modern civic architecture is forgettable and unambitious, and glass and steel do not automatically trump concrete and brick. But I would never claim to love it all.

There is a fantastic resource at www.sosbrutalism.org which contextualises classic examples in time and location is worth a few minutes of your time.

</comment><comment><USER3> DC resident chiming in here. DC is full of brutalist government buildings, and sorry but they're all eyesores.

<comment><USER4> I, too, typically despise most brutalist architecture. But the D.C. Metro is brutalist, and I think it was done exceedingly well. It's one of the greatest pieces of architecture I've personally experienced. And by experience, I mean both the individual stations as well as the stations collectively.

Sadly, subsequent modifications fell far short of the original vision, which I couldn't even begin to put into words myself.

For example, installation of waiting time displays broke up the cavernous open space.

I almost cried when I first saw (after returning to D.C.) how some of the stations had red lights along the platform instead of the original off-white. The lack of color is part and parcel of the brutalist design; adding color gives the same effect as graffiti.

The steel and glass coverings over the escalators, while nice in themselves, don't echo the brutalist style, either, though admittedly I have no idea how that could have been accomplished. I'd give the designers an A for effort.

The newer extensions don't echo the design faithfully, which really detracts from the overall feel. What made the original design work so well was the repetition--both within each station, and across stations.. If you're not going echo it faithfully, then don't even try. It's like expanding the scene in an existing painting by using crayon and crude shapes. Better to switch to another design altogether so that it's clear you've left one artistic environment and entered another.

I think the D.C. Metro is both amazing in its own right, and an example of how brutalism can be used to great effect. The Metro is imposing, yes, but not confrontational; both efficient and inspiring. It's probably not a coincidence that by dint of the architecture being almost entirely underground, both the functional and esthetic elements work in harmony. Most brutalist architecture has horribly poorly functional interiors which were sacrificed for the benefit of the exterior "statement", which makes it suck for everybody inside and outside.

<comment><USER3> Maybe I would appreciate the DC Metro architecture more if it weren't marred by how miserable the experience of using the metro for commuting actually is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Boston's Government Center is terrible not because of the building styling per se but because it's a giant concrete plaza with no activity & no structure & no people, and all the buildings are built at massive inhuman scale with nothing happening on the ground floor & absolutely no accommodation to foot traffic. The square overall could be improved by filling the square with pretty much anything: trees, market stalls, food trucks, fountains, children's playground, whatever.

<comment><USER6> It would be quite beautiful if they would replace most of the plaza with a park. I notice that a lot of concrete architecture looks best when it's standing next to a green space, or is surrounded by trees. The Government Center with its deserted plaza of concrete carries more of a sense of imposition to me. I may be a little biased though because of how similar the plaza is to the kind of parking lot that you see in front of a Wal-Mart.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There was an article recently in Jacobin that complements this well.

[https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/06/zaha-hadid- architecture-g...](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/06/zaha-hadid-architecture- gentrification-design-housing-gehry-urbanism/)

</comment><comment><USER7> "Heroic" architecture would be Albert Speer's plan for Berlin.[1] Speer's architecture was designed to make people feel small and insignificant. He liked very tall, narrow design elements. Unlike brutalism, Speer's work had good finishes and decorative details.

[1] [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2764430/Hitler-s- gra...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2764430/Hitler-s-grand- designs-giant-Nazi-city-revealed-Berlin-exhibition.html)

<comment><USER8> Looks like it was also brutalist in the use of slave laborers...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> These are the sorts of buildings that I don't think anybody likes looking at. Take, for example, a building on my University's campus:

[http://media.jrn.com/images/940333_4397240_ver1.0_640_480.jp...](http://media.jrn.com/images/940333_4397240_ver1.0_640_480.jpg)

The man who built it was Bruce McCarty, not sure what he was thinking when he designed this.

</comment><comment><USER10> ugh. changing the name will not make them better-looking.

</comment><comment><USER11> Atlantic/CityLab followed an earlier article by 99pi:

[http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/hard-to-love-a- brute/](http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/hard-to-love-a-brute/)

<comment><USER12> > As with any art form—whether opera or painting or literature—the more you > know about it the more you appreciate it. This is especially true of > concrete buildings.

I think this is called the Courtier's Reply? Just because you spent your life studying literature or sticking people in giant unpainted fascist architecture doesn't make it a good thing.

<comment><USER4> Indeed. I can appreciate the artistic vision and merit in something and still dislike it.

For example, on many occasions I've eaten dishes at restaurants that were clearly put together with incredible vision and experience. And yet it would not be something I'd ever order again. Which isn't to say I'm picky. I've repeatedly eaten dishes knowing that, with time, you can learn to enjoy something. I used to hate sushi in particular, and the characteristic flavors of Japanese cooking in general. It took me years of persistence to enjoy various Japanese dishes, but I've come a long way. But that doesn't always pan out. I've eaten balut many times, but at this point I think I'm just gonna throw in the towel. It's too livery, and while I enjoy foie gras and other heavily herbed liver pates, I don't think I'll ever enjoy balut. (The balut broth is amazing, though.)

I like to think that I _get_ brutalist architecture. It's generally meant to be imposing in general. But also a style that, because of the unique characteristics of concrete, permit the architect to experiment with different shapes, configurations, and patterns (or, conversely, utilize fewer patterns).

But it's too challenging. That's not the kind of environment you want to be forced to deal with. By being imposing, it can't be ignored. It's like being surrounded by bears in the forest--it's not the kind of imposition you normally appreciate, certainly not on a regular basis. The designs might be flexible in terms of construction, but it's entirely inflexible in the way it evolves with the surrounding environment. That's one thing architects don't pay enough service to, IMO--continuity with the past _and_ future, both wrt to form and function.

<comment><USER10> [http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3545](http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3545)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Brutalism: where architects who live in renovated traditionalist lofts ruin a city for fear of looking old fashioned.</comment>


Should people over 40 work a three-day week? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/aug/08/should-people-over-40-work-a-three-day-week <comment><USER2> Did you guys click on the paper itself? This is the scientific equivalent of clickbait.

[https://www.melbourneinstitute.com/downloads/working_paper_s...](https://www.melbourneinstitute.com/downloads/working_paper_series/wp2016n07.pdf)

As I read it, they didn't even measure working hours directly because "we have another issue in examining the effects of labor hours on cognitive functioning, that is, labor hours are censored (that is, retirees report zero working hours). Rather than directly using variables which correlate with labor hours, but do not correlate with cognitive functioning, we use these variables for creating the fitted values for squared of working hours and working hours as instruments."

And they run a regression to infer working hours from the region they live in, parent being alive, number of children and so forth.

Let me just get to the main point: I think they're just picking up a decline in cognition from lack of sleep. If someone is stressed out with all these obligations, then longer work hours will cut into their sleep.

Also, I don't see how they figure out which way that causality runs: could those who have good cognitive function afford to work fewer hours than those who don't?

</comment><comment><USER3> FWIW, I cut back to 30 hours a week for a couple of years in my late 40s. The effect on my stress level was phenomenal. The issue wasn't so much the direct hours worked, but the _flexibility_ that I had to lengthen a weekend or take a random morning/afternoon off without feeling like I was cheating anyone. It was also nice not to be on the critical path for every damn thing, which I think is a continual struggle for most people experienced enough to be in a leadership role among many more junior developers.

There was a downside, though. Between working less than full time _and_ working from home, I sometimes felt pretty disconnected, marginalized, etc. Mostly I was OK with that, welcomed it even, but I eventually came back to full time because I didn't feel like I could drive the things I needed to from that kind of position.

Overall, I highly recommend it. Just be aware that there are downsides. Like working from home, there's also a greater need for self-motivation, self- discipline, and self-reliance than if you're working in a more traditional arrangement.

</comment><comment><USER4> And many employers will read this as "Should you ever hire anyone over forty?"

<comment><USER5> exactly... that's how the age discrimination will start again

<comment><USER6> _will start again_

I believe the word you're looking for is "continue".

<comment><USER7> Or maybe, not every field experiences ageism from the same end to the same degree.

Not even in our very ageist software industry is this consistent, if you take a look at things like mobile or web development when compared to lower level or legacy stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yes, but so should the under-40s.

(If this ends up as a threshold, it will become yet another factor encouraging the middle classes to delay having children...)

</comment><comment><USER9> The article's title says a 3-day week, but the actual study more specifically said a 30-hour week.

Or, put it another way, The Guardian can't even summarize it's own articles properly, because there was no recommendation as to how those 30 hours should be split up.

Personally, I'd prefer 5 6-hour days to 3 10-hour days.

<comment><USER10> I work from home, so am able to set my own schedule, and tend to do something more like 10-20 blocks of 1-3 hours each, over the course of a week. They are not evenly spread out... I work when I am energetic and alert enough to be the most productive, balanced with the responsiveness required to meet the needs of the business.

<comment><USER8> Sounds like heaven to me.

Are there times you have to be available, or are you able to be entirely async?

<comment><USER10> Mostly async. There are some tasks that end up getting schedule at specific times -- conference calls, code deployments (sometimes), etc. But The vast majority of time is flexible. It really is a great setup for coding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Perhaps they should, but I don't think they could from an employers point of view.

I'm over 40 and would love to work a 30 hour week. But there is a cost for hiring each employee and so it's better to have fewer employees working longer. The cost includes interviewing and recruitment costs, payroll systems, management time, IT systems (email, systems access, hardware and licenses).

If we could slash all these costs and make it easier and cheaper to hire people, the 30 hour week might work. It might also make it easier for companies to fire people though, so less good for the 'youth'.

<comment><USER12> These costs are banal compared to what your usual medium to large enterprise is paying in bonuses,benefits and other.

I am coming from Europe and always admired capitalist systems but I think the americans and others are probably stressing it too much.

I have experienced large US corporations firing people that had 2-3 years till retirement, people that spent 30years with company and have been replaced with cheap offshore resources.

I think companies could keep these employees but incrementally decreasing their salaries and working hours. They could still earn more (overtime) but I would dynamically adjust the salaries.

I mean anyway...95% people are just slacking at their jobs

<comment><USER13> I vouched for this comment in spite of the idiotic assertion at the end, because I wanted to raise a question on this point specifically:

> _I have experienced large US corporations firing people that had 2-3 years > till retirement, people that spent 30years with company and have been > replaced with cheap offshore resources._

Is there any capitalist argument that a company should hold on to someone who has become redundant _because_ they have only a small period of time until retirement? My gut reaction as a capitalist to someone being outsourced at age 63 with 2 years to retirement is "so what" but of course when I think about it from the human perspective it seems horrible. They either need to find another job (very hard at that age regardless of the sector, but especially in tech) or cut their standard of living beyond what they expected _for the rest of their lives_.

<comment><USER14> At some level, maintaining a reputation for humane treatment of workers might help attract young talent.

In some sense loyalty begets loyalty.

<comment><USER15> Do you seriously believe young workers think about the old ones, or about themselves becoming old workers? If loyalty begets loyalty (to which I agree), I would expect it to appeal to those who understand what loyalty is all about. Young generation was told they will have 12 jobs over 40 years of career, and looks like they have internalised this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Heck yes! I'm targeting financial independence by my mid-40s. I don't expect to stop working entirely at that point, but I do expect to cut back. 3-days- per-week sounds entirely reasonable to me.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm not trying to disagree with the article here, but I have worked very short weeks before... and for me I found that 4 days off makes it really hard to be productive. You're away for so long that you don't even feel like you are a part of the company. Sometimes I would nearly forget to go to work, it was so much time off. I would say 4 days (maybe with less hours) is a much better schedule.

<comment><USER18> Perhaps a longer period would work better here. Maybe 6 days a fortnight (say 3/1/3/7?) or even 12 days in a month (say 4/2/4/2/4/12?) so you feel more continuity during work, but also get regular periods that feel like proper holidays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Don't tell the kids (it keeps them feeling productive and important) but by simply ignoring all the bullshit...

We already do.

</comment><comment><USER20> I suppose it could work if the employee gets time as their raise rather than a salary bump. Otherwise the business is increasing cashflow while getting less time out of the employee.

The cost benefit for the employer and employee is non-linear, so I think we need a better way to look at employment than either the hourly or salaried methods. Something that incentivizes 30 hour work weeks (assuming 30 hours is somehow an optimal compromise for both employer and employee).

</comment><comment><USER21> Employers wouldn't go for a 30 hour week and there is no modern equivalent to the power of unions and popular opinion that drove reductions from workers doing 7 days of work a week down to the 40 hour week. Even a 40 hour week is a fiction for many knowledge workers.

</comment><comment><USER22> Many people are not even halfway to retirement at 40. I guess that companies won't let them go part-time because of the increased cost per hour and employees won't be happy because of the reduced pension.

</comment><comment><USER23> Everybody (in industrialized nations) should have 3 day work week.

<comment><USER24> I would honestly like to agree, but I don't think 3 days works unless you keep the 8 hour days. 10 hours is a lot of time out of one day. Once you sleep, commute, make meals, shower, and other such things, there is very little time. In addition, folks start to really slow down near the end of the day, especially on the 3rd day.

I believe it to be much better to work 4 days at 7.5 hours a day to reach the 30 hours. This gives some continuity in a workweek and much better productive time.

I actually support five 6-hour days even more. They are trying this in Sweden. With nurses, they find stress levels go down, productivity goes up, more self- reported happiness, and decreased absenteeism.

<comment><USER25> 3 days isn't enough time for all the meetings. But 5 days of 6 hrs might work. 28 hours of meetings and 2 hours of coding.

<comment><USER26> I think you hit the nail on the head. 30 productive hours is a 60 hour workweek once you add in all the useless meetings. On a 18 month SAP implementation I was doing 70 hous a week for 18 months including 3AM calls with India 4-5 days a week. Totally fried me. It is interesting though, now that I'm working independently and change my standard rate for meetings, the number of meetings has gone way down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Whatever happened to those productivity gains we got from the 50s and 60s? The ones that were supposed to make it so we could work two to three days a week?

<comment><USER28> Red Queen Syndrome[1], those productivity gains also created increased demands on the workforce.

1\. [http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/redqueen.html](http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/redqueen.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm 39 and I've still got student loans to pay off - I can't afford not to work full time. So no, unless the pay is enough.

<comment><USER30> Honestly curious, how? Did you stay on Income Based Repayment forever? Get multiple Doctorates while deferring payments? Refinanced multiple times? Most US loans have 10-15 year payment plans so something unusual happened in your case.

<comment><USER29> I went back to school recently to pursue a programming degree, after being laid off. I wasn't the oldest person there, either, so my situation doesn't seem to be that uncommon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> yes, but not in their retarded jobs obviously</comment>


Is Internet Addiction a Real Thing? - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/internet-addiction-real-thing <comment><USER2> What on Earth is a "real thing"? And what does that have to do with the name given it?

Concepts are mental activities that identify disparate concretes by ignoring some aspects of their differences. As such, we can unify pretty much anything under a concept. The question is never "is this abstract thing really real for reals?" It is: "Does this way of grouping things give us any useful way of dealing with the underlying reality?"

Debates about whether the constellation of phenomena that get united under a named concept constitute a "real thing" are almost always undertaken in more- or-less willful ignorance of this fact. The very way of posing the question--"Is this _real_?"\--obscures the actually interesting and important question: "Is this _useful_?"

Addiction is a fairly well-defined and useful category of pathology. People who are addicted to something have similar symptoms and issues, and treatment of addiction can be usefully studied across groups of addicts, so what is learned about people with alcohol addictions may be useful to people with heroin addictions and so on (or not: simply because two things are grouped under the same concept for a given purpose does not mean they are usefully identical for all purposes, as anyone who has handled a sail boat and a row boat--both members of the abstract category "boat"\--knows.)

No concept has perfectly crisp edges, and on the borders there are plenty of cases that one person would count as "in" while another would count as "out". If enough such cases start accumulating and impede communication and thought, we create new interstitial concepts. In the case of "Internet addiction" the interesting question is, "Is this enough like other addictions to group it usefully under the came concept, or do we need something intermediate or possibly orthogonal to usefully categorize it?"

<comment><USER3> >Concepts are mental activities that identify disparate concretes by ignoring some aspects of their differences.

This is a good intuition for a certain set of topological notions:

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think a better way to look at it is "information addiction" or "social snooping addiction". "Internet addiction" is a silly concept, because the internet is merely the medium. Its like referring to gambling addiction as "casino addiction".

<comment><USER5> That's exactly what I was thinking of posting when I read the article.

I know a lot of people who could be classified under the "information addict" category.

Two decades ago they would've most likely been regulars at a library, part of book clubs, have all the encyclopedia's they could get their hands on etc.

Two decades ago they would've also have been classified as well read, informed and all similar good things.

If anything the internet has made it easier for them to understand different perspectives and participate in discussions.

Would I call they "information addicts"?

Definitely not.

But there are some types of addictions that the internet as a , medium has made easier to achieve "social snooping addiction" and "WebMD addiction" would definitely be the big ones.

But as OP said, the internet is merely a medium, not the addiction.

<comment><USER6> Right. If you're going to call those people addicts, you might as well call us all air addicts.

<comment><USER7> >you might as well call us all air addicts.

This is a ridiculous dismissal of a serious issue, and frankly it reads like you and the parent commenters didn't bother to RTFA.

>through a combination of excessive time spent online and that time interfering with necessary social and professional activities, Internet use would result in either mental distress or clinical impairment, akin to the type of inability to function associated with pathological gambling

Does that read like your typical book club member?

<comment><USER6> I was referring specifically to the notion that people who spend a lot of time in libraries are information addicts. I think that notion is not serious, and I do dismiss it.

<comment><USER7> I'm still not entirely clear. I think that it is the use of the word "right," that is giving me a snag.

I am reading the word "right" as you agreeing with their post.

Did you mean for the "right" to read as a dismissal of their post, and their silly use of "addict" to describe the book club member/library goer?

<comment><USER5> I think baddox may have meant it like "Yeah, right". That and "Right" are often spoken with a hint of sarcasm when disagreeing with said statement.

Also, I never said a casual book club member of library goer fits the definition of an information addict.

I said, and I quote:

       Two decades ago they would've most likely been regulars at a library, part of book clubs, have all the encyclopedia's they could get their hands on etc.

Which in my case implies, two decades ago, people who would be classified as information addicts on the internet(in present times) would have gotten their fix using multiple mediums in conjunction; including but not limited to:

\- being regulars at a library

\- part of book clubs

\- getting their hands on as many informative/factoid sources such as encyclopedias

I go on to say:

       Two decades ago they would've also have been classified as well read, informed and all similar good things.

Implying that it is a new phenomenon that well read, informed and curious people who like understanding the world around them are unfortunately and too easily classified as addicts.

After which I stated:

       Would I call they(sic) "information addicts"? - Definitely not.

Trying to establish, that just because a person seeks out and consumes a lot of data does not make them an internet addict or an information addict.

Now to address your comment:

       through a combination of excessive time spent online and that time interfering with necessary social and professional activities, Internet use would result in either mental distress or clinical impairment, akin to the type of inability to function associated with pathological gambling

Since you mentioned it; In my opinion that statement unfortunately seems to get the causality and effects mixed.

It points to excessive time spent online and that time interfering with necessary social and professional activities as the cause for mental distress or clinical impairment.

Unfortunately in reality things are usually the other way around (there may be exceptions, albeit few).

That is, people who suffer from mental distress, clinical impairment or extreme cases of dissonant discomfort in today's day and age use the internet to get easier access to their fix.

People suffering from these alleged symptoms would most likely always sacrifice social and professional activities, regardless of the medium that delivers their fix.

By focusing on the internet and other effects of the real disorders, it perpetuates a disregard for the serious issues that people are actually suffering from.

ex:

A serious hypochondriac would not get fixed by reducing time spent on the internet.

The same goes for disorders dealing with paranoia, obsessions, social stalking etc.

<comment><USER7> This still isn't right. I think you're throwing around the word "addict."

Perhaps you are using a very loose definition of the word "addict" while the author and I are using a narrow, clinical, definition.

When I, and the author, say "internet addiction" we don't mean that the person just has a thirst for knowledge. We mean that if a person has a behavioral addiction then that person has "an inability to control how often or how intensely you engage in an activity, even when you feel the negative consequences."

This is probably just a semantic disagreement.

The people that can browse the web all day, hold down jobs, care for themselves, these aren't the people the author is talking about. They are talking about the ones that drop out of school, quit their jobs, etc.

>Since you mentioned it; In my opinion that statement unfortunately seems to get the causality and effects mixed.

Do you hold the same stance if we swap out internet addiction for another addiction, such as gambling or heroin?

> Trying to establish, that just because a person seeks out and consumes a lot > of data does not make them an internet addict or an information addict.

This wasn't implied in the article. Maybe the grandparent comment implied it, but I don't think so.

As to your comments about "real disorders" and "serious issues" well, we take the bottle away from the drunkard, but that's really another discussion on its own.

Example of loose use of the "addict" label: [http://qz.com/304179/brazil-has- the-worlds-biggest-internet-...](http://qz.com/304179/brazil-has-the-worlds- biggest-internet-addicts/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> No. I've been browsing 10 hours a day for the last 15 years and never got addicted.

</comment><comment><USER9> Probably, but at the same time (and the article touches upon this a bit) the Internet is somewhat of an all encompassing medium the increasing use of which is not necessarily a sign of negative addiction.

I use the Internet a _lot_ , but that is because the Internet has grown to encompass some amount of nearly every aspect of my life, not (in my non- professional opinion) because I have an addictive tendency toward it.

I'm a software developer, so clearly Internet use for research/testing/etc is very common; I'm a movie/tv watcher and all of my at-home movie/tv watching has migrated to the Internet; I'm a reader and most of my reading has migrated to the Internet (at the very least for delivery to my Kindle); I'm a gamer and most of the games I play have at least some Internet-based multiplayer component; I'm a hobbyist at various things like photography, quadcopter building/flying, and 3D printing and the Internet is a spectacular way to communicate with like-minded hobbyists, so I do; I'm someone who lives across the country from most of my extended family, and we keep in contact via the Internet (in addition to occasional phone calls and visits, but the contact via the Internet is much more consistent due to the easy time-shifting of leaving messages).

I spend hours and hours and hours a day on the Internet, but OTOH I can easily go camping for a week or two and live completely without it with no ill effects. I have IRL friends I spend time with on a weekly basis, I "get out" and do plenty of things not related to the Internet, etc. So while I use it _very often_ on a regular basis, that in and of itself does not signify an addiction, as far as I understand it (again, in my non-professional opinion).

<comment><USER10> The internet is like electricity - you can live without it, but due it the prevalent use of it, you will not be part of modern society/culture and be at a significant disadvantage in terms of economic impact vs those who use it.

<comment><USER11> You could have said the same thing about tobacco, 50 years ago. That did not make the suffering of those with the proclivity to develop cancer any less gruesome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A person with addictive tendencies can be addicted to anything.

[http://www.tlc.com/tv-shows/my-strange-addiction](http://www.tlc.com/tv- shows/my-strange-addiction)

<comment><USER13> Depends on your definition of addiction. Addiction is a real medical disease. To be addicted in the medical sense you have to a) have a dependence on the object of your addiction (your body has a negative response when you don't get the thing you're addicted to) and b) it changes your behavior and causes extreme negative consequences in your life. Things like Internet addiction only account for one half of that. I think that if the statement "you can be addicted to anything" can be true then either the definition of addiction your using is too broad or it needs redefining.

<comment><USER6> How about my dependence on air to breath and food to eat? I think you also need to add the requirement that the dependence is not common, and causes problems for the person that fall outside the norm.

<comment><USER7> Those are innate dependencies, and almost all definitions of a dependence disorder include that the dependence must cause social, occupational, or recreational issues.

Check out the DSM4 criteria for substance dependence[1], but note that it has been phased out in the DSM5. They merged it with substance abuse to form "Substance Use Disorder."

[1] [http://www.buppractice.com/node/454](http://www.buppractice.com/node/454)

[2] [http://www.buppractice.com/node/4621](http://www.buppractice.com/node/4621)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> HN's comments to this article are funny. Most of them read like denials or sidesteppings of the issue.

<comment><USER15> Addiction you say?

What is 'addiction'? What is 'disease'? What is 'real'?

It recalls Bill Clinton asking for a more precise definition of the word 'is'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nah, I'm just really bored.

</comment><comment><USER17> well, few minutes ago switched into the browser out from the VNC console of my Linux workstation (where i was doing something productive for almost 20 minutes) to check something on the wiki... i'm still to reach that wiki page tab :)

</comment><comment><USER18> Yes</comment>


Yippies vs. Zippies: New book reveals '70s counterculture feud - <AUTHOR> http://thevillager.com/2018/02/25/yippies-vs-zippies-new-jerry-rubin-book-reveals-70s-counterculture-feud/ <comment><USER2> Read pretty far and still no talk about what Yippies or Zippies believe, giving no ground for conflict. I'm not a New Yorker and at almost 50, I'm still too young to 'just know'.

<comment><USER3> TBH, the more I read about the '60s/70s counterculture, the more I'm convinced Nixon wasn't so bad after all.</comment></comment>


Why are mouse sensors in the middle of the mouse? - <AUTHOR> http://jonathanhedley.com/articles/2008/04/mouse-sensors <comment><USER2> "But moving just the forefinger — not the whole hand, or bunching all the fingers, but just the forefinger — actually makes the mouse rotate, particularly for left- and rightward movements. If the sensor is up the front of the mouse, that rotation of the mouse will give the user the desired outcome: the cursor will accurately move to the left or right, or back and forth. But if the sensor is in the middle of the mouse, then all of that fine control is lost: no or little movement will be registered."

Paraphrased: With the ball/sensor at the top of the mouse, you can have more horizontal control by rotating the mouse left or right.

My response: With the way that the hand rotates (the base of the hand as a fixed point), the speed of the cursor slows down the farther back the sensor is placed. So in essence, you can get more precise horizontal control with our current sensor placement standard than with a index-thumb sensor.

This is good because it's easier for the human arm to move the mouse quickly horizontally by rotating at the elbow than it is to move vertically (by rotating the shoulder, or in my case, moving my wrist/fingers).

Then again, I have my mouse set pretty sensitively, so I can traverse the entire screen within the range motion my wrist allows (no need to lift my hand at all). Also, I'm pretty sure that the difference is negligible compared to sensitivity settings and advances in technology (such as slowing the cursor when the mouse is moved slower... that sounds obvious, how about decreasing the absolute speed of the cursor when the mouse is moved slower).

</comment><comment><USER3> My first thought was that putting the sensor/ball in the middle means the mouse is less sensitive to the way in which you hold it. That would mean that if you hold the mouse at a slight angle, it would still behave the same as if you hold it straight on. If you put the sensor in the front, the mouse becomes more sensitive to its orientation, but it limits the different ways in which you can hold the mouse since you must hold it straight on for it to behave the same.

<comment><USER4> It only becomes sensitive to its orientation during the process of changing the angle of the mouse and only then if you rotate the mouse about the dead center. For yourself I'd imagine that you only really re-orientate the mouse once per use. Also I'd imagine that you'd quickly start rotating the mouse about the position of the sensor if it was a problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anyone still using their wrist, elbow or should to move the mouse is asking for repetitive stress injuries. I highly recommend you try a trackball. Using your fingers to move the cursor is a lot more convenient, the mouse itself stays in the exact same place relative to the keyboard making it easier to switch between them, and takes up less room on your workspace, as it doesn't need room to move around.

</comment><comment><USER6> well, I think that nowadays the optical sensors are quite sensitive, and it's not that hard to achieve any apparent placement of the sensor through some software modification of the output. So even if you place your mouse at the far back, you can make it behave as though it's in front. Or at least I think so...

</comment><comment><USER6> well, I think that nowadays the optical sensors are quite sensitive, and it's not that hard to achieve any apparent placement of the sensor through some software modification of the output. So even if you place your mouse at the far back, you can make it behave as though it's in front. Or at least I think so...

<comment><USER7> I don't see how. I presume mice only register changes in position, and not changes in orientation. That's all you can measure with a ball so I presume that's all that is measured with optical mice. So if you were for instance to hold the top of the mouse in place and rotate the rest of the mouse around that point, you would definitely register a change in position with the optical sensor, and I don't know how you would do this in software. So the mouse won't ever behave exactly like it would if the sensor were at the front.

<comment><USER8> I think that your assumption is incorrect. The optical sensors are comparing images, currently looking for translation. There's not reason they couldn't look for rotation.

However, it is a firmware, rather than software change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> While we're at it:

i know nobody uses wired mice anymore, BUT: why does the wire come out the top. Don't they realize if the wire came out the bottom (towards the user), you could position the mouse much closer to the home keys?

<comment><USER10> I don't see how that works. If the wire came out of the back it would be in the way of my wrist.

I don't see how it would have anything to do with the home keys.

Edit: Wait. Do you put the mouse in front of the keyboard? I put mine to the side. I think most people put it to the side.</comment></comment>


Hey Millennials, saying 'OK Boomer' at work could get you fired - <AUTHOR> https://www.kron4.com/news/strange/hey-millennials-saying-ok-boomer-at-work-could-get-you-fired/ <comment><USER2> Age discrimination laws don't protect against having your feelings hurt, it's there to prevent real issues like firing/not hiring someone because of age. So no, the "news story" is crap and you won't be fired for saying this or have an issue unless you're a 20-something CEO with a penchant for poor decision making.

<comment><USER3> Not true. While hurt feelings isn't the legal standard, it doesn't have to rise to firing or hiring impact either.

The ADEA standards apply to age discrimination. The ADEA prohibits requiring people to work in a discriminatorily hostile or abusive environment. … The standards for assessing a hostile work environment claim under the ADEA are analogous to those utilized under [Title VII]. … Thus, the ADEA is violated when the workplace is permeated with discriminatory intimidation, ridicule, and insult … that is sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter the conditions of the victim's employment and create an abusive working environment.

Citation: Murtha v. New York State Gaming Commission et al, 17-cv-10040, 2019 WL 4450687 (S.D.N.Y. Sept. 17, 2019)

<comment><USER2> > that is sufficiently severe or pervasive

This is non-trivial standard to meet, especially if all your evidence is "they called me a boomer".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In the state I live in, anything can get you fired. Being up for a raise can get you fired. So where's the news here?

<comment><USER5> Yeah... you don't exactly need to bring in a federal law to fire someone for saying 'Ok Boomer' in most of the US. Disrespectful, insubordinate, a bad fit, etc. there's no real need for bringing in the age discrimination law unless it's a superior doing it consistently.

Also trying to bring this up to a federal discrimination suit feels like peak Boomer to me. The whole counter-backlash to Ok Boomer is really reinforcing the stereotype it's lashing out against. Decades of articles saying every mildly declining industry is being 'killed by Millenials' or 'Millenials are X' and all it takes for Boomers to start playing federal discrimination cards is a two word clap back of 'Ok Boomer' is just _chef kiss_ beautiful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why is this surprising?

Kids, don't do this.</comment>


AMD over $10 a share today, price last seen back in 2007 - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/AMD:US <comment><USER2> Looks extremely overpriced due to lots of investor hoping to get similar gains as the one from NVIDIA stocks.

Without starting a flame war, i personally think AMD is lagging way behind NVIDIA, which lately has been releasing incredible products. They have been expanding in both the gaming market as well as gained a strong foothold in emerging B2B markets such as the automotive industry and virtual reality.

Sure both AMD and NVIDIA will keep growing but now they really feel overpriced.

<comment><USER3> I don't think AMD is that far behind Nvidia. They Fury series is on par with the latest Nvidia products if they use the Vulkan API.

The upcoming Polaris is supposed to be using HBM2 which should give it a boost.

<comment><USER4> AMD are in a death spiral.

In the gaming market, AMD have completely lost the high-end and are barely managing to keep a foothold in the mid-range. The RX480 is just barely competitive with the GTX 1060 in gaming, performing worse in DX11 and edging a marginal (~5%) lead in DX12 and Vulkan. The R9 Fury has been all but abandoned by card partners, because it's barely faster the GTX 1060 or the RX 480 while costing 50% more.

None of that really matters, because AMD are absolutely nowhere in the GPGPU market. The market for consumer video cards doesn't have much room to grow, but there's exponential growth potential for GPGPU compute in server and embedded applications. Nvidia are selling rackloads of premium-priced cards to data centers and increasing quantities of chips to the automotive industry. They're in a virtuous circle of economies of scale, with the video and GPGPU markets supporting each other.

AMD have gained some market share in terms of unit volume, but they're in deep trouble when it comes to margins. Nvidia can afford a price war in the mid- range, because they've got a monopoly on the high-end. Nvidia could do to Radeon what Intel did to Opteron.

I like AMD. I particularly like AMD's support for open standards (Freesync, Vulkan etc), but I think that this is a desperation move. Polaris has been a massive disappointment, at least in comparison with Pascal. Unless Zen turns out to be _spectacular_ , AMD are in deep trouble.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Everyone is expecting Zen to perform well. AMD also has been hyping it up a lot. I hope it doesn't turn out to be a pile driver kind-of architecture. Intel needs competition to keep prices sane, which currently they are not.

<comment><USER5> AMD is going to have a live stream next Tuesday to show off Zen, but it's more gaming oriented.

[https://www.amd.com/en-us/innovations/new-horizon](https://www.amd.com/en- us/innovations/new-horizon)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is because of the rumors that Intel is going to cross license AMD GPU patents for use in their integrated GPU's as the intel-nvidia gpu cross license agreement is going to expire next year.

<comment><USER7> Wasn't their agreement long term, until patent expiry? ([http://investor.nvidia.com/secfiling.cfm?filingid=1193125-11...](http://investor.nvidia.com/secfiling.cfm?filingid=1193125-11-5134&cik=1045810))

Or am I missing something?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It all depends on Zen providing real competition to Skylake. I am skeptical. Even if zen is a killer chip, it will land is a sparse environment. AMD needs a win on CPU _and_ chipset.

Most likely outcome: Zen is decent but not enough to make a dent in intel. At most it pushes Intel's prices down a little.

ARM is the real competitor to Intel not AMD.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately ARM was bought out so we can't buy shares in them any more.

With news of the windows x64 emulator for aarch64, 2017 should be a very interesting year on the x86 arm battle for sure.

Might be worthwhile picking up qualcomm shares or stock in some other companies that license from ARM.

<comment><USER8> I expect ARM to be a threat more as a scorched earth commoditization manner. It's not that ARM chip manufacturers will take over Intel's billions, but instead they will deflate the CPU balloon by allowing cheap and ubiquitous devices that have 'enough' CPU.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Web based interactive Malbolge interpreter, generator and a crackme - <AUTHOR> http://zb3.github.io/malbolge-tools/

<comment><USER2> Awesome. I ran the 99 bottles of beer program[0] and it worked, despite locking up Firefox for a bit...

[0] [http://www.99-bottles-of-beer.net/language- malbolge-995.html](http://www.99-bottles-of-beer.net/language- malbolge-995.html)</comment>


The Best Teacher I Never Had - <AUTHOR> https://www.gatesnotes.com/Education/The-Best-Teacher-I-Never-Had <comment><USER2> All the lectures as transcripts, not videos: [http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/](http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/)

Playlist of Feynman lectures on video at Youtube: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLzGzdSNup63lMYeOpU9H...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLzGzdSNup63lMYeOpU9Hax6MBsTjdDas)

<comment><USER3> I think the messenger lectures are different from the Feynman lectures on physics

<comment><USER4> The Messenger lectures are the basis for Feynman's book the Character of Physical Law, which I would highly recommend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >Years later I bought the rights to those lectures and worked with Microsoft to get them posted online for free.

This just floored me. I hope that some day I will acquire the generosity and perspective to use a small part of my assets for something like this.

<comment><USER6> Not to take anything away from what Gates did (and I admire his post-Microsoft goals), it's probably mush easier to do this with your assets when they are as large as his.

<comment><USER5> Absolutely. But imo most of us (including myself) find it difficult to spend a token amount of our earning or net worth for a public good.

<comment><USER7> It wasn't a public good, it was a Microsoft marketing campaign to push people onto the Silverlight platform.

MS never made the Feynman Lectures free for all to read.

<comment><USER8> It was a public good and it required silverlight.

Try going to a public library and checking out books without a library card (which almost always cost money). Therefore under your premise public libraries are not for the common good because they have numerous use stipulations that go with them and they inherently restrict usage via fees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> At the time of Feynman's death, there were two quotes on his blackboard (along with a to-learn list, and several formulas). The first one is "What I cannot create, I do not understand", followed by "Know how to solve every problem that has been solved". Since the years I've known those quotes, I have those as my personal motto for software development.

Also give me a cute excuse to boo-boo Java-land and framework heavy ecosystem ;)

<comment><USER10> Thanks for those. Here's a fantastic elaboration: [https://www.quora.com/What- did-Richard-Feynman-mean-when-he-...](https://www.quora.com/What-did-Richard- Feynman-mean-when-he-said-What-I-cannot-create-I-do-not-understand)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> In 1984, I misread the syllabus for my Physics class, and, as a consequence, bought 'The Feynman Lectures in Physics'. It turned out to be a brilliant mistake, as Feynman was much wiser and funnier than the required textbook. One of the best intellectual moments of my early college life was to read his perspective [0] on how physics fit in with the other sciences, echoed nicely later by Randall Munroe [1].

[0] [http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_03.html](http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_03.html) [1] [https://xkcd.com/435/](https://xkcd.com/435/)

<comment><USER12> [1] Stephen Wolfram is missing. But I guess he is too far out.

<comment><USER11> I guess he'd need A New Kind of Comic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You can find the Messenger Lectures with subtitles here [http://www.cornell.edu/video/playlist/richard-feynman- messen...](http://www.cornell.edu/video/playlist/richard-feynman-messenger- lectures)

<comment><USER14> Thanks! I just can't get over how much like a Brooklyn gangster he sounds. I think I much prefer reading his lectures, where I can mentally substitute a proper cambridge accent. The knowledge seems to be absorbed better that way. Also, he walks around too much: this tends to dissipate the focus. But, I do like the antics with his hands/body and facial expressions!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The grandfather of my best friend from high school had the privilege of having Feynman as one of his seminar instructors whilst at Cornell. In fact, he remembered the famous lecture described in "Surely You're Joking" where Feynman showed up to teach after getting a black eye in a bar fight the preceding weekend.

According to his account, Feynman walked into the lecture hall, turned to face the crowd (at which point, his black eye was noticeable), and asked "So... any questions?"

<comment><USER16> In the very first chemistry class of a very reputated college in France, where every student discovered the new, extremely fast pace of the teaching, with an authoritarian teacher, on a lesson I already knew from high school, I, alone in the lecture, raised my hand to answer a question. And just made a very appropriate, contextual pun on paar with the answer. Teacher smiled. Asked someone else. That gave me quite a reputation for the next 5 years. The guy who makes a pun to a stern teacher.

I love lecture hall situations, where you mix respect, intrigue, the stress of succeeding, and you get to meet the real humans.

<comment><USER15> I miss lectures as well. A great lecture is my favorite way to learn - it's way more informative than a great textbook. I had a great teacher for my first circuits class in college. I wish I'd made the time to take some of his upper level classes in advanced analog design; he was able to make the material really engaging in the first class since microwave design was his specialty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you don't have silverlight, another place that may or may not work for you but has the Messenger lectures in a different format is:

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF96D8FFDDE4B9087](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF96D8FFDDE4B9087)

</comment><comment><USER18> Richard Feynman has by far the best explanations I have ever seen from anyone in my life. His explanations are fascinating and deceptively simple. His explanation of electricity in this video has fundamentally changed the way that I see the world: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS25vitrZ6g&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS25vitrZ6g&feature=youtu.be&t=8m17s)

</comment><comment><USER19> Pretty sure "the friend" was Ann Winblad, who he was seeing at the time, and that this was a trip they took to the Outer Banks of NC.

It's all been written about in more detail in past books and magazine articles.

For more see this ancient WIRED piece: [http://www.wired.com/1996/09/winblad/](http://www.wired.com/1996/09/winblad/)

</comment><comment><USER20> Ask HN: If you were building an online school, how do you find great teachers and how do you convince them to create and offer their lessons online?

<comment><USER21> In short, implement a free market system! Elaboration, let the students choose teachers, and based on the data you get from that, pay the teachers, and have this data out in the open, so teachers can see what influences their remuneration.

<comment><USER22> Would this not reward teachers who give the students the best experience, rather than the best education. I think it would be naive to expect students to be rational actors* in this market.

[http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rational-choice- theory.a...](http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rational-choice-theory.asp)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> A lot of well deserved praise for Feynman but this video stuck with me for some reason and I always pictured the guy as a bit arrogant and snobbish.

youtube.com/watch?v=3D2RaDVkylY

<comment><USER24> I just watched the same video and it was one of the most insightful things that I have seen recently. Feynman is simply acknowledging that there are a few things in physics which are very difficult reduce to layman concepts. The other bit, about "why questions", is also quite interesting. I have come to believe that a lot of questions which sound very interesting, like "why do I exist?", don't really have good answers, and probably will never have. e.g. if it did turn out that we are living in a matrix, the question will simply reduce to "why does the matrix exist?" and soon. Thats what Feynman is trying to point out that "Why something happens?" is not a complete question unless we agree to some understanding beforehand. Otherwise you just go deep into the rabbit hole.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Who is the Feynman of programming / CS education ?

<comment><USER26> Well, there's "Feynman lectures on Computation"...

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Unreal. Watching him speak about computers, while wearing his logo'd t-shirt, makes me imagine him giving this talk at a recent meetup. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA)

</comment><comment><USER28> Richard Feynman is my all time favorite person.</comment>


How Alexander Calder Became America's Most Beloved Sculptor - <AUTHOR> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/alexander-calder-became-americas-most-beloved-sculptor-180964773/ <comment><USER2> I far prefer his early mobiles and even simple but recognisable abstract wire work to the later work described. He seemed to go from small carefree and fluid to large heavy and crude/austere. I'm sure the latter made him more money.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there some well-trod path to being able to appreciate this sort of work? I'm looking at the pictures in the article and _wow_ do I ever not "get" this, to the point that I can't understand how one _might_ "get" it. That camel...

[EDIT] if it helps, the only one I kind of appreciate is Croisière, but even that one seems like it'd be better if it were less shoddy and cheap looking. It looks like a quickly-made scale mockup or model for some other, fully finished work, and I don't follow how that (lack of?) quality contributes to its value, in any sense, as sometimes such things can.

<comment><USER4> Make a point of frequently going to art museums and sculpture gardens. Read the placards and learn to recognize certain artists, spend time looking at the pieces that grab your attention and think about them. Don't feel like you have to enjoy every piece. This will build your appreciation/understanding for two reasons:

1) Like all things, art depends on context. A piece is often in conversation with other works by the same artist, contemporaries, predecessors, or historical events.

2) Sculpture in particular depends on scale, perspective, and physical detail. You'll never get to appreciate these qualities through a photograph - you have to be there in person and walk around the sculpture. Look at it from different distances, different angles.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, maybe I just need to look at more of it, though the required travel to do so makes that much more difficult than with most other art forms aside from architecture. Maybe that's part of the appeal of state- and country-spanning "conversations" of this sort? Most people are simply priced out of traveling enough to appreciate it? Meanwhile traditional sculpture relies on more general aesthetic principals and references other more-accessible media sufficiently that you don't need to see tons of it to get at least _some_ of the point or intended sense of a given piece.

This kinda junk-drawer-looking abstract sculpture stuff hits me the same way the heavier, growlier kinds of heavy metal do, in that I can never tell whether I'm supposed to be laughing with it, laughing at it, laughing with it _at some target of ridicule of which I am unaware_ , or not laughing at all, but they don't _seem_ like they could be anything other than some form of comedy, even though their fans rarely act like it's the sort of low-brow fart- joke-adjacent thing it appears to be/sounds like to me, and which I don't mind in moderation but wears thin with me pretty quickly. Probably I just haven't been exposed to enough of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The title doesn't have much to do with the article. Calder's popularity is, in my opinion, largely due to the non-political, inoffensive nature. It is in a conversation with other artists, but doesn't say anything about war, death, love, governance; it does not stimulate strong emotion, but an abstracted air of interesting-ness.

<comment><USER6> I'll give as a direct counterpoint Jo Davidson. I'd not heard of him, but friends mentioned encountering him (or someone who'd had a bust made by him) in Big Sur.

I started reading the commissions list, and the just burst out laughing. Davidson simply did an increadible number of works on some of the most notable names of the 20th century.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Davidson#Commissions](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Davidson#Commissions)</comment></comment>


Human psychology and behavioral studies overlook 85 percent of people - <AUTHOR> https://www.sapiens.org/culture/weird-cultures-human-nature/ <comment><USER2> I read the article. It barely scratches the surface of the issue, I was mad as a psychology student that this was the state of our knowledge when I read it in 2013 and didn't know about the publication crisis. The actual academic publication is really interesting and I'd recommend it as a read on whatever commute you're on.

Here is the link:

[https://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/bitstream/handle/document/42104...](https://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/bitstream/handle/document/42104/ssoar-2010-henrich_et_al- The_weirdest_people_in_the.pdf?sequence=1)

Years after pondering this article, I felt I had figured it out: psychology is secretly the study of particular subset of 18 to 21 year old American women. The ones who study psychology because it's a female dominated study and all those psych students need their credit and 'participating' in research is part of it. Most of them are American because psychology is a bigger thing in the US than in Europe, or at least it seemed to be regarding well-known theories, so I presume most research happens there.

There is another big group. A lot of dead mice (neuroscience).

<comment><USER3> > The ones who study psychology because it's a female dominated study and all > those psych students need their credit and 'participating' in research is > part of it.

Wait, does participating in a study as a _subject_ count for credit, or does working on a study count?

Aren't studies explicit about the demographics of their participants? And don't studies that make generalized claims usually control for things like gender and age?

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure whether this is a rant, or informing or both. Let me know if it's a bit too much on the ranting side, I'll edit it.

> Wait, does participating in a study as a subject count for credit, or does > working on a study count?

There was this course called "measurements and diagnostics" and for that you had to pass the theory/tutorials of the course and also 10 hours of being a participant in research. If you didn't do the 10 hours of participation, you could do them at any moment you want and if you completed it, you immediately passed the course.

My university has about 400 psychology students, so that is 4000 hours worth of people participating per year. And I'm pretty sure that more universities are doing this. In The Netherlands alone I estimate there to be about 40000 psychology students per year and probably about 5 hours of compulsory 'participation' in experimental studies. So a tiny country like The Netherlands is skewing this particular bias about 20000 participant hours per year.

Participating in experimental studies is quite fun (pro tip: go for the fMRI and EEG studies ASAP! ;-) ), but I didn't appreciate how I was forced to do it. I didn't learn too much from those experiments and I felt used. It furthermore is a way to be lazy regarding participant recruitment. I'm pretty sure that some startup could disrupt this particular problem. If you have ideas about it, email me, I'm willing to brainstorm and help you to look for ways to solve this problem.

> Aren't studies explicit about the demographics of their participants? And > don't studies that make generalized claims usually control for things like > gender and age?

Studies are explicit about the demographics, which is why the WEIRD article could be written. And yes they do control for things like gender and age and in general they are quite careful making those claims. The issue is though as a research field psychology isn't the study of the human mind and human behavior but of WEIRD people their mind and WEIRD people their behavior.

Like a lot of societal issues that are in popular media today, this is a systemic issue. Though I could imagine psychology researchers being like: "Hmm, I could get a representative group _or_ I could just get some psychology students and churn my next paper out twice as fast!"

<comment><USER4> Would it be fair to say that by being forced to participate in a study you aren't really giving your consent? Even though I presume you get to find/pick the studies you participate in.

<comment><USER5> Its not just fair, i'd say its accurate.

Here's another interesting phenomenon: a certain personality type (of which I may or may not count my self among) will deliberately supply false data which attempts to invalidate what we perceive as your study goal when forced to participate against our wills in this way. Its a small rebellion against an academic system that doesn't respect us or intellectual integrity, but is focused on pumping out shoddy research on unwilling participants.

Turn academics into a game and thats how it'll be treated.

<comment><USER6> I remember this practice of almost-compelled research participation even in the introductory undergraduate Psychology 101 course, and in that class (which included high school students and tons of non-majors) there was a lot of the attitude you describe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I actually don't see this is as too problematic.

The entire field is murky because it's very hard to scientifically measure human psychology and behavior, and the tools of the trade seem almost laughably simplistic (like the aforementioned 5 point rating questionnaires). So our body of knowledge doesn't even reliably describe WEIRD people. Rather its a crude proxy, that just might contain some elements of truth warranting further investigation.

But better crude tools than no tools, and better locally available subjects than no subjects (because most studies don't have the budget to go to Zambia). Similarly in other fields, research is done on rats pigs and monkeys with conclusions drawn to humans. Obviously not perfect, but again it's at best a starting point for later studies.

I think the real problem is the over-zealous interpretation of study results as "truth".

<comment><USER8> I disagree.

If you're trying to measure a target 1cm across from 1 mile away with a ruler and a squint _anything_ you say is not only likely wrong, but woefully deceptive.

My view is that this shouldn't even be attempted because it just generates superstitious theories. Psychology _is_ the skinner box pidegon.

There's a fallacy here that's hard to pin down clearly but roughly: to measure inaccurately isnt to measure approximately. Its to measure totally in error.

The errors in social psychology are not just "second decimal place", they're angels pushing stars.

<comment><USER9> Most people I know believe and expect that some form of talk therapy is an important part of a mental health safety net. Now, how should we train these therapists? That's the utilitarian reason why we need something like a study of psychology.

Unfortunately, much like with more physically oriented doctors, opinions and practices will vary widely (including going against established research for whatever reason)-- and those seem to be particularly diverse in this field. The replication crisis clearly shows a strong need for reform at the research level as well.

In my opinion, the way we approach these issues should be 99% focused on what we know facilitates better outcomes (short and long term) for actual patients in a cost effective way. Theorizing about fun new methods is exciting, but what we need most these days is more disciplined and well trained pragmatists in the field, who can put their world views aside for a while to provide basic care for the (emotional equivalent of) bleeding gunshot wounds in front of them. How we get there is a big question, but one part of it is always going to be recruiting and properly equipping a certain percentage of incoming students to do the work.

<comment><USER8> Talk therapy is a different case than research social psychology.

I take talk therapy to be a kind of practical skill in regulating the emotions of another human being through narrative & interpersonal contact. That requires a lot of practical training, and is in fact, mostly practical training + high empathy.

Research social psychology does not inform this at all, being a totally different area.

"Psychoanalytical research" is even more BS than social psychology, but that's rather pre-advertised. And somewhat defensible as providing a "training ground" for learning the practice of talk-therapy rather than any kind of genuine explanatory framework.

<comment><USER10> But under this view how is talk therapy not more bullshit than research, or vs more evidence based psychiatry?

<comment><USER8> Riding a bike isnt a theory of classical mechanics. Talking to another person isnt a theory of human psychology.

Both require something to be true, but have no content on what that is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> That's not the only issue.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Psychology_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Psychology_replication_rates)

> A report by the Open Science Collaboration in August 2015 that was > coordinated by Brian Nosek estimated the reproducibility of 100 studies in > psychological science from three high-ranking psychology journals.[38] > Overall, 36% of the replications yielded significant findings (p value below > 0.05) compared to 97% of the original studies that had significant effects. > The mean effect size in the replications was approximately half the > magnitude of the effects reported in the original studies.

<comment><USER12> That makes perfect sense. The published studies are a sample of 'study-space' and that have outlier significance. Replicate published studies and their significance likely returns to the norm.

Journals are filters to cherry-pick 'study space'. By the way they're constituted, they publish new studies that have overstated significance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > [...] something like "I generally trust people." Then participants are asked > to choose one point along a five- or seven-point line ranging from strongly > agree to strongly disagree. This numbered line is named a "Likert item" > [...]

Oh god, having filled out a bunch of these for diagnosis and such I hate these with a passion. I always wondered how well these actually work.

I've seen grammatical nonsense like, "Do you often do X? -- always, often, sometimes, rarely, never". What, I often rarely do X? And what does often mean, anyway? Like once a week? Every day?

Then, there are the abstract or vague questions that you then have to interpret what concrete situation it could apply to. Hard to think up an example off the top of my head, but how people reply to these surely depends on what exactly they think it might mean.

Then you start losing patience after about 3 minutes of this shit, not to mention 15 or 30 minutes, and just go through them barely reading the questions, but for the first couple of questions you were pondering whether you "agree" or "somewhat agree" for ages.

<comment><USER14> I didn't quite get why the article described these surveys as problematic. I skimmed the linked article in that section but this didn't provide any answers either. Assuming the participants fully understand the question, and the survey is designed well, what cultural aspect is stopping people from answering?

I grant that with a questions like "Do you often do X?", examples are necessary to specify what "often" means.

From the article:

> Some people may refuse to answer. Others prefer to answer simply yes or no. > Sometimes they respond with no difficulty.

That just sounds like some people boycott the Likert questions, but we don't know why.

<comment><USER13> I don't know what reasons other people have for refusing to answer. As a bit of pedant I just wanted to explain why I personally don't like them, it has a lot to do with being vague, abstract, unclear. Confusing really. You sit there and are not sure you can even answer the question honestly.

In a normal situation I would probably refuse and ask them to clarify, or challenge their assumptions or something. In this situation I just try to get over my aversion to answer and try to interpret it as best as I can. Sometimes I got no clue what it could mean and choose neutral or whatever. It's mentally exhausting.

This doesn't invalidate the methodology. Just saying I don't like it. If people refuse to answer or answer in a way that doesn't fit the schema and they throw it out, that's obviously a problem though.

Edit: To maybe answer your question, I skimmed through the actual article and they mention things like old people not culturally accepting a young person administering questions, children thinking they should not speak in the presence of elders. But also other weird things as mentioned that seem to me as stemming from confusion. I mean, you get better at answering with practice, so the whole concept might be totally baffling to some people which haven't gone through a Western school, where you're also quite often expected to answer unclear and confusing questions on tests.

More edit: The PhD students and professors designing these questions and the college students used as test subjects are basically the most overschooled people on the planet. They are the ones that, in school, excelled at answering abstract, underspecified, questions with multiple choice answers. Many have seen these before. They might even know how they are made and how the results get processed. Of course they're going to have less trouble answering.

<comment><USER12> Agreed. They are like 'which color represents your opinion on this complex subject?' I don't know what to say - I agree with some of it, disagree with another part, and have no opinion about how it applies to others anyway.

Then there are the 'Have you quit beating your wife?' questions, posed to make it a dichotomy but I'm somewhere else entirely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The big problem with this is that the more diversity you have in your study participant set (gender, age, skin color, handedness, etc), the bigger your study has to be to correct for potential biases in results caused by differences in the participants unrelated to what you're testing. And the bigger the study, the more it'll cost, so there will be less studies overall.

<comment><USER16> Even among 18-21 year old college american women there are ridiculous amounts of variables that you can't control for. Give up the idea that you can control for biases in psychology. Do big mixed tests, then if there's positive outcomes see if its correlated to any of those groups. Then you can do more tests on the groups that didn't respond.

<comment><USER15> Sorry, that's a sunken cost fallacy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is a known problem. Nearly all experimentation-based psychology research was in past decades conducted within the US and is heavily biased to US culture. Cultural differences aren't limited to how people interact with each other, but also include primitive qualities like how people perceive space and use tools.

</comment><comment><USER18> This isn't even the worst problem with psychology.

The worst is it's contextual loyalties against critiquing the relationsips people have with one another. Power struggles, to be particular.

<comment><USER19> Can you elaborate on this?

<comment><USER18> By premeditating that diagnosis will be of the individual, the society is assumed a constant. In science, we call that fraud.

Effectively, clinical psychology serves apology for societal and economic ills by blaming the effects on the individuals themselves.

The process is strikingly transparent from an objective standpoint, but ironically it's precisely an objective standpoint that is undermined by the institution. These days, you can visit one and tell them just about anything, and they will diagnose your disposition as illness.

I don't blame psychologists themselves, and who is to say they don't help people? Many surely do, but the institution is an absolute drag on our economy and society; something like a collective excuse for avoiding self-critique.

Sociology theoretically steps in here, but it is merely a study, and some branches of it would result in a totalitarian nightmare.

What's needed is _humanist_ sociology and _humanist_ psychology. As we learned in kindergarten class, there is nothing wrong with us. Each of us are unique and beautiful in our own ways. The questions are about how to live with one another.

Pyschology as a study is another thing, but as a medical malpractice it has proven antithetical to systems design from the start.

<comment><USER20> If you have scientific studies to show your objective viewpoint on mental illness being merely a product of societal or economic ill, with definition of 'societal ill' and 'economic ill', I would be more than interested in seeing the data you derived these conclusions from.

In the meantime, I would think the field of clinical psychology is a safer bet.

<comment><USER21> >If you have scientific studies to show your objective viewpoint on mental illness being merely a product of societal or economic ill

It's common sense, and there is no _objective proof_ to the contrary.

"Psychiatric diagnosis still relies exclusively on fallible subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests"

-Alan Frances

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

Psychiatry/psychology also admits that social environment has substantial effects on mental illness.

But asking for a "scientific" study of that is silly, because it is impossible to have an indepedent variable or control group -- because _it is impossible to separate an individual from societal influences._

<comment><USER20> You are making the claim of an objective evaluation. It is your responsibility to provide proof of its objectivity. I otherwise an more willing to take something that at least has supporting evidence, dubious as it may be, to claims that have no evidence at all beyond 'common sense'. I think that's a pretty common sense position, but it's clear we don't agree.

<comment><USER21> There is no objective proof that mental illness even exists, so the burden of proof is on those who claim it's just like real illnesses (psychiatrists and psychologists). They're the one's claiming to be scientific.

I'm merely claiming they're not being scientific.

There is plenty of evidence that disfunctional social environments often lead to disfunctional individuals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Reading the intro I had a strange feeling about this text.

I don't have any issue with the general message. This surely is a legitimate problem. But the intro reads a bit like "psychology is such a great endeavour, if there wasn't this little issue."

Everyone following science news should be aware by now that psychology suffers from a whole range of systemic methodological problems, notably publication bias, widespread p-hacking and failed replications.

</comment><comment><USER23> I remember our psychology 101 professor offering .1 GPA "extra credit" for every psychology study you went to. There was no way to get a 4.0 in that class unless you attended every class, answered every exam question correctly, every quiz question, etc.

</comment><comment><USER24> The human behavioral and cultural adaptability to the environment is really impressive and it makes many psychological findings local. With technological and cultural changes some results may apply only to few generations before they go away.

Think children growing in warzone or poor and violent environment. Their behaviour as adults is often sexually more promiscuous, aggressive and their impulse control seems to be less than 'the baseline'. They show trust issues.

How much of that is just damage and disorder as psychology seems to assume, and how much is adaption to survive and procreate in an environment where lifespans are short and life is uncertain. Maybe childhood stress and stress hormones trigger survival strategies that work well in hard environment. They are maladaptive only in the culture and safety of the developed world.

</comment><comment><USER25> Locus of control is another way of understanding how humans are not necessarily universal to one another by how events are perceived. The missing shape example might just be the children never encounter the square & triangles in daily life and are thrown off it. I don't really consider that a great example for showing how behavioural is different.

<comment><USER26> The very fact that familiarity with a shape can influence performance on pattern recognition tasks so dramatically is a significant finding on its own.

It would mean we are effectively blind(er) to unfamiliar shapes, even though they are extremely simple, like a triangle or square are.

<comment><USER25> I'm surprised that is a recent discovery. I would think if someone asked a group of kids why someone would get the problem wrong. They would be like well first time seeing shapes.

<comment><USER26> Well, some certainly do, but as always, it is a game of sampling, so individual errors are not as important as proportions. If we take the article at face value, proportions differ drastically between very different cultures so there must be something in the culture that biases the proportions towards one outcome or the other systematically.

Of course, it's always possible any individual study contained unknown and unaccounted biases. Funding in science is still relatively small, the number of people participating few and science itself is hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Much of experimental design in psychology is an effort to attenuate the effect of individual differences so that you can find the common (and probably core) cognitive processes. Sometimes the risk to external validity is worth it in order to reduce the complexity of data and models from confounding variables. So we work with a system where most science is conducted with a relatively homogeneous sample of college undergraduates who are convenient to obtain, while well replicated or foundational findings are later tested across cultures to determine degree of generalization. It seems an ok compromise to me.

</comment><comment><USER28> a simple arithmetic computation shows that Europe has 750 million people, and the world has 8 billion people. That's 1/10 of the population. We neglect about 90% of people in... anything. South America has 500 million people, so they should get a comparable share, and Africa has 1.2 billion.

So just by simple fractions we know something is off. A more careful study by subject and region could be required.

</comment><comment><USER16> Psychiatry is in the same boat. Anyone with multiple ongoing issues (depression + anxiety, for instance) is disqualified from studies. Guess what - those are the people that repeatedly have the worst outcomes or don't respond to treatment. We don't even know the real effect of smoking with ADHD people, because if they have anxiety they won't be included in the study.

</comment><comment><USER29> there could have been any number of blue triangles before that orange square - we see 2, but what about the rest out of frame

</comment><comment><USER30> 75% of statistics are made up

</comment><comment><USER31> Psychology and social studies, antropology (and economy and whats called climate sciences) really shouldn't be called sciences. It's one of the rare cases IMO where the word really obstructs the core meaning of the subject matter.

They should be considered temporary interpretations of statistical data or in short meta statistics cause that's really what they are.

Much damage is being done by treating these fields as science and the article is only mentioning a few of those problems.

<comment><USER32> > They should be considered temporary interpretations of statistical data or > in short meta statistics cause that's really what they are.

This is what a lot of experimental sciences are, even physical ones, when the systems being studied are complex.

There are very few areas of scientific study anymore that offer convenient, deterministic results. That fruit was picked a long time ago.

Even at the cutting end of physics, researchers have to infer from statistical results.

The difference is only that some of these fields have more reproducible results than others, often because they are studying less complex phenomena, whose causal factors and mechanisms can be more directly observed.

Psychology is at one end of that spectrum, because it is studying the output of the mind, a biological information system whose mechanisms are among the most complex and obscure that people have ever studied.

<comment><USER31> I understand that and I agree with how you think about it but the problem is that it creates a very unhealthy public debate because one end of the spectrum gets confused with the other.</comment></comment></comment>


Learn Ruby on Rails in a Month - <AUTHOR> http://onemonthrails.com/lectures

<comment><USER2> Double Submission: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5279191></comment>


Ask HN: Where/how to start marketing once you've launched? - <AUTHOR>

We recently launched PubliciTweet which is still in a public/private beta.  We have a few hundred users signed up but mainly spammers.  They've been proven to be great testers since they are fairly heavy users pushing out lots of messages.  It's helped greatly to iron out many kinks in the system.
But now we'd like to shift focus on what we deem to be our target customer.  This would be marketing firms or musicians/small businesses.
What do you recommend as a starting point for marketing. <comment><USER2> I know its not quite marketing, being picky, I would like to see a tour ( video is best and quite easy to make these days ) of some of your features.

That a side.

You say you want to target musicians / small businesses. Start with musicians.

* Email owners of some of the smaller digital distribution sites. They can only turn you down. Or they could invite you to be their goto on twitter.

* Find out where musicians post music to help them be discovered or simply because they want to. Talk to them, be passionate about your system.

Im not going to sit and list off websites I suggest you approach as it might look a lot like spamming.

Maybe if you explain some of your current approaches and which are working and which are failing. Then maybe the "old crowd" can give pointers. Or equally learn from your mistakes, success.

On a side note, I would lose the spammers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Have contacted a few distribution sites (I think they're distribution sites) but haven't had much response. Will keep trying though.

If you know of any distribution sites you can email me jaisen at jmathai dot com. Would be much appreciated.

We're definitely going to lose the spammers. The hope is that once we put in a payment model that they'd naturally disappear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How about url for your project?

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://publicitweet.com> \- sorry about that, didn't want it to feel like we were self promoting too much :)</comment></comment>


Visualizing memory leaks in Ruby - <AUTHOR> http://cirw.in/blog/find-references

<comment><USER2> Great project. I hope the community can make good use of this to make sure the different libraries and gems and pieces of code leak as much memory as possible.

Thank you for putting the work in and making Ruby better.

<comment><USER3> Did you mean "leak as little memory as possible"? Though, some days it seems like the opposite, I admit...

<comment><USER4> No, he did not, this is what is commonly referred to as a joke.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> throwaway54-762 A better title might be "visualizing the object-reference graph in Ruby;" debugging memory leaks is a neat side effect. That being said, it's an interesting little project.

</comment><comment><USER5> An unfortunate header, innit? One wonders whether to parse it as "(Visualizing memory leaks) in Ruby" or as "Visualizing (memory leaks in Ruby)".

<comment><USER6> In this case both are true, no? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I randomly stumbled across this gist by tenderlove <https://gist.github.com/tenderlove/4576780> that displays references as a tree view using d3.js. I think that this gist in particular is pointing out a bug in that the "references" for Fixnums (also Symbols) in an array aren't returned by ObjectSpace.find_references.

</comment><comment><USER8> Ruby 2.0 has a similar feature built in, although round the other way: ObjectSpace.reachable_objects_from(obj) .. coupled with ObjectSpace.memsize_of() this can be used to do some memory leak analysis.

We also get GC.stat[:total_allocated_object] and GC.stat[:total_freed_object]

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting project. Ruby memory leaks really are brutal!</comment>


Ask HN: what good music composition web apps are out there? - <AUTHOR>

I'd like to be able to compose basic songs, save associated musical scores, and listen to playback.  Where can I do these things? <comment><USER2> Nowhere. Latency is just too high with Flash or JavaScript or Java applets, even the best online apps are atrocious. I always tinker with them when I see a link to them, but they always disappoint. Most iPhone and Android music apps are also pretty much useless, unfortunately...I love composing in odd places.

There are many good free (and low cost) installable apps, though.

On Linux, there's LMMS, Ardour, Audacity, which all do different things...I'm guessing LMMS is the one that fits your description best.

On Windows, there's FL Studio, and dozens of others.

On Mac OS X, I dunno the low cost options, but I'm sure they exist, since Mac is a very heavily used music platform.

My toolchain contains the following software:

      REAPER
      Renoise (on both Linux and Windows)
      LSDJ (on Gameboy)
      MSSIAH (on C64 with a SID2SID)

I will probably add FL Studio to the bunch eventually, but I mostly do live music and chiptunes, so it's not something I _really_ need. But it's cheap enough to buy just to tinker with.</comment>


Make something people don't want by they will pay for - <AUTHOR>

 I think we need to get some new glasses to find things that people don't want but things that they will pay for.  Pay for your glasses now! <comment><USER2> Uh. Welcome I guess.

May I suggest that if you're going to post, please post something that provides an interesting topic for debate, rather than "here's my great idea because I thought of it, everyone must do it nao" type of posts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I thought everyone has an example of things that they don't want but that they have to pay for. The tone of the post is humorous. Is a response (humorous one) to another post entitle "Make things that people want". People money is not about logic reasoning, they pay only when they have to.

<comment><USER2> >> they pay only when they have to

Tell that one to Steve Jobs :)

I think you're just arguing about semantics there. Some things people want (e.g. bling). Others, people need. (e.g. detergent). You can make money in both types of industries.</comment></comment></comment>