h1karu

> It's not caffeine withdrawal or the flu. Even when no suicidal ideation is present, it's a serious disease with real costs to the individual and to society, just as real as cancer.

My argument is that it's not an "epidemic of depression" that we're dealing with but rather an "epidemic of over-diagnosis". I would argue that the industry is in practice being far too loose with the definition of "significant impact on one's lives". I think articles like this one blur the line even further by making it sound like everyone who has experienced a few of these symptoms suffers from depression. People read stuff like this and then start telling themselves "I'm depressed" and because of this mistaken belief many of them wind up being medicated inappropriately.

This epidemic of over-diagnosis has reached such vast proportions that I imagine the majority of people in the tech industry have been prescribed some kind of psychotropic drug to treat some form of mental illness at some point in their life. I wish I could get accurate statistics on this to prove my point.

As a side note I do think that caffeine induced psychosis is 100% real (because it's a very powerful drug) and the symptoms often mimic that of depression or bi-polar and can even be inclusive of phenomena such as hallucination. I don't have any credentials but my opinion as a layperson is that I think it's incredibly irresponsible to write a prescription or to give a diagnosis for any mental illness to a patient who has not first completely cut caffeine out of their lives.

Isn't the real story here the over-pathologization of normal human experience in order to turn a larger profit (for the drug industry and the mental health industry) ? With the way these disorders are currently defined I'm convinced that every human being on earth could be diagnosed at various points within their life.

I'm not suggesting that these symptoms don't exist, but rather that they've been a perfectly normal part of human life since the dawn of man.

It's perfectly natural for people to go through periods where they have less energy than other periods, overeat or under-eat, have difficulty concentrating or making decisions, feel anxious. This is normal stuff depending on the life circumstances especially if you're drinking any amount of coffee because that will lead to periods of highs and lows. It does not mean you "have depression" as if there was some flu virus that you became infected with it simply means you're a human being.

I would argue that legitimate diagnosis should be reserved for people who are either suicidal or who's symptoms strongly suggest elements of self-harming or harming others.

If I don't indulge in that coffee-guzzling manic carrot chasing mind-set then I'm not going to be as productive as the next guy it would seem. If you want to be an olympic bike racer then you have to do the same harsh practice regime that the rest of the athletes are doing in order to stay in shape.

The difference is that some founders learn how to 'snap out of it', to decompress when they need to decompress. In other words they learn how to relax deeply into the felt presence of whatever arises in the mind and body. They don't teach that in school, nor on the job, but quite often life finds a way to teach that lesson.

The forth way stuff doesn't resonate with me personally. I'm feeling the buddha dhamma especially the early stuff.. ie the 3 characteristics, vipassana/samatha. If I had to delve into something less ancient I'd look more closely at Zen.

back to work indeed.

> Maybe there's just something fundamentally ingrained in human psychology that makes us converge like this.

Or perhaps there are meetings in boardrooms where the upper echelon of a given sector of the economy work hand in hand with thinktanks, highly paid psychologist consultants, PR firms, journalists, and media executives(at the ownership level) to design and execute strategies that encourage whole populations to act against their best interests by entering into these sorts of centralized arrangements.

Why does everyone always jump to "human nature" as the explanation ? I'll tell you why it's because they have no visibility into the 10+ billion dollar/year PR industry that is operating in our midst. Human nature does factor into this though.. it's human nature to assume that you're not personally vulnerable to suggestion and manipulation, so people tend to write it off even though statistically speaking the odds are that they can be influenced, and are being influenced.

>Yes, your app/site/service needs to be built within a technical architecture that can scale…

This is where many teams drop the ball. They start building their app/service with persistence technology that really can't make it to web scale. Their plan is to "build a team to solve the big-data challenge when we hit that level of scale".

Many of these shops that decide to worry about big-data challenges later on do end up solving the problem in time so from the outside they look like a success. What you're not seeing is how the founder's equity gets eroded as he is forced to borrow money in order to build out the team to rearchitect the app in order to deal with the scale. Many VCs want for us to accept this as a normal part of building apps because it ensures that they get a major piece of the pie. It doesn't have to be this way though, we can start thinking about data access patterns in the large from the very beginning.

Out of respect for Mr Shulgin I don't want to stray too far from his work towards a disturbing subject matter. In order to make my point about legalization I had to make it known that such dark areas of inquery exist, but that doesn't mean I want to expose people to such information who have not self-selected to learn more. It's not my area of expertise anyways.

I'll link you to a Time magazine article in which the author has begun to stick his toe in the water but you'll have to guide your own research from there: http://healthland.time.com/2012/03/23/the-legacy-of-the-cias...

The details of how such a substance could be weaponized and how such munitions may have been deployed in the past is a sensitive subject not well suited for this forum. A wealth of information has been made available in the past decade or two via the freedom of information act but not much of it has found it's way into the 'for public consumption' version of history. My intention was merely to reference this unique "problem" associated with extremely potent psychedellics in broad terms without dredging up references to particular incidents or organizations. You can do your own research in this area.

Also your personal experiences only apply to normal doses of LSD you have no idea what it can do to someone at extreme doses, nor are you referencing experiments where such doses were tested.

again, I'm not aruging in favor of restricting individuals from access to personal doses, I think that would be a good thing. I just don't want to live in a world where any psychopath can get his hands of billions of doses. This is not something you have to worry about with most other drugs because with most other drugs you can't produce that many doses all at once and transport it easily. I just wanted to point out that this unusual property exists with respect to LSD and it complicates matters.

wonders never cease, thank you for the information.

I don't like the idea of lumping all "drugs" together. I don't like it when the government does it and I don't like it when well meaning individuals do it. While I generally don't approve of the practice of men with guns threatening violence to those who would ingest certain plants I do think that of all the drugs known to man LSD makes the strongest case for some form of restriction.

I think that perhaps it alone should be restricted in the same way that access to plutonium is restricted, with the aside that individuals who would like enough for their own personal use should of course be granted (free) access.

You see the problem with that particular problem child is that enough LSD to dose every man woman and child on earth could be produced in a single lab and held within a coffee cup which makes it uniquely dangerous as a weapon of mass oppression if it were to fall into the wrong hands. Also the fact that you can't easily test a substance for LSD increases the liklihood of individuals being exposed who did not wish to be exposed.

Therefor the risks that it will be used as a kind of weapon against unsuspecting populations is too great relative to other drugs. I'd also like to point out that LSD doesn't seem to universally help people in the way that responsible amounts of MDMA (and arguably cannabis) does.

I don't think there is a justification for the restriction of other psychedelics that don't have these risks of weaponization such as various mushrooms, cactai, certain vines, etc.

Well finding pure MDMA can be problematic but it's certainly not an insurmountable problem if you take your time and research it well. While it's true that there is a fair amount of "cut" product and even fake product on the market the DEA's own statistics do show that a large and growing percentage of seized "ecstasy" is testing pure, so statistically speaking you're more likely to find pure MDMA on the black market today than at any time in the past. With that said you do have to be careful. There are ways to rule out the presence of certain contaminants such as methamphetamine, you might try purchasing a kit which provides certain chemicals that test for the presence of methamphetamine and other contaminants:

http://www.raveready.com/MDMA-Ecstasy-Testing-Kit-p/dansacc....

(I'm not vouching for the above kit in particular, do your own research in this area)

If you feel like you need a third party to be there with you then maybe you do, each person is different. I will say that MDMA isn't like a psychedelic where you definitely want to have a "trip sitter" present, it's a much more controllable experience.

In my opinion MDMA may feel mystical, magical or sublime; but it doesn't feel weird. MDMA "provides a centering experience, rather than an ego diffusing experience" (Dr. Philip Wolfson).

If you decide to go ahead without one then let me advise you to try it outdoors in private setting, perhaps near a lake, or a mountain top, somewhere with a view where you can roam about enjoy yourself. If you have a significant other then I highly recommend taking it together. This drug is perfect for couples therapy.

Occasional, unmonitored use changed my life for the better no question about it, and I still feel that way even though I haven't touched it in years. I can't think of another drug that I could say that about.

If you're waiting around for the DEA to decide to write you a permission slip then you may end up waiting for the rest of your life. The government probably views this drug as the most dangerous one in existence and I'll try to explain why:

MDMA seems to have the power to help people heal psychological wounds and come together despite their differences, but that's a nightmare for a government who rather have populations remain afraid of one another, fighting with one another, and relying on the government to solve their problems. The government sees it's role as manifesting order out of chaos, and if people are not psychologically conflicted and fighting with one another then a day might come when they begin to feel that they can work together to solve problems on their own without the need for nearly as much government supervision.

MDMA is a party drug that longs to live a straight life.. see the video I posted elsewhere in this thread.

RIP to one of the true heros of our generation.

thank you Alexander Shulgin!

gone by not forgotten

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-4L5vRZ_g8

Excellent writeup! Next I'd like to see an article on deployment. What if I want my development team to be able to push code changes regularly to an app cluster via a git-based workflow and have these deploys all occur with zero downtime ? I think that an article which demonstrates how to use modern deployment tools such as ansible or docker to achieve those goals on a commonly used programming environment such as Ruby would serve to lure quite a few developers away from PaaS towards something like Digital Ocean.

For now though, those tasks are still "hard" which means that for many developers digital ocean is still hard to use relative to other emerging platforms such as Redhat's Openshift or Heroku. I know there are many shops who would love to jump ship from IaaS to a less expensive platform but they feel the cost of rolling their own zero-downtime clustered deployment infrastructure is not worth the $ savings.

I suspect that if IaaS providers were to dedicate resources towards producing more educational material for developers with the aim of demonstrating how to achieve these deployment objectives on all the popular platforms using modern open source tools then loads of PaaS developers would jump ship.

For example: How can I use ansible to instantiate 5 new droplets and automatically install a load balancing server on one of them while setting up the Ruby on Rails platform, and ganglia on the remaining ? How can I run a load balancing test suite against the newly created cluster, interpret the results, and then tear the whole thing back down again all with a few keystrokes ? How could this same script allow me to add additional nodes and how does the resulting system allow for the deployment of fresh application code ? How can it be improved to handle logging and backup ?

I know that it's possible to create a deployment system to answer the above questions in less than a few hundred lines of ansible + Ruby, so I imagine it could be explained in a short series of blog posts, but you would probably need to hire a well-paid dev-ops guru to produce such documentation. I bet if you ask around on HN...

p.s. keep an eye on these:

http://deis.io/ https://flynn.io/

^ If either of these become production quality software it could be a game changer for Digital Ocean.

You're joking right ?

I suppose if the original post had been about chaos magic alone I wouldn't have chimed in to refer to it as religious speech. I would even suggest that there are more and more scientific authors showing up who are helping to bridge the gap between "chaos magic" concepts and hard science (see Rupert Sheldrake, Bruce Lipton, Michael Talbot, and others)

"I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness." – Max Planck. 1931.

I suppose what I mean is that I don't think it's fair that fundamentalist christians don't get to post on HN about how they have a savior who performs miracles but yet it's relatively socially acceptable to have posts about "Magic" which is a reference to the same type of thing as miracles but yet it's considered "esoteric" instead of "religious" and is therefor socially acceptable. I mean lets not forget that with the discussion of Dee and Kelly we ARE talking about the scrying of the same Archangels from the old testament, so in some way it is related to the abrahamic religions. That's why I don't see why it gets a special category instead of being labeled 'religious'

"Do what you will, this world's a fiction and is made up of contradiction."

William Blake

shrug. That parsons-hubbard connection was trotted out not too long ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7641580

I'm not trying to hate on it, post whatever you find interesting, just saying to me it reads more like a phamplet for a particular 'society' or religion, see the last paragraph.

How is posting this article any different than handing out a thinly disguised pamphlet for a religious organization ? If someone were posting material here about how some people in California are into "accepting jesus as their personal savior" I would find it every bit as boring and off-topic

What does this have to do with technology or "hackers" ? Real wizards code in Lisp.

It depends on what you mean by "startup" I suppose. I've worked for three and in each I've been one of the first dozen or so employees. You don't have to be a founder but I think that being a core "early employee" with a fair equity stake is the right way to get the real "startup experience". Anything else is like.. well working for an established company, and doesn't have the same vibe, or excitement.

> People claim that startups work you hard, I personally don’t see it. From people I’ve talked to, I’d say 50 hour weeks are average. That’s about what you see in corporate America these days.

If you're working at an early stage startup then in general nobody should "work you" at all, rather you'll work yourself 60+hours a week because you ACTUALLY HAVE SIGNIFICANT EQUITY in the company and therefor you want to see it grow quickly.

In a corporate environment you don't have any "skin in the game" so to speak so there's no incentive to push yourself.

If you're working at an early stage startup and you don't have significant equity then you're doing it wrong.

Wow that's so cool! I'm personally overjoyed that the suppression of this promising area of research is beginning to lift. I hope it goes well for you.

same phenomena can be observed in gangsta rap:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15z3MU3Zel8

peace up, a-town down

Yes, but I don't wish to discuss 'PTSD diagnosis politics' in this forum instead I'd rather just add value by pointing people to a non-commerical modality that actually works for treating those who suffer from the types of symptoms commonly associated with PTSD.

MDMA-assisted psychotherapy can be an effective treatment for people who do not respond to traditional therapies for PTSD.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-4L5vRZ_g8 < three minute rundown that explains MDMA

http://www.mdmaptsd.org/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNxuRs6tTuw < The Verge / Ecstatic states: treating PTSD with MDMA

http://www.mdma.net/psychotherapy/ptsd.html

google is not the only search engine.

I hate to break it to you but ancient cultures used OTP systems for thousands of years before this guy supposedly invented it. The ancient Egyptians for example would create a pad, use it to encrypt a secret with a numeric shift cypher, then break the pad into multiple pieces each of which would be guarded in a different temple. This has been proven and there are other examples in the ancient world.

What makes it worse is when other developers whisper in their ear that you are in-fact hallucinating. This is often done out of jealousy, spite, or plain old ignorance.

The bottom line though is that if your primary stakeholders are listening attentively to the developers concerns about the underlying integrity of the product then you've got much larger problems than just a messy codebase and it might be time to abandon ship.