wdewind

> In fact, it conferred a resistance against malaria.

I think this is one of my main points: if such a large percentage of the population has something that we think of as a large negative, it's probably a good time to take a step back and wonder if we aren't understanding the whole picture because evolution tends to take care of such low hanging fruit.

> If I were to speculate, I would say that we are overwhelmingly better in our general mental health.

By what measure? Because I just posted a bunch of studies that show the opposite, and they actually address a lot of the issues you brought up.

And yet by many measures mental health issues are increasing not decreasing so where is all this drastic improvement?

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/our-changing-culture/20...

There is a wide difference in the prevalence, severity of condition and extremity of treatment in some of these conditions.

Poor eyesight afflicts a large portion of the population, but the severity of the issue and the extremity of the treatment are not high. It doesn't impact your ability to maintain social relationships, for instance, and the treatment is very well understood and has low/no side effects.

Color blindness, partial deafness etc., are readily and inexpensively treated, but they do not afflict 5-10% of the young and healthy population.

The issue comes in when we start saying 5-10% of the population has an extreme condition (ie: impacts ability to maintain work, social relationships etc.) with a relatively severe (ie: fairly large % of users experiencing side effects) treatment necessary. When you put that in the context of our massively volatile understanding of mental illness over the last 50 years, as well as the massive incentives for pharmaceutical companies to push a specific narrative, it is difficult for me not to see a red flag.

I've read a lot of your posts on this thread and appreciate your perspective. I agree with a lot of it. Honest question for you though: isn't it a bit weird to label something as a disorder if 5-10% of the population has it? Isn't it just a fairly standard human existence then? I think that's where a lot of the discomfort comes from.

> I think conservatism as a personality is a symptom of good mental health: if you arent able to do something, its lazyness. So you must just need some motivation: either a beating or some money. etc.

This is a really cynical view of conservatism and I have a hard time seeing how you don't see half the country as evil if that's what you think.

Another view might be: this stuff is so complicated, and as you pointed out it's so difficult for political leaders to have real empathy for people in these situations, there is a high degree of chance we will screw this up and make it worse while trying to help. Example: homosexuality being in the DSM. Or really much of the history of how state institutions have treated the mentally ill, which has mostly had to do with keeping them away from the non mentally ill and not actually treating them.

I didn't grow up playing or really understanding sports. I was one of those guys who joked about "sportsball" and stuff like that. When I started really taking weight training seriously I started having a frame of reference for understanding sports and started really appreciating them. Football is a sport that is designed to really allow people to showcase the limits of the human body. The most impressive athletes in any sport in the world are in the NFL and when you think about the things that happen in any single game, they truly are spectacular. OBJ's "The Catch" is one of the most impressive things in the history of sports period. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=818_M8gOnqQ

But the NFL is finding itself in a really tough position. I love this sport, but I find it ethically difficult to watch now. It would be one thing if the NFL was doing everything it could to protect its athletes, but it's absolutely clear they are trying to bury their heads in the sand on this one:

> “We need a couple million of dollars. What is stopping us is the money. We’re ready to roll.”

Think about this: we currently have no way to diagnose CTE in living people, we think we may have a way, the "we" in that is pretty credible as its the person who discovered CTE, and it will cost roughly $2mm, and the NFL isn't tripping over themselves to write the check for some reason. It would cost 12 seconds of superbowl ad revenue to fund this, and in fact the NFL has pledged $100mm to investigate CTE, but basically they just aren't doing it: http://www.espn.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/20509977/nfl-takes-c...

This is kind of shameful, and as a fan of this sport I really hope they figure out how to have a better position on this issue, because what's going on right now is not sustainable.

Hey thanks! In that case, let me shamelessly say I'm actually hiring for iOS and Rails full stack (We are a seed stage startup working on a pretty fun consumer problem, Rails experience not necessary, admitting you are wrong experience helpful) :) Contact info in my profile

Because I have a shitty knowledge of Unix :)

Best way to get the right answer on the internet is to post the wrong one.

> All `ps` is doing is reading files in proc. The memory info it prints is in `/proc/$pid/status`. Ruby can trivially read `/proc/self/status` to get that very naive view of how much memory it's using.

Yep, great point, I am simply wrong about this.

> I believe she meant the operating system's copy-on-write of memory. Forking a copy of a process is actually very cheap because it's copy-on-write. That has nothing to do with ruby or its version and has been true in linux for as long as linux has existed.

Re: Copy on write the way Ruby implements GC in < 2.0 screws this up:

> The way ruby creates objects, the GC flag or reserved bit is stored in the object itself. So, as you would have guessed by now, when the GC runs in one of the processes, the GC flag would be modified in all the objects even if they are present in the shared pool. Now, the OS would sense this and trigger a copy-on-write making private copies of the objects in each child’s memory space.

https://medium.com/@rcdexta/whats-the-deal-with-ruby-gc-and-...

Ruby can't tell how much memory it is using from within the process, the only way to is shell out and scrape the output of ps. I would love to be wrong about this, I did a fair amount of research and all the profiling libraries I read used this method. One thing I've done instead is use object allocation, which is available from the builtin benchmarker, as a proxy for memory usage. I don't have a good sense of how accurate that is, but anecdotally it seemed useful and correlated to stuff like page load times.

(Edit: ^happily I am wrong about this, though I believe the copy on write thing below is still correct, see further discussion)

Copy on write does definitely help here, only for Ruby > 2.0.

One of the things that makes Ruby so difficult to profile is that in order to do anything really fun (like get memory usage, for instance), you need to shell out, which means you're forking/doubling your memory footprint immediately, which means you probably can't do this in production. This is especially frustrating because by far the biggest issue you'll have with a Ruby (especially Rails) app is memory usage, so trying to pinpoint what of the many things that are currently running on your box are blowing up your memory can be non-trivial.

Edit: I'm having multiple people reply with basically the same thing which is: look here's what happened in 2014. I'm just going to reply to all of you here:

What happened in 2014 was not throttling in the last mile, which is what the 2015 Title II re-classification protects against, so this would've been legal even without the repeal (and more importantly did not meaningfully contribute to Title II classification, like parent is implying). What happened in 2017 probably wasn't either, but could more reasonably be construed that way because it was all happening inside of Verizon's network.

The Netflix Verizon case illustrates what makes Net Neutrality law so difficult to describe in technical terms. Verizon was not slowing down netflix packets, netflix was so big that it fully saturated multiple links. You can argue about what this implies for the peering agreements that are setup, but regardless this area is simply not something that net neutrality covers. Net neutrality says the last mile needs to treat all content it receives the same way. If the congestion is further up the network, NN has nothing to do with it.

Look I understand what you're saying, but it's complicated. Obama chose to respect a tradition and he did so at the cost of allowing anti-NN people into the FCC. He could've found a republican that was pro-NN, but he didn't. You can argue about what tradition dictated, but as the president I think you have to take some responsibility for the choices being made, even if they are hard ones. Obama broke a lot of traditions and he suffered for it, especially in his first term, so I'm not saying this is a simple decision, or one that would've cost a reasonable amount of political capital, but he did have the actual, legal choice, and he did make it. This enabled Trump to select Pai as chair. So without Obama's decision Pai would not be chair either. It's ComplicatedTM.

> The only reason the rule got put into place was because Verizon was found to be throttling Netflix.

No that's inaccurate. Title II reclassification happened in 2015. Verizon Netflix "throttling" (controversial what actually happened there) happened in 2017.

Please don't bring divisive politics into HN. Fwiw Ajit Pai was appointed to the FCC by Obama not Trump.

https://app.put.io/ Put.io is absolutely the best way to download torrents. I am not affiliated with them in anyway except that I am a massively happy user, and assume you will use this service only to download legal torrents, like me :)

> I mean, when we help people in Ghana, do we check to make sure they don't have any conflicting political values? When we aid Syria, have we checked to make sure they're there aren't any nationalists and racists?

Basically, yes. We expend an enormous amount of effort making sure aid gets to the "right" people, and we have a track record of rescinding it when those people change their opinions to ones we don't like.

> Your "1" is true, but you prefaced it by claiming that it was one of the "major things" the parent was missing. I'm pretty sure he wasn't missing this, as indicated by the sentence "This uptick has been benign because its been limited to Marijuana".

I think the thing OP's post was missing is that the distinction is important: we wouldn't expect the same trend to carry over to things that are not "benign," like hard drugs.

> This is tautologically true if you define addiction as mental illness, but would you really claim that no one regularly uses heroin because they became addicted to after starting with prescription painkillers, rather that they use it regularly only because they have an underlying non-drug related mental illness?

So, yes, this does happen, but no I don't think it's really a significant cause of drug addiction in the United States: https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/a3z98b/big-pharma-didnt...

Otherwise, yes, I am arguing the vast majority (or maybe all?) people who are drug addicts have some underlying mental illness, and I don't disagree that is tautological: that's kind of the point. Truthfully I don't think we have the data but I also wouldn't be shocked to see a large portion of the people who become addicted to prescribed painkillers and then end up using heroin afterwards come into the injury and prescription with some kind of mental illness which predisposes them to addiction. Ie: you are a construction worker, you are depressed, you hurt your back, you get on painkillers and it escalates from there. But the vast majority of people prescribed these drugs do not become addicted to them and I think that's telling.

But really, that doesn't matter to me, the only thing I'm really looking for is a classification of people who are addicts, however they got that way, as "sick" instead of as "criminals." Again: let's not put people in cages unless we absolutely have to.

Which brings me to the other distinction number 2 adds which is that Portugal's approach is decriminalization not legalization, like with Colorado and marijuana.

So there are at least two distinct ways in which the Colorado Marijuana situation don't apply.

There's a lot here that needs to be picked apart. Here are the major things you're missing:

1. Marijuana has been researched extensively and its health effects are at worst similar to alcohol, at best significantly less bad for you. In that context it makes sense to think of marijuana as a consumer product, and it makes sense that requiring a consumer product be sold in a dangerous and unregulated way would reduce demand for that product. Under these conditions we can expect legalization to increase demand, and it has.

2. Portugal's policy is decriminalization not legalization, and its success has not really been about soft drugs, it's been about hard drugs. People who do not have some kind of mental illness do not use hard drugs frequently for the same reason people without mental illness do not drink bleach: it's bad for you and if you care about yourself self-preservation is important. Portugal's solution is about the people who don't or are unable to care for themselves, and recognizing that the drug use is a symptom of that, and that you cannot fix the underlying mental issue by putting people in cages. Their solution is not "stop doing anything and fully legalize," it's "require people to be treated" instead of "require people to sit in a cage." Under these conditions we can expect decriminalization to decrease demand, and it has.

Edit: Also, I do very much agree with your larger point re: overconsumption, and I'm not saying we should ignore that problem either. Mental health in this country is a disaster, I just don't think putting people in cages is the solution.

> So unless you have a webapp that uses 8gb of memory yet stays somewhere under 20% cpu utilization (maybe with some peaks), you'll eventually get throttled.

FWIW this is, unfortunately, a pretty common description of many low traffic Rails apps.

Very interesting, thank you

> If you know how to read audit statements, Friedman bent over backwards to make sure they're not culpable for fraud (whereas normally their function is to rubber-stamp for authenticity).

Can you expand on this?

That's what I'm hoping for :)

Would you mind expanding on this comment? I want to understand what you mean :)

Sure, mind body connection is everything, but there are many keto proponents that argue that controlling for calories, keto still produces superior outcomes. Outside of extreme cases like epilepsy, there is not really any reason to think that's true.

Keto is one of many strategies that people use to comply to consuming the right number of calories.

The problem with basically all of the keto science (this study included) is that it doesn't adequately differentiate between the effects of a ketogenic diet and simple caloric restriction:

> In rodents, ketogenic diets – and caloric restriction, in general – are known to reduce inflammation,

While there is some science showing differences in calorically balanced diets that vary in macronutrient composition, the truth is it is not strong, not well reproduced and there reasonable logical models that strongly bring the keto claims into question.

That doesn't mean keto is stupid or not worth studying. It's just that the interesting things about keto aren't really the metabolic changes (which are controversial, and small even if existent), but the behavioral controls. Obviously it's an oversimplification to draw a strict line between metabolism and compliance, but the point is the important difference with keto is that for some people it helps them comply to a calorically balanced diet, not that the macronutrient composition is making a difference.

> It's an American thing which has spread to the rest of us. Thirty years ago, we never saw these muscle- and fighterbreeds. I don't believe we were the poorer for it.

Pitbulls as a general category have been around for hundreds of years and originated in Europe.

> There are plenty of geniuses throughout history who were asseholes but still brilliant.

Agreed, as I said humans are complex and I'm sure you can find exceptions. Just talking about general trends here.

> EQ and IQ are not highly correlated at all.

Assuming by EQ you mean being a nice person and intelligence are not correlated I don't agree. Tons of studies backing this up (as well as correlation with overall happiness). Here are two:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12061571

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jopy.12309/full