LSD in powder form is readily available on the black market. Expensive (because you don't just go and ask to buy only 1mg of LSD powder), but not exceptionally unsafe or rare.

Now the people who handle Fentanyl and Fentanyl analogues, those probably want to triple check their gloves and mask before putting them on.

Really? I doubt it. 1kg is about 10 million doses (@100ug each). I don't think there are enough people gobbling acid for there to be labs producing on that scale per batch. The cost of making a mistake with a batch that big would be quite high.

Edit:// having more acid than you could ever need is somewhat a novelty in this scene

IMO it's wonderful to know that this substance won't disappear anytime soon.

It's a darknet vendor btw and their name contains small mythical creatures. No personal experience with them, but I know their product and have a morbid interest for the market :)

See https://www.erowid.org/ for a large collection

And it's not really specific to HN. For instance you have well-known people in the community who do vaccine R&D, or cryptography, or contribute to the C/C++ standards at ISO, or several other STEM things that are pretty outspoken about their interests.

This is made more obvious on Twitter, where people tend to blur their personal and work identities a lot.

The wildly excessive prescription of oxycontin & opioid is a crisis and a tragedy. If the response is an overreaction in the opposite direction, the result is also more tragedies.

Pain doctors seem like they are really stuck between a rock and a hard place now. You have a whole population of patients who have been given pain meds like candy, and when you suddenly take them away they're left dealing with the problem. Some of them turn to street drugs out of desperation, and that's a countdown to another fentanyl overdose.

Then there's people with chronic pain who may legitimately need the medication on a continued basis (some of whom have had their dosage increase to dizzying levels during the opioid crisis!) You frequently have patients with chronic pain who, after the pills are taking away, spend their time thinking of ways of killing themselves, as a pain management option. They cannot deal with the all-natural, constant torture.

When I look at the opioid epidemic, to me it's really hard not to think that the onus should be on pharmaceutical companies to not advertise their pain medication to doctors as non-habit forming when they are the very opposite, and results in those extremely addictive pills being given like candy to an entire population.

The fact that we, as humans, have to decide who gets the label of 'Has the Disorder' and who doesn't is just an artifact of how we like to label things.

For the same reason that you don't magically go from a child to an adult the minute you turn 18. There is a smooth spectrum of development as people age, but for practical and legal reasons we need a cutoff for officially calling people adults.

Some disorders are also on a smooth spectrum. Some people have a little anxiety, or show a few autistic symptoms without it ruining their lives. That doesn't invalidate the experience of people who have severe anxiety or a more advanced degree of autism. Don't imbue too much meaning to the where the cutoff for the label is.

There's no need to gatekeep mental illness, the goal is helping people. We're not competing for who has the real thing™ and deserves to be taken seriously. Let's just listen to people, let them describe things as they perceive them to be, and try to be helpful.

Those two X's are not the same, and it isn't useful to compare them even though they appear comparable or similar or the same.

The key bit is the anxiety (however small or large, frequent or infrequent) that makes the distinction.

I agree it's not very useful to use labels for behaviors that are considered normal and don't have any negative cause or impact (whether that's anxiety or something else).

My understanding is that a good part of the diagnosis of many disorders, as per the DSM, is by looking at the impact they have on one's life. If someone is perfectly happy with what they're doing, it's certainly an important distinction that makes labeling them with X disorder somewhat less meaningful.

It really muddles the picture and distorts what's really important; the experience of anxiety/stress/irrationality/impulsivity/attention issues/ ... to the person feeling it.

The 'good news' is the active compound in Desoxyn is widely available at cheap prices and surprisingly high-purity in hypo-regulated markets. It is, in a way, easier to acquire (on every street corner and through the mail) than many very boring prescription chemicals. So there is at least a theoretical alternative.

Amphetamines for ADHD is one of the most effective treatment there is in all of medicine, along with things like insulin for diabetics and benzodiazepines for anxiety.

Unfortunately, self-medicating with N-methylamphetamine is an extraordinarily unwise thing to try. It is hard to recommend that anyone who is already prone to substance abuse attempt that maneuver.

But they are not applicable everywhere, so you should not expect your 8 hour days to turn into 48 minutes because you started using regexes, dynamic programming, and search algorithms everywhere.

The unlikable and unhelpful answer, but probably the single biggest fundamental multiplier, is unfortunately the g factor. General intelligence.

The only 10x differences that genuinely exist are between people who are 2x faster than average and people who are 5x worse. Not because they learned a trick, but for a complex combination of reasons, including having been handed down two or three standard deviations in general intelligence.

The harsh reality is that there is no single thing a 1x person can do to become 10x.

And brain plasticity, and the characteristics of high performing groups or institutions.

Changing the way your group works together is going to have a more profound difference on the outcomes than focusing on individual performance.

I intuitively don't like the idea of the 10x programmer, my core argument is actually that you should not try to become a 10x programmer, and that there's no order of magnitude productivity you can gain in a vacuum, ignoring group dynamics. So you shouldn't focus on individual performance too much! There's not much you can do about it, anyways

Managing groups of people is hard, and there's often big inefficiencies that are going to be obvious to some people (engineers love to complain about management!) but that have a true multiplier effect when fixed. Because for the time invested, you have an effect on the whole team. That's a true multiplier.

I don't know what specifically you think I should learn about the fallacy of reification, but please feel free to elaborate.

The original idea of a 10x developer was between best and worst, not best and average.

Any evidence for this? You may say there's no evidence that a 1x person can work up to 10x its performance, but stating it's impossible without evidence lacks merit.

The first I sort of already touched on below is that gaining a whole order of magnitude productivity, not just on a single task where a cool pattern applies but on average, is a really big effect size. If your colleagues start completing tasks that should take a month in 3 days, you would definitely notice.

The second order effect is that if we had discovered any method that reliably let an average person gain 10x productivity, it would have generated tremendous profit for companies and spread like wildfire. We haven't seen that, so we should be very suspicious when people claim a single bit of knowledge, method, or pattern is going to improve your performance by 10x.

(The other response, which is also annoying and unsatisfying, is that I'm making the boring claim that there is nothing interesting, so the burden of proof is actually not on me. If someone thinks there exists any intervention that can increase an arbitrary developer's performance by 10x, it's up to them to collect data and reject the null hypothesis)

I actually like those little patterns a lot, there are problems where you might absolutely take 10x longer because you didn't know the algorithm or the right machine learning concept.

The OP talks about becoming "significantly more productive when solving a large class of problems", and where my interpretation differs is what you mean by large class of problem.

What's large for you is really going to be relative and will vary based on your personal experience, so I can't say you're wrong. I know I speak at least for myself I when I say that in my day to day, most of what I do is not leetcode-type problems, so despite knowing many algorithms I don't think I would be 10x slower if I didn't know them.

If your interpretation of OP is that these boosts will on average give you 10x more productivity, that's the only place where I really disagree.

The 10x productivity boost I get with regexes is being able to effectively automate out a lot of text manipulation on a large scale. A couple examples. Say I get a file with a bunch of junk in it that contains some IDs that I need to use as input to other commands. I write a simple regex in a text editor, find all, delete everything else, then use other regexes (or multiline editing) to wrap those IDs with the commands I actually want to run. A more impactful example. Several years ago I was writing a new loadtest suite, when I realized that it would look A LOT like some existing load tests we had. They weren't close enough for composition or inheritance to solve the issue completely (we were already both in a few places in the codebase to help out), so I used a similar process that I laid out above to write the new loadtest suite. I barely wrote any of the code manually, I was doing most of the work from a level of abstraction above, making broad code changes with regexes. I did it all in an afternoon.

To get the 10x multiplier from regexes you've got to basically bake them into everything you do.

I'm not trying to deny your experience, so I can accept your word for it that it would take you 10x longer to complete tasks if you weren't able to do this.

At this point the core of the argument becomes more what sort of mix of tasks your daily work consists of, I think. I agree that there are patterns that solve some problems very efficiently, but in my daily life if I try to look at people who complete projects 10x faster than average, I can't point at any single method or bit of secret knowledge.

So I think the twofold response is first that the average developer is actually able to use search-and-replace and already has some vague notion that regexes are a tool they could reach for, so this is really saying that "0.1x" productivity exists in a way. And I think that's uncontroversial: if you imagine an hypothetical programmer who is still using the `ed` text-editor and hand-writing machine code to address business problems, in a world where people throw together microservices running in K8s in 100 lines of code, they're going to be a lot slower than average.

But I think the question is really about whether starting from an average (or if you want, median) dev there's any single thing that will give you a 10x productivity boost, that's not already something normal the average person knows about.

The second answer I have, and that I keep coming back to, is that if we had such a thing it would be more popular than coffee and morning meetings. It would automatically and very quickly have become something that companies rapidly adopt and that becomes the new normal (like search and replace!).

So finally the point is not that there aren't thing like regexes that slow you down a lot if you don't know them, it's more that there aren't any such things that are also well-kept secret. If the effect size is a whole order of magnitude, you won't have to scour forum threads for secret methods that turn you into a Mythical 10x Programmer, it will just quietly already be on its way to being the new 1x, and it will most likely be a gradual improvement over time.

If the 'single thing' is really a whole compendium of integrated skills, then you can't easily teach it to people the same way that you can teach them regular expressions or parser combinators.

This sort of nebulous skill that very productive people have is also especially hard to transfer. You can spend a week taking math lessons from Terrence Tao and seeing how he works, but you will still not be Terrence Tao at the end of the week, no matter how many interesting mathematical tools and methods you learn.

My point is that there is No Silver Bullet that will consistently turn your 10 hour days in 1 hour day, or if there is one I have never seen it, and evidently no company has found one. Otherwise all of their employees would follow the same method and become 10x programmers. This has not happened.

It helps to learn popular patterns and algorithms, but I don't think learning more patterns will achieve the kind of order of magnitude improvement you're looking for.

It is actually not allowed to organize raids or other Anonymous-style hacktivities that are against US law on 4chan. So, calling for cyber war may just net you a warning from moderators. The board is not the bastion of absolute unregulated free speech people think it is!

More broadly, outside of the current geopolitical context, trying to pick a target and rally anons against it is in bad taste. If you try, you may be told that "4chan is Not Your Personal Army" (NYPA).

As a result, the various "Anonymous" groups really don't have a home there.

I feel a little better than neutral when I'm at baseline. On most days, I don't need a reason to smile. I just like to smile because things are good. I didn't sprinkle this post with happy smileys to illustrate my point (for your sake!) but I would have if I were writing to myself.

I wish I could help other people. The point of this is not "look at me my life is great". I just don't know what to do.

In general, being happy is probably not something you talk about too much - it's the "normal" state of being and talking too much about it makes you look like you're either bragging or trying to sell your two week seminar. In that regard, it's a bit like money - if you have enough, you don't talk about it much unless you get really lucky (sell company, win lottery etc), but if you're lacking it, it's on your mind all the time.

I think you're right in general that there's usually no point acknowledging good things, there's no lesson to learn or corrective action to take from things being good — that's just the expected state.

What bothers me is I see people constantly talk about happiness like something you chase all your life, some unattainable goal that only an old sage that spent decades meditating would know anything about. Like it's a mythical thing, not the 'normal state of being', as you said.

I'd really like to understand what went wrong that so many people aren't feeling the way you and me would say is normal/neutral. I've started learning psychology just to understand better, but I don't know that there's anything concrete I can do to help anyone. That sort of sucks.

Definitely agree that it is not really on my mind all the time though. It is like money or oxygen that way, you only really notice when you don't have it. That might explain why we only hear about unhappy people online; the happy people simply don't post about it as much. I'll also add the insight from Epicurus that many people are confused about what brings about happiness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg_47J6sy3A.

It's funny that that's the expected state, because if you compute through various permutations of different geographical locations, and points in history, levels of socio-economic status etc you get a very different answer as to what the expected state is. You also realize it can change on a dime. And if you look around, it looks like it's starting to do just that.

This largely matches my own anecdotal observations. I'm capable of experiencing happiness like everyone else but it's largely situational and unstable and tends to be hedonic. Some other people meanwhile are unflappably happy. Happiness is probably a matter of perspective, and I think it's just really, really difficult to truly and durably change your perspective. It's like asking an atheist to believe in a god or vice versa.

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1996.tb...

Also a metastudy: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-016-9781-6

Do you recall suffering any traumas at all during childhood?

Have you had good mental health as long as you can remember?

The truth is I was not a popular kid. I had food, but I've fainted once from hunger (my fault). My parent fought for a while, the screaming was not very nice to be in the middle of. Then they divorced. So I lived with one and visited the other on the weekends.

One of my siblings went to live with the other parent, so I didn't really get to grow up with them. I didn't see them much until much later as a result.

I did not like school very much, though I'm sure the teachers weren't trying to crush my spirits. They were average people doing an average job. It only crushed me inside because it's not the right environment for me. Everyone else must have been fine.

I feel like I've been lucky, though. Mental health is not a concept I've had growing up, but I've somehow eventually managed to escape. I'm in a good environment, now. I work doing something I like, for a company that has a net positive contribution to the world. It's a small weight off my shoulders that I didn't end up working for a Palantir or a Facebook, and rationalizing to myself why that's actually okay. That would have caused some serious dissonance.

I don't know if I have trauma. I feel like if you have to ask "who doesn't?", you maybe, probably do? But I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the past. It's not that I'm trying to avoid it, everything has just changed so much that it doesn't continually affect me anymore.

I suspect the conclusion is not as obvious as it might appear. On the one hand, having had a poor childhood or a very good childhood just sets your expectations for what happiness is as an adult. An adult used to opulence will think nothing is remarkable, or particularly good, while someone who has never taken it for granted will feel comparatively better, knowing that the baseline for normal used to be worse.

And, on the other hand, trauma.

I wonder how much of this is simply genetic...

Now I am happy. Have been for ten years. I have a small house. Nothing fancy but it's tidy and looked after. Wife and kids. Kids get a whole other childhood than I had. It's like a restoration. Rebuilding of what I never had. Deeply meaningful. I think feeling a purpose and meaning are key

Faith is also an important component in my life.

Like someone said in one of the other comments: happiness is a choice. It is also orthogonal to the intellect. It’s just that people tend to turn their intellect against themselves and so a sharper intellect makes for more damage.

That's exactly what Naval (writer of the link in this post) preaches about happiness, if you listen to pretty much any podcast appearance of his he emphasizes how much being happy is a choice. It's funny, a lot of the stories in this thread (career-driven, not happy, achieve financial freedom, now what?) mirror very closely to his life and his path to happiness.

When I don't do yoga it fades away after awhile. I'm going back to it soon.

Unfortunately the internet has a large selection bias. Anger, outrage, etc. are more viral than quiet contentment. Misery loves company and all that.

It’s hard to change opinions online (especially when people go online to vent or already in a bad mood), but I’m sure you’re inspiring those with your real life interactions. Keep on keeping on.

My theory is that I’ve learned from my past mistakes of being a shut-in due to social anxiety, which led me to spiral downward when things inevitably went wrong in life.

I decided to do something about that: face my anxiety head on.

Now I have a thriving network of close friends, colleagues, mentors, and family. Things will go wrong, but I have a support stem. I will be okay.

Being okay is rad.

One of the most surprising parts of this transformation is when people reach out to me after something has gone wrong in their life. I used to freeze in those moments. Unsure how to act or what to say. Now I feel honored to be there for a friend, and it’s rewarding in ways I never thought possible.

I was fortunate to have a major career change thrust upon me.. it was too good of an opportunity to pass up, so I took it. It required me to go from a passive customer-facing role to an active customer-facing role.

It was difficult, and I struggled early on, but I feel like I’m the type of person who can rise to a challenge. Usually that’s a technical challenge or something less personal, but I just kept tell myself that I was the type of person who can rise to any challenge and kept going.

When this career change presented itself, I had just had my first child, and I wanted to be better for him. I wanted to be a good role model.

I am locked down this week with covid so I am not allowed to ride out so I am only medium happy, that is not happy enough to annoy my wife. :)

This rings true anecdotally too. I was a participant on the very same forum and received an admonishment from another commenter about my posting style, which made me realize that my health-problem-induced approach to commenting on the forum was laced with subtle ad hominem barbs and other unproductive habits. Being called out helped me realize how unproductive my engagement was.

I suspect that this dynamic is in play for a lot of fora with less healthy discussion norms than r/ssc (which has to be 99.9% percentile for quality of discussion).

Mentally ill people have more time and inclination to spend time arguing with strangers online. Deducing too much from these interactions I'd simply sampling "what do insane people think about X", which is of limited usefulness.

If you feel fine, you wait several days and try a bigger dose, then see if you feel any effects. Stop when it becomes unpleasant or unwise.

This is not safe. There is no safe way to ingest dozens of unknown chemicals. Somehow, chemists like Shulgin show that it's possible to test all those compounds on yourself and still live a long healthy life. Still, I would not recommend tempting fate.

If you absolutely must experiment, this method is a good for hopefully avoiding short-term adverse effects, but not long-term ones.

Much safer is to stick to substances that have a long history of safe human use.

That is despite a (smaller) subset of them being careful and methodical with dosage.

Personally, as a very squeamish person, I'm more than happy to stick with the tried and true, and in desperately boring moderate amounts :)

Yes this is aggressive, and yes I'm quite angry about how these laws have held back scientific progress.

Say what you will about the recreational drugs of the 20th century, their long-term effects are well understood.

> Much safer is to stick to substances that have a long history of safe human use.

Yeah, so much is clear, but saying "stick to the classic ones" when one brings up experimentation with new ones doesn't bring much new to the table. Much better to provide education up front on how to dosage new drugs (not just new to the world, but new to your body too) for the ones who do want to exist in that space.