How we can stop antibiotic resistance - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170607-how-we-can-stop-antibiotic-resistance <comment><USER3> This approach could prevent resistance far into the future. Can an expert weigh in if it is likely to be practical for wide adoption soon?

Combating multidrug-resistant Gram-negative bacteria with structurally nanoengineered antimicrobial peptide polymers [https://www.nature.com/articles/nmicrobiol2016162](https://www.nature.com/articles/nmicrobiol2016162)

An article for non-expert: [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health- fitness/body/does-this-25-...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health- fitness/body/does-this-25-year-old-hold-the-key-to-winning-the-war-against- th/)

"Lam successfully tested the polymer treatment on six different superbugs in the laboratory, and against one strain of bacteria in mice. Even after multiple generations of mutations, the superbugs have proven incapable of fighting back.

"We found the polymers to be really good at wiping out bacterial infections," she says. "They are actually effective in treating mice infected by antibiotic-resistant bacteria. At the same time, they are quite non-toxic to the healthy cells in the body.""

"Professor Greg Qiao, her PhD supervisor, says that Lam's project is one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs he had seen in his 20 years at Melbourne university."

<comment><USER4> > "quite non-toxic"

Well, that doesn't really have a _lot_ of confidence behind it.

<comment><USER5> I'd say it has quite a lot of confidence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The solution is to stop giving one antibiotic at a time. HAART for HIV [1] showed that to prevent resistance you have to give multiple drugs at the same time. The problem of course is each drug you add to the mix the more you increase the risk of bad side effects.

Of course none of this will matter until we can crack down on misuse of new antibiotics in places like India and China. If each new antibiotic developed is stolen and abused then nothing will work.

1\. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_of_HIV/AIDS](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_of_HIV/AIDS)

<comment><USER7> How about a crackdown on misuse of (new and old) antibiotics in places like the USA?

[http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/12/14/you- cant-...](http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/12/14/you-cant-buy- antibiotics-over-the-counter-can-you-yes-you-can/)

This is not a discussion of Indian or Chinese laws on "intellectual" "property".

<comment><USER6> The new antibiotics are not being misused in the USA - in the main they are not being used at all in the USA which is a big problem for any company thinking of developing a new antibiotic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Unfortunately, drug companies have few economic incentives to develop novel antibiotics given the immense costs/risks of human trials and the minimal expected monetary reward. Clinicians reserve the "big gun" antibiotics for the rare cases that need them-- which reduces the cash drug companies get from pushing them through clinical trials.

Compared to other drugs, antibiotics are relatively easy and cheap to discover or "invent" with modern techniques. Getting them through clinical trials, on the other hand, is not cheap.

Many clinicians should be less loose with antibiotics, sure. But, that won't eliminate resistance. Realistically, when superbugs become common, the incentives pharmaceutical companies face will shift. It's just there will be a lot of morbidity and mortality while we're waiting for their drugs to make it to hospital pharmacies.

<comment><USER9> Sounds like the solution is to have a very effective, very expensive antibiotic.

<comment><USER10> I don't know. With the third-party payer system, cost is hardly a factor in medical decisions.

<comment><USER11> Is it not? I was under the impression that as providers we should provide affordable care as well. For example, theres no reason to throw every test at a patient that has clear signs of a certain bacterial infection.

Maybe cost is less of a factor in life threatening situations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Torches and pitchforks for Big Agriculture?

I'd like to see a year-on-year graph of human lives lost in exchange for making livestock grow faster.

<comment><USER13> It would very much surprise me if the net lives were a loss instead of a significant gain, so yes this would be an interesting statistic.

For instance, its because of many of the practices of "Big Agriculture" that world hunger has dropped so massively in underdeveloped countries over the last 30 years. With even a 10% decline in Asia ( since 92 ), thats about 450 million people who aren't living under malnourished conditions who were doing so 30 years ago.

<comment><USER14> Can't agree more. The craziness is not that we do intensive agriculture, it is that we need it and we still do not question our demographic growth.

Some fire-brand ecologists want to go back to "traditional" ways outside of the paths of modern intensive agriculture but fail to realize that traditional agriculture both have a higher ecological footprint and is much more labor intensive.

If you want to lower the impact of intensive agriculture, promote contraception and demographic decrease.

<comment><USER15> > If you want to lower the impact of intensive agriculture, promote > contraception and demographic decrease.

You don't need to promote demographic decrease (you might need to do something about the Catholic church, though ...). All you really need to do is improve the opportunities for women.

Once women have opportunities and don't need to worry about 4 of 5 children dying, suddenly they don't want to be pregnant so often.

Many of the most advanced countries are already under replacement level. I believe the US would be, as well, if it weren't for immigration.

<comment><USER14> Well, I think we still need to promote the merits of bringing the population down because when you read about countries arriving below replacement level, it is almost universally presented as a negative thing and government try to fight that by giving natalist incentives.

No, couples who decide to have more children are not helping society. They are draining its resources. If you want kids, have only one and give her/him all the education and resources you can.

<comment><USER16> If you consider resource scarcity as an engineering problem, then removing consumers is only one solution. The other is to just increase the amount of resources available.

Re parents with many kids are draining resources - this holds true for countries like India, but certainly not regions like Europe. Here, farmers are paid by the EU for letting fields lie fallow, because there is only so much produce that is consumed in the EU. Also, consider the amount of food thrown away by supermarkets, which could be used if we were content with eating crooked looking cucumbers. An argument might be that those extra kids still deplete scarce resources by proxy, e.g. oil.. but as we are slowly transitioning to solar and wind power, this might almost entirely go away.

<comment><USER17> We can't increase the population forever,in unless we go full Culture-tech, and even then it's not "forever."

Meanwhile, while it looks as if most continents are going in the right direction, we need to stop the extremest religious/political warrior movments prevalent in North Africa, Middle East and South East Asia.

Eg. In Somalia, a lot of men want 20 kids, and while I can't personally understand why, it's encouraged by religious leaders. It's apparent that Somalia itself won't sustain that in only a generation. This can only lead to conflicts, presumably with richer regions. There are so many pear-shaped scenarios to go to from there, but I leave to your own imagination what a highly industrial neighbouring region could come up with if cornered.

Hint: that region have only minor concerns about locking down the borders, setting up incentives that leads to that whole ships filled with people and kids drowing. Ther might be some public lamenting but no policy changes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > "That's because the process of developing any new drug is extremely > expensive and the potential profit in an antibiotic after that massive > investment is relatively low. ... At current usage levels a new antibiotic, > he says, would only have about two years on the market before bacterial > resistance to it develops."

Seems to me that the patent system, meant to encourage invention, is seriously broken in the case of antibiotics. So stop using it. Set up a bounty system instead. Pay drug companies directly for developing new antibiotics. Without the pressure of having to sell them quickly we can instead use them more strategically, even holding some in reserve.

</comment><comment><USER19> So, I thought genetic mutations were random. If that's the case, why does the amount of antibiotics prescribed matter? Won't these mutated bacteria excel regardless?

<comment><USER20> Simplified, to survive one antibiotic, you need only mutate to resist that one antibiotic. To survive n antibiotics, you need to mutate to resist n antibiotics _at once_. Being vulnerable to just a single of them will kill you.

If the chance to get the right mutation to resist one antibiotic is, say 0.01 (1%). Then the chance to mutate to resist three antibiotics at once is 0.01^3, thats 1e-6 (0.0001%).

<comment><USER19> You might need to simplify some more.

<comment><USER21> I'm going to ship you a item. Luckily I have multiple copies of the item. I ship using UPS, Fedex, and USPS. You'll probably get three copies, but to get no copies of the item I'm shipping you something has to go ridiculously wrong in three different companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This article seems to exist in lalaland. Implementing antiobiotic stewardship in China and particularly India will not succeed, at least in the next ten years.

<comment><USER23> The world has had success with eliminating CFCs from refrigerants, banning leaded gasoline, eradicating iodine deficiency, dramatically increasing crop yields, eradicating polio, scaling up electrification, plumbing, internet access, etc etc. The idea that we can set a goal like this is completely conceivable.

A lot of the low hanging fruit involves banning the use of antibiotics on healthy farm animals, and at least with the largest producers who raise and slaughter the majority of animals I think this could be achieved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> >> How do we get ourselves out of this?

>> First, the entire world needs to get on board.

Like the entire world got on board with climate change. Yep, we're screwed.

<comment><USER25> The entire world minus the United States of America and Syria _is_ on board with climate change. What's your point, again?

<comment><USER26> > The entire world minus the United States of America and Syria is on board > with climate change.

As is much of the USA, even if not the federal government. 12 states and Puerto Rico in the US Climate Alliance, another 10 states and numerous local jurisdictions expressing official support for the Paris Accords outside of the Alliance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > Until recently antibiotics in the US actually listed animal growth as an > indication for use on antibiotic labels and a prescription was not required > for farmers to obtain them.

Less monoculture, smaller farms, no use of antibiotic for animals. Pure form of greed, they feed them antibiotics pro-actively.

</comment><comment><USER28> I wonder if an increase in antibiotic-resistant organisms will lead to a resurgence in table manners and resistant clothing (e.g. gloves). Many of these rules were designed to reduce the spread of pathogens.

(This is not to ignore the fact that quite few were designed for social exclusion as well)

</comment><comment><USER13> This article essentially says that in the best-case we can only slow antibiotic resistance. Is there anyone working on things to actually render the bacteria less effective at survival (perhaps using the same evolutionary principles that got them resistent in the first place)?

<comment><USER29> Antibiotic resistance imposes a metabolic cost on bacteria.

Take away the antibiotic, and resistance slowly declines.

50 years from now, we'll have a global system that coordinates the rotation of antibiotics so we use them in lockstep.

<comment><USER6> People have tried this and it doesn't work. The problem is mobile genetic elements like plasmids and transposons. What happens is the antibiotic resistance genes cluster together and so the selection for one selects for all the others. Even if you go back to an antibiotic that hasn't been used for decades the resistance hangs around. Bacteria really are formable.

<comment><USER30> if they were easy to kill, life would have never formed / progressed in the first place =)

<comment><USER6> The speed of evolution is proportional to the population size - there are way more bacteria than non-bacterial life and they are way ahead of us :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I am amazed by how many people take antibiotics for no reason. I have a partner since a year and she used to go to the doctor every time she had the flu. And the doctor, to be on a safe side - prescribed antibiotics every time.

When I showed up I encouraged her to stop taking any antibiotics and build up defence system by taking vitamins and adjusting some bad habits. The first time she had flue it was bad, she had it for 3 weeks and was forced in the end to take antibiotics. Since then she was not sick even once (usually she would be sick every 3 months). Her health improved, her defences are strong and whenever she starts feeling bad she just jumps into the bed for 2-3 hours and get out feeling good. Her bode learned how to defend on her own.

<comment><USER32> This is a somewhat strange story re: "the flu" and I'm guessing that's why it's been downvoted.

The flu is a virus and antibiotics have no effect on it. There is a yearly vaccine for the flu and the CDC recommends all adults take it, although it usually only protects about 40-70% of the time due to the large number of flu strains in circulation. The flu is a deadly disease and even a person in good health (taking vitamins, etc) in the prime of their life can be killed by it, which is why vaccination is recommended.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Relevant story: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14453281](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14453281)

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm curious what others here think about natural antibiotics, either extracted or consumed food which has antibiotic properties.

<comment><USER35> Like penicillin?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This article, like much of the debate about antibiotic resistance, is fatally flawed by its anthropocentric viewpoint.

The thing to understand about antibiotic resistance is that we humans are but foot soldiers in a global war that has been raging for _literally billions of years!_ Plants killing bacteria, bacteria killing fungi, viruses killing bacteria, bacteria killing viruses, even bacteria killing other bacteria; this conflict rages on with or without our input _constantly_. Almost all of our current antibiotics are natural products or derivatives thereof, taken from the plants and fungi that have been fighting off bacteria much longer than we have. Increasingly, we're finding that the antibiotic resistance that arrises in human pathogenic bacteria is not the result of novel mutations (as this article suggests), but rather the adoption of a pre-existing resistance trait from one species that has nothing to do with humans into one that does. In a teaspoon of dirt there are more different species of bacteria than have ever caused diseases in humans, all of which are in a constant struggle for survival, many of which have developed highly specialized weapons and defenses with which to fight this war.

We've been fighting bacteria with antibiotics for just about 100 years, and _we 're already losing!_

The idea that management of distribution or development of novel agents will be sufficient to prevent bacterial infections into the indefinite future is laughable on its face for any semi-serious student of evolution.

No, antibiotics have won us an important battle, but the war is _far_ from over. New antibiotics will help, but each new one will hold off fewer infections, with more serious side-effects, lasting ever less time before resistance takes over. We'll never see the sort of success with antibiotics in the future that we have in the past. Interesting alternatives, like bacteriophage therapy, stool transplants, and other means of grooming our natural bacterial flora will go a bit further.

Ultimately, though, the incontrovertible truth of nature is this: the only lasting alternative to conflict is cooperation (a.k.a. symbiosis). Fortunately, for reasons we still don't fully understand, organisms in conflict naturally evolve to a cooperative state...given enough time. _Un_ fortunately, evolution is very slow, and there is no rule stating that there won't be casualties (i.e. extinctions) along the way.

So, as uncomfortable as it may be to many, there really is only one long-term hope that humanity has for permanently stemming the tide of infectious agents in less than an average lifespan's time: genetic engineering. Luckily, we are developing new tools for this all the time. Yes, they pose great danger, but so did fire the first time humanity harnessed it to provide warmth and a way to cook food (coincidentally enough, yet another of our small victories in the war against disease).

</comment><comment><USER30> "Consider going to back to an era when a minor accident like a scrape could lead to death."

That a bit of hyperbole, people don't take antibiotics for minor scrapes - soap and water is the prescription. quite often when the minor scrape is life threatening, its something like MRSA. which leads me to think of the stories of people in the past dying of minor scrapes: maybe its been around for longer than we think.

after all of the scare tactics, much of the drug resistance where it matters has been appropriate use. TB, gonorrhea, etc. These diseases didn't become drug resistant because people were taking antibiotics for the flu or use in agriculture.

<comment><USER36> It's not, actually. Minor scrapes _could_ lead to death doesn't mean they always did. Same is true today. Most scrapes won't lead you to need antibiotics, but if you start to get very ill after your scrape, you will get treated with antibiotics and live. 100 years ago you might have died - <USER2> cutting yourself while gardening, for example.

<comment><USER30> thats exactly what i said, they could lead to death but they usually dont. Maybe I have to walk you through it:

1) its very rare a cut needs antibiotics 2) if an infection is severe from a 'minor scrape', the prior for it being something like MRSA is much higher 3) minor scrapes in the past also rarely needed antibiotics 4) rare stories of people dying from minor scrapes in the past might have been MRSA

<comment><USER37> 1) is only right because we are vaccinated.

2) in 2017, yea. in the past, the prior for it being MRSA is essentially 0

3) thats because vaccination predates antibiotics

4) nope

your statements amount to "i have no clue how evolution works". bacteria are single cell organisms that dont just suddenly exist into the world being resistant to antiobiotics, which were specifically developed to kill those organisms off.

<comment><USER30> vaccinations have nothing to do with the conversations about drug resistant bacteria. get that through your head, maybe even write it down and say it out loud.

MRSA existed pre 2017, which it was in fact discovered in the early 1960s.

While I understand that MRSA is probably emerged from antibiotic use, I am open minded enough to consider it could have predated modern use of antibiotics.

bacteria in the world weren't suddenly under threat once antibiotics came along. they have been fighting the fight for 3 billion years. In fact, Penicillin is a natural occurrence used to fight bacteria before humans stumbled upon it.

All of the ways our antibiotics are used to fight bacteria have been something bacteria have been dealing with since they existed.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


It's a Hot Year for Science Books - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2016/02/24/467833334/its-a-hot-year-for-science-books <comment><USER2> TL;DR "These are really good books... that I haven't read yet."</comment>


Show HN: Husky Chat, a Chrome extension that overlays a chatroom on any website - <AUTHOR> http://www.huskylab.co/

<comment><USER2> I don't mean to sound negative but doesn't someone try this (browser- extension-based-multi-website-chat) every 2 years or so and the problem is they never gain enough traction, so basically every room is empty? what makes this one different?

<comment><AUTHOR> We are going to work with more community managers to help us push the usage - this implementation is useful for these guys who manage groups, who can't / won't implement chat solutions on sites.

I think some of the solutions that came before get taken over by trolls / spammers, so we're going with the oAuth approach, which we believe provides better content/conversation.

The empty room issue is still going to be a big one, we hope features like "trending" and that combination with push from community managers, can help resolve that issue.

We're going to try this again!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It feels like I've seen lots of these chat clients on ShowHNs. Isn't there even a YC-backed one? TinyChat or something?

This one is nicely done though - here are my immediate thoughts on tweaks (mostly ideas from other in the chat rooms, but I've got a few mins so thought I'd summarize them here.)

* Move it to aggregate chatrooms by domain name

* Add a 'Always chat on this site' checkbox that pops it open whenever I visit HN.

* Remove the lobby

* Change "5 online" to say "5 people" or similar

* It needs history desperately. Just the last 10 comments would do as a start.

<comment><AUTHOR> Alex - thanks again for joining the chat, bunch of super awesome feedback, will look into this.

Biggest = move to domain/subdomain level chat right now, and the history!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The fact that this has been tried before (again and again) doesn't as much mean that it's doomed to fail, as that it's doomed to succeed at some point, so +karma for trying.

It would be awesome to find a way to make this work, and yes, it does sound like it's more of a marketing issue than anything technical.

I like the OAUTH solution. It's a bit facebook-ey to stick the name/face to the user, but it's fair.

Personally (and I do mean personally) I'd love to see it able to create "private" rooms for staging servers (web development) and admin-panels so I can instruct employees from halfway across the globe. I realize that's quite niche though, and not much of a market, but there it is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Yes, we're going to try this again, see if we can market it somehow differently.

Re: "private" rooms, we are thinking about this, just need to figure out an elegant solution...!

<comment><USER4> Yep, no worries. We spoke in chat afterwards ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very cool - I've seen website plugins that embed a chatroom, but never a chatroom plugin that lists active websites as rooms.

A couple of issues:

* The badge indicating the number of connected users looks like a notification you would get when someone has conversed.

* The lobby has less users connected than the main chat. I dont understand this if it consists of all connected users.

* Trending is amazing and should highlighted more.

Ideas:

* Market and use this like an active reddit. What are users reading and real time discussions.

* Market this towards a specific (large) community. You need an audience for the value of chatrooms to shine.

* Create a widget to embed on a website. Easiest way to grab a community IMO.

* Gamify with points and/or achievements. Basically look at how gamification works in stack overflow or even here on Hacker News and take whats best. It's extremely important on social products (which chatrooms are).

The hardest part I see for this idea is overcoming the Graveyard. Once users begin to use it, then it becomes way more valuable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Mikkel - thanks again for the feedback!

I've jotted down your other comments during the chat as well, but just wanted to say thanks here again :)

Definitely agree on the graveyard issue, will work on it.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys!

We made this Chrome extension (w/ Node.js + MongoDB in the back) that overlays a chatroom on top of websites - the idea is, if you want to discuss a certain article / website with other people, all you have to do is install the extension and open it on the given page, to talk to other users.

Say that you are on HN, we give you the ability to chat with whoever else is there reading the same article!

We also have a "Lobby" feature, so you can talk to everyone else on at the same time (that might not be on the same site you're on)

We think this could be a good tool for say - students who want to discuss homework assignments, shoppers who want to make a last minute purchasing decision, or sports fans who want to vent with one another. It's a good way to connect passionate people of the same community!

Still super early - would love get your thoughts on it! Features you wanna see, etc.

Try it out! We will be waiting on the HN homepage!

<comment><AUTHOR> Folks - we're talking about some of these comments over using Husky Chat at <http://news.ycombinator.com/> right now - come join us :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I made one of these a little over a year ago, for fun:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sitechat/affmlbhoe...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sitechat/affmlbhoebcjponkmlmoeinojjcggbnk)

We don't store logins, messages, or logs on any DB so it's ostensibly anonymous. You can use a nickname but you can't register.

It launched to a ton of early success. Thousands of simultaneous users for a few months, then it just fizzled and died. Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey - thanks so much. Do you think you'll have some time to chat? Let us know, I'm at eric[at]huskylab.co

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How do you guys plan to make money from this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Looking at reporting / analytics for sites - aggregated, of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> After installing this I have no idea how to open this huskychat or how it works.

ediT: nevermind. it's working now. After install, it wasn't doing anything upon clicking on the husky icon for several minutes.

edit 2: if I signed in with google already, why am I being asked to signup?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey there -

It's one of the problems with Chrome extensions right now - you're going to have to use it on a new tab to work.... we're figuring that out.

Also - agreed! We just thought we might give people an option, but looks like that's an extra step, so we'll fix our workflow!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why the log in? I don't trust you enough to give you all of my information. Let me play with it first then ask me to sign in after we trust each other.

<comment><AUTHOR> To cut down on trolls, we decided to start off with oAuths to take care of that issue (hopefully)... thoughts?

<comment><USER10> I remember this (the trolling issue) was a slight problem when SiteChat[1] was submitted to HN. However, it does add to the sign-up friction, so I'm not sure if the trade-off is worth it or not.

[1][http://www.chrome- plugins.info/detail/affmlbhoebcjponkmlmoei...](http://www.chrome- plugins.info/detail/affmlbhoebcjponkmlmoeinojjcggbnk)

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting - thanks for sending.

Yeah - we'll need to figure this out. When we posted to r/chrome last week, this was the same comment we got. Then again, we haven't heard this feedback from the, I guess, "non-technical" folks that's been using it... but we will think about this some more for sure.

Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't like the way we have to basically hand over our twitter accounts. Those are some nasty T&C's

<comment><AUTHOR> We will simplify!</comment></comment>


New Macbooks: What we want vs. probably what we get - <AUTHOR> https://www.macworld.com/article/3314978/macs/new-macbooks-what-we-want-vs-what-well-probably-get.html <comment><USER2> We want friggin 32 gig of ram like all the other top laptops. We want 4 cores. We want them not to cost double the competitors and not have worse components than many of them that cost less.</comment>


Visions of 1946 (1936) - <AUTHOR> http://www.rfcafe.com/references/radio-craft/visions-1946-radio-craft-december-1936.htm <comment><AUTHOR> Interesting predictions:

1\. Exercise videos

2\. A work environment reminiscent of the world of 1984

"Usual office rush. At 10, we salesmen all gathered in Television Hall, where the president of the company gave us a fight talk. He is in Chicago, but his three-foot jaw on the huge screen made him seem to be with us in the room. (...) They say around the office that we are being watched for yawns and wandering eyes, and that each one of us is being rated by the personnel vice- president on our early-morning attitude."

3\. Closed-circuit television in security systems

4\. Speed cameras</comment>


How To Increase Site Performance Through A/B Split - <AUTHOR> http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/how-to-increase-site-performance-through-ab-split-testing/ <comment><USER2> Though simple A/B tests are better than not doing any tests at all, the true power of testing is realized when you are doing targeted tests. In most of the solutions currently in the market, you can only do blanket tests: that is, all visitors see the same test. Much better approach would be to do tests for a segment of visitors because it is quite likely that your organic traffic would have different optima than your direct traffic. Similarly, repeat visitors would respond differently than first time visitors.

Also, websites usually have multiple goals. For example, while your A/B test may tell you that you have reached optima as far as clicks on the banner is concerned, you won't know if you have compromised on other goals such as visitor engagement, newsletter signups, etc. The point here is that you must measure performance on multiple goals to see the correct tradeoff.

My team has been developing a powerful testing solution called Wingify (<http://www.wingify.com/>). We have limited number of private beta accounts available. If anyone is interested, mail me at firstname.lastname@example.com

Oh, and BTW, there is a screencast of using Wingify for setting up an experiment as well. You might find it helpful for an introduction to A/B testing - <http://www.wingify.com/video-demos/create_experiment/>

</comment><comment><USER3> We've done 2 of these tests in the last few weeks using a small in-house framework I wrote and its already showing improvements in overall page views. Our initial tests have been small and were done completely client-side with javascript, using an existing internal reporting solution. Its very easy to set this kind of thing up without even needing complicated 3rd party tools.

</comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone have feedback on the Google A/B testing tool, Website Optimizer? It looks neat, but I haven't tried it yet.

<comment><USER5> Having A/B testing is better than not having it, and Website Optimizer is quick to implement and holds the hand of people who don't understand what an A/B test is yet.

However, because it is implemented in Javascript, the impact on page load times is _substantial_ (download page A and assets, execute Javascript, download page B, actually see page). Since you will often want to use it on high value pages like, oh, your checkout funnel that is less than optimal.

<comment><USER6> If you follow Google's instructions and put the Control Script within the <head> tag on page A, the JavaScript will get executed and the user will get redirected to page B before page A and its assets load. Also, if the user gets put into group A, then all of page A is allowed to load and the user is not redirected at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> AB testing is a great tool to make your site perform better, if you're not doing it yet you probably should!</comment>


'Arrow of time' reversed in quantum experiment - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencenews.org/article/arrow-of-time-reversed-quantum-experiment <comment><USER2> When scientists say "not entirely unexpected" engineers say "that's bound to be a useful hack"</comment>


My $200 Laptop Can Beat Your $500 Tablet - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/222759/my_200_laptop_can_beat_your_500_tablet.html

<comment><USER2> None of these issues are relevant to the typical use of a tablet. The fact that he leads with the lack of a _CD drive_ shows little he understands the device's role. I would bet that he beat up Apple when they dropped the floppy.

The iPad is currently a companion computer. Not just as "your plastic pal who's fun to be with," but a companion to your _real computer._ Yes, you can't type that well on a screen. Yes, it doesn't have _WIMP_ multitasking. But, how well can you balance a laptop in one hand? Tablets are meant to move with you, not just be set up. This is represented in the UI: you're interacting with a single multi-function object, not a collection of windows.

His friends don't understand the still-evolving definition of a tablet, and neither does he.

</comment><comment><USER3> My wristwatch doesn't print either, I'm such an idiot for buying it.

<comment><USER4> My wristwatch tells me the temperature around my wrist. But it can't print either. So useless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Talk about missing the point.</comment>


EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.11946 <comment><USER2> This is a pretty cool result, especially for those of us who are building models for mobile/embedded systems!

As a quick summary, the problem the authors are trying to solve is this: suppose that you have a convolutional neural network that performs some task and uses X amount of computation. Now you have access to, say, 2X computation --- how should you change your model to best use the extra computation?

Generally people have taken advantage of the extra computation by widening the layers, using more layers (but of the same width), or increasing the resolution of the image. In this paper the authors show that if you do any of these individually, the performance of the NN saturates, but if you do all of them at the same time, you can achieve much higher accuracy.

Specifically what they do is conduct a small grid search in the vicinity of the original NN and vary the width, depth, and resolution to figure out the best combination. Then they just use those scalings to scale up to the required compute. This seems to work well across a variety of different tasks.

The main gripe I had with the paper was that they didn't do another grid search around the scaled up NN to verify that that the scaling actually held. In practice it seems to produce pretty efficient NNs, but maybe the scaling doesn't extrapolate perfectly and you can get an even better NN by applying some correction.

<comment><USER3> Fwiw I always upvote comments like this and hope everyone considers occasionally writing one for an article.

Good nutshell summaries are just a starting point and there's no substitute for reading source material.

Still, they just help in so many ways like hinting at intersections of interests, so thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Associated google AI blog: [https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/05/efficientnet- improving-acc...](https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/05/efficientnet-improving- accuracy-and.html)

and the source code: [https://github.com/tensorflow/tpu/tree/master/models/officia...](https://github.com/tensorflow/tpu/tree/master/models/official/efficientnet)

</comment><comment><USER5> [https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/bumjdc/r_e...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/bumjdc/r_efficientnet_rethinking_model_scaling_for/)

</comment><comment><USER6> The results in this paper are quite astounding. Specifically the improvement in efficiency and accuracy of their EfficientNet architecture over state-of- the-art feature extraction backbones is simply amazing (see Fig 1. from the paper - [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tensorflow/tpu/master/mode...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tensorflow/tpu/master/models/official/efficientnet/g3doc/params.png)). AFAICT, this is a huge leap in improvement, and what's fascinating is how fundamentally simple the entire premise of this paper and the type of experiments performed was.

Pretty much everyone will want to switch their feature extractors to some flavor of a pre-trained EfficientNet for any image classification / object detection type application going forward. I'm also excited to see the improvements in speed and accuracy that this can enable for mobile/embedded systems.

</comment><comment><USER7> Can this now be combined with pruning the trained network to even further the size reduction by 5x? [1]

1\. [https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.06440](https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.06440) \- Pruning Convolutional Neural Networks for Resource Efficient Inference

</comment><comment><USER8> Made a video which attempts to explain the idea of this paper! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3svIm5UC94I&t=6s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3svIm5UC94I&t=6s)

</comment><comment><USER9> How is this different from hyperparameter tuning?

<comment><AUTHOR> You could think of this as being hyperparameter tuning, but that would be simplistic. Previous approaches have tried to hold most of architecture constant and then scientifically report the results of tweaking a particular variable for verifiable results. Quoc has been working with evolutionary approaches to performing these sort of experiments with large clusters. Most of the results so far have been technically superior, but at the cost of complexity/understandability. Here though, is the logical conclusion of this approach done at scale: using evolutionary approaches to explore a large swath of architecture space, finding an entirely new category of convolutional networks, then working backwards to a formal/clean architecture and paper.</comment></comment>


Yale quantum researchers create an error-correcting cat – YaleNews - <AUTHOR> https://news.yale.edu/2020/08/12/yale-quantum-researchers-create-error-correcting-cat <comment><USER2> At first I thought it was a joke, but it ended up being a good read.</comment>


Spaceteam Retrospective - <AUTHOR> http://www.sleepingbeastgames.com/blog/spaceteam-retrospective/ <comment><USER3> We played a lot of Spaceteam at Friday beer bashes at Lab 126. Great party game.

The blog post is from December, 2013. Wonder where his stats are now?

<comment><USER4> There are updates of new features on his blog: [http://www.sleepingbeastgames.com/blog/](http://www.sleepingbeastgames.com/blog/)

But no recent financials that I can see. Spaceteam was a breath of fresh air in the mobile game space and I'm glad he's enjoying success.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the pointer. Agreed about the breath of fresh air. I installed it a couple weeks ago to play with my kids and we had a fun time with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's actually disappointing that he made so little from such a smash hit - <USER2> suppose it's because it was free, but it wouldn't have been a smash hit if he'd charged for it.

</comment><comment><USER6> York HackSpace [1] created SpaceHack - a lovely "physical" game with similar gameplay [2]

[1] [http://spacehack.york.hackspace.org.uk/](http://spacehack.york.hackspace.org.uk/) [2] [http://york.hackspace.org.uk/](http://york.hackspace.org.uk/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I've had a lot of fun with space team over the last year, thanks for making a unique and great game.</comment>


How Matt Cutts Used Stack Overflow/Hacker News In Redefining "Content Farms" - <AUTHOR> http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/2011/01/31/how-matt-cutts-leveraged-the-stack-overflow-and-hacker-news-communities-in-redefining-the-phrase-content-farms/

<comment><USER2> Has this article been excluded somehow from appearing in the main Hacker News feed? It is buried very far down compared to other stories that have received less votes within the same time period. It seems to me to be a very careful analysis of an issue that has attracted a lot of discussion. Is there some sort of HN policy against meta-discussion of the site's role within the tech ecosystem?

<comment><USER3> That's a really good question, but I have a feeling no one is going to give an answer either way. Sure seems like it though, I noticed the same thing earlier, when it was only an hour old.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> There is a lot of justice to the points made in this article. That said, I also believe that scraper sites duplicating other content are a lot more pernicious than low quality original content. Also, algorithmically recognizing mediocre content is almost impossible, and actively discriminating against specific media companies is a dangerously slippery slope.</comment>


NLU on a Microcontroller - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH8Q-JplpSo <comment><USER2> Neat! How does it work?

Mel frequency cepstral coefficients matching against a phoneme corpus?</comment>


Apple is listening (Yosemite) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/fix-macosx/yosemite-phone-home/

<comment><USER2> As long as you didn't find a keylogger, screengrabber or mousetracker everything is fine (or the software firewall is silently deactivated).</comment>


Iran billionaire Babak Zanjani sentenced to death - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-35739377 <comment><USER2> In this case it is obvious high rank Iranian officials both government and private (in banking network) were complicit for a long time with Babak, perhaps the brown envelopes got a little too small..

</comment><comment><USER3> Why do people who make a significant amount of money in countries like Russia, Turkey, China, etc, stay in their home countries?

<comment><USER4> How did you club Turkey in there?

<comment><USER5> Erdogan has been cleaning house arresting and harassing journalists, judges, generals, and businessmen for years now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In the US he would have just gotten a fine.

Edit: Not sure the downvotes. Wall Street, hello.

<comment><USER7> Or, optionally, drive his car into a highway divider at a high rate of speed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I almost wish we'd hold criminal executives in the US accountable to a similar level. Many have destroyed and indirectly ended far more lives through malice than any direct murderer ever will.

<comment><USER9> The death penalty does not dissuade future offenders from committing crimes. It does not teach us about why those crimes are committed, either. With the death penalty, you create a society of anger, hatred, revenge, and violence. You improve nothing.

Its only purpose is revenge, and that has no place in our legal system.

Instead, this criminal should be removed from society so he no longer does harm (jail), and it should be studied why he committed those crimes, and we should attempt to rehabilitate to learn more about how to build a better society.

<comment><USER10> The death penalty can have two purposes:

1) First, fear is a motive to not commit those crimes. 2) Second, it's purpose can be to _completely_ get rid of the evil that he or she was. If you kill the person, there's no more of his evil. Wealthy or powerful evil people can have devastating and evil effects on so many people, and so it might not be worth keeping them alive.

<comment><USER11> If killing people is evil, which it is, because you can never ever be convinced of a truly righteous killing (there is always doubt), then killing a person does not remove all evil. It may reduce evil, depending on whether the murder of the person is as evil as the actions the person committed, but it never completely removes evil.

<comment><USER10> I believe in truly righteous killing. Killing hitler is righteous, is it not? Even though it might have been a suicide.

<comment><USER11> fair enough, but killing can never be performed ethically by a state actor. Unless it is in self defense or an act of war, in which case the morality varies with the situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I get this sense that America's war with Iran is over how it treats its billionaires. If only they didn't treat them so badly, we could just both get along?

<comment><USER13> I think that most wars are are just based on the wealthy and powerful retaining or increasing their wealth and power. Average citizens generally don't have problems with each other. Excepting whatever propaganda we've been fed.</comment></comment>


Will.i.am Uses WePay to Collect Donations For His i.am home Foundation… | WePay - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wepay.com/2010/05/will-i-am-uses-wepay-to-collect-donations-for-his-i-am-home-foundation/?utm_source=BenchmarkEmail&utm_campaign=Newsletter_2&utm_medium=email <comment><AUTHOR> his fans keep twitter spamming me, often mistaking me for him.</comment>


Why NoSQL Equals NoSecurity - <AUTHOR> http://www.informationweek.com/news/storage/portable/232700412 <comment><USER2> I'm the author of a (very) new NoSQL datastore called Artifact (<http://zv.github.com/artifact/>), that, admittedly, is very prototypical and is not representative of MongoDB, Couch, Riak or any of the other major players. I'm also a vulnerability researcher who makes his way in the world finding and dissecting security bugs and holes in network infrastructure.

I feel this article misrepresents a lot of facts about security in the same way that articles discussing the relative security of passwords misrepresent security.

Here's what I mean

Question: Whats the most obvious way to attack a system? Answer: Guess Passwords.

Because this is the most obvious way to attack computer systems, an undue amount of attention is paid to the topic because it's the only way we're aware of. In reality the vast majority of systems compromised happen because of memory corruption vulnerabilities, or in recent years, (predominantly) web bugs like SQLi and LFI. Explaining the dynamics of taking control of a program through smashing the stack and getting EIP is tough, at least in contrast to explaining how guessing passwords works. So people worry that "their passwords aren't secure" despite that any real black hat deleted D8.dic off their harddrive years ago. Thus, theres a million articles and sites on how secure your password is, but not that many to check if you've got address randomization enabled.

Are Blackhats trying to read your NoSQL stores after staging an internal attack? Possibly, but not nearly as likely as the fact that you've got xp_cmdshell enabled. Attacking MongoDB is tractable, and provides numerous opportunities for a wide nop sled w/ memory mapped files and more than enough opportunity for use-after-free attacks in objects, but the same (and then some!) can be said of any modern SQL database.

The fact that query strings are safe in every major NoSQL datastore is such a massive advantage over SQL DBs that, even if you're using prepared statements, NoSQL is almost assuredly more secure in a day to day context, except against zero-days (Which we can reasonably say are less frequent in established datastores, irrespective of their design decisions).

The fact that he quasi-attacks stateful firewall security in the article is pretty much baseless, clever TCP bugs are long since worn out, and all the things that mainstream developers have thought is clever like firewalk(8) haven't been effective since I was 11. It's not unreasonable to trust major commercial firewalls for anything you'd trust SSH for. It's not reasonable to trust C/C++ applications in general, as even the most valorous efforts at secure software have turned up short (The beautiful irony here may be that SSH, as trusted as it is, has had numerous pre-auth exploits in it, as it is written in C++)

Finally, let's be real, as an article aside -- SSL does absolutely nothing. Every single year there are multiple complete breaks in what SSL is supposed to do, both practical and theoretical. These complete breaks are regularly released with executables, so don't give me that "We're only raising the ba-" Nope, ASLR and W^X raise the bar, you could argue SSL widens your attack surface on anything but HTTP transactions. Furthermore, if MITM is the biggest thing you're worried about then I'd encourage you to download any of the latest XML parsing libraries or PDF readers to rectify that -- it's tragically only minor exaggeration to say attacking these complex, loosely interacting components such as parsers to stage a more complex internal attack _is_ organizational computer hacking in 2012.

<comment><USER3> Serious question -- was your post generated by a Markov chain? While the sentences and paragraphs are basically grammatical, they make no sense at all.

<comment><USER4> I found the post very clear and interesting. Maybe it was written like a rant that you'd normally say out loud rather than write down, but it was good nevertheless. What did you find confusing?

<comment><USER5> What's your takeaway from it?

<comment><USER4> Multi-layer security is an interesting issue where each service can be exploited in a couple of ways. There are app-logic layer problems like not escaping input as well as app-internals layer where app's language matters to some extent. Java does have reasonable protection from buffer overflows... unless it's a bug in jre where all apps suffer. On the other hand we only have some unfortunate exceptions like unusable but safe qmail.

So while it's not the end of your worries of course, from the developer's point of view if you can make sure you're running on a system handling ASLR properly, using a language with managed-memory, designing a system to not require escaping in the first place, so there's nothing to forget about... you can eliminate several classes of attacks without even starting to think about specific scenarios and business logic itself. (not all follows from the post itself, but this was on my mind after reading - so matches your question hopefully)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We use hadoop, cassandra, and redis in production. I've never found Information Week to be a high quality source of information, and unfortunately this is no exception. Data systems almost always rely on being in segmented and protected portions of a network with access being controlled by applications and firewalls.

Overall this article struck me as having an axe to grind. I wouldn't put, SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL or any other database on the web with open access. Just like we don't do that with any of our NoSQL solutions. Generally, I've found that security granularity is not as robust in the newer Big Data tools, but that was the same argument against MySQL and Postgres a decade ago.

* Edit: Since we are playing on names, apparently Information Week = Information Weak.

</comment><comment><USER7> This article makes it sound like relational databases are the pinacle of security. Sure, they have usernames and passwords and other controls, but the data is still usually stored unencrypted.

I don't think putting a few username/password credentials onto the datastore will make it much more secure, especially if I can put those same access controls into a database access layer.

In the end you need to defense in depth just like always, and that includes putting access controls, network controls, OS controls and everything else.

<comment><USER8> I haven't tried it myself, but Redis has support for simple authentication at least. <http://redis.io/topics/security>

<comment><USER2> Just in case you want to open up your Redis instance to the internet?

Sometimes I think people like antirez add these features just so an article isn't published proclaiming Redis security to be broken because of no password authentication.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> WTF? If you can't trust your network, OS, and user level access, how are you going to trust a DB ACL? I'll put everything up against Information Week using a caching layer (Re: memcached), which has unfettered access without security from an external layer. Non-NoSQL don't magically make security a non-issue; what a joke; in all cases, equally, one has to be aware and diligent about securing your network.

<comment><USER10> _> WTF? If you can't trust your network, OS, and user level access ..._

You can't trust them all equally, and allow for a failure in any one of them to result in a total failure of all security. That's the M&M security model -- crunchy on the outside.

This is one (of several reasons) I wouldn't use memcached without authentication if it could lead to a privilege increase: It completely breaks defense-in-depth. Compromise of just one system can lead to total system compromise.

<comment><USER9> The article's author/etc simply has an axe to grind with NoSQL. Are we going to throw out our *nix flavors that have us disable root SSH? Our FSes that don't have or disable-by-default block encryption? Security should definitely be championed, full stop, but I'm not convinced by this article that NoSQL or relational DBs have any reason to be implementing the secure layers on my systems.

A big draw to NoSQL is not only the ease of use. One advantage is the separation of working parts. Not jack of all trades, master of none architectures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The article doesn't make it clear what sort of security features the author would like to see in NoSQL databases beyond SSL support, which they then admit is offered by MongoDB's "commercial offering". Never mind that the commercial version is, I'm assuming, the one that is used by all of the financial institutions the author is worried about.

I'm curious though -- what security features (if any) does HN think NoSQL DBs are missing?

<comment><USER12> Exactly -- for his example of a financial services system, just buy the commercial version, or tunnel using ssh.

You can also encrypt the underlying file system using your OS's tools.

I can't speak to how financial institutions use, say, Oracle's authentication and authorization. Most web apps & services use their own logic to manage access control. I'd love to hear what someone form that industry has to say. (An "architect" preferably. Not a mere "developer", who are the cause of this whole security problem ;) ).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> RDBMS's, put a large focus on data integrity and access within the datastore layer itself (To differing degrees); NoSQL systems more or less offload that responsibility into the application layer. There is still a responsibility of running it within a trusted network.

This is a decision that may not be appropriate for everyone, but that does not make it wrong. Many people who used mySQL to power web applications did use just one credential to access the database. In that scenario the authentication overhead is pretty much just a waste of time.

</comment><comment><USER14> I would tend to think financial/banking/<insert would-be secure application here> would be insecure no matter what data store they use. It seems to just be part of the game - ask anyone that's developed for one.

One would assume that by adopting NoSQL that would mean a refresh of code/architecture/security but only a small part of me actually believes that.

I also do not really understand the point of this article ad it did not provide me with anything useful.

<comment><USER6> I'll play. I worked at a financial institution for several years. On the one hand you'd think we were secure because we used a relational database, but we also had a heavily segmented network with all of the databases in their own VLAN's with highly restrictive permissions. On top of that each application was locked down to exactly which data it could use and what could be done with that data.

So if you buy the premise of the article, it wasn't NoSQL, so it must have been secure. In reality we were very secure from external breaches, at least as secure as you can reasonably be.

Personal information was secured to the maximum extent possible. Encrypted, backed up to multiple independent tapes stored in separate locations etc. On the other hand, the overall complexity of the system was very high and if someone breached our network there would have been a very large surface area to attack. I didn't feel like the article addressed this aspect of security in the least. Security just isn't one of those things that are easy or are ever done. It takes constant vigilance and continuous adjustment and improvement.

<comment><USER14> Did your institution go the seldom traveled route of encrypting sensitive information? Typically all the effort is spent trying to avoid breaches instead of protecting against them when they occur.

<comment><USER6> Initially it was not encrypted and was stored in plain text in the database. Then we started encrypting sensitive information at rest, both the database files and the backups. We also encrypted certain sensitive information with a secondary encryption. The next massive undertaking was to find all of the processes that use the data, how they use it - both internally and externally, and then ensure the data was protected throughout the entire process. The company was still working through that process when I left. They had identified many places that were problematic and were actively working on fixing them. The team I managed was the payment processing and cash management team. There were a number of legacy systems written in access, fox pro, DTS, Excel even. Many of those were the most painful, and frankly the most problematic.

Many people were put in a situation where the requirements for getting something implemented through the IT teams would take months, yet they were still held accountable for getting things done, so they would build an Excel process to get the job done. They would build some fantastic process, and get promoted, then that Excel system would get dumped on either someone in IT or someone replacing them.

I'm getting off track, but looking at it superficially the data was encrypted. If, however, you watch the data through it's entire value stream, there are many places it is vulnerable. Given the state of affairs in most companies and how few of them think in terms of managing value streams, I expect my observations are fairly widely applicable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> How much information from highly secured RDBMSs is leaked and lost on a daily basis? How much of that leakage is prevented by the database's security mechanism, vs. that of the application connecting to it?

And to pick on certain things - does SSL connections REALLY matter? If you're running over an untrusted network (bad idea, in general), why not just use IPSEC?

</comment><comment><USER16> Sybase and Oracle do have pretty good security solution when you dive deep into them, but I gotta question the whole premise of the article. I have always believed if a outsider can get to your database / datastore then you already have a ton of problems.

</comment><comment><USER17> Seems like NoSQL target was to solve small part of your Big-Data problem. This is changing because NoSQL can replace RDBMS in many fields and Security is becoming a MUST to have too.

AFAIK OrientDB is the only NoSQL supports security: <http://code.google.com/p/orient/wiki/Security>.</comment>


Steven Pinker's fake enlightenment: Misleading claims and false assertions - <AUTHOR> https://www.salon.com/2019/01/26/steven-pinkers-fake-enlightenment-his-book-is-full-of-misleading-claims-and-false-assertions/ <comment><USER4> I read this hoping to see examples where Pinker's data about progress - <USER2> I find surprising and interesting - was misrepesented. Instead it's mostly about the semantics of the argument.

It's definitely not cool if Pinker used quotes in ways that gave the impression people agreed with him who don't. But these are also viewpoint quotes that are just as meaningful in the new context Pinker gives them - <USER3> reattributing them doesn't exactly refute his argument.

And a bunch of the stuff later on is just giving a platform to people who disagree with Pinker, and don't think he included enough of their view. Which is like, a reasonable opinion but not an error.

Does anyone have a good piece that takes on the substance of Pinker's arguments?

<comment><USER5> Most of Pinker's arguments are basically ok giving statistical data on how things like life expectancy have improved.

I agreed with this article that Pinker's take on AI is off though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> In "Authority and American Usage", DFW once described Pinker as having a "1950s SCIENCE: POINTING THE WAY TO A BETTER TOMORROW high-school filmstrip" vibe -- and once it was pointed out, it's impossible to ignore.

</comment><comment><USER7> "Some have pointed out that modern racism more or less originated in the Enlightenment — contra Pinker"

This is an odd statement because didn't the Enlightenment start many modern thoughts? Is this odd or unusual? All who is "some?" Are their ideas important for some reason? It's odd to make a vague reference like it's somehow meaningful. Is the author quoting her neighbor.

<comment><USER8> Racism wasn't racism simply because people failed to notice it, it was so common. So, yes, in a way, it's true that it didn't exist. It didn't exist in people's conscience. Yet, it doesn't mean it didn't exist in practice. Same as child labor. It too wasn't a problem because, it was ever-present and part of everyone's life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Pinker's stuff often follows the old 18th-century Whig history pattern.

<comment><USER10> This sounds interesting but I know nothing about 18th century, Whigs (other than they are/were the Torys counterpart[y]), or history patterns. Could you explain this, maybe give examples of what Pinker said/wrote and why that follows this? Thank you in advance!

<comment><USER9> The Wikipedia entry for "Whig history" is fairly informative: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history). Essentially, a view of history that everything represents a progression towards something better. It's also tied up with the rise of mercantilism (i.e. merchantocracy) of the 17th and 18th centuries. (It's also associated with Liberalism, in the classical sense of the term.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> why is this article not on the front page? Was it flagged by too many people? If so I wonder why ... Yes, it's a personal attack on Pinker, yet I agree with most of the arguments (and had the same feeling when I was reading his book ... he takes too many things out of context and thinks just because he's an expert in language and cognition he's an expert in other topics ... I have some knowledge in machine learning and found insulted when I read the AI parts of Enlightenment Now).

It's a bit sad because Pinker's older books are great. I recommend "The Blank Slate" and "The Language Instinct". In "The Better Angels of our Nature" he already started to stray away from his expertise.

</comment><comment><USER12> I read this book and had the same thoughts. But I think what he was intending to get across, is that you can take any statistics and spin it in a positive or negative way. In other words - you can choose to be optimistic or pessimistic. He does address this at several points where he says something along the lines of having a healthy level of skepticism is a good thing, but to do it in a positive way.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've never been able to get past chapter 1 of any of pinkers books I've tried 3. I just don't get why he is lauded. I am missing something.

</comment><comment><USER8> Why is salon bothered by Pinker? Lots of professors follow ideology rather than logic, specially in the softer majors. Listen to philosophers, and they loosely tie things together from time to time.

Maybe this book of Pinker's is full of it, but why take exception to Pinker when there are many more out there?

It seems pathetically personal, for no good reason [by that I mean it attacks some flourishes and liberties, but not the substance]

<comment><USER14> Hungry writers sometimes attack their betters in order to earn some publicity from the controversy. For it to work, the victim has to be famous and with a significant following, such as in Pinker's case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I stopped reading on the first line: "Quillette, the "Intellectual Dark Web's" online safe space"... That's junk writing and I'd already had more than enough. A paragraph of that would get flagged on here and reprimanded by dang for being tiresome flame-war language. All it wants to do is fight.

Someone let me know if I've been unfair and it's actually worth reading, thanks.

<comment><USER16> > Someone let me know if I've been unfair and it's actually worth reading, > thanks.

Sorry, are you referring to the Salon article linked here ([https://www.salon.com/2019/01/26/steven-pinkers-fake- enlight...](https://www.salon.com/2019/01/26/steven-pinkers-fake- enlightenment-his-book-is-full-of-misleading-claims-and-false-assertions/)), or the Quillette article interviewing Pinker ([https://quillette.com/2019/01/14/enlightenment-wars-some- ref...](https://quillette.com/2019/01/14/enlightenment-wars-some-reflections- on-enlightenment-now-one-year-later/))?

I thought both were well worth reading!

The Salon article gets better after the first couple paragraphs, and gives a number of specific examples of how Pinker appears to use poorly-sourced quotes out-of-context in manner that the original authors disagree with. It tracks down a couple of these quotes, with those authors explaining what they really meant. So while it's extremely anti-Pinker, I thought it made a good case for why one should be skeptical of Pinker's argument.

I liked the Quillette article because I'm normally very pessimistic about human progress, and I thought Pinker made a good case that, in fact, lots of things are going much better than they did in the past. I particularly liked his quote of Obama's question "When would you choose to live if you didn't know who you would be?" I now wonder if the quote is accurate, but I think it's still a good one to ponder. I also liked Pinker's attempt to explicate Scott Alexander's theory of "Conflict vs Mistake", where he says that he feels that the "mistake" side is the essence of the Enlightenment.

<comment><USER15> Hi, thanks. Not sure why you would think I meant the Pinker interview. Yes, I read that a few weeks ago I think. I don't think I've seen an article on Quillette that wasn't worth reading.

I like reading savage criticisms of people/positions I like! That wasn't the problem. Ok thanks, will give it (salon) a go.</comment></comment></comment>