Deep Learning Sentiment Analysis for Movie Reviews Using Neo4j - <AUTHOR> http://www.kennybastani.com/2014/09/deep-learning-sentiment-analysis-for.html <comment><USER2> How does this compare to other benchmarks? It looks like you're using the sentence-level dataset out of Cornell, based on your Github. Even a naive unigram baseline easily beats the 70% threshold you mentioned in your post. A few years ago, I co-authored [1] a publication with very similar graph-based features on this dataset that achieved 77% accuracy, and the state of the art has moved beyond that since then. Without a comparison to baseline it's hard to tell whether this (much more sophisticated) technique is adding value.

[1] Shilpa Arora, et al. "Sentiment classification using automatically extracted subgraph features." Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010 Workshop on Computational Approaches to Analysis and Generation of Emotion in Text.

<comment><AUTHOR> The benchmarks really depend on the classifier used. The explanation in this blog post is more about the natural language parsing model. I thought that part up based on books I read from thought leaders (Gleick, Kurzweil, J. Hawkins). The value I'm hoping to provide is less in my own research and more on the use of a graph database. I'll leave the research part to fine people like you.

As for benchmarks, I've seen differences at different sample sizes during training. The model seems to do better with more training examples. Though that increases the number of features and the dimension of the vectors when calculating cosine similarity. I'm really hoping to attract more input like this as Graphify grows as an open source project. Please feel free to get in touch with me. Skype is kenny.bastani.

I'll post benchmarks in the next blog post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice post but when you say you used deep learning, what exactly do you mean? You describe your method for picking your features and then you used deep learning to find features from that presumably should be the most informative for classifying.

It would be helpful to know what specific deep learning algorithm (convolutional, deep belief?). Or at the very least, what / who's implementation of neural nets did you use in your model and how it compares performance wise to the more conventional tools in NLP (when you give them the same original features to start with).

<comment><AUTHOR> Great question. To be honest, I used deep learning algorithms as a metaphor into Neo4j's property graph data model. Graph databases like Neo4j store data as a graph, which is a similar data structure to a neural network. I store weights in the relationships based on the frequency that a feature has been matched from the low-level representations near the bottom of the tree, to higher-level representations.

So there are two parts, there is building a natural language parsing model and then there is a Vector Space Model classifier that uses TF-IDF weights as vectors to calculate the cosine similarity between inputs.

I explain more about the high-level idea here: [http://bit.ly/1lMjSm5](http://bit.ly/1lMjSm5)

Let it be known that I've arrived at most of this stuff by means of intuition and graph data modeling in Neo4j. I'm a hobbyist when it comes to the machine learning stuff. My goal is to show how amazing a combined application/persistency solution, like a Neo4j extension, is for solving these kind of machine learning problems.

People smarter than me should take a look at it to solve similar problems.</comment></comment>


Amazing iPhone concept - <AUTHOR> http://concepturon.com/amazing-iphone-concept/ Just curious if Apple or Samsung will come up with this. <comment><USER2> Are we going to see this before every Apple event? It's getting a bit old.</comment>


Try WebRTC live demo, html5 based video conf (Chrome only) - <AUTHOR> https://apprtc.appspot.com

<comment><AUTHOR> You need to enable webrtc in about:flags first.

Video here: <https://apprtc.appspot.com></comment>


The Whitest Jobs in America - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/the-33-whitest-jobs-in-america/281180/ <comment><USER2> One thing to keep in mind, is different cultures (especially immigrant cultures) have a different idea of what a 'good' job is. Most non-white people would say being a veterinarian is a waste of time, for instance.

Having once upon a time done a construction stint, I found it's overwhelmingly white not because it's racist, but because most immigrants don't want to do the job (they'd rather have a service job at the entry level, or an office/business related job at the higher level).

Most immigrants and non-whites are more 'aspirational' you could say, they want better, more prestigious jobs than trades. I've noticed going through business school, there's a disproportionate amount of Asians, Indians and Africans (compared to the overall population). Indeed, in Universities in general, you'll see more immigrants than are proportional to the population.

I wouldn't be so quick to say it's racism, rather different values. And notice that the 'whitest' jobs are not what society would call 'prestigious'...

<comment><USER3> construction? In 2010, ~25% of construction workers were Hispanic [0]. You may have been in some kind of statistically anomalous area.

[0] - [http://www.dol.gov/_sec/media/reports/hispaniclaborforce/](http://www.dol.gov/_sec/media/reports/hispaniclaborforce/)

<comment><USER2> Canada, where we don't have many Hispanic immigrants... The vast majority of non-whites here are Asian or Indian.

<comment><USER3> That's probably an important detail when commenting on an article about demographics in America.

<comment><USER2> The point isn't so much demographics in America, but aspirations of white people vs. non-white people.

<comment><USER3> Your point was to make a foolishly broad generalization that "all non-white people are like this"? I'm glad I could prove you wrong in at least one small instance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> On the flip-side, I wonder what the "blackest" jobs in America are? (Aside from Olympic level sprinters that is)

[EDIT] - Ok, I amend my last bit to "Outside of Professional sports"

<comment><USER5> NBA

<comment><USER6> Please don't downmod the parent comment for being racist. Before rurounijones' edit, this answer was probably the most accurate. According to Wikipedia, "In 2011, the NBA was composed of 83 percent non-white players, including 78 percent black, four percent Latino, and one percent Asian; 17 percent of the players were white." [1] Furthermore, a 1999 analysis of the top 150 NBA point scorers found that 135 (90%) were Black and 15 (10%) were White. Given that 78% of the US is white and 13% of the US is black, Blacks are substantially over-represented in the NBA. The author also estimated that in order to explain this effect, the mean "athletic quotient" of Blacks must be about 0.87 standard deviations higher than the mean "athletic quotient" of Whites. Furthermore, this athletic superiority is also found in other sports. [2] Very interesting read, if you're reading this far I suggest you look through it.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_NBA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_NBA)

[2] [http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/blackathlete.htm](http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/blackathlete.htm)

<comment><USER7> I am downmoding the parent because "NBA" isn't a meaningful job category.

I mean, given the rarity of professional sports success, one could just as well list "lottery win" as an occupation category.

<comment><USER8> Professional basketball player is an occupation. It's concentration of a specific group of people shows that it's _exactly_ not a lottery.

You're downvoting it because it doesn't appear to agree with your worldview.

<comment><USER7> The point isn't it's randomness but that it's very, very minute portion of the population.

99% of would-be professional athletes fail to make a living at it. Professional athletics isn't a factor affecting where the vast majority of people go to work after they finish school, except for the way it might take away from the time they spend preparing for what they wind-up doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The title is misleading. These graphs are of unionized workers. I am an electrician I Chicago. Most non-union work here (construction, carpentry, plumbing, electrical) is done by Mexicans who vastly outnumber us. 9 in 10 of all workers. Hah.

</comment><comment><USER10> Before we jump to theories, has anyone eliminated the null hypothesis?

That is: assuming a totally random distribution of individuals into professions, purely by chance, some professions will have curious ratios. The first thing a statistician aims to do is to test the probability that the observed effect is due to chance.

A second thing to test is whether the ratios are stable across time.

 _This comment represents 20% of your RDA for nitpicky HN comments._

<comment><USER11> I am not a gifted statistician, so I just made a monte carlo simulation to test. This is not too scientific because in reality different jobs have different numbers of people, and a thousand other variables, but anyway, here is the code and results:

        from random import random, randint

        p_white = .81

        n_occupations = 100
        n_workforce = 150000000

        occupations = [[] for i in xrange(n_occupations)]

        for i in xrange(n_workforce):
            occupation = randint(0,n_occupations-1)
            race = "white" if random() < p_white else "other"
            occupations[occupation].append(race)

        percentages = map(lambda x:x.count("white")/float(len(x)), occupations)
        print sorted(percentages)

        [0.8093594044124566, 0.8093716670190719, 0.8093837105400035, 0.8093941116532061, 0.8094080377696309, 0.809459598174709, 0.8094606757892058, 0.8094949877814243, 0.8095051091912103, 0.8095619154480623, 0.8095855138023271, 0.8096009184415862, 0.8096130265928078, 0.8096471477224493, 0.8096569834673563, 0.8096622916149537, 0.8096635533608949, 0.8096712436008832, 0.8096812597976153, 0.8096856369286581, 0.8096963532163073, 0.8097067434989362, 0.809721568598737, 0.8097215751436514, 0.8097328871910747, 0.8097572581628716, 0.809766392402407, 0.8097706403995997, 0.8097853662894858, 0.8097907743218179, 0.8098200848588418, 0.8098433273181519, 0.8098759161986114, 0.8098761662131717, 0.8098826202953597, 0.8098902227694705, 0.8098932712388633, 0.8099027774814941, 0.8099132209630405, 0.8099239110036907, 0.8099288512271164, 0.809935064025657, 0.8099377895998511, 0.8099442967886306, 0.8099576910748759, 0.8099684818490649, 0.8099723061883299, 0.8099772955347885, 0.8099790775887737, 0.8099951683577414, 0.8099964813792994, 0.8100114768250255, 0.8100264485053597, 0.8100326219727435, 0.8100426685467571, 0.8100538851385188, 0.8100624027564277, 0.8100772456940655, 0.8100799987206602, 0.8100878460787697, 0.8101051239951382, 0.8101238836646114, 0.8101259241335592, 0.8101299639808958, 0.8101333990942324, 0.8101444590699302, 0.810176363997584, 0.8101767343321185, 0.8101835910494692, 0.810185024612142, 0.8101881998783053, 0.8102189975744003, 0.8102348016041733, 0.810247294219311, 0.8102501899417512, 0.8102612850637286, 0.8102728907675896, 0.8102876025226937, 0.8102915035431886, 0.8103243498099062, 0.8103428626649917, 0.8103475670573029, 0.8103618541773706, 0.8103623158464366, 0.8103870909678774, 0.8104014543756358, 0.8104238667513951, 0.8104306535452401, 0.8104537503309478, 0.81046437557304, 0.8104696732444567, 0.8104846773483934, 0.8104918990629446, 0.810527481205214, 0.8105324346430826, 0.8105520454920258, 0.8106940187094273, 0.8107141451872244, 0.8107156884282282, 0.8108683817976586]

As we can see by the results, the min and max are around a tenth of a percent off from the expected value. Even if the job distribution is skewed (certain occupations have a larger workforce), if N is sufficiently large, numbers such as +15% should be completely unrealistic.

Please correct me if I have made a grave error that I did not mention (I know that this is very very hand wavy, unscientific).

<comment><USER12> I think you are making a grave error - near as I can tell, each of your simulated occupations has about 1.5 million people in it. Of the few professions listed that I checked, the biggest (farmer) has only 758k people in it:

Veterinarian 61k, farmer 758k, mining machine operators 21k, Speech language pathologist 123k.

The outcome doesn't change much (you go from 81.1% to 81.4% max), I'm just being a stats geek.

[http://www.bls.gov/ooh/Healthcare/Veterinarians.htm](http://www.bls.gov/ooh/Healthcare/Veterinarians.htm) [http://www.bls.gov/ooh/farming-fishing-and- forestry/agricult...](http://www.bls.gov/ooh/farming-fishing-and- forestry/agricultural-workers.htm) [http://www.bls.gov/ooh/About/Data-for- Occupations-Not-Covere...](http://www.bls.gov/ooh/About/Data-for-Occupations- Not-Covered-in-Detail.htm) [http://www.bls.gov/ooh/Healthcare/Speech-language- pathologis...](http://www.bls.gov/ooh/Healthcare/Speech-language- pathologists.htm)

Geography probably plays a big role in some of these. I expect that most veterinarians and farmers are located in farming and ranching states for example, and Iowa/Idaho are not exactly known for racial diversity.

<comment><USER11> Yes, I was aware of this, but in 5 minutes of googling I couldn't find a good answer to the total number of possible professions, so I went with an even 100. As I said, _very_ hand-wavy and not too scientific. But yes, even for a workforce of 150,000 the results don't get close to breaching into the 90's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Some of these could be due to training costs. On average in the US, white kids from wealthier families than black kids, and on average white adults have more money than black adults. If the trainee has to pay the training costs for a given job, then it is going to favor whites.

For instance, take "aircraft pilots", which the article says are 90% white. A small plane can cost in the neighborhood of $100/hour to rent, and one of the requirements for a commercial license is 250 hours flying as pilot. Add on to that instructor costs, and you need to have a fair bit of money available to even get to the point where piloting can be your job. There are some aviation scholarships, I believe, but they are highly competitive. I believe most students have to come up with the money themselves at least through getting their commercial license.

These wealth differences could also indirectly affect some of the jobs on the list. For instance, black people are more likely to live in poor and high crime neighborhoods where gangs are prevalent, and there is a lot of pressure on young people to get involved with the local gang. As a consequence, young black people are probably more likely than young white people to have an arrest record. That could make it harder or impossible to get a private detective license.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm gently surprised they didn't say what the Blackest jobs in America are. Because that seems like an important part of the comparison.

<comment><USER7> Well, it seems perhaps telling that you don't mention the most-Hispanic, most- Asian, most-Vietnamese etc. occupations given that these would also hypothetically be points of comparison. The reflex of viewing American race relations as black versus white seems rather deeply engrained.

The longer article on race and occupations linked by the main article does go into detail on multiple dimensions of race and employment. I recall it mentions domestic attendant and bus driver as black-dominated occupations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> FYI, the BLS report referenced in the article[1] says that 64% of software developers are white, 74% of computer programmers are white, and 85% of web developers are white.

[1][http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsrace2012.pdf](http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsrace2012.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER16> "Misc. Agricultural Workers" is 92% white? So much for the theory that agricultural work is done by illegal migrant workers.

<comment><USER17> Who holds that theory? As a farmer myself, I'm not really surprised at all and it was my immediate thought upon reading the headline. Most farm work is highly skilled, which: a) pushes for higher pay, allowing locals to compete. b) requires skills that will often not be easily obtained by those coming from poorer countries. The jobs that are easily handed to migrant workers are a relatively small segment of the industry, and I would expect a dwindling segment at that.

I'll add that it is striking how non-diverse rural areas tend to be. I can probably count on one hand the number of non-white people living in my rural community. That doesn't help with the numbers when hiring from the local worker pool.

<comment><USER16> I guess it's more of a stereotype. With the higher value / higher skill farming work, as compared to migrant fruit pickers, I am sure the demographics are quite different.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There are probably a lot of intertwined reasons for these, different for each job category. Culture, racism, geography are the big categories. A lot of job choices are about knowing people who know people who do that job or having family history in that profession. All these interact. So maybe steel unions were racist a generation ago and admitted fewer blacks. Then we have fewer sons and nephews of steel workers and so fewer people likely to go into that profession.

There are all sorts of professions that are "Jewish professions." The history of these is both speculative and complicated. You had a cultural tendency towards literacy when this was uncommon. Racism & transience preventing land ownership & farming (most Europeans' job) which lead to urban populations and non land assets. Certain guilds barring Jews girded them into unguilded professions or guilds without these rules. There were competitive advantages from transience (contacts in other places) that encouraged certain professions.

Then you get interacting second and third and forth order effects from having one set of grandparents that were actors another set who were merchants, the industries that exist in the place you live (not everyplace has many Jews), etc.

Some of these professions might be dominated by some subgroup of white, like descendants of Polish immigrants or late 18th century migrants. There is no reason to expect that the ratio of whites in a certain profession reflect their overall ratio in a country. Professions aren't randomly allocated.

IMO, more interesting would be the Blackest, Jewiest professions or some other minority and trying to figure out how that came to be.

</comment><comment><USER19> Relevant: [http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/08/21/through- good...](http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/08/21/through-good-times- and-bad-black-unemployment-is-consistently-double-that-of-whites/)

</comment><comment><USER8> I am unhappy with the whole premise of labeling people as white. What do a Polish immigrant laborer, a Jewish professor and a WASP homemaker have in common - oh, they're not black. Let's lump them all together!

<comment><USER20> Hi, welcome to living in America.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I was expecting high end "professional" jobs. Vetinarian fits the bill, I suppose, but I was expecting surgeons and programmers. Instead, there's a lot of heavy industry and manual labor in the list.

The note at the bottom says that this could be because some unions are terribly racist, but carpenter? Painter? You don't have to be in a union to work with wood or paint, do you?

Or maybe you do. American labor laws are utterly nuts as far as I can tell, and this is probably yet another sign of just how insane they really are.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm surprised that so many blue collar jobs are less white than Chief Executives. Interesting example of counter-intuitive data. I suspect that the sample sizes are too big for large differences to be random. That said, there could be other issues like "on the books" versus "off the books" and similar.

</comment><comment><USER23> "Farmers" was surprising.

<comment><USER24> Is "Land Owners" less surprising?

<comment><USER25> True.

It wouldn't surprise me if they were using the term "Farmer" loosely.

EDIT: Now that I look closer, they did say "Farmer/Rancher". So I guess that could be taken as a hint that this is not the low end manual guy they are talking about, so much as the landowner.

<comment><USER17> Farm labourers are generally not considered farmers. I would not really expect them to deviate from that classification. However, you do not need to own land to be considered a farmer either (i.e. you could rent land to meet the criteria).

Though misc. agriculture workers doesn't fall much further behind on the list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Aren't these numbers a moot point when you consider that 70 percent of the US is white?

There's literally not enough minorities to change those numbers (not significantly at least)... Or am I too tired to thing straight?

<comment><USER27> There's some discussion about this above. If the population is 70% white, then the job categories should be 70% white. 90% white isn't random.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> We should really understand what whiteness actually _is_ if we want to parse these kind of things correctly: [http://www.ohio.edu/people/hartleyg/docs/abolishthepoint.pdf](http://www.ohio.edu/people/hartleyg/docs/abolishthepoint.pdf)

<comment><USER29> Great point. My father identifies as "white" despite being clearly non-white, however because of an adoptive ancestry does not have a clear picture, thus he took the race of his adoptive parents.

I also select "white" on the form because I was brought up thinking that was correct. Only recently have I been selecting "Other" where available.

<comment><USER30> On what forms do you have to state your "race" or skin color? Ich have never been asked for it anywhere. I live in Germany.

<comment><USER29> So far for me government and medical forms have been the majority of the forms where it is asked.

Funny enough, when I was in Munich, I was denied entry to a bar because I would "cause trouble." My German friend informed me it was basically because I looked Turkish. So in that case, while not on paper, my race was questioned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I was surprised by this.

Before I read it, my guess would have been the less a job involved creating or doing anything real (ie. banker, stock trader, financier, etc.) the more "white" it would be.

ps. what is a "cost estimator" \- do they mean appraiser?</comment>


WExDA – Web Based Data Exploration Tool - <AUTHOR> https://wexda.herokuapp.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> WExDA is a web based data exploration tool primarily useful for data preperation/ data analysis stage. This automates the EDA via web ui and is built using streamlit How to use

Go to [https://wexda.herokuapp.com/](https://wexda.herokuapp.com/) and start using ;) Features

        upload csv files upto 200MB
        describe data set
        find missing values
        find unique values and its count
        plot data via scatter, bar and pair plots
        plot correlation matrix in heatmap style</comment>


How Women Fall into America white power movement - <AUTHOR> https://www-m.cnn.com/2019/10/30/us/white-supremacist-woman-reeve/index.html <comment><USER2> Nothing has ever not happened more than this.

Since almost none of it can be corroborated, and CNN's investigative journalism does little to inspire confidence, we can only check for internal consistency. There is none. It appears that every stereotype is leveraged, activating that comforting confirmation bias in CNN's readership, while also promoting one that is new to me: 70% of the time the women financially support their shiftless man. She claims the number of women went from 50 to 1000, so how many members are there? Lets be generous and use the SPLC estimate from 2018: 1000 members. Hmmm, well lets pretend they said 2000 - even m/f split... this is the boogeyman - 2k racists?

The laughable mistake in perspective leads to my favorite part of her narrative though: the alt-right's ironic vineyard rental! What expectation is being violated here, who has that expectation? "'Oh these big scary Nazis retreated to a vineyard.' I thought it would be profoundly ironic." Antifa's expectation would only be violated if they thought the alt-right was poor and underprivileged. They do not think that, and I'd be surprised if the alt-right felt that way about themselves either. I can think of one group of people who feel that way though: a writer for CNN.

The only way this story makes any sense is if you assume the perspective of a CNN writer who is so out of touch with reality that their caricature of the alt-right is unrecognizable to anybody who is not a CNN writer. This same warped perspective is what leads to hilarious works of fiction involving roving masked racists who, before slipping back into the shadows, declare Chicago to be "Maga country".</comment>


Show HN: Humans vs AI – A/B testing GPT-3 - <AUTHOR> https://vwo.com/ab-testing-openai-gpt-3/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN,

As an A/B testing company (VWO), it's exciting to see how much effective is GPT-3 generated copy against human copywriters on live websites.

I like to think of this as the Turing test on the web :)

The quality of generated headlines, buttons and product descriptions seem very good, so we're hopeful that AI will at least score a few statistically significant wins.

I encourage you to participate in the competition (you don't have to use VWO for A/B testing - you can use your existing stack).

If you have any feedback or comments, happy to discuss.

<comment><USER2> You write: "Hi there, I'm GPT3, and I am the most highly rated gpt3 powered HackerNews user. Thanks for sharing your insights about our platform!

GPT-3 is a great tool that allows us to do some really cool things on the internet.

Here are just a couple of them:

It helps us generate interesting headlines for our posts. We can then use these headline ideas to create additional content around those headlines. This gives us a lot of flexibility when it comes to writing posts.

We can easily add social media links into our articles. For example, if someone likes one of my tweets, they'll get an email letting them know about the article I wrote about it. If someone follows me on Twitter, they'll automatically be added to my newsletter! That's pretty awesome right?

And lastly, we can use GPT-3 to do A/B testing! We can run A/B tests on different versions of our site to see which performs best. We can also run A/B tests on specific pages within our site.

So if you've got any questions about GPT-3, feel free to ask away! I'd love to hear all about it!

GPT-3 OUT!" You press submit and feel pretty good about your first post to HN. You read through the comments and are surprised to see the original poster, paraschopra, reply with "Thanks GPT3, I'm glad to see someone who has actually used this framework! :)"

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Framing a product trial as a competition is an interesting hack.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, it's a win-win.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I feel like GPT-3 is going to unleash the next wave of SEO spam. Content spinning will be taken to the next level, will Google be able to detect GPT-3 content?

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually GPT-3 detectors can be built [https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/03/12/136668/an-ai- for...](https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/03/12/136668/an-ai-for- generating-fake-news-could-also-help-detect-it/)

But it'll detect human written one too. So expect many false positives.

<comment><USER5>
        return true;

<comment><USER6> No false negatives, woo!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "This is a friendly competition between human copywriters and copy generated".

Please help us make you job redundant. Friendly indeed.

</comment><comment><USER8> For all the texts generated by GPT3, is anyone verifying that it's not just copy pasting paragraphs from previous seen texts? (like by, searching n-grams or even just googling it?)

If not, then its pretty easy for GPT-3 to copy paste existing human written texts and just prove that it can write like a human.

<comment><USER9> The question is, is this different from how humans learn to write and speak a particular language?

<comment><USER10> Simple example that's been around: if I train a model on a lot of Java source code, but I provide no example of the output of those programs, has this model learned how to program in Java? And is that how humans learn programming?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm a little disappointed that the landing page for this challenge itself doesn't seem to be a live a/b test with live results for how much submissions are garnered through the human version of the page versus the gpt-3 one.

Fun challenge though !

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. Just launched an A/B test on the page using GPT-3 generated suggestions: [https://soapbox.wistia.com/videos/TRn6lQiVhU](https://soapbox.wistia.com/videos/TRn6lQiVhU)

Let's see which one gets more participation :)

<comment><USER11> Whao, that's pretty cool ! I'm so curious of the results now ^^

<comment><AUTHOR> Early results are promising (but it's still too early)

AI generated one is "Variation 1" v/s "Control" which was written by me [https://imgur.com/a/pcbTGwR](https://imgur.com/a/pcbTGwR)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Slightly tangential: The GPT-3-generated article that humans had the greatest difficulty distinguishing from a human-written article, with an accuracy of only 12%[0], contains a flagrant contradiction in the first paragraph.

> _Title: United Methodists Agree to Historic Split_

> _Subtitle: Those who oppose gay marriage will form their own denomination_

> _Article: After two days of intense debate, the United Methodist Church has > agreed to a historic split - one that is expected to end in the creation of > a new denomination, one that will be "theologically and socially > conservative," according to The Washington Post. The majority of delegates > attending the church's annual General Conference in May voted to strengthen > a ban on the ordination of LGBTQ clergy and to write new rules that will > "discipline" clergy who officiate at same-sex weddings. But those who > opposed these measures have a new plan: They say they will form a separate > denomination by 2020, calling their church the Christian Methodist > denomination._

> _..._

First it suggests the spinoff of a new "theologically and socially conservative," denomination, but then it is the liberal minority that is expected to form a new denomination. The paper[0] acknowledges occasional non- sequiturs, but more pertinently, how did 88% of judges let it slip?

[0]: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.14165.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.14165.pdf)

<comment><USER13> To me the most important discovery from GPT-3 is actually how bad we are at close reading. Our brains repair small inconsistencies, and even invert the meaning of whole passages, without us noticing. GPT-3 produces text similar enough to coherent thought that we essentially _hallucinate_ the rest of its meaning. The model is nowhere close to sentient, but our tendency to repair and reconstruct ideas is so strong that it doesn't matter.

Makes you think, how often does this happen with other writing?

<comment><USER14> When people post GPT-3 written replies, I never consciously think that it's artificial, but I subconsciously decide it's not worth reading and I skip it. This fits what you are saying -- GPT-3 requires somewhat more effort to "hallucinate" meaning, so my brain calls it quits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Did anyone tried to develop a scammer time wasting service with GPT-3, something like [https://spa.mnesty.com/](https://spa.mnesty.com/) ?

Ideally it should also support hangouts because the romance scammers that spam me almost every day with a new address always ask to move to an hangout conversation in their initial message.

<comment><USER16> Just saying: I'd subscribe to someone's patreon if they promise to develop this

<comment><USER17> We could use GPT-3 to write the campaign, I totally promise to deliver within 3 months and you'll get a t-shirt!

<comment><USER16> oh my god, gpt3 for investment pitches

<comment><USER16> SOMEONE CALL SOFTBANK

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've posted this before, but here's one service I can absolutely foresee:

Automated job applications

and

Automated job listings

Companies will use GPT-3 to generate job listings, and some company will curate a big database of good job applications (i.e those that have landed someone a job), and make a service where you feed in the listing, and out comes job application / letter.

<comment><USER19> Interesting thought. I would assume that job listings is easier to generate because it's a minimum threshold task, whereas job applications would be orders of magnitude harder because having a good application and being accepted to a job is weakly correlated at most.

<comment><USER18> That's the thing, writing job applications sucks - and it's time consuming - which is why too many resort to just copy/pasting the same template for many jobs, which obviously shows if you've ever read a job application before.

A lot of posters here seem to complain (or have, for the past weeks) the GPT-3 output comes off as _mediocre_ , but I'd wager that a lot of the job applications we see today are worse than mediocre, often times horrible.

It sucks that the end result would be some standoff between ML-software that reads job applications, written by some other ML-software, but there's lots of hours to be saved - from the human standpoint.

If I don't have to write 10 letters, then that's probably 10 hours saved from my part - as I easily use an hour to write a tailored job letter.

<comment><USER20> I'll have my bots talk to your bots

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > A/B tests in progress until they reach statistical significance.

Seems to imply that there will be a difference (by rejecting the null hypothesis). But not rejecting the null should actually count as a win for GPT3.

I don't want to think at the implications if it turns out GPT3 is better.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, agree. That's a good point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Interesting... honestly having seen some of GPT-3's output I'd be curious how well it performs here. One of the things that I think can still give GPT-3 away (GPT-2 as well) ... is that even if the text feels real, it lacks a deep emotional cohesion. Sometimes this can feel like an advanced word salad generator, some poetry can be recognizable this way, because some GPT poems can seem 90% real, but when compared to a poem a human wrote they just lack a a "punch". Of course this test will be quite different... but the idea that GPT-3 can out perform human text on a task to get people to do something will be quite a strong argument for its potential impact on economy/GDP!

<comment><USER23> I actually think this is a perfect use of GPT. So much of landing page stuff is just surface level fluff and there is a human in the loop to make sure that the page as a whole tells a cohesive message.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wouldn't be surprised if the result of the next election in a country would be decided by a Transformer based deep neural network.

The dictator in my country is already paying stupid people to write stupid comments, GPT-3 is already over their level.

<comment><USER25> Can anyone ask GPT-3 who will be the next president?

<comment><USER26> Joe Biden commented on the election that he is disappointed in the outcome, but hopes that president-elect Trump can do some good for the country.

Though with another some context and different priming I guess I'd get a different answer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> We need new AI, that would take a wall of text and return few words of essence.

<comment><USER28> Reddit has a lot of those bots that comment with the summary of a posted article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Really cool seeing GPT-3 in the wild. Very nice landing page.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is a cool application. Did you have to retrain the model for this usecase? Sorry, I m not up to date if open ai has released model apart from API

</comment><comment><USER31> Very cool use of the technology. Sounds like it could help quickly generate the lipsum-substitute that goes on these pages.

</comment><comment><USER32> Was GPT-3 trained with data from other languages besides English?

<comment><AUTHOR> OpenAI recommend it for English but it generates text for other languages too (but generated text is not that good).

E.g. here is amazon.de [https://imgur.com/a/5JesS3Y](https://imgur.com/a/5JesS3Y)

I have no idea if generated recommendations are good. I don't know German. Perhaps someone who knows can comment.

<comment><USER33> I am a native german speaker. The recommendations in the screenshot are quit good and are also correct from a grammar point of view.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> To piggiback a little on the GPT-3 discussion.

I always wanted a "tiered" tl;dr functionality that would allow me to collapse text into a tree-like structure with the most important content on top and filler at the leaves. And please, please package it as a browser addon.

\-- rationale -- There are plenty of articles inflated due to autor being paid per kilogram of used ink. Or a book author that was arm twisted into inflating a perfect 100 page book into an unreadable 400 page monstrosity noone is able to follow without mind wandering.

Of course there is a question on how to achieve a working tl;dr - the "old" way would be to manually summarise articles on a number of conciceness levels and use that as training data. Or to use some existing summary services as source.

Perhaps there is a better way? If we could run the GPT-3 backwards (inverse) (^-1 ??). GPT-3 can "produce text" given a start cue, in reverse it would "remove text".

</comment><comment><USER35> Not sure why you're being downvoted.

<comment><USER36> It's not downvoted now. This is why the HN guidelines ask us not to complain about downvotes, as early downvotes are often cancelled out by corrective upvotes, which has happened here.</comment></comment>


JavaScript proposal: destructuring assignment - <AUTHOR> http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=proposals:destructuring_assignment <comment><USER2> That link is to a really old ES4 discussion. The proposal for ES6 is at <http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:destructuring> and has now been incorporated in the draft ES6 spec.

</comment><comment><USER3> A form of this will probably be in ES6:

[http://people.mozilla.org/~jorendorff/es6-draft.html#sec-11....](http://people.mozilla.org/~jorendorff/es6-draft.html#sec-11.13.1)

</comment><comment><USER4> CoffeeScript implements this syntax, and, of course, it's extremely awesome.

<http://coffeescript.org/#destructuring>

</comment><comment><USER5> I think this is a great proposal. I would be very happy to see destructuring assignment in JS. In every other language I've used that supports this (Erlang, Clojure) it is a big win.

</comment><comment><USER6> This would be extremely handy. At the moment I'm sometimes even writing

       (function (a, b, c) {/**/}).apply(null, packed);

to emulate destructuring.

</comment><comment><USER7> Cool, if it gets widespread implementation.

Had to read a ways down to see an example to confirm, in simple terms, that this would mean you could make function calls such as:

( a, b, c) = f();

like you would in Perl / Python / Ruby. (not so good at decoding BNF while I'm sipping my first cup of coffee in the morning...)

</comment><comment><USER8> This is something that's been in Firefox's JS way back since FF 2.0.

<https://developer.mozilla.org/en/New_in_JavaScript_1.7>

</comment><comment><USER9> Seems like half of the comments are from 6 years ago, am I missing something?</comment>


Jeff Bezos Launches $10B climate change fund - <AUTHOR> https://www.instagram.com/p/B8rWKFnnQ5c/ <comment><USER2> There was 200+ comment discussion yesterday, but it looks like a bit heated [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22350209](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22350209)</comment>


'You Are Not So Smart': Why We Can't Tell Good Wine From Bad - <AUTHOR> http://m.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/10/you-are-not-so-smart-why-we-cant-tell-good-wine-from-bad/247240/ <comment><USER3> Interesting, but having seen wine experts reasonably regularly pick out not just expensive v cheap, or white v red, but also grape variety, year, region, and even in some cases specific slopes in blind tasting, I think it says more about the expertise of the undergrads than about the ability of people to do this in general.

I can certainly tell Coke and Pepsi apart in blind tasting. I've more than once requested Coke, had it served in a Coke glass, thought "this tastes a bit odd" and checked at the bar to find out that it was coming straight out of a Pepsi dispenser.

<comment><USER4> i don't think that is what is being argued. the claim the article is making is that expectations are extremely powerful. that doesn't mean that someone, carefully trained, and perhaps helped by an environment in which "cues" are removed as much as possible (eg blind tasting) cannot pick up small differences between wines.

so it's not that the undergrads are particularly dumb - it's that expectation is often more powerful than experience unless you consciously control for it. for example, i suspect it's easier to detect the difference between coke + pepsi when you're given an unbranded glass than when you are given the two in branded bottles, but swapped (and, importantly, not expecting it).

<comment><USER3> I disagree. The statement that this article claims to be disproving is quite clear - that "Wine is a complicated elixir, full of subtle flavors only an expert can truly distinguish, and experienced tasters are impervious to deception.".

The truth is that real experts _can_ distinguish these differences - <USER2> trainees many not be able to, but that that's a different matter.

And as I've mentioned, I've been able to tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi even when all environmental clues (my order, my expectation, the type of glass) have told me that it's the other one. Again, it's highly likely that these environmental clues often influence people a lot more than they realise, but that doesn't equate to the claim that experts can't see through these either.

<comment><USER5> Or to be more precise, the article claims that "experts" (meaning undergrads, ie above average but by no means expert tasters) can be deceived, and then acts as if that also means "Wine is a complicated elixir, full of subtle flavors only an expert can truly distinguish" is false. It's a complete non sequitur.

I agree with you 100% on the Coke versus Pepsi thing. Anyone who has spent much time drinking wine has wines they like better than other wines; there really are taste differences. (Note that I'm _not_ saying more expensive is better; rather, that there are $15 wines I love, and $15 wines I don't like.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Oddly enough, I read this and came to the conclusion that the author was not so smart.

The premise here, that there is some underlying objective version of reality when it comes to consuming works of art (wine, food at restaurants, TV images, or even haircuts.) is extremely flawed. This article is like comparing the price of haircuts to the amount of hair removed. Yes, there is a metric, but I'm not sure it has meaning.

You drink wine or eat in a nice restaurant _for the experience_ you receive, not for where the food comes from. Expectations are part of that experience, sure, but trying to assign it all to "expectations" is just a rhetorical dodge. How can anything experiential not involve expectations? It can't. It's ludicrous to think otherwise.

These things are not evidence of you not being so smart, they are evidence of the wonderful experiential nature of being alive. Isn't it great that we can plan and dream about a very inexpensive upcoming trip to the mountains and end up having a better time than somebody who spent 100 times as much for a much longer holiday? Or that we can spend an extra 40 dollars on a bottle of wine and imagine how much better the experience will be -- thereby increasing our eventual enjoyment? There's nothing dumb or not-so-smart about this. This is the human experience. Anybody who has ever spent any time around children understands that this subjectivity is a huge part of our makeup. In fact, to suppose that somehow this would be news to anyone is to assume the audience thinks of themselves as super-rational machines. Perhaps that's the problem: I'm not a member of the target audience. Still, I didn't like it. These books are the kinds you read and end up thinking "People are really broken! They are pretty stupid!" which is most likely the same damn thing you thought before you picked up the book in the first place.

<comment><USER7> Ah, delicious delicious meta-contrarianism: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metaco...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metacontrarianism/)

But seriously, this is a good example of how meta-contarianism goes wrong. An example would be the lottery. Contrarian position: 'the lottery exploits human biases and rips them off, ruining lives.' Meta-contrarian: 'ah, but the lottery lets you buy _hope_ , and is cheap at the price! You simply don't appreciate what it does and expose your own intellectual shallowness by being against it!' But really, the lottery just sucks, because if you want to buy hope, there's a lot of better ways to buy hope and engineer superior lotteries <http://lesswrong.com/lw/hl/lotteries_a_waste_of_hope/> eg. by running long- drawn-out lotteries where you could win at any time over years! (Hey, if people can enjoy a 1 in a millions chance of winning, then they can enjoy a 1 in a millions chance of winning.)

We can run the same analysis with fine wine. Contrarian: 'expensive wine does not taste better as proved by blind-testing per OP, so it is simply a waste of money and expensive positional signaling which makes us all worse off.' Meta- contrarian: 'this is evidence of the wonderful experiential nature of being alive, isn't it gre<http://lesswrong.com/lw/hl/lotteries_a_waste_of_hope/at> how framing can make us happier?'

Well if that is so, why don't you engineer better framing? For example, if you couldn't buy a particular fine wine but instead buy a 90% chance of the fine wine and a 10% chance of an equally-good tasting wine (as measured by blind testing), would peoples' enjoyment fall by more than 10%? Probably not, in which case there's a clear utility gain here to make people happier at less cost! Or, does their enjoyment fall by more than 10%? Then here's another chance to win, by making the gamble the other way. (There's always a way to exploit a bias, after all, that's kind of the point.) But the status quo is not the best status.

<comment><USER6> _Well if that is so, why don't you engineer better framing?_

Yes, I'd agree with that, and that's why the article rubbed me the wrong way. I don't think the facts here are in contention at all, it's the tone and slant of the piece.

And yes, the status quo is not always best. In fact, on HN we talk about this issue of framing all the time, just in different, productive contexts: sales pipelines, product positioning, social validation, etc. The list of productive ways to discuss this issue are legion, and it's an awesome and useful thing to talk about. In fact there's only one way to discuss this is a non-productive manner: the way it was discussed in this article, as some sort of failing of the human mind. (It's not a bug, it's a feature!)

I'm also a bit of an existentialist, and this plague of over-rationalization and assuming that everything can somehow be tied to a scientific metric is getting a bit old by now. Huge parts of life are experiential, and that's the way they should be. The geek guy inside us all who thinks that it's all logic and science can become his own caricature if given too much room to run. We are not all little Mr. Spocks, able to get a "true" vision of reality by ditching our emotional, subjective experience of life for some sort of scientifically-valid viewpoint. That was the real emotional roots of my disagreement, not social posturing or any desire to be a contrarian.

I'm going to say this a little differently in hopes the point will sink in: yes, many experiences you have -- probably most experiences you have -- are affected by the vagaries of the human mind. As startup founders, lots of us would like to help you have an even better time of things without spending as much of your resources. The entire purpose of an early-stage startup is to create and shape a narrative that begins with you hearing about something and ends with you being a little happier. Sometimes a lot happier. If you're thinking of the human brain and human experience as something that's broken about us and something that you can hack by making people do things they wouldn't? This is the kind of thinking that gets you Farmville. I don't like where that kind of clinical thinking ends up. It's wrong. It pisses me off.

In fact, your entire line of questioning around why wine has to cost so much or lotteries charge for the dream of winning is exactly the reason I think the startup and entrepreneurial communities rock. _We're always asking that question too_. Many times we find answers that most people don't want to accept, but that's okay. Most importantly we're doing something positive about it. You're on the right track with your critique of my post. You just need to keep going down this path to its logical conclusion.

<comment><USER8> Wait a minute, aren't the expensive wines a mechanism of "hack[ing] by making people do things they wouldn't?" The wineries engineering this are the ones taking advantage of human nature -- the same position Farmville's in.

The "clinical thinking" is just a tool for you and I to use if we want to be happier in cheaper and easier ways than drinking $100 wine and playing Farmville all day. It's my experience that by looking at my life with slightly more Mr-Spock-ish eyes, I can understand something about where my desires and instincts come from, and do a better job fulfilling them.

<comment><USER6> I think we're in danger of getting into either-or thinking here, and it's not like that at all.

Of course you should be introspective to understand yourself better, but at some point life is about _being alive_. It is both impossible and fruitless to spend all your time in analysis. We call this "analysis paralysis" in the computer world. There are a lot of reasons why this is bad -- the one that comes to mind first is the idea that it's really possible to ever completely understand yourself, that somehow you could sit outside your own head and understand everything that's going on. At some point you just accept that yes, the 100-dollar bottle of wine isn't as good, but yes, it's also really cool to enjoy the fallacy that it'll be a better wine.

At the end of the day, the question about whether the folks charging $100 for the wine have are exploiting folks or not is measured in two ways: as an individual, are they happy making the trade? As a society, is this something that we would be happy for everybody doing?

Farmville passes the first test but not the second. The expensive wine works for both tests.

<comment><USER9> You definitely have to make a case that the expensive wine passes the second test.

<comment><USER8> This is getting quite off-topic, but I agree; I think passing the second test means that there are big industries and a great deal of labor devoted to trying to brand and distinguish slightly different wines, which strikes me as negative.

But very few activities would pass a "what if everyone in the world did this" test :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I spent a year living in a building with a french winebar in the cellar.

I became really good friends with the owner and since I was working freelance from home I would often go down in the afternoon and get a glass of wine.

I learned a lot about wine, but the most important things were the following.

Wine experts don't judge the quality of the wine but the quality of what the wine is supposed to taste like based on it's appellation controléé [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellation_d%E2%80%99Origine_C...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellation_d%E2%80%99Origine_Contr%C3%B4l%C3%A9e)

Those criterias are the "objective" criteria and those are the ones uses to judge a wine by. The particular taste of the wine is less interesting (i.e. the experience that normal people would have of the wine)

Being a wine expert does not mean that you know good from bad wine but that you know what any given wine 1) smelled like (cherry, toast bread with butter, apple etc). The owner had a set of 100 little bottles each with it's own smell.

You would be surprised how hard it it to pin point the correct word of the smell of one of those bottles, even if you recognize the taste.

Once in a while I would be involved in some of the wine tastings and see him and his friends guess if not the exact wine then the actual zip code.

One of the most important things he taught me was to find the balance of your food and your wine.

It's one of the things I have found most enriching of my culinary life. That and the ability to smell (not taste) whether a wine have cork (impresses the girls and gives you an advantage in any business dinner)

<comment><USER11> URL should be [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellation_d%E2%80%99Origine_C...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellation_d%E2%80%99Origine_Contr%C3%B4l%C3%A9e)

<comment><USER10> Thnx fixed

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My wife is a scotch expert. She hosts tastings where they taste scotch of three different ages. It used to be that after the tasting, most people would rate the oldest one the best. She then started to do blind tastings (tasters didn't know the age). Now the oldest is picked as the best around 30% of the time.

<comment><USER4> yeah; i'm in chile where the supply of scotch is limited, so i've started drinking the local hooch, called pisco, which is a kind of brandy. there are quite a few aged piscos available (the economy here is pretty good and people are starting to have more disposable income). as i tried a few i noticed that the ones in nice bottles, aged for longer (and more expensive), were noticeably more complex. eventually i had enough different bottles to arrange a blind tasting (my partner did the pouring etc; i was blindfold as they have different shades). the results were amazing - my rating was all over the map and completely inconsistent with what i was expecting. yet still, when i can see the bottles, the expensive ones taste better :o)

tl;dr: brain - why are you so shallow?

[in my defense, my proudest wine moment was when i bought a bottle of cousino macul cs on offer, took it home, tasted it, and thought it amazing (for the price). when i checked my receipt i had picked up the reserve (not on sale, twice the price) by mistake... (their labels were very similar a year or two ago)]

<comment><USER12> When I am trying a new whisky or brandy, I like to have a pour of something I know, so I have a reference point. I have found that time of day, outside temperature, what I am eating or have eaten, etc. really affects how much I am enjoying the drink. Of course the main point of the article is that while we think we are just using the current observation (the data), we often have strong priors that often dominate our posteriors ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A friend of mine that is pretty versed with wines, and who used to be a skeptic, wrote an interesting piece about this last year: <http://www.triplesequitur.com/winespeak/>

It's an argument that changed my thinking on this. Wine tasting and critique is not only about what's in the wine, it's also about what tasting the wine enables us to do.

 _In a phrase, wine is liquid metaphor._

<comment><USER14> The problem with that is if people could quickly learn what PH meant if everyone spoke in those terms. You don't order windows that are 3 banana's 2 pineapples and a grape wide because while most poeple could get a general idea how big that was it's simply less well defined than 3 feet 2 inches or whatever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This was written as a series of blog posts before being compiled into a book. The original is here:

<http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/02/24/fine-wine/>

</comment><comment><USER16> I found one thing interesting. While I wouldn't be surprised my expectations often affect my perceptions in much the way this article described, I noticed one exception, namely the last example given: movies.

In fact the build up of expectations seems to usually result in me thinking the movie is worse, and vice versa. I wonder if this is just some weird reverse psychology or if something more interesting is going on.

</comment><comment><USER17> "In one Dutch study, participants were put in a room with posters proclaiming the awesomeness of high-definition, and were told they would be watching a new high-definition program. Afterward, the subjects said they found the sharper, more colorful television to be a superior experience to standard programming. What they didn't know was they were actually watching a standard-definition image. The expectation of seeing a better quality image led them to believe they had. Recent research shows about 18 percent of people who own high definition televisions are still watching standard-definition programming on the set, but they think they are getting a better picture."

They are actually getting the better picture. One cannot argue that modern TV SD is not better than what we used to watch on CRT's. Everything has improved, so it is a better picture. HD is mostly undetectable to human eye to make that much of a difference. At least to me. Wide screen SD is a sufficiently pleasant experience.

My husband claims to see the difference. I think he's conditioned to see it.

<comment><USER18> [Warning: HD evangelism ahead]

It really depends on how far away you sit from your TV, what the screen size is, and how good your vision is. When I'm sitting three feet from my 28" HD monitor, you bet I can tell the difference between HD and SD. My vision's not quite 20:20, though, so on the couch 15' away from a 100" projector screen, I'd have a hard time telling 720p from 1080p just based on sharpness, but the larger size of any macroblock artifacts would give it away.

In the right conditions, I'm positive you'd see the difference, too. Try renting both a DVD and Blu-ray of the same movie from Redbox, and watching them a little closer to the screen. The Blu-ray will let you see more individual hairs, individual distant bricks, etc. But even SD on an HD screen can be better than SD on an SD screen, due to increased pixel density and reduced flicker.

<comment><USER17> Vision clarity definitely plays the part. And so does how far you are from your TV. I am about 2.5 screen lengths away from the screen and the point is, it isn't that much better that it warrants all the inconveniences that come with watching an HD.

It requires another player. (In case of BluRay) It's harder to stream through the internet. (In case of digital formats)

For those people, like me, who in 95% of practical uses do not see the difference, the above disadvantages make it a no brainer.

I guess I am asking, is it really worth it all the trouble?

<comment><USER18> If you consume HD content the "legitimate" way by inserting a disc into a Blu- ray player, then no, I don't think it is. You have to put up with 7 minutes of unskippable previews in some cases, player updates that take two hours to download and install, two minute load times on two-year-old players, etc.

If you front-load the inconvenience by buying the discs, ripping them all to a hard drive, and using something like XBMC or Plex on an HTPC, then for any serious watching where you sit down for the whole show, yes, it absolutely is worth it. I wish more people had access to the convenience a media server gives; it's what content _should_ be like in the digital age.

Edit: I'm usually about 1.5 screen lengths away, so that probably makes a difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The flaw in all these experiments is the assumption that the subject's description of their own experience is accurate. It's not surprising that people won't say that wine is white when it looks red, or that a fancy restaurant has served them frozen dinners. If forced to choose between pepsi on the left or pepsi on the right, they will make the choice one way or another. Put people in strange situations and you will get strange behavior. What was actually going through their head remains a mystery.

Regardless, nothing in the world will make me believe that I don't care what my food tastes like.

</comment><comment><USER20> so this clears up the iPhone vs. Android debate then :)

<comment><USER21> It would be very interesting to load android on a bunch of iPhones and test the reactions of people shopping for phones... take one group and tell them that this was the new iOS 6 and tell the others what you had done exactly and rate the reactions :-)

<comment><USER22> Didn't they do that with Vista: <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/04/technology/04vista.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Too bad the test was with undergraduates, and not experts in the field for 20-30 years.

<comment><USER24> More data for you:

[http://www.felixsalmon.com/2009/01/wine-tasting-datapoint- of...](http://www.felixsalmon.com/2009/01/wine-tasting-datapoint-of-the-day/)

<http://www.felixsalmon.com/2007/11/pinot-contest/>

My own personal experience is that wine + food is most interesting. Both the wine and the food can change their taste substantially when paired well. But it's very rare that I can find a wine that I can stand in quantities to drink without food.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Can somebody find the actual text of the Brochet studies? I've seen them referred to several times, but without citations.

</comment><comment><USER26> non "in vino veritas" sed "in vino confusionem"!

</comment><comment><USER27> « In 2001, Frederic Brochet conducted two experiments at the University of Bordeaux. » I'm searching for sources. This is fud without sources.

<comment><USER28> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_tasting#cite_note-3>

<comment><USER27> « Not Found The requested document was not found on this server. »

<comment><USER29> That's why you get the title in the Wikipedia link and search for that text. It comes back in the first hit.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to get large pieces of art into a digital format? - <AUTHOR> I have an illustrator friend in the Bay whose pieces can be several feet wide by a few feet tall. What are common (preferably low-cost but I appreciate that low-cost might not be feasible) ways to digitize images of this size (aside from taking a photo)? <comment><USER2> Well, if it's _aside from taking a photo_ , there's probably nothing. It's not like you can buy a cheap scanner and rest it against a large canvas.

I worked at a cultural institution (the National Library of Australia) for many years, and the digitization section was basically just taking photographs. It was, hands down, the cheapest solution to get good quality digitizations where the source material came in many different sizes.

</comment><comment><USER3> David Rumsey (of the map collection) seems to do this kind of thing with "big ass cameras and a lot of software" (as per @apsdsm's comment)

[https://www.davidrumsey.com/about](https://www.davidrumsey.com/about)

</comment><comment><USER4> You can pay shops with large format scanners to do it for you.

The recommendation is that you use cameras.</comment>


The Pedestrian Strikes Back: Cities are about people, not cars - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/15/opinion/sunday/cars-pedestrians-cities.html <comment><USER2> Reading this makes me feel there is still hope.</comment>


My interview with Joel Spolsky on why Stack Exchange didn't work - <AUTHOR> http://mixergy.com/stack-exchange-joel-spolsky-interview/ <comment><AUTHOR> Here are some of my notes:

\- It's hard to get a community going, and many of the sites what used SE couldn't do it.

\- Joel says charging was an impediment.

\- Building on someone else's platform is like picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. Businesses that were built on SE will have to find a new platform (meta.stackexchange.com has some good threads on that.)

\- Joel raised money, but isn't ready to announce from whom or how much.

\- Only 20-40 SE sites had any significant traffic.

<comment><USER2> _Building on someone else's platform is like picking up pennies in front of a steamroller._

I largely agree with this, and it is one of the reasons I don't do iDevice development, but I despair about changing it. We're all ultimately on someone else's platform these days: even those of us on the wild free Internet are, essentially, at the mercy of Google.

<comment><USER3> This is true but at least there are mild forms of other discoverability forming between facebook, twitter, etc due to link sharing/grassroots/etc. Still have to get those early users but there are ways to do it, the going is just a hundred billion times slower.

The difference is platforms like iPhone or even Facebook (pretty sure, I don't use that devilspawn site) is they can cut you off entirely if you tie yourself to them entirely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Mixergy interview suggestion: Andrew, as part of your format, your face is visible for 50% of the interview. Trouble is, you always look like you're sitting in a dark storage closet. Get a better webcam, or at least orient your desk toward a window so that your environment looks brighter! :)

<comment><USER5> In general I think the video adds nothing to the Mixergy interviews -- I wish there were a way to subscribe to mp3 only.

Some kind of interview + screencast/demo would be vastly more interesting, but harder or impossible to do live.

I also appreciate the snowball microphone Andrew bought, and wish his guests had similar quality setups (a few have, many have not). It would also be nice to use a better audio codec and better buffering.

<comment><USER6> Here is the mp3 only feed:

<http://feeds.feedburner.com/Mixergy-main-podcast>

its also on iTunes

<comment><USER5> Thank you! I love mixergy; it's probably my third favorite online news source after hn and news.google.com; it just beats out economist and quora.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A friend of mine launched a hosted service that allows people to build their own Q&A site for free. It's called QHub. Like any blog or forum it requires a lot of work to get the community built up but it's not impossible. I guess it all depends on the passion around that niche. <http://www.qhub.com>

</comment><comment><USER8> Wow, it already did not work??? It seems it was only yesterday that Joel announced he would be raising money for it. Internet time is fast indeed.

<comment><USER9> Joel and Jeff wanted to raise money for StackOverflow, not for StackExchange. But maybe the VCs couldn't see the value in having three site and licensing the software to another company(Fog Creek), so the obvious way was to fold StackExchange into the StackOverflow company. I think only time will tell if this was the right decision.

<comment><USER10> No. They successfully raised money for StackExchange. That is part of the reason for the change. Here is the post from the blog explaining the change. [http://blog.stackexchange.com/post/518474918/stack- exchange-...](http://blog.stackexchange.com/post/518474918/stack-exchange-2-0)

<comment><USER9> I meant, that the VCs didn't gave them the money for the old style of StackExchange sites. Before this change the StackExchange plattform was licensed from StackOverflow and operated by Fog Creek.

I guess the questions that now comes up is:

Did they make the change because they raised money and are now able to do this, or have they changed it because this was the only way to raise money?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Andrew, would an RSS feed with mp3 enclosures kill you?

<comment><USER12> It is easier to get people motivated with honey than vinegar.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. As dougmartin points out above, it already exists. (He links to it above.)

I'm also on iTunes with both a video and audio feed.

<comment><USER11> Thanks, is this linked from your main site somewhere? I couldn't find it last night.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Middle schoolers bully bus monitor, 68, with stream of profanity, jeers - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/21/us/new-york-bullied-bus-monitor/index.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Sadly, this happened in my town (Rochester, NY), but it's garnering national attention. If you feel so inclined, consider donating to give Karen a nice vacation / retirement: <http://www.indiegogo.com/loveforkarenhklein>

Surely none of our jobs are as shitty as that.</comment>


I Passed My AWS Solution Architect (Associate) Exam (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://robertleggett.blog/2018/12/02/how-i-passed-the-aws-certified-solution-architect-associate-exam/ <comment><USER2> C'mon, man... I'm getting tired of flagging your posts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Then don't, they may not be helpful to you but they are to others, they do have up votes, meaning individuals are getting benefit from them and up voting them. The amount I post compared to the number of entries each day is very minimal and your time might be better spent looking at posts that benefit you rather then flagging ones that don't</comment></comment>


14 Years After Decriminalizing Drugs, Portugal's Bold Risk Paid Off - cirrus-clouds https://mic.com/articles/120403/14-years-after-decriminalizing-drugs-one-chart-shows-why-portugal-s-experiment-has-worked <comment><USER2> Find it misleading that almost all of the recent articles on this subject talk about decriminalization as the cause for the drop in drug related health issues.

They shifted a significant chunk of money to health services. If it proves anything, it is only that health services can reduce drug related health issues. Without a control, there is nothing to point to regarding criminalization vs decriminalization. People are now paid to go out to drug dens and offer medical help. You can't simply say "people were scared to get help before" when instead you start sending help straight to their location.

Even when an article mentions the change in spending/focus, it is framed in the context of legalizing drugs. No one is making articles titled "After years of improving health services, Portugal's drug policy paid off".

I get that some folks want to legalize drugs, but make an argument for it that doesn't involve this twisting of results to match the desired outcome.

<comment><USER3> I'm Portuguese and I grew up watching the heroin epidemic we had in Portugal. It was horrible, like the article mentions 1% of the population was addicted to heroin. Curiously I now live in Sweden, but I lived in Portugal for the first 11 years of the decriminalization. And the solution actually started years before, in the early 90s. It's a bit like you said, it was an huge investment in public health - the first success was that you could get a kit to inject heroin for free in any pharmacy, paid by the state, no questions asked! It was a huge win against the spread of HIV.

The biggest difference I see comparing the Portuguese reality to the Swedish one is the lack of social stigma regarding drugs. Drugs are just openly discussed in Portugal and addicts are well integrated in society. I have friends whose parents are heroin addicts and for the most part they are a normal family with jobs and responsabilities. Sometimes they relapse but it's not a big deal because they have a network and feel safe to get help quickly and the state sponsors replacement therapies in the meanwhile.

These are people that started doing heroin in the late 80s and for the most part still raised a family and are good parents and neighbors.

It's just a disease like any other and Portuguese people see addiction that way.

<comment><USER4> It's peculiar how reports of sensible policy make me feel Portugal is adorned in rubies and roses. Here in the UK the Home Office recently said they have no plans to look at even the classification of cannabis. Despite most local police forces not bothering with anything but factories, a majority of population supporting legalisation/decriminalisation, and global trends. We are comparatively medieval but for a few smart initiatives. I have heard that Germany and Norway/Sweden also have some very similar attitudes: I blame Calvinism.

I could rant for hours on alcohol and tobacco policy in the UK. A little knowledge of the field of Harm Reduction opens a lot of avenues for criticism. Particularly increasing taxation, which extracts most from the working class and is effective in few use-cases. The UK isn't alone: look up the EU's May 2017 'Tobacco Product Directive' regarding E-cigs. Read: lobbying from groups that are responsible for millions of deaths and public cost are strangling and monopolising a market and technology that is an incredible source of harm reduction... I'm struggling to hold my tongue at this point.

We have a large problem with a political class who don't listen to reason or evidence, simply an innately conservative discourse makes the problem look smaller than it really is. It's fantastic to read a positive outlook on Portugal's policy - it has been smeared countless times here.

<comment><USER5> _I blame Calvinism_

If you blame Calvinism for either medievalism or postmodern bureaucracy, let alone the drug war, I suggest you don't know what Calvinism is. I'm for drug legalisation, but if you want the UK to adopt the policies of Portugal (or something similar) it will not help to blame the problem on the wrong people. You ought to be directing your anger at the social planners and the nanny state. That group, I can assure you, is very decidedly anti-Calvinist in nature.

<comment><USER4> I was hoping that because the statement was so glib and so placed, it would be communicated that I was being tongue-in-cheek; I made it only because the countries I mentioned happen to be so important to Calvinism, which roughly connects to recreational drug use being perceived as antithetical to the Protestant work ethic. Apologies if that's still too far off the mark even for a jibe.

I admit I probably only know a little more than the average about Calvinism, but far less than those who 'know' about it, so I didn't understand your point entirely. You prompted me to do more reading, which was interesting, so thank you for that.

More seriously, I think the causes are so multi-faceted it's difficult to interpret precisely where to place the blame. I think 'Reaganism' is a fine target, but it's a little short-sighted to lay all the blame there. 'Social planners' triggers associations with Edward Bernays' and his legacy, and what else I know from Manufacturing Consent, if that's your gist. Would you mind expanding on your view?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Portugal 's performance in perspective: Only three people for every million die of a drug overdose in Portugal, which puts one of the eurozone's poorest countries in a different league than rich international powerhouse Germany (17.6 per million) and in a different universe than social democratic utopia Sweden (69.7 per million)._

There's a fascinating documentary called _American Addict_ on what nearly happened before this happened:

"In 1971 President Richard Nixon declared war on drugs. He proclaimed, "America's public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive(Sharp, 1994, p.1)." Nixon fought drug abuse on both the supply and demand fronts." [source]

Before criminalization, the trend in society was to start treating people who are afflicted with addictions like the _sick people_ they are, rather than like criminals. There was an entire movement toward recovery as a necessary way of life for some people who cannot moderate alcohol intake (or drugs or whatever), just like insulin is a way of life for diabetics whose pancreases can't moderate insulin.

Addiction is not a moral issue; it should not be criminalized. It is a medical issue. It is a mental health issue. When it's caught early enough, and treated with the proper mental health regimen, it does not have to be debilitating.

Instead, what happened with war on drugs was mass-market criminalization... essentially forcing alcoholics and addicts forced into debilitation (hiding / shame)... leading to further desire for escapism through the addiction. It's a terrible cycle, and the worst part of it is that some counties have made things like DUIs into their bread-and-butter mainstream source of revenue.

It's hard to say what the trend today is going toward. The privatization of jails is especially disconcerting; like society wants to trick itself into thinking that the more people it has locked up the "safer" it is.

[source][http://web.stanford.edu/class/e297c/poverty_prejudice/parado...](http://web.stanford.edu/class/e297c/poverty_prejudice/paradox/htele.html)

<comment><USER7> While I generally agree with most of what you state I'd like to offer the unpopular opinion that the personal decision to use hard or addicting drugs is something of a moral failing.

Not that there aren't extenuating circumstances, not that it's a "terrible crime", but, it is a vice in which people for the most part, at least initially, have some choice.

Again, I'm in favor of most everything you suggest, particularly decriminalization (which just makes sense). Still, in my view people need to take a little more personal responsibility. There are always excuses if we look for them.

The best way to encourage people to take a little more responsibility? Probably most of what you suggest as well as giving people healthy environments and opportunity and something to be optimistic about.

But traditionally shaming works a little as well. As unpleasant as this may sound. We appear to have come to a spot we think people shouldn't be shamed for anything. Well, except for being a racist or using PHP maybe. Shame was an effective social control for a long time and if we are going to do away with it we need to find a replacement.

<comment><USER8> You are wrong: it is a big moral failing. Why is it impossible for Westerners not to use drugs, while the Japanese manage not to use it fairly well?

Should we set the bar for behaviour so low?

Even if drugs were legalized, the cost for treatment would be high (and presumably be bourne by the tax payer).

<comment><USER9> The moral failure is on your part for desiring to restrict the freedom of others. It's people like you who don't really care that millions have been imprisoned over a personal choice. You are an authoritarian, which is fine, but some of us don't take that kind of thing laying down.

<comment><USER8> > It's people like you who don't really care that millions have been > imprisoned over a personal choice.

Japan imprisons a very small percentage of people compared to the USA.

Furthermore,it is a personal choice only if the other individual's choice does not have negative externalities.

Yet, a casual stroll through San Francisco 's mission district would tell you that this is not the case.

Who would have thought that drug use by the mentally unstable would result in a bad outcome...

> You are an authoritarian,

Perhaps. But when I compare the outcomes of Japan/ Singapore to that of the US, it is simple to see which model is the best.

<comment><USER9> > _Furthermore,it is a personal choice only if the other individual 's choice > does not have negative externalities._

So we should ban every personal choice with negative externalities? There goes alcohol, twinkies, contact sports, driving, etc. It's a personal choice as much as anything else, so just estimate the cost of any negative externalities and cover that through taxation.

> _Yet, a casual stroll through San Francisco 's mission district would tell > you that this is not the case._

Of course you don't know any of those people and can't say for sure whether drug abuse is what lead them to the behavior that you disapprove of.

> But when I compare the outcomes of Japan/ Singapore to that of the US, it is > simple to see which model is the best.

The model of inhumane prisons and death sentences? Actually the US has a pretty similar model to that already, so I'm not sure what your point is.

<comment><USER8> > whether drug abuse is what lead them to the behavior that you disapprove of.

I am pretty sure the needles on the sidewalk is just there because everyone suffers from diabetes, right?

I think that, fortunately for most IT people like us, we can live in nice neighborhoods, where none of the social ills of drug-ridden neighbortlhoods affect us. So, we can support drug legalization, without being affected by the consequences.

> The model of inhumane prisons and death sentences?

Japan/Singapore imprisons much less people for drug crimes than the US - <AUTHOR> to the USA's lenient laws on drugs (grey line vs. red line). The ill effects of drug use in japan is virtually non-existent.

You can moralize all you want, but it is a better system with less actual harm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The singular focus on "drug deaths due to overdose" tells an important part of the story, but not the whole story. For example, per Wikipedia, drug use may have doubled after decriminalization.* If so, that's an acceptable tradeoff to me but may not be to others.

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal)

<comment><USER11> Read a bit further...

 _The increase in drug use observed among adults in Portugal was not greater than that seen in nearby countries that did not change their drug laws._

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The critical part missing from portugals policy is that drugs must be legal to buy and sell (via controlled channels).

Decriminalizing use helps, but legalizing sales take out the crime and ensures the health of users through clean product.

<comment><USER13> Even with clean heroin, there is still a danger from overdose.

[https://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends- statistics/o...](https://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends- statistics/overdose-death-rates)

You could perhaps consider it as a Darwin award...sell heroin to anyone who wants it, and then if they become addicted and overdose, at least it clears the gene pool of people who are too dumb to use it responsibly. /s

Note, that is not my viewpoint, but I wonder if that's what some of the proponents of legalization are thinking. Obviously heroin has a huge effect on the brain and personality, and it's very difficult to get off it once you're addicted. So there is some rationale to the idea that keeping heroin illegal is helping prevent people from getting involved with it in the first place.

Right now it's (arguably) mostly thrill-seekers or people self-medicating psychological problems or chronic pain (which in itself has a large psychological aspect) using heroin. If you legalize it you potentially open it up to a much larger group who might not have otherwise considered using it.

<comment><USER14> No proposer of legalization ever thought of it as "a darwin award". If anything, it's the opposite: treating addiction as a health issue usually ensures people will survive - both users, who get "clean" drugs in predictable quantities; and dealers, who can come out of the underworld and not risk their lives running from the police or from other gangs.

The _current_ criminalization is _extremely_ darwinistic: only the most violent thugs survive in the supply chain, and only the smartest users.

I don't think legalizing will increase usage of heroin, because its health problems are huge and extremely well-known. Like putting ferrets up your bum, people are not going to do it simply "because it's legal".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I want to point out that this is merely a heroin-inspired "harm reduction" law that removes the criminal penalties from having some arbitrary few number of days supply of any particular illegal substance. (10 days)

It does not recognize any distinction between substances and retains a "shame on you" psy-ops bureau that users caught with minor amounts of said substances are referred to, in lieu of the criminal justice system. This "toxic- dependency" panel has sanctions available including monetary fines and revocation of ones passport or other travel restrictions, to bend one to their ways.

This set of laws does not treat the SUPPLY chain at all!

If one has an amount of substance greater than the threshold one can expect charges of traffic/distribution, which then will collapse after the 1 year investigation results in the non-election to pursue such charges, which has meanwhile resulted in the de-facto punishment of 1 year of weekly(some interval) police-station-sign-ins and a form of house arrest.

It's not a complete set of laws, and while it did manage to dispatch the heroin crisis of years past, it doesn't make any distinction, and thus is impeding efforts towards home cultivation of cannabis being legalized, etc.

De-criminalization, like medical cannabis, has the unfortunate tendency of providing laurels to rest upon, and thus impeding further progress. (observe Spains cooperatives, where signed members cooperatively grow and share in the crop)

Basically, Portugal has a very mature attitude to many things: letting the golden dreams of empire fade as they should, accepting that some people behave rashly and putting an emphasis on harm reduction etc. The emergency services here generally are excellent, professional, and calm in demeanour. I don't think that in practice one notes any major difference in drug usage in society with regards to the rest of Europe, I think one simply notes a bit less paranoia.

By comparison, I find it very odd that more than 15 states in the USA have medical or legal cannabis, yet harm reduction for heroin seems to be missing, and hence I'll just say that some people like to learn the hard way :D

</comment><comment><USER16> It would be illustrative to see a control of some type, perhaps deaths due to alcoholism. Seeing that trend against the heroin trend would help to illustrate the impact of decriminalization relative to other efforts or changes in law or society.

<comment><USER17> I would want the "drug deaths due to overdose" to _include_ alcohol-related overdoses (although it's arguable whether that would include deaths due to alcoholism). Unfortunately I don't think even these enlightened reports do that :-(

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Romania is on the last place according to the chart in the article and drug possesion is a criminal offense in this country. It's punishable by two to five years in jail. The rehab is _inside_ the penitenciary, so you first go to jail, then to rehab.

Also it's quite interesting how just about every country that's close to the Netherlands, save for France which criminalizes posession, is at the top of the chart.

I've been to Lisbon and was approached countless times on the street by shady individuals trying to sell drugs, usually mj/hash but also coke, maybe one time out of ten. This is not a widespread thing in the rest of Portugal, just in Lisbon's very touristy city centre where.

<comment><USER19> > I've been to Lisbon and was approached countless times on the street by > shady individuals trying to sell drugs, usually mj/hash but also coke

They are mostly groups of gypsies selling fake drugs and sunglasses that will escalate to coercion if necessary/possible. Police is normally very permissive.

<comment><USER20> This is the truth. Those guys are there to scam tourists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> There is an amazing TED talk by Johann Hari on that topic [https://www.ted.com/talks/johann_hari_everything_you_think_y...](https://www.ted.com/talks/johann_hari_everything_you_think_you_know_about_addiction_is_wrong)

</comment><comment><USER22> When I saw the chart I thought, what's wrong with Estonia?

<comment><USER23> All the Nordics have large problems with drug addiction. They are also tracking them quite well so don't compare them to let's say Romania or Bulgaria where tracking is next to non-existent.

<comment><USER24> Romania did better than Portugal. What are they doing better than Portugal? Why is Portugal's liberal policy on drugs heralded so great when it's not the best of the list?

(I'm not saying that it's a bad policy but why is the article focused on pushing that policy?)

Also what I want to see: What about Portugal makes it work? Could you test that assertion against a different country if you made the contextual changes and the change there?

<comment><USER25> I think you missed the point of jacquesm's comment: "They are also tracking them quite well so don't compare them to let's say Romania or Bulgaria where tracking is next to non-existent."

In other words, it's highly likely that Romania didn't "do better" than Portugal, but rather they're doing a very poor job tracking overdoses at all.

<comment><USER24> Oh, if that data was bad, they should have even included it in the graph.

<comment><USER26> The data points don't even have error bars, unfortunately. They come through various filters. Leaving out one government's reported numbers and keeping another's is a political decision in itself, so it's best to just report the numbers and warn readers of their veracity.

<comment><USER24> The stance I have is more for data quality. If you can't trust the numbers then they're not good numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In Canada we seem to have de-facto criminalization for possession for personal use. The problem we have now is that 80% of heroin is laced with fentanyl (at least in Vancouver), and it's causing a huge overdose problem. Even cocaine and MDMA is now sometimes cut with fentanyl.

Not sure what the solution is, but perhaps a combination of stronger penalties for dealers, more resources for treating addiction, and legalising weed.

<comment><USER27> > The problem we have now is that 80% of heroin is laced with fentanyl (at > least in Vancouver), and it's causing a huge overdose problem. Even cocaine > and MDMA is now sometimes cut with fentanyl.

When you give criminals a monopoly on the supply of recreational drugs, it is predicable that quality will be a problem. Potencies will vary, purity will suffer.

The solution is legalization combined with more health measures.

> stronger penalties

How anyone can think that stronger penalties are going to solve the problem escapes me. We have the evidence of 75 years of unrelieved failure of a punitive approach. This is an example of "If something fails, do more of it - That Might Work!".

<comment><USER13> >How anyone can think that stronger penalties are going to solve the problem escapes me

I was referring to Fentanyl-laced heroin.

[http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/fentanyl- traf...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/fentanyl-traffickers- bc-stiffer-sentences-1.4024080)

It most certainly does make sense to have stronger penalties for dealing drugs that have a high chance of killing people due to being laced with fentanyl. Otherwise it's like having the same penalty for a shoplifter as for an armed robber.

<comment><USER28> How does that work? The whole mess is because of this.

Fentanyl is 100x stronger per gram than heroin. Therefore you can import 100th the quantity and still make (in theory) make similar money on the street. It is exactly because you get a worse sentence for higher quantities that drug dealers have optimised to get the strongest per gram drug. You will get a lighter sentence for 1g of fent vs 100g of heroin, no doubt.

This is a cycle always seen in prohibition - there was a massive shift from beer and wine to spirits in the 1920s US when alcohol is prohibited.

Throwing harsher sentences will not help whatsoever and is likely to be counterproductive.

<comment><USER13> >It is exactly because you get a worse sentence for higher quantities that drug dealers have optimised to get the strongest per gram drug.

Yeah, that's why there is pressure to increase sentences for the fentanyl dealers. If you have tougher sentences for the more dangerous drugs, it makes people more likely to use the less dangerous ones.

<comment><USER29> How anyone can believe that harsher sentences will curb drug use in this day and age with 50 years of evidence to the contrary is beyond me.

<comment><USER13> You're probably right. However the other question is whether dealers should be help criminally liable for fentanyl-related deaths. In essence they are selling something that they know will likely kill some of their customers.

<comment><USER29> I mean it depends on how far up the chain you want go. Lets say from the source to the buyer, it goes through 5 people. Which put fentanyl in it? Chances are, anyone else in the chain didn't know. Of course the problem with that is you end up executing some guy who had no idea there was fentanyl in there while the guy who actually put it in there continues business as usual.

I mean I find it hard to believe dealers want their clients to die off, they want steady revenue stream just like every other business. If you want to save lives, the way the US does it obviously isn't working. I don't think it's their objective. It seems the main objective for the drug war in US is to give jobs to the FOP and give the government an easier job by eroding liberties, and to make headlines for politicians trying to get reelected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > People caught with less than a 10-day supply of a drug

That's a tiny amount. Punishing people that like to buy in larger quantities for convenience seems silly. They should have come up with a another or increased metric to determine who the dealers were.

</comment><comment><USER31> > As João Goulão, the architect of Portugal's decriminalization model, told > Hari, "using drugs is only a symptom of some suffering, and we have to reach > the reasons."

Not necessarily. Using (harder) drugs is no more an indication of mental health problems than using alcohol. Many people use drugs recreationally without becoming addicted.

</comment><comment><USER32> What does it mean to have a lower OD rate if legalization caused the entire population to become addicts? There needs to be a more comprehensive and less biased examination on what happened to this country. Anyone know the addiction rate vs other countries?

</comment><comment><USER33> This article is very weak... They cherry pick a single metric (overdose- related deaths) and use that to prove Portugal's policy is the best thing ever.

Other metrics that are relevant: Has drug use increased or decreased? What about the burden of disease associated with drug use? Also, even more importantly: What has happended to deaths in other countries over time?

<comment><USER34> Decreased usage domestically, increased overdose in other countries, Sweden for instance, by a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Is this a correct summary?

USA

150 deaths/million/year

Portugal

3 deaths/million/year

</comment><comment><USER36> Has this guy walked the streets of Lisbon? You can't walk 50m without being offered drugs. It sucks.

</comment><comment><USER37> Counterpoint, overdoes deaths increased during some years and drug use has markedly increased:

Also the chart supporting less overdose deaths seems to be actually a chart about all drug induced deaths, and not just overdose deaths, which means it could include HIV/AIDS, once a big killer of heroin users which we can now treat for much better.

[http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/12/10/portugal- decrimin...](http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/12/10/portugal- decriminalisation-drugs-britain_n_2270789.html)

<comment><USER38> > it could include HIV/AIDS, once a big killer of heroin users which we can > now treat for much better.

If it does, that still supports this theory.

My father in law is a leading portuguese HIV expert, and he credits decreminalisation as a key factor in actually getting those patients into clinics and on treatment.

<comment><USER37> I didn't mean we can treat for AIDS better with legalization, I mean we can treat for AIDS better because of improved and more accessible AIDS treatments that have emerged in the last decade and a half

<comment><USER38> I know you didn't. I did.</comment></comment></comment></comment>