Why a linked list always come between me and a great job offer - <AUTHOR> Recently I interviewed at a big company in bay area and everything went well except I can't FINISH (but explain the approach and half coding done) coding a version of reverse a linked list in 20 minutes. I am coding in java for last 4+ years. Why all of my great work experience and coding and design skills + good performance in other 4.5 interviews are escaped by a single linked list question?? Is this the trend in all over bay area technology companies???? <comment><USER2> While I strongly dislike "puzzle questions" and questions which don't directly apply to the job (e.g. Reverse Linked List for a Java job?), I will say that this comment:

> I checked the guy who asked me the question, he never went to any > competitive school or never has done anything special except mugging up > those linked list question.

Makes you look bad. Disagreeing with the questions or interview process is completely fine. Making it personal by looking up the interviewer and then suggesting that such questions are unreasonable because the interviewer isn't worthy of them is unprofessional and immature.

Also maybe this is a company YOU don't wish to work at? If they were giving you inappropriate interview questions maybe that is an indicator of the company's internal culture (e.g. unreasonable demands, etc).

<comment><USER3> The problem is that irrelevant whiteboarding questions are far more the norm than relevant whiteboarding questions. Most companies interview this way, so if you avoid those companies you avoid nearly everyone.

I'm a full stack developer who specializes in front-end. Knowing how to structure a front-end app, knowing/following JavaScript best practices, and understanding the arcane idiosyncrasies of JavaScript are in my opinion three of the biggest values a front-end developer can add. However, the companies that assess this stuff in interview are an extremely small minority. I usually get questions about binary trees.

It's partly because it's more difficult to assess those ways of thinking in interview, and it's partly because linked list kinds of questions are just the way interviewing has always been done, so people keep doing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A linked list is a fundamental data structure. Being expected to reason about fundamental data structures is not unreasonable.

Unless you _specifically_ know that taking 20m to reverse a linked list was _the_ reason for not being hired (I'm skeptical), you're just guessing.

While I don't generally ask questions like this, I'd _also_ be wary of someone that can't reverse a linked list in 20 minutes, although it depends on what type of position you're actually applying for.

I also didn't go to a competitive school; I don't know what arbitrary criteria you'd use to decide if I've "done anything special".

I expect coders to be able to code, or at least reason about code, more or less on demand. I'm pretty forgiving about poor whiteboard coding performance since I also suck at it. But even a terrible whiteboard performance can be accompanied by the thought process behind it, and from that, you can discern whether or not the coder knows anything and just sucks at being put on the spot, or if they truly don't know.

<comment><AUTHOR> I can reverse a linked list even in my dreams. But I was not able to finish the coding under the pressure and time constraint. I explain all the pointer manipulation etc and interviewer was satisfied (unless he was lying :) ).

<comment><USER5> No need for pointer manipulation. When I had to implement reversing a linked list (for which already an implementation is there) I'd first ask whether it's single or double linked. In the former case (Pseudocode)

        LinkedList toInvert;
        LinkedList out;

Either iterate through toInvert and call out.push_front(...) on each element or (if the operation may be destructive) do

        while (!toInvert.empty)
          out.push_front(toInvert.pop_front())

All this should not take more than 5-6 lines - should be doable in 20 minutes. Also: these two lines surely could also be written under pressure.

If the linked list is double linked, I'd ask whether the reversing has to be called often in the code. If yes, you could add a direction flag to the linked list, which tells in which direction the iterator will iterate. This makes the iterator implementation a little bit more complicated, but makes the reversing O(1).

<comment><USER6> This is a solved problem.

       Collections.reverse(myLinkedList);

Absent a demonstrated performance issue, there's no reason to even consider writing and tuning a new version. There's a debugged performant library. The first engineering tool is to apply is Google, not a whiteboard.

<comment><USER4> I'm unconvinced knowing how to manipulate data structures is useless knowledge.

<comment><USER6> It's not useless knowledge, but it's less useful than sound judgement regarding which problems require the preparation of a new design and which can be solved with off the shelf components.

Twenty-five years ago It might have been faster to write such a routine than to find it in a library. I found `Collections.reverse()` in under five minutes on StackOverflow and I suck.

<comment><USER4> I think you've missed my point.

Your "sound judgement" argument is orthogonal to my "being able to reason about fundamental data structures". I doubt most people will need to manually re-write list operations. Most people _will_ need to reason about fundamental data structures.

Ultimately I guess I just find it impossible to believe that basic coding skills are no longer relevant to a large number of commenters here, and that using a "but I can find it on teh Googs" is a reasonable response to "please write a few lines of trivial code that operate on a trivial, but fundamental, data structure".

<comment><USER6> Questions warrant answers commensurate with the effort invested in their construction. "How do you reverse a linked list?" is, on it's face, a waste if time. Beyond being a solved problem:

~ Single or doubly linked?

~ How is the data structure implemented (e.g. is there a header structure and to what does it point)?

~ What does "reverse" mean? mutate in place? create a new list? and if I am to mutate it in place, why?

~ Reversing a linked list is O(n). One implementation us pretty much as good as another. It doesn't really differentiate on insight into the problem.

~ Winding up in a situation where reversing a list is critical smells like bad design...a stack/queue would have been a better choice upstream than a queue/stack.

But though all that may make for interesting conversation, "with a library call" is the only professional answer to "How would you write a function to reverse a list?"

<comment><USER7> > "with a library call" is the only professional answer to "How would you > write a function to reverse a list?"

Most interviewers - in my experience - would then mark you down as a smartarse and the interview will be all downhill from there.

<comment><USER6> I can in fact be a smartass in the presence of bullshit.[1]

I come from a field where there is an ethos of professionalism, and the answer to "How would you reinforce a strip footing?" is "With rebar."

~ Uncle Bob has a point.

~ Half of all interviewers are below average.

[1] "Bullshit" in the technical sense - when a person knowingly states something misleading or false and openly doesn't care if the person hearing those statements believes them.

<comment><USER7> I'm wholly in agreement with you. I suspect questions like this are used in lieu of a sane programming test. Although I guess they might have relevance if you have no library (embedded?) or there are weird constraints (can't think of any).

<comment><USER6> If the company is writing embedded systems, then purchasing a library will probably make more sense than rolling up a complete linked list implementation. If there are weird constraints to the point where reversing the linked list justifies writing special code, then any assumption that the linked list is the right data structure is worthy of doubt.

The truth is that in a few hours, looking at some of the code base and discussing it is going to give both parties a better feel for the fit of person and job than anything else. The interviewer gets a feel for how the candidate will deal with the mess that is someone else's code and build process and the candidate gets a better feel for the mess they will be dealing with.

<comment><USER8> How about if you are implementing a library for a new programming language?

Don't PL developers need to implement things like List.reverse() in their new languages all the time?

Rhetorical question, because I know the answer is yes.

Here's an example for Julia: [https://github.com/JuliaLang/DataStructures.jl/blob/master/s...](https://github.com/JuliaLang/DataStructures.jl/blob/master/src/list.jl)

        function reverse{T}(l::LinkedList{T})
            l2 = nil(T)
            for h in l
                l2 = cons(h, l2)
            end
            l2
        end

(Note that this algorithm is not an in-place reversal, so it wouldn't have worked for the OP's interview.)

<comment><USER6> Can you imagine someone hiring for such a position using such poor pre- interview screening that reversing a list made sense as an interview?

The premise of your remark indicates the absurdity of the claim of relevance. An interview for a position responsible for writing a new language in a language sufficiently low level to require a new `list.reverse` would invariably require implementation of a list type as well...what language includes <List> without a reverse?

<comment><USER8> Do I think that it makes sense? No. I agree with you there. Can I imagine it? Absolutely. It's just how the industry does hiring.

It's pretty well known that Google's hiring process for SDEs is designed to select for skilled computer scientists--the type of people who could do something like implement a stdlib for a new PL if needed. Then, since they can afford to hire only great all-around CS people, they can just allocate people to projects after the hiring decision is made. Of course not every SDE job at Google requires that level of CS skill, and it's massively wasteful to put most people on projects below their skill level, but they can afford to hire that way just because they're Google.

As a side effect, other companies hiring developers are likely to just cargo- cult whatever Google is doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> An alternative view on this, which may seem cynical but which I find empowering:

In their best form, these types of questions are a litmus test for whether you have a certain type of background. When they fail it's because they test for skills not required by the job. It's fashionable to complain about this, but it seems to me to be more practical and useful to just _get better at answering these sorts of questions._ Leveling up from "terrible" to "adequate" at this will take less time than you think, and due to the craigslist penis effect[1] will put you way ahead of the game.

Easy resource to get started: [https://www.interviewcake.com/](https://www.interviewcake.com/)

This book is pretty well regarded: [http://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Coding- Interview-Programming-...](http://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Coding-Interview- Programming-Questions/dp/098478280X)

Btw, anyone with better starting places for this, please jump in.

[1] [http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/the-craigslist- pen...](http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/the-craigslist-penis- effect/)

EDIT: formatting

<comment><AUTHOR> My personal view is cracking the coding interview is not a good quality book. I would prefer to read jon bentely book instead. or formally eva tardos or cormen algorithm book.

These companies has made computer science students simply dev ops who never use algorithm (except during interviews). So many computer science students don't go beyond cracking the coding interview. This is really sad.

<comment><USER9> Fair enough, but I feel I should clarify my comment.

I'm suggesting that if you feel the interview process is flawed even from the company's standpoint (i.e. not screening for the appropriate skills) your best approach might be to reverse engineer the interview (i.e. get better at answering the questions, instead of actually developing the [perhaps irrelevant] skills being screened for).

The Tardos book that I think you're referring to is a $100+, 850 page CS textbook with the goal of making you an expert on algorithm design. The book I suggested costs $30 at is focused on a specific goal of getting through the interview.

I'll grant, however, that there may be better resources for this (and I'd be very curious to hear what others think those are).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm sorry to hear your interview didn't go well. I know it's a crushing blow to have weeks of build-up undone by a temporary brain fart.

Here is how employers rationalize this: resumes are not reliable. Resumes can include exaggerations, or even outright lies. When looking at your work experience, however great, it's hard for the prospective employer to know if you made any real contribution, or if you were just nominally attached to the project. Your past employers certainly won't say.

So they need to put you on the spot, to make sure you're the real deal. It would admittedly be nice if the questions were targeted towards your experience, but frankly, reversing a linked list is not an unreasonable problem. You should be able to do it.

If you performed well in the other interviews, the linked list may not have sunk you. Finding good engineers is hard, and if you demonstrated mastery exceeding basic CS problems, they may be able to explain away your mistakes as nervousness, tiredness, or just getting befuddled.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can reference check or see code in github. If nothing is reliable then just invite candidate and play Russian roulette :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I realize I'm going against the grain a little bit here, and I realize that reversing a linked list is a pretty contrived problem. But...

One of the things I look for is people who have a decent understanding of how the implementations underlying abstractions might be implemented. I've found that that can dramatically reduce the amount of unnecessary complexity and work (either by leaning on the properties of the implementation, or by using a different abstraction that is more appropriate).

A prime example from my work history was with Google App Engine and the data store (this was in 2008ish, before they had a solid SQL abstraction). I read the documentation for the API and kind of "got it", but it wasn't until I read the BigTable paper that I really understood how it worked and how to design for it. Each query has two parts: an index look up, and a bulk read from disk. If you're trying to do something that doesn't fit into that model, it's going to be SLOOWWWW. Once you understand that, you can be more creative in designing your indices and structuring your data to fit into that underlying model. Way better than having your "simple query" explode into 1000 subqueries.

</comment><comment><USER12> You have no idea why they didn't hire you. It's probably a completely different reason, even if they said it was the linked list question.

If the interviewer likes a candidate, every minor error is forgiven. If the interviewer doesn't like the candidate, any minor mistake is a reason for "no hire".

Just move on. There are plenty of opportunities.

</comment><comment><USER13> Another equally plausible hypothesis is that the other 4 interviewers gave only lukewarm feedback ("This person seems to know his/her stuff, but I'm somewhat reserved because...") and the decision ultimately against you.

Yet another hypothesis (not pleasant to consider, but it happens) is that it's got nothing to do with linked list and everything to do with another interviewer who gave you a "warm-up question", saw you spend 30 minutes on it, decided it's a lost cause and just made sure you feel good about the result (because that's the professional thing to do, and you never know if the candidate might pull off something spectacular with the next interviewer).

In general, what a candidate _feels_ about an interview has very little correlation with how the interviewer scores the candidate. (Even for a single fixed candidate.)

<comment><AUTHOR> other interview was finished 15 minutes early with 2 problem solved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Are complete morons and uninformed flunkies an influential part of the recruiting process? Yes.

Do companies overlook and miss brilliant talent? It happens everyday.

Move on. Focus your search efforts on interesting organizations, dialoging with senior executives/managers who you know how to help.

</comment><comment><USER15> You might be creating the impression of not being sharp enough. It's probably true that you will never need to reverse a linked list in real life but it is not particularly difficult either.

It is just a fancier fizz buzz test.

</comment><comment><USER16> I completely agree. I feel like these type of interviews are biased towards developers who have just graduated and still have data structures fresh on their minds and have the free time to actually study for interviews. I also think that this is an incredibly inefficient way to hire developers for both sides of the process. I mean, having 4-5 developers spend a one hour meeting for each interviewee who has a high chance of not making it is such a waste of time. And on the interviewee side, having them take a day off just to interview? That's a lot to ask especially if they are interviewing for several companies. Again, this is a bias towards younger grads who do have the time to take a day off.

Personally, if these algorithm interviews are nothing more than a fancy FizzBuzz test, why not just provide a take home coding problem? And if the interviewee doesn't pass them, then at least they just didn't waste a vacation day to interview with the company. And if they do pass, then subsequent interviews should be more open ended (like how to design/code an elevator) and more knowledge base (deep down questions about systems that they have worked on) to prove that they try to understand the entire problem space and not just do superficial fixes.

Also IMO, asking questions where there is an obvious right or wrong answers adds unnecessary pressure to the interviewee since a 90% correct solution is still wrong. And expecting an interviewee to code during a whole day interview is crazy. How many of us can think straight after having a whole day high pressured meeting?

In all honesty, the place where I worked with the best developers was with this one company who only had an average level of difficulty on their interview process but was very proactive in letting people go if they don't measure up within 6 months. I'm not saying that is the correct approach (as it had an adverse effect on the company culture and welcoming new employees), but I _think_ for me, I would gladly do that rather than go through the Bay Area interviews.

</comment><comment><USER17> In my (limited) experience bay area startup attach way too much value to bullshit interview tests like these. I'm a proficient developer, I know a lot of practical stuff about programming (setting up a solid architecture, design patterns, scalability, etc.), I have proven many times that I can build, launch and market products from A to Z, but I forgot most of the theoretical stuff I learned back at school, simply because I never have to use it. For example, I failed misserably at writing a recursive function, simply because I never need it and it's usually considered bad practice.

It's nice if you know all the theory, but you really don't need that for 95% of the programming jobs.

I felt really crushed after I failed the test and forgot all that basic knowledge, but in the end it doesn't even matter.

<comment><USER18> I would argue that recursion is very important. Could you elaborate on what makes it bad practice? Sure, in languages without tail-call optimization, using it instead of a loop will incur more overhead, but certain problems (like traversing directories in a filesystem, nodes in an XML document, or any tree structure) are impossible to implement otherwise. Do you have a specific scenario in mind where recursion was a poor solution to your problem?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Having been on both sides of a technical interview many times I see these kinds of things as a sort of pissing contest. You would think that devs would approach a technical interview in a more pragmatic way, but instead it turns into a secret handshake to figure out if your interviewee has read the same books you have. I've actually walked into multiple interviews where I was effectively quizzed on the book "Programming Pearls" \-- which is/was required reading at Google. There seems to be a belief among devs that if you don't know A or B then you don't know anything. I've gone from positions where I did extensive ML and signal processing to interviews where I walked out thinking I was a complete fraud. I don't know why we do this to each other....

</comment><comment><USER20> A linked list is a pretty trivial data structure that all CS students should learn in their first course. 20 minutes is a long time, and if you couldn't figure out how to reverse it, at least in pseudo-code, during that time, I would question your grasp of CS fundamentals.

</comment><comment><USER21> I guess that some interviews are more about showing off their (interviewer's) skills instead of mutually exchanging views. Cliched puzzles around linked lists are one game they are good at and gives them a confidence to beat you at their own game.

<comment><USER22> I honestly doubt any interviewer is looking to catch someone out by asking them to invert a linked list. Also 5 interviews must be pretty expensive, why would you try to 'beat' the candidate away at that point?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It caught me out once... At the time I thought it was useless with no real practical application. But I was only fooling myself. Reasoning about linked lists is a basic fundamental and easy to solve. After I failed, I went away and studied it, and implemented it in code. Many many people can reason about it and describe the pointer manipulation at a high level, but then only 10% can actually put pen to whiteboard so to speak. It is a remarkable question. After you master that (take half a day), move onto trees and then maybe graphs. Practice modeling some problems with those data structures and after you do that any development job is yours for the taking.

</comment><comment><USER24> A similar thing happened to me a while back - except it was for a UX-focused front-end development position. When I turned it around and asked the interviewer why it would be a waste of time in nearly every use case to implement linked lists in Javascript, I got nothing, he just moved on to quizzing me about binary trees. This was the point at which I decided that, despite it being an interesting company tackling a great challenge, I just wouldn't be able to come in to work with people like this every day. Catch ya later, second-tier application performance monitoring startup!

<comment><AUTHOR> :) your experience was worse than me :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Depends on the company. I was applying for a jr/student linux admin job at a university. They asked me to code a linked/doubly/inverse linked list in C++. The school did everything in java... Beyond that no other job has asked me about linked lists.</comment>


A 120-Year Lease on Life Outlasts Apartment Heir (1995) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/29/world/a-120-year-lease-on-life-outlasts-apartment-heir.html <comment><USER2> "Mrs. Calment, physically active all her life, rode a bicycle until she was 100"

That should probably have been a warning sign that she wasn't going to drop dead any time soon.

<comment><USER3> Yes but she was "only" 90 when he signed the lease :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Fantastic story. According to Wikipedia, Jeanne Calment did pass away two years later in 1997 at the age of 122.5 years.

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

<comment><USER5> Andre-Francois Raffray was the dude that made the deal and died in 1995 at 77. Jeanne Calment is the women who died later in 1997 at the age of 122.5.

<comment><USER4> Oops, wrong copy-n-paste buffer!

BTW, I edited the original.

<comment><USER5> No worry I suspected a typo. Like you I went straight to Wikipedia because I wondered by how long she outlived the article that 1995 article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting that no one has gotten particularly close to outliving her.

<comment><USER7> It's hard to catch up, when everyone moves at the same speed.

<comment><USER8> Solution is simple: move Earth to the vicinity of a black hole.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I seem to recall that she was asked what Van Gogh was like, and replied that he smelled bad.

<comment><USER10> Because he had no nose?

<comment><USER11> he cut his ear lol

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Although the amount Mr. Raffray already paid is more than twice the > apartment's current market value, his widow is obligated to keep sending > that monthly check. If Mrs. Calment outlives her, too, then the Raffray > children and grandchildren will have to pay.

Hard to see how that would be legal.

<comment> shawn-butler It is very legal and common in France. The overall payment is calculated according to the age of the seller on a scale set down by French law.

It isn't really a purchase or deed contract. It is an agreement between two estates. The property becomes an inheritance so that is why it persists generations. I think that is the best way to explain it anyway.

<comment><USER12> Then I don't know why the author didn't just say "his family will have to continue paying out of his estate". I suspect that kind of obligation is very legal and common in most of Europe and North America (and probably elsewhere): if someone dies, their debts and contracts are settled against their estate.

The way it's written, it sounds like the family was legally obligated to keep paying until Calment's death, even if the estate ran dry.

<comment><USER13> The Bible mentions punishments continued to the children, and in some cases up to 10 generations from the person who committed it.

A typical passage might say, "Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me".

I think King David was only allowed to be king because he was the first generation in 10 after such an incident.

I don't know if Israel today still has any crimes that punish the family. It also wouldn't matter for a civil agreement like this.

However, in ancient Israel everyone's debts and land were forfeited every 7 and 49 years, so real estate would be priced according to how far the country was from a reset. That would certainly affect a similar agreement.

<comment><USER12> When I said "hard to see how that would be legal", I meant it with regard to modern legal systems, not semi-fictional bronze age legal systems where people can be stoned to death for innocuous things.

<comment><USER13> If you're looking for a modern example, I think North Korea has a 'three generations of punishment' program. You and your family get sentenced to a labor camp, and if your children are born there they stay there too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not really. The widow of the couple that bought the lease collected it 2 years after her husbands death.

<comment><USER15> This is an important point. No sudden huge _finanical_ loss was incurred when the husband died because of this arrangement. In fact, depending on inheritance tax, the widow might well end up getting a favourable deal (again, _financially_ before anyone accuses me of being callous!). Still, any arrangement in which an individual might benefit from another's death is slightly dubious, much more so if the two parties aren't related.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> How incredibly unfortunate.

The annual death rate for people in their 90s is probably in the 10s of %, and rising every year. Someone posted a nice infographic where you could put in your age and it would give you some simulated death ages. It was pretty hard to get over 100 even when starting quite close to it.

This guy happened to pick the oldest person ever.

<comment><USER8> Actually death rates level out fairly quickly, at least until you hit a wall at about 120.

<comment><USER17> Yes, I think I read that cancer rates fall off slightly after a certain age.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> And yet she didn't get to experience what my great-grandmother did, which was to live in parts of three centuries. She was born in 1899 and died in 2002.

Admittedly, she probably didn't remember the first '99.

</comment><comment><USER19> > She moved that year into a nursing home, which is now named after her.

This is pretty cool as well. I'll put this on my list of goals when I'm old.

</comment><comment><USER20> This story somehow made its way into a sermon prep book for pastors - I've heard this about 20 times in sermons by now...

<comment><USER21> How curious--I suppose leaning on the Raffray side of the story?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Life is a drama with sprinkles of comedy.

</comment><comment><USER23> Too bad she didn't have a Fitbit or Apple health app so we could have that data :-(

\--- EDIT:

Who the fuck would downvote that?? Knowing the exercise habits of a 120 year old person should be awesome. You think I'm playing fanboi? Jesus, no it just would have been valuable to know her physical habits. So, explain yourselves.

<comment><USER24> I didn't downvote you but I certainly don't agree with your point. Data about her exercise is _hers_. It's private. Just because it might be "useful" (in a cargo-cult'ing "what works for one person surely works for all" unscientific and nonsensical version of "useful") doesn't mean we should have any access to that information any more than access to her email would be "useful" to look at the way 100-year-olds communicate electronically.

In my opinion we should be thinking of ways we can do useful data science _without_ access to private data, not working out ways to make gathering private data easier.

<comment><USER25> Well, you say that, but given the arrangement, is it? By taking on a viager you effectively act as pension and actuarial agent - and knowing the health of your client is highly relevant to the investment you are making.

This is why one has to have a medical to get health insurance.

<comment><USER24> I wasn't suggesting _no one_ should have access to other people's data. If there's a good reason, such as informing the basis of a contract in the case of a medical to get health insurance, then both parties benefit - one gets to understand the risk they're undertaking and the other gets insurance. So long as the person having the medical understands what they're handing over that's fine.

What I take issue with is the assumption that any data that could be analysed for some marginal good should be openly available. Data is hugely powerful and incredibly valuable, so we need to take individual privacy in to great consideration. In the case of this old lady the tangible benefits of her data being analysed is so tiny (it's not a controlled study, there's no rigour to 'using a fitbit', and it's a such a small sample size of _literally_ 1 person that any hope of anonymity is impossible) that her privacy is _far_ more important than any possible insight in to ageing that the data _might_ give us.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are there good papers/books that cover soft skills side of software? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> _soft skills side of software_

There is no "soft skills side of software". Soft skills are universal. They're (mostly) applicable to every single job. Eg [https://www.wikijob.co.uk/content/interview- advice/competenc...](https://www.wikijob.co.uk/content/interview- advice/competencies/soft-skills)</comment>


Show HN: Radio Paradise JSON - <AUTHOR> http://api.zvoid.net/rpjson.php

<comment><AUTHOR> Basic JSON for RadioParadise.com website. But may help some one else code new web app.</comment>


Ripcord allegedly fires employee over claims of toxic work environment - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/ripcord-fostered-a-toxic-work-environment-former-employee-says-2018-2 <comment><USER2> Can we just make use of the word "toxic" to describe anything other than actual poisonous chemicals a firing offense?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah yes, evolving linguistic meaning and sexual harassment, totally equal.

/s</comment></comment>


Science has lost its way, at a big cost to humanity - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20131027,0,1228881.column <comment><USER4> _" The demand for sexy results, combined with indifferent follow-up, means that billions of dollars in worldwide resources devoted to finding and developing remedies for the diseases that afflict us all is being thrown down a rathole. NIH and the rest of the scientific community are just now waking up to the realization that science has lost its way, and it may take years to get back on the right path._"

The institution of science is undergoing a catastrophic decline. The reason behind this is simple: it is no longer a growing economy. Public funding for science is frozen or being cut, private R&D labs are shuttering their doors, and companies are increasingly concerned with quarterly results at the expense of long term research.

And why should it be otherwise? Science has never payed off as a logical financial investment. It is the riskiest of gambles by definition, requiring inordinate expenditures of time and resources in the present for a chance at some distant breakthrough decades or even centuries in the future. Institutional science is not an economically sound choice in the best of times, let alone during the current span of never-ending recessions.

The truth is, science is a creative pursuit much like the arts. Like the creation of literary masterpieces or profound paintings, it has never made economic sense in the present. Only afterwards, once the impact can be seen, do we understand its significance. And that is why it will always be worth pursuing.

The reality is that, increasingly, we live in a society that does not understand this philosophy of life. People only care about how they will survive tomorrow, and who can blame them, as the world economy gets ever more competitive and cut-throat.

Increasingly, it has become clear that our society does not reflect one designed with its own best interests at heart. Why this is, how it happened, and how we can change it, will be the greatest challenge of our lifetimes.

<comment><USER5> > Public funding for science is frozen or being cut, private R&D labs are > shuttering their doors, and companies are increasingly concerned with > quarterly results at the expense of long term research.

It's ironic that Silicon Valley owes most of it's existence to investments by the DoD and ARPA. Most of the technology we use in the electronics industry today would not exist except for all the public money that was poured into semiconductor research. Slashing public funding, especially of fundamental research, is one of the worst things we could probably do for our economy's future.

<comment><USER6> The transistor invention was privately funded.

<comment><USER7> The semiconductor material used by Bardain, Brattain, and Shockley for their Nobel Prize work at Bell Labs was developed by researchers at Purdue University under a grant funded by the National Defense Research Council. Their developments were hardly independent of publicly funded research.

<comment><USER8> If you want to play this game, you can go back even further and find that they built on work done by privately funded individuals during the Victorian Era and during the Enlightenment. Go back even further and you'll find that much (but by no means all) of the wealth that funded that was acquired thanks to Feudalism.

I therefore credit feudalism for the creation of the transistor.

<comment><USER9> You seem to have misunderstood the comment, (the sibling comments should help explain, or maybe some light reading about the invention of the transistor).

<comment><USER8> I have no idea what you are getting at. I am familiar with the invention of the transistor, and understand the comment I was replying to completely. Furthermore, there are no sibling comments to my comment....

What I am guessing went wrong here is that you are unfamiliar with sarcasm, so I'll help you out: I don't actually credit Feudalism with the invention of the transistor.

<comment><USER10> Don't bother. HN is libertarian leaning thus will defend military spending and fight any criticism of the US military or its massive spending to the death.

I'm not even going to go into how a lot of that spending, if freed up, would go toward endeavors that are not military related and to a parallel timeline we can never know. Imagine NASA with 10 or 50x the budget. Or NSF with 10x the budget, etc. We'd probably be typing this on a moonbase or on a cottage on Alpha Centauri's earth-like planet.

Instead we fawn over the peanuts that falls out of the elephants mouth and praise its generosity for feeding the hungry.

<comment><USER8> I think you may have responded to the wrong person. I'm just making a point that who you credit with a discovery can change many times if you are willing to point at the owner of the shoulders that the inventor was standing on.

Transistors discovered by a private lab? A private lab with government funding? A private lab building on work done by individuals such as Faraday? Individuals who in many cases received government funding in the UK? Individuals who were building on work by Benjamin Franklin, a self-made and self-funded man? Benjamin Franklin, who doubtlessly was enabled by early work on the scientific method itself by Roger Bacon? Roger Bacon, who was supported by the catholic church? Roger Bacon, who built on work of earlier Muslim scholars?

If we want to play the _" who gets credit"_ game, we need to decide beforehand how many times we are going to go down the _" who funded who"_ tree, and _" who researched the prerequisites"_ tree.

I'm not talking about politics; I am pointing out that you people are talking past each other because you all have different ideas of how to assign credit.

<comment><USER10> Right, my point is that a lot of people here are invested in the idea of "military solves all" and will try to disingenuously tie all innovations to military or defense financing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There's nothing wrong with criticizing science, but the reaction to _The Economist_ article -- which itself was a bit too breathless for comfort -- is heading rapidly into tiny-green-football-linkbait territory.

The scientific funding and publication system has problems that deserve scrutiny, but _science_ itself is far more rational than nearly any large, human-maintained system I can think of.

When we resort to hyperbole like _" science has lost it's way"_, we give a group of vocal, clueless idiots more power to undermine the most consistently productive engine for progress that humanity has ever devised. So let's talk rationally about the problems, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

<comment><USER12> "Science has lost its way" is usually a statement I see trotted out by people in the media, who think that the quality of scientific journalism by the media, represents the quality of the actual science it fails at reporting on accurately.

"Scientific journalism has lost its way" would be more accurate were it not for the fact it clearly never had one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> First of all, criticizing science is like criticizing democracy. Yes, it's flawed, but still far better than anything else we've tried so far!

If you look at the typical application for funding, you'll see questions that basically prod you to explain why your research/students/etc. are exceptional/revolutionary/ground-breaking. Everything must look like a Nobel prize waiting to happen if you're going to have a chance at beating out everyone else making the same application (and exaggerations). It's utterly ridiculous! It's as if thousands of guitarists were auditioning at the same time and, in an effort to be heard, each has cranked their amp to 11. The result is a cacophony where even each individual sounds awful because of the distortion. If everyone dialed it down to 5 things would be bearable, but there's always someone willing to nudge it up to 6 or 7...

A nice long list of high profile publications is great to hype when your amp is set to 11. If you have published many papers in high impact factor journals (again, often by inflating the significance of your work), you must be worth funding!

Perhaps scientific funding needs to be awarded in a manner that is more... scientific. Heck, perhaps funding agencies should reserve a certain percentage of their funding specifically for reproduction of results. Currently, if you apply for a grant to check other peoples work, people doing original research will win absolutely every single time. Unfortunately, the preference for original research goes right to the very top of governments. Politicians want brilliant nobel price winners, not competent fact-checkers.

</comment><comment><USER14> One idea to improve the state of things is to require graduate students to verify some number of external studies. In addition to helping with the problem of not enough review, it would make an excellent practical test for doctoral candidates.

It wouldn't work for every field and area, but it could work for a significant subset of research.

<comment><USER15> Motivation is an issue - each verification would require a bunch man-months of effort, so it won't happen unless there is separate funding for that or somehow magically started to be as prestigious as putting the same effort in a new experiment/publication.

"Requiring" has the same motivation problem - those who could require it, currently would rather require those students to do something that brings funding or prestige, so they won't.

<comment><USER14> Graduate students are already required to take courses and various tests that don't bring funding or prestige. This could simply be an additional requirement, or replace an existing requirement.

In time, such a program would bring quite a lot of prestige as flaws are discovered and fixed in existing work. It's really the easiest and most immediate way to address this problem since it only needs to involve single institutions (whose faculty presumably care deeply about this issue).

It doesn't seem likely that journals will suddenly start valuing verification work. Similarly, politicians and funding agencies appear uninterested in actual science; they care only about their careers or immediate application to the politically popular cause of the day.

<comment><USER12> Graduate students already verify people's work. Because every new graduate project involves building on the work of previous science. Which by definition involves re-verifying the work to show you get the same results.

If the results are hard to replicate, or dependent on other causes, then usually that's when a project shifts or when the knowledge pool expands (for example chemistry is fraught with environmental effect dangers - <USER2> lights provide UV to reactions, your glassware has imperfections, the temperature and humidity of labs varies with climate).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm a scientist and I agree with this article. Fact is that the way we incentivize science is what is causing these issues (that and tenure, but that is a longer post).

Science, at least in biology, is just like any business. Both are motivated by $.

The good news is that open science and the impact that the internets is having on science can help this problem. In my opinion, transparency in science will fix many of these issues.

</comment><comment><USER17> A nod should be thrown out here to John Ioannidis, who has been banging this drum for a while.

1\. [http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies- dam...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies- and-medical-science/308269/)

2\. [http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/09/why...](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/09/why_most_publis.html)

Marginal Revolution also throws a tip of the hat to Brad deLong and Kevin Lang's paper condemning econ journals for refusing to print any piece that fails to reject the null hypothesis: [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2138833?uid=3739936&ui...](http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2138833?uid=3739936&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21102824481747)

Speaking of econ, this feels like a market failure to me. I'd be in favor of redirecting some portion of government research dollars towards an independent "validation" shop staffed by scientists who attempt to independently replicate submitted findings, and vow to write up all results (even detailing events that lead to the interruption or cancellation of an experiment). Findings that cannot be replicated by the validation shop should be viewed with extreme skepticism. Researchers would quickly learn not to fudge the results, and find more effective ways to control their own unintentional biases.

It wouldn't have to be government. It could be useful as a nonprofit, I just don't think it'd be sexy enough for anyone to support, despite the sort of urgent necessity of something like this.

<comment><USER18> For subjects with a lot of data analysis you could largely automate a part of the validation as scientists use programming languages.

Papers would have to provide access to their raw data and the code used to process it. You could then just run code(data) to generate the figures / results in the paper.

Two problems here:

1) assumes that the raw data is ok (which is a big assumption).

2) existing scientific code is largely terrible (completely imperative, no abstraction, no documentation, poor typing conventions), and it is very unlikely you can do

        figures <- code(data)

to regenerate a paper.

This is what forced validation would aim to change though.

<comment> a-priori That only proves that their analysis is right. It doesn't rule out the possibility that their results are caused by a quirk of their implementation.

To really validate a paper you have to be able to recreate their code from a high-level description, then check that.

<comment><USER18> I agree, but this would give you a starting point in that you could see exactly what steps were used to create the figures in a paper.

It might be that their high level description (usually in papers anyway) is correct but their implementation is flawed in some subtle way that peer review doesn't pick up.

Assuming a correct implementation this would be useful for anyone wanting to use the methods of the paper.

For example, I've spent the last 3 weeks coding a numerical solver for some equations in a fluid mechanics paper. Having the code for this available would have saved me figuring out all the quirks of the solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Because of science - not religion or politics - even people like you and me can have possessions that only a hundred years ago kings would have gone to war to own. Scientific method should not be take lightly.

The walls of the ivory tower of science collapsed when bureaucrats realized that there were jobs to be had and money to be made in the administration and promotion of science. Governments began making big investments just prior to World War II...

Science was going to determine the balance of power in the postwar world. Governments went into the science business big time.

Scientists became administrators of programs that had a mission. Probably the most important scientific development of the twentieth century is that economics replaced curiosity as the driving force behind research...

James Buchanan noted thirty years ago - and he is still correct - that as a rule, there is no vested interest in seeing a fair evaluation of a public scientific issue. Very little experimental verification has been done to support important societal issues in the closing years of this century...

People believe these things...because they have faith."

From Kary Mullis, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner (and the genius inventor of PCR) in an excellent essay in his book "Dancing Naked in the Mind Field".

</comment><comment><USER20> Real science depends on room to fail, but starting in middle school science fairs, it's clear that negative results and "failed" experiments aren't what the teachers/judges are looking for.

I made it through to the state science fair in 8th grade. It was based around magnetism, and after months of work, it turned out my tests just weren't sensitive enough to measure any difference in any of the electromagnets I built.

When I mentioned this to my teachers, they encouraged me to _fix_ the results with a wink and a nod. Sure I could have turned in a "failed" project and maybe got a B, but I was an A student and there was no room for failure.

I'd love to see some data on how many high level science fair projects are faked each year.

<comment><USER12> Except this is completely mis-stating it.

People love negative results. But proving something _doesn 't_ work requires proving you didn't stuff up the implementation. That is _amazingly_ hard, and about 10x more work then showing a positive result.

For example what you're talking about with magnetism isn't a negative - <USER3> can prove that an effect is bounded by the lower limit of accuracy of your instruments. Physicists do this all the time, because it's the correct way to phrase the result. I'll not to speak to the quality of your teachers though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is not only in medical science, but apparently archaeogy too. (Anecdote alert) A very close friend took part in a dig by a very well known professor. Artifacts that were found that disproved the professor's theories were destroyed before my friend's eyes.

It really makes you wonder what percentage of what we "know" is true.

<comment><USER15> Nothing new here - read up on, for example, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_Wars](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_Wars) almost 150 years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> There are a lot of issues flying around that are being inappropriately mixed up for all sorts of political purposes.

The Begley 'study' is impossible to assess, because they didn't report what the studies were, nor any of their methods, or anything. It's BS and hearsay, not science. Moreover, according to the Begley article itself, "The term 'non- reproduced' was assigned on the basis of findings not being sufficiently robust to drive a drug-development programme."

Nobody said that the purpose of every single scientific paper was to enable Amgen to go start a drug-development program.

There are many problems with the science funding situation, the glamour pub game, excess hype, funding getting sucked up by mega-projects, lack of open- access, inability to publish negative results, etc, etc, etc, but in general, it is not true that scientists are making up sexy results to get them into Nature and Science.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is just way too true. I know someone (anecdote alert) learning at a really prestigious university in a medical field and she told me multiple times that they intentionally cheat the results to match the expected output.

By cheating I mean... flat out lying. I don't know the implications of this (how far misinformation can get) but it seems like a wrong culture and attitude, especially for science.

<comment><USER24> Such a thing happened in my graduate school lab. I'll even cop to having a data point in one graph where I just got sick and tired of doing the experiment so there's an N of 4 instead of an N of 5 as it states it is in the methods section (this is actually impressive for the field I was in at the time, which typically didn't even do replicates at all. I am sure my colleagues' results are, at best, cherry-picked).

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> "lost its way" suggests that science was once firmly on a sure path of rigorously verified studies, never a thrice-checked statement assumed. That was never the case.

Acknowledging, attempting to quantify, and then (some institutions) attempting to fix systemic issues in the peer review system is not an emerging crisis. We have to fix incentives, but we aren't about to see some fundamental tenets about to be overthrown here.

It isn't clear what the "big cost" is referring to. Certainly money has been spent on poorly-founded studies with fundamentally inconclusive results. If it instead refers to opportunity cost, fortunately we have the entire future of humankind to pick up what we might have figured out earlier.

</comment><comment><USER26> While I certainly agree with much of the factual content presented both in the article and in the comments, I think that science already has a lot of self- correction mechanisms built in. None are perfect individually, but the big, messy system has a lot of redundancy built in. It's just not always so visible to journalists or science writers, who don't hang around the scene for the years that it often takes for science to find its way again, so to speak.

For example, many of these high-profile, possibly erroneous (or occasionally fraudulent, it seems) Nature or Science articles are high-profile because they seek to address a contentious or long-standing problem in the field. When this happens, there are typically existing alternate hypotheses. It's much easier to get papers published or grants funded by seeking to test competing hypotheses than to simply try to verify an isolated study. It can also be easier to find weaknesses in an individual study by testing it in a different way, or against other models, or whatever, than by simply trying to reproduce it. Often, a single study might be impossible to directly replicate, or the underlying flaws may not be apparent until the problem is approached from a different angle.

Granted, this can take a couple years or even decades, but falsehoods (intentional or not) tend to become more apparent as their context becomes more clear.

</comment><comment><USER27> Science Exchange is on it: [https://www.scienceexchange.com/reproducibility](https://www.scienceexchange.com/reproducibility)

</comment><comment><USER28> Science is working exactly the way it has always worked.

Most papers have always been flawed, wrong, or not reproducible. There has always been pressure to publish--going back even to Newton's battles with Hooke over gravity, or Darwin's rush to publish _On the Origin of Species_ before Wallace.

What has changed are the cultural expectations. Culturally, we've become spoiled by physics. We're used to the precision, speed, and accuracy of physics and engineering. Moore's law, the iPhone, incredible bridges, the 787 and 380 airplanes--they all just work, safely and reliably.

Note that the reproduction problems are most prevalent in chemistry, biology, medicine, etc. These are areas of science that are far more complex, and about which we know far less, than physics. It will take a long time, and a lot of failed research, to even start to approach that level of knowledge. Given the complexity, it might be impossible.

</comment><comment><USER15> What I'm reading in the article is claims that science _funding_ has lost its way, and is rewarding exactly the wrong actions with money and prestige.

<comment><USER16> Science funding is what drives science now. So the article is correct as are you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The title should read: "A subset of the Scientific Community has lost it's integrity, at a not so easily quantifiable cost to humanity"

</comment><comment><USER30> If you are a biologists and you want to keep your lab going, and you want to have RA-ships for your graduate students, you need to get grants. You aren't going to get grants unless you are cranking out publications. The days when as a biologist, you could work on a problem for several years, being careful, checking your work before you publish... those days are over. I'm confident the system will right itself eventually, hopefully in my lifetime.

</comment><comment><USER31> It seems like the solution to this is fairly simple. Use some statistical or machine learning method to figure out the probability that a certain thing is true using the information we know about it, like what journal it was published in, the results of replications, maybe even stuff like how crazy the result seems or the experience/reputation of the scientists, etc. There is a ton of data to work with, on top of the actual data itself.

You could predict with decent accuracy how probable a study is to turn out to be true or false. Then you can use that information to decide whether it would be worthwhile to do more studies.

<comment><USER32> If you can work out what learning problem you've got here, and what methods you can apply towards a solution, you should go and pitch that as a start-up.

<comment><USER31> I'm not sure there would be anyway to monetize it but I considered trying it as a personal project. It would be way to much work to manually enter the data of thousands of papers into the computer though. I would also need objective data on which studies actually turned out to be true or false. Or at least which ones could be successfully replicated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The PubMed Commons initiative[1] by the National Institutes of Health, mentioned in the article kindly submitted here, is a start at addressing the important problems described in the article. One critique[2] of the PubMed Commons effort says that that is a step in the right direction, but includes too few researchers so far. A blog post on PubMed Commons[3] explains a rationale for limiting the number of scientists who can comment on previous research at first, until the system develops more.

[1] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedcommons/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedcommons/)

[2] [http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2013/10/22/pubmed- now-a...](http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2013/10/22/pubmed-now-allows- comments-on-abstracts-but-only-by-a-select-few/)

[3] [http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~tibs/PubMedCommons.html](http://www- stat.stanford.edu/~tibs/PubMedCommons.html)

USING MY EDIT WINDOW:

Some of the other comments mention studies with data that are just plain made up. Fortunately, most human beings err systematically when they make data up, making it look too good to be true. So an astute statistician who examines a published paper can (as some have done) detect made-up data just by analyzing what data are reported in a paper. A researcher who does this a lot to find made-up data in psychology is Uri Simonsohn, who publishes papers about his methods and how other scientists can apply the same statistical tests to find made-up data.

[http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~uws/](http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~uws/)

From Jelte Wicherts writing in Frontiers of Computational Neuroscience (an open-access journal) comes a set of general suggestions

Jelte M. Wicherts, Rogier A. Kievit, Marjan Bakker and Denny Borsboom. Letting the daylight in: reviewing the reviewers and other ways to maximize transparency in science. Front. Comput. Neurosci., 03 April 2012 doi: 10.3389/fncom.2012.00020

[http://www.frontiersin.org/Computational_Neuroscience/10.338...](http://www.frontiersin.org/Computational_Neuroscience/10.3389/fncom.2012.00020/full)

on how to make the peer-review process in scientific publishing more reliable. Wicherts does a lot of research on this issue to try to reduce the number of dubious publications in his main discipline, the psychology of human intelligence.

"With the emergence of online publishing, opportunities to maximize transparency of scientific research have grown considerably. However, these possibilities are still only marginally used. We argue for the implementation of (1) peer-reviewed peer review, (2) transparent editorial hierarchies, and (3) online data publication. First, peer-reviewed peer review entails a community-wide review system in which reviews are published online and rated by peers. This ensures accountability of reviewers, thereby increasing academic quality of reviews. Second, reviewers who write many highly regarded reviews may move to higher editorial positions. Third, online publication of data ensures the possibility of independent verification of inferential claims in published papers. This counters statistical errors and overly positive reporting of statistical results. We illustrate the benefits of these strategies by discussing an example in which the classical publication system has gone awry, namely controversial IQ research. We argue that this case would have likely been avoided using more transparent publication practices. We argue that the proposed system leads to better reviews, meritocratic editorial hierarchies, and a higher degree of replicability of statistical analyses."

<comment><USER34> Tokenadult provides helpful input.

Like all other sectors, scientific research can get inbred and peer review corrupted as a mechanism. It's similar to a character/job/performance reference: "We want to hear what other people say about you," can be problematic when the folks talking are untrustworthy--yet they wield credentials imparting trustworthiness. Peer review only worked when the majority of peers were rock-solid good scientists. (when there were fewer scientists, with personal reputations and the discoveries to back up their reputations) Wouldn't it be great if Pierre Curie, Darwin or Tesla were doing peer reviews? (or men/women of similar caliber)

At leading research schools (they aren't all universities), falsification of data exists at the student and professorial level.

Funding is definitely cut at NASA, whereas "sexy" research funding is increasing. We need excellent researchers across all areas of expertise. And we need increased accountability and transparency. And more funding.

I argue that what is most needed is increased scientific literacy at the level of political leadership and the general population so that findings can be accessible/understood/evaluated on a more concrete level by all.

Coming pathogen shifts associated with climate change, and extreme weather events, etc. alarm people. And people want to be able to trust science and to trust science reporting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> There is no reproducibility crisis in science.

1\. Reproducing work is a waste of resources. Use the money and researcher hours to develop tools that are more reliable, cheaper, and easier to use. A major reason why no one reproduces experiments is that the initial work was very difficult. Let's invest in technologies that make science easier. Reproduction (of experiments) should be done in high school biology classes.

2\. Technical reproduction is rarely done, but conceptual reproduction is common. Findings in the literature become incorporated into disparate subsequent hypotheses tested by many other labs. If something doesn't add up, this will often increase the impact of the paper and eventually be addressed through experiments to resolve different models of the phenomenon.

3\. There is no widespread fraud in science. Your academic career rests on your integrity. When I publish a paper, I do my damn best to make sure it is accurate. My reputation relies on it. When scientists continue to publish results that are false or fraudulent, they become discredited within the community. All graduate students in the life sciences are required to take a class on the ethics of science.

4\. Publishing is a bitch and a source of real rot within the community. Fortunately, many researchers and academics recognize this problem and are addressing it. Look at the new journal eLife, or open access journals, or the increasing interest in arXiv.org (moving to a publishing model closer to that found in math and physics, which appear to be healthier research communities than life sciences). As experiments become more technically advanced, the expectation for methods sections have increased, not decreased.

5\. People want to commercialize scientific findings that are relatively new - it's obvious that is risky! Why put the burden back on (under-funded) scientists? Drug companies are the ones that would benefit financially. Or wait until the phenomenon is better understood. Notice they're talking about drugs for complex diseases like cancer, metabolic disorder, etc., not Mendelian diseases. It's as if people complained that they couldn't get their lasers to work using a 1917 understanding of the physics of light. But Einstein demonstrated the fundamentals! Why did it take 40 years to make it work in practice?

</comment><comment><USER36> Someone do a sentiment plot with "goodness" on the Y-axis and years ago relative to writing no the X-axis. I won't be surprised if there's a positive correlation. Successes, new challenges, and shortcomings become apparent. Whatever worked looks like it was good principle in hindsight. Whatever hasn't panned out due to new challenges looks terrible. Cherry picking in order to build a case that allows one to write authoritatively doesn't make anyone a saint or cultural leader.

Therefore, when I see an article like this with such a broad, generalizing headline, I just think it's click-bait. Lost it's way? I've read some absolutely terrible papers. "Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life" by Erik Andrulis is an excellent example of such unfathomably speculative garbage. I've also read a huge number of well-done papers on topics in aerospace engineering and materials science. It's always on the reader to re-produce experiments if they depend on the result, to understand the paper correctly etc. This is what my professors did. If part of the community is circle-jerking, let evolution run its course. We used to treat Aristotle as canon in the western world. Obviously things get better over time.

Skimmed article. Old news. The fact that someone is raising the flag, saying "there's a lot of low-hanging fruit to use to establish yourself as a more accurate researcher," just means we will see more of such review activity, making the title seem inaccurate. You never know when you can free yourself up an adjunct professor position in exactly your preferred field of research.

</comment><comment><USER37> Especially in medical studies, where you've often got cases of n=40 or similar (even in later stages!), this is a huge issue. In contrast, just think of the size of n you need in physics to be taken seriously!

The major reason for that is, however, that most people in the medical & biological area are rather lacking a profound mathematical education. There are cases where papers get rejected because they are too mathematical.

<comment><USER38> There are 2 reasons you want a large sample size: (1) to have enough subjects to expect a reasonably representative random sample (typically ~30+ for social science [1]) and (2) to have sufficient statistical power. There's nothing inherently wrong with n=40 and n=40 from an unbiased sample is better than n=400 from a biased sample.

Physicists are generally looking for very very small effects, hence very high n (higher n = higher power = more sensitive to treatment effects). This doesn't mean lower samples sizes are insufficient for other areas of research.

Anyway, the real issue is over-reliance on convenience sampling.

[1] [http://sph.bu.edu/otlt/mph- modules/bs/bs704_probability/BS70...](http://sph.bu.edu/otlt/mph- modules/bs/bs704_probability/BS704_Probability11.html#centrallimittheorem)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> In the UK, there is the widely-derided "Research Assessment Exercise": [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Assessment_Exercise#Cr...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Assessment_Exercise#Criticism)

There is also the criterion of "impact factor", for papers and publications. It's very similar to a "Karma" system as used by HN, Reddit, etc., and it has many of the same problems. Imagine a system where you have to choose between doing research that might be vital but probably won't, versus something safe and predictable that ensures that you get paid next year.

The problem is not so much science as the _management_ and _funding_ of science, which have been infected by the same managerialism that causes so many problems in big government and corporate projects.

</comment><comment><USER40> Here's a case study of mass-media attention-seeking through pseudo-science: an evaluation of behavior on sinking ships, coincidentally issued five days before the centennial of the Titanic's sinking. POS, but well, ok, surely serious scientists wouldn't take such work seriously. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) received the paper for review on May 2, 2012, approved it on June 29, 2012, and published it on July 30, 2012. Science has lost its way.... For details, see [http://purplemotes.net/2012/04/22/deadly-sex- discrimination-...](http://purplemotes.net/2012/04/22/deadly-sex- discrimination-in-titanic-chivalry-myth-reporting/)

</comment><comment><USER41> While I would say that the drop in rigour is worse in Medicine than Physics, it is clearly still present even there.

The way funding works, in particular, means people publish stuff-that-will- get-references with a similar attitude to web start-ups iterating their code, (by which I mean too damn fast and not listening to the peer reviews.)

I'd love to see this change, but I don't know how central agencies can easily/affordably work out which research(ers) to fund and which to cut. As others have said, by definition we don't know what work was useful/valid/critical until many years later.

</comment><comment><USER42> Why do authors and publishers of articles like this, which invariably turn out to be about medical knowledge/studies/research, resort to using the misleading, incredibly broad word "Science" in their titles? All of "Science" has lost its way? Really? Phyics? Chemistry? How about this for a headline: "Journalism has lost its way"? The article could then simply be a list of all the sensationalist, purposely misleading crap that's published in major publications. Long list.

</comment><comment><USER43> This will continue because the tendency to make excuses for it is directly proportionate to the ability to do anything about it, same as with most/all social ills.

</comment><comment><USER44> The article refers to a move several years ago by one biotech company, Amgen, to attempt to validate the results of some well-known studies.

Where can we find the list of these studies?

<comment><USER45> This information has not been released:

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v485/n7396/full/485041e...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v485/n7396/full/485041e.html)

The irony is thick:

1) They were unable to reproduce the experiments from the papers alone, and this is considered normal.

2) The "scientists" required them to sign an NDA before helping them to reproduce their published results.

3) We're left here drawing conclusions from anecdotal evidence from a study that cannot be reproduced.

Luckily, science is self-correcting so we need not be overly concerned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Reproduction of results sounds like a good area of AI and automation. Thankless toiling, not very gratifying work, largely mechanical (not creative).

It would be very cool if someone came up with a unit test framework for various fields of science. Then we could make reproduction unit tests a requirement of publishing, so anyone with the proper equipment/framework could sync and run the tests themselves.

</comment><comment><USER47> In the spirit of inquiry, I'm waiting for the other half of this story. These articles seem sensationalist. So what's the catch? Does it have to do with studies being pre-clinical and more likely to be wrong? Or is it that they're being held to a different level of scrutiny? Or the evidence shows correlation, but not statistical significance?

Or are things really this bad?

</comment><comment><USER48> Does this impact venues like HN and Wikipedia that value citations substantially more than common sense?

<comment><USER14> No. Any attempt to do better than guessing should be valued above guessing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Why not allow comments from everyone? We all know that closed clubs lead to politics. Many life scientists are extremely allergic to feedback, and they go to great lengths to avoid scrutinizing their own or others' results.

</comment><comment><USER50> When you make publishing a number of papers mandatory and tie it to tenure, it is inevitable that quality will suffer. The need is to rethink quantitative metrics and move to a more quality oriented one.

</comment><comment><USER51> Society has lost its way.

</comment><comment><USER52> I would highly recommend that anyone with further interest check out the book, "The Cult of Statistical Significance" It's eye opening.

</comment><comment><USER53> Science (management) has lost its way, at a big cost to humanity

</comment><comment><USER54> climate change.</comment>


Ten Rules for Web Startups - <AUTHOR> http://evhead.com/2005/11/ten-rules-for-web-startups.asp

<comment><USER2> Advice Twitter hasn't followed: "design something to charge for into your product and start taking money within 6 months"</comment>


Playbook - Share your hookups with your bros (at PennApps) - <AUTHOR> http://theplaybookapp.com/?

<comment><USER2> This may be an unnecessary warning, but unless you have a model release signed by Angelina Jolie to use her image to promote your site, you should probably find another photo to use.

I'm not a lawyer and laws vary by state, but in most states, to use someone's image commercially, you need a model release, which basically a contract stating that they have received appropriate compensation for use of their image. (Note, it is not necessary to have a model release for "news" uses.)

Failing to do so opens you up to being sued. Using a celebrity's image increases that likelihood because they have a legitimate claim that their image is worth something.

<comment><USER3> I totally agree with you about that. It could be that when she was younger she had some pictures taken, signed a release and some agency/photog. owns the rights. This agen(t)/cy in turn could sell the image for a specific use and she can't do anything about it.

Now, if it's hers and she's got the (c) on it, then she could sue for all kinds of damages, if used without express consent.

I have no idea when this image was taken.

<comment><USER2> Exactly. And I didn't even address the copyright issues with using this image.

As I mentioned in another comment, the laws on this one would be pretty clear cut, and regardless of how you feel about IP laws, it would be a huge mistake to so flagrantly misuse an image while starting a business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't always hate on the patriarchy, but when I do it's because of crap like this.

<comment><USER3> True enough. I think someone should put out an app to keep track of and share info about guys who use apps which objectify women like that.

<comment><USER5> And call it "douchebook".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Disgusting.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is this a joke?

<comment><USER8> Not at all. We saw a clear demand for this type of thing. Guys already keep little black books and discuss girls with their friends -- we just made it digital and secure!

<comment><USER9> curious..so when does the age restrictions go up as its obvious yo cannot do this for minors as far as US law is concerned.

<comment><USER2> Why would there be age restrictions, other than the usual "can't collect user data under 13"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> good way to keep track of all the broads with your bros

</comment><comment><USER8> Just curious what people think of <http://www.onlulu.com/>

<comment><USER11> Not sure why the tech press is beating up the creators of Playbook when that already exists. It's all in good fun anyways

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Apparently, Playbook has stirred a bit of controversy?

<comment><USER12> Controvsery is defined as: Disagreement, typically when prolonged, public, and heated

There's not really any controversy here. Y'all aren't even pretending this isn't insanely offensive. You just seem to feel okay about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> yeah bro this is so bro

</comment><comment><USER14> You can't be serious.</comment>


The CDC has failed: Ex-health officials urge states to abandon agency - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/09/ignore-the-cdc-former-top-health-experts-say-some-states-already-have/ <comment><USER2> Oh no, not this again. There's been a long-running propaganda campaign to convince Americans that the CDC and their government has failed them because they can't achieve a supposedly easy level of Covid-19 testing which is in reality an order of magnitude beyond what any other major country has managed, and that that this is a uniquely American failure. The NYT opinion piece this is based on looks like it's in part a continuation of that.

It's gone hand in hand with a narrative that the US is behind the rest of the world in its level of Covid-19 testing, when in fact it's ahead of almost everyone else. (Last I looked, this trick was being pulled off by comparing based on the number of tests per positive, even though this is really a measure of outbreak size rather than testing levels if you're trying to test everyone with symptoms - unless the outbreak has hit catestropic levels, the number of tests required to do that is basically independent of the number of cases. Clearly it has absolutely nothing to do with how close a country is to being able to test a particular proportion of the population on a regular basis regardless of symptoms.)

<comment><USER3> Why is there such a force of propoganda surrounding Corona trying to make everyone feel like things are worse than they are? I've noticed it too.

<comment><USER4> We shut down the entire world and it killed over 100,000 in the US alone in 3 months. There's no suspicious conspiracy surrounding Covid19, it really is a very infectious and capable of killing a lot more than it already has.

<comment><USER3> Complete worldwide infections are 25 million that are known.

There's around a 40-50% asymptomatic number so the total estimated infections so far are around 40 million.

Total deaths is around 800,000.

.02 death rate on average and it drops drastically the younger a person is.

Depending on your risk tolerance, to many people, that's not worth destroying life as we know it.

Especially because the death rate of heart disease and cancer is higher than this and has easily targeted reasons with mountains of scientific evidence that could reduce the death rates.

It just seems like propaganda and we're making a bigger deal out of it than necessary.

<comment><USER5> Cancer and heart disease are not contagious like Covid-19 is, why is this ridiculous equating done so often? It's apples to oranges...

Also, some studies seem to suggest we're actually undercounting the death rate [0]. Combine that with likely under reported data in Russia, China, and other countries, it's clearly a significant threat.

I think it's kind of crazy to say preventing potentially 10s of millions of people from dying is not a big deal and propaganda. Seems like searching for a grand narrative in something that's rather pretty cut and dry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Which statistics plot are they interested in?

[https://www.statista.com/statistics/1076314/covid-19-case- fa...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1076314/covid-19-case-fatality- rates-select-countries-worldwide/)</comment>


Ask HN: AWS keeps charging me on a close Amazon account - <AUTHOR> Sometime in April I closed my Amazon.com account. On May I received an invoice from AWS saying my account has been charged for the AWS services I used.
However because my Amazon.com account has been closed, I was no longer able to access my AWS console to stop the services.
I have tried to contact AWS and Amazon.com multiple times, without getting anywhere. Today after spending hours on the phone they finally told me that I have to re-open my Amazon.com account, then stop the AWS services, and re-close my Amazon.com account. Out of principle this is something that I don't want to do.
I have closed my account, they have locked me out of the AWS console, that's the end of it. I find it kafkaesque that they are still happy to send me invoices and charge my account when they are not allowing me to access the AWS console.
Does anyone have any advice on how to resolve this without playing their game? <comment><USER2> A lawyers letter perhaps?</comment>


IPad Brings the Growth of Netbooks to a Halt - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2010/05/06/ipad-netbook-market/

<comment><USER2> Well that's a poor interpretation of that data.</comment>


Diaspora's (YC S12) Next Act: Social Remixing Site Makr.io - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20120816/diasporas-next-act-social-remixing-site-makr-io/

<comment><USER2> This is exactly what the internet needs less of. Sad to see the diaspora guys reduced to overlaying unfunny text captions over jpgs.

<comment><USER3> Hm, this is kind of sad.

On one hand, I understand that the original concept wasn't as successful as everyone thought, so the best thing to do is try to do something else.

On the other hand, "meme creation" is so overdone at this point that I am surprised that this is the "next big thing" that they try to build

<comment><USER4> Actually, the prevailing attitude when Diaspora was announced was that it had as much chance as a bumblebee's fart in a hurricane.

<comment><USER5> But it didn't actually have to take over, right? It just had to build up a decent user base. Then it could be linked with identi.ca, and they would be linked to whatever came along next . . .

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I know we had this discussion a lot, but I can't be the only one to find this trend a little disturbing.

I seriously admired (and still do) the Diaspora guys for tackling probably the hardest problem there is, replacing facebook with a distributed alternative. And things have probably been a lot tougher than any of us can imagine.

However, how do you go from the ambitious Facebook-Killer to an quickmeme/pinterest mashup, especially from the godfather YC? I know all the big things start small somewhere, but something just doesnt feel right to me. There must be some secret sauce that only pg et al. know.

<comment><USER7> I'm noticing many problems with your perspective, and since I'm in a good mood this morning I'm going to try and help force-puke the cool aid out of you.

> I seriously admired (and still do) the Diaspora guys for tackling probably > the hardest problem there is

Its a trivial problem compared to what SpaceX, Solum, and _tons_ of others are tackling.

> However, how do you go from the ambitious Facebook-Killer to an > quickmeme/pinterest mashup

This sentence is a great example of cognitive dissonance. The reality is, it is easy to go from one to the other because they are pretty much the same thing: People get to share stuff with each other on a web interface.

> especially from the godfather YC

> There must be some secret sauce that only pg et al. know

PG invests in dumb shit. YC invests in dumb shit. All the time. Their business model is not "invest in the best ideas in the world" its "invest in people who have the potential to make billion dollar companies".

Furthermore, PG has stated this in his essays, and there is ample evidence in the many startups they have invested in throughout the years.

So, I hope I've helped push you through the social-web-center-of-the-universe and YC-the-creator stage.

I've been there, and its nice to move on.

<comment><USER8> Facebook is a powerful societal force at this point, and successfully disrupting it with a distributed, non-corporate-controlled service would make a big difference for individual choice. See what I wrote here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4389118>

I get your frustration with the constant stream of Blathrs and idiot.lys — most of these trendy social sites are never going to amount to anything. But what Diaspora originally set out to do was and is important.

<comment><USER7> > Facebook is a powerful societal force at this point, and successfully > disrupting it with a distributed, non-corporate-controlled service would > make a big difference for individual choice.

What individual choices would it make a big difference for?

> I get your frustration with the constant stream of Blathrs and idiot.lys

I'm not frustrated.

> But what Diaspora originally set out to do was and is important.

I didn't say otherwise.

<comment><USER8> > What individual choices would it make a big difference for?

As I said in the linked post: choosing not to use Facebook is currently a high-cost/impractical choice for many people. That means we're almost obliged to accept how they use our data.

You called Diaspora's original aims "a trivial problem". That sounds like the opposite of "important" to me.

<comment><USER7> I called Diaspora's original aim trivial compared to the aims of SpaceX.

<comment><USER8> Well, that seems like apples and oranges to me. Space exploration may (or may not) end up being important to human race's survival super-long-term, but breaking Facebook's monopoly, replacing it with services that offer clear, honest privacy settings, would help a lot of people now. There's no reason we can't have both SpaceX and a Diaspora-like project — important in different ways to different groups of people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow.. that's soooo much like <https://canv.as/x/everything> (aka the site built by 4chan moot).

Besides there is so many of such sites already, it makes me sad to think that resources are wasted there instead of on Diaspora (or other "usefull" stuff).

<comment><USER10> Canvas is a lot more fun because it adds a level of playful interaction (stickers) and brings along a known-for-lulz community (4chan and by proxy Reddit) that Makr.io doesn't. My problem with Makr is that if it's trying to create memes, not only is the audience terrible at choosing photos, but the design isn't even using Impact (which may seem silly on the surface, but ensures the content is read to be funny/sarcastic).

In this sense, it reminds me more of an LJSecret's Pinterest, and these two audience types don't blend well together at a social level, so I'm not sure how a a platform catering to both of them will do over time.

<comment><USER11> What's impact?

<comment><USER10> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_(typeface)>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So does that mean that Diaspora dream of replacing Facebook is dead? A Facebook login option and .io domain points strongly in that direction.

<comment><USER13> I think they are delegating the task to app.net

<comment><USER14> Except app.net is neither distributed nor open source.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, this needs to be made entirely clear. App.net is a change in degree, trying to make another twitter, but better. Diaspora and identi.ca are changes in kind, trying to make something different to replace fb/twitter.

<comment><USER13> Regardless of how different Diaspora is from Facebook, they still tried to do the "social network" better. I'm pretty sure every startup wants to make stuff less suck.

By the way I remember last time when Diaspora first surfaced as the real alternative of Facebook and I was kinda excited with it. For the first time I can customized everything I want from my social network. But then the project run out of any traction and suddenly just disappeared. So I guess, while we can dream big and aim big, the big stuff would come up eventually and not just boom in the first place (as Google comes out from home garage and Facebook comes out from college dorm). It's a big disturbing how App.net just really booming in its first release but I wish them the best and hope they will succeed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> They say it's hard, yet nobody is gonna pay anything for this. That's the worst of both worlds. These guys still haven't learned their lesson from making Diaspora.

</comment><comment><USER16> Visiting the home page gives the impression of someone's not-quite-technical mother trying to "do a meme."

</comment><comment><USER17> Login with Facebook, Pinterest + 9Gag clone, meme... What the hell??? Hmm, it smells like April Fools to me but... it's not even April =/

</comment><comment><USER18> To me, this just demonstrates the problems that arise when you say you're trying to tackle this huge gigantic problem. There's a ton of building hype, and then people are disappointed/scornful when you can't deliver. It reminds me a bit of the Thiel Fellowship.

Maybe this YC class is just a result of many lessons learned. It does seem the problems they tackle are, for lack of a better word, lame, but that doesn't mean they can't grow into something really big.

I guess time will tell, but best of luck to Makr.io. My only wish is that they share everything they must have learned through the process of Diaspora.

</comment><comment><USER19> Questions on ownership:

1\. Does Y Combinator then own a stake in their product Makr, or in Disapora?

2\. When _Allerta_ went from Waterloo Velocity's incubator to _inPulse_ (at Y Combinator) and then _Pebble_ (with Kickstarter's help), which pivot does Y Combinator have an ownership in? The parent company, or the new product?

3\. Did everyday.me get accepted into the YC class, or Noodle Labs (makers of everyday.me) receive funding?

4\. If you start an unrelated side project while you're there, is it seen as a pivot? And does YC have a claim in that?

</comment><comment><USER20> The most confusing part about this is that they don't seem to acknowledge the disappointment that the public might have after reading this. Diaspora did such a good job of capturing people's imaginations, but did a terrible job of communicating about its shortcomings. This just seems to be a continuation of that.

</comment><comment><USER21> If its a remixing place for memes, why not make them look like original memes? I don't like the font you chose to overlay since I'm so used to the ones currently on all the meme generators.

</comment><comment><USER22> so bunch of youngsters abandon ideals and create yet another photo with a caption sharing site?

color me disappointed

</comment><comment><USER23> Just curious, if any of the funds raised via Kickstarter for Diaspora were used in the development of Makr.io, including founders/developers salaries/expenses/etc.?

If yes, that is the biggest flaw of Kickstarter, no accountability. I can dream something really great, raise tons of cash via Kickstarter, and use that to do something else.

<comment><USER24> They burnt through the Kickstarter funding long before Makr.io.

<comment><AUTHOR> well, 4 guys for almost two years on about 150k (after taxes and teeshirts)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> They have Login with Facebook. What can we say.

<comment><AUTHOR> feel free to use login with email.

<comment> k-mcgrady I think his point is that we can login with Facebook or email but there is no Diaspora option. In other words you support your competitor but not your own company.

<comment><AUTHOR> there is no login with Diaspora.

<comment> k-mcgrady Sorry, didn't know that. I still think it's a bit strange to support a competing social network when it's not necessary (people could just sign up with email).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> They should better focus on cleaning up D* code, solid federation and security (such as end to end encryption and etc.). Flashy UI is really secondary.

<comment><USER27> Flashy UI and solid backend code are almost always done by different people. The designer may be writing markup or some JS, but they won't be hacking on end to end encryption. The alternative then, would be to fire the designer and hire another backend guy.

Except they're not going to just not have any UI design at all, and hiring contractors for a whole project would probably end up being more expensive than a full time person anyway. Other members of the team could do it (probably not as well as a specialist), but then they would actually be spending time on design that they would have spent on the back end, which was your original criticism.

Also, the "flashiness" of the interface has a lot more to do with the talent of the designer than anything else. A talented designer may charge more, but probably not that much more, especially on a feel-good open source kickstarter project.

<comment><USER26> In general yes, but in D* case the team is so small, that core devs do all work including UI and backend. Unless I misunderstood their situation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> What's the point of this? Why would you even write an article on this?

</comment><comment><USER29> Quick note to all the people who ask: "How is this site different from XYZ?"

Makrio may or may not be different from 4chan (some thoughts on that here <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4393668>), but regardless, for many of us it might be the first service that actually works!

I don't like memes, I think they are stupid, and that's why I've never used 4chan or 9gag or cared much for the Cheeseburger network. But, with Makrio I actually have fun; something about it is different and it draws me in.

Before you dismiss the site as "just another X", give it a try for a few days, you just might like it!

</comment><comment><USER30> What the internet truly needs right now is more image macros.

</comment><comment> adam-_- Slightly weird that they didn't actually link to <http://makr.io> once in the whole article?

<comment><AUTHOR> I know, I emailed the author :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> While I don't mean to come down on Diaspora specifically, I feel like YC S12 is a decidedly weak class (at least what we've seen of it so far). When the online interior design site is one of the strongest offerings of the bunch, what can you really say?

<comment><USER19> I'd say S12's their best one yet, with Coco Controller, Double Robotics, Flight Fox far ahead in monetization (and business model development) stages than was previously seen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The irony of this site using a facebook login is so thick you could swim in it.

</comment><comment><USER33> Yet another Pinteresting UI. Disappointing.

</comment><comment><USER34> Wow some of the comments here are brutal. Granted that the more recent YC graduates are not the most exciting it seems unnecessary to react with so much anger.

</comment><comment><USER35> When I look at companies like SpotHero, who are trying to help people have a better (and cheaper) parking experience, I'm happy they're trying to help real people by solving real problems.

When I look at companies like Makr, I simply just wonder "why"? I'm unconvinced many people in "the real world" will use this or need to use this.

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER36> 'Real people' use the Internet, and you spend almost as much time online as you do in the "real world." You're right - not everyone will use this or need this, but it's our way of making the Internet - the place we now spend so much time - a better place, in a different way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I guess all the hate stays here but judging by the explosion of programming memes, some hacker news people are having fun over there.

</comment><comment><USER38> Wow.. I guess I am late to this thread. But have any haters here actually tried to use Makr at all? I second Koji - when you're not just passively watching, but contributing is when the real fun begins! You become part of a conversation, almost a little competitive fun to outdo your friends. Not something you will find in random cat picture sites.

</comment><comment><USER39> This is a duplicate. Makr.io has been discussed here not too long ago and heavily criticized.

</comment><comment><USER40> Why is distributed social apparently so hard that we couldn't buy it with $150,000?

Is sharing status really a lot more complicated than an RSS feed with public key encryption?

<comment><USER41> Yes. Yes it is.

<comment><USER40> I'm willing to believe that. Actually, I'm happy to believe that, because it just always nags on me. You would be doing me a big favor by pointing out how it is more complicated than that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> More insular, inward, bubble-bound myopic nonsense.</comment>