Revisited: big VCs investing in seed rounds - <AUTHOR> http://cdixon.org/2012/04/02/revisited-big-vcs-investing-in-seed-rounds/ <comment><USER2> Even knowing this, would you be able to turn down an investment from a top VC firm while you were raising a seed round?

We're wired to expect things to always get better, we're wired to believe that we are the ones who will succeed and that the VC not doing a follow-on round would happen to other companies, but not us.

I also suspect getting a big name VC in on your seed round goes a long way to getting more investors in that seed round.

Can somebody give an example of when they turned down an investment from a larger firm, and if they now look back on it as a positive?</comment>


Does Ruby Suffer From An Overabundance Of Choice? - <AUTHOR> http://www.rubyinside.com/does-ruby-suffer-from-an-overabundance-of-choice-3648.html <comment><USER2> Maybe this isn't written down clearly everywhere but it should be. If you're new to ruby ALL you need to know is that everyone in production runs:

Rails 2 (currently at 2.3.8) Ruby 1.8.7 or REE (which are 100% compatible, since REE is only slightly different) MySQL or PostgreSQL + Memcached

That's the boring, vanilla, stack 90% of production sites run. That's why it's pretty much the only stack Heroku and Engineyard support. If you have special needs (Java interop, more performance, NoSQL, Async IO) then yeah, do your research. If you just want to write a regular plain RoR app like 90% of people the above advice will suit you fine.

You can have a full ruby environment with:

apt-get install ruby-full mysql-server

gem install rails

gem install mysql

Now, how hard was that?

<comment><USER3> You're right, it's not hard. However I have a challenge: Find me a website that says exactly that, comes up first in Google, and is promoted by other Rails sites.

<comment><USER2> You're right about that. But people shouldn't be learning rails from online tutorials, they should be reading Active Web Development with Rails which has clear instructions.

Learning new languages from random online tutorials is always going to be confusing because stuff on the net is either too cutting edge or too disorganized, no matter what language you're using (yes, even PHP).

<comment><USER3> I've got like 5 different tutorials over the web that say otherwise. More importantly, any Rails book is going to be out of date in less than 3 months.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone think we should have a slightly more bureaucratic approach to project and gem creation ?

For a rubyforge project, we do need to fill in a form. But gem creation can be done by anyone. There's no need to show some documentation, no need to justify why you've created yet another XYZ, or why its better that the alternatives.

Even rubyforge projects do not require any justification. We've got to delete projects that have not released ANY code for X period (blank projects).

What of projects that do not have proper documentation (take wikipedia for instance, where badly written pages get flagged off).

I've often griped about codeforpeople.com where there's no summary for what all those gems are for. You have to download each one and check the docs inside!

</comment><comment><USER4> Very sensible article. I can scarcely improve upon it.

The choice is not the issue, its probably more categorization, and somehow having the good stuff bubble up and the bad/broken stuff sink.

We cannot totally rely on google searches, for often google brings up outdated articles that perhaps have a high number of hits, while something current does not show up.

I liked your para on READMEs and railscasts. I recently saw a video demo of a Java framework named "Play" -- really made me want to download and try it -- that kind of stuff can do wonders for a project.

</comment><comment><USER4> This article is in response to another which is discussed here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1590955>

</comment><comment><USER5>
      The problem is that Ruby's documentation, main advocacy
      sites, and even most sites for popular Ruby libraries
      (with one major exception - coming later) try too hard to
      demonstrate freedom

No, the main problem is that Ruby's documentation sucks. If it tried too hard to demonstrate freedom, it would at least demonstrate normal use cases. I point to <http://ruby-doc.org/core/classes/File.html> and I rest my case. I hereby promise to submit a patch for that documentation somewhere next week. It has bothered me for too long.</comment>


How Google Uses Angular 2 with Dart - <AUTHOR> http://angularjs.blogspot.com/2015/11/how-google-uses-angular-2-with-dart.html <comment><USER2> Does this news means that Google Dart used only by the Google and does not used by other serious companies?

Or does this news means that Google has finally decided to use their own software product but the other serious companies still has not been decided to use Google Dart?</comment>


Climate report: Scientists politely urge 'act now, idiots' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45775309 <comment><USER2> Britain has just approved restarting fracking. Germany wants to demolish ancient forest to mine more lignite for power stations. The US wants to save the coal mining industry. The North West passage is almost ice free in summer. Australia's coal exports are booming.

IPCC thinks it will need 2.5% of global GDP for 20 years to fix.

Act now? It still doesn't seem like any of the world's electable politicians even believe the problem yet. Just in greenwash and talking about GDP growth.

The next generation is fucked.

Edit: That's very disappointing to see. Submission goes from top 5 on front page to nowhere, yet isn't flagged.

<comment><USER3> >Germany wants to demolish ancient forest to mine more lignite for power stations.

It isn't Germany, the RWE corporation wants this because in the near future they will loose the ability to mine coal in that area, so they'll happily pay off politicians and raze the forest to get at whatever coal is down there until the time's up.

The easy and most efficient solution to all these problems it to outlaw oil and coal now. It would cause all kinds of auxiliary damage but it would likely be cheaper than continuing down the current path.

<comment><USER2> Good point, though from memory of news reports the energy minister is in favour. I imagine it's far less popular with the public.

In light of this morning's IPCC report I think you are right with the second point. An outright ban may soon cause less auxiliary damage than trying to encourage economies (i.e. ignoring the issue)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was reading a blog post about problems in academia which said the following in the first paragraph:

> There's a narrative I find kind of troubling, but that unfortunately seems > to be growing more common in science. The core idea is that the mere > existence of perverse incentives is a valid and sufficient reason to > knowingly behave in an antisocial way, just as long as one first > acknowledges the existence of those perverse incentives.

[http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2018/10/02/no-its-not-the- inc...](http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2018/10/02/no-its-not-the-incentives- its-you/)

As a cyclist who's slowly switching to a mostly vegetarian diet, partly to reduce my carbon emissions, I find this quote to apply equally well to people who believe that climate change is a problem but seem to want to wait for the government to act before they do much.

Yes, maybe my efforts are "wasted" in some respect, but I don't think I'm missing much anything valuable anyway by cycling for example, so that eliminates the downside in my view.

<comment><USER5> Does anyone know how much carbon is released to grow the extra food that you use cycling verses what you would use driving? Food production is very energy intensive and the human body very inefficient.

You can't effect the amount of carbon released by adopting a low carbon lifestyle when the price of fossil fuels is above the cost of production. All reducing demand at the margin does is lower the marginal price causing an increase in consumption elsewhere in the economy.

<comment><USER4> [https://bicycleuniverse.info/bicycling-wastes- gas/](https://bicycleuniverse.info/bicycling-wastes-gas/)

According to this a "typical" omnivore cyclist produces about 3 times less carbon than a "typical" driver. Vegan and vegetarian are about 4 times less. You can play around with the numbers in the calculator. I think this guy's probably biased towards veganism, but this is what I've seen.

I haven't seen a comparison with motorcycles or electric vehicles, or a comparison that took into account the embodied energy of the vehicles.

Edit: This calculator also assumes equal trip distances between modes of transportation, which is not realistic in my experience. Cyclists tend to have shorter trips. So that's another factor to consider.

> You can't effect the amount of carbon released by adopting a low carbon > lifestyle when the price of fossil fuels is above the cost of production. > All reducing demand at the margin does is lower the marginal price causing > an increase in consumption elsewhere in the economy.

If that's true, then I guess the goal is to slowly reduce the price. Perhaps cycling is ineffective in terms of carbon emissions. This is okay for me as I find either the cost or physical fitness benefits convincing in isolation.

<comment><USER5> Thanks - as I suspected it is really complex and very dependent on the assumptions.

I would love to cycle more, but I fear for my life riding on roads with traffic. I have seen far too many killed cyclist with my own eyes - in fact when I think about the only dead people I have seen are cyclists and motorcyclists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Stop eating animals. Governments are slow to act, but switching to a plant based diet is something you can do right now.

<comment><USER7> I admit to being tired of this vague moralizing. We're in this mess because of corrupt energy industries and fucked up factory farming on a global scale, not because I like chicken nuggets. There is absolutely zero chance that we avoid global warming because enough people voluntarily switched to a vegetarian diet. It's a non-solution, just like everyone biking, turning their a/c to 85 and heaters to 60, etc etc. It will never, ever happen unless government makes it happen, and I'm sure advocates know it, and I'm therefore forced to conclude it's just some weird eco-shaming.

<comment><USER8> Shrill messages can and do backfire, but I think there might be a point to add. If we go vegetarian, as an example, we're likely promoting new vegetarian industries which then can create real alternatives for wider and wider groups of people. For example if people start a craze for foods made from kelp and it spreads, then it can become a part of larger government-arranged action.

The same is true for alternative energies.

Meanwhile you'll agree that the consumer is indeed the _most_ important part of any economic activity, and that they often have the most choice, as most corporate managers answer to shareholders who in turn answer to short-term profits.

<comment><USER7> > Meanwhile you'll agree that the consumer is indeed the most important part > of any economic activity, and that they often have the most choice

I actually disagree. I think it's difficult to be a healthy vegetarian (let alone a vegan) if you're in rural or poorer areas, as the majority of the US and indeed the world are. Most people aren't choosing their diets, they're eating what they can, or succumbing to billions of dollars of advertising carefully crafted to hypnotize them into brand loyalty to corporations dependent on factory farming. It's a fundamental flaw in market-based thinking: consumers often don't have serious choices or the information or resources to make good ones.

It's also a convenient escape hatch for irresponsible corporations and corrupt governments. "Well we agree there's a problem, but we can't fix it without unethical market regulations".

<comment><USER9> My biggest issue with living in the South and (slowly) shifting vegetarian is restaurants. I want to go out and eat with my friends, but most of them just don't have good vegetarian options, and it's really annoying. It's part of the reason why I haven't completely gone vegetarian yet.

<comment><USER7> I was vegetarian for years and basically lived on fries and bad salads. I feel your pain haha.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's past time to recognize that this is happening. We're going to experience the fallout of a rapidly warming planet. We need everyone to switch from prevention mode to cure mode. The political will to avoid this just isn't, and never will be there.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's really disappointing that the political systems we have don't encourage long term stewardship of our resources.

I don't see any kind of reform happening in the US until negative consequences are felt by a significant chunk of the population.

<comment><USER11> It's disappointing that such a political system is necessary for individuals to act responsibly, ethically and morally.

<comment><USER12> Welcome to [REDACTED], land of the free and home to the brave.

<comment><USER13> Dang ([https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/dang](https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/dang)) arthurcolle I too have been damned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Al Gore said 2015.

</comment><comment><USER15> Enjoy life while you can, it won't be here for long.</comment>


The Importance of Cigarette Receipts in a Thirty-Two-Year-Old Murder Case - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-importance-of-cigarette-receipts-murder-conviction <comment><USER2> Among the interesting aspects of this case (e.g. the witness compelled to give false testimony) is the surprising endurance of paper records – when they can be found. Apparently, the prosecutor who is defending the convictions didn't realize that a particular file for this decades-old case had been moved out of the police precinct to the Municipal Archives:

> _She had asked an investigator to fetch it from the police precinct, she > told the judge, and after being informed that it wasn't there, she had gone > looking for it herself. Last December, she reported that she had finally > found the file "because I personally crawled through a disgusting basement > in the police precinct."_

> _Keenan appears not to have known about the existence of another file: a > tattered legal envelope filled with Goldstein's files that had been sent to > the Municipal Archives. When I found it there recently, the envelope > contained numerous manila folders with crime-scene photos, witness > statements, and notes about the case that Goldstein had handwritten on legal > pads. Buried inside a file marked "Witnesses," there was also an expense > report he had filled out for costs related to the trial. One expense, for > $17.41, was for "cigarettes and soap for inmate." The attached receipt, > which was from a pharmacy near the courthouse, was dated July 8th—the same > day that Burns testified._

</comment><comment><USER3> There have been countless instances of criminal witnesses giving false testimony for consideration.

I recognize that in some cases it might be the only way to convict, but the fact that so many people have spent decades in prison only to later be exonerated inspires little confidence in this practice.

Rape and murder convictions get all the attention and resources, but certainly there are countless lesser crimes with the same problem.

<comment><USER4> Something around 30 years ago, an inmate in the LA County jails was recorded on tape explaining how he put himself in a position to be able to testify falsely. I assume that was one of the factors that led to a grand jury investigation: [https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bx- Cz6-HaJA_U240RVBvQkxMNEE...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bx- Cz6-HaJA_U240RVBvQkxMNEE/view)</comment></comment>


Present and past history of international surveillance - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b036k7cy

<comment><AUTHOR> BBC Radio 4: 9.00 BST and repeated at 21.30 BST on the 9th July.</comment>


Uber's delivery business is now larger than ride-hailing - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/06/ubers-delivery-business-is-now-larger-than-ride-hailing/ <comment><USER2> How long will that be the case? This seems quite obvious if people have to stay home. The main problem with Uber is the low barrier to entry and brand loyalty. Uber has left the market I am living in and except the color of the app it did not change anything to my life.</comment>


Medical research: If depression were cancer (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/medical-research-if-depression-were-cancer-1.16307?WT.mc_id=FBK_NatureNews <comment><USER2> The big shift that's taking place is the gradual removal of nosology (disease classification) from its pedestal in psychiatry - naming symptoms as the foundation of all practice and services, which no other area of medicine does anymore - and replacing it with a _scientific_ framework for discovering dysfunctional mechanisms at every level from genetic to neural to behavioural. This was started by Thomas Insell / NIMH (named in the article) and has been followed in the EU.

The framework is called RDoC and you should familiarise yourself with it if you've been influenced by psychiatric literature or practice as to your own mental health.

TLDR General argument: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeZ-U0pj9LI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeZ-U0pj9LI)

More in-depth presentation: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hU_5i2clSKI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hU_5i2clSKI)

Slightly more technical introduction: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyGt8-ddacA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyGt8-ddacA)

Google Scholar search: [https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&q=rdoc](https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&q=rdoc)

RDoC @ NIMH: [https://www.nimh.nih.gov/research- priorities/rdoc/index.shtm...](https://www.nimh.nih.gov/research- priorities/rdoc/index.shtml)

RDoC inspired EU project: [http://www.roamer-mh.org/](http://www.roamer- mh.org/)

Interested if anyone here has an inside take on RDoC.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for more or less responding to my comment elsewhere in this post. I've watched the first two vids, looking forward to the rest of your links.

Diagnostically RDoC (Research Domain Criteria) looks like a welcome overhaul of the increasingly derided DSM.

Them's a lot of circuits: [https://www.nimh.nih.gov/research- priorities/rdoc/units/circ...](https://www.nimh.nih.gov/research- priorities/rdoc/units/circuits/index.shtml)

<comment><USER2> You're welcome. RDoC was tactically proposed just before DSM5 was published [1]

For comparing RDoC and DSM there are some good books published recently:

The DSM-5 in Perspective: Philosophical Reflections on the Psychiatric Babel [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U4JLKM4](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U4JLKM4)

Alternative Perspectives on Psychiatric Validation: DSM, IDC, RDOC, and Beyond [http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00Y355QZC/](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00Y355QZC/)

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's becoming increasingly taboo to suggest that depression and other mental disorders are not _diseases_ per se but may arise purely from the use of the mind. This in turns depends to some extent on a person's ideas and not solely (or even at all) on the presence of pathogens, tissue injuries, faulty genes, etc (though there may be medical consequences).

There could be important social reasons for this taboo. Perhaps it helps people suffering from disorders to get more practical help and sympathy (instead of righteous indignation, unemployment and ostracism).

However, without intellectual honesty there's less hope in the long term of finding solutions to these problems.

<comment><USER5> Well, it's complicated, because although you might get depressed to issues of the mind, once that switch has been flipped in your brain, then you do have a biologically-mediated disease and you're often totally fucked without some kind of medical intervention.

<comment><USER6> Everything in the mind is biologically mediated. That doesn't make every mind problem a disease.

<comment><USER7> Doesn't it? Replace the word "mind" with "body" and it seems like the very definition of disease.

<comment><USER6> By that argument, if you're grieving the loss of a loved one, deciding whether to marry, struggling to write a novel, or even fixing a bug in a computer program, you have a disease. All those presumably have some biochemical correlate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As someone who suffered from a major depressive episode that nearly cost me my life, I certainly acknowledge it as a serious disease no different than cancer.

But thinking of it purely in those terms implies that the development of depression can be attributed and therefore remedied by addressing chemical irregularities in the brain. I used to believe that. It put me under stress and fear that somehow, randomly, because of some defected biological mechanism, I would fall victim once again to another episode.

It took me years to finally understand that that's an oversimplification of a highly complex illness. The chemical irregularities that characterize depression are influenced more so by emotional stresses and the interaction of an individual within the social environment, than say, genetics (it can increase the probability of development, but it needs to be "activated" by the environment). I think the best way to approach depression would be to identify and understand the condition not in isolation, but contextually as a coping mechanism to the stresses surrounding us.

</comment><comment><USER9> Just like cancer is caused by environmental pollutants, depression is caused by toxic social environments. You learn to be helpless. Shine light there and research funding goes bye bye.

<comment><USER10> Wow. "depression is caused by toxic social environments." you have no idea how you just helped me there. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> By the way, chemotherapy can cause depression. It's not the "normal" depression associated with the realization that one has cancer, but a deeper depression with a separate cause. It seems people who undergo chemo lose the ability to create new neurons in the hippocampus. The hippocampus is the only place in the brain where new neurons are born throughout our life. Losing the ability to create these cells is causing depression.

</comment><comment><USER5> I disagree that "depression is as biological as cancer and heart disease" due to the fact of etiology. While it does spring up out of the blue in many cases, for the most part depression appears to be triggered by complex life circumstances. That is not say that it is not a real disease state with a discrete biological basis. It should just be kept in mind that often the most salient things involved in getting someone depressed and getting them out of depression are not biomedical.

It's possible that this is a mostly rhetorical statement by the NIMH head, but I've been disappointed the attitude I see a lot of researchers take towards depression, like it's solely the result of bad gene expression or bad brain connectivity.

</comment><comment><USER12> On the question of whether "mental illnesses" are diseases or simply arise from behaviour (as discussed in comments below).

My personal theory is that they are neither. Most mental illnesses are actually social illnesses. That is: we've engineered a society that is hostile to a set of (perfectly healthy) behavioural phenotypes.

It's already known that within different cultures and environments, those with certain "mental illnesses" fare better or worse.

Nobody with cancer "thrives" depending on their cultural environment, but if you're an engineer on the Autistic spectrum, you might. If you're an artist with ADHD, you thrive. Even schizophrenics do well in some cultural environments.

Force someone who was born bipolar, or with attention deficit in a society that demands them to sit in an office (or classroom) for 8-10 hours a day, every day, at the same time, and focus on the same thing, and sure... they will become "disordered". Just as most people would go crazy in the sort of fluid or even chaotic environment that those people would thrive in.

* * *

A Thought Experiment:

Imagine you were born into a world where the predominant behavioural phenotype is bipolar or ADHD: there are no set work hours, only goal posts. Teams work in frenzies of 24 - 36 sleepless hours, followed by a day or two off. Maybe one week there's no work, but then for a month it's crunch time. Some days you work nights, some days you work early in the morning. Everyone wears many hats, otherwise they'd become bored; and you're expected to do the same.

To everyone, this is just the way things are. To you... your stress levels are through the roof, you can't focus in such an environment, yet everyone is wondering what's this guy's problem? Why does he have such a hard time working in a fluid environment? Why does he need special treatment and be given evenly-distributed work at predictable hours?

Clearly there's some sort of disorder going on here. So you read some pamphlets and you see a Doctor... maybe there _is_ something wrong with you, you think. It's so natural for everyone else, yet you can barely function in society. Luckily for you, there is "help": the standard treatment for Rigid Thought Pattern Disorder is a 50mc dose of LSD every three days. Sure, it makes you not quite feel like yourself, but look at how much you've been improving since you started treatment! You no longer sleep regular hours like you used to, you're no longer displaying Rigid Thought Patterns. Just give the treatment some time and you'll get used to the side effects.

* * *

I have no science to back this up of course. Just something I think about sometimes at 3 in the morning while I'm having a particularly productive night...

(Yes it's likely that this would be a rather inefficient world in many ways, so it makes sense for the predominant behavioural phenotype to be more predictable and stable. The point being, in both cases the non-neurotypical individual can have a positive impact if they're not regarded as deficient, but if instead we see these differences in behaviour the same way we see differences in height, strength, or any other physical attribute.)

<comment><USER13> It is strange to me that you never mentioned how depression fits into your pet theory of mental illness. Can you enlighten us and explain in what type of cultural environment someone with depression thrives?

<comment><USER12> Is the depression inherent to the disorder, or is it caused by the unrelenting stress brought on by living in an environment that is actively hostile to this individual?

Either way, it's just something to consider based on personal observation/experience. It could be completely wrong, could be a bit of both. There's no harm in asking questions.

* * *

edit: to you comment below. I am suggesting that the depression itself (for example, in the case of a bipolar individual -- not in the case of major depression, which is a different thing altogether), could be a symptom not of a "disease" but rather a natural reaction to living in an environment that is toxic to him or her.

In such an environment, it is perfectly natural for this individual to lose all drive, feel "worthless", and even break down mentally.

The links between chronic stress and depression are well known. Robert Sapolsky has a great lecture on the biology of depression: [https://youtu.be/NOAgplgTxfc](https://youtu.be/NOAgplgTxfc)

(tl;dw: major depression physiologically looks very little like "sadness" and a hell of a lot like chronic stress (an over-active stress response) and does indeed fit the profile of a biological disease, often caused by early trauma.

My question here is: have we built societies that are inherently traumatizing to individuals with particular behavioral phenotypes? Looking elsewhere, at societies and subcultures where these "disorders" are not as common or as debilitating to me suggests that there is at least some truth to this.)

<comment><USER13> That is your description of a cultural environment where someone with depression thrives? It kind of seems like you dodged the question. I am interested to hear how someone can thrive when they cant manage to get out of bed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > The problem stems — yet again — from the disorder's fuzzy definition: > grouping everyone with a diagnosis of major depressive disorder into one > genetic study is like looking for the genetic risk factors for fever, > explains Flint. "You would have lumped together autoimmune disease, > infection, cancer and a whole set of different conditions."

This is quite the problem, yes.

But ultimately the perceived intractability and the root cause of the difficulty of investigating this phenomenon is the subjective nature of the reports of the symptoms. Clearly _something_ is up, we can see that from macro-behavioural patterns and cases of attempted suicide -- but these diagnostics are crude.

What is needed are robust bullet-proof objective diagnostics[1][2]. It's great that we've progressed beyond "humours" and "hysterics" and "demons" but compared to other areas of modern medical research we are practically in the stone ages as the article points out.

For instance: we could have genetic, bio-chemical, neuro-chemical, and/or neuro-wiring diagnostics. Any others? Until there is a comprehensive set of biological markers scientists are of course going to be reluctant to research this. It's unfortunate but I can't say I blame them.

And what if the majority of major depressive disorders turn out to be down to wiring? And what about the perfectly natural reactive depression one gets when someone close to you dies or when a relationship breaks up and you lose your partner and/or your kids. Are we now saying that we oughtn't feel this way? And what if the way we've structured society plays a large role in our individual well-being and wellness, what then? What if it turns out to be part of the human condition, as is perhaps the case with existential depression[3]?

Absolutely the best book I've read on depression and suicide is _Night Falls Fast_ [4] by Kay Redfield Jamision, a Johns Hopkins psychiatry professor. It's a few years old now but I don't think that the topics and themes in it will ever date even though the science in it might. It is filled with compassion, it strives for precision. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Welcome your thoughts on the matter.

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19396703](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19396703)

[2] [http://www.newsweek.com/first-blood-test-depression-holds- pr...](http://www.newsweek.com/first-blood-test-depression-holds-promise- objective-diagnosis-270951)

[3] [http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10554.aspx](http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10554.aspx)

[4] [https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/j/jamison- night.html](https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/j/jamison-night.html)

<comment><USER14> > Absolutely the best book I've read on depression and suicide is Night Falls > Fast ... I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Honest question: do you recommend the book to folks suffering from non-trivial depression? As in: is there some sort of "happy ending" within the precise facts it lays out? Asking for a friend...

<comment><USER3> Sorry for taking so long to reply. I didn't know how best to answer you.

I do recommend it but not it alone. The books points to scientific studies of depression. A constant theme is nature versus nurture but always from the perspective of scientific studies, twin studies, demographic studies. What makes this book different though is that it contains short biographies of people who have taken their own lives which grounds the surrounding discussion in the human element. It looks at the history and current practise of dealing with mental health issues and shows us the barbarity and futility of many of the practises. It debunks myths. It evaluates theories dispassionately while at the same time having compassion for the sufferer. It's a beautifully written book. There is no "happy ending". But that's not the point, the point is to gain a better understanding of this huge social and personal phenomenon.

Hope that helps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> > genetic studies have come up empty-handed

Perhaps we should focus more on data with a hereditary component (?) This would eliminate depressions that are really sadness caused by life events.

Also, I wonder if clustering techniques have been tried to the fullest in separating genetic data.</comment>


Harvey Weinstein Is My Monster Too - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/13/opinion/contributors/salma-hayek-harvey-weinstein.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> Curious about why this article went missing from the first few pages in a few minutes it took me to read it. Is it by design or intervention and if intervention then the rationale for it.

I found the article to be underscoring in detail the modus operandi of sexual harassment in the film industry (and workspaces in general) and adds a fair amount of interesting thoughts to my mind about the functioning of society and inherent oppression within.

<comment><USER3> I noticed the same thing. Right now it's near the top of the second page. But at 90 upvotes in less than an hour, it appears it should be solidly on the front page.

My educated guess: lots of downvotes pushing it down, a fact (more cruel perhaps than ironic) consistent with the points Salma Hayek is making in her article.

<comment><USER4> >My educated guess: lots of downvotes pushing it down, a fact (more cruel perhaps than ironic) consistent with the points Salma Hayek is making in her article.

You cannot downvote a submission, just comments.

<comment><USER5> IIRC, submission flags act like downvotes before reaching the threshold where the entry is killed, so this is essentially a distinction without a difference.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's now flagged as "[flagged]", so I guess we know the answer to this question.

Sigh. HN is so disappointing sometimes.

<comment><USER6> Yet incredibly predictable. I mean... are you surprised?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Guy seems to fit every characteristic of a psychopath. Glad he's finally been taken out of power and society.

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow. An incredibly frank and honest article from Salma.

It underscores that the problem in these situations for women isn't just assault - it's a sexualized power that has _expectations_.

It's disgusting and Weinstein should be rightly vilified for what he has done; let's not forget that he's a symptom of a larger societal problem however.

<comment><USER8> Weinstein's course of action is a personal choice and responsibility. It is absurd to infer or assert collective guilt, or to ascribe some sort of original/social sin to "society." What he did is his individual vice; it is simply not a "larger social problem." Any other man who raped or otherwise assaulted women is similarly responsible for his own actions, and should be punished accordingly.

<comment><USER9> His abuse was a personal decision, but it wasn't made in isolation. The behavior that Hayek described doesn't fit into the traditional model of sexual misconduct. He didn't physically force himself on her, instead he used his power to emotionally degrade and control her. And that's the point- the traditional model of abuse utterly fails to protect victims. There's a reason the word "complicit" is so popular right now; abusers rely on a support network to minimize and cover up their actions. This network begins with knowledgable persons who turn a blind eye (like Tarantino) but extends all the way out to those who victim-shame on social media. And the fact that so many women suffer sexual abuse and so few abusers are held accountable shows that it is absolutely a larger social problem. "Isolated incidents" that affect 1/6 of a population must be viewed systemically.

[https://www.rainn.org/sites/default/files/Out_Of_1000_Rapes%...](https://www.rainn.org/sites/default/files/Out_Of_1000_Rapes%20122016.png) [http://www.11thprincipleconsent.org/wp- content/uploads/2016/...](http://www.11thprincipleconsent.org/wp- content/uploads/2016/12/Rape-Culture-v4.png)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So much damage done to so many people in so many ways... ugh.

</comment><comment><USER11> Anyone who thinks, "a little nudity in a movie is harmless" needs to read this.

<comment><USER5> So, I read it, and it doesn't say anything to indicate that nudity (whether a little or a lot) in a movie is harmful, but that the particular nudity in this particular movie wasn't the product of the creators artistic vision but power plays by a funder, and that the harmful stemmed explocitly from the manipulative personal power dynamics, not the nudity.

<comment><USER11> Yes, this was probably a very isolated incident. Keep telling yourself that.

<comment><USER5> > Yes, this was probably a very isolated incident.

That's not the issue; the harm—and the article _explicitly_ says this—wasn't the "nudity in a movie". I'm sure this _isn 't_ an isolated incident, either for Wienstein or more generally.

But Hayek has done a fair amount of nude work for a mainstream actress, so when she explicitly points to the source of the problem and says it's _not_ the fact of doing nude work for a film, I wonder why your so desperate to recast it as being about nudity in film.

<comment><USER11> We are talking about _sexual_ harassment here. How could nudity not be the problem? The fact that nudity in film is common allowed Harvey the pretense to demand full-frontal nudity, "the senseless scene," as Hayek described it.

The point I'm trying to make, apparently too subtly, is, how many nude scenes were coerced just like Hayek describes the one in Frida in order to satisfy the lusts of the male director/producer/writer just like this? It doesn't seem far-fetched, with all the revelations of sexual harassment coming out, that it's a lot of them.

Maybe it's so many that we should simply not tolerate nudity in films. If there was some way to certify that the nude scene wasn't "forced" then it would be OK, but if we accept that this was an act of force on Weinstein's part (Salma could have chosen not to do the movie, yet we all seem to agree this was still evil on the part of Weinstein), then how could that certification ever be done?

<comment><USER5> > We are talking about sexual harassment here. How could nudity not be the > problem?

It was in large part retaliation for Hayek not acceding to Weinstein's demands for sexual favors offscreen. If nudity were categorically prohibited or simply commercially unviable in film, and instead of a "do this scene or no movie" threat Weinstein had simply canned the film in retaliation, or demanded some distasteful (whether or not itself sexual) offscreen favor to avoid such cancellation in retaliation, it would have been just as much of an act of sexual harassment.

The problem here has nothing to.do with nudity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What is the reason for this to be flagged ?

<comment><USER13> Since not everyone regularly submits to HN, I think reposting the link from the footer is relevant:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

"Hacker News Guidelines

What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Ideological or political battle or talking points. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

This isn't anything groundbreaking as Harvey was already exposed, this is just another data point.</comment></comment>


Titan Seas Reflect Sunlight - <AUTHOR> http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150202.html

<comment><USER2> Tangent: I was just watching the new Cosmos and it pointed out ice was the most reflective surface on earth and water the least. But sea ice is near the poles, where the sun's angle of incidence is shallow and water presumably becomes more reflective--how close is the sea's albedo to snow and ice at the poles on average (different seasons have different angles of incidence, waves probably have an effect, the sun isn't always shining directly but sometimes comes through (or reflects off the water back onto) clouds, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER3> I am curious if you could use multiple exposures to identify waves on the surface.

<comment><USER4> They did indeed detect what they believe to be waves from the sun-glint, from what I recall.

<comment><USER5> [http://www.space.com/25186-cassini-spies-titan- waves.html](http://www.space.com/25186-cassini-spies-titan-waves.html) \- "New observations from NASA's Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft show what appear to be glints of sunlight bouncing off a wind-rippled lake on the moon Titan." but cautions there may be other explanations.

[http://news.sciencemag.org/space/2014/12/spacecraft-spots- pr...](http://news.sciencemag.org/space/2014/12/spacecraft-spots-probable- waves-titan-s-seas) \- "Near the moon's north pole, there is growing evidence for waves on three different seas, ... In a handful of flybys of Titan in the past 6 months, Cassini scientists have seen signs of waves on three different seas: Kraken Mare, Ligeia Mare, and Punga Mare. ... Scientists involved in the discoveries have been cautious, saying that the features could also be floating debris or bubbles. At Kraken Mare, however, Cassini researchers detected a wavelike feature with both the spacecraft's radar and a mapping spectrometer. That double detection gives Alexander Hayes, a planetary scientist at Cornell, extra confidence."</comment></comment></comment>


Democrats propose new federal agency to fight back against tech privacy scandals - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/5/20950171/democrat-privacy-bill-data-agency-dpa-eshoo-lofgren <comment><USER2> I would like the article better if there was a link to the actual legislation. As is it seems a bit like fearmongering to say it is dense and over 100 pages like that is unusual or bad for laws.</comment>


Brain implants allow paralysed monkeys to walk - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/brain-implants-allow-paralysed-monkeys-to-walk-1.20967 <comment><USER2> _" For more than a decade, neuroscientist Grégoire Courtine has been flying every few months from his lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne to another lab in Beijing, China, where he conducts research on monkeys with the aim of treating spinal-cord injuries.

The commute is exhausting — on occasion he has even flown to Beijing, done experiments, and returned the same night. But it is worth it, says Courtine, because working with monkeys in China is less burdened by regulation than it is in Europe and the United States"_

I personally know researchers who have to take similar measures to be able to do their research.

When we are happy as a society to slaughter billions of animals every year for food (usually keeping them in appalling conditions beforehand) I don't understand how we can justify the restrictions we put on scientists.

<comment><USER3> I would assume it's because monkeys are more intelligent than the animals we tend to eat; cows, chickens, sheep & pigs.

Also, intentionally paralysing a creature, leaving it to live in that condition, and then performing experimental surgery/procedures on it is _significantly_ different than slaughtering it.

Whilst I appreciate the scientists mean well, and I do understand how this could benefit humanity; this sort of research still seems unethical to me, and at the very least makes me feel sick.

As a software developer and reverse engineer, this feels like hacking anyway. It's not particularly scientific just to "capture and replay" data without much understanding of how it works.

<comment><USER4> The intelligence argument is nonsense. Pigs are as intelligent as dogs. Describe the treatment of livestock (pigs, chickens, cows) but frame it as something that is happening to dogs and you'll drive hundreds of thousands of outraged meat eaters to signing a petition. The reason is cognitive dissonance, we're taught from the moment we can understand that it's okay to farm animals and very few people ever really think about the consequences of that. To be humane means "having or showing compassion or benevolence" which is about as far from how you can describe the treatment of livestock that you can get. To suggest that the the real problem with livestock farming is the slaughter demonstrates a clear misunderstanding of where the real problems lie, slaughter is one of the most humane parts of livestock farming.

Dairy cows spend more than half a decade being repeatedly raped and abused until they're slaughtered because their bodies have been destroyed by the milking process, and they spend that half a decade having their young snatched away from them over and over again. If having the emotional intelligence to mourn your stolen young isn't enough to justify ending the inhumane treatment then it's certainly not intelligence that humans care about.

If this research is unethical then learn about gestation crates, which immobilise pigs for months of their pregnancy.

<comment><USER5> In that case, why not start with human subjects?

<comment><USER6> Economic reasons? Humans are worth a lot more than monkeys. I know it's a cruel reason and hardly the only one.

<comment><USER7> Unfortunately not entirely true, depending on where you live.

Americans would be astounded to learn the usual settlements awarded for deaths due to traffic accidents (as an example I'm familiar with) in South America.

Payments of 25.000 dollars aren't uncommon. Colombia and Uruguay pay around U$ 150.000 per death. Heck, even first world countries like Spain can pay less than that.

So, an expensive monkey pet can be more expensive than a human.

[http://www.therichest.com/luxury/most-expensive/10-most- expe...](http://www.therichest.com/luxury/most-expensive/10-most-expensive- animals-in-the-world/)

[https://www.scoopwhoop.com/Most-Expensive- Pets/](https://www.scoopwhoop.com/Most-Expensive-Pets/)

(Spanish) [http://sociedad.elpais.com/sociedad/2014/04/08/actualidad/13...](http://sociedad.elpais.com/sociedad/2014/04/08/actualidad/1396983870_372201.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "The problem I see with this is that they implant monkey before paralysis and can use machine learning to build a model of the monkey's unique representation for walking. Then they paralyze and show the monkey's can adapt to only using their interface in 5 days. There's no way the mapping from neural activity to stimulation is generalizable..." [1]

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/5c2ljz/brain_impla...](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/5c2ljz/brain_implant_device_enables_paralyzed_monkeys/d9trzrr/)

<comment><USER9> I have a spinal condition called Syringomyelia, at the moment apart from neuropathic pain it doesn't effect my ability to walk but down the line it could (with complete paralysis been a possible outcome).

They could record the way my brain sends walk signals and if I end up paralysed they have the data to train the model.

There are multiple spinal conditions that result in paralysis _after_ not be been paralysed, not everyone who ends up in a wheelchair gets their by an accident.

<comment><USER10> I hadn't thought of that kind of application before. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We need to talk about animal experimentation regulation and protests here in europe. It has gone so far that scientists have literally given up their science: [http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/05/embattled-max- planck-...](http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/05/embattled-max-planck- neuroscientist-quits-primate-research)

</comment><comment><USER12> We have seen many such interfaces in recent years, but as I understand these techniques they all suffer the same problem. The body eventually coats the electrodes in a non-conductive layer, essentially scar tissue, and the whole thing grinds to a halt in a matter of weeks. Until that practical limitation is surmounted, it seems very wrong to treat animals in such a manner. Watching the paralyzed monkey (also the rat) struggle in obvious agony as the commentators cheered was not fun. This was not the sort of thing I had expected to see on a program clearly aimed at a general audience. This was the very dark side of animal testing.

I saw this story on a canadian news show a couple days ago, a show that regularly does spots on human exploration of Mars. The stories are similar. The headline feel-good story is about the shiny new mars habitat or spacesuit someone is testing, but they haven;t figured out how to actually get it to mars. The result is the false impression that the dreamed future, colonizing Mars and curing paralysis, is closer than is true.

<comment><USER13> Gliosis is a big problem for sure, and the central nervous system's scarring is not well understood at this time.

Typically with recording electrodes you can either 'jiggle' them to shake off the scarring cells or pass a small amount of current between the combined electrodes to kill off the cells. These recording electrodes are typically only a few microns apart, so long range damage is a non-issue if the subject is not connected to ground in another way. You can go for ~6 months like this before the gliosis really builds up, and honestly, by that time the recording electrode has probably broken anyway or the subject has bonked the implant and it broke that way too, or as is typically the case with monkey subjects, it tore out the implant and ate it, stabbed another monkey with it, or tried to have sex with it. Monkey studies are rare and hard, not just because of ethical issues, but because monkeys are clever little assholes.

<comment><USER12> The process of refreshing an electrode sounds tortuous for the subject. And your information re monkeys clawing out devices Jurassic Park-style is equally disturbing. This points to the conclusion that the efforts spent internalizing the system has less to do with benefit and more to do with preventing the animal from ending the agony.

But speaking of the electrodes, how long do they last in human subjects? Docs have been implanting various electrodes in human nerves/brains for decades and I assume a paralyzed person in a research study isn't going to rip them out. With enough current can the gliosis be overcome perpetually?

(lol, spellcheck went with 'parallelized' and 'gigolos'. That might say something about my normal writing subjects.)

<comment><USER13> Well, there are no pain neurons inside of the central nervous system, so they literally cannot feel anything when you record or 'clean' the tips of the electrodes. Besides, since electricity takes the least impediant path, the current can only flow locally, i.e. over the non-sensing scarring cells. There is not harm to the subject, only to the scar tissue.

Human electrodes can last a lifetime if they are properly done. Look at a pace-maker. They last decades. Granted they are not for individual neuron recordings, but they work great. The first deep brain stimulation patients are about 5 years old now and they seem to be doing fine as a whole, the Parkinson's disease symptoms are significantly lessened and their quality of life is very improved. It'll take more time and effort, but yeah, I think we can overcome the gliosis, though it is probably gong to be a drug interaction with the mechanical/electrical that will do it, not just electrical alone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I struggled with this while in graduate school studying neuroscience. Fortunately, I was studying crustaceans so there were not too many ethical issues. But there was rodent and monkey research happening in the school. I choose to return to my first profession - software. I assume that I'll be long dead before there are ethical issues with experimenting on AI.

Animal research is something that we as a society are going to struggle with for many years into the future. I would like to be able to argue that it is for the greater good of the planet, but I don't think that I could put up a good argument that we are being proper stewards of the planet.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is absolutely fantastic and its a great step in the right direction but we are still years if not decades away from being able to circumvent spinal lesions in humans.

One of the major problems with human spinal lesions is the loss of control of the trunk of the body (ie the core). Humans have dozens of muscle groups that control balance and posture through minute movements. Without fine grain control over these muscles balance is going to be extremely difficult.

<comment><USER16> >we are still years if not decades away from being able to circumvent spinal lesions in humans.

On the other hand it's quite possible that if you implanted the same equipment into humans right now that it could work with a bit of tweaking. It's kind of hard to say till someone tries it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm eager for the day to come when we can map an entire animal to a computer model -or even human-, so animals won't be necessary anymore for this kind of procedure. How many years away do you guys think we are from that dream?

<comment><USER18> That depends largely on whether you want to model mites or mammals.

We could probably make a computer model of tiny arthropods in 2017, if someone were willing to throw piles of money at the problem. A computer model of a human will be more difficult.

But also consider that an acceptably accurate model of the human brain would be an AI. You would still be experimenting on a person.

<comment><USER17> I'd definitely consider a fully emulated human brain another human, because by the premise that's fully emulated, it will also feel desires, and have survival instincts. That'd be another moral debate -similar to slavery-, because there will be people that would emphatize with them, and there will be others that will think they're just "machines".

But that's talk for another topic. On this case, you'd want to emulate only the physical functioning of our brain and body and not our minds.

<comment><USER18> The emulation program becomes the mind. You cannot avoid it. The natural consequence of the boot-up sequence for a real human brain is a human consciousness. If you create a precise and accurate model of a human brain in software, and emulate its physical functions, the emulation program contains the consciousness.

If you try something clever, like disconnecting all motor controls and sensory inputs, you now have a person who is blind, deaf, numb, anosmic, and paralyzed. The horror of that situation is compounded if you are emulating over a scanned copy of a cadaver's brain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Another reason why we need strong, unbreakable encryption. Can you imagine something like this getting hacked/cracked?

<comment><USER20> Stop kicking yourself. Stop kicking yourself. Stop kicking yourself...

<comment><USER21> or murdering someone...

<comment><USER22> Is this guerrilla marketing for Ghost in the Shell?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I cant help to feel sad for the monkey. I'm not sure this is the way research should be done. Why not try this on a smaller scale animal first before doing it on a monkey?

Also you don"t need to cut the spinal cord todo data analysis.

<comment><USER24> Do you also feel sad for the millions of animals that live in miserable conditions for months/years just to be eaten by us afterwards? This is arguably less of a torture to a much smaller number of animals, yet it is heavily regulated in most countries.

<comment><USER23> I have a lot of friends who are farmers. Those animals dont live in miserable conditions. And when they are killed, its in an instant. Heck i even feeded cows and pigs.

Its something different to experiment on a living animal.

However I do understand its important for research. However its a difficult subject.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Seems like a zombie scenario. Where dead bodies are controlled wirelessly through implants.

<comment><USER13> Haha, we are already there. Here's the instructions from 2014 via a 15 year old: [http://www.instructables.com/id/Control-a-Cockroach-With- Ard...](http://www.instructables.com/id/Control-a-Cockroach-With-Arduino-for- Under-30/)

<comment><USER26> Holy shit. That made me queer at the same time fascinated

<comment><USER13> Wait, _that_ made you homosexual? I'm going to assume that was a spellcheck or non-native speaking error...

<comment><USER27> Queer can also mean strange, and indeed that was a historical meaning for quite some time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is not going to work if you break your back more than once...</comment>


Offer HN: free design work. - <AUTHOR>

Inspired by http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1826828 I decided to see if HN would be open to the idea of a weekly "giveaway" for around 5 or so design hours [1]. And the idea seemed to go over well, so I've decided to do it.
The first one is today. Just comment with a link to your project/company. After around 24 hours I'll pick the post with the most upvotes and send them an email.
In return for the design hours, I'd love to write a blogpost with a before/after and about the overall process.
I think it'll be fun. :)
[1] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1827654 <comment><USER2> Africa Nutrition Society - <http://answeb.org/>

I'm doing pro-bono work for them to move their flat html to a CMS so the people running the organization can update news, events, calendar, etc. on their own without need for tech support, but am still just evaluating CMS's and hosts (probably gonna be Django-cms or Vosao on GAE for the amazing price point).

Their flat html site was designed by a company in UK, but is not as modern looking as it could be, and the information architecture is busy imho. They don't have all the content available for it yet either, but had to make it public for their annual African Nutritional Epidemiology conference in early October. It's also all table-based, and converting the non-tabular elements to div/span something I'd like to do, but getting it converted over to a CMS is a higher priority.

I've got my hands full getting the backend up and running and would love to have a review by a pro web designer. In addition to being able to blog about it, I'd be happy to include 'Design by Sahillavingia' at the bottom and introduce you (via email at least) to the organization principals.

<comment><AUTHOR> You "win." I'll be contacting you... now. :)

EDIT: I can't find an email address on your profile, could you email me (in prof.)? Thanks!

<comment><USER2> Great, thanks Sahil, added my email address to profile comments and just emailed you.

Thanks also to everyone who upvoted, much appreciated!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> <http://www.mymomjust.com> and <http://www.mydadjust.com>. Using hadoop/pig, I searched through my 620-million strong twitter archive for all tweets containing "My Mom/Dad Just....." The results are hilarious. It's just a single-page site and could be some low-hanging design fruit.

<comment><USER4> I think your site already looks quite good. Just clean up the about bar (remove underlines, vertical center text, add more space between each item)

<comment><USER3> um how? Dammit Jim I'm a data nerd, not a UI designer! This is why I threw my hat into the competition ;)

<comment><USER5> Like this? <http://kruisit.nl/projects/mymomjust.png>

I would also add a hover effect for the arrow and maybe some javascript to replace the page reload. Since this seems to be HN feelgood week: need a bit of help?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> <http://ihackernews.com> \- HackerNews for iPhone/Android/Mobile phones.

<comment><USER7> I love ihackernews.com, I just emailed you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> <http://fairtradeauckland.org/>

Fair trade is an industry that places emphasis on the producers of goods, rather than the distributors of them. A group of people in Auckland, New Zealand, are donating their time and resources to try and convert Auckland to be a fair trade city. With a population of over 1M people, this would make a significant difference to the lives of many producers in developing areas.

I've been managing social media and IT for the group, but we've yet to find a good design for our branding. The website above is a temporary page with some basic information, however as you can see it's nothing flash.

The entire project is coming from community efforts, so this would fit us perfectly, and if we're successful in our goal, many people around the world will benefit.

</comment><comment><USER9> Hey Sahil,

I'd very much like to take you up on your offer of doing design work but I would feel embarrassed to see you do it for free which means I can not enter in this round.

But if after you're done doing this really fantastically nice thing you feel you still have energy left over to do one more site and get paid for it then let me know, email in my profile.

greetings,

      Jacques

</comment><comment><USER10> <http://www.staticbuzz.com/> \- Implementation of Q&A site model, done in the Drupal cms. Bonus, if this is picked, I'll make your design into a theme and contribute it back to drupal.org where the ArrayShift install profile is still in need of a good default theme. (*Note: The is site is hardly used, but I've actually used it many times to showcase what Drupal can do)

</comment><comment><USER11> <http://mugasha.com> We make it really easy to listen to long DJ sets. Best place for listening to electronic dance music.

<comment><USER12> I have used you guys before, pretty good site, well designed. It would be cool to see more social integration with your site. I like hypem.com (for listening to music) because of its integration with for instance, last.fm. Really spurs for discussion and brings me back to the site to listen to music.

<comment><USER11> Hey, Thanks! We are working on improving the social component of Mugasha right now. Should be live in the next 2 weeks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> cool post :)

we just redesigned <http://www.easycalapp.com> \- a frustration-free booking calendar for solo entrepreneurs - but we need a sales page.

<comment><USER14> Quick thing to fix:

When the page loads in my browser (1366x768 resolution), it automatically scrolls me down the page a bit, enough so that I cannot see the EasyCal logo without scrolling back up.

This is because of the auto-focus on the email address text field under "Interested in using Easy Cal?". Maybe remove that and only apply it when "I want to try it!" is clicked?

<comment><USER13> good idea, i just fixed it, thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/park-in-the- shade/id391296993...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/park-in-the- shade/id391296993?mt=8)

It's a simple fun iphone app.

<comment><USER16> Neat idea!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> <http://remembersaurus.com> \- My recently launched webapp, and also my first attempt at making something look decent on the web.

<comment><USER18> Hey we're doing some really similar stuff at Quizlet.com (small startup but over 1 million registered users), let me know if you want to chat.

<http://quizlet.com/>

<comment><USER19> Very cool site. I can't remember the link, but I read a while back about a researcher who discovered that the optimum way to memorize using flash cards is if a learner who answers incorrectly is shown the correct answer and then asked again after a number of other questions just at the point where the correction is on the threshold of slipping out of his short term memory. This length of time has to be optimized for each learner by some sort of adaptive algorithm. Have you considered doing anything like that, or do you already?

<comment><USER18> You're talking about SRS (Spaced Repetition - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition_software>). We don't technically do SRS (yet -- although we're thinking about it).

But our "Learn" mode does keep track of what you know and what you don't know, and keeps asking you the terms you have trouble with until you know them all.

Hit me up by email if you have any more feedback for me - would love to keep improving the product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> CityReporter - <http://plus1lab.com/about-cityreporter>

It's a service for state and local governments to improve their customer service relationship with their citizens. It implements the Open311 GeoReport v2 API, meaning the data is open and Free.

We could really use a nice theme for the web administration interface! I have no idea if that fits within your 5 allotted hours though.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm looking to produce a few banner ads for our new startup: <http://www.happybuy.com/>

Would be interested in an outsiders thoughts on the best creative to express the idea of the site and have banner-ad viewers turn into active users.

My initial thought would be to simply have different banner ads highlighting a product along with its price graph. It quickly shows the utility of the site and how you can save money by knowing the best time to buy. Turning product info such as:

[http://www.happybuy.com/product/Apple-iPad-MB292LLA- Tablet-1...](http://www.happybuy.com/product/Apple-iPad-MB292LLA-Tablet-16GB- Wifi/amazon/B002C7481G)

into a mini-banner ad could provide some insight, more so than a simple brand focused ad.

</comment><comment><USER22> <http://peerlove.com> \- web based employee recognition

</comment><comment><USER23> Hello Sahil,

Excellent offer, I hope you have fun creating and blogging about the process.

I would like to suggest creating a logo for the Gramps project [1] (a Genealogy Program) which I just found a few days ago and in a reply to me one the developers mentioned that they have "No real official logo."[2] and from the looks of the project they could use a new wiki template[3].

Please consider upvoting to help improve the project.

[1] - <http://gramps-project.org/> [2] - <http://goo.gl/JDN1> [3] - <http://www.gramps-project.org/wiki>

<comment><USER24> I should replace myself with a bot that does this, but here's the real URL of [2]: [http://gramps.1791082.n4.nabble.com/Impressed-with-Gramps- an...](http://gramps.1791082.n4.nabble.com/Impressed-with-Gramps-and-some- Observations-td3008884.html#a3008884)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> <http://maziesoftware.com/>

Please help! I'm always hard on my own designs but I dont think my current one is good at all. My product is a meeting management web app.

</comment><comment><USER26> <http://www.getaquirk.com/> Ties your social network accounts (FB, Twitter, 4SQ) to a QR code. Scan to connect.

Main focus is on getting users past the home page to sign up for the service. What's there still doesn't do a good enough job convincing the users why they should sign up.

The next problem is getting users to actually connect through the service. Channeling users to download a scanner app and download their QR code is probably the next major step.

</comment><comment><USER27> Startup Weekend Atlanta (Start Atlanta)! We are planning the 3rd annual startup weekend in Atlanta. We have a base Wordpress site up, and need some graphic design help. The more pressing need is for a logo. The event will be held at the Georgia Tech ATDC in January 2011. Our team of 6 has no graphic design expertise, and we will otherwise have to pay for the design work out of sponsorship dollars. The upside for you is getting your design in front of Atlanta's entrepreneurship community. Sound like a win-win?

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm doing a project in which I live in a different neighborhood in New York City with different people every week. I guess I'd rather see this go to the Africa nutrition society but I'd love to improve the site and do some cool things with maps / linking to specific posts.

The site is on tumblr right now at <http://thenycnomad.tumblr.com>.

Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm building an HTML5 Video Player. I would be interested in a nice and custom carcass for it. (That is the buttons, progress bar, volume...)

</comment><comment><USER30> <http://ripplepay.com/> \- It's a monetary system that works in a peer-to-peer credit network rather than the hierarchical banking network. See <http://ripple-project.org/>.

It's been a project of mine for five years now, and I'm working on a rewrite and need a new design.

</comment><comment><USER31> <http://www.rhinoaccounting.com> \- Web based accounting software

</comment><comment><USER32> <http://www.agentshowroom.com>

It is a Facebook app that lets Realtors shows their listings. I have tried to make it presentable, but I usually end up doing tasks that are more fun and let the design suffer. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER33> <http://broker.mapthatpad.com> \- looking for advice on making this look more professional. Would also like to pay you for your work if interested in taking on this project. Hit me up via email.

</comment><comment><USER34> <http://tambramsham.appspot.com/> A Geography Quiz app! The maps are from the CIA Factbook and there are some countries no one is ever heard of :)

</comment><comment><USER35> I asked for some feedback here for my site: <http://www.mcsquare.me> , the main concern was about design and the ads, maybe you could take a look.

</comment><comment><USER36> <http://www.SpellingThing.com/> \- Web based spelling practice app. I'm clearly not a designer and would love some help.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm writing a new todo application that runs and syncs on ALL platforms: Fin.

<http://kennethreitz.com>

</comment><comment><USER38> SafeB4Sorry - <http://www.safeb4sorry.com>

Any thoughts? We are a Life Insurance Agency!

</comment><comment><USER39> <http://www.ampnote.com/> \- Guitars and Gear, Mostly Text

</comment><comment><USER40> Http://Like.fm - you don't have to design it, just advice on how it can make it look better. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER41> <http://tekbob.com/join/default>

:)

</comment><comment><USER42> <http://isshort.com>

</comment><comment><USER43> I'm struggling to design a decent toolbar location for an RPG Maker type website.

Here's a snapshot: [http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Vtq6sCdzyKs/TMUub_v3L9I/AAAAAAAAAG...](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Vtq6sCdzyKs/TMUub_v3L9I/AAAAAAAAAG4/MvKs9JNXXjg/s1600/map_editor_2.png)

</comment><comment><USER44> I work in sustainable fashion. We have a designer, but he is busy with other projects. I would love an infographic to help me put the facts on the fashion industry and pollution/waste etc in an easy to read and visually interesting format for lay people.

<comment><USER45> Hi Klbarry,

there are a couple of option you might want to look at: 1) There are 2 books that have numerous stats like the one you probably looking for. One is "Travels of a t-shirt in the Global Economy" by Pietra Rivoli, the other is "Sustainable Fashion and Textiles" by Kate Fletcher.

2) I've written a blog post some time back for which I've researched data that you probably just could pop into a info graphic to make it visual. Here's the link: [http://shirahime.ch/2010/03/wardrobe-undressed-why-the- fashi...](http://shirahime.ch/2010/03/wardrobe-undressed-why-the-fashion- industry-needs-to-change/)

Under the same blog you'll find also book reviews of the two aforementioned books if you need a in more depth idea of what they offer.

Cheers, Pamela \--- <http://shirahime.ch>

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> <http://cineight.com>

App is working fine. Need help in making it look good

</comment><comment><USER47> Pick this one.</comment>


Mimosa – A lightning-fast build tool for modern web development - <AUTHOR> http://mimosa.io/index.html <comment><USER2> Ignoring all other positives, I love how easy the install/setup is.</comment>


Where We're Going With LXD - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2014/11/where-were-going-with-lxd.html <comment><USER2> As the famous misquoted saying goes, build it and they will come. Since the quote is always out of context, allow me to add, brag about it, and they will laugh. This is vaporware. This, whatever this is (more on that below), will not be ready in six months, and when _something_ will be demoed in some future, we will all laugh at how it neither does all the grandiose promised bag of features, but whatever little it does, it does badly.

Hasn't Canonical learned not to overpromise and underdeliver? Examples are multiple, Juju, the Ubuntu Phone, etc.

Oh, and speaking about Juju and what Canonical hasn't learned, it appears it still hasn't learned that when it announces something, it has to explain in clear terms what it does. In the same vein that "Juju is DevOps distilled", LXD is everything and nothing. It's a hypervisor, but it's not really a hypervisor. Now I did my own research, and after heroic effort I think I understand what this supposedly is. Mind you, I am not sure, but here goes nothing.

LXD is tooling over Linux namespaces, cgroups and associated technology that uses CRIU, or something like CRIU (is CRIU even production-ready?) that manages containers, and can move containers between different hosts.

Now this is one phrase that I think everyone understands. Instead of this we got vague statements evoking delusions of grandeur, unwarranted comparisons to virtual machine, inappropriately and misleadingly using the word hypervisor, and mentions of Ceph and OpenStack. And we still haven't learned what the supposed hardware-integration is. They say they can't say because of contractual obligation. That sounds lame, but whatever, if they can't tell us what it is, why mention it at all? To check a buzzword from the list of used buzzwords?

Now what is the purpose of this thing? I genuinely don't know. What's wrong with docker? Docker can't move containers. Surely that can be solved (IFF it can be solved) easier than creating all this contraption from scratch. Docker is supposed to run processes while they seem to want to run full Linux distributions. Is that it? I don't know. Why do they even want to run full Linux distribution? We don't know. It might have something to do with the fact that this is what Juju expects. It might not, who knows.

I'll stop speculating here because we have very little to work with.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious to know about why you say that Juju overpromised and underdelivered. I definitely agree that the marketing of the technology detracts from making it clear what the technology does, but Juju is still pretty cool. Perhaps you're thinking of MAAS (which is basically unusable)?

<comment><USER2> No, I mean Juju. Juju overpromised that it will be ready years ago. It wasn't. Then it overpromised that the Go rewrite will only take a short while and that it will be production ready in a very short time. I would not call Juju production ready today, after all these years. Juju overpromised total independence from the underlying provider; EC2, MASS, OpenStack, LCX, etc. In reality the one that sucks less is EC2, and the difference from the others is pretty massive.

Juju overpromised that it will change the way people build infrastructure. It changed nothing. Sure, the reason for that is a very complex phenomenon that's not only technical, but social and political as well. But that's kind of my point. Juju promised things it couldn't ever have a direct influence over.

<comment><USER4> I'm curious, when's the last time you used Juju?

Juju has first class support for Azure, Joyent, HP, MAAS, and whatever Openstack you want, in addition to EC2. They're all at feature parity (plus or minus some pretty minor stuff).

There are a lot of features still to be added, for sure... but calling it not production ready is disingenuous, IMO.

<comment><USER5> Spoken like a Juju developer. The list of problems with Juju is not short, but the primary two are whatever is the opposite of synergistic: you are completely locked into ubuntu for every step, and the support available from canonical is utterly unacceptable. In this space, "the code is there" is step 1, and it took Juju an awfully long time to get there. Step 2 is "the system is sustainable" and that's currently where Juju falls over.

<comment><USER4> As for the Ubuntu lock-in: we actually are going to be announcing support for deploying to Windows very soon (the code is all there now, we just need to work through some issues with the public clouds and Microsoft). And we're actively working on support for other linuxes (yes, including some in the redhat family), which will land in the next few months.

I'm sorry you've had trouble with support. I would love to hear what problems you've seen, and how you think we can do better in that regard. The Juju team is still pretty small, so it can be difficult for us to cover all the places where people might want help, but we generally try to give the best support we can, when given the opportunity.

I'm not sure what you mean about the system not being sustainable, if you could explain, that would be helpful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Perhaps you might read a bit about CPU VT extensions, No Execute Bits, and > similar hardware security technologies. Use your imagination a bit, and you > can probably converge on a few key concepts that will significantly extend > the usefulness of Linux Containers.

This is the most interesting part. Anyone want to guess? I'm having a hard time - from a hardware perspective contained processes are currently no different from any other processes, taking advantage of the standard user/kernel divide that hardware has supported for decades; they're merely namespaced differently by the kernel. How do you inject hardware into that?

<comment><USER7> I was going to guess they were using the improved support for things like shadow pagetables to help with live migration - but I'm not sure why they couldn't just do that with the existing user/kernel divide, as you say.

Another possibility that occurs to me is that you might use the VT-d device- side stuff to provide some restricted directed access to containers (as you can for full VMs). I'm struggling to think of a device where that would be a significant improvement on what was already available, though...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Intel SGX: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8425178](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8425178)

</comment><comment><USER9> I've spent a lot of time looking at this area in a cross-platform way (ie. distribution-neutral, even OS-neutral, even 'service code execution environment might be a language VM instead of an OS' type ways / smacks of erlang, clojure or embedded development). Ubuntu contributions may be interesting but there's a few things in this statement that stuck out to me:

(1) Serge Hallyn moved to Ubuntu a fair while back. He was one of the two original LXC developers. We were in touch about 2009/2010, before he moved. The kernel features were IIRC originally funded by IBM with a view towards more efficient allocation of resources on their mega-scale platforms, but apparently failed to get adequate traction against the rest of industry which is parallelizing on commodity hardware.

(2) CRIU's DOOM demo is a loaded one. Moving containers around is very cute, and has definite appeal to less technical management who perceive it as adding flexibility, however the real tradeoff here is random weirdness across your application or service's execution (from probably-OK latency spikes to probably-not network stream accounting interruptions on third-party devices and associated layer 2 and 3 security hiccups) for assumed portability. These days, that's a crutch, albeit a useful one - particularly for very specific cases such legacy applications you can't rewrite requiring very high uptime - but not something to use if you can avoid it. Removing the monolithic assumptions in your service and incorporating node-failure and a distributed execution model is generally a _much_ better idea... cheaper hardware, lower blood pressure, lower TCO, higher uptime.

(3) _Our primary design goal with LXD, is to extend containers into process based systems that behave like virtual machines._ What does that actually mean? For one, workflow considerations are not at the fore. It also means hybrid paravirt/container or hybrid third-party-cloud/local infrastructures are still going to need another management layer to abstract the various portions of infrastructure in to a common interface (as will services relying in whole or in part on non-Linux OSs or execution environments). These are a big part of the infrastructure and process challenge in many/most modern environments. As far as the 'extending' part goes, mostly LXC already offers everything, though the plethora of paradigms available for security, storage, resource allocation and QoS represent a relatively imposing research and execution challenge to even the most hardened Linux users: there's some ease of use work to be done, but how to achieve the same without sacrificing flexibility?

(4) _our customers are, in fact, asking us for complete operating systems that boot and function within a Linux Container 's execution space, natively [...] Ubuntu boots_ unmodified _in Linux Containers today_. That's the very easiest thing to achieve and has in fact been considered the 'lazy way' of using containers rather than writing custom applications with carefully crafted chroots and minimalistic dynamically-linked library dependency trees, refining custom kernel security toolkit policies for your application to back up carefully considered capability restrictions for the container, network namespaces with additional restrictions, custom cgroup-based multi-subsystem resource caps, etc. The fact that some distros assume they in full control of the hardware during their init process is largely resolved these days ... and I'd wager with very little to no thanks to LXD, except perhaps internal lobbying within Ubuntu.

(5) "Cloud Solutions Product Manager" version: _LXD is a whole new semantic_ ... meaningless. Coder version from [https://github.com/lxc/lxd](https://github.com/lxc/lxd) : "a REST API, command line tool and OpenStack plugin based on liblxc". 'Nuff said.

</comment><comment><USER10> The link in the submission no longer exists. Perhaps the blog author changed the link title after the HN surge? New link seems to be: [http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2014/11/where-were-going- with...](http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2014/11/where-were-going-with- lxd.html)

Can a please moderator change the link, or mark this as a dead submission?

<comment><USER11> Yes. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Terminal.com also already has fast containers that you use as virtual machines that people use in production (disclaimer: I'm a founder)

<comment><USER13> How are those twitter ads working out?

<comment><USER14> Why the hate? I've never heard of terminal.com...

<comment><USER13> I see... a lot of ads for it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>