Vegetarian diets are not going to save the planet - <AUTHOR> https://shift.newco.co/vegetarian-diets-are-not-going-to-save-the-planet-4f50d0c1f8cf <comment><USER3> TL;DR: Terrible article, I suggest not waste your time on it.

Why?

* Author writes """it's more accurate to say that vegetarian diets are "less awful," not "better," than omnivorous diets""". He gives no hard numbers to back it up. Less awful IS OBVIOUSLY the same as better. According to many sources, that are well presented in the Cowspiracy documentary (among others) it is shown that a vegetarian diet, and specially a vegan diet, is A LOT less awful then an omni diet both environmentally, ethically and considering health impact.

* He argues vegetarians eat more staples. And that they are usually grown as mono crops, thus bad for the environment. He forgets that animals slaughtered for meat have been eating staples all their lives. A large part of the staples are grown for life stock; this makes meat so inefficient in the first place. The author is seems to know that it is also grown for life stock, but then continues that vegetarians are responsible for the monocrop disaster. Clearly misguided he is.

* Showing pictures of hippies to re-enforce the idea that vegetarians/vegans are some treehugging margin group. Whoever lives in a cosmopolitan city knows this is not true, or not anymore.

What I do agree on: eat with the seasons. But simple economics of "eat what is cheap" should help with that. It is that supermarkets choose to put the "high price" on produce all year long, except for a discount crop maybe. This is because produce does not pull customers.

What pulls customers? Cheap meat, and cheap beer. That's why there's always some meat on offer that costs less per kilo then bell peppers in the supermarkets near where I live.

If we want to save the planet from the rather imminent "mass extinction" (lets not call it "global warming" that sound waaay to nice), we should not optimize for consumerism but for sustainability. And meat eating is simply not sustainable.

<comment><USER4> > According to many sources, that are well presented in the Cowspiracy > documentary (among others) it is shown that a vegetarian diet, and specially > a vegan diet, is A LOT less awful then an omni diet both environmentally, > ethically and considering health impact.

Just a quick note: The "Cowspiracy" movie unfortunately presents its case by cherry picking scientific evidence and presenting much higher numbers than what is reasonable. Wikipedia has something about it: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowspiracy#Criticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowspiracy#Criticism)

I recently saw that movie. Basically what the movie maker did was taking the highest number he could find and repeating it over and over again.

This is unfortunate, because the overall message is still very much true: Meat production causes a lot of greenhouse gas emissions and cutting them is a great opportunity. And NGOs are very reluctant to talk about it.

<comment><USER5> 51% of CO2 emissions is just a number that was repeated.

there's also dead oceans by 2048 which is the most pessimistic estimate.

but some numbers are fine.

the amount of land that is used for livestock is incomparable. water pollution, dead ocean zones, all caused by animal agriculture.

the amount of environmental destruction and pollution is incomparable. more than 90% of destroyed Amazon rainforest was for the sole reason of raising more livestock.

yeah, CO2 equivalent footprint might not be 51% but the oil industry does less environmental damage than animal agriculture. highest CO2 footprint isn't even cars and transport but heating and cooling.

<comment><USER6> I believe it's 51% of the greenhouse effect, that include 20ish percent of co2 emission resulting from cattle + the effect of methane which is a much more powerfull green house gas than co2.

(now whether this number is 51% or something else is another debate)

<comment><USER7> 51% includes also respiration of cows, which should be net zero, because it is exactly the CO₂ that was captured by the plants before. (which is not okay to do)

Also 51% because equivalent calculations are not done over the span of 100 years, but shorter (methane becomes more dominant) and deforestation is also accounted for - (which is both fine).

So it is somewhere in between the results of renovated studies that say it is around 31% (e.g. Tukker et al) and the 51% worldwatch report.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't eat meat not to solve any sustainability problems. I don't eat meat because of how the meat industry is treating the animals and the nature (By the way, most soy and grain is produced to feat our animals). I can give you a lot of examples for the planned economized genocide on other races than humans. But people, like the author of this text, don't want to hear arguments or examples like that. They don't buy at the local market, they buy the cheapest meat at the supermarkets and care about their wallets more than they care about others. We totally lost the connection to the lives of the animals we eat. Additionally I don't eat meat because 80% of our antibiotics is produced to feat it to animals. Just Google MRSA and find out how much your government is doing about that issue. Some scientist, here in germany, call the resistance against antibiotics an equal threat to the mankind like nuclear weapons. This issue brings meat consumption and therefore the meat industry in a total different perspective.

<comment><USER9> That's not what this post is about (why people shouldn't eat meat). It's about the claim that vegetarian diets are better for the environment, which they are, but not to the extent that they'll solve our sustainable agriculture challenges. Please take your soapboxing to a place where it's on topic.

<comment><USER10> Please there is no call for being mean like this. I personally found this comment to be interesting and relevant. I also think it is relevant to the larger discussion of which this article is a part.

<comment><USER9> How is calling out people for highjacking discussions that are remotely about their personal convictions to preach about those convictions 'mean'? If anything, this site should police such behavior more - what we have now is half of the posts arguing a straw man because they see a keyword in the title and feel they need to defend their ideological positions. The OP is about how vegetarianism won't lead to sustainable food supply - and the GP answers 'you should become vegetarian because poor animals'. Fine, but in the context of this threat pure noise. Look, I'm not saying I can always restrain myself to stay on topic in every post I type; I'd be happy to have those posts summarily deleted too if that meant the signal to noise ratio in the comments would increase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure what to make out of such a text.

Basically what the text says is that plant-based food usually is less resource intense and thus better for the environment, but there are also other factors and plant-based food production isn't perfect. (Independent of the question whether all the other things he says are true.)

So the headline is obviously strictly true, but highly misleading. A more accurate one would be "Vegetarian diets are good for the planet, but they're not the whole solution".

<comment><USER11> Uh, no. That is not what the article says _at all_.

The text explicitly says that vegetarian diets are _not_ part of the solution. Either now, or under the system he proposes.

He's very clear that eating a fully vegetarian diet now is worse, footprint- wise, that eating a mildly omnivorous one.

He's also very clear that while eating a vegetarian diet under his proposed system would be just about possible, it is built around the assumption that most people will be eating meat, and that it would form a primary food source for the months of year when plant-based sources were scarce.

<comment><USER12> He's certainly trying to _suggest_ that vegetarianism is worse, but he doesn't back it up. In fact, his off-hand remark that "Most of these staple crops — especially corn and soy — wind up in animal feed" undermines this point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The article should be titled something more like 'Local, Seasonal Diets Are Going To Save The Planet'. It's not much about vegetarianism, except to attack it for clickbait reasons.

<comment><USER14> And a local, seasonal vegetarian diet is a lot easier to implement in a city environment than a local, seasonal omnivorous diet. So vegetarian is still likely to be a better option in the future, especially if you consider vat- grown meat to be a vegetable.

<comment><USER15> No, because with your vegetables you get lots of peels and seeds and remains that will be just great to feed a couple of hens for instance. Sustainable agriculture, even at a very small scale, always combines plants and animals.

That's the fundamental blind spot of vegans. Anyone actually growing some vegetables and fruits in his backyard will understand this. I know many starry-eyed hippies growing organic stuff in the countryside, and if many of them are vegetarians (eating dairy, eggs, etc but no meat) absolutely 0% of them are vegans because _it doesn 't make sense from a producer perspective_.

<comment><USER14> _Sustainable agriculture, even at a very small scale, always combines plants and animals._

Absolutely, and that's why I said vegetarian rather than vegan. Working animals for eggs, milk, wool, etc are a good idea. That's still not supporting an omnivorous diet though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> While I think the solutions presented in this article sound fantastic (in both senses of the word, unfortunately; it sounds way too ambitious to be realistic in the current political climate), the attack on vegetarianism is disingenuous.

As the article itself points out: "Most of these staple crops — especially corn and soy — wind up in animal feed". So that means that eating meat has the same devastating effect (but on a larger scale, because animals eat a lot) as its strawman vegetarian diet of wheat, corn, soy and rice.

Of course vegetarianism isn't magically going to solve all the world's problems, but _all other things being equal_ , eating less meat will reduce your ecological footprint. There's a lot more you can do, but eating less meat is an easy first step.

</comment><comment><USER16> Besides some flimsy claims about who consumes the most staples the article just basically says:

\- buy local

\- eat with the seasons

\- many small local farms are better than few big (remote)

\- there's need for a better market for those small farms

Is it just me not getting what this has to do with the cons of "vegetarian diets"? At least where I live eating meat isn't a sign for any of those points.

Although I'm a sarcastic person myself, this anti-hippie rhetoric is completely self-defeating. While I get the environmental and economic benefits of the "eat local" ideology, the consequences for our menu appear (at least to me) more hippie-like than not eating meat. But maybe this is just my opinion living in the North German Plain not wanting to eat rutabaga the whole winter.

<comment><USER17> As another person living in that region, rutabaga is not the only locally available crop - cauliflower, a whole variety of cabbages, corn lettuce (feldsalat), parsnips, and a bunch of other related plants are in season now, as are cultivated mushrooms. We mostly eat fresh stuff from the local farmer's market and it certainly doesn't feel hippie-like at all - it's just normal winter food.

As an aside, rutabaga has an awful reputation, which I feel is very much unjustified. It's by no means my favorite vegetable, but it certainly has its uses, and is lovely combined with say sweet potato in a mash. I understand it was the food of last resort for many in times of famine, but it's been two generations since the last time that was the case, and I think it's high time it was restored to the table as something more than a poor substitute.

<comment><USER16> I told you I'm a sarcastic person ;). I confess using the rutabaga example knowing its bad reputation for the sake of aggravation. Although I grew up in that region with food-conservative parents,[0] I'm still fan of occasional rutabaga mash or rutabaga gratinée - withstanding the lack of understanding from my flatmates.

[0] Means: regional/seasonal food not as ideology, but because it's the food one has eaten since childhood; or in other words: "What the farmer doesn't know he doesn't eat."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> >Most of these staple crops — especially corn and soy — wind up in animal feed and fuel;

Exactly. So why should eating less of the same food than is necessary to produce a substantially smaller amount of meat be discouraged? Using less resources overall is still better, right?

edit: formatting

<comment><USER19> Yeah this article is completely half-baked. If we had only grown enough of these staples to feed humans, it would require a whole lot less than growing enough to feed animals who feed humans. The author here is making it sound like there wouldn't be much difference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Most of the arguments are just an appeal to nature. Doesn't address cow burps as a major source of pollution. Seems to be making a food miles argument, when what matters is carbon per pound of food. Transporting by boat is highly efficient and a high percentage of the cargo is food. Driving to pick up your food from 3 farmer's markets can create more pollution than would be used to transport them from across the world, because the food is such a small percentage of the weight of your car.

</comment><comment><USER21> The title should really be "Vegetarian diets alone are not going to save the planet".

</comment><comment><USER22> > Unfortunately, most food plants in this country are grown in resource- > intensive systems that groan under the weight of a relentlessly demanding > global consumer,

Question: aren't 'local', small-scale farms _more_ resource-intensive per unit of food grown than factory farms, not less?

</comment><comment><USER23> I think it entirely depends on the timescale. I like to imagine a distant future where all food production is automated. Staples, vegetables, and fruits (and fresh water) would be available to everyone for free. People wouldn't eat meat because of the environment. People wouldn't grow up eating meat, so eating a cow would be just as repulsive as eating a cat or a dog. It wouldn't even be a temptation.

> They're so large, astronauts can see entire sections of the planet turn > brown and die every Spring as farmers nuke the soil's native biology to make > way for the artificially imposed order of the grain field.

I don't know what to make of "artificially imposed order of the grain field." People have been artificially imposing order on the earth for thousands of years. Granted, it's on a much bigger scale today. Still, how do you propose feeding the earth without any artificial order?

In this future world, all of the machinery will run on solar and wind power. We will grow genetically modified crops so that we only need to use a small amount of pesticides and fertilizers. And just like all plants, these crops will absorb a lot of carbon dioxide and release a lot of oxygen.

I mean, even if this is still bad for the environment, would there even be any room for improvement? The only thing I can think of is somehow reducing the human population. That's a prickly subject.

And we're going to really have to think about all of this before we defeat aging.

</comment><comment><USER7> Founder of Eaternity here. Putting facts to the issue, we have collected the largest database to calculate the CO₂ emissions for food - and it is freely available: www.eaternity.org

<comment><USER24> Cool project! Forwarded to people at oekom-research.com I know.

<comment><USER7> thank you

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The author should cite the article(s) that claim vegetarian diets alone will save the planet - this is clickbait/trolling. I'm a vegetarian and make no claim that being so is going to save the planet - it would help if we all were but it's definitely not a silver bullet.

</comment><comment><USER26> This article is long on assertions and devoid of facts. It is junk. To the author: post again when you can back up your statements.

</comment><comment><USER27> The author's agenda is showing.

</comment><comment><USER28> > Note: everything written from here on is from the "local" perspective of a > Virginian

Then why talk about the planet.

</comment><comment><USER29> I am still not convinced that _local_ anything is more eco/carbon friendly. Think the Law of Comparative Advantages - in certain areas my lunch will be way more eco/carbon friendly if I only spend the whole day producing guns instead of butter. Also I suspect that huge farms employing high end software, hardware and even weather prediction technology are more eco/carbon friendly than any local farmer can ever be.

</comment><comment><USER30> Quality of the article aside, local agriculture is usually worse environmentally due to its smaller size: [http://freakonomics.com/2011/11/14/the-inefficiency-of- local...](http://freakonomics.com/2011/11/14/the-inefficiency-of-local-food/)

</comment><comment><USER31> The author's very excited about urban gardens, but have we gotten anywhere close to cleaning up our cities well enough that we can grow food there without swallowing a bunch of lead in the process?

</comment><comment><USER32> This article reminds me of a previous one from a few months ago that talked about where the produce in Chinatown comes from (local, small growers rather than large industrial operations).

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11981063](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11981063)

</comment><comment><USER33> TL;DR: Try Vegan/Vegetarian diets and buy local to have the best sustainable diet. Also, bring your own hand-knitted bags to buy food at the farmers market.

</comment><comment><USER34> i was in NYC for work during the holidays, etsy had a pop up exchange in Chelsea market and it was absolutely nuts. After seeing it, the need to create a food market to connect, and incentivize, local producers and consumers was obviously apparent.

I think garden tech is a wide open space with room for even small application of tech mentality to have a huge impact on yield

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm the author. Ho boy. Just a few clarifications based on things I'm seeing here:

"a vegetarian diet, and specially a vegan diet, is A LOT less awful then an omni diet both environmentally, ethically and considering health impact."

I agree. Nowhere did I contradict this.

"He argues vegetarians eat more staples."

No, I argue that the most vegetarian diets are composed primarily of staples. Subtle but extremely important distinction.

"Showing pictures of hippies to re-enforce the idea that vegetarians/vegans are some treehugging margin group."

I dug my own grave here. Had no idea this article would go viral. Oops.

"meat eating is simply not sustainable"

Correct; CAFO industrial meat that's eaten without an ear toward seasonality or ecological propriety is pure hell. However, sustainable food production systems will rely on modeling natural patterns (which is the opposite of what nearly all farms today do), and that will rely heavily on animals - <USER2> far, far, FAR fewer of them - for mineral cycling and fertility, as do nearly all native ecosystems. I don't have the space here to talk about fertility via animals vs nitrogenous covers; may address that in a later article.

"Cowspiracy"

This movie is directed at the industrial meat supply chain: the land-expansive background farms that feed CAFOs and the CAFOs themselves. I advocate for neither.

"The author is also playing the false dichotomy vegetarian <-> omnivorous"

There is an entire paragraph in my article where I explain that not all vegetarian diets, and not all omnivorous diets, are created equal.

"Had the author consulted the literature, he'd know that the environmental credentials of grass-fed beef are extremely suspect; some studies suggest that the carbon footprint is actually greater than intensive feedlot beef and the land use is absolutely vast. He'd know that only a handful of animal sources of protein have equivalent CO2 emissions to plant sources - intensively reared poultry, eggs and some inshore seafoods."

The increased carbon footprint of grass-finished beef is based on grass finished beef living longer than grain finished beef because they take longer to finish. The studies I've seen regarding grass/grain cattle emissions are limited to examination of lifetime carbon output directly from the cow through expiration. They do not examine 1.) the sequestration of carbon into soil built by ecologically managed, rotationally-grazed herds, 2.) the carbon output of CAFO manure lagoons, 3.) the carbon footprint of the grains fed to CAFO animals. In short, the studies do not address the net carbon effect of the entire system, and they only address the two "traditional" methods of raising cattle, neither of which I endorse.

"He's very clear that eating a fully vegetarian diet now is worse, footprint- wise, that eating a mildly omnivorous one."

Not quite. I said it's POSSIBLE for a fully vegetarian diet to be worse, footprint wise, than a plant-centric omnivorous one. I.e. there is no deterministic link between vegetarian diets and sustainability.

"Besides some flimsy claims about who consumes the most staples"

Again, I make no claims about who eats the most staples. I make a claim that the most vegetarian diets are principally composed of staples.

"It's not much about vegetarianism, except to attack it for clickbait reasons."

Absolutely correct. I had to choose between an accurate title that almost no one would read, or a caustic one that would stimulate debate and get me yelled at. And so here we are :-)

"The author should cite the article(s) that claim vegetarian diets alone will save the planet"

As stated in the first sentence, this article was prompted by a slew of responses from vegetarians to my previous article about organic agriculture, nearly all of whom argued that the "simple" solution to food sustainability was to switch to a vegetarian diet.

"Question: aren't 'local', small-scale farms more resource-intensive per unit of food grown than factory farms, not less?"

Yes. However, I'm advocating a form of agriculture that doesn't exist yet.

</comment><comment><USER36> > On the east coast, the solution is large numbers of smaller (50–500 acres) > cultivated food forests surrounding our urban centers, forming the backbone > of a production system augmented by urban gardens growing on nearly every > rooftop, balcony, vacant lot, road median, yard, public park, and empty > warehouse floor. The solution involves brick & mortar markets and food hubs > being supplanted by producer/consumer exchanges* that allow computers to > handle the aggregating without obscuring the relationship between grower and > eater.

I am suspicious of this - especially the part about rooftop gardens. I remember someone telling me that small gardens are quite carbon intensive because they don't get the economies of scale that large farm operations do. Can anyone confirm that? Do permaculture farms get economies of scale?

The true solution is very, very simple. A crippling carbon tax. It needs to be large enough that it becomes unprofitable to have tomatoes in winter, and for food to travel long distances.* We don't necessarily need to buy directly from directly from producers if middlemen supermarkets can transport food efficiently.

Perhaps such a heavy carbon tax would force supermarket chains to downsize and source more food locally and in season, but the real optimisations would come from the things we haven't thought of yet. Every business would be looking to for ways to cut their carbon costs, necessity is the mother of invention of course. This would require a huge restructuring of the world economy. That's possible, just a hard sell - think how much the world economy changed during WW2.

I've been in a pretty apocalyptic kind of mood lately (feeling my vibe? F#A#∞ is a great album to day dream this stuff to.). Melting permafrost in Siberia and Alaska will cause a a vicious circle of carbon being released, further warming temperatures. Political action is the only thing that can stop climate change and with the way Trumps first week has gone, my hopes for that are the bleakest they've ever been. Are we past the tipping point? I'm kind of wondering if we should just give up and use the rest of our oil to move people away from coastal areas. Perhaps militarisation of national borders is the logical thing to do to prepare for waves of climate refugees that can't be supported (that's a very, very sad thought). Will starving nations resort to nuclear war? What do people here think?

* Worried about how the poor would handle such a rise in food costs? You should be. I imagine the bulk of the tax would need to be transferred to the poor, as they spend the largest proportion of the income on basic necessities caused by a heavy carbon tax. On a global scale, a heavy carbon tax would need to result in large transfers from the developed nations to the underdeveloped. A political pipe dream...

</comment><comment><USER37> The vegan nonsensealists perhaps should consider the role of hunting and animal husbandry in the ability of humans to inhabit northern and semidesert regions of the planet and to sustain a population. It is also good idea to read about the causes of malnutrition in poor communities.

<comment><USER38> With 54% [1] of the world's population in urban areas already (rising to over 70% in the developed world) [1] that "role of hunting and animal husbandry in ... regions of the planet" is becoming an ever increasing rarity. By 2050 the 54% is expected to rise to 66% [2] so I doubt there will be many hunter gatherers left anywhere.

Here in 'the North' at longitude 10.757933 people only hunt for sport. Although they make the claim of culling for environmental reasons I have yet to see any elk or red deer without venturing deep into the forest on foot (so I'm calling BS).

>the causes of malnutrition in poor communities.

Obvious response would be to eradicate yet more rain-forest and open a McDonalds in all those poor countries. /s Malnutrition in poor communities (and I'm not sure to where you refer with that vague choice of phrase) is likely caused by factors that control diet, and not by diet in and of itself. In other words, it's the poverty itself causing malnutrition, not a lack of meat or forced vegetarianism.

1\. [http://www.prb.org/Publications/Lesson- Plans/HumanPopulation...](http://www.prb.org/Publications/Lesson- Plans/HumanPopulation/Urbanization.aspx)

2\. [http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/news/population/world-...](http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/news/population/world- urbanization-prospects-2014.html)

<comment><USER37> That was a hint on the cause - why this evolutionary adaptation would emerge in the first place.

For everything else - think what would happen in any urban area if a few poultry farms would close for a month. India is one single example of mostly vegetarian traditionalist population, but even in India in the tribes populated north and north-west regions vegetarian diet cannot sustain a population.

Bonus question: how do you imagine a vegetarian Pakistan or any other middle east country?

Do not bother to answer here.</comment></comment></comment>


Indian Aadhaar biometric IDs 'not mandatory for tax returns yet' - happy-go-lucky http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-40213566 <comment><AUTHOR> Not true. The Machiavellian Finance Minister has taken out spots in newspapers saying they are not mandatory for PAN cards - the cards which previously would've become invalid won't be anymore. They remain mandatory for filing returns; instead of linking the PAN card, you now have to mention the number while filing. The loophole continues to be molested.

Nothing new here. The supreme court has kept parroting the line ~5-6 times. They have neither the will nor the integrity to keep the executive to its word.

</comment><comment> awinter-py I think the laconic reply to this is: 'yet'

</comment><comment><USER2> The best way for the USA to fight terrorism and crime in the USA is to have biometric IDs with unique USA citizenship ID number. Also everybody must inform its home address to the state.

<comment><USER3> That's a good start. Also need a DNA sample from everyone and constant record of movements/conversations. Maybe full 24-7 video feed also if storage gets cheap enough. Constantly uploading biofeedback data maybe also? The government should ideally know when anyone gets excited or angry to prevent possible problems. That way we can finally stop terrorism for good!</s>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> National IDs run by governments are problematic for a variety of reasons. It would make more sense for one or more global nonprofit(s) with significant privacy, InfoSec and document security talent to offer an opt-in, open-source, voluntary "card" which can be deployed, maintained and improved to verify, nonrepudiate and generate a physical/electronic card for a given individual. This way, corporate interests and govt waste/incompetence can be mostly mitigated. Also useful would be the ability to grant/revoke rights to personal information in a single place and to load authoritative information onto a "card" (nationality, status, health records, etc.), perhaps backed by blockchain technology. Card being a physical token into an API that a consumer must have authorization and authentication to access.

<comment><USER5> The biggest problem is the centralizing of biometric data.

That's not only slower but a treasure trove once it is hacked.

An Opt-in as you're suggesting would be a positive move - even more so would be a decentralized biometric tokenization approach.

Device side biometrics that don't leave the user's device.</comment></comment>


Contracting For Equity? Get a Lawyer - <AUTHOR> https://grouptalent.com/blog/contract-work-for-equity-bad

<comment><USER2> I would think that the moment you're offered 40% of a company, your first thought would be "this guy clearly doesn't believe in this company himself, or else he'd never offer me that much of his company". There are so many options available, be it leaving no stone unturned to find some additional cash (bank loans, borrowing from family, cashing investments, etc), or offering a non- equity profit sharing arrangement, that there's really no excuse for giving up large chunks of equity until you're receiving serious capital in return. This just sounds like a stupid deal to offer, and a worse one to take.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe, but when you're being offered such a large chunk of equity I think folks tend to think of it more like a partnership. I mean 60% and 40% are relatively equal and generally on par with the kind of split many serial entrepreneurs think there ought to exist, whether you agree with that or not.

Well finding technically skilled people who are available and willing to work on your project isn't exactly easy. He may have embraced that a little sooner than other entrepreneurs and decided to go for something juicy enough that he could make headway.

<comment><USER2> Well, that's kind of the point, isn't it? As a non-technical business founder myself, I just can't understand what that guy possibly would have been thinking. I'd never give up that much of my company unless the other party was coming on board as full partner, meaning they're also going to be sharing all the financial and legal risks (and yes, that means contributing money as well as time). If you value your company at all, 40% is a massive sum to pay someone unless they're sharing all the risks with you, not just spending some of their time. Just giving yourself a $1 million dollar valuation, that means paying someone $400,000 to handle just one element of your business...and you could probably get it done a lot cheaper if you just took the time to go through your options.

As for finding technically skilled people who are available and want to work, it's not easy, but nothing in business is easy. It's no harder than any other part of a business, it just requires persistence and knowing where to look (I should know, I've hired a bunch of them in the last 6 months). Taking a shortcut and throwing a bunch of equity at the problem just shows the kind of lack of foresight that should make you question whether you really want to work with that kind of person.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Being the Chief Tech at Conceivian (and having the best job of my life), I can tell you that working with startup founder's is a thoroughly enjoyable experience, and I'd do it again. There were tons of learnings, innovation and fun in the project Andrew mentioned and several others we have done. BUT nothing beats getting fully paid for the work done!!

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. Thanks again for sharing the story, I think it's super helpful to other folks to see where things break so they can either avoid common pitfalls, or avoid the topic altogether!</comment></comment>


Dear Marissa: Think Different - <AUTHOR> http://500hats.com/pink-is-the-new-purple <comment><USER2> As one of the few women on Hacker News, I'm going to come right out and say it: I think this is a _fantastic_ idea, and Marissa Mayer would do well to take it to heart.

Imagine if Yahoo made a serious bid for Pinterest, and then Marissa went really crazy and made their homepage into a Pinterest-like site. Not only would it cause a great sensational uproar in the press, but it would make Yahoo a serious contender again.

P.S. Not offended by the fact that Dave said "pink".

<comment><USER3> Yahoo acquiring Pinterest would definitely be interesting. I don't know though how affordable Pinterest would be.

<comment><USER4> Step 1: acquire Pinterest.

Step 2: add no new features to it for five years, but force users to create a yahoo account to use it.

Step 3: fire all the developers.

Step 4: ???

Step 5: profit.

Oh wait, that was Flickr.

<comment><USER5> Oh, I thought you meant Geocities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My favorite success story of marketing towards the under-served gender is Dyson.

Before Dyson vacuums were marketed to women exclusively. If you suggested marketing a vacuum to men before Dyson, you'd be laughed out of the boardroom. Dyson threw that all out the window and entered the market with a vacuum that actually looks like a sci-fi weapon, and to great success.

<comment><USER7> Says the guy with a username of the ship in the sci-fi movie _Alien_! (Just observing a humorous juxtaposition.)

Anyway, your point is noted. One of my favorite tweets ever was one by Amy Jane Gruber, to the effect of: Boys say "If we get a dog, I'll clean up after it," and men say, "If we get a Dyson, I'll vacuum!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "What if Marissa made it known that Yahoo would be the best tech company in the world for hiring women execs, putting women in leadership positions, and advancing the opportunities for women in the workplace (as Sheryl Sandberg is so well-known for promoting at Facebook)?"

Sounds discriminatory to me.

<comment><USER9> This presupposes that the industry-wide preference for male employees is _not_ discriminatory, which scarcely goes without saying.

<comment><USER10> You suppose that there is an "industry-wide preference for male employees".

Just like I suppose there is an "industry-wide preference for female employees" in K-6 education.

<comment><USER9> That there is a preference is a statistical fact; the controversial question is what is the cause for the preference.

Incidentally, even if we were to pretend to compare the industries of "technology" and "education of children between the ages of 6 and 12", your quip fails the test: A majority of teachers may be female, but there is no such majority among those in "leadership positions" (administrators, principals and superintendants).

<comment><USER11> I think I misunderstand what you mean by "preference".

Take as example a company where 90% of the programmer applicants are male. As I understand the word "preference", a resulting workforce of 90% males would indicate no preference one way or the other (assuming the men and women were equally skilled).

Further, a 91% male workforce would be evidence of a male preference, while an 89% male workforce evidence of a female preference.

Is that what you mean by "preference"?

<comment><USER9> Yeah, obviously a lot of people misunderstood that. I apologize for the confusion.

I was using "preference" in a more generic complex-systems-analysis sense. We begin with a potential workforce, at birth, of half men and half women. Over time, the further you go into the industry, you see more and more men and fewer and fewer women. The women are being rejected, the men are being selected for, this demonstrates a preference. Again, not imputing any consciousness here, it's just what the system is doing.

The claim we are asked to accept is that this reflects a something real and measurable, such as my transportation preference for cars over horses, rather than something subjective and arbitrary, such as my berry preference for blueberries over strawberries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Err, Yahoo is making less profit, but it's still making $1B profit on the bottom line last year. Why is everyone acting like it's on it's beyond redemption?

Sure, Yahoo and Microsoft are boring, but they're still profitable.

[http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/financials...](http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/financials/financials.asp?ticker=YHOO:US)

<comment><USER13> > Why is everyone acting like it's on it's beyond redemption?

Because the only things that get attention in SV are products with growth. Yahoo is a very profitable company and has billions in the bank, so it'll be around for a while, with or without a rebound.

<comment><USER14> Who cares about attention in the valley when you're netting $1B?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Just an FYI: two of Yahoo's stronger properties are Yahoo Sports and Yahoo Finance, both of whom haven't historically had a large female audience. The other properties that might attract a female audience haven't done as well.

That's not to say Yahoo can't sell these and purchase the properties Dave mentions, of course. It's just that Yahoo currently doesn't have a core strength in targeting women and would need to reach out a lot to build that competency.

<comment><USER16> I remember when I interned at Yahoo! several years ago, Yahoo! Shine, their women's lifestyle portal, had a fairly large audience. According to Alexa, it's still one of their larger web properties:

      mail.yahoo.com 48.76%
      login.yahoo.com 29.14%
      yahoo.com 24.39%
      search.yahoo.com 19.22%
      answers.yahoo.com 16.42%
      news.yahoo.com 15.16%
      sports.yahoo.com 6.35%
      finance.yahoo.com 6.25%
      omg.yahoo.com 5.86%
      my.yahoo.com 4.71%
      in.yahoo.com 4.67%
      tw.yahoo.com 3.39%
      docs.yahoo.com 2.78%
      movies.yahoo.com 2.75%
      shine.yahoo.com 2.59%

<comment><USER17> <http://omg.yahoo.com> is the more relevant "portal" from that list, and <http://answers.yahoo.com> is the kind of demographic very few of us HN users rub shoulders with.

<comment><USER15> Just for curiosity's sake, I looked up Quantcast's demographic metrics on Yahoo! Answers:

[http://www.quantcast.com/answers.yahoo.com#!demo&anchor=...](http://www.quantcast.com/answers.yahoo.com#!demo&anchor=panel- GENDER)

Female: 53%

Male: 47%

And interestingly, Yahoo.com's demographics are:

[http://www.quantcast.com/yahoo.com#!demo&anchor=panel- GE...](http://www.quantcast.com/yahoo.com#!demo&anchor=panel-GENDER)

Female: 52%

Male: 48%

Whereas Google is:

[http://www.quantcast.com/google.com#!demo&anchor=panel-G...](http://www.quantcast.com/google.com#!demo&anchor=panel- GENDER)

Female: 50%

Male: 50%

Looks like Yahoo does indeed have a slight skew towards a female audience. Dave may be on to something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Dave, just curious, did you properly capitalize and punctuate this or did Svbtle do that for you?

<comment><USER19> nope that was me, not svbtle. just occasional change of pace, maybe give the trolls less to blather on about (altho seems like i got plenty of shit for using too much pink).

personally, i think proper grammar is mostly a waste of time... as has happened previously, its use will be eroded by pop culture and mainstream behaviors rather quickly.

also, for some reason i think capitalizing the word 'I' is somehow king of arrogant. don't know why that is, but just seems that way to me.

<comment><USER20> On the spectrum of adherence to an arbitrary standard of Proper Written English (TM), there's counter-signaling, a great region of "You just can't write well", a region where one writes very well with errors, and then things bifurcate at the top where a) you write perfectly like the New York Times and this signals status or b) you use non-standard grammar, and that is OK, because you're a better writer than any English teacher and everyone knows it.

Just a bit of literary criticism here, take it or leave it: when I read the classic articles on your site, with the ransom-note formatting, the presentation often overwhelmed the content. I mean, anyone drawing _that_ much attention to their rejection of social norms must mean that to be the primary purpose of the performance. I often slogged through -- and it was a slog -- to get at the meaty arguments hidden somewhere in the pink/green/etc text.

I'm totally on-board with grammar being essentially arbitrary and fluid (this is a True Statement about material reality), but given that this is true, the Dave-maximizing approach is probably not to say "stufz da grammerz!!1" but rather to write well-enough-to-be-understood and not care about the occasional transgression or three.

(There are other writers who make the stylistic choice to be near-perfect paragons of English grammar -- that totally works, too. It communicates something a wee bit different, for example that one is really going for university professor levels of erudition, but that works for some people. PG's writing style, for example, causes me to pull out a dictionary if I see a spelling mistake because it means there is probably a word I haven't learned yet. On the other hand, I generally tend to aim for about a 98% on the mechanics of standard English, don't sweat the last 2% all that much, and frequently break the rules for comedic/dramatic/etc effect. It's much more noticeable when you aren't breaking the rules all of the time.)

This is entirely compatible with continuing the iconoclastic Dave McClure branding, because that branding is a consequence of thinking fairly radical thoughts and articulating them, rather than being entirely a consequence of the packaging of thoughts that are under the surface exactly the same as every other VC's.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Interesting thoughts. Creepy stalker collage!

</comment><comment><USER22> This is an interesting idea, but the title is dangerous. As has been pointed out a lot lately, making something "pink" doesn't mean you can sell it to women. :)

Edit: Just noticed that Gina Trapani helped forge the headline... It's probably OK ;)

<comment><USER23> I don't think that Dave was going for a literal interpretation.

<comment><USER22> You're probably right, but it worries me a bit after Nokia sent women tech journalists a box with pink lipstick as part of an ad campaign for the pink Lumia 900. As well as all of this: [http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/03/does-this- smartphone-...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/03/does-this-smartphone- make-me-look-stupid-meet-the-ladyphones/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't think a gender focus, or discrimination should be part of any strategy.

<comment><USER4> Depends on whether you differentiate between implicit gender focus (we mostly hire guys, guys make most of our decisions, but we don't FOCUS on guys) and expliciy (we need to appeal more to guys).

It seems to me that it's almost always better for a strategy to be explicit rather than implicit. Plenty of successful strategies are gender focused, so you're opting for some kind of ideological purity over possible success.

But I tend to agree with you on discrimination in the bad sense ("discrimination" just means telling things apart, but I assume you mean "bias").

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> _What if Yahoo went back to its vision for media and entertainment,_

i.e. what a lot of people think has been wrong with Yahoo for a long, long time now.

</comment><comment><USER26> I think this is a huge opportunity for companies in general. Let's face it, most companies are run by dudes and we're largely clueless when it comes to understanding what women want. I think there's a massive opportunity for any company that chooses to focus on women right now, whether that's Yahoo or a brand new startup.

<comment><USER27> I agree that women are under-served by technology companies, but I'd argue that it's vital to break the demographic down to actually provide anything useful.

Tech firms don't build sites with the stated aim of being "for men", they make sites that provide finance news, sports scores, gadget reviews etc. To redress the gender bias, we should be looking to find what the smart/wealthy/interesting women are doing and build sites that they love.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The thing is, Yahoo is a really good portal site. Probably the best. It turns out that being a portal isn't as lucrative as people thought it would be 15 years ago, but there's definitely still a demand for them. Yahoo just need to focus on being the beat portal on the internet, IMO. It's a sound long term strategy.

</comment><comment><USER29> IMO this isn't doing much to advance the cause of women in technology.

Suggesting the highest ranking woman CEO in the tech sector should concentrate on serving women, is slightly sexist.

Both men and women use Yahoo. Demographic splits aren't necessarily as gender specific as the author assumes. We're not living in the 1950s.

</comment><comment><USER30> Thoughtful, inspiring article.

What's up with the spelling of the last line, though?

</comment><comment><USER31> This would almost certainly be a winning strategy.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm not a woman, but I agree this is a great strategy to consider. I think one of the reasons that both Pinterest and Instagram caught so many of the startup & wantrepreneur crowd off-guard was that their success, to a large extent, came from a predominantly female user base, and typically feminine interests. Google, for all it's strengths, is mostly run by intelligent but geeky male nerds. Same for Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, etc. I don't think a "pink strategy" alone will save Yahoo -- I do think they need to import more of the cultural strengths of Google, Apple and Facebook -- but it can be a competitive advantage.

There's one potential negative to the "pink" strategy, however. Regardless of how some might like it to be, the overwhelming majority of hackers do seem to be male. If you evolve your company to be female oriented in their product suite, you may make the company less attractive when recruiting and retaining male hackers. And ultimately having talent on staff is the bottleneck. But there may be a way to pursue a balanced path which gives the advantages of a pink strategy while not being too bitten by the negative, so you come out ahead.

I also wish they'd drop the "!". Just "Yahoo". Much cleaner.

<comment><USER33> 'If you evolve your company to be female oriented in their product suite, you may make the company less attractive when recruiting and retaining male hackers.'

I think those currently working at companies like Pinterest and Etsy would disagree.

I greatly admire those companies and as a developer seek teams with a good culture that grt stuff done anf create great products. I would argue that the market focus of a company is not the key determinate in attracting developers but rather your reputation for valuing devs and being a great place to work.</comment></comment>


Schools warned over hackable heating systems - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-42355665 <comment><USER2> I love the last line:

"And we still need manufacturers to design secure equipment, because even if a device is not directly connected to the internet, there almost certainly is an indirect way in."

I think what Trend Control Systems was getting at was that most networks aren't isolated. Electricians think that DMZ's are enough. But often times if you're behind the router you can still find the units using an old fashioned port scanner on the LAN.

</comment><comment><USER3> The HVAC system was how the major Target hack was done.

EDIT: [http://people.carleton.edu/~carrolla/story.html](http://people.carleton.edu/~carrolla/story.html)</comment>


Taste for Makers (2002) - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html <comment><USER2> Back when I was a 16 year old mediocre chess player, the captain of our high school team took me aside, set up a position and asked "Do you like white or black?" I looked at the board and said "I don't know." And channeling a Yoda then decades in the future, he said "That is why you lose."

His name was Matthew Looks, and his point was that it doesn't matter whether you're right or wrong. It only matters that you have a visceral opinion.

If you believe something or care about something strongly, it gets you to engage. If it turns out that you're objectively wrong, the clash will focus your attention and you'll learn. Just having an opinion, just caring, will bring out a better game.

This is how I interpret PG's post on taste. Having good taste is wonderful. But having taste, even bad taste, is better than not caring at all.

<comment><USER3> Sounds like some of the worst advice I've ever heard.

<comment><USER4> I agree. There are already too many people in this world with strong opinions on topics they don't fully understand. We certainly do not need even more of them.

<comment><USER5> Uh, you're both really missing the important part:

> If it turns out that you're objectively wrong, the clash will focus your > attention _and you 'll learn_.

Yeah, if you have a bunch of ill-informed wrong opinions and, out of some stubborn ignorance, you refuse to update them when the conflicting evidence comes crashing in all around you, then you will be a stupid person. However, if you have a bunch of wrong opinions which you then turn into _right_ opinions after reality keeps kicking you in the ass, then you are on the road to being a smart person.

But if you're apathetic, you won't even notice reality kicking you in the ass. Reality won't even bother with you. You're right that having wrong opinions _as a steady state_ is worse than having no opinion, but the whole point of GP was not to be in a steady state in the first place.

<comment><USER4> > _Yeah, if you have a bunch of ill-informed wrong opinions and, out of some > stubborn ignorance, you refuse to update them when the conflicting evidence > comes crashing in all around you [...]_

There's a ton of research demonstrating that once you've formed an opinion, you'll actively defend this opinion in the face of contrary evidence. Everyone does this to some extend, and the best prevention is to not form a premature opinion.

> _But if you 're apathetic [...]_

That's a false dichotomy. It is very well possible to not form an opinion and still be interested in a topic.

<comment><USER5> > _There 's a ton of research demonstrating that once you've formed an > opinion, you'll actively defend this opinion in the face of contrary > evidence. Everyone does this to some extend, and the best prevention is to > not form a premature opinion._

Yes, everyone does this at least a little bit because that's how human brains work. But you can be aware of it and compensate for it, if you make the truth (and, by extension, _actually being right_ ) your highest goal. Just throwing your hands in the air and giving up, seems to me equivalent to saying "everyone has biases, the best way to avoid them is to not think".

That said, obviously I am not suggesting that you just form opinions before you know _anything_. The example given was a chess position. The OP knew enough about chess that he could have picked a side had he taken time to examine the position well. If he had initially chosen black, but white was the stronger, he could have perhaps reached this conclusion after evaluating black's position a little more carefully. Then he could update his opinion to prefer white. But he did none of that, because he didn't care enough to form any opinion at all, _even though he had enough information to do so_.

> _That 's a false dichotomy._

Ugh, yes okay if taken absolutely literally, yes it is a false dichotomy. I mean, I guess I took it as a given that readers would understand that there are _degrees_ of apathy, and that you might be in a mental state where _sometimes_ you notice reality kicking you in the ass, and then sometimes you _don 't_, and so I didn't have to explain that part, and that they would give me just enough benefit of the doubt to suppose that I also understand this, but yes it's true that apathy is not a binary thing, nor is self-awareness. Conceded. Congratulations and I award you one Internet argument point.

So just to be clear, my position is that _the more apathetic you are about a thing, the less likely you are to notice your wrong opinions about that thing_. Is that better?

> _It is very well possible to not form an opinion and still be interested in > a topic._

About as possible as it is to change your opinion on new evidence? Of course it's possible, although if I had to guess between two people which of them is interested in a topic, I'd go with the person who has the opinion, and I'd be right more often than I'd be wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wish I'd known 20 years ago how important design was going to be. Getting my 10,000 hours of design isn't going to be easy. I started this course a few days ago on Udacity:

[https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-the-design-of- everyd...](https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-the-design-of-everyday- things--design101)

And I'm using this subredit to learn how to draw: [http://www.reddit.com/r/ArtFundamentals](http://www.reddit.com/r/ArtFundamentals)

</comment><comment><USER7> It's amazing how close pg's ideas in this essay are to those of David Deutsch's in his _Beginning of Infinity_ , e.g. on the topic of why flowers are beautiful to humans as well as insects ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMiP2SM8Tpk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMiP2SM8Tpk)).

<comment><USER8> I was happy to see someone else bring up that book as well. I did not imagine someone else or make a connection

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "In math and engineering, recursion, especially, is a big win. Inductive proofs are wonderfully short. In software, a problem that can be solved by recursion is nearly always best solved that way."

I don't make use of recursion very often but this statement doesn't sound right to me. Actually the opposite seems right. If you read the chapter on recursion from Concrete Mathematics (I'm thinking about the The Tower of Hanoi, Lines in the Plane and The Josephus Problem here, it seems obvious that a closed form is much faster, simpler and according to the blog post more beautiful. Does anybody with more extensive knowledge on the topic care to comment on this?

<comment><USER10> I find inductive proofs tend to leave me hanging - I become convinced that the conclusion is true, but I still have no intuition as to _why_. For example, Wikipedia's proof [0] that sum of 0..n == n(n+1)/2 is convincing, but unenlightening. There are proofs which seem much more "elegant" to me, for example, pairing (1+n) == (2+n-1) == (3+n-2) ... (n/2 + (n/2 + 1)) [1], or constructing triangles [also 1].

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_induction#Example](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_induction#Example)

[1] [http://betterexplained.com/articles/techniques-for-adding- th...](http://betterexplained.com/articles/techniques-for-adding-the- numbers-1-to-100/)

<comment><USER9> The book I mentioned above, Concrete Mathematics, talks about how to develop an intuition when it comes to induction. One of the advice mentioned is to always start with smallest cases possible because that makes the problem easier to understand. I suppose the more you practice the better your intuition becomes.</comment></comment></comment>


Best way to pull in news to my app. Theoretically.  - <AUTHOR>

I'm thinking of making an app which pulls in various news items from different publishers.
The app would display a list of news items that are to do with education. so would pull from BBC education, guardian and various other sources I could find I deem good for the users.
Simply, whats the best way to the news items in terms, of speed, load and efficiency?
Maybe RSS, some sort of API?
Please excuse my lack of knowledge on this, I plan to know more in the near future with a bit of help.
FYI it will be an android mobile app <comment><USER2> RSS and ATOM. An API (if they provide one) is an option, but stay away from screen-scraping as it will make your solution brittle and put you on shakier legal ground.

</comment><comment><USER3> RSS is always a good first option. Also look into XPATH for sites without RSS or an API.</comment>


Friends With Benefits (on how Google+ leaks private information) - <AUTHOR> http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/592-Friends-With-Benefits.html#

<comment><AUTHOR> To be clear, this article was previously posted on HN [1] but the original title is misleading and I think that the content is relevant. For this reasons, I posted it again with a more specific title.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7181287](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7181287)</comment>


Show HN: Alpaca Trading API Now Available on Mashape - <AUTHOR> https://market.mashape.com/alpacahq/alpaca-trading <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN! Alpaca is a modern platform for algorithmic trading & automated investment strategies. Alpaca's API is the interface for your trading algo to communicate with Alpaca's brokerage service (SEC registered and a FINRA member).

The API allows your algorithms to access real-time price, fundamentals, place orders and manage your portfolio, in either REST (pull) or streaming (push) style.

In order to start trading with Alpaca API, please sign up here to firstly get on the waitlist. We are currently in the private beta. [https://alpaca.markets/](https://alpaca.markets/)

Once you have signed up and have familiarized yourself with our API, please check out our python client to begin writing your own algos!</comment>


Show HN: RioFolio – Build productivity momentum with journals and reward system - <AUTHOR> https://riofolio.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I am the creator of RioFolio. You might have heard of the 'Done list' (Marc Andreessen comes to mind). I have unknowingly used a variation of it for several years, using pen-notepad-coins. For each good/productive action, I give myself points. Redeem rewards (eg 1 Adventure Time episode) with the accumulated points. Flip a coin, heads double the reward. I only recently found out that this is called 'gamification'.

Anyway, the simple system has helped me with overcoming social anxiety (greatest personal achievement), cold calling, my consulting business, motivation for exercising/studying/chores/brainstorming, creative projects, etc. I hope it benefits you too.</comment>


Show HN: Location History Map Explorer – Gamified fog of war world visualisation - <AUTHOR> https://locationhistoryexplorer.com/ <comment><USER2> I like the concept of the app! Especially how the fog view looks. However I think $17 is a bit steep for me to download the app.

One question directly arose me; ie I visited a place somewhere in Croatia now, come back to the app in 5 years, but the place in Croatia has been completely reconstructed. Will I see the state of when I was there or will it be the current state?

</comment><comment><USER3> I like the landing page a lot. Very good pictures, very clear.</comment>


Ethanol: A Trump Subsidy for Big Corn - <AUTHOR> https://www.heritage.org/energy-economics/commentary/the-trump-administration-should-end-not-expand-the-ethanol-mandate <comment><USER2> Title is actually:

 _" The Trump Administration Should End, Not Expand, the Ethanol Mandate"_</comment>


Show HN: Joel Learns Copywriting - <AUTHOR> https://joelb.substack.com/ <comment><USER2> A quick feedback: There are so many newletters these days that lot of people need a strong reason to give their email ID. Substack has a good feature where people can read previous issues before subscribing. Since there is no landing page or preview content, I would suggest to write a few issues before putting it out for the world to see.

That being said, good luck with this project. I will come back and subscribe once I get a feel for the content I can expect.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great feedback! What do you think of the teaser post I added?

[https://joelb.substack.com/](https://joelb.substack.com/)

I'm still crafting the early issues. Plan to promote more once content starts rolling out.

Thanks for your suggestion. Any others?

<comment><AUTHOR> You'll also find a Sneak Peak on my Twitter profile:

[https://twitter.com/joelrandyblake/status/126535990873350144...](https://twitter.com/joelrandyblake/status/1265359908733501440?s=20)

I hope to earn your subscription soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This newsletter is your cheat code to Copywriting mastery. Concise, persuasive writing will augment your career, online business, and access to future opportunities. With Joel as your lab rat, you will accelerate your Copywriting mastery by 80%. Subscribe to join hundreds of your peers on this life-changing journey.</comment>


Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer's disease act as prions – study - <AUTHOR> https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2019/05/414326/alzheimers-disease-double-prion-disorder-study-shows <comment><USER2> Y'all, please never post _university press releases about single scientific studies_. They are the worst thing. Every major human problem has been declared solved by one of them. They are even worse than posting single scientific study papers themselves at the time of publication, and that's still pretty bad, because of the overwhelming incentive to create exciting studies that are wrong, and our current inability to notice the same due to limitations of peer review in catching results that were created by some form of chance.

This result looks very exciting and if it replicates and is built upon in five years' time then we can all talk about it then, you know?

I note that Science Translational Medicine's impact factor is not awesome. But even that doesn't mean much to me: lately it feels like _Science_ and _Nature_ are in fact _especially_ likely to collect results that are very exciting and also wrong, because they feel like they're the best journals so their results should be surprising.

<comment><USER3> > lately it feels like _Science_ and _Nature_ are in fact especially likely to > collect results that are very exciting and also wrong, because they feel > like they're the best journals so their results should be surprising.

I believe this is accurate on all counts.

Slate Star Codex put the issue fairly pithily: there's only one way to get surprising-if-true results that isn't surprising.

<comment><USER4> Can you explain the joke?

<comment><USER5> The only way to get a surprising-if-true result that is not surprising is if the result is not true. Hence the joke is that most of these surprising findings are probably B.S.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Taken out of context, the press release makes this finding look a lot more ground-breaking than it is after I quickly read through the actual study. Still a good piece of work though.

It was already known, as pointed out in the actual paper, that Amyloid-beta (AB) and Tau, the proteins that have long been implicated in Alzheimer's disease (AD), have prion-like properties which means they exist in an abnormal 3D configuration that causes other AB/tau proteins they interact with to adopt this abnormal configuration.

But they can also polymerize into large neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs). Patients who died late, e.g. at age 80 with AD had a lot of these NFTs, so it seemed reasonable by many to assume that these NFTs are the major cause of brain deterioration. But there were a number of alternative hypotheses of what exactly AB and tau were doing in the disease.

This study suggests that AB and tau cause disease primarily through their prion-like activity and not due to their ability to accumulate into large trash-balls (NFTs). They noted that patients who died young of AD had very few NFTs but have a lot of the AB/tau prion-like forms, whereas patients who survived longer had a lot of NFTs but not a lot of prion activity. This lends evidence to the idea that the primary pathogenicity of AB/tau is through their prion activity and not the fact that they accumulate into large protein blobs.

<comment><USER6> could that be interpreted as the ones with trash balls (NFTs) might actually be the ones handling it 'better'?

<comment><USER5> You mean like the NFTs are somehow protective against the Prion forms? That is a possible interpretation that this study does not directly disambiguate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is it possible that these prions were also acquired by human through meat consumption? As in the case with PrP prion from Mad Cow Disease which spread through meat eating as well. Another very similar case is by eating fruit bats containing toxic BMAA, which has a very similar structure to L-Serine amino acid causing it to be picked up instead during the protein synthesis process and resulting in a misfolded version. Studies are being done as BMAA could be a likely cause for many neurological disorders such as Parkinson's.

Has there ever been any researches in determining the rates of Alzheimer disease in meat eaters vs. vegetarians?

<comment><USER8> Interesting topic. Here is an anecdote that I found through a simple web search that somewhat addresses your question:

"Few studies have looked carefully at the risk of dementia in vegetarians versus other people, and the data is contradictory. One small study of California residents found that meat eaters were more likely to become demented than their vegetarian counterparts. Another study in Alzheimer's patients, however, found that adhering to a strict vegetarian diet resulted in lower cognition compared to a pescatarian diet (i.e., a diet that includes fish)."

[https://www.alzdiscovery.org/cognitive- vitality/blog/vegetar...](https://www.alzdiscovery.org/cognitive- vitality/blog/vegetarian-and-vegan-diets-for-brain-health)

<comment><USER7> You're right, I used to know a few vegetarians who often supplement their diets with Vitamin B-12 which theoretically could help boosting and balance their cognitive ability vs. meat eaters. I personally did not notice any cognitive problems in those people at least.

Our DNA contains the sequence of folding steps instruction for each protein to fold. So for a protein to misfold itself, could this mean it must have received an incorrect instruction from the source? As we know, damages to DNA are often a result of foreign agents or coming from external environmental factors. Prevention is always better than a cure so it is probably a lot easier to figure out the source and eliminate that rather than trying to change the structure of these molecules which is extremely difficult.

<comment><USER9> As I understand it, the DNA only contains the sequence of amino-acids from which the protein is built, not their folding instructions. Some proteins are also modified and/or cut in pieces by other proteins before reaching a functional state. Discovering how a protein folds, is a very complex problem, that would have been much easier if it were indeed encoded by the DNA. the website [https://fold.it/portal/](https://fold.it/portal/) gives a good introduction to the problem of protein folding.

<comment><USER10> My biochemistry education is 20 years old.. As you say DNA encodes the sequence of amino acids. Protein folding is a thermodynamic problem as parts of the protein stick to other parts and bonds try to achieve a low energy shape.

There are enzymes, co-enzymes, and other molecules that can help a protein to achieve its proper shape.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A good primer on prions: [http://www.prionalliance.org/2013/11/26/what-are- prions/](http://www.prionalliance.org/2013/11/26/what-are-prions/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Pretty awesome work. Looks like we don't have obvious ways to avoid these classes of proteins in the same way we can just avoid tainted meat and abstain from cannibalism...

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

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

<comment><USER13> Or do we?

People taking acyclovir regularly (to suppress HSV1 and 2 symptoms) have been found to have a 10 fold decrease in risk of getting Alzheimer's (Taiwanese study).

[https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/322463.php](https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/322463.php)

Additional studies are currently ongoing to confirm this in the US.

The scientific "journalists" seem to jump to the conclusion that therefor HSV1,2 must be cuasal for Alzheimer's. But it could be that Acyclovir somehow prevents or slows the formation of AB tau prion-like forms (and has nothing to do with the herpes - Alzheimer's causality).

Or. Some Acyclovir prevents Alzheimer's through a completely different mechanism we don't know about yet.

My point: effective medication may already be there. We just don't know how it works yet.

<comment><USER14> Or, you know, it might be that Alzheimer's has an autoimmune factor contributing to it... :-)

<comment><USER13> Can you elaborate? As far as I know the immunesystem "has no access" to the brain?

Also by "factor" do you mean protein?

I'm just an electronics guy, would love to know more.

<comment><USER14> Sure! It'a common misconception that the brain is completely separated from the immune system. If it were, it would take one evolutionarily successful pathogen to threaten the existence of our species. The brain is indeed (usually) impenetrable to immune cells circulating in the blood stream, but there are "resident" immune cells protecting it from everything that manages to pass all the other barriers. You can read more about it on Wikipedia [1].

By "factor" I didn't mean a biological entity, but rather... well, a factor contributing to the development of the disease. (As you might have noticed, English is not my native tongue, and I couldn't come up with a sophisticated synonym to "a thing that makes a contribution to sth" ;-))

It's been long postulated that AB/tau proteins are only a symptom of Alzheimer's and not a causative agent (which would explain why, so far, no treatment has been successful despite pre-clinical successes). According to some hypotheses, what we observe is the effect of "strayed" lymphocytes going postal and attacking brain cells after being activated by a microbial agent – and HSV is one of the suspects.

Hope that helps. If something is not clear, feel free to ask and I'll try to explain :-)

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The actual study is here: "Aβ and tau prion-like activities decline with longevity in the Alzheimer's disease human brain" < [https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/11/490/eaat8462](https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/11/490/eaat8462) >

</comment><comment><USER15> I still remember undergraduate biology class where the lecturer mentioned that crazy idea of proteins being infectious. Most scientist thought the results were errors and that Prusiner was a fool. Even after kuru was proven to be cause by infectious proteins.

</comment><comment><USER16> How does this mesh with the gingivitis correlation?

<comment><USER17> There is an inflammatory correlation as well, it may be simply that.

I have been out of the AD literature for about 6 years but back in Med school read every major paper from the 80s onwards. The flip flop between tau and AB as the causative agent was very interesting

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How does a protein come to be misfolded? Is it a random mutation that happens to be self-propagating? Is it different between alzheimers and other ones like mad cow?

<comment><USER17> Thermodynamics.

Certain proteins have a propensity to Misfold, this is driven by the folding conformations as well as by Heat Shock Proteins. The underlying genetics that drive amino acid sequence are the basis for this. In the best known prion disease, Mad Cow, one misfolded protein drives other similar proteins it runs into to induce the same conformation. Due to the thermodynamics of folding, it is now in a very stable structure and won't revert to its original or desired biological structure, is difficult or impossible to clear, and will cause other proteins to fold in the same way.

<comment><USER18> So the first misfolded protein is just a random occurrence?

With mad cow, will uninfected cow populations spontaneously develop mad cow on their own? Or was the first mad cow protein a rare misfortune not likely to happen again? Or did the first mad cow protein come from something other than a cow?

<comment><USER17> Look up the sheep prion disease scrapie. It's been around a lot longer than mad cow (1700s) and likely continues to arise spontaneously.

The protein structure needs to have a mutation which gives it a propensity to occasionally misfold. That creates a chain reaction. If this happens at a low enough rate then the underlying protein may become widely distributed in the population, and then it may only take a chance mutation or misfold to cause the cascade

The reality is we don't know what the prime mover in any of these conditions are. Likely some combination of random occurance and possibly some other mechanism as well. For example, CJD comes from mad cow - so mad cow is transmissible, but scrapie seems to both arise spontaneously in flocks and be transmissible between sheep

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can someone with a better background tell me if this is a game changer? I thought the consensus was that Alzheimer's probably had a few potential causes.

<comment><USER20> There's nothing in principle that prevents other mechanisms from inducing the prion conditions that eventually leads to Alzheimer's symptoms.

This paper is just another piece of evidence that points to the plaques and tangles being self propagating, instead of being say for example a pure by- product of some other mechanism. In itself, that doesn't really tell us anything about the mechanisms at play.

Is it a game changer? Probably not. It's unlikely that Alzheimer's is purely spread through inter-human prion transmission, so other factors are likely still at play.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Are there any curable prion diseases right now? As far as I can tell from googling, CJD does not have any known cure. If there aren't, does it mean we need to come up with a completely new class of treatments?

<comment><USER22> Speculatively, in the future we may be able to design proteins that would target the prions and destroy them or refold them into less harmful shapes. To do that we would need to 1. know what protein shape would be required and 2. be able to figure out how to make that shape (what sequence would happen to fold itself into that shape). I would think we would need to advance quite a bit more in protein science before that is feasible.

<comment><USER23> Just to provide background, what you describe is nowhere close to feasible. Designing novel proteins is computationally intractable. It took evolution billions of years and parallel optimization to figure out how to problem solve with polypeptides. We're not even at the punch card phase.

<comment><USER24> That is simply not true, we have been making great progress in protein design in the last years. I recommend you take a look at this Nature review by Baker one of the biggest names in the field:

[https://www.nature.com/articles/nature19946.pdf?origin=ppub](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature19946.pdf?origin=ppub)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is an absolutely astonishing game-changer for Alzheimer's research. The scientist who discovered prions (and got a Nobel prize for it) now has convincing evidence that the proteins that cause Alzheimer's are themselves prions. Amazing, scary, and hopeful all at the same time.

<comment><USER26> Well, when you're an authority on prions everything looks like a prion disease.

<comment><USER27> As a web developer, I'm curious if Alzheimer's is really a cross-site scripting attack. If so, we could prevent it by encoding the amino entities, and that would be a game changer.

<comment><USER28> The encoding would have to be part of our DNA though right? Do you think this method would work as a treatment or just as a method of prevention?

I like your mindset and I think your metaphor may be correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Does this mean that inflammation of the brain is to be ruled out as a cause?

<comment><USER3> cheesymuffin's comment is downvoted, but I think he's on to something. It would be very odd to consider inflammation of the brain to be a _cause_ of any problem, because inflammation is a symptom of something else.

<comment><USER30> Inflammation often is directly causative, for example atherosclerosis where the inflammatory response directly results in the buildup of plaques. Inflammation is not typically the _root_ cause, however; something else instigates the inflammation.

The distinction matters because the best treatment (greatest efficacy, most cost efficient) may target one or more of the links in the causative chain, but not necessarily the root cause.

<comment><USER3> Fair enough. Treatment can attack any link in the chain.

Prevention can't, and to me Alzheimer's is something that should be prevented. But we work with what we have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This makes the disease even worse than expected and it's already a wicked disease. Has a prion disease ever been treated?

</comment><comment><USER32> The problem is too little capitalism in science. Hear me out on this one please. We humans have a natural fear of breaking up into small groups and parallel execute counterrunning endavours.

</comment><comment><USER33> Bad news! Prions are extremely stable and not even boiling, Protease or high radiation can disrupt them.

<comment><USER34> _Some_ prions are extremely stable</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can you give some feedback on this thing I built? - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I'm grateful if you could go to https://www.cachoid.com/ and:
0) Try to understand the service being offered
1) Follow the CTA
2) Sign up
3) Use the app
I'm expecting some road bumps along the way. Could you please write a sentence or two on where that happened? You can reply here or email at joe at the above domain.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> You're really missing a short paragraph describing the exact service you're providing, you have a nice headline, website looks fine, list a lot of features, but I'm only vaguely aware of what varnish exactly is. Why should I want this?

What exactly is your target audience? Perhaps not me, and then it's ok. Do you think all your target visitors know what Varnish is, if they have it or not, if they need it or not, if they need your service to get varnish, etc.

Not an expert, just my personal experience on the site. I run a couple of my own sites, know on a basic level how to run websites, I feel like I might be close to the target audience, but perhaps not.

<comment><AUTHOR> _> You're really missing a short paragraph describing the exact service you're providing_

Is the subheading "Spin up Instant Varnish Nodes for ..." not descriptive enough of the service? Perhaps I'm better off writing a short paragraph right before the "features" section?

Now that I've read your comment and sogen's, it's pretty clear I need a quick explainer of both the service and Varnish. Perhaps I need to fuse both into a paragraph.

Much appreciated!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'd work more on educating people, i.e. "What is Varnish".

I know that this is a cache for Wordpress but you must expect _Non-Technical_ folks visiting your website.

Congrats on launching!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, definitely! I started off wanting to target people who've heard about or used Varnish. But now it's becoming clear that I shouldn't exclude those who don't.

Thanks :) !</comment></comment>


How We Work: Swarms [video] - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.sharethis.com/post/130159480299/how-we-work-swarms <comment><USER2> Oh how I hate this. Hard to hear, no subtitles, 24 minutes long, and I have _no_ idea beforehand whether it will be interesting. The only clue I have is that someone here on HN thought it would be.

Is there a transcript? Summary? Abstract? Anything? I'm not going to sit through several minutes of hard-to-hear video just to find out if there might be some value.

<comment><USER3> I skimmed the video by listening to 20 or so seconds every few minutes of the video, so forgive me if my take away missed out on something. This is what I got from it:

Change workflow from string (Person A takes Issue A, Person B takes Issue B, Person C takes Issue C) to a "swarm" (Issue A taken by People [A-C], Issue B taken by People [D-F])

Multiple eyes pass the code = more bugs caught. Social pressure to be working on the project (group of 4-5 people). If things fall too far behind, revert to "string" method of each person working on an individual issue.

Results in less time wasting (FB/Twitter) due to social pressure. Some study said a pair of 2 is the most productive, but they feel the social pressure is too high in that scenario, hence group of 4-5 to relieve social pressure while maintaining the benefits of collaborative work.

Not worth the time. Not all that interesting. Mostly saying stuff that many "lean startups" have learned. That pair coding increases productivity. They just applied this to their queue instead of only new features or something.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nadya - Thanks the summarizing the video! You mentioned that other lean startups have done this, could you point me to other lean startups working in this methodology? I'd love to learn how others are approaching this idea.

I've also found while many accept that pair-programming increases productivity it's rarely implemented. The video we created outlines an approach that is an alternative to pair-programming but maintains many (if not more) of the benefits.</comment></comment></comment>