Why Nothing Works Anymore - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/the-singularity-in-the-toilet-stall/517551/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> While automatic bathroom fixtures are a bit touchy, I think the author hasn't really considered how much they improve the worst case.

I used to _regularly_ walk into public bathrooms in which someone had used the toilet and simply not flushed it. That doesn't happen much any more. I'm willing to deal with a lot of phantom flushes to _not_ deal with someone else's literal shit.

I used to _regularly_ find public bathrooms where someone (I'm assuming a vandal, although it could just be a distracted or careless person) has left the water running. A fully open faucet can erase the gains of more judicious human usage pretty quickly.

The author waxes nostalgic about those cloth towel roll dispensers. His experience does not match mine. I generally see those things in old gas stations where the cleanliness of the towel is _deeply_ suspect.

<comment><USER3> Automatic faucets are one of my favorite examples of _positive_ added technology. They're flaky and annoying to activate, but compared to the possibility of leaving a faucet running full-blast for (potentially) hours? That's a huge improvement.

Automatic soap dispensers are much less persuasive to me, though. There was no "just open" state to get rid of, so the flakiness is offering much less benefit. You have to touch pump-dispensers, sure, but that's also done _before_ you wash your hands.

<comment><USER4> What's wrong with the faucets that instead of turning, you push down and they run for a few seconds before stopping?

My pet hate of public toilets now are the airblade style hand dryers. My hands are seemingly too big, so to dry the top (closest to my wrist) I need to bend my fingers to avoid touching the puddle of water and dirt in the bottom.

<comment><USER5> >What's wrong with the faucets that instead of turning, you push down and they run for a few seconds before stopping?

dirty hands touch them a lot and you have to touch them multiple times during handwashing, re-dirtying your hands

if the stream actually lasted a reasonable amount of time it would be less of an issue but i dont think i've seen that ever

<comment><USER6> Without towels you're going to touch the door handle on the way out anyways. People that don't wash their hands touched the door handle. My point is to stop pretending you can keep your hands clean for any significant duration

<comment><USER7> I generally use my feet to open doors actually. It's not at all hard and with touchless faucets and toilets I pretty much only touch paper towels.

<comment><USER8> With doors you can push to exit, sure. More troublesome are those you have to pull. I basically have to wait impatiently by the door for the next guy to come in so I can get out without touching the door with my hand.

<comment> nils-m-holm Use a paper towel or the sleeve of your jacket or shirt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In most of these cases technology seems to have replaced something that was fairly precarious and imperfect before.

Autocorrect incorrectly assuming the word you want to use replaced that message taking three days to arrive at its destination. Content wrapped in DRM replaced that content not being available at all. Unwieldy knobs and dials in hotel room showers replaced... unwieldy knobs and dials in hotel room showers. Amazon's tyranny of choice replaced being price gouged because the thing you wanted was only stocked by one retailer in town.

This folksy techno-luddism is quick to point out the foibles of what we have now, but almost never points out how shit things used to be.

At least it doesn't end in the same place as most of these pieces, with a vacuuous assertion that we all need to start living 'in the moment.'

<comment><USER10> > _Autocorrect incorrectly assuming the word you want to use replaced that > message taking three days to arrive at its destination._

Seems like you don't remember email on your PC.

> _Content wrapped in DRM replaced that content not being available at all._

Seems like you don't remember Napster either. Where were you in the decade 1995–2005?

<comment><USER11> _> Autocorrect incorrectly assuming the word you want to use replaced that message taking three days to arrive at its destination.

Seems like you don't remember email on your PC._

Or simply sms without autocorrect. OP has a point, but this indeed is a bad example. As far as I can see autocorrect for messaging being wrong didn't replace anything, it's something new which just doesn't always work properly. Which is exactly the point of the article.

<comment><USER12> I could type faster using T9 on a 10-key flip phone than I can on an iPhone today. On Android I used SwiftKey for many years and would bet I'm fastest on that, but I decided to try an iPhone 6S and it seems like a huge step back regarding input. I still can't believe they don't have a swype-like input method.

<comment><USER13> iOS supports third-party keyboards since, like, 8th edition. Exactly what made iPhone acceptable to me.

Not that I'm too happy with it: for some reason my SwiftKey's gesture- recognizing algorithm seems to be getting worse over time, while next-word prediction becomes better.

<comment><USER12> Oh wow, that's embarrassing for me, but thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is one reason I have almost no interest in IoT / home automation. It just replaces extremely mild annoyances (turning on the lights) with something complicated and fragile.

<comment><USER15> But there are ways to build/architect home automation so that it's an "addition" and at worst will go back to "dumb switch".

Most of the light switches in my house are wired up through Z-Wave. Those z-wave boxes are in the electrical box in-between the normal, everyday, traditional light switch and the power.

100% of the time, if i flip the switch a direction, it changes the state of the light. It never fails. Power just came back on? still works. Z-Wave controller down? Still works. Internet out? still works.

Then, I can "add on" automation using that zwave network to do things like turn lights on/off from my phone.

If anything were to cause issues, have bugs, have problems, etc... I can unplug the controller and it goes back to fully functioning light switches.

<comment><USER16> I think your hitting the aspect most IoT designers never think about: systems should fail like an escalator, not an elevator. You should still be able to get the basic usage out of the product if everything else fails.

While I'm working on my own system similar to yours, and I'm designing around the same concept, most IoT manufacturers aren't. I get why people's default reaction to IoT stuff is to run away, because they are mostly _very_ poorly designed.

<comment><USER15> I love that expression! "Fail like an escalator" describes it perfectly!

The issue I see is that there are many things that are designed like that, but they often require professional installation or are significantly more expensive, which leads to many just getting the cheaper option which works in the best case scenario.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This reminds me of the "everything is awesome and nobody is happy" essay.

We are most of the way to the wonderful goal of being able to use the bathroom without touching anything anyone else has touched, and all this person can do is complain that it isn't quite perfect.

Do you remember the 80s solution for public faucets? They used springs to turn off the water after five seconds. You had to press a button really hard, then wash really fast. The electric things aren't perfect, but they are a big improvement.

The complaints about auto correct are especially funny. I had a palm 5 and a wonderful folding keyboard and a cdpd modem. But only one serial port on the palm, so it was connectivity or keyboard, not both. Graffiti was terrible compared to any modern input system. The smartphone in my pocket is amazing. Swype is what it took to make me abandon thumb boards, and Swype is amazing.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm a software engineer, and I work with technology all day long, and am mostly thankful for it - it pays the bills, after all. But I dearly love going back home to Hicksville a couple weekends a month. Most of the stuff my parents have and use on a daily basis is older than I am, and it just works, because it is all mechanical and built to a much higher standard than you can get without spending an exorbitant amount of money now, if indeed you can get that kind of quality at all. It's not like it was high-end stuff at the time they bought it, either - I'm talking about a 1930s John Deere farm tractor, a couple 1980s Ford pickups, kitchen appliances from the 1970s, hand tools that could collect Social Security. Stuff that just works, and if it breaks, any idiot with some basic tools can fix.

Even mundane objects that nobody (I hope) is ever going to try to put a WiFi card in are not-so-subtly more terrible than they used to be. My favorite example is the five-gallon gasoline can[1].

[1] [http://www.gad.net/Blog/2012/11/22/one-mans-quest-for-gas- ca...](http://www.gad.net/Blog/2012/11/22/one-mans-quest-for-gas-cans-that- dont-suck/)

<comment><USER19> wow thanks for linking to that article. My current gas can is ridiculously difficult to use.

<comment><USER20> That's partly because of safety regulations making it have anti-spill features.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > devices like automatic-flush toilets acclimate their users to apparatuses > that don't serve users well in order that they might serve other actors, > among them corporations and the sphere of technology itself

This nails it. It's not that things couldn't be implemented in a way that serves the users, it's that they're optimized to serve the interests of other parties first.

</comment><comment><USER22> > The iPhone's touchscreen keyboard works, in part, by trying to predict what > the user is going to type next. It does this invisibly, by increasing and > decreasing the tappable area of certain keys based on the previous keys > pressed.

I've had an iPhone since iOS 2 and I never realized the key's touch area could change size. If you ask me the iPhone keyboard works perfectly.

<comment><USER23> Absolutely agreed. I could type better on an iPod touch with its tiny 2010 screen than I can on my 6 inch Android screen (despite my large hands.)

Outside of that, the author nailed it. Especially the phone system, though he could have taken it further in saying that the humans after the recordings is also taught to not serve the user, but rather be an obstruction with just enough "give" to prevent legal action. The exceptions to the seem rare, but I definitely cling to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I tend to think that this is a product of the "newness" of technologies. Old technologies - such as paper, pens, flush toilets, etc. - lasted in part because they were robust and not-precarious. We don't remember the technologies that fell by the wayside along the way - they simply didn't last.

</comment><comment><USER25> I find it extremely funny that loading the website shows me a message asking me to turn off my ad blocker. Seems that some things don't work anymore because we break them intentionally...

BTW I'd be fine looking at some ads, turning off my blocker is not an option though as the third party ads always track your behavior and often store personally identifiable data without user consent.

<comment><USER26> The argument can easily be made that your ad blocker is the component that's intentionally breaking things.

<comment><USER27> For values of breaking that include

\- Keeping your pc free of malware. \- Keeping people from trying to aggressively promote lies, half truths, and nonsense in your own home. \- Making the web work both better and faster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It reminds me of the bathrooms at the conference center at the Union Square Hilton where a sensor will ejaculate some white creamy foam soap on your cuffs if you aren't careful.

<comment><USER3> I once saw a soap dispenser which had gotten stuck in a loop.

If no one caught the soap, it fell past the sensor, triggering another soap release, and so on.

I'm sure it was a special case, some obscure failure of the repeat-dispense lockout or something. But I couldn't help marveling at how much effort had gone into making such a singularly crap product; it was behaving worse than would even be _possible_ for a lower tech device.

<comment><USER29> Reminds me of this marvel of modern engineering: [http://imgur.com/Na9jGYR](http://imgur.com/Na9jGYR)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> You can see this in websites too. Each year they get bigger and slower while offering nothing (of value) new to the user.

[http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/)

</comment><comment><USER31> I think it's interesting how PC technology has changed in the past 30 years. I remember when PC's first were everywhere in the late 80's. They generally worked, but when they went down (like a virus), they were down for a long time and sometimes never came back.

This is all subjective, but I feel like the end of the 90's and early 2000's was the low point for PC's and computers in general.

Viruses were everywhere it seemed. Things would break all the time. Shit was never compatible. You had to have detailed knowledge of how software worked in order to fix it.

I remember the day I was trying to fix my PC when I finally looked some of the more under the hood files and programs, and was blow away at the complexity. It was very humbling.

Then, somewhere in the late 2000's, something changed and I feel like computers have been working better.

I don't have to fix my computer nearly as much. It just sort of works.

Sure, there are issues, but the frequency and intensity are much less (knock on wood).

</comment><comment><USER32> This reads like a general lament about the world at large declining.

<comment><USER33> The declensionist narrative is really in fashion right now.

<comment><USER34> People have been pining for the past golden days since antiquity. I'm not really sure if it truly can be said to be "in fashion right now"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Ok this seems like a good time to get something that's been bothering me off my chest. Can we please start using pressure sensors on toilet seats instead? It kind of feels like it always should have been that way.

<comment><USER36> Lots of people stand when they wipe: [http://deadspin.com/5424415/sitters-vs- standers--the-great-w...](http://deadspin.com/5424415/sitters-vs-standers-- the-great-wipe-hope)

<comment><USER37> Finding out about this a few months ago was enlightening. Entire classes of messes I've seen in public restrooms that were previously inexplicable short of deliberate action became comprehensible through a combination of stand-to- wipers plus carelessness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> > Digital distribution has also made media access more precarious. Try > explaining to a toddler that the episodes of "Mickey Mouse Clubhouse" that > were freely available to watch yesterday via subscription are suddenly > available only via on-demand purchase.

It was a pain trying to explain to a toddler why they couldn't watch Sesames Street right now because it wasn't currently airing.

Generally, explaining anything to a toddler is a pain.

</comment><comment><USER39> I think autocorrect provably does not provide any value. When you make a typo, then the autocorrect mechanism is making an inference on your input that the receiver of that message would be able to make better, since they have way more context, and humans are still much better at this kind of problem than computers.

</comment><comment><USER40> I think we're in the dark ages of user interface currently. It feels like we've mastered skeuomorphism and moving away is fine, but we're in the infancy of whatever's next.</comment>


Stanford Expert Explains Antibacterial Soap Ban - <AUTHOR> https://woods.stanford.edu/news-events/news/stanford-expert-explains-antibacterial-soap-ban <comment><USER2> Interesting! This seems to be the crux of it:

That [2005 study in Pakistan] compared the health outcomes from antibacterial soap and soap that was indistinguishable from and otherwise chemically identical to the antibacterial soap, but without triclocarban. Compared with a control group who received school supplies, children living in households who received soap and handwashing promotion had 52 percent less diarrhea, 50 percent less pneumonia and 45 percent less impetigo. Impetigo, a skin infection, was a particularly important outcome, because laboratory studies had suggested that triclocarban would have antibacterial activity against the organisms that most commonly caused impetigo. There was, however, no difference in any of the health outcomes between children living in households who received the plain soap compared with children who received the antibacterial soap.

Related, it appears school supplies are not only ineffective against bacteria that cause diarrhea, pneumonia, and impetigo, but may cause these ailments.

<comment><USER3> > Related, it appears school supplies are not only ineffective against > bacteria that cause diarrhea, pneumonia, and impetigo, but may cause these > ailments.

Obviously we need to reduce the amount of school supplies these children are exposed to. I suggest we force them to replace everything with tablets. That will undoubtedly solve this problem once and for all. Anyone that objects to this just doesn't care about child health in developing countries. /s

It's actually kind of depressing to write that, and realize the sarcasm marker is desperately needed not just because Poe's law, but because it's all too plausible to think this might be a common conclusion. :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm glad they're doing this.

This is why I moved our household over to the "Method" brand a few years ago (no triclosan). I'd happily move again if something else was safer, but I do enjoy foaming hand soaps.

Also why on our newborn I purchased Waterwipes (wiper + fruit juice only). They massively reduced diaper rash too compared to the Huggies branded wipes we were using before (and can be used on the face because they won't upset stomachs if consumed).

I like the FDA and am glad they exist, but feel like they were slow to act in this case. We've know for almost ten years (via peer reviewed science) that these compounds are unsafe and ineffective.

<comment><USER5> FWIW, we found that we can dilute Dr. Brommer's soap with water and it works really well in those same foaming soap dispensers (and it foams!). Pure organic saponified oils for washing my hands... for the win.

<comment><USER6> Your suggestion also works for most liquid soaps: Just add ~50% water (mix well) and they foam in a foam soap dispenser.

<comment><USER7> Maybe not...

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Frugal/comments/13by00/if_priced_in...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Frugal/comments/13by00/if_priced_in_line_with_foaming_hand_soap_a_bar_of/c72tj46?context=1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In line with this development, the United Nations also recently decided to release a unanimously ratified declaration regarding antibiotics [1]. It concerns educating the public on the use of antibiotics, development of new antibiotics, and surveillance and regulation of current use of antibiotics on humans and animals.

[1]: [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/un-signs- groundbre...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/un-signs- groundbreaking-declaration-to-tackle-antibiotics-threat-a7319396.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Along the same thought, John's Hopkins tested automatic facets with infrared sensors and standard facets with hand levers for hazardous bacteria. After the study they removed all the automatic facets because the standard facets where much cleaner and saver.[0]

[0]: [http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/latest_ha...](http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/latest_hands_free_electronic_water_faucets_found_to_be_hindrance_not_help_in_hospital_infection_control)

<comment><USER10> Not necessarily due to the automatic vs. manual distinction but the mechanical design of the valves.

"While the precise reasons for the higher bacterial growth in the electronic faucets still need clarification, the researchers say it appears that standard hospital water disinfection methods, which complement treatments by public utilities, did not work well on the complex valve components of the newer faucets. They suspect that the valves simply offer additional surfaces for bacteria to become trapped and grow."

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This reminds me ( and I guess every time i leave a shared bathroom ), how people really don't know how to wash their hands[1]. I guess anti-bacterial soap came in as a nice marketing gimmick to quick hand washing.

I've stopped shaking some people's hand's after seeing them "drizzle some water" for a second after, well, you know what.

[1] [http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult- health/in-...](http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult-health/in- depth/hand-washing/art-20046253)

<comment> semi-extrinsic > Always wash your hands after:

> Touching an animal or animal toys, leashes or waste

I guess having a puppy lick your face is right out then?

<comment><USER12> Dogs' saliva actually has a number of antibacterial molecules (e.g., K9CATH, etc.) that should kill most pathogens, so you might be okay there.

<comment><USER13> Dogs are capable of... if left unattended. Read TheOatMeal then fill in the dots ;) [http://pleated-jeans.com/2012/09/17/my-dog-the-paradox-by- th...](http://pleated-jeans.com/2012/09/17/my-dog-the-paradox-by-the-oatmeal/)

<comment><USER14> What do you mean by "if left unattended?" I've yet to see a dog that would check if a human is around before licking whatever part of his anatomy he just wants to lick. And they're surprisingly agile when it come to that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Are they going after the toothpaste next? I've used Colgate Total for like 20 years now and my gums really notice when I run out and use something else for a week.

<comment><USER16> FWIW, my dentist recommended Colgate Total because it had Triclosan in it; I don't remember exactly what she said -- it was years ago --- but something along the lines of it being the one toothpaste that seemed demonstrably better than others.

(The usual YMMV/talk to your own dentist/etc. disclaimers apply).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Quick Summary: Probably safe but not any more effective than normal soap. Possibly harmful to the environment so not worth the risk of environmental damage.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's going to be really interesting to see what Henckel does with Dial soap, which has been defined by its antibacterial ingredient for years. (I actually use Dial Basics in the shower because it's the closest thing I can find to cheap, plain soap with no moisturizers or antibiotics, but that's not a product they promote much outside of dollar stores.)

<comment><USER19> Isn't Ivory a pure, plain soap? If Dial goes away or changes, that's still an option.

<comment><USER20> Ivory is the best. One of my favorite things about it is that it isn't scented, and doesn't attract mosquitoes and black-flies the way some of the cloyingly sweet and fruity scented soaps tend to.

<comment><USER21> Careful... They did release scented ivory and I accidentally bought some, worse still it was lavender and packaging was only barely different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> One point for science!

</comment><comment><USER23> Best solution: make your own hand soap, or find someone who does it for cheap. Support local products, save money, and save the world at the same time.

<comment><USER24> Plain soap is already very cheap and widely available. With fancy hand-made soaps you're paying for the image, and usually also scents and colorings that add nothing to the cleaning power. The inefficiency of small batch production is likely worse for the environment. If you want to support your local community I think it's better to support local services than local products, because services don't benefit from the same economies of scale.

<comment><USER25> > With fancy hand-made soaps you're paying for the image, and usually also > scents and colorings that add nothing to the cleaning power

I'm confused; with industrial soap, are the scents and colorings free?

I'm pretty sure that if someone had the numbers, the marginal energy/environmental externalities of a bar of home soap compared to that of industrial soap + transport + packaging would be miniscule[1].

To look at it from a different angle, I'm also pretty sure it is more energy efficient to cook large batches of food than small. Do you suggest single people and couples not cook at home so as to benefit from the energy-saving- economies of scale?

[1] Q: But what if everybody did it? A: Perhaps it would add up in that world. But we don't live there.

<comment><USER26> > I'm pretty sure that if someone had the numbers, the marginal > energy/environmental externalities of a bar of home soap compared to that of > industrial soap + transport + packaging would be miniscule[1].

> [1] Q: But what if everybody did it? A: Perhaps it would add up in that > world. But we don't live there.

If you're comparing like with like, that shouldn't make a difference (unless you claim widespread small-scale soap production is somehow actively hurt by more people doing it).

> To look at it from a different angle, I'm also pretty sure it is more energy > efficient to cook large batches of food than small. Do you suggest single > people and couples not cook at home so as to benefit from the energy-saving- > economies of scale?

You're talking about solving a huge coordination problem. They're talking about keeping on using a solution to a huge coordination problem that already exists.

<comment><USER25> > If you're comparing like with like, that shouldn't make a difference (unless > you claim widespread small-scale soap production is somehow actively hurt by > more people doing it).

No.

As best I can tell, the GP post was claiming that those considering making their own soap should not, due to environmental concerns. Exploring a scenario in which everyone in the world suddenly converting to home lye soap might be an interesting thought experiment, but has nothing to do with the real world.

> You're talking about solving a huge coordination problem. They're talking > about keeping on using a solution to a huge coordination problem that > already exists.

Perhaps I am, in a world in which everyone abruptly started making their own soap last week.

In this world, I'm talking about arguments that fail because they are predicated on extremely weak claims of economy of scale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Please correct me if I am wrong but government banned something because it is not useful ? Or were these soaps violating "No Harm Done" rule too ? When is government banning Axe for failure to attract hot chicks ?

<comment><USER2> From the article: "Antibacterial soaps are biologically active, and they have no proven efficacy. So, I don't see dumping tons of them into the environment each year as being a good idea."

<comment><USER27> Is FDA authorized to ban things because of the impact it might have on environment ? I thought FDA was restricted to people

<comment><USER28> The quote is from the article, which is an interview with someone who's an expert on this but who is not one of the FDA officials who made the final decision. The interview includes both questions about the FDA's action, and questions about the expert's own personal opinion. The quote you replied to is an answer to a question asking for the expert's own personal opinion.

It's also not a very long article, and you could have read it to find this out for yourself instead of jumping to conclusions.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Vellum - <AUTHOR> http://vellum.nytlabs.com/

<comment><USER2> Hi, I am one of the developers. Yes, we got crushed for a bit under heavy HN traffic. We are back up now. Sorry for the blip in service.

</comment><comment><USER3> seems to be "Retrieving your reading list..." indefinitely...

<comment><USER4> Do you have adblock? Disabling that fixed it for me.

<comment><USER5> Same issue and I don't have adblock.

chrome error: Cannot read property '0' of undefined

firefox error: v.tweets is undefined

<comment><USER6> Ditto. Line 28 in links.js:

var title = v["tweets"][0].entities.urls[0].display_url;

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice experiment, I will try to use it.

But I usually save interesting links to favourites. Please consider to add favourites to selection of lists.

Also, Vellum does not support cyrillic at all, even if it's in utf-8.

</comment><comment><USER8> Launched in Apr [http://blog.nytlabs.com/2014/04/25/vellum-a-reading-layer- fo...](http://blog.nytlabs.com/2014/04/25/vellum-a-reading-layer-for-your- twitter-feed/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Five minutes later it's still retrieving my reading list (tried with and without AdBlock). I'm very happy using Nuzzel, which seem to do the exact same thing.

</comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone know how this works with the paywall?

<comment><USER11> This parses twitter, so the paywall is unaffected?</comment></comment>


What's the latest with TrueCrypt? - <AUTHOR>

A few weeks ago there was a huge debate over Truecrypt, as apparently the encryption tool was no longer safe to use. Is there any solid, clear update on what's going on? <comment><USER2> Still waiting on phase 2 of the audit, formal cryptanalysis. [http://istruecryptauditedyet.com/](http://istruecryptauditedyet.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Nothing is clear. Just as when that all started.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, that was my guess too. Sad that no good alternative has arisen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> NSA</comment>


GNU: A Heuristic for Bad Cryptography - <AUTHOR> https://soatok.blog/2020/07/08/gnu-a-heuristic-for-bad-cryptography/ <comment><USER2> This received some more comments here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23819964](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23819964)</comment>


The best UI typeface goes unnoticed - <AUTHOR> http://thomasbyttebier.be/blog/the-best-ui-typeface-goes-unnoticed <comment><USER2> Excellent examples in the article, I will be using these illsutrations to demonstrate these ideas to people when I talk about legibility for the web.

I have recently been very impressed with Fira Sans, and it may have the most beautiful sans-serif italics I've seen in a long time!

</comment><comment><USER3> I've never really liked it when people with strong opinions about design decide to use black text on an eye-searing white background. This article made a lot of great points, but was actually painful to read.

</comment><comment><USER4> Great article, but a seemingly unfair comparisons granted the examples provided seem to have no baseline for differentiating legibility between the fonts.

The author may have chosen the same "font size" but font size has no standardization a size 8 font may be dramatically different in pixel height between different fonts.

</comment><comment><USER5> So, why did Apple switch from Lucida Grande to Helvetica?

<comment><USER6> Probably because they have hundreds (if not thousands) of people working on OS X, and they need to "do something" to justify their paychecks.

It's the same reason that there's no longer a toggle for "Translucent menu bar" in the Desktop preference in Yosemite. Instead it moved elsewhere and does something almost the same, but not quite as good.

Or why they removed the "Dock" entry from the Apple Menu. They're showing that they're "improving" the product. But it's make-work, they're not improving anything.

I'm sure that all of these things were discussed for countless man-years in countless meetings. But Apple made somewhere in the neighborhood of $70B in profit last year, so it's not like they can't afford paying these people.

OTOH, all the silly bugs in Yosemite ... apparently there isn't enough money to pay _good_ , _competent_ people to chase and fix them.

<comment><USER7> or all the good and competent people are busy fixing the problems made by the first set</comment></comment></comment>


A Chronology of Computing at Columbia University - <AUTHOR> http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/index.html?#intro

<comment><AUTHOR> Some interesting parts:

Sep 1947: ACM first meeting

Jan 1948: John von Neumann's thoughts on high-level languages(FORTRAN)

Oct 1957: Students' reaction to computerized registration

1 Oct 1969: First ARPANET transmission

1 May 1978: First spam email

12 Aug 1981: 16-bit IBM PC

1985-1989: Supercomputers made from Radio Shack parts

1993: The era of the search engine begins

1994-95: Windows and the Web take over. The diverse, rich, idiosyncratic history of computing stops here

<comment><USER2> I was very surprised to read of John Vincent Atanasoff out at Iowa State this morning. He had a tremendous impact and I hadn't ever heard of him.

[http://www.columbia.edu/~td2177/JVAtanasoff/JVAtanasoff.html](http://www.columbia.edu/~td2177/JVAtanasoff/JVAtanasoff.html)

A US District Judge ruled in the 70s that the ENIAC was largely derivative of the computer Atanasoff had developed with his student Clifford Berry. Berry would continue on to work for Remington Rand and Burroughs on the BatComputer

[http://tjsawyer.com/B205Home.htm](http://tjsawyer.com/B205Home.htm)

<comment><USER3> Tiny web-archived link [http://web.archive.org/web/20130420132055/http://www.scl.ame...](http://web.archive.org/web/20130420132055/http://www.scl.ameslab.gov/Projects/ABC/Progress.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A goofy connection here but wow, this gives new perspective on Eric Fensler's line in Fenslerfilm GI Joe PSA 15 - computer, "I'm a computer" ([https://youtu.be/7g__E2z3kBA?t=14](https://youtu.be/7g__E2z3kBA?t=14))

"Computer" was an actual job title in those days, referring to someone whose job was to compute -- usually tables from formulas -- by hand or using a mechanical calculator (more about this in Herb Grosch's Computer, Bit Slices of a Life, e.g. on page 4).

</comment><comment> a-dub Also interesting is his writeup on the 1968 riots:

[http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/1968/](http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/1968/)

Interesting trivia: He was the maintainer of C-KERMIT up until just a few years ago, when the bastards that run the place laid him off...

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm always amazed by how much computer technology existed before the late 70's and early 80's personal computer market exploded.

<comment><USER6> In college, I didn't tell anyone I had an Atari St someting? I wrote all my papers/homework on it, but felt like I was cheating?

All the other students were typing away, or paying a service to type their papers. This was the 80's. I tried to get my girlfriend into it at the time, but she wanted no part of it.

I think my presentation of the computer was the problem? I saw that she didn't see the value in word processing, so I drew a slightly erotic cartoon with paint/illustrator? She looked down at me and said, "If you want the real thing, put that computer away?" I put my homemade cover on it, and had a great night! I remember her telling me in bed, "I don't think computers will ever take off?" I actually agreed with her. I never thought they would be so commonplace. I was still trying to impress her, so I didn't tell her everything I wrote since high school was on this Atari. Anyways, she was a great girlfriend, and I miss her. She is now head of technology at some company. Ingrid, you were the best! I wish I was a better boyfriend. I never experienced the relationship I had with you--with anyone else. I tried, but never found that chemistry.

Anyway, I once had a English teacher accuse me of plagiarism. I wrote a research paper on The Amygdala; the efficy of Psychosurgery on Violent Individuals. He said he needed to ask his wife what an Amygdala was, and 'She's a Psychologist?'. 'And the type on this paper looks weird?' He kept tuning over the pages and looking for typewritten impressions? I was beyond an introvert, and had no self-esteem at the time. I remember just listening to him, and my only response was, I wrote this. My references are in the library? I walked out of his office, and felt; I don't trust this older generation of people? To appease this English teacher, I dumbed down all my papers. The irony was I am, and was a horrid writer. The only words of wisdom in that little English department I overheard while sweltering in Mr. Taylor's class was in Mr. Robinson's class. His class was next door. He told his class to never use clichés in your writing! He then quipped "even in verbal conversation?". I always thought that was great advise. He also stressed funneling thoughts, and paragraphs.

I sometimes wonder why I wrote that Engish paper on that subject. I remember, at the time, I had some weird thoughts, and thought someting was wrong with my brain? I look back and had so much acne--everywhere? I noticed, as my acne cleared up, so did my weird thoughts.(I bring this up because no one told us what to expect in the latter stages of puberty. I honestly fell the natural testosterone made me feel like I was going crazy? As I got older, the violent thoughts went away. I always wondered if it was just hormones that make me feel like such a wako in college?

Anyway, my Atari St was a dirty secret back in the 80's, but I loved it. I don't recall that dot matrix ribbon ever needing replacing? Could any of you imagine--never buying any extra ink cartridges in four years of college?

I don't miss college, and really didn't learn much. I miss Ingrid, and my classmates though. I do miss the simplicity of computing back then. I don't miss needing to go to the library though. I do miss seeing people out in public with nothing in their hands. I miss that most? No--still miss the college girlfriend; the grass was not greener in my little life. Sorry, about rambling on!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good ol' Frank. He kindly mentions me in relation to the assembler manual...

</comment><comment><USER8> wow, I'm also surprised to see my alma mater on the front of Hacker News. I actually worked at Columbia AcIS from 1996- for quite a while (and now live in the area, posting this from the Hungarian Pastry Shop).

I'd say most of the historic stuff was before my time, but being there in the 90s definitely had its moments.

Frank's history is a little biased since he worked embedded in AcIS and developed Kermit software -- obviously that's fair, since it's his history! Some interesting (though possibly a little too inside-baseball-y) addendums that he doesn't mention:

* The Electrical Engineering department had installed Ethernet itself very early. So when everything else was wired, there was a period of time when the EE department had the slowest and worst Ethernet capabilities since it was so old.

* One of the people that worked right next to Frank's office was also a volunteer fireman. On 9/11/01, he rushed down to help at the World Trade Center site, and ended up helping to establish wireless networking and other communications on the ground, since he found a lot of the police/fire department were unable to communicate with antennas down, etc.

* Before web mail, students and faculty logged in to 'CUNIX' the Columbia unix timeshare to use Pine (or whatever program, etc you wanted). Way after the transition, Cunix still had a lot of people logging in and using unix to manage their ~username web accounts and, yes, continue to use Pine (which was so much better :-)

* I remember the day that we hit 65536 Columbia affiliates and our login system was down for a while, as people realized (and then fixed) the problem.

* The lore was that AcIS ( _Academic_ Information Systems) split-off/was born from a cantankerous English professor that was upset that central IT wasn't doing anything for faculty -- that ended up being the organization that provided Email and Internet connectivity along with most other services for Columbia students and faculty.

* He alludes to funding/reputations between AcIS and AIS. AIS was allowed to bill departments for their services, and provided services only to departments that could afford it. AcIS got central funding but then budgets directly protracted what was possible. An interesting early lesson for me in business models!

* Columbia was especially decentralized. Frank's story is mostly from the perspective of central university IT. The medical campus, business school, law school and many other departments all had their own IT departments that did varying amounts of services.

* Frank doesn't tell the story of computing in education at Columbia. Mike Crow (who now makes headlines as the President of Arizona State University) was Provost and during the 90's tech boom funded several organizations that were going to "make millions in online education." Many of the first attempts at proto-MOOCs were through organizations like EPIC (publishing), 'Digital Knowledge Ventures,' Fathom, and the Center for New Media Teaching and Learning. All but the latter lost funding after a few years after being unable to profit. Was it an idea that was too early for its time? In some ways, a big reason that Columbia is behind other places wrt MOOCs is because the organization was burnt out from those previous investments.

Anyway, a lot of the folks there introduced me to things like Emacs and all the obscure unix commands. Thanks to all of them.

</comment><comment><USER9> Always love to see my Alma Mater on front page HN :)

<comment><USER10> i was flipping thru vintage vinyl the other day (dunno why, i don't have a turntable) and saw this (actually, Boone had at least a couple album covers on campus: [https://longfade.wordpress.com/2011/07/06/pat-boone-randy- wo...](https://longfade.wordpress.com/2011/07/06/pat-boone-randy-wood-pioneer- life/)

<comment><USER11> Whenever CNN has some piece on college, their stock footage is always Columbia.</comment></comment></comment>


Is America Encouraging the Wrong Kind of Entrepreneurship? (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2017/06/is-america-encouraging-the-wrong-kind-of-entrepreneurship <comment><USER2> The original article [1] is, in many ways, clearer than the economist's take on it and avoids political diversion.

They summarize Baumol's theory for entrepreneurship as assuming that the total amount of entrepreneurial spirit remains fixed, but, for structural reasons, some of it can get channeled into unproductive rent-seeking behavior (like getting favorable regulation).

They then say that their empirical work (three decades of data so more than one recession in there) shows that there is a decline in new firm formation, "in each state and nearly all metropolitan areas, and in each broad industrial sector, including high tech."

According to Baumol, this should be offset by an increase in "unproductive" behavior. This appears to be harder to measure, but they point to [2], which argues that both labor and capital (i.e., returns to shareholders) have been in decline.

This is all very complicated from the perspective of innovation and entrepreneurial endeavors in tech, where money is often lost despite the fact that the product is useful.

[1] [https://hbr.org/2017/06/is-america-encouraging-the-wrong- kin...](https://hbr.org/2017/06/is-america-encouraging-the-wrong-kind-of- entrepreneurship) [2][https://home.uchicago.edu/~barkai/doc/BarkaiDecliningLaborCa...](https://home.uchicago.edu/~barkai/doc/BarkaiDecliningLaborCapital.pdf)

<comment><USER3> I really don't believe that useful products, products which mitigate more cost than alternatives, fail.

<comment><USER4> What if your product never gets built, because you are unwilling/unable to navigate the legal and regulatory barriers that have been set up to keep you out?

Not many startups do medical devices. Everybody knows why not. Many other industries are just as walled off.

<comment><USER5> This is the one thing about the article that is a little off or misleading from my experience (which appropriately is in health care).

When you have this rent-seeking, it not only encourages unproductive business, but shuts down good ideas that would have worked if they were implementable.

The article seems to approach the problem as if there's these entrepreneurs sitting around trying to decide what to do, and then put their energy into unproductive but incentivized rent-seeking. I'm sure that happens, but just as often in my experience there are people who are in the right position to pursue good ideas, but are shut down, turned away, or whatever, because of the rent-seeking arrangements and regulation.

I also think this rent-seeking subtly influences perceptions of the public at large in such a way that ideas get scoffed at or go under the radar. It alters peoples' whole perspective on things, such that they never question the basic assumption of why the rent-seeking arrangement needs to be to begin with. This, in turn, can have consequences for how certain problems and solutions are approached.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not a very good article, but I agree with the idea that rent-seeking should be discouraged and we need to fight against it.

As an entrepreneur/self-employed person who 100% does not have any special relationships in government and relies almost solely on referrals, it is very frustrating to see people "create" wealth because they have special relationships with government officials.

In my industry, education, it's pretty rampant. Textbook deals are particularly horrendous.

Even on the local level it can be pretty bad. At a local charter school near me, a math teacher working at the same school is the number one recommended math tutor for students in HIS program. While they are not allowed to be his current students, he has a very parasitic relationship with them.

He charges a very local high rate ($100+ per hour) to students that he has taught math to. It just blows my mind how corrupt this is. I have heard him bragging about making thousands of dollars a month and more than doubling his school salary from students in a math/science program that he is an administrator/teacher for.

And this is at a very competitive math and science charter school who routinely sends people to the top math and science colleges in the country.

I mean, I get it, people want to make money, but this type of behavior is just disgusting.

<comment><USER7> Tutoring isn't rent-seeking. It is not in any way analogous to charging money for some commons that would otherwise be free (like the toll-chain-across-the- river example). If the parents feel that $100 is excessive, they can find another tutor. That teacher doesn't have a monopoly on mathematics.

> _And this is at a very competitive math and science charter school who > routinely sends people to the top math and science colleges in the country._

So that tutor helps do the job, and the rich parents find the rate acceptable.

<comment><USER8> It's not rent seeking, it's a conflict of interest.

Paying teachers and administrators for services creates a conflict of interest when it's time to grade papers, recommend students for advanced courses, or graduate students.

<comment><USER7> That is clear, but from the limited information given by OP it seems that the tutored students are not enrolled in that class any longer: _" While they are not allowed to be his current students, he has a very parasitic relationship with them. [...] He charges a very local high rate ($100+ per hour) to students that he has taught math to"_

Tutoring strictly past students seems to be a way of eliminating much of the glaring conflict of interest that you describe. (A smaller one remains yet: the possibility of doing a worse job of teaching the class, with the understanding that students who wish to be more rigorously prepped for post- secondary studies can just take the expensive tutoring.)

Other than that object, I don't see what's wrong with students who are no longer in that class paying for more tutoring (probably so they are better prepped for the entrance exams to those aforementioned post-secondary schools?)

<comment><USER6> He is the number one recommended tutor that they all go to when they are struggling in the program.

There is supposed to a list of people/companies that the guidance counselors recommend, but that's not the case with this school.

They only give out his number. Honestly, he shouldn't even be allowed to tutor these students. He is an administrator in their program, it's a huge conflict of interest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _In 2009, the number of businesses that closed down exceeded the number of new ventures for the first time in three decades, a sign that productive entrepreneurial activity is declining._

I haven't read the underlying paper, so this probably doesn't detract from the larger point. However, in terms of the Economist's article, I'm not sure that this is a good "sign" of _any_ trend; rather, it would seem inextricably linked to the 2008 crash that led to the Great Recession.

<comment><USER10> To put it another way:

Tech startups before 2008 generally made money by suddenly providing new and cool stuff. Think Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple.

Tech startups now seem to be focussed to a greater degree on rent-seeking business models- think Uber, AirBnb, UpWork, Stripe, various ginormous tech mega-consultancies.

Do you see the difference? The former have won market share by making products that are clearly better than the competition. The latter are essentially attempts to capture "middle man" monopolies on existing transaction chains.

This is of course a bit of a generalisation, but rent-seeking _is_ a bad thing in a number of non-obvious ways, and should be called out to a much greater degree.

<comment><USER11> How are Uber, AirBnB, UpWork, and Stripe rent-seeking business models?

<comment><USER12> Rent seeking is the wrong term for those businesses. A more appropriate term might be a market maker.

Rent seeking specifically means to extract extra money from an existing asset, but not produce any extra value (but purely by virtue of owning the asset).

<comment><USER10> What you say is true in the purest sense. Building on this, some economists regard monopolies of exchange as "assets". Baumol (the economist referenced in the article) did a lot of research into "Contestble Markets Theory", essentially concluding that markets which are not contestable generate free money for incumbants/owners/monopolists

You could say that anything to do with the "Sharing" or "Gig" economy is a play on rent extraction. Companies seek to own a marketplace in order to levy a rent on transactions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Fully half of the startups I've worked for have the primary (unstated) business model of transferring assets from investors to executives, with the nominal business activity only pursued to the minimum extent necessary to further the executives' real aim.

I wonder to what extent these numbers are caused by similar control frauds _, or if I 've just been particularly unlucky.

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

<comment><USER14> I saw a fun one that looks much like money laundering:

1\. Receive investment from Imagine K12, under the company's name.

2\. Rent four apartments in the heart of San Francisco.

3\. List the apartments on airbnb, under the _founder 's_ name.

Now you've got a substantial income stream under your own name that happens to be funded purely out of your investors' pockets.

<comment><USER15> This is no different than what a lot of flippers and small time real estate investors do by buying up numerous condos, duplexes, etc., in an upcoming neighborhood, throwing on a fresh coat of paint and some fake granite counters, and renting for 50% more than the month before.

Instead of VC money, they're leveraging low interest funny money created by banks and de-facto guaranteed now by the feds.

I really don't think the VCs nor the banks care, as long as the rental and AirBNB money keeps flowing, allowing return of principle and even eventual profits. They could care less that it is adding to the unaffordability of homes for everyone else.

<comment><USER14> It is different in that the ownership of the capital changes. Going in it belongs to the company; coming out it belongs to the founder personally.

If I buy an apartment under my own name, renovate it, and then rent it out under my own name, that's a pretty normal business. If I work for a company that rents an apartment, and I, knowing the company isn't using it, personally rent that apartment out in exchange for payments directly to me, that is, more or less, embezzlement. I don't have the legal right to sell or rent the company's property to you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This article does very little to discuss much about its supposed main point.

</comment><comment><USER17> The security industrial complex constructed after the wake of 9/11 certainly contributes to this, in addition to the preexisting military industrial complex.

</comment><comment><USER18> I find it interesting that the article ( _referring to the original article [1], not the economist 's which is mostly just some sort of political piece_) considered unproductive rent seeking mostly in forms of corrupt relationships between government and industry. Quoting that article,

" _Baumol was worried, however, by a very different sort of entrepreneur: the "unproductive" ones, who exploit special relationships with the government to construct regulatory moats, secure public spending for their own benefit, or bend specific rules to their will, in the process stifling competition to create advantage for their firms. Economists call this rent-seeking behavior._ "

However, should rent seeking behavior in traditional business to consumer (or business to business) relationships be excluded? Take for instance the explosion in software being sold as a service even when such things make very little practical sense. The 'cloud' certainly has some uses, but companies are trying to shoehorn it into absolutely everything and no small part of the motivation there is to justify charging an going rent for usage of software that's not _fundamentally_ changing.

The same is, in a way, even increasingly true of entertainment. Ever larger number of games are designed around attempts to coerce players into engaging in ongoing purchases after buying the game, often to no end as in the case of buying consumable items or currency of various sorts. In the end it seems identical as the idea is to artificially increase revenue through the seeking of rent instead of the creation of new products.

[1] - [https://hbr.org/2017/06/is-america-encouraging-the-wrong- kin...](https://hbr.org/2017/06/is-america-encouraging-the-wrong-kind-of- entrepreneurship)

<comment><USER19> I suppose the idea would be that if you are selling a good or service that isn't actually worth much, then the companies that don't buy will have an advantage over those who do, and eventually it should be self-correcting, if only because people tend to imitate the winners. This wouldn't make all B2B entrepeneurship sensible, but it would not have a tendency to get worse over time. Whereas, in theory, rent-seeking via government has no such reason it would not get ever-worse, as attempts by one company to influence government result in competing companies doing the same at first as a defensive measure, and then while they're in the lobbying game why not try to get something for themselves as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The original article referred to ( [https://www.colorado.edu/ibs/es/alston/econ4504/readings/Bau...](https://www.colorado.edu/ibs/es/alston/econ4504/readings/Baumol%201990.pdf) ) is really interesting (I'm part way through):

> Here I shall proceed on the basis of historical illustrations encompassing > all the main economic periods and places (ancient Rome, medieval China, Dark > Age Europe, the Later Middle Ages, etc.) that the economic historians almost > universally single out for the light they shed on the process of innovation > and its diffusion. These will be used to show that the relative rewards to > different types of entrepreneurial activity have in fact varied dramatically > from one time and place to another and that this seems to have had profound > effects on patterns of entrepreneurial behavior.

</comment><comment><USER21> The article dances around interesting ideas but instead settles for the washed up thesis that people are abusing government handouts.

There is an interesting phenomenon we are seeing: entrepreneurship is suddenly more glorious, encouraged by governments but often with misguided incentive structures (i.e. rewarding those who are great at pitching or making shiny vanity products).

So a more interesting question is: how can a government encourage entrepreneurial activity without enticing wantrapreneurs to demand free cash?

One idea is reverse tax. The government could reward a startup that is making money even if it's a small amount, and that way, the government is amplifying the market's rewards and not creating a faux incentive structure.

</comment><comment><USER10> This article does a pretty poor job of describing what rent-seeking is, and why it is bad, which is a shame.

I strongly encourage HNers who haven't already done so to read up on rent- seeking (aka rent-extraction).

</comment><comment><USER22> Also, the typical startup journey of "Incubator -> VC funding -> Corporate acquisition" is mostly rent seeking. Corporations use rent seeking (lobbying) to extract huge amounts of money from the government then startups use rent seeking to extract money from corporations.

There hasn't been any meaningful 'creative destruction' in the last 10 years; it's all been tech gimmicks.

</comment><comment><USER23> Uh, Monopoly Capital, Baran, Sweezy, 1966. Thick read. Resonates when it describes as capitalism's endgame, what the article defines as merely the result of bad incentive structures... but it's A Marxist read so heh...

</comment><comment><USER24> Garbage Clickbait Strategy for 2018:

1: Find a year old apolitical article from respected publication. 2: Figure out a way to make it about Trump.

<comment><USER2> The economist piece is a year old as well.

<comment><USER24> Ahh, you are correct. So it's more like, hacker news upvote clickbait strategy - post year old article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> If it makes money, keep doing it.

<comment><USER26> It makes US Dollars. So, as long as the rest of the world is willing to save in USD, keep doing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > since he was elected president last November, Donald Trump has paid more > than 40 visits to Trump corporation properties. His Mar a Lago club in > Florida makes twice as much profit as it did two years ago. Family friends > fill government offices which oversee parts of the Trump business empire. > The administration has hired dozens of former lobbyists, most of them > working on issues they previously lobbied on.

I'm no Trump fan, but this article reads more like a political piece than a business one. The practice of securing government grants and not creating much wealth from them has a long history.

<comment><USER28> > The practice of securing government grants and not creating much wealth from > them has a long history.

This is true, it does -- in Congress. (Pork barrel spending, logrolling, etc.) However, in the executive branch, this is unquestionably a new phenomenon.

<comment><USER29> _unquestionably a new phenomenon._

It depends on how you define "new."

If you intend "new" to mean it is exclusive to the current administration, you are incorrect.

<comment><USER30> Can you give recent examples of prior administrations doing this in the executive branch?

<comment><USER31> [https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-death-of-obamas-slush- funds...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-death-of-obamas-slush- funds-1496878321) seems pretty close. Different mechanism, sure, but similar result.

<comment><USER30> Stuff like the Volkswagon settlement being used to remedy the complaint have been going on for many years and is a nuanced thing[0]. not sure it belongs in the same category. That's also a pretty biased opinion column so I'll hold off on judgement of the practices until I do more research. Do you have a more neutral source than an opinion column with a few paragraphs of information?

pdf page 351-352:

[0] [https://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...](https://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2483&context=lawreview)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tracking Inconsistencies in Jupyter Notebooks - <AUTHOR> https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/friggeri/notebooks/blob/master/tracking_inconsistencies_in_notebooks.ipynb <comment><USER2> ...or you could define in system (ie embedded in jupyters engine) a state variable per cell, with time order monoticity and require sequencing as an option between cells? Dependency chaining by time. Makefiles. Failed on NFS but otherwise normal and understood.</comment>


Why We Find Self-Driving Cars So Scary by Dr Jerry Kaplan - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-we-find-self-driving-cars-so-scary-1527784724 <comment><USER2> Perceived being not safe and inability to assure the user about Safety and other related matters</comment>


Show HN: Test Driven Interviews - <AUTHOR> https://testdriveninterviews.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Original poster here.

Can't find a job, I'm obsessed with the whole terrible process, so I created this. Please be gentle on the test runners because its not set to scale very high because I'm broke.

I don't think TDD is best for everything, especially when the spec isn't clear, but it might be good for evaluating developers, whether they use TDD or not. And its much easier for the evaluator to assign a test and see if it passed than to say "flatten an array without using any libraries and send me the code so I can copy and paste it and see if it worked"

Stack: rails, docker for the test runners, AWS auto scaling groups and various test frameworks (request more, easy to add), and a pinch of react.js</comment>


Why Goldman Sachs Is Wrong About Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcQwvePC0OY <comment><USER2> Because I am holding bitcoin, and I will go broke if the price drops.

That is always the reason.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't believe they will get broken, but holding some bags is an alternative to their portfolio.

If they hold enough to go broke, it means they are the big whales and can freely manipulate the price.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> First they try to block the innovation, as always. But under the hoods they buy and always have a bag of coins 'just in case'.</comment>


Ask HN: Best uptime monitor? - <AUTHOR>

Looking around for uptime monitoring systems. What do you guys use? Thanks! <comment><USER2> I made my own service with a free Google App Engine instance, using this script as a base → <https://github.com/danawoodman/python-uptime-monitor> mainly to use the SMS gateway api from my provider.

Simple enough, write the views and use the cron service from GAE, for myself 2secods it's more than efficient.

I will never hit any cost on GAE just monitoring 12 servers every 2 seconds.

You will get more capabilities, writing your own uptime script and personally I will add: it's more fun :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> Uptrends has a pretty good service. Probes that run every 10 minutes. <http://uptrends.com>

</comment><comment><USER4> How many systems are you planning to monitor?

Are you looking for alerts? Performance graphs? Managed vs. In house?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just 1 server.

Email (and SMS) alerts and graphs yup.

<comment><USER4> Clicky: <http://www.pingdom.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> That's perfect, thank you!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Knol – Let's Rethink the Way We Handle Knowledge Bases - <AUTHOR> http://knol.io/

<comment><USER2> "We are in no way affiliated to the discontinued Google Knol."

Google trademarked Knol back in the day (2007). A USPTO search shows it is still live:

[http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4809:9wz...](http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4809:9wzrk3.2.1)

 _Electronic publishing services, namely, publication of text and graphic works of others in the field of general encyclopedic knowledge; providing education, entertainment and information services, namely, providing information via the Internet in the field of general encyclopedic knowledge._

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, thanks for the heads up. I wonder if this applies to us, since we're not a US based company.

<comment><USER2> IANAL, but I was also able to find Knol from Google on the UK IPO search:

[http://www.ipo.gov.uk/tmcase/Results/4/EU006911796](http://www.ipo.gov.uk/tmcase/Results/4/EU006911796)

and the OHIM website, which as I understand it covers Europe-wide trademarks:

[https://oami.europa.eu/eSearch/#details/trademarks/006911796](https://oami.europa.eu/eSearch/#details/trademarks/006911796)

But like I said, I am not a lawyer, do your own research, consult an expert etc etc...

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course, I'll have that checked out! ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This looks very cool. My company ([http://periscope.io](http://periscope.io)) is just now getting to the point of putting documentation online, and -- surprise! -- it's a huge pain and products in this space all seem mediocre.

One deal-breaker for me is that it has to feel like it's on my website. This means templates are not enough: I need full CSS customizability (statuspage.io does a good job with this) or iframe ability. The lack of a great, fully customizable product in this space is why I am currently fucking around with Markdown pages.

It's certainly fair to charge a lot more than you're apparently charging in order to get this customizability -- needing it probably predicts a real business that cares about its brand. (If knol.io becomes a big business I bet you'll end up charging a lot more in general.)

Anyway, awesome job with this! Looks like a great product solving a real problem.

<comment><USER4> just took a quick look at your site, are you using D3 for the charting?

<comment><USER3> CanvasJS, which we're really pleased with. Very fast to develop with, very fast to render (some customers have hundreds of charts per dashboard).

<comment><USER4> thanks, hadn't heard of canvasjs, I'm assuming it is relatively new?

could you explain a little about why you chose it? and how you compared and determined the other options out there?

I'm in the same boat and looking at several possible solutions (for example DC.js which is based on D3) so would appreciate any help.

thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here. Thanks for the huge support! I can already see a good amount of requests. I'll be sure to get back to you shortly.

Let me know if you have any questions. I'll be glad to answer them!

<comment><USER5> Are there any demos of a knol instance/site running?

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, the website is still under development. Hopefully, we'll have the first version online in a few weeks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm intrigued, but I have nearly no idea how to link what appears to be a sales landing page to "Let's Rethink the Way We Handle Knowledge Bases". I don't see anything about "rethinking" there, just that I can buy 10, 100, or 300 of them. Is there a better link that more clearly represents "rethinking"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe the page doesn't represent the "rethinking" properly. Our vision is that knowledge bases should not be on a separate website. For example, if you're a web agency and you sell a Wordpress website, your knowledge base should be inside the Wordpress adminstration. If you're selling a custom solution, you should be able to use an API to plug your documentation there.

I hope the examples explain better what we are trying to achieve here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "No image storage limit (as long as it's fair)"

Personally, I've never liked seeing this in ToS and the like - it usually means "unlimited until you hit the limit we didn't tell you about"

<comment><AUTHOR> I see exactly what you mean. Maybe it's clearer if we go with "XX GB of storage space".

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Aside from getting a few examples up, I'd clarify the pricing. It's not clear if that's $ per year or per month.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ohh that's a nice find. It's actually per month. I'll have that modified right away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What does "20 Knowledge bases" mean? Is it 20 articles, or 20 independent sets of articles?

<comment><AUTHOR> It means 20 sets of articles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Typo on your front page:

"Import your existing documentation, create new ones or choose from our exsiting library!"

Edit: tone

<comment><AUTHOR> Ouch. So ashamed of this! But I fixed it. I'm verifying all the text again. Thanks for he heads up.

<comment><USER11> [http://www.boxuk.com/upload/2014/02/Relaunched-Ultimate- Webs...](http://www.boxuk.com/upload/2014/02/Relaunched-Ultimate-Website- Checklist-2.0.pdf) someone on here posted it the other day and I've used it, snagged a bunch of stuff so far.

I like the idea of what you are doing I'll be sure to keep an eye on it :), Good Luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a pretty exhaustive list. Thanks. I used this one (which is not too bad): [http://www.clickminded.com/seo- checklist/](http://www.clickminded.com/seo-checklist/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Home Food Lab Project - <AUTHOR> The Project:
It is The Cook for a Year Project. To be precise,  cook 500 dishes in 330 days. Yes, you read it right.  My kitchen will be a food lab and I will cook 500 meals in 11 months or 48 weeks, or 330 days. And my Final dish is set to be on July 1st 2021.
The Contender: ...
https://www.urbancottage.net/recipes/the-home-food-lab-project <comment><USER2> Do they have to be unique? Cause otherwise that's pretty easy

</comment><comment><USER3> Any interesting technology you're going to make/use?</comment>


Ask YC: how would you pay for music? (if you could choose) - <AUTHOR>

Would you prefer to pay by the download (like itunes), subscription (like emusic)<p>or, have unlimited music downloads included as a part of your ISP deal? <comment><USER2> if all other things are equal, i would prefer to pay by whichever method is cheaper. if i intend to download a lot, some sort of unlimited subscription plan. if not, pay per song.

<comment><AUTHOR> and that makes total sense. for example, i download a lot (some months), so i would be happy to pay my ISP an extra $20 a month to download as much music as I want.

but you can't ignore all the people that use itunes and are satisfied with it and might feel they are paying some kind of 'tax' if a music/isp bundled service is pushed onto them.

<comment><USER2> perhaps an option for both? have a fixed song price menu, but also offer an all-you-can-eat option for $X/mo.

i don't like the ISP option because it locks you in. no choice = not customer friendly.</comment></comment></comment>


For loops help - comp.lang.c - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c/msg/e105e5d339edec01?pli=1 <comment><USER2> Mostly deobfuscated:

        int putchar ( int ) ;

        int main ( void )
        {
            int z ;
            for (z = 0; z < 90; z++)
            {
                putchar (
                    z % 9 + z / 9 > 3 &&
                    z % 9 + z / 9 < 14 &&
                    z / 9 < z % 9 + 6 &&
                    z / 9 > z % 9 - 5 ? '*' : ' ' );

                if (!(z % 9 - 9 + 1))
                    putchar ( '\n' );
            };
            putchar ( '\n' ) ;
            return 0;
        }

It's too late at night for me to try to simplify that big expression in the middle...

<comment><USER3> The big expression in the middle is effectively unpacking a 2D point encoded in z. z % 9 is the x coordinate and z / 9 is the y coordinate:

      x = z % 9;
      y = z / 9;

      putchar (
              x + y > 3 &&
              x + y < 14 &&
              y < x + 6 &&
              y > x - 5 ? '*' : ' ' );

      if (x == 8)
        putchar ( '\n' );

Wolfram Alpha plots this inequality nicely:

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=x+%2B+y+%3E+3+%26%26+x+...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=x+%2B+y+%3E+3+%26%26+x+%2B+y+%3C+14+%26%26+y+%3C+x+%2B+6+%26%26+y+%3E+x+-+5+)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This problem appears in the Deitel and Deitel book "C++ How to Program" as well as in their Java book.

It's a great exercise that challenges CS students every year and does a very good job at teaching nested loops.

Later in the same set of exercises is the four triangles problem that ties increment and decrement operators to the use of nested loops. It's one of my personal favorites.

CS students who legitimately complete these exercises always do well with chapter 4 (Arrays, Simpletron), chapter 5 (pointers) and chapter 6 (structs and classes) and come away with insight and a sense of confidence that echoes for a long time.

It is literally one of those defining problems that separates those who are serious from those who are not.

The responder at comp.lang.c knew that. Kudos to him.

<comment><USER5> Exactly. I'm surprised to see many people here saying that the responder was unhelpful or rude. I think that the answer was not only fascinating but also responsible, pedagogical and, in a way, even compassionate.

<comment><USER6> Not rude, but has waaaay too much time on his hands!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I subscribed to comp.lang.c for a few months about two years ago when I was taking a course on C. Like a lot of older or more high-volume lists, the regulars are complete characters. Small battles over minor points of style go from 0 to A.E. Housman in no time at all. (If the Housman reference is too odd, substitute Erik Naggum.)

I eventually quit the list because it was too much of a time suck, but it's well worth a half a day swimming through the archives. Heathfield's posts are almost always worth a look.

<comment><USER8> _go from 0 to A.E. Housman_

Piqued. Lessee, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Edward_Housman> ... _colleagues were unnerved by his scathing critical attacks ... they "were often savage in the extreme."_

Also, for other reasons: _A fellow don described him as being "descended from a long line of maiden aunts"._

<comment><USER7> Once upon a time, I was a Classics student, and even in the 1980s and 1990s, people still got a lot of mileage out of Housman stories and quotations. (He died in 1936.)

Apparently, after he died, they found notebooks in his office that he had filled with long elaborate, witty, hurtful insults -- aimed at nobody in particular. When he wrote a review, he would tweak the pre-fab insults as needed and voila. A sick, twisted person, but fascinating. (If you're _really_ curious, check out Tom Stoppard's _The Invention of Love_.)

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the pointer. I tried desultorily to get a (net-)look at the Gow text, but no dice. I'll have to leave it to some weekend/vacation time to chase sources.

It's curious that the A.E.H. vinegar does not get wider circulation. My copy of Matthew Parris' Scorn only features a couple of harmless barbs (one the 'malt/Milton' line). There are some scraps over at <http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alfred_Edward_Housman> , and here [http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n13/frank-kermode/nothing-for- ever-...](http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n13/frank-kermode/nothing-for-ever-and- ever)

(Also, a passing appreciation by Chesterton, a guide I trust, here [http://wikilivres.info/wiki/Autobiography_%28Chesterton%29/C...](http://wikilivres.info/wiki/Autobiography_%28Chesterton%29/Chapter_XIII))

<comment><USER9> "Nature, not content with denying to Mr — the faculty of thought, has endowed him with the faculty of writing."

The name was left blank in the original, but was intended to be filled in and used when a suitable subject should turn up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Now I'm just waiting for someone to post a Perl version shaped like a camel.

<comment><USER11> Hm. Or I could take the obsfucated C version, dump it into an Inline::C block and then run it through Acme::EyeDrops. Then we could have a C version shaped like a camel. I am, however, far too tired to actually do so - anybody more awake is welcome to steal the idea ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you're too lazy to compile it yourself, you can run the code online: <http://ideone.com/QKQG6>

<comment><USER13> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> A one-line solution in Python:

        print '\n'.join(['%s%s%s' % (' '*((9-step)/2), '*'*step, ' '*((9-step)/2)) for step in [1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 9, 7, 5, 3, 1]])

Not diamond shaped, but moderately obfuscated.

<comment><USER15> I think the hardest part of the problem is defining the formula that generates the number (or position) of asterisks at each line.

And you hard-coded it in a list. I consider this cheating.

<comment><USER15> Here, a one-liner that makes its own calculations:

      print '\n'.join(max(4-i, i-5)*' ' + (min(i, 9-i)*2+1)*'*' for i in range(0, 10))

Edit: shaved off a few more characters and somehow made it _slightly_ clearer. I _would_ make it diamond shaped, but python will whine because of "invalid indentation".

<comment><USER16> Parameterized!

      def d(n): return '\n'.join(int(max((n-1)/2-i,i-n/2))*' '+(min(i,n-1-i)*2+1)*'*' for i in xrange(0,n))

<comment><USER15> I have made a version of that myself just before posting here, but I made _n_ be width, not the height. Still an interesting solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> That's just cruel. Very clever, though.

<comment><USER18> A bit, perhaps. But the guy asking the question is clearly just offloading his homework to a newsgroup, which is also rude.

<comment><USER19> Rude, No. Lazy, yes.

<comment><USER20> How is telling a group "I have made no effort to do this task, can you guys do this for me" not rude?

<comment><USER19> _> I'm having a hard time writing a code for this one. I tried several

> times, but I can't get it to work properly. I live in Japan and I take

> an online C++ course. The instructor lives in the US so whenever I am

> awake, he's asleep. Therefore, I cannot contact him directly when I

> need help. I have to get this program up and running ASAP. I tried

> searching everywhere for help, but there's none except for this group.

> My textbook isn't much of a help either. I WILL GREATLY APPRECIATE THE

> HELP I WILL GET! _

This is what he said. And trust me I have seen people struggle with writing a function to add two numbers after taking a college course of 1 year in C. I don't think he didn't try at all.

<comment><USER18> The way he presents the problem gives no point of reference for a nice person to say "oh, I see where you misunderstood what foo does" and make it a learning experience. He could, for example, have included one of the several some-what working attempts.

The only "good" answers to such a request are a: here's the code and b: lesson one, here's how a for-loop works. Since his textbook doesn't help, option b doesn't seem viable.

Rude, lazy, it's a fine line, I suppose. Being lazy in front of strangers you're asking for help is perhaps not rude, but doesn't exactly scream for a super-constructive response.

<comment><USER21> His "C: The Complete Reference" textbook?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1339884>

:)

<comment><USER22> Ah, yes. Another little piece of comp.lang.* lore: the expression "Bullschildt" was not invented for nothing.

See also his annotated version of the official C standard, which at the time it was published contained not only Schildt's comments but also the complete text of the standard itself. The standard was available from the international standards bodies for a small fortune, yet the annotated version was available in bookshops for a modest fraction of the cost. It was widely speculated that the difference in price reflected the value added by Schildt's comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> funny... though that was easier to read and less obfuscated and hideous than code i've encountered in real life.

</comment><comment><USER24> Bleh. Perl + Acme::EyeDrops >> * Nice try though.

<comment><USER25> There goes the rest of my morning...

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> A little of topic. I may need to dive back in C++. I knew the language pretty well (circa 1994), the STL was brand new and namespaces were experimental. I don't know what happened after that. Can anyone recommend any online resources to fill the gap? Thanks

<comment><USER27> One of the things you want to hit up right away after you get reacquainted is the boost library: <http://www.boost.org/>

If you use it well, it does a lot of heavy lifting, adds a lot of safety and expressiveness (boost::bind is just pure magic) that just wasn't there before, and a lot of the boost libraries are going into the standard - and are already implemented in the TR1 namespace.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> What percent of HN users could figure this out without using references? I've been .NET programming for 5+ years and couldn't figure it out giving it a few hours to try.

</comment><comment><USER29> Wow, how do you even begin to write something so obfuscated? Do people do this by hand, or are there any computer-assisted tools for it? I mean:

       for( z = 002354l / 000644l / 000132l / 000322l / 000374l ; ...

has all the hallmarks of machine-generated code.

<comment><USER30> Not really. Almost any numbers would do, since z is an int and integer division "a/b" in C means not exactly a/b, but its floor. For instance, "2/2/2".

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Nobody's yet mentioned the poster's very first mistake -- asking for help with C++ in a C newsgroup.

</comment><comment><USER32> That wasn't helpful at all!

</comment><comment><USER33> Regardless of whether or not the original post was rude is no excuse for a rude answer. Kindness begets kindness, patience begets patience. We have a duty to not escalate stuff like this into shit-storms. If the kid didn't post correctly, then we should answer by asking the right questions to guide him to the correct question. If you can't do that, then just move along, you don't need to post.

I remember being that kid. Well, not quite so bad that I literally wanted someone to write code for me, but I'm sure someone thought my poorly worded questions were asking people to write code for me. How many kids are we scaring away because we're being assholes to them?

<comment><USER22> > Regardless of whether or not the original post was rude is no excuse for a > rude answer.

The answer wasn't rude, it was just unhelpful.

For those not familiar with the culture on comp.lang.c and the various related C and C++ groups, it is very simple: people will generally be helpful in dealing with homework questions _as long as the asker has made a genuine effort_.

On the other hand, anyone who just reposts homework verbatim with no effort whatsoever to solve the problem first is likely to find themselves given a very clever answer that is technically correct but clearly completely implausible for a beginner, thus making it very obvious to the teacher that the person is cheating on their homework. I recall a similar example where someone asked how to work out factorials in C++, and was presented with a highly efficient answer... because it used template metaprogramming and generated that answer at compile time.

This was certainly clear in the related FAQs last time I checked, so anyone who asks a homework question without making any effort to solve it themselves is not only lazy but also incapable of following basic netiquette. I doubt you'd find many regular posters on those groups who had much sympathy, even though some of those same posters give up a great deal of time to help those who are making a _genuine_ effort to improve.

<comment><USER34> >The answer wasn't rude, it was just unhelpful.

Being deliberately unhelpful _is_ rude.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is too funny xD</comment>


What Yahoo + Tumblr Could Mean for Everyone. - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/things-tech/77049d5702bb

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a great piece by someone who was with Yahoo for quite some time and really understands the company. Was more interesting to read than all the Facebook & Instagram posts back then.</comment>


Scientists say they have new evidence that autism begins in the womb - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-26750786

<comment><USER2> Patches of Disorganization in the Neocortex of Children with Autism

[http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1307491](http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1307491)

doi://10.1056/NEJMoa1307491

Background

Autism involves early brain overgrowth and dysfunction, which is most strongly evident in the prefrontal cortex. As assessed on pathological analysis, an excess of neurons in the prefrontal cortex among children with autism signals a disturbance in prenatal development and may be concomitant with abnormal cell type and laminar development. Methods

To systematically examine neocortical architecture during the early years after the onset of autism, we used RNA in situ hybridization with a panel of layer- and cell-type–specific molecular markers to phenotype cortical microstructure. We assayed markers for neurons and glia, along with genes that have been implicated in the risk of autism, in prefrontal, temporal, and occipital neocortical tissue from postmortem samples obtained from children with autism and unaffected children between the ages of 2 and 15 years. Results

We observed focal patches of abnormal laminar cytoarchitecture and cortical disorganization of neurons, but not glia, in prefrontal and temporal cortical tissue from 10 of 11 children with autism and from 1 of 11 unaffected children. We observed heterogeneity between cases with respect to cell types that were most abnormal in the patches and the layers that were most affected by the pathological features. No cortical layer was uniformly spared, with the clearest signs of abnormal expression in layers 4 and 5. Three-dimensional reconstruction of layer markers confirmed the focal geometry and size of patches. Conclusions

In this small, explorative study, we found focal disruption of cortical laminar architecture in the cortexes of a majority of young children with autism. Our data support a probable dysregulation of layer formation and layer-specific neuronal differentiation at prenatal developmental stages. (Funded by the Simons Foundation and others.)

<comment><USER3> Thank you for posting that! I am not exposed to current research on autism, but I want to know what is happening.

Does that mean that autism can be an evolutionary symptom of trying to balance maximum intelligence (which I assume requires, in layman's terms, a ton of neurons) with robust brain organization and overall brain health?

And do we know if any other species experience autism?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Coming soon:

new evidence that prostate cancer begins in the womb.

new evidence that schizophrenia begins in the womb.

new evidence that Alzheimer's begins in the womb.

<comment><USER5> Is this supposedly amusing or are you just venting off because of something, with no intent of contributing to any form of civilized discussion?

<comment><USER4> It's not really interesting that a condition which is with you from birth might begin in the womb. The others I listed are also known to be... phrased conservatively... strongly influenced by something in the womb, but at least they all exhibit late-life onset and could conceivably begin at some later point.

<comment><USER6> Given the amount of coverage bullshit theories about autism and it's causes got a few years ago don't you think it's worth promoting valid research about it (particularly where it directly contradicts the bullshit)?

<comment><USER4> Well, for one thing, it doesn't. Assuming the antivaxxers take this research to heart, which there is no particular reason to expect (how have they viewed other research?), watch for the message to become "save your grandchildren from autism by not vaccinating your children".

On the general question of "if one bad idea gets press, should we devote a bunch of extra attention to refuting it?"...

Daryl Bem managed to conduct some studies showing a "statistically significant" effect of ESP. He got those published in a respectable journal, which felt duty-bound to print them because Bem had followed all the formalities of the scientific method, and That Is The Process Of Science.

Obviously, ESP is not real, and this attracted several replication efforts. When they duly failed to replicate, they couldn't get published. Are you arguing that after publishing Bem's paper, the journal should have wasted further space publishing the inevitable refutations? Their position was that a paper demonstrating that ESP is not real has no scientific value, and they're completely correct about that (we already know!). So they opted to publish papers that might have something more worthwhile to say.

neolefty points out that the article's content has little to do with the title, and that's fair criticism of my complaint. But the title is so incredibly inane that it immediately sold me on the idea that reading the article would be nothing but a waste of time.

<comment><USER6> I'd like to say I don't care what anti-vaxxers think but sadly I have to as their children don't deserve to be lumbered with their irresponsible idiocy and the overall impact on herd immunity means that they're causing significant problems even outside their families.

There are two things here:

1) What's covered in the scientific literature

2) What's reported in the mainstream press

In the former you're absolutely right, in the later I don't think so (and the original link is the the BBC, not the NEJM).

Most people don't have the skills, time or subscriptions to go and view medical papers. When Wakefield got coverage for his bullshit for most people there was no "this is obviously wrong" because they had no evidence to suggest Wakefield was wrong. As a result his position became commonly and widely accepted.

When that happens I think the papers should spend time covering the refutations and trying to inform the public when real research - even if dull or obvious research - shows something which will slowly help the public adjust their incorrect viewpoint.

I'd love to think that the MMR/Autism thing has run it's course and we shouldn't have to do this any more (and hell, with even Jenny McCarthy backing down some we are getting there) but sadly I think we still have some way to go.

And in that vein, long live the promotion of tedious (but factual) research.

<comment><USER4> I mostly agree with what you're saying here; I'm not sure about this one:

> When Wakefield got coverage for his bullshit for most people there was no > "this is obviously wrong" because they had no evidence to suggest Wakefield > was wrong. _As a result_ his position became commonly and widely accepted.

My gut says that isn't responsible for the acceptance. Antivaccine beliefs crop up from time to time, apparently independently, all across the world. They are generally cultural phenomena; e.g. the polio vaccine was rejected as being part of a Western conspiracy to do nefarious things to the people getting it. I'd be more inclined to blame the fact that getting injections makes some people pretty uncomfortable.

I'm not actually sure how widely accepted antivaxxers are; they're certainly vocal about their (deserved) persecution by saner people. As you mention, they're a problem more because even small concentrated groups of antivaxxers can cause big problems to everyone around them than because there are so many; UFO junkies aren't exactly accepted by the mainstream, but there are a lot of them in an absolute numbers sense _and they 're harmless_.

I can't tell you how shocked I was when my sister's best friend, a graduate of UC Berkeley, came into our house and started telling us about the evils of wheat. Among other preposterous claims, apparently the wheat we eat today has been genetically engineered to be nefariously addictive, and has all kinds of ill effects on your bodily health. I was able to trace most of her ideas back to this guy, the natural culmination of the gluten-free food fad:

[http://www.wheatbellyblog.com/](http://www.wheatbellyblog.com/)

but, as is always the case, her ideas were garbled, and attributed even more evil to wheat, compared to what is presented in that awful, scaremongering book.

You can't stop completely crazy ideas from springing up in the most unlikely places, and skills, time, and access are much less protective than you might hope.

When Brazil had its antivax scare at the turn of the 20th century, the government showed up in full military force and vaccinated everyone anyway. That's the sensible way to handle antivaxx beliefs.

This has been a long, rambling comment. Let me try to sum up:

\- Antivaxxers aren't doing it because they're convinced by any research. They're doing it as a weird cultural phenomenon, like many, many other crackpot quasireligious groups (UFOs / astrology / cryptozoology / 9/11 truthers / vegans / what have you). As with other quasireligious believers, they're not going to be convinced by argument or evidence. What makes them different is not that people weren't around to defend reality when they formed, it's that their beliefs and practices are quite harmful to everyone around them.

\- Given the long and distinguished history of antivax movements, it doesn't make sense to me to blame this one on Andrew Wakefield and a failure to publish counterpapers in a timely manner. It makes more sense to view it as another antivax movement, fueled by whatever keeps causing and sustaining them, where the trigger is basically just a coincidence.

edit-addendum:

> Most people don't have the skills [...] to go and view medical papers

This is no less true now than it was in 1998. For all of those people, they have no evidence _now_ to suggest that Wakefield was wrong. The publication of research discrediting him further and further can never help; by assumption, those people cannot understand medical papers. They don't understand Wakefield's paper either (which is what I'm getting at when I say "Antivaxxers aren't doing it because they're convinced by any research").</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>