Java 7: Oracle pushes a first version of closures - <AUTHOR> http://www.baptiste-wicht.com/2010/05/oracle-pushes-a-first-version-of-closures/

<comment><USER2> The syntax won't win beauty pageants but I like how they retrofitted lambdas onto interfaces so you can do something like:

      Collections.sort(list, (Comparator) #(String a, String b) {
        return a.compareToIgnoreCase(b);
      });

<comment><USER3> (sort list #'string-lessp) still wins in my book :)

<comment><USER4> You can always static import Collections.sort. The main thing missing, then, is a way to simply refer to an existing method to perform the comparison. Is there syntax for this in the current release? (I believe there was in some of the earlier proposals.)

<comment><USER5> I haven't tried this but according to the comments on the post you can do something like this:

        Comparator string_lessp = (Comparator) #(String a, String b) {
            return a.compareToIgnoreCase(b);
        }

        sort(list, string_lessp);

<comment><USER3> Yeah, but that just seems _wrong_. It's like "I have this function, but I can't actually refer to it, so I'll have to wrap it in this thingamajig just so that I can pass it around".

<comment><USER5> Huh? You can, but the sort method already takes a Comparator class. If it took a function you could pass around the function instead.

Anyway, the point was only that "(sort list #'string-lessp)" is nothing special.

<comment><USER3> The definition of Comparator-interface includes only two methods, .compare and .equals. The documentations says that it is always safe to not override .equals, so we're left with just .compare. This effectively means that each comparator is effectively a function of two arguments that returns a boolean. Had functions been in Java in the first place, the whole Comparator interface would have been superfluous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Look at what the cat dragged in - a syntax for closures in Java.

<comment><USER7> yea, that looks about right.

Everyone looking for these kind of features should probably just be using Scala...

<comment><USER8> While I would prefer Scala over [Java + closures], and would prefer Clojure over either of those, I am still pleased to see closures in Java for several reasons.

1) For now, I still have a job as a Java programmer. Closures in Java will save me some lines of code until I can fix that.

2) Currently each JVM language has its own incompatible reinvention of closures. I think that closures in Java are a step towards better interoperability between JVM languages.

3) A lot of programmers will be introduced to a higher level of abstraction than they otherwise would have.

<comment><USER9> > 2) Currently each JVM language has its own incompatible reinvention of > closures.

Yeah, but as long as they expect Callables in the right place interop can be pretty easy with just interfaces. For instance, you can pass JRuby lambdas to Clojure functions just fine. Sure there's a duplication of effort, but it's not too bad for interop purposes.

<comment><USER10> How in the world do callables replace closures? Closures can have arguments, callables can't. You cannot pass a ruby lambda expecting arguments to Clojure.

<comment><USER9> > You cannot pass a ruby lambda expecting arguments to Clojure.

I beg to differ: [http://github.com/technomancy/clojure- gem/blob/master/test/t...](http://github.com/technomancy/clojure- gem/blob/master/test/test_ref.rb#L46)

<comment><USER10> Have you looked at the source code for that project? It doesn't use callables at all. the orig_commute function, the original commute method on class Ref, gets passed a monkey-patched ruby Proc object that implements the invoke method which takes one argument, a list, containing all of the original ruby arguments. Clojure then most likely calls invoke inside orig_commute through reflection. The end result: a bunch of hackery specific to Ruby and Clojure, something JVM-level closures would help eliminate.

Again, you cannot pass a ruby function expecting arguments to Clojure! What your link shows is that you can, however, send monkey-patched versions of ruby functions that implement clojure-specific calling conventions to clojure. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I _really_ didn't expect to say I love Oracle. But in hindsight, better productivity for the Java platform is a huge thing for them.

<comment><USER12> It's like watching your hero being swallowed by a monster and then discovering the monster started to exhibit some personality traits of your hero ;-)

Oracle is ceasing to be the Ultimate Uncool Company in tech. (no, really, that place is Microsoft's - Oracle never stood a chance)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think waiting for Oracle to do something with Java 7 at this point is like believing Lucy will let you kick the football this time.

<comment><USER14> Is there anything to suggest that they'll let the current development hell continue? They have a lot invested in Java now, they might actually get their act together and push Java forward. Both to make it attractive to the programmers that like C# better, and to add features to the JVM to allow alternate languages to thrive, e.g. tail-calls and coroutines.

<comment><USER13> > Is there anything to suggest that they'll let the current development hell > continue?

History, inertia, lack of any demonstrated interest or unified direction, key Java players running away, a change in planned features every month, no clear incentive, almost no interest from Java programmers? (What interest there is seems to be mainly from the fringe community involved in Scala and Clojure, who want invokeDynamic.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Good or bad, I am just happy they are actually doing something. (Wow, that is depressing.)

</comment><comment><USER16> Good to know that they at least work on it and dont delay it till jdk8. This will be a great addition to the jdk for alternative-language-developers just like MethodHandles allowing them to compete with Java performance-wise.

</comment><comment><USER17> What's with the "#" sign? Is that new for lambdas, or an existing Java symbol?

<comment><USER18> That's new for lambdas.

<comment><USER19> Java isn't very "symboly" in practice. Any idea why they made such an unusual choice? I'm not against it (I prefer symbols to long words generally, even if they have a slightly longer learning curve), but it seems unlike the rest of the Java spec.

<comment><USER20> Well, the alternative is adding a new keyword, and it's difficult to do that without risking breaking any existing code that uses whatever identifier they choose. Breaking old code is even less "Java" than introducing new symbols.

edit: Actually, now that I think about it, this wouldn't be the first time they introduced a new keyword with a language update. So much for that argument:

[http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/java/nutsandbolts/_k...](http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/java/nutsandbolts/_keywords.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> None of these closures actually close over any state. Is that feature going to exist, or are these really just C-style function pointers?

<comment><USER22> If this is equivalent to anonymous classes, then it can close over final references.

E.g.,

      public class Ref<T> {
         private T t;
         public Ref(T initial) { t = initial; }
         public T get() { return t; }
         public void set (T t) { this.t = t; }
      }

      public Callable<Integer> makeIncrementer(int initial) {
          final Ref<Integer> ref = new Ref<Integer>(initial);

          return new Callable<Integer> () {
             public Integer call() {
                 int rv = ref.get();
                 rv += 1;
                 ref.set(rv);
             }
         }
      }

Nonetheless if the reference closed over still has to be final (e.g., I can't just give it an Integer) this is merely syntactic sugar over what Java already has. Perl had this for ages:

      sub make_incrementer {
          my $i = shift;

          return sub { return $i++; }
      }

Too little, too late. I am almost certainly using Scala (or Clojure) for any future JVM projects (unless there's a good reason not to).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> now the blob-programmer can create compound blobs out of smaller atomic blobs.

<comment><USER24> You mean "blub", right? Anyway, as someone stuck programming in Java because our customers require it I would welcome this language addition.

<comment><USER25> Out of curiosity, how flexible are your customers to updating java versions?

And for that matter, are they receptive to Clojure?

<comment><USER23> usually its the jvm that is the dependency. So I don't see why you could not program in clojure or scala.

<comment><USER24> We could but it would be difficult. Our product requires that our customers subclass our Java classes to implement their custom business logic, and sometimes it's necessary to provide the source to our base classes for reference. Sending a customer some Clojure code and expecting a Java developer to know how to handle that doesn't seem reasonable.

<comment><USER23> one can also ask the question whether its you that want to continue coding in java, because you think in java, or because you want to avoid learning something new. But yeah, if the customer don't grasp Lisp, you are pretty much settled with java.

<comment><USER24> If one were to ask me that question I would respond by saying that I have been programming in Common Lisp for many years and would gladly switch to any lisp, especially Clojure, if it made sense for our business.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google is 16 today – here is a look at their most inspiring moments - <AUTHOR>

Google is 16 years old today. My site has created a small tribute to them whereby we've collected their most inspiring videos (7) in one slideshow. They can be viewed here - getinspired365.com/google <comment><AUTHOR> clicky - [http://www.getinspired365.com/google](http://www.getinspired365.com/google)

</comment><comment><USER2> Nice video, good job!</comment>


Ask HN: How to cut accommodation costs in major city? - <AUTHOR> I guess the question applies to any major (expensive) city but I'm planning to move to London in a few weeks and work as few hours as possible for another company whilst pursuing my startup. Costs on food and entertainment are easy to keep low but rent/accommodation is so damn high anywhere near the center and you start to incur high travel costs the further out you move.<p>Are there any alternative ways of living that would reduce costs to below the rental rate for a room? I'm happy to live as unconventionally as I need to so long as it's safe. <comment><USER2> Well, besides just getting a cheap place?

1\. Live with other people. Hopefully you should already be doing this. Every sane single person in their 20s in New Zealand does.

2\. Go further, and share your room with another person. It's not so bad. You can put a curtain in the middle of the room. I've done it and it was fine.

3\. Pay someone a small weekly fee to freely use their kitchen and toilet, and sleep in a van in the carpark. If you insulate your car and have a mattress, as well as find someone game, you'll learn to enjoy it.

I don't consider any of this to be "hardship". You might. I think many of us have a hard time accepting how possible it is to be comfortable with less.

If these really are unthinkable, then just find a cheap place.</comment>


Just 11% of 53 cancer research papers were reproducible - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v485/n7396/full/485041e.html <comment><USER2> I came to the biological sciences trained as a chemist. As I began working on my Ph.D. and variously encountered papers on cell signaling research (the field that much "cancer research" would fall into) it was blindingly apparent to me, perhaps because of my chemistry background, what was going on...

Cell Signaling (and much of Biology) research is in its Alchemy phase. Now, alchemy often gets a bad rap as being completely worthless, snake-oil type stuff, but this was not the case at all. Rather, individuals were working on an area about which almost nothing was known, and (more importantly) for which the key _central organizing laws_ were not yet revealed (for Alchemy: the atomic theory of matter and chemical bonding, for Cell Signaling: how individual proteins and small molecules interact). Furthermore, the goals were lofty and almost certainly unattainable (for Alchemy: turn base metals into gold, for Cell Signaling: cure cancer), driving people to do "rush" work. It's not that the results are completely invalid, or that the experiments are useless. It's just that everyone feels like they're _so close_ to a solution (Alchemists were way off with Phlogiston, and I'll bet Cell Signaling researchers are similarly clueless as to what _really_ matters) that no one takes the time to step back and synthesize the results in an attempt to understand the forest from the trees.

Cell Signaling will, eventually, have its Joseph Priestley, its Dmitri Mendeleev.

From experience, the fact that 89% of these "cancer research" papers are not reproducible almost definitely has less to do with fraudulent data and so much more to do with crazy complex experimental setups that end up probing a half- dozen experimental variables all at once (without the researchers even grasping that this is going on).

Yeah, publish or perish sucks, but what sucks more is the death of basic science research. The Alchemists eventually became Chemists because they refocused on core principles (atomic theory, bonding) and forgot about the lofty goals (turn lead into gold)...

...but try telling any politician that they should decrease cancer research funding and refocus on genetics, structural biology, and evolution research. I'd love to know how they respond.

<comment><USER3> >Cell Signaling will, eventually, have its Joseph Priestley, its Dmitri Mendeleev.

That's very optimistic, but not necessarily true (even ignoring the question of _when_ ). Priestley succeeded so well because he developed simple, reproducible experiments (expose mercury oxide to sunlight to produce oxygen etc.) that he was happy to share for no financial gain (even traveling to others' labs to help them reproduce his work [1]). The current environment of paywalls and competitive grants seems hardly conducive to the rise of similar figures.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiments_and_Observations_on...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiments_and_Observations_on_Different_Kinds_of_Air#Discovery_of_oxygen)

<comment><USER4> What do paywalls possible have to do with the reproducibility of results? Anyone who has access to a lab capable of even attempting to reproduce such research is either 1) at an institution that has access to those journals or 2) can use google to find the papers anyway. Hopefully both.

The fact that tax-payer funded research is put behind paywalls is a travesty , but it seems wrong to claim it actually hinders researchers from doing anything given.

<comment><USER5>
        > What do paywalls possible have to do with the reproducibility
        > of results? Anyone who has access to a lab

Actually, there's no institution subscribed to every journal. There are, in fact, many papers inaccessible to even the most funded labs. Spotty coverage.

<comment><USER6> I'm published in a highly-ranked journal that our university doesn't have access to.

Sorta funny.

<comment><USER4> Can you find the paper online by searching for it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What is more troubling is not that so few of these results results are reproducible, but that it appears almost no-one is trying to reproduce the results of earlier studies. The ability of the scientists who wrote the paper to even get access to the resources necessary to try and reproduce the results is limited.

I'm reminded of Feymann's Cargo Cult Science:

"I was shocked to hear of an experiment done at the big accelerator at the National Accelerator Laboratory, where a person used deuterium. In order to compare his heavy hydrogen results to what might happen with light hydrogen he had to use data from someone else's experiment on light hydrogen, which was done on different apparatus. When asked why, he said it was because he couldn't get time on the program (because there's so little time and it's such expensive apparatus) to do the experiment with light hydrogen on this apparatus because there wouldn't be any new result. And so the men in charge of programs at NAL are so anxious for new results, in order to get more money to keep the thing going for public relations purposes, they are destroying-- possibly--the value of the experiments themselves, which is the whole purpose of the thing. It is often hard for the experimenters there to complete their work as their scientific integrity demands."

For anyone who hasn't read it, the whole thing is excellent <http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm>

<comment><USER8> If I had to sum up science in one phrase, I wouldn't say anything about the "scientific process" or anything like that. I would say: "Look for reasons why you are _wrong_ , not reasons why you are right." You can _always_ find reasons why you're right. You can always do an astrology forecast and find someone for whom it was dead-on accurate. That's not the problem with astrology, the problem lies in how often it is wrong. It's wrong so often it's useless. But if you only examine the positive evidence in favor of it, you will never come to that conclusion.

The theories that are powerful and worthwhile are the ones that are rarely or never wrong. Can't always get "never". It's a complicated world and we aren't all physicists. But we at least ought to be able to get "rarely", and if you can't, well, I guess it's not science then. That's OK. Unfortunately, not everything is amenable to science, though you can still approach it in this spirit of trying to see how you might be wrong rather than proving yourself right.

Once you start looking around with that standard, it's not hard to see how little science is really being done. Why are we publishing these dubious studies? Because for all the scientific trappings we claim, with statistics and p-values and carefully-written recordings of their putative procedure written in precisely the right way to make it sound like everything was recorded (while still leaving out an arbitrary number of relevant details), we've created a system where we are telling people to look for reasons why they are right... or we won't publish their results. Guess what kind of results we get with that?

If you start from the idea that you need to look for why you are wrong, the scientific method will fall out of that, along with any local adjustments and elaborations you may need, and every discipline, sub-discipline, and indeed at times even individual experiments need adjustments. If you start with "The Scientific Method", but you don't understand where it came from, how to use it, or what it is really telling you, you'll never get true science, just... noise.

<comment><USER9> _"Look for reasons why you are wrong, not reasons why you are right."_

I share your worldview. Makes intuitive sense to me. It's intellectually honest. And if I'm wrong about something and no one corrects me, I get kinda grumpy.

Maybe everyone else already knows, but I learned relatively late that it's called Popperian.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper#Philosophy_of_scien...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper#Philosophy_of_science) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability>

<comment><USER8> Falsifiability is one natural landing point, but it is also somewhat controversial. What I'm advocating isn't so much a philosophy as a state of mind, one hopefully less controversial than trying to declare a "definition of science". I think of it more like a mind hack you can perform on yourself. (So much discipline boils down to figuring out how your conscious brain can fool your subconscious brain.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have been in discussions about this with one of my friends working in academic materials research. Its amazing the amount of work today done by scientist at universities writing code without very basic software development tools.

I'm talking opening their code in notepad, 'versioning' files by sending around zip files with numbers manually added to the end of the file name, etc.

This doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of the 'reproducible results' problem. Often times, the software I've seen is 'rough' to be kind. Most times its not even possible to get the software running (missing some really specific library or some changes to a dependency which haven't been distributed) or its built for a super specific environment and makes huge assumptions on what can 'be assumed about the system.' This same software produces results which end up being published in journals.

If any of these places had money to spend, I think there could be a valuable business in teaching science types how to better manage their software. Its really unfortunate that outside of a few core libraries (numpy, etc.) the default method is for each researcher to rebuild the components they need.

I'm surprised about only 11% of results being reproducible. It seems lower then I'd expect. I agree we don't want to optimize for reproducibility, but obviously there is some problem here that needs to be addressed.

<comment><USER11> This is an entirely different issue than code; code mostly does the same thing when you run it twice. There's no such guarantee in biology. A cancer cell line growing in one lab may behave differently than descendants of those cells in a different lab. This may be due to slight differences in the timings between feeding the cells and the experiments, stochastic responses built into the biology, slight variations between batches of input materials for the cells, mutations in the genomes as the cell line grows, or even mistaking one cell line for another.

Reproducibility of software is a truly trivial problem in comparison.

<comment><USER10> Oh, I agree. Biological experiment reproducibility is an incredibly hard problem. You are probably right that it is 'trivial' by comparison in the same way that landing on mars is trivial to landing on Alpha Centauri.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> After decades of publish-or-perish sweatshop science I'm sure the great shining archive of scientific truth is sort of like an inbox with no spam filter.

<comment><USER13> Such a powerful sentence.

Lately science looks like olympic games without anti-doping control...

<comment><USER12> I'm becoming pretty convinced that the human future depends on the disruption and obsolescence of bureaucracies.

<comment><USER14> I think you are on to something. When science became so big that it first needed then eventually was run by "managers" I bet it lost much of its effectiveness. But how do we change this? For starters there is a lot of money involved for the institutions conducting this (apparently shoddy) research.

<comment><USER5> > When science became so big that it first needed then eventually was run by > "managers" I bet it lost much of its effectiveness.

You can just do projects on your own, you know. There's nothing about science that absolutely requires an institution.

<http://groups.google.com/group/diybio>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I work in biomedical research, and this finding has been discussed quite broadly. Most researchers don't believe it.

Exactly reproducing novel findings usually requires a significant investment into the underlying procedures, which most places will not undertake. Reproduction instead usually occurs as part of an extension of the initial findings. The complexity of biology means that the first findings are frequently not reproduced _exactly_ the same way as the original, but this does not detract from the "direction" of the initial findings.

For example, the first finding might be that protein A promotes tumor growth by modifying protein B. An extension of these findings might be Protein A _sometimes_ modifies protein B, and when it does tumor growth is stimulated, but it _mostly_ does not modify protein B, it instead modifies protein C, which suppresses tumor growth. In this case, were the first results replicated? Yes, and no.

This is how most biomedical research proceeds...

<comment><USER16> Really?

Meaning that either there's another unaccounted variable(s) that controls the effect of A in B and C, meaning that we cannot conclude anything from the experiment.

Yes and no is not acceptable...

<comment><USER17> You're wrong. What you say - that we conclude anything if not everything was taken into consideration - is undoubtedly true for mathematical meaning of "conclude". Mathematicians, computer scientists and a few others, like theoretic physicists, have a luxury of using law of excluded middle, which Sherlock Holmes also used. The famous detective states that if you eliminate everything that is impossible, whatever remains is true, even if it sounds improbable.

All the people who use this law do so because their work is about some kind of model, which can be wholly known. However, if you have a misfortune of working in the real world - like nearly everyone - then you can't apply this law. This means that you won't ever get a proof in a mathematical sense. You won't ever be completely certain - you can be convinced beyond reasonable doubt, but that's all.

So when we talk about how biologists are just grant hunters because someone couldn't reproduce their experiments we need to take this into account. I don't know, but if I had to guess I'd say that nobody ever expected these experiments to be 100% accurate, 100% reproducible or 100% true. I think they are treated as a data point, some input to think of, and not definite truth.

But I may be completely wrong here, of course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I read a lot of medical research papers and I'd say about 1 in 10 is about cancer. They usually go something like this: We found this receptor on a cancer cell and it caused it to grow or shrink. We therefore propose making a drug to inhibit or act as an agonist for this receptor site which also affects an enormous amounts of completely un-releated stuff around the body in order to fight cancer.

Truth is, they may have just gotten a funny little mutant of a cancer cell that happens to heavily express this one receptor as part of its unique mutated biology. For all we know a lot of cancer research has been about exploring the peculiarities of the genome of Henrietta Lacks.

</comment><comment><USER19> Perhaps we are looking for the wrong measure of success. This is not inclined plane ball rolling in fifth period Physics with Mr. Johannes. Reproducibility in cutting edge experiment is success. It means that what is being measured - even if the wrong thing - is within the control of the experimenter.

It is absurd, but practical, to publish experimental results with the implication that they are reproducible based on a peer review of the results. "Well they look reproducible to me," when uttered by a peer reviewer is the current standard. All we are seeing is that the _a priori_ reasoning of experts is not a substitute for empirical investigation of scientific claims.

Let us not forget that a journal which finds no worthy articles this quarter has only two options, publish unworthy ones or publish no articles. I know how I react when a magazine subscription does not come.

<comment><USER20> I wonder if it would be possible to produce a journal that only released an issue when it has, say, 10 articles? No monthly/quarterly schedule, you could have an issue release next week, or next year.

<comment><USER19> As a digital document it is easy. Because printing requires substantial coordination, it is less practical. The subscription model common to the scientific journal industry makes it contractually problematic.

I wonder what portion of academic research is equivalent to content farming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> _Most published scientific research papers are wrong, according to a new analysis._

[http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7915-most- scientific-p...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7915-most-scientific- papers-are-probably-wrong.html)

 _Ioannidis JPA (2005) Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. PLoS Med 2(8): e124. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124_

<http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124>

<comment><USER22> Is this analysis a published scientific research?

<comment><USER23> Joking aside, the authors of these studies have highlighted the low statistical power of research in a number of fields (see also <http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v14/n5/abs/nrn3475.html>), which is a serious issue that often leads to over-interpretation. It's as if researches willing to publish more are rushing hasty studies out the door.

It's a good thing that people can measure these things and ring the alarm

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The analysis in question:

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a.html)

<comment><USER25> This is a really insightful article that contains a number of points that qualify the result and present lessons for any one interested in data science.

A few points that stand out to me:

!) The 11% number comes not from a randomized sample of cancer papers but from attempts made by AmGen to reproduce results that might be useful in drug development. This means that they made good effort to reproduce these results but there is also a strong selection bias that needs to be acknowledged.

2) They point out that using survival time as the measurement complicates things. I've done a lot of machine learning and statistics on cancer and medical data and, in my experience, this can not be overemphasized. and There are loads of confounding factors that contribute to survival time. I expect that big break throughs will come as we develop rigorous ways for measuring the behavior of a tumor (does it metastasize? how does it feed itself?) and use those as the targets of our regression. (Currently these thins are measured by human visual inspection if at all.)

3) They point out that the studies that were repeatable were the ones that were careful about using blinded controls, and eliminating investigator bias. This is basic stuff but easy to overlook. In terms applicable to a startup, a data scientist needs to me motivated to vet existing and proposed practices and identify flawed ones as much or more then they are motivated to maximize gain.

<comment><USER15> With regards to 1), it would be ironic if this study was itself not statistically valid...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I feel obliged to point out that these other journals are merely copying the real pioneer in this field: <http://jir.com>.

<comment><USER27> Negative results vary from field to field. In math or physics, a conclusive negative can be very important in deciding what to study next or disproving established theory. In biology, a negative usually just means "I haven't found what I'm looking for yet".

<comment><USER28> And that is the exact problem with certain researchers. I just had to explain this to my undergrad who's project resulted in negative results (his 1'st study). I congratulated him, as he discovered that the treatment he gave did NOT effect the genes he looked into. He didn't understand, so I had to explain that his study (with the correct controls), provided information that is useful to science. Negative data = data. Data = good :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Wow, that's sad. Are we really so blind when it comes to cancer research?

I recall that oncology journals usually have a ludicrously high impact index (as ludicrously as 5 digit IIRC); that means there are a lot of citations, which is an indicator that there is a lot of research going on. And with a lot of research going on, well, you can expect a lot of false positives. So, I'm wondering, could this be a case of cherry-picking or some kind of selection bias? It wouldn't be difficult to select a lot of bogus-sounding research and test it.

<comment><USER20> But who is going to pay to reproduce that research? What if that research took years to do?

<comment><USER8> Why do the research in the first place if the only outcome is a number, floating in space, disconnected from anything and unreproducible?

You're still sort of operating on the idea that the unreproducible papers have some sort of abstract value to them, and therefore we shouldn't slow the flow of them lest we ruin their value. But they don't. They're worthless. They're _worse_ than worthless. They're of negative value. It would be far better to slow down and verify that what we think we know is actually true, because in the end that would actually both faster and a more efficient use of resources. Basically, instead of learning worse than nothing (thinking we know something but actually being _wrong_ ), we'd learn something. That's a pretty decent upgrade.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> An article claiming that only 11% of findings could be reproduced doesn't cite its sources, thus rendering the findings of the article unreproducible. Nice work!

<comment><USER31> Nature wrote an editorial justifying the situation, you can read it here [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v485/n7396/full/485041e...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v485/n7396/full/485041e.html)

<comment><USER23> > "those authors required them to sign an agreement that they would not > disclose their findings about specific papers"

I don't know why this doesn't cause a huge stir in the scientific community. Seems like everyone is fine with people sweeping their negative data under the rug. Shameful is a very mild word for that.

<comment><USER32> How were those authors able to enforce this request? To be a proper paper it should not be necessary to contact the author in order to reproduce it.

If you had to ask the author for more details then their paper was incomplete - perhaps that's why it could not be reproduced.

<comment><USER33> If you want to maximize your chances of reproducing the results, you will use identical apparatus and methods to what the original study used. That is often not possible to do just from reading the paper.

<comment><USER32> If the identical apparatus is essential to reproducing the result, then the description of that apparatus is part of the experiment. Omitting that means it's not a proper paper.

<comment><USER14> If only it were so. Often important parts of the protocol exist only in a hand written entries in a lab notebook. Because very few people are reproducing experiments and it is lots of extra work and jornals have limited space all the required details are rarely included. This is a big part of the problem. The typical work around is to contact the original reaseach to fill in the missing details.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It seems like a big win for science could be had by centralizing some aspects of research within academic and research institutions. There should be well- funded software czars and statistics czars at each university that facilitate the efforts of the individual researchers to try to reduce the amount of shoddy science that gets published. Researchers are really terrible at this, and presumably slower than dedicated people even who are working on many different projects, so the division of labor should make the whole apparatus vastly more efficient, able to write and win more grants, etc. Of course, many researchers would fight against this because if you can't publish shoddy research, you can't publish as much research, but I would think there should be some way to get there from here.

</comment><comment><USER35> This is a great issue to highlight. However, I'm unconvinced we need to optimize around creating research that can be reproducible, rather that the process of science generates the best possible results.

Both the scientific and lay public should read this (appropriately) as: one study does not prove a result, there is an 89% chance that a single research paper is simply wrong.

This mentality seems to be the bigger gap, although generating high quality research is a big part of the equation (mostly I think for the wasting of resources to validate, process, and reproduce claims).

<comment><USER36> Cold fusion was reproducible. What are you suggesting we do here?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> This editorial commentary and the article on which it is based are part of an ongoing effort to improve the quality of scientific publication in a number of disciplines. The Retraction Watch group blog

<http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/>

by two experienced science journalists picks up many--but not all--of the cases of peer-reviewed research papers being retracted later from science journals.

Psychology as a discipline has been especially stung by papers that cannot be reproduced and indeed in many cases have simply been made up.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/magazine/diederik- stapels-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/magazine/diederik-stapels- audacious-academic-fraud.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

That has prompted statistically astute psychologists such as Jelte Wicherts

<http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/>

and Uri Simonsohn

<http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~uws/>

to call for better general research standards that can be practiced as checklists by researchers and journal editors so that errors are prevented.

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

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

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

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

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

Uri Simonsohn provides an abstract (which links to a full, free download of a funny, thought-provoking paper)

<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2160588>

with a "twenty-one word solution" to some of the practices most likely to make psychology research papers unreliable. He has a whole site devoted to avoiding "p-hacking,"

<http://www.p-curve.com/>

an all too common practice in science that can be detected by statistical tests. He also has a paper posted just a few days ago

<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2259879>

on evaluating replication results (the issue discussed in the commentary submitted to open this thread) with more specific tips on that issue.

"Abstract: "When does a replication attempt fail? The most common standard is: when it obtains p>.05. I begin here by evaluating this standard in the context of three published replication attempts, involving investigations of the embodiment of morality, the endowment effect, and weather effects on life satisfaction, concluding the standard has unacceptable problems. I then describe similarly unacceptable problems associated with standards that rely on effect-size comparisons between original and replication results. Finally, I propose a new standard: Replication attempts fail when their results indicate that the effect, if it exists at all, is too small to have been detected by the original study. This new standard (1) circumvents the problems associated with existing standards, (2) arrives at intuitively compelling interpretations of existing replication results, and (3) suggests a simple sample size requirement for replication attempts: 2.5 times the original sample."

The writers of scientific papers have a responsibility to do better. And the readers of scientific papers that haven't been replicated (or, worse, press releases about findings that haven't even been published yet) also have a responsibility not to be too credulous. That's why my all-time favorite link to share in comments on HN is the essay "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation" by Peter Norvig, LISP hacker and director of research at Google, on how to interpret scientific research.

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

Check each submission to Hacker News you read for how many of the important issues in interpreting research are NOT discussed in the submission.

<comment><USER38> The pressure on academics is indeed an issue. They have to teach, guide PhD's, research and publish (without mentioning controlling internal affairs).

On a side note. Has anyone found a good alternative for Mendeley? I heard <http://bohr.launchrock.com/> is working on sth cool.

<comment><USER2> Have you considered Papers? <http://papersapp.com/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> We are attempting to solve this by identifying and rewarding reproducible research (www.reproducibilityinitiative.org). However, it has been incredibly difficult to get funding to conduct the validation studies due to the obsession of funding "novel" results, rather than funding the replication studies required to identify reproducible research. Funders need to step up to solve this problem.

</comment><comment><USER40> This is one of the reasons I went into math and software. In math there is only black and white, provably true and patently wrong. Still, part of the reason this is so is that to show any results everything must be laid on the table. CS and Math papers are therefore open by design and the world has benefited. I hope the rest of science will move in this direction.

<comment><USER41> CS has similar problem, specially in AI fields. Researches often claim the accuracy rate more than 95%, but in reality that is much lesser (in fact less than 10% in most of the claims).

<comment><USER29> Having worked in computer vision and robotics, I can attest to this.

<comment><USER42> Yes. Of the fields I've implemented algorithms from papers in, computer vision seems to be particularly adverse to discussing the (often critical) downsides of their algorithms. Often its something like "Camera calibration isn't exactly perfect? Well this scene reconstruction technique simply wont work."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> This is one of the reasons I am happy to see what is going on with the Center for Open Science [0]. The goal of the project is to open up the entire research process, not just create open access to published results. They aim to make open tools supporting the entire research process as well, through the Open Science Framework [1].

One of the benefits of this approach is to provide peer review at each step of the research process. There is also an emphasis on encouraging validation of prior results, rather than having everyone focus on creating new research. This is the focus of the Reproducibility Project [2].

The Center is just getting started, and I sure hope it takes off.

[0] - <http://centerforopenscience.org/>

[1] - <http://openscienceframework.org/>

[2] - <http://openscienceframework.org/project/EZcUj/wiki/home>

</comment><comment><USER44> This can be explained without bringing in accusations of fraud or incompetence [1].

Basically, if you have a bazillion experiments running and only publish the results which are significant, you still have a huge predictability problem, because most of those statistically significant results will be due to chance alone.

For example, assume that only 1% of cancer experiments produce something valid and interesting, and that standard for statistical significance is the industry standard 95%, or 1 in 20. If 100,000 hypothesis are tested, you'll get 100,000 * 1% = 1000 valid results and 100,000 * 5% = 5000 results from chance alone. In this example, only 16% of the published results will be reproducible, because only 1000 / 6000 are valid.

[1] [http://sciencehouse.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/why-most- publis...](http://sciencehouse.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/why-most-published- results-are-false/)

<comment><USER45> this basic fact is understood by scientists and children alike. it is still either incompetence (lack of middle school statistics) or fraud (ignoring the above fact).

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> The most interesting thing about all this is the fact that the researchers were required by paper authors to sign non-disclosure agreements and agree not to identify papers with non-reproducible results. This says a lot about the confidence authors have in their papers, doesn't it?

Sorry but this isn't science anymore.

<comment><USER36> It's good old capitalism making money from "treating" sickness. The longer the better. A lifetime of "treatment" means a lifetime of profits.

Who cares about the cure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Pediatric Cancer gets only 4% of Federal funding and less than 1% of Private Drug company research. Also American Cancer Society less than 5 cents on the dollar goes to research.

Pediatric Cancer is the leading cause of death for 15 and under.

So to see this funding for cancer get thrown away by fraud is extremely upsetting.

<comment><USER48> Those are some pretty misleading statistics.

First off, pediatric cancer is NOT the leading cause of death for those 15 and under[1]. It's up there, but "unintentional injury" takes twice as many lives.

Second of all, not many children die (1200 per year), so even if something is the leading cause of death, it doesn't mean it happens very often. Cancer kills 10 times as many people between the ages of 35-44. If you add up all adult cancers it's probably 20-30x the number of deaths.

Also, just because money goes to adult cancer, doesn't mean it can't help. Most drug are developed for adults first and then tested in children. It's not like people are ignoring pediatric cancer.

Before you get so upset you should really sit down and think these things through.

[1][http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/10LCID_All_Deaths_By_A...](http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/10LCID_All_Deaths_By_Age_Group_2010-a.pdf)

<comment><USER49> "Most drug are developed for adults first and then tested in children."

It was also be unethical to develop drugs for children without first testing them on adults, since children can't give informed consent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Having read through these comments for the last several minutes, I'm left with the overwhelming conclusion that programmers, on the whole, have about as much to contribute to a discussion on the biological sciences as they do one on economics.

</comment><comment><USER51> There's an awful lot of money in cancer (research funding/patents), an awful lot of diet/lifestyle handwaving in cancer research conclusions (that aren't about treatments), and very little progress in making cancer more survivable.

Just those facts would lead me to assume that most of the published research is bad. The great part is that 11% of the papers are reproducible, so the science isn't at a standstill.

<comment><USER52> That isn't limited to cancer. Western medicine is driven by a lot of bad mental and social models. Doctors only make money if you are sick. That strikes me as a seriously flawed model right there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> There are many reasons so many papers are not reproducible.

1.) The prospective data collection methods used in a lot of studies are deeply flawed and worse aren't documented.

2.) The retrospective data used in many studies is poorly validated and the quality is rarely a concern for most universities.

3.) The people who publish these papers are very intelligent, most far more intelligent than I am, but you'd be surprised how many of them don't have a very good handle on basic statistics. Not because they aren't smart enough to learn but mostly because they have no interest in it.

4.) There is a lot of pressure put on researchers to publish papers even if they aren't ready and as a result mistakes are made, there really needs to be less of an emphasis on the quantity of papers that are published and more emphasis on quality.

For anyone who might be interested in such things, if you ever find yourself locked in a dungeon with nothing but a computer loaded with every journal article ever published you can find articles involving similar cohorts from the exact same universities that have different results.

</comment><comment><USER54> The problem is not that research is not reproducible. Researchers are humans and full of biases. The problem is too much emphasis is put on novelty vs. reproducibility. It took a long time for software engineers to recognize the value of testing/validating vs. creating new code. In the same way the research world needs to put new emphasis on reproducing/validating results.

<comment><USER23> The problem is that too much emphasis is put on prestige and reputation than on actual impact of the work. Coming from a physics background I always felt that life scientists tend to be overly audacious in their claims, am I alone in this?

<comment><USER54> Is it only in life sciences? Remember the cold fusion and the faster than light particle fiascos?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> So maybe we need rename Life Sciences to Life Arts?

</comment><comment><USER56> This has been going around along with the Chemo Therapy doesn't work thread.

The problem with people like the author is they think all cancer is the same. They try to apply information about Hodgkins to non-hodgkins. They think "Breast cancer" is a disease, not a symptom. There over 40 different cancer causes for breast cancer. And the treatments that work are primarily based on the cause not the visible symptom.

This makes studies hard. Most people never learn the cause of their cancer. We are not fortunate enough to always have a single known cause that says "yes you worked in a nuclear waste plant for 6 years" and know that was the cause.

Chemo for example in Hodgkin's Lymphoma increase your 5 year survival chances by 45%. But if you have Smoking related Lung Cancer it is less than 2% difference.

Nature.com rarely produces articles that are informed. They push an agenda of Holistic medicine at the expense of scientific research. I am all for non- traditional medicine, but I don't discount the advances from University and Clinical research.

</comment><comment><USER57> There's nuance here that's going to be totally lost on the general public as this becomes an anti-science talking point.

</comment><comment><USER58> Does reproducible in this context mean:

The paper did not document their steps sufficiently, so the authors were unable to reproduce the experiment.

\-- or --

The paper relied on circumstantial evidence that was not well-understood enough to be reproduced.

\-- or --

The authors were able to perform the experiment as documented in the paper, but were unable to reproduce the results.

or something else?

</comment><comment><USER59> Perhaps part of this is statistical errors and selection bias. Most studies are done with a 95% confidence interval, but only studies that reject the null hypothesis are published. If we assume only 20% of all experiments reject the null hypothesis, then we should expect ~25% of those to be fasle positives. Journals might also be biased to include more sensationalistic results, which are more likely to be statistical errors.

My guess is that if you included all test results, that reject the null hypothesis or not, and are published or not, then the reproducibility rate would be closer to 90%-95%.

<comment><USER60> > My guess is that if you included all test results, that reject the null > hypothesis or not, and are published or not, then the reproducibility rate > would be closer to 90%-95%.

No; you need to bring in power, not just assume an alpha of 0.05 and a base- rate of real results of 20%. (Consider the recent neuroscience paper estimating the experiments average a power of like 0.3...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Cancer is such a weird beast that I'm actually not as alarmed by this as it might seem reasonable to be.

Only in the last year or so people have realized that how heterogeneous cancer is. A patient biopsied 10 times from different parts of the cancer turns out to have 10 different (but related) cancers. While such major findings are still occurring about the underlying nature of cancer, it is not surprising that studies are hard to produce; they don't even know which parameters need to be controlled yet to make them reproducible.

</comment><comment><USER45> I found a company to precisely fix this problem. Every dataset, every analysis, every computation fully transparent, reproducible, accessible. You can even embed it in your blog. For instance check out <https://igor.sbgenomics.com/lab/public/pipelines/> if someone uses one of those, and share their task, there is full transparency + instant replication.

</comment><comment><USER62> The tradition in science publishing has been to leave out the nitty-gritty details. Most specialists will know (or quickly deduce) most available methods (unless the results are a radical improvement). As for the details, that's what conferences and telephones and joining the department and gossip are for.

</comment><comment><USER22> Scientific publications have a history of having papers contradictory to each other for a long time. In medical research, findings are often based on statics results from limited samples. From that perspective, it will be a big surprise if they are more accurate than public polls.

</comment><comment><USER63> After hearing similar things about psychology papers, this is rather disconcerting. This is why I am a climate change skeptic, I don't know whether it is happening due to CO2 or not, but I am confident that science can't be confident when they can't do control experiments. You can't control for any variable when it comes to the climate, let alone all the reasonable ones. We have infinitely more capabilities to control variables when researching cancer than we do with the climate of something as massive and complex as the earths climate, and it turns out our confidence is cancer research may kind of suck.

one interested in the subject should check out feynman's discussion on the psychological effect on scientific research. Millikan use bad assumptions for his oil drop experiment to determine the charge of an electron, but nobody would publish results that differed too much. <http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment>

<comment><USER22> The possibility of CO2 causing global warming isn't 100% but it isn't very low either. It is the risk we are talking about, the risk of doing nothing and let the man made green house (if there is one) turn earth into an irreversible disastrous environment. Most CO2 emitting energy sources are not sustainable anyway and many of them emit other proved pollution as well. There is really nothing lost to going green energy, other than the cost of having some CO2 emitting energy reserved there.

<comment><USER64> Without qualification, I'm afraid what you're saying is parlously close to mere verbiage. Even the most ardent climate sceptic does not object to solar, wind or water energy under certain conditions. What is 'Going Green' then? In the UK it currently means, for instance, paying wind farms a million pounds sterling a day to produce no energy at all. Meanwhile poor people die because they can't afford to keep themselves warm thanks to horrendous energy bills punped up by huge subsidies to the likes of windmill owners and owners of land, hosting windmills.

<comment><USER22> "Going Green" does not equal to switch to renewable energy at the cost of poor people's lives for gods sake. It simply means that recognizing the global warming and have a plan to switch to renewable energy, for example, take some of the hundreds of billions of dollars of the oil companies' profits to invest on renewable energy.

<comment><USER63> proposed cap and tax carbon regimes disagree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> A scientific writer should state this result as 6 of 53, not 11%.

</comment><comment><USER66> So ironic that the paper about these findings is not reproducible itself because the initial data set is not available for legal reasons.

</comment><comment><USER67> It would have been 13% of papers reproducible if this blasted paper hadn't ruined things and included itself

</comment><comment><USER68> Why not just say 6 papers!

</comment><comment><USER65> This seems like an awesome example of Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap.

</comment><comment><USER69> What the hell? That's 5.83 papers. How do you reproduce .83 of something?

<comment><USER70> Um, 6 papers out of 53, significant digits give you 11%. Not that difficult.

<comment><USER71> I guess saying "11% of 53 papers" was _cooler_ than saying "6 out of 53". Meh.

<comment><USER70> Yeah, my guess is they used that form to imply 11% of all cancer research is unreproducible. But in ironic fashion, they can't show their own data and thus we can make no broad claims about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Also, this is why evidence base medicine is flawed. What we want is science based medicine.

</comment><comment><USER36> NaturalNews brought this back up recently.</comment>


Show HN: Investor Hunt is a database of 40k+ investors to raise your seed round - <AUTHOR> Hey guys!
Investor Hunt (https://www.investorhunt.co) is a categorized database of 40k+ angel investors and venture capitalists.
Figuring out which investors are likely to be interested in your project and how to get in direct contact with them is a nightmare. All this data is spread out, and finding it pushes you down a rabbit hole of AngelList, personal websites, Crunchbase, and VC fund portfolio pages. All this can take hundreds of hours of research––hours you could be using to actually close rounds.
For the last few years while we've been fundraising for different projects, we've built out spreadsheets of all the investors we've met with (and who we'd want to meet) complete with data like where to best contact them. Over the years, our private lists grew to over a thousand investors.
After building the data engineering tools to make Press Hunt (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/press-hunt) and Howler (https://www.howler.media/) possible, we realized it would make perfect sense to use them to grow our lists of investors into a comprehensive all-in-one database.
Investor Hunt is a simple SAAS product that aggregates the names, contact info, investment focuses, past investments, and locations of the best investors in the world in one place. We've grown the list to 40k+ investors (~30k of them have emails, and the rest have alternative contact links like Twitter, LinkedIn, and AngelList).
The database is still very much a WIP––we're constantly enriching data and adding new sources. We've been using this ourselves (and have a few beta users), and have found it really useful, and it's now 10x bigger than other investor database alternatives.
We also just launched on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/investor-hunt.
We'd love feedback––thanks for the time!
- Matt, David, Ermek, & Rashid <comment><USER2> It is totally useful, emails is a pain in the neck. How can you prevent startups from spamming tho?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks––we agree! We built Investor Hunt to make finding relevant investors easier. In our experience, investors don't mind receiving cold emails as long as they're polite and relevant. Startups who aggressively spam irrelevant investors won't have any luck raising.

<comment><USER2> You should keep prices high, high entry price will cut-off random unserious startups in my opinion

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that could be true. I think now it's pretty standard that it doesn't make sense for people to spam others

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks useful! It'd be great if I can see which stage of investment the investor focuses on though

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it. Thanks for the feedback! We'll add this feature ASAP. In the meantime you can see past investments so you can get a feel for company's maturity level. Thanks for subscribing :)</comment></comment>


Kickstarter Economics 101: The True Costs of a Successful Project - <AUTHOR> http://littlemight.com/kickstarter-economics-101-the-true-costs-of-a-successful-project/

<comment><USER2> This should be mandatory reading for everyone running a Kickstarter or similar. Great breakdown of costs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Kudos for their transparency. I hope this helps make it clear that the core value of doing a Kickstarter project is creating an engaged community of your fans, not making profit.</comment></comment>


Washington Times: How we create and deploy sites fast with virtualenv and Django - <AUTHOR> http://opensource.washingtontimes.com/blog/post/coordt/2010/01/how-we-create-and-deploy-sites-fast-virtualenv-and/ <comment><USER2> Second time I've seen something on this site in a week, and my first impression stands: difficult to read with the mint toothpaste background.</comment>


Book Copies Y Combinator Logo For Cover? - <AUTHOR> http://jasonlbaptiste.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/ycombinator-stolen.jpg

<comment><USER2> Eh. The book is about generation "Y", a phrase that's been around for about 15 years. There are 8 basic colors. Odds are it's unconscious.

I was about to recommend a book on this called Borrowed Design, but apparently it's a hard-to-get classic. $189 used!

[http://www.amazon.com/Borrowed-Design-Abuse-Historical- Form/...](http://www.amazon.com/Borrowed-Design-Abuse-Historical- Form/dp/0471284408)

<comment><USER3> Yet another reason to switch to e-books... :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A white Y using a standard font on an orange background isn't a hugely original logo.

It's quite conceivable that they came up with it themselves given the topic of the book.

<comment><AUTHOR> orange looks much more like the yc orange in the photo. in real life, it looked a shade lighter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Link the image directly, It's not showing up for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not letting me change the url. Here are two direct links. Editors please use whichever one works best if you decide to change the URL:

[http://jasonlbaptiste.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/01/ycombin...](http://jasonlbaptiste.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/01/ycombinator-stolen.jpg)

[http://photos-h.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak- snc3/hs235.snc3/2224...](http://photos-h.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak- snc3/hs235.snc3/22244_708116681437_10603313_40844636_4815687_n.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Calling that 'stealing' has to be the logo equivalent of patenting resizable arrays...

<comment><USER7> You can't patent logos but you can copyright them.

<comment><USER6> That's why I used used the word 'equivalent' ;)

I suppose it could be called copyright trolling...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "This content is currently unavailable".

Please provide a direct link to the image.</comment>


How Professional Writers Write - <AUTHOR> http://calnewport.com/blog/2007/10/15/monday-master-class-how-to-schedule-your-writing-like-a-professional-writer/ <comment><USER2> I think the biggest obstacle for aspiring artists is not scheduling, energy, location, etc., but the perfectionist mindset. In my experience, it's easy to become paralyzed by trying to create the final product from the start.

It's this mindset that leads people to start thinking things like: "If only I had a cabin in the woods somewhere with a nice espresso machine, I could really do this right."

I once had to write a first draft of a full-length screenplay (160+ pages) for a screenwriting class I took for fun. Our professor made it clear that we shouldn't worry about our scripts sucking because he was 100% sure that they would.

Once you accept that your art will suck in its early drafts/stages, you can focus on cooking out ideas/material to start improving upon. This will be so easy that you will want pen and paper, recording equipment, camera, etc. with you all the time.

<comment><USER3> The perfectionist mindset isn't just an obstacle for artists -- it also can be for programmers, engineers, and others. I actually wrote a post about it called "The Perils of Perfectionism" (see [http://blog.seliger.com/2008/01/16/the-perils-of- perfectioni...](http://blog.seliger.com/2008/01/16/the-perils-of- perfectionism/) ), which I just submitted to HN: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=778408> .

The basic problem is that almost any creative process is iterative and recursive. When you think it has to be perfect the first time through, it by definition can't be. You've set yourself up in a loop with no exit conditions. Get to the rest of the program.

<comment><USER4> The best essay on writing I've ever read (by a NYT bestselling author)

"Some Thoughts on Writing"

<http://www.elizabethgilbert.com/writing.htm>

"Magazines, editors, agents - they all employ young people making $22,000 a year whose job is to read lots of manuscripts and send back letters telling you that you aren't good enough yet: LET THEM DO IT. It's their job. Don't pre-reject yourself." -Elizabeth Gilbert

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Solid writing comes from hard work and there is no shortcut on this.

Successful professional writers are amazingly disciplined (even Hemingway, for all his boozing, had a strict regimen of rising early and writing for many hours first thing, day in and day out).

For non-fiction, good writing correlates strongly with sharp thinking - meaning, thinking topics through carefully to be able to offer important insights that others have missed, understanding context so as to put things in a format, and in a style, that is strongly aimed at those who will be reading it, and having a deep reservoir of technical proficiency from which to draw so as to phrase things sharply and vigorously.

And write, write, write. William Zinser once used an illustration about an exchange between a writer and a brain surgeon where, in response to the surgeon's casual reference to doing "a little writing on the side," the writer gave as a riposte the thought that he would do a "little brain surgery on the side" as well. The point: we all think we can write because we all do it, but quality writing comes only through hard work, severe discipline, careful thought, and lots of practice - just like brain surgery.

</comment><comment><USER6> Cautionary note of warning here: as Larry Wall observed, "there's more than one way to do it."

Alternatively: if anyone tells you there is one true way of writing ... then they're a charlatan.

(I speak as a professional writer, on the basis of (a) personal experience and (b) knowning a bunch of other professional writers.)

<comment><USER7> Accelerando is amazing.

(I speak as a Sci Fi fan).

<comment><USER8> "Lobsters" was amazing. _Accelerando_ dragged a bit and could have used some more aggressive editing toward the end.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When I'm writing an essay, I generally do the following:

* Research a lot of stuff on it, including things that seem orthogonal or at best tangential. Interview people, chase down primary sources, etc. Keep an eye out for _surprises_ (in the Paul Graham sense [1]): new information that expands, challenges or outright debunks something I believe about the topic.

* Free-associate and try to tease out some dimensions along which the information can come together.

* Gradually settle on a thesis that's strongly enough supported by the evidence for the type of writing I'm doing.

* Get a good night's sleep. (Crucial step - do not skip!)

* Write a draft in the morning when my mind is fresh and the system of supporting arguments and information is still present. This may take one or more mornings depending on the length of the paper.

* Edit and format the draft, insert references, etc. Then set the paper aside and do something else.

* A day later or so, edit the draft again to cut out the fat, streamline the structure, fix spelling and grammatical errors, and so on.

* If it's intended for publication somewhere, give it to a friend to review.

* Make final edits and then submit.

Obviously, the size and complexity of this exercise depends on how big the subject is and how long the essay is going to be.

[1] <http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html>

</comment><comment><USER10> Any advice for full-time software developer, father-of-two young-children, aspiring (non-fiction) writers?

<comment><USER11> Write.

<comment><USER9> In the morning.

<comment><USER12> While the article showed more writers wrote in the morning, I don't think the sample size was large enough to be especially significant.

In contrast, all the writers did something to isolate themselves. That seems more concrete and clear advice....

I should sign off NOW!

<comment><USER13> I read a study of classical piano students. The best ones, who were expected to become pros, all practiced in the morning; and there was some practice at other hours -- the same pattern, as far as I can remember. The good but less elite students also tended to work in the morning, but with more variance and less total practice. (This was one of those studies about the 10,000-hour rule and deliberate practice -- I think there were some refs to studies of other fields showing similar practices.)

Everyone needs to find what works best for themselves, but I'm pretty sure now I was just being macho when I thought I did best at night.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Makes me wonder how I've never thought to look into that while I was writing 15 page papers all the time.

<comment><USER9> Too busy cranking out 15 page papers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Where Do Professional Writers Write?" certainly matches up with Roald Dahl's writing space: <http://boingboing.net/2009/02/13/roald-dahls-writing.html>

<comment><USER16> Many, many more here: <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/series/writersrooms>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> For me, my best writing happens when I've procrastinated away the day and I'm on the verge of falling asleep and I'm fighting tiredness as I write. I've tried so many other ways but that's the most conducive environment to get me into flow.

Unfortunately, this means that half the time, I end up falling asleep before I get into that zone.

</comment><comment><USER18> For me, the time between 2am-6am is the absolute peak of concentration: for writing, coding, thinking, anything.

The time between 2pm and 6pm is the absolute peak of cognitive weakness. The only thing I do well in that time is sleep. It's like a dead zone.

</comment><comment><USER19> More specifically how _10_ professional writers write.

Note some the advice is so general as to be useless. Plenty of professional writers write at night. Plenty of professional writers write in public spaces (just about almost any newspaper writer, for a start).

The observations made are interesting but don't really fall under "advice" any more than copying the writers' bowel or eating habits would.

</comment><comment><USER20> For me, design is the same way. When I need to design something from scratch, or look at a current web design from a different angle, I like to be isolated and full of coffee (or red wine) -- free of distractions.

For coding, on the other hand, I don't really mind distractions.

</comment><comment><USER21> I write at night. I don't think I've ever written anything of value in the morning.</comment>


Privacy Fail: Klout Has Gone Too Far - <AUTHOR> http://therealtimereport.com/2011/10/27/privacy-fail-klout-has-gone-too-far/

<comment><USER2> This is the result of open data, or the semantic web, or whatever you want to call it. Anyone can look at your public info on the web, do some simple math, and get this same info. Facebook encourages this through their "social graph" APIs, and twitter has been used this way by researchers for years. So if anyone wants to do this to you, they can. Are you going to opt-out of every service that wants to look at your twitter account?

<comment><USER3> I was thinking the same. What is is that klout does here, that is wrong? If the post is public on Facebook, what can you do about it?

<comment><USER4> What the author says is wrong is the fact that you can't opt-out of this service, and that it is too difficult to determine what is and isn't publicly available on social networking sites.

The author has a point, but he's just going in the wrong direction (and should be focusing more on twitter and Facebook and less on Klout). He should be arguing in favor of more transparent privacy options, opt-in instead of opt- out by default, and more secure defaults in social networking rather than saying someone is doing something wrong with publicly available info.

<comment><USER5> _The author has a point, but he's just going in the wrong direction (and should be focusing more on twitter and Facebook and less on Klout)._

He should be holding up Klout and saying, "See, this is what's wrong with Facebook."

But this seems to be a hard message to convey. People want to like and use Facebook, and would rather blame a site like Klout than face the truth about what liking and using Facebook actually means.

To me it's like walking down the street naked and then complaining about how cameras work because people are able to take pictures.

Facebook + time = sadness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is obviously wrong, and I'm surprised Klout thought it was okay.

"UPDATE: I just heard from another social media professional that she has found a Klout profile for her son, who is 13 years old. In other words, Klout is creating profiles and assigning scores to minors."

And that is probably illegal in many countries. I expect lawsuits.

<comment><USER2> I'm pretty sure it's part of the ToS you agree to when you sign up to FB or Twitter. Since minors can't use those services without parental permission anyway (because they can't agree to the ToS by themselves), I think the parents ought to be aware that they are giving FB & Twitter permission to do this.

<comment><USER7> The world seems to be turning into a messed up place where we willfully trade off our privacy for sociability.

Should we just accept that it is ok for corporations to trade our info willy- nilly while all we want to do is be social on the web?

How long and how far will this go on? Until every other bit of our digital life is tracked, profiled and sold?

When did we stop being consumers and became products? Will there ever be a B2B transaction with our faces next to a barcode?

I think we need to get a grip before we start finding this all too normal.

<comment><USER8> I've found a solution to the problem of people finding information I want to keep private. It's actually fairly simple.

Stuff I want to make public goes here: <https://github.com/stucchio> <http://crazybear.posterous.com/> <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=yummyfajitas>

If I had a twitter/facebook/etc, it would fall into this category.

Stuff I want to keep private goes here: file:///home/stucchio/

The general rule of thumb (ignoring exceptions like gmail): "http" = public, [ "file", "ssh"] = private.

<comment><USER9> Well, you can connect to webspace via SSH. Which reminded me of a phenomenon I almost forgot: Back before facebook, I can remember multiple situations where people made the mistake to think that things on their public webspace are private just because they weren't linked.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


North American versus European distribution systems (2011) - <AUTHOR> https://electrical-engineering-portal.com/north-american-versus-european-distribution-systems <comment><USER2> I think from a practical perspective the biggest advantage of the European system is that every household gets three phases. This is I guess likely the reason you have many more gas stoves in the US than in Europe where you can easily install a high power electric/induction stove instead.

<comment><USER3> > This is I guess likely the reason you have many more gas stoves in the US > than in Europe

Is this true? Either way, gas stoves are _so_ much nicer to cook on than electric hobs - electric ones take forever to heat up and cool down compared to gas.

<comment><USER4> Pure resistive heated stoves yes, most inductive ones are actually quite fast and nice to use.

<comment><USER5> I was pretty against electric stoves, but just moved into a place with a modern induction setup. Extremely impressed. It can boil water amazingly quickly and the exact heat control is great. I do miss the ability to char things, but not massively.

<comment><USER6> Few other benefits of induction are easier cleanup (you can wipe it down) and no long term "soot" accumulation around the stove.

<comment><USER7> > Few other benefits of induction are easier cleanup (you can wipe it down)

With the downside that the surface is more fragile and susceptible to permanent damage, particularly if you have heavy cookware.

> no long term "soot" accumulation around the stove

I have lived extensively with propane, natural gas, and electric ranges/cooktops. I have never seen a "soot" accumulation, or really any difference in discoloration between any of those fuels.

<comment><USER8> > I have never seen a "soot" accumulation

You're just generalizing your individual experience and it's just plain wrong. Very few people dismantle gas burners after every spill to properly clean around and under the burner plate so eventually there will be a burnt layer of soot. The uneven surface of a gas stove doesn't make cleaning too easy either.

A perfectly flat and smooth glass surface it's a lot easier to clean. It's a matter of wiping it, especially on induction stoves that don't really heat up that much. And in case of more serious neglect you can use a cooktop blade to scrape this soot.

<comment><USER3> > You're just generalizing your individual experience and it's just plain > wrong

That's unfair, and TBH a bit rude - they didn't generalise, they explictly stated "I have never seen...".

Another data point here, from someone who's been cooking with gas for a looong time, and who does regularly take the burners to piece and clean them well.

I've also never seen any soot accumulation. Maybe it varies and happens on some models ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

<comment><USER8> > That's unfair, and TBH a bit rude

You are correct but I'm sure OP didn't mind and might even agree with me. That's quite literally a quote from one of their comments responding to a similar assertion.

> Maybe it varies and happens on some models

I think it's mostly because of people's cleaning habits. Since cleaning a gas stove is a lot more involved it's likely that more people are putting it off until the soot is there. Old stile electric stoves (with elevated burners, no glass plate) are in a similar situation, albeit still easier to clean than gas stoves. I assume that if you're cleaning it thoroughly after every spill (or just don't spill) this wouldn't happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Having 400V 3-phase is excellent for EV charging. Guessing any new garage construction in europe makes sure to put in a 3-phase socket.

Lots of older houses like mine have their Tesla socket beind the stove and only 230V in the garage unfortunately.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm seeing some broad generalizations in this thread, and some downvotes in disagreement. Please remember that Europe is a big place, and is not necessarily homogeneous. There are large differences between countries, and sometimes between smaller regions within countries. Just because A has 3-fase power cookers, doesn't mean B does too, for example.

</comment><comment><USER11> When you say "European", please also say "excepted UK" who (like usual) does things differently. E.g ring cabling.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_wiring_in_the_Uni...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_wiring_in_the_United_Kingdom)

<comment><USER12> Maybe the article is trying to stay relevant in a few months :)

<comment><USER13> Last time I checked UK will still on the European continent for the foreseeable future ;)

<comment><USER14> It's always been just off the continent. I think they'd sail away if they hadn't been tethered to us by that tunnel.

<comment><USER15> Japan is also an island, but you don't see anyone trying to make the claim that it's not part of Asia. I wish people would stop conflating Europe and the EU.

<comment><USER14> From the UK, "the continent" refers very specifically to continental Europe, which means Europe without the British islands.

While Japan is an island, I would not consider it part of continental Asia, although that might be less of a common concept than continental Europe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This article seems to only cover the residential distribution system. I say that, because it covers the single phase, center-tapped 240V (120V-Neutral-120) that's conventional in North American residential circuits. However, in commercial buildings, I've seldom seen single phase 240/120V service from the utility. Rather, I've seen 3-phase 480/277V. If 208/120V is to be used, there's usually another transformer on premise to step down the voltages.

I wish the article covered how the secondaries for commercial distribution was done as well, but at least its coverage of residential service is informative.

</comment><comment><USER17> And Norway (+Albania?) mostly have a system totally different than rest of the world called IT-system where there is no ground. This require two errors to be present (on different wires) to give a problem. It's the same systems as used internal in hospitals.

</comment><comment><USER18> > For urban systems, the European system can take advantage of the flexible > secondary; for example, transformers can be sited more conveniently. For > rural systems and areas where load is spread out, the North American primary > system is more flexible.

I've often wondered how many of the differences between Europe and The United States are the result of population density.

</comment><comment><USER19> Consumer-facing question:

Does anyone know if the higher European voltage at the socket produces statistically more severe or more frequent injuries among consumers? The 240v plugs themselves are designed differently (wider spacing between prongs) which I imagine is partly because they're supposed to safely handle higher voltages…

<comment><USER20> The UK plug causes far less injuries than any other plug due to its incredible safety design.

<comment><AUTHOR> Type F and E plugs in Europe have the same safety as the UK plug but they are less bulky.

The reason why F and E have similar safety but don't require fuse as UK plugs have is the use of ring circuits in the UK.

<comment><USER21> F and E don't have switches on the wall, and don't have the same shutter-safe design. They're likely closer than some even worse plugs, but the UK plug (aside from bulk/cost) really is the safest plug in the world.

<comment><USER22> The sockets are however not recessed making them less safe than type E and F as it now becomes possible touch the the live conductor if the insulation at the base is damaged (or is completely absent for some cheaper cables).

<comment><USER21> > now becomes possible touch the the live conductor if the insulation at the > base is damaged

If the UK plug isn't pushed all the way in the contacts aren't live. So, nope. The insulation is an extra safety measure on an already over-engineered plug.

<comment><USER22> That's not actually true. The pins mate on the side and have quite a bit of play when they make contact (otherwise the connection would be quite unreliable and might even be a fire-hazard). The insulation is _not_ an extra safety feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Good to see, at the end of the article, that there are people thinking about different voltages and more sophisticated systems for transforming voltages. Now that so many devices are capable of running at quite low power it might be worth using USB-C alongside the usual power outlets for more than just computers.

<comment><USER24> Not really, just like it's not worth it having any power supply embedded into a power outlet. It's also a bit dangerous, it can malfunction and burn your place to the ground without triggering circuit breakers. Also USB-C power in particular is pretty inefficient by design, as having say a 150 watt power supply to efficiently deliver 5 watts of power is rather complex and expensive to achieve.

<comment><USER25> What makes the risk of malfunction higher compared to a standard power supply plugged into an outlet?

<comment><USER26> As sibling says, no cooling but also no easy way to disconnect the supply eg if it gets hot or starts smoking or sparking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> From what I'm currently experiencing here (Sweden) three phases also allows for interesting issues like partial power outages that take down only some of your house... Never saw anything like this in Australia where it's probably the US style

</comment><comment><USER28> There was a sponsored ad below the article, 'How to Make Electricity for Free.'

<comment><USER29> I block ads, but that kind of "chum" is horrible - here's an article with some info on it [https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of- intern...](https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet- chum/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> "Reference" is a little conservative. A majority of this post is copied right out of the Electric Power Distribution Handbook by T.A. Short.

</comment><comment><USER31> Does having a higher voltage make a substantial difference in the quantity of copper used?

<comment><USER32> Twice the voltage - four times the power with same loses and same wire.

And resistance is inversely proportional to the area of the cross-section of the wire.

So, if you want the same power - you can use 2 times less copper with 2 times higher voltage.

<comment><USER31> I understand that. Does it have a particular meaning on a large scale?

I mean, is infrastructure overall cheaper in that regard? Are wires less likely to be stolen? Things of that sort.

<comment><USER33> For sure it is cheaper. On the scale of a house, it is not so much, i spent maybe 300€ of wires alone for my house (mix of 1.5 and 2.5mm2).

But you need also to add the manpower cost. With 240V 16A (standard for a 5 plug circuit) breaker you can wire your house with 1.5mm2 wires. For 20A you need 2.5mm2 wires, and for stove (32A) you need 4mm2.

By experience, I can tell you that wiring your house with 2.5mm2 is way harder to manipulate (bending, taking turns etc...) than the flexible 1.5mm2, and you need bigger enclosure in the walls. Your electrician will charge you higher because of this.

Edit: section for copper, with aluminium you need a higher cross section

Edit 2: my god, in the US you need a wire awg12 (4mm2) for a 20A 120V plug, to have a mere 2400W. This can be wired in europe with 1.5mm2 wires on 16A breaker, and you have 3800W of useful power ! It must be a pain to be electrician in the US

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I think it is great to have everywhere a 3-phase system here in europe.</comment>


Australian stats bureau deploys a bot to harvest Twitter IDs - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/03/oz_stats_bureau_deploys_a_bot_to_harvest_twitter_ids/ <comment><USER2> Trust the ABS to use this. They've consistently shown they have zero cognition of the criticism levelled at them.

But how are these kind of bots even a thing, for anyone? I can't think of a single case where it's a good idea to fire off automated tone-deaf social media replies that ignores negative sentiment.

This is the 21st century version of "your call is important to us, please hold".

</comment><comment><USER3> "This is egregious stupidity". That aptly describes the ABS from what I hear. Now where do I get one of these bots from.</comment>


Show HN: Ever wish online discussions had more privacy? I hope you like this. - <AUTHOR> https://www.jiffchat.com/about/ <comment><USER2> Hi,

I always think having an anonymous discussion is so cool. People can be honest about they're thinking, or provide real opinions. On the other hand, I'm also curious about how to prevent inappropriate discussions or comments like violent, racist , etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello Chris,

I constantly worry about violent, racist, and sexually-explicit content. I'm currently doing manual content moderation but I'm exploring other ways to prevent them. Youtube has implemented AI tech to flag inappropriate content, so that's something I'm considering.

In the mean time, my focus is to make this anonymous discussion board a healthy place for honest discussions.</comment></comment>