How To Become A Spammer Regardless Of People Following You On Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://www.skorks.com/2010/02/how-to-become-a-spammer-as-a-programmer-regardless-of-people-following-you-on-twitter/ <comment><USER3> I don't know. I read the original article and felt he was talking about building numerous cheap apps and selling those to get rich quick instead of building a single one and hopping it will take over the market. I did not felt like he was talking about spaming!

Few days back there was someone here who told us that he was getting as much as 1 thousand dollars EVERYDAY by developing many small apps for the iPhone and selling those. This is opposite of putting all your time on a single iPhone app and betting on it.

The original article was really helpful for me. I disagree with those that are getting a different message from it.

<comment><USER4> > Few days back there was someone here who told us that he was getting as much > as 1 thousand dollars EVERYDAY by developing many small apps for the iPhone > and selling those.

I believe that _was_ Max (the original article author). Was it not?

<comment><USER5> Yes, that is correct.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1060019>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "I know he is not just advocating building made-for-adsense sites, it's not the method, it's the attitude that goes with it, that is the real issue. Lets not care about providing any kind of value, lets not worry about any sort of professionalism, all we want to do is scam some suckers out of $1 a day and believe you me there are plenty of suckers on the web."

I don't get this common reaction to the post? What's wrong with providing something for a dollar, if it's worth a dollar?

What's necessarily unprofessional about providing something worth a dollar?

What is it about online entities that make it necessary for them to be somehow more "worthy" than most peoples' daily slog in a cubicle or behind a register? Yes, the internet makes it more possible to make "worthy" entities, but why _must_ they be worthy?

Just because some people associate their better instincts and identity with the internet doesn't mean that everyone should do the same. Otherwise we'd all be driving Priuses.

<comment><USER7> I think the matter of the method of the monetization is part of the problem here, Max never explicitly wrote how he intended to monetize the traffic. Selling something for a dollar is one thing, entering the SEO page space war in order to attract enough traffic to get $1 per day per web property is another.

<comment><USER8> I think I should state this a bit clearer - I don't know SEO, I've not done SEO marketing or generate pages or all that stuff. I have no idea how it works.

I make money with iphone + developer tools + web tool + code repackaging. I can follow the $1 principle using those and it works.

Of course, I started with $1 goal, but they are all making far more than that.

SEO stuff is just too competitive, I am not smart enough to go battle against people with years of experience. My next moves are going to be facebook, smaller social network apps. Then I'll face video and add-on tools for iphone.

Assuming niche sites is about SEO is thinking small. I specifically mentioned examples and said to build software around it, not to go make a landing page style stuff.

The journey towards 400 projects will give you the insight you need to make a lot of money. It's the journey that makes the difference, not the goal.

<comment><USER7> I think you _completely_ set people on the wrong track with your 'owl' site example.

<comment><USER8> I got that from Patrick! He gave that example, so I used it also.

<comment><USER9> Oh, I thought you had posted first and it was the weirdest coincidence ever.

Your owl idea and my owl idea are quite different, Max. If you notice people criticizing your owl idea, they keep coming back to the fact that your idea exploits content already created by someone else and served by YouTube, and that the act of putting it on an owl video minisite monetized by AdSense does not create value.

In comparison, I paid to have my owl bingo cards created, I am unambiguously the moral owner of the content (both because I paid for it and because I made the software that made it possible), my cards enrich the Internet because they fill the "owls of Asia bingo"-shaped hole in the life of some actual user somewhere, the cards accurately demonstrate the operation of a software product which is actively supported, maintained, etc.

<comment><USER8> I'm not advocating the method. I am not here to judge what anyone wants to do with their time. What I am saying is that if you put owls on a site and call it owlvideo, you will make $1 a day.

The context was about how difficult or easy it was to make $1 a day, and my samples there were made to demonstrate the required amount of work involved in making $1 a day.

I don't do such things (I tried with the ninja video site, did not work out). I'm pointing out that it can be done that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think we need to view maxklein's blog posts through the prism of what he's setting out to achieve. He has mentioned a few times that he's in a "notoriety building" phase (my words, not his) with a view to exploiting that at a later date.

Right now he's generating buzz around his personal brand so that when he does have something he really wants to shout about he'll have people ready to listen.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this approach as such - but keeping it in mind does temper my expectations when I read one of his articles. It's less "I wonder if I'll learn anything new/interesting" than "I wonder how he's going to draw a reaction with this"

<comment><USER8> Just to clarify this - I am working on a big project that I want to release end of the year. For the project to work, I need to get the word out to a lot of people. So I am making an effort to write stuff that is useful and interesting to people so that they will pay attention when I make my announcement.

In the past I announced stuff and it died in the grave of silence - this time I want to make sure that I can get the word out.

Sure, I could do all that without actually saying that I am doing this, but I want people to opt-in, pay attention even though they know what I am doing, and not because I am pretending to be a sage business man just to later spam them. I'm clear and upfront about it - I'll give you good information on the few things I know, in return when I announce my project, go try it out, be a beta tester or something.

My current small projects are just stepping stones, and this is the path I have chosen to break into the big time. I tried it the other way - <USER2> soemthing and then announcing it - didn't work. Now I'm trying it by first building an audience, and then releasing software.

<comment><USER10> And there's nothing wrong with your approach as far as I'm concerned. It's appreciated that you are as up-front about your strategy when many aren't but it does affect how I come to your articles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The moral argument defended in the article is mute in the business world, because there are some people that can have fun doing anything (even selling crappy $1 products). If you are not happy with competing with them, then find something else to do, but don't tell them that they shouldn't be doing it. You are just trying to apply your moral standards to somebody else.

If there are people willing to create $1 "crappy" products, and people that want to buy them, I think this pretty good.

<comment><USER12> I'm having trouble following your argument. If something is fun to make, then it is moral? How on earth are those two connected?

His argument was that regardless of how much fun it is or how easy it is to do, it is _crap_ , and filling the world with crap is bad from a basic moral standpoint.

<comment><USER11> The problem is exactly that it is a moral judgment. You can't apply your moral standards to others. Should be people paying for crappy apps? Should they be paying for porn? Who are we to decide?

<comment><USER13> This is simple moral relativism. Of course we can judge what we, as a community, believe is good and bad behavior.

<comment><USER11> Why should we do this, if there is a market that can do an even better job? If there are only crappy products, just create a good one and the market will embrace it -- Just like people buy more Mac laptops than laptops from other brands. No need for moral coercion.

Your idea also creates a virtual barrier for people who want to create new stuff -- who cares if the version 1.0 is bad?

<comment><USER13> You're saying we can't judge people's work. I'm saying we can, should, and do all the time. If someone is spamming viagra ads, or polluting the web with scraped YouTube videos, we can safely call that bad behavior.

<comment><USER11> You can, but I don't see a reason unless you feel you are a superior being. I am glad there is a free place called Internet where people can load whatever videos they want, publish their half backed projects, or even try to make a buck or two writing posts about Viagra. -- Great things also happen there from time to time.

<comment><USER13> You won't even say it's bad behavior to send spam email with viagra ads?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I believe this guy misses the point of Klein's post. He definitely misses the point I thought Klein was making, which is: if you're having a hard time finding a market where there is money to be made, just try to enter some markets and probably fail lots of times. After a few dozen attempts, you are bound to find one in which you can make a buck. The methods you use to achieve that are not the main point of Klein's post and, frankly, irrelevant. This article cracks down on the methods Klein supposedly promotes, which feels like one huge straw man.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think there is a whole spectrum of making money online, from scamming/phishing and the like all the way to squeaky clean, not one bit optimized (SEO, conversions) shopping cart.

The debate is where you draw the line to define something as spam, and it also depends on your definition of spam. I mean, you can twist Google's business model and say it's scraping other people's content and plastering ads all over its pages. That sounds horribly close to a definition of spam and yet people love the search results from Google.

<comment><USER16> For me the key property that defines spam is that it is unsolicited. I'm the one going to Google to receive a dose of that "scraped content with ads", they don't come and bug me with it.

For the same reason, all the content this guy is ranting against is not spam either. I'm free to ignore all those eHow pages (actually some of them are not that bad) and referral sites and quirky apps that people write.

It only turns into spam when so much dark SEO has been applied to it that it turns up in search-engine results for which it should have been irrelevant.

<comment><USER17> But applying all that dark SEO is basically the point. Why else would a crappy $5 article written by an English-challenged Indian show up on the front page of any search result? It's all about gaming Google, Yahoo, and/or Bing. As has been described by others, since it's all about making ad-revenue, the article is SUPPOSED to be bad enough that they'll click on the ads to find what they are actually looking for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I gotta say, there are a lot of adsense sites and affiliate marketing that isn't spammy...for example, a large portion of ehow articles, amazon affiliate links, etc. Just because some people do micro niche blogging and profit unrespectably doesn't mean every one does, I do some made for adsense sites but they are written to be high quality, useful, and ad-click generating.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't agree with Max' position 100%, but what he's advocating is not spam per se, and the attitude of having 100 dripping taps instead of a single firehose is one that is hard to assail from a 'robustness' principle.

If you only have one horse in the race, if it dies you're toast, so having 10's or even 100's of little sites is good business in the sense that it will never die overnight.

Let me give you some examples of sites I built in that vein, now both defunct because the $1 / day target was not even in sight.

I built a platform that allows you to sell stuff online, and because I figured the good advertising and affiliate money is in financial products I focused on houses and cars.

The two sites were close enough that they could share a single database, free to use for the user and attracted a small group of users from various countries.

But that's where I missed the boat, this sort of thing doesn't work on an international basis, you have to tailor it to each and every market specifically. So what started out as a vision of low maintenance useful sites with solid income slowly morphed in to high maintenance sites with low income. In other words failures.

Spam didn't enter in to it, and if the concept would have been successful I can see a lot of ways in which to create further 'clones'.

Then there was Max' example of the site with the owls. There is quite a bit wrong with that whole view, for one it doesn't really add value, after all, if you go to youtube and type in 'owls' you get the exact same list. Only with a couple of twists, for one that list is up to date, no broken links. Whereas any 'collection' of youtube video links that you maintain will have to be checked periodically for broken links (this can be automated though).

Finding a successful 'template' that you can clone is an essential component to the scaling of many businesses, each of the clones can then be targeted at verticals, just like what I tried to do with the cars & houses, you could do with owls and penguins.

But the line for me gets drawn at having nothing but links to other peoples content, aggregation with razor thin added value is too cheap and spammy to me, I'd like projects to have a bit more meat. But that also means that you'll be investing more time and that may eventually not be worth it, especially not if a project fails.

There's something to be learned from Max' treatise, I agree with the initial impression that it advocates spammy thin sites, but if you look at that as a way of testing the waters to see what has 'legs' then it may not be all that bad.

And I'm really curious about how his experiment with the site he's going to be building will pan out.

</comment><comment><USER19> As high brow as we'd all like to be, the honest truth is the only measure in business relates to profits. How much you can make and how quickly.

Your investors don't care how you make money, so long as it doesn't impede the making of future money.

<comment><USER20> While your utilitarian philosophy (the only measure that counts is success) might make sense on the surface, many people (including me) believe that utilitarianism has a number of problems.

First, your relative success today doesn't mean that you will be more successful or successful at all today. This is similar to the fallacies of greedy algorithms in computer science, if you're familiar with them. Secondly, utilitarianism will not give you happiness, which is pretty much the most important thing in life, more important than financial success.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Viewed 52096 times Favorited 3 times

Posterous has a terrible conversion rate.</comment>


50 Singapore Startups You Should to Get to Know - <AUTHOR> http://foundersgrid.com/50-singapore-startups

<comment><USER2> great list. for fintech i think itbit, moolahsense are worth a mention too. Any more fintech in the capital markets space?</comment>


Ask HN: Microservices and K8s Not in the Cloud? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
Our products are running in Kubernetes, but we have to target institutions that are very conservative and for various complance reasons tun their own small datacenters and don't have k8s knowledge or private clouds.
Is anyone else in this boat? Do you deploy k8s for your clients to run your software or do you use some turn-key variant of it? <comment><USER2> Why do you need to push into your clients Kubernetes in order to run your product?!

Surely you can give them the containers and they can run as they see fit, or, even more commonly, you can give them RPMs and some instructions on how to set up.</comment>


Ask HN: I removed every cookie from my blog, because Cookie Law. Am I wrong? - <AUTHOR>

As some of you may know, in the coming days the infamous Cookie Law will begin to reap souls in Europe and Italy (I'm based in Italy, so...)
I could have added an ugly and invasive banner, plus a convoluted privacy policy to my poor little blog [1]. I should have.
Instead, at some point during preparations, I decided to get rid of all cookies and cookie-placing services.
Because I'm angry at those bureaucrats who would want me to have a privacy policy because I use Disqus as a commenting system.
So I got rid of:
- Disqus, and I am thinking of opening a Facebook Page where I will repost articles from the blog and allow commenters to do their thing
- ConvertKit, and I am done with drip email marketing
- Gumroad iframe, and instead I have now direct links to Gumroad
- BootstrapCDN, and I now serve bootstrap and fontawesome by myself
This leaves me bitter and angry, but I think I'm doing the right thing.
What about you?
[1] My uninteresting blog: http://www.williamghelfi.com/ <comment><USER2> You run a technical blog. If it makes you feel any better my browser is configured to block all the content you removed anyhow. And I suspect lots of your readers are like me.

I am glad to see the pendulum shift in favor of consumers and privacy, although the libertarian side of me makes me question the need for more laws dictating how businesses behave.

<comment><USER3> How do you usually deal with those two somewhat opposing views?

<comment><USER2> On an issue-by-issue basis.

In this case I'd want the regulations to apply to Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS web browsers (only) and force those browsers to display a boilerplate notice about cookies when they're detected... rather than putting the burden on the much larger set of end websites and API providers.

In general there's not a permanent way to reconcile consumer rights with business rights. One thing that would help a lot is to restrict/ban money in politics so that at least each side of the debate has a more equal voice. Although in this case the side without money won.

Personally I guess my outlook is that of a moderate... or maybe a left-leaning libertarian.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does hosting your website elsewhere fix the problem? I'm not familiar with the details of the law, but I'd be interested to find out if this fixes your problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> AFAIK, nope

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I want to go this route as well, but I am addicted to Google analytics. Any other services people can recommend?

<comment><USER6> Grep your server logs! There are open source analytic tools available as well like [http://piwik.org/](http://piwik.org/) .

<comment><USER7> +1 for piwik

IIRC, piwik works two ways. One with a tracking cookie like Google Analytics. Another is with a tracking pixel on every page. (When they load the pixel, it registers a pageview.)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why hasn't Twitter done anything about this bot army following Trump? - <AUTHOR> 90% of his new followers are all brand new accounts that have no followers, no profile pic, etc.
Yet Twitter is completely OK with this it seems.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/followers <comment><USER2> Twitter is filled with bots in general, and they often follow popular accounts. I wouldn't necessarily conclude that this is Trump-specific, although that's also possible.

The general conclusion, since Twitter itself won't explain, is that they don't want to tank user numbers, which would weigh down their stock even further.</comment>


How do you manage tasks with your team? - <AUTHOR>

I love using rainlendar on my desktop, and I love that it is iCalendar compatible.
Are there any services or tools that use the iCalendar standard that will allow us to send tasks and events to each other within our team? What do you guys do?
My first go at this was using BaseCamp and Google Calendar, but neither export tasks in their webcal features :( <comment><USER2> Do you not work face-to-face (or back-to-back) with your team members?

Over the summer I worked for a company of a few hundred people that didn't use project management software (except when contracted externally) because if you needed something, you just went to the appropriate person and told them. It got things done fast.

<comment><AUTHOR> we all live a good hour away from each other, and come together once a week</comment></comment>


A social technology that reduces social involvement and psychological wellbeing? (1998) - <AUTHOR> http://paedpsych.jk.uni-linz.ac.at/PAEDPSYCH/NETSCHULE/NETSCHULELITERATUR/KRAUTetal98/Krautetal98.html <comment><AUTHOR> They knew in 1998</comment>


Show HN: A point-and-click visual decoder for flag semaphore - <AUTHOR> https://bobbiec.github.io/semaphore-decoder.html <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all, I made this decoder for flag semaphore recently in Vue. It lets you click on each flag position independently to define the input symbol, because I found it difficult to read the usual lookup table.

I also wrote up the project experience here [1], and the code is on Github [2]. This is my first Vue project and I enjoyed the learning process, but I probably made some mistakes, so feedback is appreciated.

[1] [https://bobbiechen.com/blog/2020/5/28/the-making-of- semaphor...](https://bobbiechen.com/blog/2020/5/28/the-making-of-semaphore- decoder)

[2] [https://github.com/bobbiec/bobbiec.github.io/blob/master/sem...](https://github.com/bobbiec/bobbiec.github.io/blob/master/semaphore- decoder.html)

</comment><comment><USER2> Looks like this only renders correctly in chrome.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, what browser are you using?

I do know that it's broken on mobile Firefox (but works on desktop) - works on nightly mobile so I didn't investigate further. I should put up a banner or something for mobile Firefox.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A Flask/AWS Rekogniton Implementation of Silicon Valley's 'Not Hot Dog' - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ryanml/NotHotDog <comment><AUTHOR> Been learning more about AWS' offerings lately. This is by no means groundbreaking, (I couldn't source enough quality hot dog images to train a TF model to an acceptable degree of accuracy) but just a fun way to test the chops of Amazon's image classifier :)</comment>


Let's hear scientists with different Covid-19 views, not attack them - <AUTHOR> https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/27/hear-scientists-different-views-covid-19-dont-attack-them/ <comment><USER3> The example this article uses doesn't help drive the point. Ioannidis _was_ heard, and the majority of the attacks on him came from outside the scientific community. Within the community science played out how it's supposed to. The paper was looked at critically and flaws in it's data uncovered and thus correctly discredited.

Meanwhile, his hypothesis is _still_ held by many prominent figures outside of the scientific community. So it's very hard to claim this is an example of valid ideas being at all squashed.

Worse, in this case we have hard evidence of some pretty catastrophic results from this virus. So trying to argue that the overall outcome isn't going to be so bad is proven false by counter example. We _already_ have situations that are bad enough to warrant extreme counter measures.

<comment><USER4> Lots of things about the Ioannidis paper.

A) This was published as a research paper but how much of a research paper was it? As mentioned, it selectively and fairly shallowly looked at some data (the Diamond Princess) while wholly ignoring other data (South Korea) without even providing a strong justification for its choices. It was more like "an essay with scholarly footnotes".

B) This article wasn't simply offered to scientific community. You can find a huge swath of mainstream media reports describing this paper and another large number of popular articles with by _Ioannidis himself_ defending the positions he staked out in his article. This was essentially a media campaign.

C). The particular position Ioannidis staked out was just one of a series of positions one can find staked by a variety of figures, some real scientists, some right wing ideologues, some somewhat in between. Again, if you look, a well financed media campaign. Below is a series of link I've cobbled together I've cobbled together as documentation of this:

The American Institute for Economic Research (libertarian/right wing think tank) give it's of "significant" article: [https://www.aier.org/article/vital- information-that-is-falli...](https://www.aier.org/article/vital-information- that-is-falling-through-the-cracks/) Essentially a web of articles united by the need to avoid undue action on the virus (IE, not cost money).

A nice article describing the similarity of Covid-denial and Climate-change- denial: [https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/04/coronavirus-d...](https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/04/coronavirus- doubters-follow-climate-denial-playbook/)

An article on the effort to spin the Santa Clara tests befor e they were even release: [https://slate.com/technology/2020/04/coronavirus- circulating...](https://slate.com/technology/2020/04/coronavirus-circulating- california-2019-bunk.html)

What's on with Ioannidis: [https://undark.org/2020/04/24/john-ioannidis- covid-19-death-...](https://undark.org/2020/04/24/john-ioannidis- covid-19-death-rate-critics/)

Richard A. Epstein of the Hoover Institution, another Stanford Connected "minimizer" [https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-contrarian- corona...](https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-contrarian-coronavirus- theory-that-informed-the-trump-administration)

A summary of several related minimizers, with a similar program: [https://arcdigital.media/what-the-federalist-doesnt-get- abou...](https://arcdigital.media/what-the-federalist-doesnt-get-about-the- importance-of-life-1833c714f08f)

Aljazeera gives a broader discussion, why real scientist would do this: [https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/coronavirus- herd-i...](https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/coronavirus-herd- immunity-eugenics-market-200414104531234.html)

<comment><USER5> What is your point?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Part of the problem with the reporting on death rates and, to a lesser extent, many of the tests and treatments of COVID-19, is the almost nonexistent emphasis on uncertainty quantification. A view might only be 'different' in the sense that the mode of the belief is shifted significantly, which is to be expected if existing beliefs are quite diffuse (i.e., uncertain).

<comment><USER7> Former actual scientist here.

This! This, exactly! This, a million times over!

If I could teach people _one scientific concept_ to help us get through this, it wouldn't be immunology or epidemiology. It would be an understanding of uncertainty, where it comes from, what it means, and how to handle it.

<comment><USER8> The funny thing is that they actually do this -- they show that based on their measurements of the assay's specificity, the confidence interval for the number of true positives includes zero. That means, even discounting all of the other biases, their study cannot provide a lower bound for the number of infections, which was the whole point of the study.

They then proceed to ignore this and use a point estimate for their further calculations.

The right thing to have done would have been to test the assay further, or move the study to an area where there was higher positivity and they could get a more reliable signal.

<comment><USER7> What I actually had in mind with my comment was the hydroxychloroquine trials. The interpretation of those results has been just saddening to the scientist in me. They've all been weak studies, for various reasons (many of them quite valid!), and so the results just don't have much power. And yet, the partisans jump on everything they like to push their agenda: Miracle cure! Worse than drinking bleach! Et cetera.

My reading of the data to date (note: not including anything that might have shown up in the last few days) is more nuanced. Hydroxychloroquine most likely has a small positive effect, but the data are consistent with anything from a modest negative effect to a modest positive effect to absolutely nothing at all. From its long history of previous use, the drug has known negative effects, but these are unimportant or manageable for most COVID-19 patients. However, any positive effect it may have is limited; the studies to date, albeit limited, _have been_ powerful enough to detect a "miracle cure".

None of this says a word about mechanism of action. Someone is bound to say, "But what about zinc? You need to consider zinc!" The thing is, we _did_. These analyses are independent of mechanism of action. It's entirely possible that hydroxychloroquine's small positive effect is mostly or entirely caused by zinc interactions. Or not. We don't know! We'd have to do a study designed around zinc to test that theory out.

In my opinion, again as a science-y but not doctor-y person, is that giving hydroxychloroquine to COVID-19 patients in most cases will not hurt them, and might help a little bit. The biggest danger, I believe, is that people think it's more powerful than it is. We should not stop and think that hydroxychloroquine is good enough or a "cure". Because it isn't. And if a patient receives hydroxychloroquine instead of better care because people misunderstand science, that is a _failing_.

(The above is definitely a tangent. But getting it off my chest somewhere was good for _my_ mental health!)

<comment><USER9> Problem is that most patients will recover from Covid 19, so unlike a more deadly disease, need a high bar for treatments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Views still need to be backed by solid data and in this case, the Stanford study the article is highlight has a number of issues with its data:

"I think the authors of the above-linked paper owe us all an apology. We wasted time and effort discussing this paper whose main selling point was some numbers that were essentially the product of a statistical error."

"I'm serious about the apology. Everyone makes mistakes. I don't think they authors need to apologize just because they screwed up. I think they need to apologize because these were avoidable screw-ups. They're the kind of screw- ups that happen if you want to leap out with an exciting finding and you don't look too carefully at what you might have done wrong."

source: [https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal- flaw...](https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal-flaws-in- stanford-study-of-coronavirus-prevalence/)

<comment><USER8> I don't think that Ioannnidis needs to resign or something, but he should retract the paper and recuse himself from the ongoing debate about this issue. It was their group's decision to

a) Run op-eds in the WSJ and get on Fox News with their theories

b) Create a faulty study with biased data analysis (of all people, Ioannnidis should be very sensitive to this -- he's famous for his paper "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False."

c) Publish the flawed paper as a preprint without peer review.

d) Publish the results of the L.A. serological survey without even a preprint so that the methods could be looked over.

If you publish a study that has huge societal implications before peer review, then Twitter is going to be your peer review. Deal with it.

<comment><USER11> I don't blame them for posting a dodgy preprint (that's what preprints are for) but I do blame them for going on a press blitz for their dodgy preprint. It's not a responsible way to use their platform.

<comment><USER12> Well, some may find posting said preprint particularly questionable simply because it had Ioannidis' name on it, and he's primarily known for his emphasis on standards of evidence.

<comment><USER13> As somebody who was always annoyed by the weird amounts of odd attention that Ioannidis' "standards of evidence" papers got, I hope that this makes people reevaluate them.

The "standard" he set up was a straw man, and not how any practicing scientist I know actually looks at papers.

And when he allows his name to be used to push highly politci contrarian takes, all the weird attention his other papers received starts to make sense. It's not about the science, it's about being contrarian, at best, and at worst ways to subvert the public's view of science by deriving them on what it really means to publish a peer-reviewed paper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _That's why we believe that the bar to stifling or ignoring academics who are willing to debate their alternative positions in public and in good faith must be very high._

But the "good faith" part is precisely the problem. Though it is difficult to discern good faith from bad, those who argue in bad faith destroy the system entirely, and we need some kind of defense against them.

</comment><comment><USER15> Reading the tweet thread linked under "personal attacks and general disparaging comments" ([https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1253822258692284416](https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1253822258692284416)), I see much more a criticism of poor science journalism in the WSJ than the poor science in the article itself (aside from one swipe as a "methodological piece of shit"). I'm all for rigorous debate of different scientific ideas, but the WSJ Opinion page is not where people should be marshaling allies to their scientific ideas that are regarded as tenuous by the majority of the community.

</comment><comment><USER16> This point from the article is really important IMO

'Scientific consensus is important, but it isn't uncommon when some of the most important voices turn out to be those of independent thinkers, like John Ioannidis, whose views were initially doubted. That's not an argument for prematurely accepting his contestable views, but it is a sound argument for keeping him, and others like him, at the table'

In a free society information and ideas should flow freely, not be banned and originators punished as happens in closed societies. It is alarming the level of vitriol and blind adherence to 'the scientific method' aka accepted establishment viewpoint in some cases, particularly online.

For all the endless proselytizing about 'innovation' there are some remarkably closed minded people around, enabled and amplified by social networks

<comment><USER17> I'm not in the academic sciences but when my uncle published his thesis in a journal for his physics PhD, he got literal hate mail in his mailbox for going against the old-guard with his conclusions. It completely blew my mind that his peers who worked in the sciences got so wound that they sent hate mail to him. I think he still has the letters all these decades later.

I learned second hand that apparently a lot of scientific acedemia is like that. Crazy.

<comment><USER18> Thanks for sharing this. I've heard many stories like that of your uncle from professional researchers in science, economics, and other fields. This is something that people who have no experience in professional academia and science often do not understand.

In my experience a lot of people assume that because science and related disciplines are rational endeavors that the institutions and culture compassing them must also be rational, empirical, purely evidence-based, etc. Reality can be almost comically, and sometimes tragically, the opposite.

<comment><USER19> It's like finance or law or any other field with some hothead cutthroat personalities in powerful positions. Where there is perceived power there is an attraction to people who feed off of power alone. Egos are a plenty and often cruel to others trying for the same goals. Lots of people are hypercompetitive rather than collaborative, and see any peer as an adversary or challenger rather than leaning into synergy.

This kind of stuff would happen at conferences too, a couple notable cases of screaming matches from the audience to the presenter have happened. Sometimes vindictive professors will go to a rival professors's grad student's talk and just grill the poor kid, asking them impossible questions and being hypercritical. Usually the grad student's own professor has to step in and try to deflect the assholes line of questioning. Sometimes the professors are even in the same department. It's a total cringe moment for the rest of the audience, and is definitely a phenomenon that is slowly growing out of the field as professors retire.

Take a look at the comment section of this blog to see it first hand: [https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2017/08/02/how-not-to- perf...](https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2017/08/02/how-not-to-perform-a- differential-expression-analysis-or-science/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Part of the problem is that there are some Doctors and Scientists participating with agendas.

Take cloth masks, there are doctors who say it helps and doctors who say it doesn't help much. Some the doctors who said it doesn't help were genuine.

But some of the doctors were saying it doesn't help were lying because they assumed people wouldn't social distance if they wore a mask, believing the increased risk due to not wearing masks was not worth what they believed would be a big decrease in social distancing. Some of the doctors were are saying they didn't help, were lying to preserve masks for health care professionals (including lying about n95 masks).

It's hard not to feel like attacking some one you believe is deliberately putting many lives at risk to forward a political or personal agenda.

<comment><USER21> I've also heard it claimed that masks not helping was pushed because there was no peer reviewed randomized trials that showed that masks helped therefore the official advice was there is no evidence that masks helped. Of course there is no randomized trial evidence on the effectiveness of social distancing on long term reduction in mortality due to corona virus but different ideas have to hurdle different levels of evidence. This idea of different levels of evidence actually makes sense because some things have potentially high payoffs and very likely low costs. For example wearing masks would appear to fall into this bucket.

This comes back into reasoning under uncertainty that someone else brought up in the thread. The medical community has had problems in the past because bad medical interventions typically impose high costs on patients so if they have little positive benefit then it can easily become a net-negative situation. So then you have a culture where anything that hasn't gone through an RCT with multiple confirming studies doesn't exist as an intervention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've followed the virus from the very beginning. About six weeks ago the media decided blanket lockdowns were the only reasonable solution. Flatten the curve became the mantra, dozens of models showing millions of dead in every country were trotted out as evidence and justification for draconian shutdowns.

Any scientist that had a differing viewpoint was a monster who didn't value human life. Any public health official who suggested maybe just the most vulnerable be isolated was met with scorn and a heap of emotional but illogical arguments.

Look up David Katz [1]. Only Fox News would let him talk until Bill Maher put him on. He's eminently sensible, and he was silenced by the media.

Blanket lockdown (that is, all ages locked down) for this virus has never made sense in Western democracies. China did it because they could, and they have a command economy and a willing populace. The UK knew it didn't make sense from day one, but caved to public pressure. Sweden is still going strong, thank God, as they will be the country that shows the rest of the world how to live with, and ultimately beat, this disease. Norway just let the youngest kids go back to school, smartly, to increase herd immunity with less personal impact.

It will be clear in several more months that the Sweden strategy is the only way to minimize total harm and navigate this crisis.

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lze- rMYLf2E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lze-rMYLf2E)

[Edit]: Good job HN participants. Way to prove the story correct.

<comment><USER23> Stockholm has about 1300 deaths per million (excluding our systematic late reporting) and it's still increasing and no sign of the curve tapering off.

Also, probably the wrong country to praise a capital G God about, but that's just a cultural thing.

(yeah, everyone says it does since a week ago but data is reported late and it has been showing a downward trend the last few days for many weeks, it's not)

<comment><USER24> Sweden COVID-19 numbers are much lower than the flu numbers in the years before. Now they are at 2000 deaths total, in the years before they were at 1800 weekly. That's almost everywhere, besides a few outliers which need to be studied. The global trend is that it is a very weak flu season, despite there's no vaccine, no proper treatment (ventilators turning up wrong at the end of the wave) and extremely high spread (R0 of 5). Turns out people's immune reaction can fight SARS-CoV-2 much better than the normal influenza strains, for which vaccination exist. Maybe because it's so close to the common cold our body is accustomed to.

Everybody likes to play the numbers and curves games, but don't make it political by deliberately faking it. Like the NY Times or FT curves lately.

Even euromomo.eu changed its curves recently so they do lookh more dramatic. Not backed by the absolute numbers. They suddenly invented 32.000 unaccounted new deaths out of the magicians hat, not telling us were these new numbers came from. Some countries forbid pathologies on COVID-19 cases and forbid classification post-mortem. But this only applies to elderlies dying at home alone. But this would only apply to countries like the US with no healthcare system. Like the New Jersey case of 70 seniors. Everybody else goes to the hospitals.

<comment><USER25> The mortality rate from all causes in Stockholm is more than double the average from the previous five years.

Suggesting it is the equivalent of a "weak flu season" is an outright lie. And the bit about our immune system being able to fight it off well due to a similarity with the common cold is just something you made up, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Scientists who "express different views" _are_ listened to, when they have convincing data to support those "views."

Ioannidis is the only real example provided in the article, and his opinion piece (and the related Stanford study) was criticized, not because he's an iconoclast, but because it was bad science (and especially bad policy). Not only that, but then, instead of engaging with the scientific community, his "expertise" was co-opted by the conservative media and its agenda.

<comment><USER26> >> but because it was bad science (and especially bad policy).

is this not exactly what the original article cautions against? if it's bad science (which should be debatable) it's value as policy follows directly and doesn't need to be stated or discussed seperately.

<comment><USER12> Uh, no.

First, the original article is actually about the exact opposite. It says nothing about attacking an opinion based on its merit, it talks about attacking an opinion based on dogma. When I say it's bad science, I'm saying it's bad science because of glaring problems with its methodology; I thought that was obvious (the term "bad science" being fairly common).

Second, I'm talking about the social policy argued for in Ioannidis' opinion piece. Social policy absolutely _does not_ just directly follow the science; they are very different things and absolutely should be discussed separately. I find it a bit absurd to think that science inherently dictates a certain social policy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The problem is that the word science has been robbed of its meaning. Or the meaning didn't scale well.

Every side of the so-called debate throws it left and right, now which science do you believe in? As if belief is part of the equations.

And the other issue is that there are no debates. You send a tweet, and tag WHO or some authoritative figure and then we have to believe it. Those who don't believe it are not following the science.

Edit: Science is supposed to evolve as new data comes in. Today, we stop at the first sensational news. When a fact is updated or retracted, it doesn't make the news.

<comment><USER28> > As if belief is part of the equations.

In the data starved regime, belief indeed does enter the equations in the form of a Bayesian prior.

Agreed that new data should update the results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think the researchers behind the Santa Clara study should be applauded for going out and gathering data. While the methodology may have been flawed, I think that having a small amount of flawed data is better than having no data. My hope is that the public controversy of this study spurs more and better serological studies in the future.

I don't agree with the premise that scientists should be silenced or suffer personal attacks for putting out controversial or even flat out "bad" science. I think we have seen that approach backfire, and lead to distrust of expert opinions and traditional news sources. Instead I think that we should be focusing on improving scientific literacy in the general population, and electing leaders who surround themselves with and take advice from competent scientists. And if people in certain countries, districts, etc. are not interested in doing so... well... they are certainly free to vote however they see fit and live with the results of that decision.

<comment><USER30> The main criticism is that they came to a conclusion that was completely unsupported by the evidence. They made an error you'd flunk a first-year statistics student for: ignoring the effect of false positives. They then politicized their bad conclusion by doing a media blitz. This is especially dangerous when the conclusion you are prematurely coming to is something that a lot of people really want to believe. When their report first came out, it gave me hope. I live in Santa Clara County; what they were saying would lead to a very low death rate -- unless you allow for as few as 1% false positives, and then you realize that the numbers they report could also arise if _no one_ had any antibodies.

They shouldn't be silenced, but they should be criticized, and criticized intensely, for a botch a first-year grad student shouldn't make.

<comment><USER29> > They made an error you'd flunk a first-year statistics student for: ignoring > the effect of false positives.

I don't think it's fair to say they "ignored" the effect of false positives. The paper very clearly states:

> We consider our estimate to represent the best available current evidence, > but recognize that new information, especially about the test kit > performance, could result in updated estimates.For example, if new estimates > indicate test specificity to be less than 97.9%, our SARS-CoV-2 prevalence > estimate would change from 2.8% to less than 1%, and the lower uncertainty > bound of our estimate would include zero.

Some statisticians have accused them of being sloppy with their estimate of their lower uncertainty bound (among other things). The authors have stated that they disagree, and are working to put out additional data to show that their findings are "robust". I honestly don't know (I don't have enough of a background in stats to have an opinion either way), but I look forward to seeing what the authors put out next and how the scientific community responds to it. And more importantly than the results of this single study, I'm looking forward to more antibody testing in the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is pretty much a problem in public communication in Italy. There are some notable figures that (even if they are right) act in total disregard of deontological ethics, and make disparaging comments on other colleagues.

As the article notes, it is not a matter of agreeing but of treating other people in the scientific field with respect.

Also, some of those opinions may be wrong or just partially wrong, but we don't see that many _mea culpa_ , if any.

<comment><USER32> I agree (though I am not aware of the Italian controversies), but it's worth acknowledging that in the case of a pandemic, scientific opinions drive policy, and policy may have dramatic consequences, including the loss of lives. So it is understandable that conversations get heated, vs disagreeing about a pure academic topic. I am less worried about the heat than about deplatforming, ie suppressing the dissenting opinion.

<comment><USER31> I don't mind heated discussions, I mean, I had some on lab meetings over what people could consider obscure details. I find however not professionally appropriate to shame what are essentially your colleagues on social media.

These controversies are pretty local: they tend to flare up every now and then because most of these people are regularly invited (in presence or via video call) to TV shows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The fact that this article exists, and needs to exist, worries me more than any virus or lockdown.

What, if anything, is more necessary to a free society than the free expression and debate of ideas?

This of course requires a literate and critical interpretation of the facts and data by all, but I digress. This is science.

<comment><USER34> > _What, if anything, is more necessary to a free society than the free > expression and debate of ideas?_

The commons must be protected from bad actors, and bad faith whose purpose is to use the openness of society against itself. [1]

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

<comment><USER35> To imply that John Ioannidis is a bad actor is ridiculous.

<comment><USER36> What is a "good actor" motivation for organizing a press tour for a non-peer reviewed preprint?

<comment><USER35> If that's suspect, why aren't you questioning all the other scientists and doctors doing interviews right now?

<comment><USER36> I am absolutely questioning all of the scientists and doctors who perform press tours for unreviewed preprints, yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Good luck. Anyone even slightly out of the mainstream will get shamed into oblivion.

Just look at the 2 Bakersfield doctors this week.

<comment><USER38> But those doctors clearly don't have a good grasp of basic statistics. You cannot extrapolate cases for a whole state based on test results from a non- random sampling of people. They are making a basic error and claiming to be experts, that deserves some shaming in my book.

<comment><USER37> Everyone seems to be doing that from NYC data.

IHME_UW has been making massive errors and no one seems to mind.

<comment><USER38> No, they aren't. That's why those two were called out. Not sure how IHME's mistakes come in to play here. If they are making mistakes, they should be called out as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Is there a resource for up-to-date reviewed papers on COVID? Like a Reddit group with community members from relevant backgrounds or something? Because it gets hard for me to keep up on what's bs or factual, and many people pushing articles usually have political motivations.

<comment><USER40> r/covid19 is pretty good unlike the much larger and more political r/coronavirus.

<comment><USER39> Gotcha thanks. I also found r/medicine. Lots of doctors and ER professionals weighing in on the news with personal experience from their hospitals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> That is not how science advents, not currently. Collaboration takes a backseat in science when your name, reputation, career prospects are in the line.

If you advance an argument that lack proper and vigorous proof, I have no reason to hear you. I will however tear your work to pieces. As many pieces as I can, so I can ride that train as long as I can.

That's how science advents currently. Otherwise all of us academics would be building our work on top of each others' collaboratively and productively. Minorities and women would not have been shunned out; graduate slave labor, and adjunct faculty would have been unthinkable.

</comment><comment><USER42> Scientist should hold themselves to the highest ethical standards. The article seems to defend an article and opinion that sees economic consequences are more dangerous than human lives lost to COVID-19. In terms of scientific discourse, this sounds fishy to me. We don't know so much about the virus: long term effects etc.

If a scientist argues against saving human lives now, because of a man made economic systems inability to cope with the crisis might kill more people later, I say don't hear him, criticize him based on an ethical discourse. Save the lives now and adjust the system so people don't need to die.

<comment><USER6> You are assuming that a particular course of action: (1) is guaranteed to be the best way to save lives and (2) only has ramifications which we have the ability to 'adjust'. Many scientists may disagree with you on both accounts. I don't see why they are not holding themselves to the highest ethical standards.

<comment><USER42> In hypotheticals I would agree with you. Yet, at the time of the writing of that article, the data from several countries regarding COVID 19 were in, and we have an indication on what metrics work to limit deaths.

We also see what we could have done to prevent and outbreak, China, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan seemed to be extremely prepared.

Germany followed the virologist, epidemiologist consensus (and is going now off track to open businesses again ... a lot of scientist believe too early).

We will see in the long run which approaches worked and which didn't. Yet, calling for an opening of businesses (because we cannot be sure about the death rate), when none of the successful countries did that, is ethically dubious to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The SAGE committee in Whitehall is permitting Dominic Cumming not only to listen in to the scientists and demographers and economists: he is joining in. Thus, the mis-apprehension of science leaks out, into official acts.

<comment><USER21> It will be interesting to see what policy influence Cummings has had. A media outlet earlier had claimed Cummings pushed for no lockdown. So seeing we had a lockdown that would appear to show that he doesn't have much influence. Though, it might be that Cummings opinion on what to do changed as he received more information and he ended up supporting the lockdown. Or it could be that the media misreported the situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> My worry with pieces like this is that they're meant to encourage intellectual diversity _in scientific discourse_ , but some people will undoubtedly try to use them as "teach the controversy!" to justify any kind of crazy non- scientific idea. How do we teach people to draw that line? Or is that a lost cause?

<comment><USER45> Scientific discourse is based on the assumption that all parties have the basic reading comprehension to look at the primary data.

I'm not really worried about creationism or climate stabilism competing given those conditions. And if those aren't the conditions, it's not scientific discourse.

<comment><USER12> Others are not so discerning in what they think is scientific discourse.

<comment><USER45> If anyone who feels that way would like to suggest a neologism for the sort of discourse I describe, I'd be open to using it - I do feel the term 'scientific discourse' has been watered down a fair bit.

<comment><USER12> My point wasn't that I necessarily have a different view on what scientific discourse is; my point was that someone who is less discerning might see a discussion of one of the views you listed and see valid scientific discourse.

The issue is not that scientists, or discerning non-scientists, will take those views seriously, it's that others might (or will, or do). Hence the issue is not with defining scientific discourse, it's with educating a population to be able to apply that definition (or formulate their own functional individual ones).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> We can see how Seattle and Tokyo kept their SARS-CoV-2 case load very low by listening to their own scientists; New York City and Austin, not so much.

<comment><USER47> In what ways did Austin not listen to their own scientists? I was there during part of this and they had a fairly early response, I believe SXSW was one of the first major events to be cancelled in the US. They were also pretty quick about limiting the size of gatherings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Interestingly also other scientists seem to suffer from this phenomenon: [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/26/virologist- chr...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/26/virologist-christian- drosten-germany-coronavirus-expert-interview)

</comment><comment><USER48> Just graphing death rate data that Google provides shows weird trends. [https://mindmatters.ai/2020/04/why-does-covid-19-target- the-...](https://mindmatters.ai/2020/04/why-does-covid-19-target-the-northern- hemisphere/)

</comment><comment><USER49> Let's look at climate science: there was a study that 99% of researchers on the topic are convinced it's real, 1% have some doubts.

Should we give the 1% a voice? Yes

Should we consider the view of the 1% as equal to the 99%? No.

Here's what happens when someone vocally has a dissenting view: they get press coverage, both neutral and from agenda-driven perspectives. There is exactly one country (the US, maybe two if you count Australia) where a majority of those in decision making positions believe or act as if they believe that climate change is not real. They justify this by quoting the 1% and ignoring the 99%.

As such then the 1% are causing significant harm to the planet (assuming that the majority view is correct).

The same in a more vivid way is true for covid: those dissenting voices (eg the French doctor Trump ended up quoting) get a lot of coverage no matter how sound the science proposed by those dissenters is (or in this case unsound - <USER2> study on the medicine he recommended had to be ended due to heavy health impacts of the medicine).

These dissenters and rapidly published papers have led to deaths. No doubt, no questions, people have died due to those perspectives being pushed into the mainstream discussions.

So should they be heard by peers and their views be discussed? Yes. Should they get press coverage, blog their viewpoints out there, etc, even if it leads to thousands of deaths (or destruction of the planet)? I don't think so.

This is a role for media to filter (rather than blare everything into the ether), but also a self-constraint that any serious scientist should impose upon themselves. The public is not able to decide which old guy with a professor/Dr in front of his name is the one to trust.

</comment><comment><USER50> Yeah... About that... I mean... no. When the possible death of thousands upon thousands of people is on the line, your proposal better be ironclad and well equipped to stand many lines of attack if you want it to be taken seriously.

"Hey maybe let's not do the one massively researched thing that we've done since times of the plague because there's not enough data" is neither of those things.

Open dialogue in science needs to take place in the forums already in place, not on clickbaity money-starved legacy media.

EDIT: Dear rando downvoters, please instead of lurking help foster debate by stating why in your opinion untestable indefensible claims should be allowed to pass as science in the name of "open dialogue".

</comment><comment><USER51> Imagine being forced to remove this article, the server provider cuts off service, and your domain banned because these kind of articles have violated terms of services.

That's happening on YouTube now.

<comment><USER52> I usually find that if you have to make an analogy for any reason other than explaining something technically complex, your position is probably faulty. E.g. in this case, I'd call this a false equivalence. Rather than making an analogy, you should explain directly why YouTube's policy is immoral or dangerous, rather than indirectly pointing at some other scenario, which will always differ in many relevant and irrelevant ways by the simple nature of it being a different scenario. It needlessly complicates the conversation.

<comment><USER51> Your video gets deleted, your channel gets a warning or a ban. Seems equivalent to what YouTube is doing to youtubers that posts information inconsistent with WHO.

<comment><USER53> > Seems equivalent to what YouTube is doing to youtubers that posts > information inconsistent with WHO.

Absolutely nothing? Unless you post misinformation, in which case, it will be left up but demonetized. [https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9803260?hl=en](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9803260?hl=en)

Where did you get the deletion and ban nonsense from?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> The article makes some good points. Much is not yet known about the pandemic, and we should listen carefully to alternative views.

The article ends by saying the problem is that the issue has been politicized, which is quite correct. But author should have said this started when Trump and a large portion of the conservative media claimed that the whole thing was a hoax, that the scientists knew the coronavirus is no more dangerous than the seasonal flu, but decided, thousands of them, to lie to the public so as to undermine the US economy and prevent Trump from being re-elected in November.

</comment><comment><USER55> Let's apply this to climate change as well.

<comment><USER56> The first line of the article is

>When major decisions must be made amid high scientific uncertainty, as is the case with Covid-19, we can't afford to silence or demonize professional colleagues with heterodox views.

How much scientific uncertainty actually exists when it comes to climate change and its causes?

<comment><USER57> A lot! There's no serious debate that it's happening and the main cause is human burning of fossil fuels, but numerical estimates of future temperature change have wide error bars and estimates of ecosystem damage are all fairly speculative since they depend on species not being able to adapt (which they may or may not.)

The debate has been poisoned by deniers pointing to any uncertainty as evidence of it all being fake. The intellectually honest approach is to consider the expected costs across all likely outcomes, and spend money on mitigations accordingly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> <rant> Is anyone really surprised? Current culture world-wide is built on 15 second attention span idiocy and social media b __ _s_ __.

Want to see this go away? Remove FB/Insta/Twitter from the planet, along with the entire mainstream media, all of which have business models based on the aforementioned idiocy as well as non-stop conflict generation.

When you are done with that task go purge every sitting legislative body on the planet which in general are bought and paid for by those same special interests.

Then you'd have a clean slate to build on for intelligent dialog and meaningful efforts related to not just Covid 19, but many other pressing global concerns...</rant>

</comment><comment><USER59> > Scientists who express different views on Covid-19 should be heard

It's interesting to phrase this as "views." I'd prefer to see all relevant _data_.

<comment><USER60> You're out of luck, the data are still relatively sparse, (understandably) collected under duress, and (understandably) without controls. Just about anything predictive (and many descriptive things too) any reputable scientist says will be slightly better than informed speculation. The ethically sound scientists will disclose the level of caution their suggestions for policy entail, and there will be plenty of very talented scientists who will raise a furor on the grounds that the _layperson_ cannot be trusted to take socially responsible action without an exaggerated threat over their heads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> The public response to COVID-19 made the transition from a scientific topic to a subject of politics/religion about a month ago. While I appreciate the author's sentiment I can't help but feel the authors' are pissing into a hurricane. At this point the course this thing is gonna run seems to be out of the control of scientists, academics and honest debate.

<comment><USER62> An individual is smart. People are stupid. Collective thinking is just too hard. We're all guilty of it.

<comment><USER63> or how about a crowd is wise but a herd is not?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Yeah videos of doctors and scietists who don't follow the official line are being censored on YouTube. This one is the latest, highly recommend watching to the end. [https://archive.org/details/full-press-conference-dr-dan- eri...](https://archive.org/details/full-press-conference-dr-dan-erickson-dr- artin-massihi)</comment>


Raspberry Pi 4 and the State of Video Game Emulation - <AUTHOR> https://hackaday.com/2020/01/14/raspberry-pi-4-and-the-state-of-video-game-emulation/ <comment><USER2> I can't say I understand the continued interest in RPI emulation. A few years back it might have made sense, but small board options are much more varied now.

The Nvidia Jetson Nano seems like a no brainer in the emulation space. It's 90$ with 4GB RAM (vs 70$ for a 4GB Pi4). For that extra Jackson, one gets actual GPU cores with compute support baked in(not to mention mature graphics drivers).

And its not like there is much of a trade-off for those CUDA cores. The Nano is also roughly the same size as a Pi, has that 40 pin header (it even throws in actual PCIe lanes)

I realize emulation is often CPU bound, but having a decent GPU on tap can't hurt.

I don't do small boards, so maybe I am missing something?

</comment><comment><USER3> I never understood the hype about emulation on Raspberry Pi. Fidelity goes out the window and the experience is very subpar. End result being the emulated games don't even come close to the real thing, even for 16bit systems.

It's sad that all the effort spent on "optimizing" emulators for RPI is essentially wasted, putting lipstick on a pig.

Spend a little more money and get a single board x86 computer (e.g. Odroid H2) or a NUC and these issues go away.

<comment><USER4> > Spend a little more money and get a single board x86 computer (e.g. Odroid > H2) or a NUC and these issues go away.

Or ditch emulation and buy an open source based MiSTer FPGA-board. No Playstation generation consoles though, but 8-bit and 16-bit era consoles, arcade systems and home computers are pretty accurate and are getting better each day.

MiSTer also supports "486" core, although it's closer to ~16 MHz 386. Amiga core is also pretty nice.

An FPGA based system can achieve higher accuracy than even the fastest x86 CPUs. Not sure if MiSTer is the ultimate solution yet, but the potential is certainly there.

(Not affiliated with any MiSTer authors, just a fan of the project.)

[https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki](https://github.com/MiSTer- devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki)

[http://www.atari-forum.com/viewforum.php?f=117](http://www.atari- forum.com/viewforum.php?f=117)

<comment><USER5> There is no inherent accuracy with FPGA. Just like with software emulators, FPGAs must be worked on extensively in order to achieve the desired accuracy. I don't know why this myth keeps coming up. Lack of understanding that just gets repeated over and over again, eventually being accepted as fact, I guess.

The accuracy you see with the Analogue products and with MiSTer are the result of hard work towards the goal of accuracy, and not an inherent feature of using an FPGA.

When connected to a CRT, an FPGA solution can provide much better end-to-end latency than a software solution running on an operating system, that's certainly true, but again that's not inherent to running on an FPGA; it's inherent to running without an operating system that does display composition.

<comment><USER4> > There is no inherent accuracy with FPGA. Just like with software emulators, > FPGAs must be worked on extensively in order to achieve the desired > accuracy.

Very much true, and sorry if I didn't make it clear enough. However, there's inherent potential for the ultimate accuracy without performance penalty. That's what I meant by saying it's getting better every day. You couldn't say that about a perfectly accurate system.

> FPGA solution can provide much better end-to-end latency than a software > solution running on an operating system

CPU based emulators can actually reach _very_ low latency with modern beam racing techniques. See [https://www.blurbusters.com/blur-busters-lagless- raster-foll...](https://www.blurbusters.com/blur-busters-lagless-raster- follower-algorithm-for-emulator-developers/).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Did We Forget People are Dying of Starvation Due to Commodity Speculation? - <AUTHOR> http://rebelvc.com/did-we-forget-people-are-dying-of-starvation-due-to-commodity-speculation/

<comment><USER2> anything to help improve this post would be appreciated.</comment>


Nevergrad: A Python library for performing derivative-free ML optimization - <AUTHOR> https://code.fb.com/ai-research/nevergrad/ <comment><USER2> To the best of my knowledge, Hyperopt is limited to random search and Parzen variants. We have more algorithms, and include test functions, deal with noise. On the other hand, in Hyperopt conditional variables are naturally handled, whereas for the moment Nevergrad needs user manual work on this.

Both frameworks are asynchronous.

</comment><comment><USER3> Are there any practical Pytorch examples? Say my network training time is 12 hours, I wonder how beneficial this would be for hyperparameter tuning over just simple grid/random search? Or would I instrument my network in a way to iterate over hyperparams faster than at every epoch/run?

<comment><USER2> We have not yet released examples of interfaces with Pytorch. Maybe with moderate number of hyperparameters the benefit compared to random search will be moderate, whereas it will be very significant with high number of hyperparameters. It also depends on how parallel you are. In all cases we have a wide range of algorithms with a common interface, so that you can compare.

We also use it for direct training of the weights of a network in reinforcement learning, not only hyperparameters.

<comment><USER4> Can you elaborate on the benefit for a high number of hyper parameters?

<comment><USER5> A fundamental problem is as the number of parameters increase the probability of sampling from the edge of the hypercube increases. You will then not effectively explore the parameter space. This might be some what alleviated by a concentrated multivariate normal, but I guess that has its own caveat.

If you instead have a sampling algorithm informed by the loss functions you avoid this problem. (You instead might have to worry about local minima.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How does this compare to hyperopt?

<comment><USER2> To the best of my knowledge, Hyperopt is limited to random search and Parzen variants. We have more algorithms, and include test functions, deal with noise. On the other hand, in Hyperopt conditional variables are naturally handled, whereas for the moment Nevergrad needs user manual work on this. Both frameworks are asynchronous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nevergrad?

I wonder if the maker never graduated.

;-)

<comment><USER8> > Nevergrad offers an extensive collection of algorithms that do not require > gradient computation

<comment><USER7> I like my idea better

<comment><USER9> You are not alone

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Would this type of thing be suited for program synthesis or property based testing?

<comment><USER2> For property-based testing I would say yes, with an objective function equal to the margin by which the properties are satisfied.

Program synthesis only in some particular cases, like the parametrization of programs for speed or another criterion - but not in the general case of program synthesis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Has anyone tried this? Interested to know if results were in line with the benchmarks.

<comment><USER2> We have a wide range of experiments on plenty of objective functions in games, reinforcement learning, in real world design and machine learning hyperparameter tuning - these reports will come soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> isn't this the same thing as blackbox learning?

<comment><USER2> It's black-box optimization. This means that we just have an objective function, without access to derivatives or whatever other information. This is not relevant for training weights in deep learning for image classification, or other things for which the gradient works well.

<comment><USER13> There was a recent paper from Uber, that GA works well for weights, so I wouldn't drop that area right away.

<comment><USER2> Sure GA can be great for weights as well - but mainly when gradient is unreliable. I would not use Nevergrad for training the weights of a convolutional network for image classification for example; whereas I use Nevergrad for WorldModels.

<comment><USER13> Doesn't the model Uber used begin with a bunch of convolutional layer sets, since it processes raw images?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Google and Apple Win - <AUTHOR> http://www.chriswere.com/blog/2009/10/why-google-and-apple-win.html

<comment><USER2> Original here: <http://stuffthathappens.com/blog/2008/03/05/simplicity/></comment>


Show HN: Browserless.io now has a scraping API - <AUTHOR> You can now scrape information off of page, powered by headless chrome, using browserless.io in the cloud. Docs for this feature are here: https://docs.browserless.io/docs/scrape.html, and we even include helpful debugging information like screenshots, network calls and more. <comment><USER2> Hey, nice work. It might be useful though to explain why one would use this over something like beautiful soup or the dozens of other scraping libraries out there.

In my mind, I see the target audience already needing programming skills. That same audience would be comfortable just using a free scraping library.

But maybe there is some functionality or ease of use that would make your offering a better choice.

<comment><USER3> Is there a list somewhere of scraping libraries and/or tools? I am struggling to find a product that will allow easy scraping of websites with little to no programming. Something a non-developer could use.

e: Nevermind, found this: [https://github.com/cassidoo/scrapers](https://github.com/cassidoo/scrapers)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> mmm billing by second can become extremely expensive as it doesn't depend only on the client-side but also on the speed of your servers. Why don't you bill by request like [https://proxycrawl.com](https://proxycrawl.com)</comment>


The Latest on the Linux 5.9 Kernel Regression Stemming from Page Lock Fairness - <AUTHOR> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-59-fairness&num=1 <comment><USER2> >Linus explained, "It's the fairness. Fairness is good, but fairness is usually bad for performance

dangerous words these days</comment>


Help with Yahoo Pipes Error - <AUTHOR> http://jdavid.net/?p=93 I am getting an error on the response while using OSDE ( Open Social Developer Environment )
HTTP ERROR 500
 Problem accessing /gadgets/makeRequest. Reason:
    host parameter is null
I think Yahoo Pipes is rejecting the request because it's coming from a local server.  Can anyone confirm this?
I did not see any documentation at pipes.yahoo.com that would confirm or deny this in their documentation or their forums.
Has anyone use used Yahoo Pipes in an opensocial/ facebook context? <comment><USER2> Why not post on stackoverflow.com?</comment>


Introducing Our Certificate Transparency Monitoring Tool - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/notes/protect-the-graph/introducing-our-certificate-transparency-monitoring-tool/1811919779048165/ <comment><USER2> > Using this freely accessible tool...

Would be cool if it was open source and didn't require a FB login.</comment>


Beautiful APIs and Dogfood - <AUTHOR> http://blog.apiaxle.com/post/beautiful-apis-and-dogfood/

<comment><USER2> > the best way to design an API which is presenting your company's data might > not be to represent your current products with a REST interface, but rather > to design the API from scratch, keeping it as generic as possible.

What's more generic than a REST interface?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, my point was more about the data /behind/ the rest interface, not the rest interface itself. In other words, just plonking a rest interface on top of your current aggregations might not do the trick.

<comment><USER2> Ah, gotcha. Thanks for clarifying.</comment></comment></comment>