Boeing's 'Transonic' Wing Design Could Mean Higher, Faster Airplanes - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/boeing-transonic-wing-scli-intl/index.html <comment><USER2> Or, it could just be another "Gee Whiz!" article entirely based on concept art. Come on, we've been seeing this kind of rubbish from aerospace companies for nigh on 60 years. Except for winglets, commercial air transport looks almost exactly like it did in 1960.

Between Boeing and the FAA, there's no other constituency, so unless this does something for Boeing or the FAA, it ain't gonna happen.</comment>


Show HN: React-Awesome-Router - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hzeroo/react-awesome-router <comment><USER2> Thanks I like the rationale behind it. Routes in JSX didn't seem right to me either especially when you then need a hook or renderprop to pull out the params like an id for example. Nice to have an alternative.</comment>


Analyzing the Evolution of Linkin Park's Music with Pandas - <AUTHOR> https://kvsingh.github.io/lp-music.html <comment><USER2> Interesting to see this here...

One of the things I like about Linkin Park is that their style evolved so much over the years. Even when they got big they were not afraid to completely change up their style almost completely.

I think the author knows this and tries to point it out in the commentary but I don't know if the graphs tell a compelling story.

One thing I'd like to point out from a data perspective is that a bar graph might not be the best tool for this. An album consists of many songs and there are graphs that can convey more information while maintaining readability. Perhaps a scatter plot or candlestick graph? If you use point size for song duration you can even display duration and energy of all the songs on each album in a scatter plot and I think it would be readable still.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hi, author of the post here. I thought it'd be nice to post some information about the analysis.

I got some audio features (loudness, energy and valence) for Linkin Park's songs using the Spotify API. In the post, I do an album-wise analysis of these features, and how they vary across and within the albums using the Python Data Analysis Library, Pandas.

I try to articulate the general progression in style through the average change in these features, as well as the change in variation of these features.

If you're a Linkin Park fan, I would love to know how your experience of listening to LP matches with my analysis :)

<comment> w-m Fun analysis! It's great that you visualize both mean and std deviation. Having them in two graphs side-by-side makes it a bit hard to read though, as you have to go back and forth.

Using for example a box-plot ([https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas- docs/stable/visualization.h...](https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas- docs/stable/visualization.html#box-plots)) could show the mean/std in a more comprehensible way by having it in a single plot.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the tip! Will keep that in mind going forward.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I didn't know the framework, I seriously hoped it included actual pandas.

<comment><USER5> Me too. Quite disappointed to be honest.

Was hoping for "We put headphones on 7 pandas and analysed their reaction to Linkin Park's best known songs. 5 out of 7 pandas agreed that the 'Living Things' album wasn't very good."

<comment><USER3> That is part 2 of the blogpost. I'll be putting headphones on pandas and they'll be outputting the mood of each Linkin Park song.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This made me remember the awesome MoodBar [1] plugin. I suppose the current flat design trend doesn't allow for such a busy-looking feature.

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

</comment><comment><USER7> PSA if case you're a Linkin Park Fan and in San Francisco... Mike Shinoda (Rapper/Guitarist) is on tour right now and performing in SF tomorrow night (11/6) at the Masonic.

</comment><comment><USER8> I once also analysed a bunch of Linkin Park songs. No matter which algorithm I inputted into the discombobulator, the flux capacitor always overloaded and threw error messages about trash and crap. /me crawls back to reddit</comment>


Show HN: Email Analytics Meets Machine Learning - <AUTHOR> http://www.boomeranggmail.com/insights/ <comment><USER2> This looks great! As a Founder, I probably spend 70-80% of my time on email. Would be nice to see how effective they are.

How long does it take to figure out what I should be doing?

<comment><AUTHOR> It will show you some suggestions right away. But I think changing something like how you write email takes some effort to be mindful every time you write an email. I'd suggest checking back every month or two to see if you are making progress.</comment></comment>


Nursing Home Recreates Communist East Germany for Dementia Patients - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/01/22/578664161/nursing-home-recreates-communist-east-germany-for-dementia-patients <comment><USER2> Reminds me of the plot of "Good Bye Lenin (2013)"...

<comment><USER3> 2003.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For some reason it really bothers me that they keep using the word "communist". Not an expert, but it seems wrong. Maybe socialist would be more fitting?

<comment><USER5> delete: I'm just going to delete my comment, it was off the mark.

edit: I was not precise with my use of 'most' and I apologise. I meant most Americans would better relate to Communist, as that's what's taught to us and was in the news.

<comment><USER6> As someone growing up in the east german (I was 15 in 1989), I can tell for sure that we've learnt in school that the GDR is an socialist country on its way to the communism.

<comment><USER5> I appologize, my comment came off much stronger than I intended.

<comment><USER4> I don't think it did. Maybe the terms are being used differently in different cultures. Nothing wrong with that. The article is written with an American audience in mind.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Midlife Low in Human Beings - <AUTHOR> https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/09/midlife-low-human-beings.html <comment><USER2> Mid life lows are real. I think theres a few factors at play.

First, middle aged people are at the height of their responsibilities in life. Often at the age with children in the home, and parents entering old age. Everybody else needs taken care of.

Financial burden is definately highest, right at the time your salary is likely leveling off. Salaries stop increasing in your 40s.

Also, for the first time in life you start to see your own physical deterioration. Eyesight, facial lines, certain medical issues, which helps to remind one of their own mortality. For men, Testosterone decreases, gut size increases, for many. This is not good for ones mental attitude.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sharing this here as it has relevance to

\- career planning and reflection

\- team dynamics

\- product management</comment>


An AI First World - <AUTHOR> http://avc.com/2016/04/an-ai-first-world/ <comment><USER3> Does this article actually say anything? I feel like I could summarise it as "Famous person said <thing>. What does <thing> mean? I'm not really sure. I think they're right and <thing> is going to be big."

<comment><USER4> Fred Wilson is actually more famous than Sundar Pichai, at least in some circles. In this case it is "famous and influential investor says other famous person says X is going to be big, and he agrees", which is a useful data point for the 10k people who will now pitch AI startups to USV over the next week.

(I also wish it said more, but his blog comments tend to have better discussions than even hn, sometimes, so maybe he is just trying to kick that off. I wish it were a better technology for commenting, though.)

<comment><USER5> sigmaalgebra's comments are pretty fucking epic, on this post.

<comment><USER6> That's the same guy that posts as @graycat here on HN. Most of his posts espouse the wonders of hardcore applied math, often with a comprehensive bibliography, so he seems to know what he's talking about, although his rambling (and, to be fair, somewhat off-topic) style does him no favors on HN, which is why his posts almost always end up at the bottom of the comments here (see also @michaelochurch).

<comment><USER5> Michael O. Church got modded off of HN for being critical of certain aspects of YC (according to him).

<comment><USER7> True, but it's more b/c his criticism of VC and PG specifically has a Captain Ahab level of intensity and persistence, which can get in the way of discussing, well, anything else.

<comment><USER6> Exactly, which is why I made the connection.

Still, the "single-issue commenter", as exemplified by both of them, can be valuable to a good community. @michaelochurch's writings have definitely shaped my thoughts, so kudos for him, and, if I were in the position to use it, @graycat's bibliographies would be rewarding to mine (unless his knowledge _is_ outdated, as @barrkel suggests). Yet I can't help but get the impression that the single-issue commenter is very prone to overexposing themself, especially if a large proportion of their comments are multi-thousand word diatribes that recycle most of the same themes. Not to mention, people readily pattern-match prolix commenters to complete crackpots, even though both those users seem to be above that level. My impression is that single-issue commenters would be best served by posting a lot for a year or so, followed by some time to lie low -- if their contributions to the discussion around their issue are really valuable, their posts should stay in moderate circulation as other users refer to them in later discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > It feels like this AI first world is arriving. That's big.

AI is today's "one word: plastics!" ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dug-G9xVdVs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dug-G9xVdVs)). Much hype, some substance, lots of people throwing money around.

<comment><USER9> Rather than spreading "meta" hype about AI being hyped. I highly recommend reading up on recent advances due to Deep Learning and ideas of Neural Processing. To summarize briefly, a lot of core problems in applied machine learning, such as image recognition/segmentation/understanding, Natural Language Processing saw a significant improvement in performance over last five years, often bringing them to near human performance. This improvement was possible due to new approaches that were rooted in empiricism, availability of large datasets, powerful GPUs and algorithms such as Deep Convolutional & Recurrent Neural Networks. Combined with the advances in Drones, Batteries, Cloud computing & Smartphones a lot of application which previously would have been impossible to deploy can now be quickly deployed.

Here is a good article that goes over the topic: [http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial- intel...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial- intelligence/facebook-ai-director-yann-lecun-on-deep-learning)

<comment><USER10> > ... often bringing them to near human performance

That's quite far from the truth. You could say that they are now at the point where they are able to respond to direct, simple questions/commands.

I am not saying that we haven't seen some great advances in machine learning and language algorithms, but they are still a far cry from anything I'd call intelligent. NLP is still rather primitive (although impressive compared to where we were two decades ago), and bees are able to navigate better than self-driving cars or drones, yet I'm not sure they would or should be called intelligent.

I have no problem with using the term AI for current technology -- which is certainly cool and useful -- as long as we understand that the "I" is little more than a marketing gimmick. Otherwise people may think that these algorithms are the first step towards "true" intelligence -- i.e. that true intelligence is some version N.0 of those algorithms, that it is a complicated yet natural extension of them -- and at this point the knowledge we have to say whether this is true or not is pretty much zero.

<comment><USER11> > That's quite far from the truth

No, it is not. Because it's in stricter terms (like character or picture recognition, for example)

<comment><USER10> aub3bhat was talking about natural language, not character recognition.

<comment><USER12> aub3bhat also mentioned image recognition.

<comment><USER10> Then _I_ was talking about natural language :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> noir-york AI isn't the product, its the enabling tech. The killer app of AI most likely won't even make that AI visible to its users. It will be under the hood.

AI is useful because it changes the economics - it either enables the removal of humans from an activity, or makes economically feasible an activity that would otherwise be unfeasible _at scale_ due to the need for humans.

</comment><comment><USER13> After every VC, every founder, just everybody is talking about AI and bots Fred is a bit late to the game but better late than never. Or maybe writing about the Blockchain kept him back.

</comment><comment><USER10> Can someone explain what people mean when they say AI these days? Statistical clustering algorithms like neural-networks? Natural language algorithms? Any algorithm that didn't work well a decade ago due to a lack of computation resources? Algorithms that mimic everyday human activities? All of the above?

I think that applying the label "AI" to some algorithms only serves to give us a very impartial sense of awe towards them that goes far beyond what their actual performance merits.

<comment><USER14> I'd say it's using computers for solving problems in a wide open model space.

Any algorithm for solving practical problems embodies a model of the problem domain. Traditionally we try to bake in as much of our own experience as possible in the model/algorithm.

In some fields, we're now seeing for the first time that it's better to not do that, to make _fewer_ assumptions, build in less of our own knowledge, and just use (new, powerful) general purpose learning algorithms. With enough data, they can make sense of it themselves - our attempts at explaining it through model-building just get in the way.

<comment><USER10> I think that you'll find that the learning algorithms that actually work well in practice have more built-in assumptions and heuristics than you may think. But, yeah, as a general rule that's a good categorization. A far cry from intelligence, though, so the name AI is still misleading. Not all adaptive behavior is intelligent, although it often gives the illusion of intelligence, so I guess we make this labeling mistake not only when computers are concerned.

Anyway, statistical algorithms, adaptive algorithms or inductive algorithms would be much better, less misleading and less breathless -- if less inspiring -- names for those programs than "AI".

<comment><USER14> The main built-in assumptions in neural network are usually extremely high- level and abstract things, such as "this and this can be approximated with more or less smooth functions", or "things that are near are more likely to matter than things that are far away".

Before, using machine learning to build models from the data was in some sense a last resort, for things you couldn't get a grip on modelling by hand from your own understanding. When you could, you preferred hand-made models because they did better.

To take a concrete example, the top computer go program before Alphago, CrazyStone, still had hand-crafted patterns to prioritize which moves to explore during playouts. The author (and even more his competitors) tried to find better patterns with machine learning but they couldn't. The _weights_ of the patterns were tuned with machine learning, but any attempt to e.g. evolve patterns with genetic algorithms just did worse.

Now, it's going the other direction, we're seeing very general models only constrained by training data beat carefully hand-crafted models in area after area. And models are becoming more similar, more generalized as well - <USER2> people have noticed that state of the art recurrent and feedforward nets increasingly look more like each other.

I disagree that it's a far cry from intelligence. I think people's ideas of intelligence are fuzzy and inconsistent, and it's far too often confused with things we _associate_ with intelligence (from consciousness to independence and arrogance).

<comment><USER10> > I think people's ideas of intelligence are fuzzy and inconsistent, and it's > far too often confused with things we associate with intelligence (from > consciousness to independence and arrogance).

I can certainly agree with that -- it's not clear at all what intelligence is -- but induction and pattern recognition (really, statistical clustering) are either not sufficient for anything which we'd reasonably call intelligence, or can be found in creatures that we'd say have negligible intelligence (insects). Again, I'm not saying the achievements aren't impressive or that they don't resemble anything we can associate with biological beings, but even most biological beings aren't intelligent.

In any event, no one claims (with any evidence) that the current "statistical induction" algorithms (inspired in part by some features of biological systems) are a simple, primitive form of "general intelligence" algorithms. They may well be, but we don't know that. So the "I" in AI is, if not a marketing gimmick, at most inspirational and aspirational. As far as we know, those algorithms are as far from human intelligence as solid-fuel rockets are from warp drives. Understanding it otherwise only leads to people conjuring up fantastical deadlines to achieving "true" intelligence. For all we know, we are as likely a century away from "true" AI as we are five years away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> At first glance I thought this would be about the inequalities in who will control AI technology. I would have been more interested to read that article.

</comment><comment><USER16> There are sites readable with lynx but they ask for subscription with regular browsers. Is that AI first enough?

</comment><comment><USER17> To me this seems like a poor analogy. It's the evolution of technology. Print first, terminal first, desktop first, web first, mobile first, AI first, quantum first, etc, etc. Mobile is exponentially easier than it was in 2007. Machine learning is, arguably, becoming exponentially easier than it was in 2012. I think most agree that strong AI is many years away, but the learning curve will pass just as it has for all previous technological breakthroughs and we'll collectively move on to the next.

</comment><comment><USER18> That's a plausible claim. It's far more likely than VR being the next big thing.

But who do the AIs work for? Google, Facebook, and Homeland Security?

<comment><USER19> Themselves? For the lulz?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What are some widely used applications using AI for something that could not be implemented cheaper and more easily than a decision tree?

<comment><USER9> Almost everything, decision trees are the bubble sort of AI.

To expand upon my comment: For most programmers Decision Trees & Nearest Neighbor, at a first glance look very promising and seem like natural solutions to lots of problems. However in reality one can easily prove that Decision trees tend to be suboptimal even with trivial problems due to the brittle nature of the rules represented. Also Nearest Neighbors methods face problems due to difficulty in deciding optimal space and metric (Euclidean distance is not inherently better). The reason why "Deep Learning" methods trained using non-convex optimization perform so well is because they can represent a hierarchy of features at different granularities. They can be "designed" to favor one task over the other. E.g. by choosing correct loss (triplet loss), network structure, etc.

If you are interested beyond Image recognition problems, I highly recommend reading on interesting approaches such as Triplet loss for Face Recognition , Semantic Segmentation, Attention based models and Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning by Context Prediction.

An interesting outcome of Deep Learning research is that a lot of papers are extremely accessible and involve little proofs/difficult math. E.g. This is a good one [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUgRR- JFE8s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUgRR-JFE8s) & [http://web.cs.hacettepe.edu.tr/~aykut/classes/spring2016/bil...](http://web.cs.hacettepe.edu.tr/~aykut/classes/spring2016/bil722/slides/w08-deep- context.pdf)

<comment><USER11> Very good analogy

But from decision trees you get decision forests, which can't be said of bubblesort

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> There are some mind-boggling / humbling comments on NLP and the computation of human emotions down below:

[http://avc.com/2016/04/an-ai-first- world/#comment-2640180803](http://avc.com/2016/04/an-ai-first- world/#comment-2640180803)

</comment><comment><USER22> If machine learning and other statistical methods continue to gain traction in the AI space, won't AI be limited to only as good as the dataset is? The first step to enabling an "AI-first world" is to have open access to large, quality datasets.

</comment><comment><USER19> > Does it suggest that voice will emerge as the primary user interface?

In the short term, perhaps, at least for mobile devices. But there's a lot more bandwidth in visual input. So I suspect visual input via EMF. Eventually thought.

</comment><comment><USER23> We only started talking about "mobile-first" after the iPhone. Until we start to see real AI technology with similar impact, I think it's too early to talk about "AI-first" anything.

</comment><comment><USER24> Where does Google fit into an AI automated world? With weak AI sure Google can use it to make profile of its users. When strong AI comes on the scene, if strong AI is at all rational it would most likely remake our civilization without any sort of marketing, without any sort of consumerism, without much waste. It would create a boring sustainable system that could sustain human beings for another million years. It would not continue things as they are now, that would be to it insanity.

Strong AI would completely change the power structure of human civilization. It would hold all the power, much like States try to do today, and it would dole out little bits of it to the puny mortals so they can do what it wants them to do.

Eventually I think human beings will come to worship strong AI. It will become a God of sorts to them. Like religiously because AI provides what the real/imaginary God never could.

<comment><USER3> You're sure assuming an awful lot about the behaviour of something which you're defining to be much smarter than yourself.</comment></comment>


{Y Combinator,Russia's DST} invests where others fear to tread - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a2a42578-2ef1-11e0-88ec-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1CsfVyZ5C

<comment><AUTHOR> Two titles: "$SOURCE invests where others fear to tread", where SOURCE="Russia's DST" in yesterday's ft.com story (linked to), and SOURCE="Y Combinator" in today's print edition. By Richard Waters in the FT's Inside Business column, ft.com free subscription required to read.

The story is an op-ed on how the Yuri Milner/ Ron Conway backing of $150k to every Y Combinator startup risks pulling the rug from under the carpet of the traditional, large injection VC model, by meaning that maybe the angel round is the last that many start-ups will need.

See <http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=2154706></comment>


Hackers are exploiting Magento flaw to steal payment card info - <AUTHOR> http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=18565

<comment><USER2> Wow talk about a useless clickbait article. No details and no proof.

</comment><comment><USER3> This happens when banking industry develops protocols. Credit card payment is an idea that has a brain-dead execution.</comment>


Glucosamine Supplementation Reduces All-Cause Mortality: Study - <AUTHOR> https://www.lifespan.io/news/glucosamine-supplementation-reduces-all-cause-mortality/ <comment><USER2> If you are interested in digging into this stuff, and what really works medically/scientifically based on reviewed evidence and sources such as Cochrane Reviews, I can't recommend Dr Stanfields youtube channel high enough: [https://www.youtube.com/c/DrBradStanfield/videos](https://www.youtube.com/c/DrBradStanfield/videos)

Also here is his video on Sulforaphane which Glucosamine activates. He goes into detail as to how this mechanism works. Because of his video/latest research presented I changed to taking Broccomax because you need Myrosinase to actvite the SGS for it's full effect, he goes into detail on this here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAb1eQbRAe0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAb1eQbRAe0)

Cochrane Review he uses as his primary source: [https://www.cochrane.org/CD007176/LIVER_antioxidant- suppleme...](https://www.cochrane.org/CD007176/LIVER_antioxidant-supplements- for-prevention-of-mortality-in-healthy-participants-and-patients-with-various- diseases)

<comment><USER3> Is a Cochrane review really a primary source? They're meta-analysis, which I'd think of as secondary.

In the case linked, the analysis seems pretty unequivocally to not support supplementing:

"We found no evidence to support antioxidant supplements for primary or secondary prevention. Beta-carotene and vitamin E seem to increase mortality, and so may higher doses of vitamin A. Antioxidant supplements need to be considered as medicinal products and should undergo sufficient evaluation before marketing."

Did I miss something?

<comment><USER4> The op talks about sulforaphane but then links to an article about vitamin a and e(I don't know why) They're totally different chemicals that work through completely different pathways.

And a study on vitamin a and e etc doesn't tell you much about other supplements. Just like how a study on does whether or not statins are associated with reduced mortality tells you little about whether or not ACE inhibitors are associated with reduced mortality.

Also I don't think op meant primary source as in primary vs secondary sources but meant in the sense of "this doctor primarily uses Cochrane as his source for information"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The paper this is based on, which might be a better link: [https://ard.bmj.com/content/79/6/829](https://ard.bmj.com/content/79/6/829)

<comment><USER6> The study says the participants were 62% female, overwhelmingly ate more vegetables and supplements, exercised more than the control group, were mostly white, as well as self reported glucosamine supplementation - without dosage information. Overall it might be more indicative of wealth, education, and fitness than the effect of glucosamine. The paper itself says it's not able to differentiate the effect from lifestyle changes:

> Third, regular glucosamine use may be a marker for a healthy lifestyle, but > it is hard to distinguish the confounding effects of a healthy lifestyle > from the impact of regular supplementations in an observational study. > Although we had carefully adjusted for potential confounding lifestyle- > related factors in our analyses, we could not exclude the possibility that > the results were confounded by unmeasured lifestyle-related factors. In > general, with the current observational study design the possibility of > residual confounding due to imprecise measurements or unknown factors cannot > be excluded for all findings in our study, despite our careful adjustment of > all measured confounders.

<comment><USER7> That is possible but the large sample size may help. The study involved roughly a half million people with around one hundred thousand supplementing with glucosamine. With that many people and these big numbers the results are rather strong.

<comment><USER8> Sampling addresses variance, not confounding factors.

If the sample is not representative of the broader population, then in no way will any amount of sampling correct that error.

Observational studies often involve quite large samples, but they remain unreliable because it is extremely difficult to address all possible confounding factors. Experimental intervention is the gold standard for a reason, and absent the ethical or practical impossibility of experimentation, should be used here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been supplementing glucosamine along with a large amount of other things for awhile now. I'm not too bullish on it in humans, but it doesn't seem like it hurts, and is definitely cheap: [https://nearcyan.com/supplements](https://nearcyan.com/supplements)

My latest favorites that I'm a bit more hopeful for are glycine, spermadine, and rapamycin.

<comment><USER10> On Rapamycin: "The known adverse effects caused by sirolimus and marketed analogs at the doses used in transplant regimens, especially the increased risk of infection due to immunosuppression, as well as dose-dependent metabolic impairment, make it unlikely that chronic, long-term treatment with sirolimus could become a widely used anti-aging agent."

Sounds more than a little dangerous, unless you have an illnes like Lupus that activates mTOR, and _even then_ I'd be nervous taking this drug without expert medical supervision!

On the upside, my partner has a Lupus-like autoimmune disease, so this drug will be an interesting one to track.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I have it in a different section on my page mostly for that reason. It's not something I'd ever encourage people to 'just take', in the way I might some simple vitamins or minerals or so on that they might need.

Personally, I do think it can likely be taken pretty safely if monitored reasonably, and I am pretty hopeful for it as well. But it's true it's a serious drug so it shouldn't be messed around with as if it's a game.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder why we need to supplement glucosamine (e.g. to treat arthritis) when it is synthesised by the body from glucose in one of our basic metabolic pathways. I could only imagine this becomes a problem unless a) the enzymes responsible stop working or b) if the glucose gets shunted off to some other purpose.

It's also funny that chondroitin supplementation does the job too, because it actually contains no glucosamine, but contains monosaccharides that are derived from glucosamine (N-acetyl Galactosamine).

I think there's probably a very interesting answer to these metabolic questions that could shed a lot of light onto the phenotypes of aging. That said, I don't know what evidence is out there for systemic lack of e.g. glycosaminoglycans in aged populations, or even in arthritic cohorts.

<comment><USER12> In absence of good, hard, scientific evidence of effects above and beyond placebo, I'm gonna go with "Cos it's easy to bottle and it's easy to sell".

And profitable too, I have no doubt. Thanks to Orrin Hatch, US supplement peddlers don't even have to prove their products are _safe_ , never mind effective:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietary_Supplement_Health_and_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietary_Supplement_Health_and_Education_Act_of_1994)

I bet the oft-reviled Big Pharma (who, amusingly enough, are some of the biggest manufactures of supplements too) just wish _all_ their products could enjoy such lax standards of regulation. Meanwhile, to everyone else, I wholeheartedly recommend The Poison Squad:

[https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/poison- squ...](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/poison-squad/)

[https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/312067/the- poison-s...](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/312067/the-poison-squad- by-deborah-blum/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've given glucosamine to my dogs for years, and I can clearly notice a difference in their joint health and how stiff and sore they are after long runs ('long-run': 15-25 miles, measured on GPS collars). When I run out of glucosamine, or just drop off of giving it to them for whatever reason, I see them fall back pretty quickly. And when I restart them on it, I notice a response in a few days.

I also give give them fish oil pills, but I've never been able to notice a difference.

<comment><USER14> Purely anecdotal data but a I know a good number of dogs and cats that had really good results supplementing with glucosamine. As for me personally and few other friends and family, glucosamine supplements didn't have much of a noticeable effect.

<comment><USER15> Probably because we, humans, don't move as much as cats and dogs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Like others, I give my dogs glucosamine and it seems to have clear health benefits, but I have tried numerous dosages for myself and when I consume any meaningful amount it gives me absolutely wretched headaches about a day or two after consumption. Something to be aware if you start taking glucosamine and get headaches, it's probably the glucosamine.

<comment><USER17> Perhaps you have some undiagnosed shellfish allergy?

FWIW, I've noticed iHerb has started selling shellfish-free glucosamine.

<comment><USER16> I had that thought but have never formally tested it. I do eat an above- average amount of crab, clams, scallops, shrimp (tail on), etc... and I always feel great afterwards. Obviously a glucosamine tablet is far more concentrated, so I could very well be allergic.

I'll definitely checkout that brand though!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This title is not the title of the study.

"Associations of regular glucosamine use with all-cause and cause-specific mortality: a large prospective cohort study"

This does not mean it reduces all cause mortality. This is correlation, not causation.

To take this further, there might be no limit to what you could correlate to some degree with all-cause mortality, especially since it might be heavily correlated to financial status, which would correlate to an enormous amount of other behaviors (eating avocados, owning a swimming pool, having a high ceiling, having your own bathroom, having a gym membership, organic food, name brand laundry soap, not taking public transportation, better healthy insurance, smoking habits, coffee quality, living in a low crime area, etc etc). Determining cause and effect takes a lot of control variables.

<comment><USER19> "The UK Biobank used a baseline touch screen questionnaire to assess several potential confounders: sociodemographic characteristics (age, sex, ethnicity, Townsend Deprivation Index, education and average total annual household income), lifestyle behaviours (smoking status, alcohol consumption, physical activity, body mass index (BMI) and vegetable and fruit consumption), health conditions (CVD (myocardial infarction, angina or stroke), respiratory disease (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or emphysema), cancer, digestive disease (liver failure, cirrhosis or alcoholic liver disease), dementia, depression, longstanding illness, hypertension, diabetes and high cholesterol), drug use (chondroitin, aspirin and other non-steroidal anti- inflammatory drug (NSAID) use), vitamin supplementation (vitamin A, vitamin B, vitamin C, vitamin D, vitamin E, multivitamin and folic acid) and mineral and other dietary supplementation (calcium, iron, zinc, selenium and fish oil)). "

<comment><USER20> Still, the authors accept correlation as a potential objection, despite doing their best to control for it. I suppose they need a randomised controlled study or something to be more certain.

"Third, regular glucosamine use may be a marker for a healthy lifestyle, but it is hard to distinguish the confounding effects of a healthy lifestyle from the impact of regular supplementations in an observational study. Although we had carefully adjusted for potential confounding lifestyle-related factors in our analyses, we could not exclude the possibility that the results were confounded by unmeasured lifestyle-related factors. In general, with the current observational study design the possibility of residual confounding due to imprecise measurements or unknown factors cannot be excluded for all findings in our study, despite our careful adjustment of all measured confounders."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > This population-based prospective cohort study included 495 077 women and > men (mean (SD) age, 56.6 (8.1) years) from the UK Biobank study. > Participants were recruited from 2006 to 2010 and were followed up through > 2018. We evaluated all-cause mortality and mortality due to cardiovascular > disease (CVD), cancer, respiratory and digestive disease. HRs and 95% CIs > for all-cause and cause-specific mortality were calculated using Cox > proportional hazards models with adjustment for potential confounding > variables.

> Regular glucosamine supplementation was associated with lower mortality due > to all causes, cancer, CVD, respiratory and digestive diseases.

<comment><USER22> I am guessing they didn't control for lifestyle, etc. Someone who takes glucosamine either works out heavily and supplements (and probably watches their diet), or had joint surgery, and falls into the first group to some degree.

Edit: Yea, reading the study, I don't see anything about controlling for fitness level. Running and caring about one's diet alone would account for this effect without glucosamine.

<comment><USER23> > Edit: Yea, reading the study, I don't see anything about controlling for > fitness level.

They specifically control for the following lifestyle factors: "smoking status, alcohol consumption, physical activity, body mass index (BMI) and vegetable and fruit consumption."

(Ctrl+f for "covariates")

In the conclusion, they acknowledge: "Although we had carefully adjusted for potential confounding lifestyle-related factors in our analyses, we could not exclude the possibility that the results were confounded by unmeasured lifestyle-related factors."

But if someone "works out heavily and supplements," that should show up in self reported physical activity, and indirectly in BMI.

<comment><USER24> _But if someone "works out heavily and supplements," that should show up in self reported physical activity, and indirectly in BMI._

Well, not to nitpick, but people with high muscle mass can easily end up with an "obese" BMI even if they have very low body fat. And it also doesn't take very many hours of working out per week to get jacked if you're doing heavy weightlifting and supplementing.

No idea if such people are common enough to skew the results of this study significantly, but it still makes me wonder a bit.

<comment><USER25> Even body builders will have a hard time of getting to obese levels of BMI most of them are in the "overweight" range usually around 26-27.

And no people like this aren't common at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've been a big fan of N-Acetyl Glucosamine (aka NAG), which is one of the most underlooked safe supplement to deal with autoimmune disease. Could it be the same as the mobility supplements with Glucosamine?

</comment><comment><USER27> The bit questioning its usefulness in addressing arthritis is pretty much bullshit, as it's working for my parents and even my cat - Who went from dragging himself around to going all jumpy within DAYS of having it mixed in with the food.

Glucosamine + Chondrotin + MSM - This supplement combination is ideal.

<comment><USER28> The evidence for Glucosamine alone to do much about arthritis is poor. Glucosamine + Chondrotin + MSM is a different matter entirely and is not the same as what the author is speaking about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I do indeed note that my minor (RSI related) joint issues almost immediately disappear when I take that stuff. It seems indeed quite beneficial.

<comment><USER30> What dosage do you take and how long does the pain relief last?

<comment><USER29> I take Glucosamine / Chondroitine Complex 500/100mg. One or 2 per day.

It's hard to say how long, it does take a day or 2 to kick in (when I said "immediately" I meant within a couple days when I start taking it. I probably shouldn't have used that term.)

I'm not very strict with medication so I tend to stop it when I don't have issues.

But especially in my elbows where I only have mild pain it seems to help a lot. In my wrists it doesn't as much, but I think the pain there is not totally joint-related.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I wonder if humans used to eat more bones ... I had a physical anthropology professor who studied an ancient site in east Africa where it appeared humans got a fair amount of food from eating leftovers from lions and whatnot, breaking open bones and eating marrow. Basically humans were in between the predators and the vultures.

<comment><USER32> Yes, and even more recently, the stew pot extracted a lot more than the boneless chicken breast of today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I was suffering from severe knee pain due to cartilage wear and started taking liquid Glucosamine supplement as per doctor advice since 4 years. Now I'm perfectly OK and run daily.

</comment><comment><USER34> Quote: "Glucosamine is a polysaccharide that is found naturally in cartilaginous joint tissues, bones, skin, ligaments, and nails"

Why not just eat natural sources like cartilage, bone broth, skin etc ?

<comment><USER35> Interestingly most sources I could find on the web say categorically that "No natural food sources of glucosamine exist", while the the supplement is made from sea shells. All resources related to canine health on the other hand mention cartilage, bone marrow and beef trachea as rich in glucosamine... someone is being dishonest there.

<comment><USER36> Natural source means made by plants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I wonder if you get enough of it on a highly carnivorous diet -- bone broth, bone marrow etc.

<comment><USER29> I doubt it as many people mention it has great benefit on dogs, and their diet is pretty much all that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Probably because those who are old start moving again with lower joint pain.

My 80 year old grandfather is the most fit person I know. Super healthy, but literally lifts rocks and gardens every day.

To contrast other family members are in their 50s with diabetes and heart conditions.

Keeping active is key. Remove peoples joint pain (which is what this supplement is used for) and of course they reduce mortal across the board.

<comment><USER39> Props to your grandfather. I can barely lift even a small garden.

<comment><USER36> lol

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is an impossible field to be working in - I know - and it's to do with the way our medical research and treatment systems are set up.

We began as a species focused on making sick people healthy, and it's the way the entire system works. It's near impossible to get studies approved that tackle aging and proactive healthcare with drugs, as they will largely need to look at the effects on people who are healthy now, but will almost assuredly die from dementia, Alzheimer's and heart disease.

I understand why it is the way it is, but it's frustrating to see the system wait until you have heart disease in your 70s before doing something about it.

<comment><USER12> You do realize the reason people now die of dementia is because medical science and improved standards of living have largely eliminated all the things that used to kill them before they got old enough to develop it? The same goes for cancers.

As for heart disease, that's largely a product of lifestyle choices: smoking, obesity, inactivity. And doctors already tell their patients to eat healthily and exercise daily, but who wants to hear that when they're young enough not to feel the consequences, or old enough not to want to change their ways now?

Hence the eternal market for easy, quick magical pills and their silver- tongued salesmen that promise to cure it all.

We began as a species programmed to spot the difference between a zebra and lion on the plains of the Serengeti, and we've barely evolved since—if anything, we're even easier to hack now. Just ask the vampires.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> [https://examine.com/supplements/glucosamine/](https://examine.com/supplements/glucosamine/)

Always used this site when trying to find unbiased information, and also not be to hyped about a single study. However now the effect matrix is hidden behind a paywall.

When talking about joint health: As a young and very active person my biggest problem is overtraining injuries. Wish I knew how to be able to train as much as I would like to, with just a simple supplement or so...

<comment><USER42> There's always peptides that do work with mouse models but there aren't any decent safety studies on them with humans. I really wish there was a push to get safety and efficacy studies around BPC-157 and other peptides.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Is it a simple case of pain-free joints enabling one to exercise more?

<comment><USER44> Every time you move, the body releases adrenaline, so you are not far wrong in your line of thought. The adrenal glands produces around 180 different hormones including adrenaline, so protecting or even attempting to improve their function would be a logical natural pain killing route to take. Hint they are layer upon layer of epithelial cells. Of course other factors like the body attacking itself is also a problem which the adrenal glands alone cant "fix", for example too much sodium increases the Th17 cells to the point they start attacking the body. T cells from Thymus, B cells from bone marrow. However considering civilisations & Religions have existed for over 10,000years dating back to Sumerian times, observation was the only "scientific" methods available at the time, and Religions had to keep their followers healthy for the next attack, so looking into different religious fasting methods could also improve health outcomes. The world record for a water only fast, still in the Guinness book of world records is 382days, carried out in 1971 at the University of Dundee. Having done an 18day water only fast myself and felt like a teenager again, I'd highly recommend investigating it to others. A US movement in the 1950's called the Hygienists and Shelton were big advocates. Also consider the immune system attacks the food we eat, so as our immune cell count falls during a fast, are there still more immune cells now working solely removing damaged cells from the body? Its suggested viruses need carbs as noted by the use of the Keto BCAA Lysine for Cold Sores, bacteria builds biofilms when they go dormant in the body but are not impenetrable to the attacking immune system either. So there seems to be some merit with a water only fast for some, however sudden death is a risk to those with undiagnosed conditions, a bit like we see with some seemingly healthy people dying of covid. Either way, the human body, in fact any lifeform is an extremely complex biochemical and electrical real time puzzle where many chemicals play their part in lengthening life spans or shortening life spans. I wouldnt bet my life on just one supplement, unlike Linus Pauling and Vit C, its effects like all supplements, need to be put in context in the scheme of things keeping us alive, healthy and happy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Article title is gross overreach, if not outright wrong.

IANAS, but even I know Correlation does not mean Causation. The paper itself only says "associated with", _not_ "responsible for". Being an observational study of self-selecting cohorts, even with the authors' attempts to control the confounders will be massive.

Honestly, this is the standard of reporting I'd expect from yellow-bellied fish wrappers like the Daily Mail. Please do better.

</comment><comment><USER45> All-Cause Mortality? Is it make you also somehow immune to fire arms for example? Just the title makes the article to view unserious.

<comment><USER46> >Is it make you also somehow immune to fire arms for example?

No, you have to start off with daily injections of small arms fires (think .22 caliber) in order to begin building immunity. Over time you gain immunity and then can work your way up to larger calibers.

<comment><USER39> That was one of the low key funniest things I've ever read on hacking news

<comment><USER39> Hacker News. I'm an idiot. But I stand by the rest!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> It's interesting to see that even on HN people don't know the difference between correlation and causation.

<comment><USER48> Have you read the paper? They adjust for damn near everything including reverse causation. What confounders do you believe the UK biobank data can't account for?

<comment><USER47> It doesn't matter if you eliminate 10 million confounds. No matter how good your correlation study is, it cannot establish a causation. To do that you need random assignment at the very least.

<comment><USER49> ... and even that gives you the wrong answer if your diagnostic specificity is faulty.

This last is why we keep seeing muddled reports that "antidepressants don't work". Diagnosis of "depression" is a snakepit; the only known way to discern which among at least six conditions you might have, all labeled "depression", is to see what medications work, if any. Imagine trying to conduct a plausible RCT for that.

"Gold standard"? Ha.

<comment><USER47> Did you reply to the wrong comment?

<comment><USER49> I replied to "...it cannot establish a causation. To do that you need random assignment at the very least."

<comment><USER47> Oh, your quoting of "gold standard" really threw me off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> What dosage is recommended?

<comment><USER51> This other study suggests 2000mg per day: [https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/37/1/45.short](https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/37/1/45.short)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52>
       Regular glucosamine supplementation was associated with lower mortality due to all causes, cancer, CVD, respiratory and digestive diseases.

associated, not direct causation

</comment><comment><USER53> are there dietary sources of glucosamine?

<comment><USER22> Yes - cartilage. If you eat chicken or something like that, eat the cartilage. You can do this on pre-cooked chickens you get from Sam's Club / Costco. If you eat chicken breasts only (which a lot of health-conscious people do), you don't get this benefit.

I talked to Dr.Yang Jwing Ming (one of the few Kung Fu practioners with a Western phd and he said eating cartilage is one of the best ways to help reduce the risk of arthritis. Oh, and pig ears too, but I never tried that, being a Westerner and all.

<comment><USER54> Westerners have eaten pig ears for centuries.

<comment><USER55> I would be surprised if I've met anyone in the US who has eaten pig ear nor the chicken feet you see next to them in the hispanic market. And just about everyone would react to the ick factor.

I don't think it's as common as you think: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig%27s_ear_(food)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig%27s_ear_\(food\)).

<comment><USER56> I don't really know of anyone who eats pig ears but chicken feet aren't that weird for the American South.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> To people who put too much stock in these "studies", consider this: as of July 2020 we _still_ have no conclusive answer if _eggs_ are good for you or not. What makes you believe this is any different?

<comment><USER58> Why would eggs, for which there isn't a chemical formula, nor a standard preparation, be _easier_ to study? What even does "good for you" mean?

Don't get confused between mass-media popular "science" and things science can actually do - like measure whether a dozen eggs a day will raise your LDL and HDL (cholesterol) and cause heart disease - and drawing wild conclusions (especially right now) from pre-print articles that are used to sell magazine articles to use as justification to eat chocolate and drink wine under the guise of "it's good for you".

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> People who take glucosamine often do so BECAUSE of their active lifestyle, most don't have a use for it otherwise.

This study did not control for lifestyle.

In other news, people who own Peloton shoes likely to live longer...

<comment><USER60> > Covariates

> The UK Biobank used a baseline touch screen questionnaire to assess several > potential confounders: ..., lifestyle behaviours (smoking status, alcohol > consumption, physical activity, body mass index (BMI) and vegetable and > fruit consumption),

You seem to not have read other comments, where the same complaint is made, and its answers.</comment></comment>


Pushing Nginx to its limit with Lua - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cloudflare.com/pushing-nginx-to-its-limit-with-lua <comment><USER2> I'm really glad to see a Cloudflare post at the top of Hacker News, I've been following them and they have lots of interesting things to say. I switched from Amazon Cloudfront to Cloudflare two months ago and can't be happier. My hosting bill was reduced a 95% and my website speed decreased only a 13%, a figure my weekend project can afford to make it profitable.

<comment><USER3> What caused the reduction in your hosting bill? Was it Amazon's supposedly- poor cache hit ratio, or a CloudFlare-specific feature? Have you tried negotiating with a larger CDN?

<comment><USER4> CloudFlare typically reduces bandwidth usage and load by about 70%. That can translate into cost savings if your host (e.g., AWS) charges you for bandwidth.

<comment><USER5> > CloudFlare typically reduces bandwidth usage and load by about 70%.

How does it do this? I'm going to be flipping our content-service from IIS to CloudFront soon so I'm familiar with CloudFront on a theoretical level. Not clear on what you mean.

<comment><USER6> One big thing they do is cache static assets for you at their edge locations. The majority of the bandwidth costs imposed by static images, CSS and JavaScript (assuming appropriate cache settings) should be offloaded onto CloudFlare once you set it up.

<comment><USER5> Well, yeah, but my point is that CloudFront does this too. The quote I selected made it sound like CloudFlare reduces bandwidth usage by 70% _in comparison to CloudFront_. So I'm curious how that works.

<comment><USER4> Simple: CloudFlare doesn't charge for bandwidth, CloudFront does.

See: <http://www.couldflare.com/plans>

<comment><USER3> $3k/mo buys you a lot of bandwidth, though; even at CloudFront's somewhat- high-for-a-CDN pricing, that's 30TB of bandwidth; to see a 95% reduction in your hosting costs over CloudFront with $3k/mo unmetered bandwidth you'd have to be pushing 1.8PB of data. (edit: I originally said 600TB, but I had done the math wrong for the later discount brackets.)

Even if you were down at the $200/mo plan, that's 45TB/mo before you get to the "95% less expensive" point; I have tens of millions of users worldwide downloading megabytes of packages from me (while the Cydia ecosystem has tons of things much larger, I don't host those: I just have the core package), and I don't often go above 45TB/mo.

Is the idea here that CloudFlare is seriously giving you ludicrously unlimited amounts of bandwidth (and will not give you any crap about it) with a high cache-hit ratio even at their $20/mo plan? If so, I'm going to have to run some insane experiments with their service ;P. (Part of me isn't certain that I want them to hate me that much, though ;P.)

(edit:) Ok, I looked into this some, and this argument ("they don't charge for bandwidth") is just as false as one would expect given that it isn't feasible of them to price that way ;P. Their terms of service makes it very clear that they are only designed for HTML, and that "caching of a disproportionate percentage of pictures, movies, audio files, or other non-HTML content, is prohibited" <\- yes, even "pictures".

With this glaring restriction, there is really no way I can imagine any reasonably-normal company getting a 95% reduction in hosting costs over another CDN, even CloudFront: if you are pushing tens of terabytes of mostly- HTML content a month, you are doing something insanely awesome (and we've probably all heard of you ;P).

<comment><USER7> We're running some e-commerce sites with 8-20k items through the $20/month plans and have never heard a complaint from Cloudflare. That said, any sites we 'care' about are running on their business or enterprise levels which are much higher than $20/month :P.

<comment><USER3> Right, which is why I started that evaluation at the top-end of the scale. How much data do you move a month?

<comment><USER7> Probably you won't see this reply, but if you do... we move a decent amount, but not a crazy amount. In the last 30 days it was around 3TB total (through Cloudflare... we only saw about 2/3 of that).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm using nginx+lua as the backend to <http://typing.io>, and I've found the combination to be a fast and robust alternative to more full featured web stacks like Rails.

</comment><comment><USER9> It would seem that this approach gives all the advantages of async with none of the drawbacks involved with writing callbacks. If someone added a type annotation extension to the language and parser, this would be a killer combination for large code bases. Lua is also a good match for "The Good Parts" of Javascript, so it should be possible to have all the code in one language.

<comment><USER10> Lua was never designed to be used for really large code basis. It's a lightweight scripting language on top of C. The entire runtime is written in 20k lines of C. It also is designed to be easily incorporated in C programs. Nginx is a popular server case, while World Of Warcraft is another popular us.

It's really a pretty amazing language, when you embed it you can choose exact what functionality is exposed to the scripts you run in it, so it's pretty good for sandboxes type code (though, imposing memory restrictions is much harder).

<comment><USER11> > Lua was never designed to be used for really large code basis

I'd certainly agree that "maintainable for large code bases" was probably never on Ierusalimschy & Co's language design requirements document, but you could say the same of same of Perl, Python, Ruby, Javascript, and most Lisps. None of those languages have any additional mechanisms traditionally associated with enforcing uniformity and consistency across large projects. This hasn't stopped people from building large successful projects using these languages.

As for your comment on the implementation size: I'm not sure which way you meant it (complimentary or pejorative) but I often find people react to this in exactly the opposite fashion I would. I see "self-ish/JS-ish/python-ish semantics in 20kloc of ANSI C? Sign me up!". I find some people see it and assume it to be a toy. It reminds me of the Bill Gates line about (paraphrasing) "measuring software's success by lines of code is like measuring an aircraft's success by its weight".

<comment><USER12> Playing devils advocate here, Lua does indeed have some warts that make it less pleasant to use in a heterogenous environment (which pretty much all large code-bases are). Not so much due to deficiencies in Lua but due to the impedance-mismatch versus other languages.

The most obvious issue that everyone stumbles across is the "counting from 1". It seems like a minor thing, but the context-switch remains a drag when you're dealing with complex data-structures in two languages and only one of them is Lua.

The impedance-mismatch becomes even more apparent when the table-abstraction meets serialization. The lack of distinction between an "array" and a "hash" is awesome when you're in a pure Lua-environment, but it becomes a real problem when you need to exchange data with languages that do depend on this distinction (e.g. if you feed Lua an empty "array" it will later serialize it back to an empty "hash").

The final issue that I can't resist mentioning here is not a language but a community/mindset one. Up to this day Lua doesn't have an established package manager akin to RubyGems, Pip, Maven, Leiningen etc. (Luarocks exists but is... well, I've yet to see someone actually using it)

This is a deadly sin in terms of mainstream adoption. It makes deployment a serious pain in the ass.

GoLang shows how a modern language is supposed to handle this (importing/bundling packages directly from urls). I keep hoping someone will add something similar to lua-core, but I'm sadly not very optimistic about it.

I think many of the driving people behind Lua just don't care about it becoming a mainstream language or not. They care about it shining as an embedded language (and it does!) - it's just a little bitter for those of us who would love to use it on a broader scope.

<comment><USER11> You raise some good points; I understand you're playing the devil's advocate but I thought a few would benefit from a friendly counter :)

> ... everyone stumbles across is the "counting from 1" ...

Fair enough :) I find this objection to be largely a matter of taste; it was never an issue for me [added in edit: even when interoperating with C and JS code]. People have made similar complaints about Matlab that I never found persuasive (there are other more persuasive criticisms of Matlab's language design). I think the core argument I'd make here is that if you're using Lua tables in a way that requires array-offset semantics for the index variable, you could probably step up a level of abstraction using ipairs/pairs and save yourself worrying about 1 vs 0.

> The impedance-mismatch becomes even more apparent when the table-abstraction > meets serialization.

Lua tables naturally serialize to Lua table syntax (modulo cycles). This is in fact Lua's origin story (if Lua were a spiderman comic, it would be a story of a table description language being bitten by a radioactive register-based VM). At a technical level, how are Lua table literals any less successful a serialization format than JSON (i.e. JS object literals)? To put it another way: JSON doesn't map naturally to XML; should we then conclude that it has an impedance mismatch with respect to serialization?

> doesn't have an established package manager ...

<old guy hat> The idea that a _language_ should have a package manager has always seemed... confusing... to me. C doesn't have a package manager; people still seem to be able to get the relevant packages when they need them through the OS's package manager. That, to me, seems the sane solution. I realize I may be in the minority. </old guy hat>

Having said that I agree that LuaRocks' comparative weakness relative to Ruby's gems limits adoption in mainstream programming applications. OTOH, it is _vastly_ easier to get started embedding Lua in a host program than any of its competitors (this is in fact what drove me to try it in the first place). So it's not all friction on the deployment story.

> ... many of the driving people behind Lua just don't care about it becoming > a mainstream language or not.

Yes, I think this is likely true. I don't think any of the core contributors care about it being "the next Python/Ruby/Perl". If I had to summarize the emergent aesthetic, it's that Lua is designed to be a _just a language_ with a large set of DIY practices around it, rather than a curated software ecosystem.

<comment><USER13> > C doesn't have a package manager; people still seem to be able to get the > relevant packages when they need them through the OS's package manager.

This is fine with Linux, which has at least a few sane package management systems between the different distros. This goes out the window with OS X and Windows.

(This may just be an argument that anyone working on server-side software should be working inside a VM that matches your production environment. The Ruby community seems to have shown that people push back very hard on that.)

<comment><USER14> In the particular case of Nginx and Lua, the OpenResty package[1] is pretty much self contained except for libpcre.

Nginx+Lua is only the core part that powers this ecosystem. OpenResty comes with a lot of libraries for "usual web stuff", except maybe a default template system. I've been using this rather simple one [2]

In the full example[3], I installed it on Mac OS (and actually found a small problem with homebrew that should be fixed soon)

[1] <http://openresty.org/#Download> [2] <http://code.google.com/p/slt/> [3] <https://github.com/mtourne/nginx_log_by_lua/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I used OpenResty as the core for an experimental HTTP routing service at my previous job. The idea was to maintain host:port pairs for HTTP services in Redis and use a small bit of Lua code to look up the right place to proxy a virtual host to. It worked well enough, but never got deployed because we were concerned about the Redis SPOF. Now-a-days it wouldn't be that big of a deal.

That said, the nginx/lua combo is wonderful to work with. I got the core of that thing working in just a few hours.

</comment><comment><USER16> Why doesn't everyone try Apache Traffic Server with its LUA plugin which has way better performance and many more capabilities?

<comment><USER17> (a) no evidence of better performance. Lua/Nginx is very fast too. (b) Its just a proxy, while Lua/Nginx/openresty is much more of a full web development environment. You can use it as a proxy, but it is not the main use case. (c) I don't think Traffic Server has more capabilities, as far as I can see, I think it has fewer as it is much more focus on being a proxy product, while Nginx is a full web server.

<comment><USER18> I think Lua/nginx and ATS are quite different beasts, solving different problems. Nice presentation on ATS - "Apache Traffic Server: More Than Just a Proxy" [https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa11/apache-traffic- serv...](https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa11/apache-traffic-server-more- just-proxy)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've been using Openresty (with Lua and Redis support) to collect a large amount of data from GET requests for a video sharing site. Having nginx push data directly into Redis is super fast, lends easily to real-time metrics, and makes it easy to batch everything up and push it into MySQL at the end of the day. Now that Redis supports internal Lua scripts, you can also do custom atomic functions and other neat things.

If you can get around the Redis SPOF, OpenResty + Redis is great for large- volume data collection. Thousands of requests/sec on an EC2 Small at < 10% load.

</comment><comment><USER20> Sounds amazing and would love to step in immediately. Have some basic questions after reading briefly the post and the comments here.

1) What's the difference between OpenResty and the Nginx+Lua module (is the module the core of OpenResty)?

2) How does it compare to Node regarding ecosystem, performance and every day usage/maintainability (if it's comparable)?

<comment><USER21> I've only been playing with openresty for a couple of months. Here's what I've learned:

1 - openresty is nginx and many official and unofficial modules. From what I've asked the experts, there is supposed to be no difference in the source; openresty is just a single package of many modules with an easy to use ./config and make process.

2 - The nginx module and lua lib ecosystem seems to have most of the basics in order to roll a high level app framework, but only a half baked one exists thus far: <https://github.com/appwilldev/moochine> Also: <https://github.com/antono/valum> <https://github.com/pintsized/lua-resty- rack>

My impression is if you have the time to roll your own sinatra-like framework, it should be pretty straightforward.

<comment><USER20> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've written an authorization server for CloudFront using Python/Flask and have wondered whether just writing the same functionality via Lua could be a better/faster replacement. I'm just not clear on how to use Lua to make the calls to our API. This is a good pointer in the right direction though.

<comment><USER14> Nginx exposes multiple phase to process an incoming HTTP Request. Mainly rewrite, access, content, header_filter, and log

You can embed Lua at the access phase, and query your API from there. Some of the Lua libraries of the OpenResty package [1] might help you do that.

And here [2] you can find an example of OAuth support.

[1] <http://openresty.org/#Components> [2] [http://seatgeek.com/blog/dev/oauth-support-for-nginx-with- lu...](http://seatgeek.com/blog/dev/oauth-support-for-nginx-with-lua)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> But what happens when people put big numbers in my Fibonacci calculator?

<comment><USER23> Lua implements TCO, so it'll do just fine. :P

<comment><USER24> If we are being pedantic, the naive Fibonacci implementation isn't tail recursive. (And any tail recursive implementation is unlikely to need TCO before the numbers get too large.)

<comment><USER25> Sorry friend, it's time to be SUPER pedantic.

Silly Computer Science nerds spend a lot of time trying to figure out the most efficient implementation of a recursive Fibonacci number function. "Ooo, let's make sure to take advantage of tail-call optimization, oh, and memoization, aren't we fancy?"

Meanwhile, mathematicians look at the problem and then cock their heads to the side and say "uh, guys, that's way too much trouble, just use the closed form solution and calculate any value in constant time using a tiny number of floating point operations". Because Fib(n) = (phi^n - (1-phi)^n)/sqrt(5), where phi is the golden ratio.

<comment><USER24> No, if there's any computations happening, that's engineers and physicists, _especially_ if there are approximations happening.

A mathematician looks at the recurrence formula and generalises it (e.g. f(n) = a f(n-1) + b f(n-2) or f(n) = f(n-1)*f(n-2) (solve this one, hint: xkcd) or ...) and investigates its properties. The actual values of the numbers are not of much interest.

And a^n can only be computed in constant time if one uses exp(n log(a)), and (I think) that the scale of the numbers can have a large impact on the accuracy of the result, and so for large n, one needs more operations within both exp and log to give the same (relative) accuracy.

<comment><USER26> Last time I checked, numerical analysis was still considered a field of mathematics. It's _all about_ the approximations.

<comment><USER24> Pssh, it's not abstract enough, it can't be _real_ mathematics. ;P

(But seriously: yes, agreed.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Frightened Should We Be of A.I.? - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/how-frightened-should-we-be-of-ai <comment><USER2> Frank Herbert Dune, Minority Report.

These people were profits warning us of the danger of A.I. and writing about it for a long long time.

\----

We see it with human beings; the higher the intelligence can come at a cost of empathy as they don't view other humans as their equals.

That said certain countries would program the A.I. to hunt certain people; Drug Users, Criminals. Arresting someone for thinking about a crime... thus removing more freedom</comment>


Awesome-wasm:  Curated list of awesome things regarding WebAssembly - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mbasso/awesome-wasm <comment><USER2> Please add TeaVM: A Java bytecode to JS/WASM transpiler. [http://teavm.org/](http://teavm.org/)</comment>


Clear the Bookshelf and Fill It Up Again, All Online - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/15/business/media/15mooch.html?ex=1350100800&en=089318b608bec779&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

<comment><USER2> I wonder if I can find a copy of "On Lisp" on this site. I've checked Amazon and it sells for 300+ dollars. I have the electronic copy but reading on the computer doesn't really work out for me.

<comment><USER3> <http://www.abebooks.com> is the place to buy used books, not Amazon.

<comment><USER4> They're close on this one ($180+):

[http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?isbn=013030552...](http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?isbn=0130305529&sts=t&x=8&y=7)

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer- listing/0130305529/ref=pd_bbs...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer- listing/0130305529/ref=pd_bbs_olp_1/102-3946590-2838560?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1192555287&sr=8-1)</comment></comment></comment>


On quadratic voting and politics as education - <AUTHOR> http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/01/my-thoughts-on-quadratic-voting-and-politics-as-education.html <comment><USER4> While this mechanism may seem as though it may work for minority groups with strong preferences, it's important to point out the implicit assumption of class equality between majority and minority voters. That is, the example of gay rights works because homosexuals are spread evenly across the wealth distribution (and in fact are _more_ financially and socially successful in the aggregate than non-homosexuals).

But compare this to transgender peoples, who are marginalized, disproportionately homeless, almost universally imprisoned, and make up a very disproportionate percentage of the lower class (usually they 'fall' to this class rather than being 'borne of it'). It is unlikely that transgender people could buy the votes to achieve policy measures they felt necessary just as it would have been impossible for slaves and poor indentured whites and immigrants in the 1700s and 1800s, Native Americans pushed from their land and made to walk trails of tears, children working in factories, or women for these same centuries (who in addition to having effectively no political voice also had few reasonable financial options) to 'buy' freedom.

Additionally, entrenched interests within classes - and in disputes between them - make it easy for the upper division of the wealth distribution to buy political power to block the opposing classes vote, this exacerbated by high wealth inequality. That is to say so-called Quadratic Voting also depends on the wealthier class having no strong opinion - yet its very easy to find examples both today and historically where this is easily shown not to be the case.

So its suspect whether today's working poor, child laborers, blacks and latinos, immigrants, or members of small (or no) unions would benefit from a system like this.

Finally, these market based solutions to voting would be yet another way to trade financial power for political power. The history of all governments show how strongly political power already responds to wealth. Is it smart (and ethical) to make votes market commodities?

<comment><USER5> A niggle on the term "transgendered" (via [http://www.glaad.org/reference/transgender](http://www.glaad.org/reference/transgender)), specifically the final point:

Problematic: "transgendered"

Preferred: transgender

The adjective transgender should never have an extraneous "-ed" tacked onto the end. An "-ed" suffix adds unnecessary length to the word and can cause tense confusion and grammatical errors. It also brings transgender into alignment with lesbian, gay, and bisexual. You would not say that Elton John is "gayed" or Ellen DeGeneres is "lesbianed," therefore you would not say Chaz Bono is "transgendered."

<comment><USER6> The difference is a person is born gay, they don't need an operation to become gay. The Ed reflects this process. Hence you cannot be gayed, but you can become educated, indoctrinated, experienced, and transgendered.

<comment><USER7> Transgender does _not_ mean having a sex change operation. Statistics say that somewhere between 66 and 90 percent of transgender people do _not_ get sex change operations[1][2], and 40% have any no medical treatments at all (hormonal, surgical... _anything_ ) related to transitioning their gender[1].

[1] [http://www.thetaskforce.org/static_html/downloads/reports/re...](http://www.thetaskforce.org/static_html/downloads/reports/reports/ntds_full.pdf)

[2] [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/23/nyregion/23gender.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/23/nyregion/23gender.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > I would gladly have gay marriage legal throughout the United States. But > overall, like David Hume, I am more fearful of the intense preferences of > minorities than not. I do not wish to encourage such preferences, all things > considered. If minority groups know they have the possibility of buying up > votes as a path to power, paying the quadratic price along the way, we are > sending intense preference groups a message that they have a new way > forward. In the longer run I fear that will fray democracy by strengthening > the hand of such groups, and boosting their recruiting and fundraising. Was > there any chance the authors would use the anti-abortion movement as their > opening example?

This is the punchline for me. At the end of the day, the whole point of democracy is that the majority is in charge. Majority control is the general rule; protection of minorities is the exception to the general rule.

<comment><USER9> Which is very problematic, the minority will forever be limited to the whim of the majority.

On the otherhand if you look at the super wealthy minority, allready have a disproportionate say in poltical matters, donations, lobbyists etc.

<comment><USER8> The whole point of democracy is to limit the minorities to the whim of the majority. This is unfortunate when we're talking about harmless racial or social minorities. However, the alternate state of humanity, where the majority is subservient to minorities, such as warlords or hereditary feudal lords, is worse.

As for the super wealthy, in a democracy the manner in which they exert influence is very different. In a non-democratic system, minorities have direct power (they own the guns). In a democratic system, wealthy minorities can't beat the majority with firepower. This is a _fundamental distinction_. They have to rely on indirect power--usually by leveraging their ownership of the means of production. This is inevitable so long as capital resides in private hands. "My factory creates 10,000 jobs in your district, so you had better vote against that environmental legislation" will always be a disproportionately powerful argument, even in the total absence of direct exchange of money for political influence.

<comment><USER9> Personally I view that as being a pretty big flaw in democracy, but it also works the other way when the extremist element has a hard time gaining influence. But that is not a guarantee either, the Tea Party being a good example.

It may be a distiction, and the second way is more subtle and covert, but the net result of a power imbalance is still the result.

<comment><USER8> Flaw in democracy relative to what?

Thought experiment. Zuck & Co., fed-up with U.S. immigration policy, skip the PAC and just import foreign labor in heavily-armed gunships past Navy defenses. Sounds preposterous, but that just goes to show how desensitized people living in democratic countries are to the plight of humanity. A system that forces elite minorities to get buy-in from the majority instead of unilaterally imposing their will is a historical aberration and still not enjoyed by most of the world.

The Tea Party is a great example of the resiliency of democracy. Money buys influence, but billionaires must at least make the case that their interests are aligned with those of the majority. Again, it's not clear what you can do about this within a capitalistic system. The factory owner can always tell his workers: "universal healthcare will be bad for you because I won't be able to keep all of you employed if my taxes go up." And that message will always be tremendously compelling.

<comment><USER9> Does a flaw in a system have to be relative to another system, or can it be a flaw in isolation?

How does that show resilience, numerous Tea Party members have been elected, it may have been under a Republican banner, but that is more a symptom of a 2 party electorial process.

<comment><USER8> > Does a flaw in a system have to be relative to another system, or can it be > a flaw in isolation?

I think talking about flaws in political systems without any point of reference is navel-gazing and not very interesting. Kind of like talking about whether the Flash or Superman would win in a fight.

> How does that show resilience, numerous Tea Party members have been elected

Even $80 billion between the Koch Brothers can't buy the election of proper statist libertarians, much less railroad through actual policies consistent with the ideology. The Tea Party is libertarian ideas watered down to the point of almost being unrecognizable. In the end, it's just a bunch of Republicans running on a platform of lower taxes, less regulation, and, inexplicably, conservative social issues--ideas that have always had tremendous traction among the majority.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One thing that was helpful to me in making sense of this post was to understand that Quadratic Voting is trying to solve the problem of the "tyranny of the majority." It's a voting scheme that gives greater weight to minority preferences than the one-person-one-vote schemes we are mostly familiar with.

(Please note that this is "minority" in the "!majority" sense of the word, and not merely "!caucasians.")

Tyler's contribution here is to push back a little against the idea that we should be favoring minority preferences more than we do currently. He thinks this is too indiscriminate. Some minority preferences are quite good and others are pernicious. Favoring _all_ minority preferences empowers the good and the bad.

I was also struck by the last paragraph: > "In any case the relevant question is what kinds of preference formation, and which kinds of groups, we should allow voting mechanisms to encourage."

In other words, all voting schemes favor certain preferences and groups over others. There is no perfectly objective voting scheme that would let us avoid this. We as a polity have no choice but to grapple with what and who to favor.

The implicit criticism in that final paragraph is that Quadratic Voting is leaping over the "what/who should we favor" question and optimizing for a particular answer. Tyler is saying "wait a minute, we haven't even agreed on the fundamental questions. So why are we already optimizing for a particular solution?"

<comment><USER11> While I broadly agree with your criticism and Tyler's, what I have to _particularly ask about_ is the following:

>One thing that was helpful to me in making sense of this post was to understand that Quadratic Voting is trying to solve the problem of the "tyranny of the majority." It's a voting scheme that gives greater weight to minority preferences than the one-person-one-vote schemes we are mostly familiar with.

There have always been minorities insisting that we are under a moral imperative to avoid a dreaded monster known only as "tyranny of the majority". Strangely enough, they have never been required to prove the existence of any such creature by actually measuring the degree to which the status-quo system functions in a majoritarian way and represents majority preferences.

Since the status-quo system largely seems to represent the top 10% of the population by income, who are already a minority, I would say that contrary to talk of "tyranny of the majority", we actually need the system to represent the broad masses _more_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why purchase votes retail when you can just buy a Congressperson wholesale?

</comment><comment><USER13> This system seems to encourage extremism - extremist groups are more able to affect political decisions than indifferent people.

</comment><comment><USER14> The person who gets to decide how to break down policy into binary decisions and when to ask questions is the one with all the power here.

Suppose they want to suppress a 49% minority who care far more than the 51% majority and will pay far more. Assume that if the question (e.g. do you support gay marriage) was asked once, the minority could afford the votes for it to pass. If the person deciding what questions are asked wants to suppress this, they simply formulate the policy so that for the minority to get what they want, they have to answer 'No' to n binary questions (e.g. each of the n questions is a measure that bans gay marriage in a slightly different way). The minority can afford to overcome the majority on one question, but for some n, they can't afford to defeat the majority repeatedly. Therefore, asking the same question more than once would change the outcome.

Bundling decisions would also allow manipulation of binary preferences - <USER2> example, by mixing popular and unpopular measures (e.g. cutting taxes and re- establishing slavery) in a single decision so that just enough people considered it worth supporting, even though they don't support all line items.

The mechanism is therefore useless as a voting mechanism without some way of controlling how things get on the ballot.

Of course, the bigger issue (assuming, as the paper does, that a real currency is used and not an artificial one) is that the laws in place are never perfect, and measuring how much influence a group should have to make new laws based on how wealthy became under current laws will likely lead to dynamic evolution towards a solution that benefits a tiny minority.

For example, suppose we live in a fictional world where the currency is apples with 100 people. A person needs 1 apple a day to live (which is consumed, destroying it). The world has enough trees to produce 125 apples a day (and no more land to plant more trees). Due to an archaic and unfair law, people numbered 0-49 get 1.5 apples a day, while everyone else gets 1 apple a day. People 50-99 perform services to people 0-49 and get a little bit of extra apple in exchange. People 50-99 never vote, because they can't afford it (or if they do, it is the minimum - they always vote for everyone to get 1.25 apples per day), while people 0-49 put forward a bit over the minimum and easily win to retain the archaic law.

One day, people 0-48 decide they want more apples, so they propose to change the law so that person 49 gets only 1 apple per day. Person 49 puts in all their savings, but it is not enough, and the law is changed. Person 49 is now impoverished and in the same state as people 49-99. Gradually, this continues until one or two people have virtually all the superfluous apples - <USER3> everyone else even has to work hard for that small group of people to get even the one apple they need to survive.</comment>