Please review my new app, argumentclinic - <AUTHOR> http://www.argumentclinic.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Its a news based real-time argument site. We provide content or the user can add them as well. We encourage users to take stands (positions) on the piece and others to challenge that position and have a real-time (chat mode) arguments. It would be great if HN people can give some honest feedback on what you think of the site, its usability, design etc. I can face cruel feedback...I think.

<comment><USER2> Initial thoughts:

\- It's hard to tell what are buttons and what are simply boxes

\- Share button appears on accidental mouseover and obscures article text

\- Top banner is a black box that takes half of the screen. Should be smaller

\- Cosmetic issue with "Yes" / "No" buttons and lines

\- I'm not american

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, we'll fix the problems you mentioned. What was the cosmetic issues with the Yes/No buttons?

The last one really does not matter...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think you could do much better with a good user ineterface.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, we've got some comments on it and we plan to address it. It would help to understand what people don't like about it.</comment></comment>


The Key to Meaningful Productivity: Being Receptive - <AUTHOR> https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/285495 <comment><USER2> Does this article go on to make any points? I could only see three paragraphs.

<comment><USER3> Not really; it's a redefinition of the word productive to mean 'doing' and so is able to argue that creativity needs space (aka be receptive).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The key is discipline.</comment>


EBS Encryption for Additional Data Protection - <AUTHOR> http://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/protect-your-data-with-new-ebs-encryption/

<comment><USER2> What's the point if the user doesn't control the keys?

If the data and the keys are both with Amazon, is this anything other than a ticky box for the marketing dept?

</comment><comment><USER3> Is Amazon ever going to add https for its site, I wonder?</comment>


DNA may not be life's instruction book – just a jumbled list of ingredients - <AUTHOR> https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-04/uom-dmn042220.php <comment><USER2> One of the paper [0] looks at biological inheritance with a nearly computer science point of view.

I could not judge of the value of those articles, but I am happy that someone says that DNA is not the blueprint of life. If someone in the trade could give more insight, I would be thankful.

It is true that some people have studied morphogenesis since many decades (including Alan Turing).

[0] [https://science.umd.edu/cbmg/joselab/myPdfs/JoseAM_Interface...](https://science.umd.edu/cbmg/joselab/myPdfs/JoseAM_Interface_2020.pdf)</comment>


Show HN: Expire – Less waste, more taste - <AUTHOR> http://www.expireapp.net/

<comment><USER2> I am very interested in getting this app when it is ready. Since I am sort of adhd type you might find my profile type is a good match.

</comment><comment><USER3> Show your product to [http://betapage.co](http://betapage.co)

<comment><USER4> [Off-topic: This looks like spam and will probably get downvoted. If you continue with this kind of comments the mods will probably ban your account and the site. If you want to promote your site, send it in a submission.]

<comment><USER3> I am new on HN, I will take care of this. Thanks gus_massa for alert.</comment></comment></comment>


China's Market Crash and the Man Who Saw It Coming - <AUTHOR> http://www.ozy.com/rising-stars/chinas-market-crash-and-the-man-who-saw-it-coming/61193

<comment><USER2> _Everybody_ saw the crash coming. It was clearly a bubble as the Shanghai Stock Exchange went up 250% in 12 months while every indicator (company profits, manufacturing prices, etc) were showing bad news.

[https://au.finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=000001.SS&t=5y&l=on&z=l&...](https://au.finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=000001.SS&t=5y&l=on&z=l&q=l&c=)

Stock exchanges don't _double_ in price year over year on bad news. That's just stupid.

I'm surprised the SSE has only fallen 30%. It still looks like it needs to lose another 30% (it's still up nearly 100% since early last year).

The only reason the entire world isn't shorting Chinese stocks is it's tricky to fight deliberate market manipulation by the Chinese government. Although I don't doubt this crash has made a few people _very_ rich.

<comment><USER3> Seriously. The average P/E ratio for a stock on the mainland indexes was 84. For a frame a reference, Facebook's is around 78. There's no way that could last.

<comment><USER4> Wow. If that was the average, that's insane. Anybody investing in that market was gambling on the hype keeping it going.

<comment><USER5> Textbook bubble.

When widows and orphans are borrowing money to gamble because they've been told it's a sure thing, it's time to get out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have said it before and I will repeat that advice here: anyone who can predict economic crises and when they will occur is just plain lucky.

There are enough people on this planet staking their reputations on one claim or another that we should expect people to "see things coming". Those many millions of people making grand claims are usually, but not always, incorrect.

There is a very important quote to remember here, if you're ever told by someone to make an economic bet:

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

You may know, for a fact, that a commodity is overpriced, that a stock is overvalued, or that the entire market is operating under "irrational exuberance". Okay, but in the history of the discipline, no economist has ever been able to predict when the party will stop. Prices can soar to many multiples of their values, and selling short will bankrupt almost everyone who thinks they know, for certain, when the party will stop.

Every once in a while a few economists stake their reputation on a market crash and are correct, and sometimes they get a little too full of themselves, write a book on their ability to forecast the market, and disappear into obscurity. Michael Pettis seems he may very well be one of these people.

Just about every economist I've read has thought the party would stop in China soon, no nation can sustain growth rates like theirs indefinitely. Short of the Chinese discovering and secretly using cold fusion or a perpetual motion machine, I would think.

So why is it the "Pettis hypothesis"? Sheesh.

I look forward to another person fleecing poor investors to fade into obscurity. The man who saw this crash coming was dealt a good hand, that's true, but he won't always win.

<comment><USER7> Still, I would read something titled "China's Market Crash and the Man Who Earned >10M$ Having Precisely Predicted It".

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's no luck and gilgoomesh is right, many people saw it coming.

There are stories about it and relating tadbit such as Chinese ghost towns and Chinese build projects. These segment alluding to the fact that China's economy is base on building stuff constantly and that the government is encouraging loans for these projects. There were also shadow loans that a few articles were talking about where bank were loaning outside of the government consents.

There's an article on Jalopnik about a Chinese car bridge that was the longest but it didn't save any time at all. It was built just cause they can.

I'm pretty much moderately on top of this because I got hacked by Chinese IPs and invested in Chinese stocks in the mid 2000 decade. Ended up doing research of China in general and it's a very fascinating country. Oh, and also China is flexing its muscles against my birth country so yeah.

We should just watch and wait to see how severe it is. The 6 months stop gap isn't gone yet. I think we'll have to wait a year or at the latest after 6 months.

There's always greedy people and if they think they can make money in China they will invest in China.

</comment><comment><USER9> I am bearish but I find myself unable to trust China's stock market to make a bet because the government is manipulating the prices in order to not have something like two times the entire population of Canada angry and out for blood because they lost money in the stock market, which btw, encouraged by the government.

The quote 'market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent' really hits home here. Especially when it's half way across the world, and a government that doesn't like to open it's books to outsiders.

Just looking at the chart there could be another crash seeing that the SSE has failed to close above the crucial 4000 line. People are taking profits and looking to park their money in West Coast real estate. When the 1400 companies banned from trading suddenly find the herd is gone, they are in for a nasty surprise since they put up their company as collateral to raise capital and they will face margin calls and in turn banks facing margin calls themselves with each other, and being forced to write off the mountain of debt from overbuilding will cause catastrophic failure that will make Tokyo's bubble look tiny.

One thing is for sure, the China that emerges from this market collapse will be a very different one from the one we have today. Further manipulation and showing lack of control of the markets will be the CCP's final undoing. Some members of the party including the current leadership Xi knows this and save himself as the guy 'that tried' and save himself to the trip to Hague when they throw jiang zemin under the bus instead.

<comment> norea-armozel This has been one my issues with the CCP. They seem to feel the only good policy is to keep the markets growing rather than focusing on making the lives of the average citizen better. Building highways and airports are nice if you have a population that can afford to use them, but what many people in China need is to have their healthcare and schooling made affordable (they basically took away most of the socialized medicine and schooling programs they still had in the 1980s which by then were half-govt-covered/half-citizen-covered affairs). The wealth of the economy shouldn't serve a few if they really support socialism. But that's just my take on the matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> California's earthquake and the man who saw it coming. I'd only believe in the value of a financial prediction if a) it was timely and actionable and b) the person making the prediction has made scores of similar predictions satisfying point a)

Anyone can get lucky predicting a disaster once, that says nothing of the persons ability to model and predict actual useful scenarios.

We all know there will be boom bust cycles. They exist in human endeavors, they exist in ecosystem predator/prey relationships. It's interesting to look at the causes, but predictions like this are only worthwhile to the individual if they can tell you the best time to get out.

</comment><comment><USER11> I saw it coming too - having advised my Chinese cousin to stay out last month. My last name is also "Man". Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER12> If no-one sees the crash coming, then it doesn't come.

When enough people see the crash coming, then it comes.</comment>


The stockmarket is now run by computers, algorithms and passive managers - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/briefing/2019/10/05/the-stockmarket-is-now-run-by-computers-algorithms-and-passive-managers <comment><USER2> "Computers and algorithms" is just a synonym for people; people implement ideas in code, design the algorithms, pick the weights for training machine learning, etc. No matter how many levels of abstraction you go through it's _always_ people at the top. If anything happens in the society there's _always_ a person who made the decision to make it happen somewhere. Deferring that responsibility to "computers did it" is dangerous bullshit.

<comment><USER3>
        If anything happens in the society there's
        always a person who made the decision

Imagine a green field of gras.

People start walking on it. In all kinds of directions.

Slowly paths through the grass start to emerge.

Those paths attract more people to walk on those.

The stronger the path through the grass, the more people use it.

Finally, there is one clearly visible path through the grass everyone uses.

Who made the decision?

<comment><USER2> _Who made the decision?_

The first person who walked the final path. Everyone who agreed with that person and walked the same path compounded his decision. _Everyone_ who crossed the field should have thought about what they were doing at the time.

Far too many people, and _especially_ developers, are way more focused on absolving themselves from responsibility for anything bad than they are willing to put the thought in at the beginning, and that's the root cause of a lot of problems.

<comment><USER4> That's a stretch. I know you're enamoured by your synopsis, but realistically emergent systems aren't designed or thought about. They might be tweaked.

<comment><USER2> _realistically emergent systems aren 't designed or thought about_

I'm aware of how they work. I'm arguing that someone who builds a system is responsible for it _even if they don 't know how it works_. Ignorance, even in the face of a system so complex that no person could ever understand the underlying causes of what it does, is not an excuse. No one should be able to hide behind complexity.

Developers must either build in protections against their systems going wrong or they shouldn't deploy them.

<comment><USER5> I want to agree with your thesis, but it's impossible to foresee every possible outcome. Leaky abstractions aside, bugs aside, misaligned incentives (the new "I was just following orders", as someone here immortally put it) aside, it is impossible to imagine _a priori_ all the ways a certain outcome that is desirable _now_ will be undesirable in the future.

Every step of the development ladder is fraught with possibilities for error and catastrophe. To quote James Goldman:

"It is too simple. Life, if it's like anything at all, is like an avalanche. To blame the little ball of snow that starts it all, to say it is the cause, is just as true as it is meaningless."

<comment><USER6> It's useful to distinguish between responsibility and accountability here. The algorithms may be responsible for a particular outcome but the people who commissioned them should be accountable.

<comment><USER7> What about turnover? If the buck stops at the CEO, what happens when that person moves on? Is their successor responsible for everything that went on prior? Im not saying either way, just asking how that should work.

<comment><USER2> _Is their successor responsible for everything that went on prior?_

Yes.

That wouldn't even be a change to the current system. That's how it works _now_. If you take on the role of CEO and it turns out that years earlier the company did something terrible you will be expected to resign. It's one of the reasons they demand so much money.

<comment><USER7> In that case they might want a very in depth analysis of what they're getting into prior to taking the job. How much does that happen?

<comment><USER8> Pretty much always if the incoming CEO can competitively negotiate and is a good hire.

Contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of career CEOs are good hardworking people. Like any high profile position, the outliers skew perception for everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What is missing here is the Big Picture: trading activity has totally decoupled from value creation, and technology has sped up the process exponentially. These are not investors, they are speculators, and it is creating a form of technical debt that has the inherent capability to take down the productive parts of the system.

<comment><USER10> Trading activity was never about value creation to begin with.

Non-finance people seem to think the stock market only exists for investing, which isn't true at all. In fact outside of an IPO you are not investing into a company, but just trading a piece of a pie that already existed. The stock market has always been primarily about trading, and informational arbitrage is simply more efficient when you have computers calculating it

<comment><USER11> > Non-finance people seem to think the stock market only exists for investing, > which isn't true at all. In fact outside of an IPO you are not investing > into a company, but just trading a piece of a pie that already existed. The > stock market has always been primarily about trading, and informational > arbitrage is simply more efficient when you have computers calculating it

Baloney. Corporations compensate employees, management and executives in stock. Furthermore, they may use their stock as debt collateral, or flat-out purchase investments [e.g. startups or other companies] completely or partially with stock. For example Facebook purchased Whatsapp with $12 billion of Facebook shares, $3 billion RSUs, and $4 billion in cash [1].

Moral of the story: The higher your stock price, the lower your cost of capital.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#Facebook_subsidiary_(...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#Facebook_subsidiary_\(2014%E2%80%93present\))

<comment><USER10> What exactly are you arguing? That stock based compensation or usage in an acquisition means the stock market isn't about trading?

Sure, the more valuable your company is (let's not say stock price because really it's your market cap and some other factors) the more it can leverage that to make deals. Not sure how that's related to the function of the stock market itself

<comment><USER12> Companies save cash by paying employees in stock instead of cash (and saving cash is just an indirect way or raising cash, a penny saved is a penny earned etc.) Companies cannot pay employees in stock unless the employees have a way of eventually selling that stock. Employees can only sell stock because a robust secondary market exists for buying and selling stock. Therefore, the continuous trading of stock helps companies raise cash and "create value" even after the IPO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is this .. bad?

> FIFTY YEARS ago investing was a distinctly human affair. "People would have > to take each other out, and dealers would entertain fund managers, and no > one would know what the prices were,"

Was this, on the other hand, good?

If we take the doctrine that a market is a system for transforming information into decisions through the medium of prices (see e.g. _Red Plenty_ ), then using an increasingly sophisticated information system to do it seems only right and natural? And that it should reduce overheads of fund management?

(As an aside, that initial-cap "F" looks really nice and is a neat bit of CSS)

<comment><USER14> The old system makes the man rich who can hire the right people with the "right" people skills.

The new system makes the man rich who can hire the right math graduates.

It seems like we've got the same system as always. The rich get richer.

<comment><USER15> Cool tagline. But the richest men in this industry are math graduates.

<comment><USER14> No, it's the one who hire the graduates. It's literally what I wrote.

<comment><USER10> I'm pretty sure the Rentech and DE Shaw founders were mathematicians. I've heard Simons in particular is stupid good at math and there are apocryphal stories to that effect. Wouldn't surprise me if other quant funds were also ran by the math-heads themselves as well

<comment><USER16> No need for apocryphal stories about Simons. See, e.g., [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Veblen_Prize_in_Geometr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Veblen_Prize_in_Geometry).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Most of the comments strike me as negative, like the article's discussing a bad thing. This is weird because the article itself is very positive.

From the conclusion:

> It is natural to be fearful of the consequences, for it is a leap into the > unknown. But the more accurate and efficient markets are, the better both > investors and companies are served.

Sure this is bad for people who wanted to do the jobs getting automated, much as self-driving trucks are bad for people who wanted a career in driving trucks. But if we automate away all of the jobs with machines that do them better than humans ever could, is that really a bad thing?

I mean, sure, we'll need to rework our economic systems to adapt to a world in which the economy neither requires nor desires human laborers -- and, yeah, that's gonna require quite the overhaul -- but is a world in which people don't need jobs to survive really so scary?

<comment><USER18> Why such an optimistic assumption that the extreme rent seeking of today won't just balloon to unknown heights in the wake of a seismic shift between labor and capital, creating a permanent class of haves and have nots? Especially once personal security, law enforcement, and military operations are automated...

There's certainly a Brave New World style dystopia available in your scenario where only a select few are free and even fewer are wealthy.

<comment><USER17> I'm not particularly worried about dystopian outcomes like that because I don't see how they'd actually happen.

I figure that there're basically two cases:

1\. Automation kicks in slowly enough that the government isn't toppled, allowing people to simply vote on a more equitable way of doing things.

2\. Automation kicks in quickly enough that powerful individuals can openly defy the government, acting above the law.

The first case doesn't seem problematic. I simply can't see a society with >99% unemployment and mass poverty, with booming wealth in the hands of <1%, not voting to distribute the wealth, so long as they have the ability.

The second case would then have sub-cases, depending on how the powerful- faction chooses to behave:

a. The powerful-faction chooses to comply with the government despite being powerful enough to topple it. Then stuff turns out like in Case (1) anyway.

b. The powerful-faction refuses to trade with everyone else. Then they'd have their own, exclusive economic system, but everyone else could still trade with each other. Then they might not be as wealthy as the powerful-faction, but they could still be much wealthier than people today.

c. If the powerful-faction chooses to kill-off or cage everyone else, that'd be bad.

So, sure, there's that hypothetical scenario in which people who rapidly rise to power would leverage that power to kill off everyone else. But, that just doesn't seem particularly plausible to me. And most of the other scenarios seem to have positive outcomes.

<comment><USER19> This is fun.

Isn't there a case d.

\- The powerful faction cages everyone else, but not necessarily in literal physical cages but rather psychological cages. Provide bare enough for survival, and use psychological techniques to engrave in everyone's mind that "this is fine".

I feel like this comment sounds rather edgy, but to me this is the most likely dystopian scenario if we're anyway talking about powerful-factions > government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I find it easier to select what companies not to buy. It's hard to do it cost effectively and with low risk. Short selling or put options is not the answer.

Idea for a new fund directed at retail investors:

S&P 520 index fund. It's basically just low cost S&P 500 index fund, except that the index tracks 520 largest companies listed and individual investors can remove any 20 companies from their index. If you don't know what to drop, the fund managers drop the 20 smallest and the index becomes S&P 500.

The catch is how to implement this strategy with low cost. In practice the fund as a whole would take input from every fund owner at the time they do rebalancing. Then they would adjust the ownership of the fund based on how the investor performs relative to the whole fund in the next rebalancing. How to implement this may be tricky.

<comment><USER21> The name for the product category you're broadly describing is "smart beta." This exists in quantity. "SPY but without overvalued stocks in it", etc etc.

The reason the exact product you want doesn't exist is because it will have the same returns as SPY but cost 20X as much due to lower economies of scale, broadly because people _don 't want it_.

<comment><USER22> > but cost 20X as much due to lower economies of scale, broadly because people > don't want it.

For any existing fund manager who tracks an index (i.e. Vanguard), this shouldn't be too difficult or expensive. They're already buying/selling a TON of SP500 shares at the close of trading day. Now they just need to subtract some of those buys/sell for the overvalued companies that people do not want. Am I missing something?

EDIT: Oh, I guess the (SEC?) would require a different fund management and prospectus for every index "smart beta" permutation, and therefore wouldn't be realistic.

<comment><USER23> Whenever I feel the need to use the adverb "just" when talking about something I think someone else should do, it usually means my understanding of the situation is the tip of an iceberg I can't fully see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> [https://outline.com/JE65Eu](https://outline.com/JE65Eu)

<comment><USER25> Thank you

</comment></comment><comment> d--b This completely misses the point.

The stock-market is a gamification of financing. While financing has been invented to direct money to the most __useful __project, stock-market transformed this __usefulness __function into a score: the return on investment.

The problem of the algorithmication of finance is not that we don't know where it's going, but that it's lost its objective of optimizing for utility in favor of optimizing pure profit. This has been a problem since the 80s with the "greed is good mentality". But that's not true, maximizing profit does not maximize societal utility.

</comment><comment><USER26> Imagine people advocating to go back to open outcry and wining and dining leads

</comment><comment><USER27> Has this not been the case for well over a decade?

<comment><USER28> AI has been a dominant force in the market since at least the 1980's.

<comment><USER29> citation?

<comment><USER30> my guess is he is using the acronym AI to mean statistics/modeling/inference vis a vis actual intelligence (understanding/conceptualization/novelty)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It surprises me that a multitude of separately developed systems acting in the same 'playground' don't give rise to more emergent behavior. I would expect accidental death spirals as systems unknowingly couple together and get caught in a loop of failing together, along with the polar opposite of just astronomical growth spurred by nothing but the systems bidding logic interlocking in unexpected ways.

Sure there have been catastrophic failures like Knight Capital, but those, at leas the ones I am aware of, all boil down to the system having flaws. I have yet to see a system which worked and followed the logic the designers intended, but which is accidentally (or purposely?) exploited by other automated systems doing the same. Shouldn't the complexity of these systems make such a thing almost inevitable and common?

<comment> 1e-9 They undoubtedly do to an extent, but the exchanges use price limits, trading halts, and mandatory nonstop human supervision to keep things under control and allow human operators time to kill errant systems that are losing money. Trading firms and clearing firms require additional safeguards to limit instability and losses. Also, if some group of trading systems does go wheels- off in a positive feedback loop, there's likely to be another, larger group of trading systems operating correctly and taking the other side to eventually stabilize prices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The growth of "dark pools" for electronic trading off of the stock exchanges has also been an important development in the last couple of decades. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pool](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pool)

</comment><comment><USER24> One possibly interesting consequence of this is that companies that want to optimize their stock value may now try and find what factors the financial algorithms are looking for and optimize their business based on that. Might be an opportunity for some creative upper management people?

<comment><USER33> Executives were already doing this for the factors human investors look at (hence the "Wall St. driven short-termism" complaints).

<comment><USER24> Absolutely, I guess what I'm saying is that this might bring about new types of factors to look for - meaning whole new categories of strategies.

<comment><USER33> They're still going to be factors that a human already thought was relevant to making investment decisions. Machine learning data pipelines don't write themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> In theory the small investor who has the freedom of not being obliged to track the index and is small enough not to be troubled by low liquidity could potentially exploit these advantages?

</comment><comment><USER35> Some day we'll have central AI-planned economies, and we'll laugh at our "free markets" of olde. Computers will allocate capital far better than humans can.

<comment><USER36> We'll hand over economic decision making to a computer? Doubt it

<comment><USER37> You say that as if you think we will have a choice in that matter. A centrally planned economy is the kind of numerical optimization problem that computers are far better at solving than humans are. Eventually, some country will implement an AI-driven centrally planned economy that will function far more efficiently than our current market-driven model, at which point everyone else will either out-competed by this new more efficient system, or adopt something similar.

<comment><USER38> _Eventually, some country will implement an AI-driven centrally planned economy that will function far more efficiently than our current market-driven model_

Your core assumption is that it's _possible_ for an AI-driven centrally planned economy to be "far more efficient" than a market economy. There are two problems here: getting your AI the information they need to make the right decisions, and the political risks of implementing a perfectly efficient centrally planned economy, which will by necessity cause all kinds of suffering and death as a result of its allocation decisions (which, by the way, will probably be guided by value judgments made by humans, but I digress). Both of these are huge challenges, and it's not clear to me that either of them will be easier to accomplish with a AI-driven planned economy vs. a pure market economy (which also has its problems, I know!). They're ultimately just two different kinds of algorithms, and it's unclear to me that the top-down centrally planned approach is necessarily better, even given general AI and tons of input information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Ok time for a stupid question: if machines trade 90% who is on the other side of buying , or if a machine (or algo or whatever) sells to another machine, cant it be manipulated?

</comment><comment><USER40> Old news. Companies like rentech have been doing this for decades.

</comment><comment><USER41> Anyone who thinks this is a good thing should read Flash Boys by Michael Lewis, and look into front-running and HFT.

<comment><USER42> Flash Boys is written to entertain, though, not inform. It is littered with inaccuracies and dramatization to the point of lying.

Front-running, for the record, is illegal and nobody does it. Michael Lewis perverts the phrase to mean "using publicly available information and extremely expensive- though publicly available- radio technology to move stock information faster than competitors". Which you might still think is "unfair", though I would argue it's only unfair in the same sense that WalMart and Target make it hard for small shops to compete because they can't afford ultra-efficient trillion dollar supply chains. It's not illegal, it's objectively more efficient, and the only thing that prevents anyone from "just doing it too" is capital.

"Dark Pools" by Scott Patterson is a much more educated and in-the-know look at electronic trading.

<comment><USER41> >> Front-running, for the record, is illegal I didn't get the sense that it is illegal from the book. Could you please elaborate what you understand by front running and why/how is it illegal.

>> Michael Lewis perverts the phrase to mean "using publicly available information

Per my understanding Michael Lewis is referring to the fact that HFT firms were able to race faster than the original trade executions and execute part of the trade, due to it being spread over multiple exchanges with different latencies.

While this may not be illegal, it surely sounds unethical.

<comment> 1e-9 > I didn't get the sense that it is illegal from the book. Could you please > elaborate what you understand by front running and why/how is it illegal.

Front running involves placing a trade based on nonpublic information. It's a type of insider trading that has been going on for at least hundreds of years and it has nothing to do with HFT. The classic example is a broker placing orders ahead of their own clients in order to profit off the market's reaction to the client orders.

An HFT system placing orders based on public data feeds is not front running.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> How are inputs entered into these systems. Consider for example Trump's decision to withdraw US from Syria. I assume there is a human somewhere that needs to tweak a variable "Conflict risks in the Middle East" or something as soon as possible after this news breaks? That can not be automated... or?

<comment><USER44> It's now just a built feature of a traders bloomberg terminal. [https://www.bloomberg.com/company/press/bloomberg- launches-t...](https://www.bloomberg.com/company/press/bloomberg-launches- twitter-feed-optimized-trading/)</comment></comment>


U.S. spam now top of global list - UPI.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Security-Industry/2011/01/11/US-spam-now-top-of-global-list/UPI-36781294775925/ <comment><USER2> somewhere here the researcher of this article decided to leave out China, whether it refuse to acknowledge it, or just couldn't get the data from the almighty Communist Dragon, but from personal experience, China is probably in par with U.S. in terms of spam.

There's virus on every other site. Especially phishing for gaming accounts. The country's hacking network nets couple hundred million $US dollars just hacking gaming accounts and sell the virtual currency on a third party platform. If you have heard "Chinese Gold Farmers", then you must have also heard " Chinese Phishers"

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell This article speaks as though there was a time when the US wasn't the biggest source of spam on the Internet... I thought the US has historically _always_ been the biggest source? ...</comment>


Don't be a cube potato: Gadgets, apps, and tricks for a healthy lifestyle - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/offbeat/94505/dont-become-a-cube-potato-ways-get-out-your-chair-and-get-healthy <comment><USER2> The website has a full-screen intro ad, and the article itself is broken down into lots of pages.

Page 2 is "burst training" (excercise for 30-60 seconds to burn a bit of sugar)

Page 3 is to move around, go to the bathroom at least (!), walk more during your commute

Page 4 suggest changing the chair for a phisioball or working while standing up for some stretches of time

Page 5 suggests Wii Fit and the like

Page 6 suggests some Social Networking sites for health & fitness</comment>


Show HN: Tracking the billions of dollars spent each year on lobbying - <AUTHOR> https://www.quiverquant.com/sources/lobbying <comment><AUTHOR> I've been working on this dashboard to follow which organizations are spending the most money on lobbying, and which issues are receiving the most lobbying attention.

The data is sourced from LDA Lobbying Disclosures, and Python was used for the analysis and visualizations.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions for improvements or new features!</comment>


Plagiarism detectors are a crutch, and a problem - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00893-5 <comment><USER2> Once in undergrad, I got an email from my professor one day instructing me to meet him in his office with all of my notes and materials for a research paper I had recently turned in.

When I arrived, his first words to me "I think we both know why you're here." I didn't.

He explained that he had run my paper through a plagiarism detector, and it had come back as a 100% match with a paper turned into a university in another state. I was rather dumbfounded because I had researched and written the paper entirely on my own.

We quickly came to an impasse, because he had faith in this rather damning score from the plagiarism detector, and I obviously was quite sure I had in fact written the paper myself.

As I left the office and began gearing up for a battle with the Office of Academic Integrity, I got another email from him profusely apologizing and telling me he had run the paper through the same plagiarism detector again and it had come back clean.

I'm really glad I didn't have to fight that fight, but I got awful close. My theory is that there was some problem during the upload, and it just checked an empty document against another empty document and found they matched exactly, but I'll never know.

<comment><USER3> One time in a take home programming interview problem I was asked to create my own quicksort implementation in python. I had already done this previously in answer to a StackOverflow question, so I just submitted a copy of that implementation.

Later I was told I was disqualified because I had cheated and copied my answer from StackOverflow. I tried to explain that the user I copied it from was indeed me and that I could prove it by logging into SO in front of them but I never heard back.

<comment><USER4> FFS how many different implementations of quicksort in Python can there possibly be? How would they expect you to make yours unique? Different variable names or something?

I'll never understand the concept of plagiarizing long-established solutions to problems.

<comment><USER5> It's ridiculous. If you're going to require a take home programming test, at least make it something that isn't solved immediately just by opening SO. Ask a cookie cutter question, get a cookie cutter answer.

<comment><USER6> Or Wikipedia. (OK, you'd have to turn the pseudocode into Python. I'm not even primarily a developer and that would take me about 10 minutes.) Or wherever. There are apparently a few slightly different implementation details to Quicksort but how unique can a Quicksort be?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I once reviewed a journal article that at least a few pages of plagiarized text in it. I noticed only because I thought some sentences sounded like I wrote them, and as it turned out, I did write them. Not surprisingly, I found the paper even worse from a technical standpoint, so I gave it a rather negative review. I tried to be as helpful as possible, even suggesting what they should do instead of what they did. It appears the paper was rejected.

Fast forward 6 to 12 months. I found what seems to be a descendant of the paper published in another journal. While the vast majority of the plagiarism I identified was removed, they added some parts _plagiarized from my review_. I contacted the journal, who replied that plagiarism detection software didn't find anything. I replied that it wouldn't because a confidential review would not be in their system. Plus, I gave them a list of plagiarized parts; all they had to do was check against the paper. I told them that I did not spend much time checking for plagiarism, so for all I know there's a lot more plagiarism in the paper. The journal representative never did anything about the paper, unfortunately. I now refuse to publish in that journal and discourage others from publishing there as well.

<comment><USER8> >The journal representative never did anything about the paper, unfortunately.

I wonder if you could submit DMCA requests for this.

<comment><USER7> I thought about that, but was too busy. I might try that later this year, though.

<comment><USER7> A followup: I am in contact with lawyers at my university now...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Are students really comparing their work against the scores generated by these tools to game the scores lower because they're worried about being punished for false positives?

That is, pardon my French, fucked up.

Beyond that it's egregious that any academic institution would allow the success of students/researchers/whatever to hinge on scores generated by a black box algorithm that hasn't been rigorously proven as very close to 100% accurate. There should always be a human in the loop, and if we don't have enough humans for that then I think we have a problem that goes beyond automated plagiarism checkers.

<comment><USER10> In my experience, that's not happening.

First of all, if your work is submitted through these detection systems, you almost never have the opportunity to see your 'score' and then resubmit. That's just asking for people to cheat the system.

These plagarism checkers are also not really smart enough to differentiate proper citation from actual plagarism. Thier function is to alert the person grading the papers to sections that might be problematic. It will highlight "plagarized" sections, but the professor will ignore it if it's properly quoted and attributed or if it's just a short phrase, etc.

<comment><USER11> What stops me from renting the software and running my own paper through it to see what it says?

<comment><USER3> They usually only grant licenses to certain organizations. Same reason you can't simply buy the solutions manual to any given textbook.

<comment><USER12> Quite often you can buy the solutions manual to a given textbook. They are on half.com or available in pdf format, a lot of the time.

They won't show you the work, so copying the answer is not sufficient to get credit in practically any course.

"Academic integrity" has ridiculous rules (eg self-plagiarism is not really a thing that anyone should care about) and I'm sure some people would be pissed about that, but if you're doing the work I personally don't see anything wrong with getting immediate feedback on whether you've done it correctly or not. Particularly given that many textbooks do like one or two simple examples and then jump to complex problems in the assignments... being able to check a couple problems to be sure you understand the process is extremely helpful as a learning aid.)

If you want a real-world assessment of whether someone has mastered a concept, schedule an in-class quiz or a test.

<comment><USER13> > self-plagiarism is not really a thing that anyone should care about

Sure it is. The entire methodology of schooling is to learn through exercise; if you are asked to write a paper, it isn't because the teacher wants the information in the paper. They are wanting you to learn through the act of writing the paper.

If you just turn in a paper you have written for another class, you are not doing that exercise.

Turning in a paper that you wrote for a different class and getting upset that the school doesn't approve is like thinking that sending a picture of you lifting weights 3 years ago is going to make you stronger.

<comment><USER14> All of this nonsense comes one root evil: giving publicly viewable grades for fundamentally in original work. Grades and homework should be for the student's private benefit. The only public marks should be proctored exams for demonstrating skills, and whatever original work someone creates that has value that stands on its own outside he artificial school environment.

<comment><USER13> A proctored exam can only really measure a few types of skills, and don't work very well for demonstrating skills learned in many classes.

Take, for example, a class that is about learning to write effectively, which is clearly a valuable skill that adults need no matter what they do in life.

Part of that skill is being able to construct, from scratch, an effective piece of writing in a length of time that is longer than a proctored exam session. You can only measure that skill by having them do that, and if they turn in work they have written prior, you aren't learning anything about their ability to write something effectively on demand.

Research classes are similar; you can't demonstrate that you know how to do research well in a 3 hour exam. Programming classes, too; you can't measure the ability to create a large project in a 3 hour exam.

<comment><USER14> I think a defense (oral examination) of the paper can cover that scenario.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> When teachers rely on the output of these detectors without checking the source material, they are effectively doing what they are accusing their students of doing with Wikipedia, etc.

The end result may be totally convincing, but nobody really knows until they actually look at what they _think_ they are citing. The teachers should operate at least at the lowest level they impose on their students -- Check your work. Don't blindly copy someone else's results.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is really nothing new. "Ethical problems will never be resolved by a software tool" [1]

The author uses a straw man argument that plagiarism detection software promises to "replace the professor" when in fact, it is just a tool.

Besides, there are highly sophisticated ways of cheating that even a professor would not catch reliably. I wrote my undergrad thesis about plagiarism and it was interesting to learn that there are students who are highly motivated to "beat the system" instead of doing the task properly.

[1] [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/248606848_Support_f...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/248606848_Support_for_checking_plagiarism_in_e- learning)

</comment><comment><USER17> As someone who teaches degree level content to apprentices, I definitely think these tools have value. I know that until very recently my current institution has not bothered with such a tool and I saw with my own eyes that quite obvious (to me) plagiarism was rampant and that the already overburdened assignment markers were not catching these instances. By moving to an automated tool, our students were immediately put on notice that such behaviour would not be acceptable.

That said, I do still hear worrying comments from my colleagues ("what number is too much?" is I'm afraid a common question) - but I can clearly see the change in student behaviour - so I don't think this is such a bad thing. Yes, markers do still need to watch for plagiarism - and there are of course other types of plagiarism that these tools can't usually deal with (ghost-written essays being a common talking point these days), but just because a tool may be misused or may be misunderstood, it certainly doesn't necessarily mean it is all bad.

<comment><USER6> I don't have any real experience with these tools but for writing (as opposed to some types of code, especially well-defined algorithms), the odds that two pieces of writing are going to be highly similar to each other by chance are pretty tiny.

Sure, the same quotes from another source may be used here and there (and hopefully cited). And there may be some rote definition or other short text lifted from Wikipedia, etc. that maybe doesn't rise to the level of requiring a footnote. But if any sections of text longer than a line or two aren't substantially different, something is going on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Plagiarism detectors are more akin to linters than code reviewers. Arguably helpful but not sufficient.

<comment><USER19> Agree and would add that there is no reason that the algorithms need to be secret. Well, there _might_ be some value in keeping the algorithm from the writers, but definitely none in keeping it from the editor/teacher. Also, the algorithm can report on the likelihood of it's own error, which can help teachers to interpret the result.

<comment><USER20> Coders live in a bit of a utopia. Imagine your code quality being scored by a proprietary black box. That would be intolerable and contrary to the spirit of producing a quality product and developing better coders.

Keeping the algorithms secret for plagiarism detectors is about as dubious. If they are not good enough to reject gaming they are not robust enough to deliver reliable scores. If you don't trust students to see that gaming a plagiarism detector is more effort than honest work, you've admitted the wrong student, and/or you are using a duff plagiarism detector.

<comment><USER12> At the very tail end of when I was going to college, classes were starting to move to "online assignments" where you type your answer into an online tool which matches it as a string against the expected answer, and it's exactly as intolerable as you imagine.

Teachers like them because they don't have to grade papers, textbook publishers like them because the online code prevents reselling the textbook (or at least, the new customer will need to purchase a key anyway).

<comment><USER14> This seems to complete the charade that a college degree is just a taxi medallion, an inherently worthless object that only has value because powers conspire to require it as a roadblock to something impot, and then extract money from people who need to get past the roadblock

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Honestly, I'm a little disappointed with this article. Plagiarism detectors themselves are neither a crutch nor a problem--they're simply a tool. People's _use_ of them as the grand arbiter on plagiarism as though they were stone tablets delivered to them from Mount Sinai is the problem.

I thought that, despite the title, that's what the author was talking about for the majority of this article, but then they mention things like...

> Only if a text is somehow off, and online searching does not help, should > software systems be consulted.

Sorry, what? The only reason text would sound weird is if it's been specifically mangled to defeat plagiarism software (which makes plagiarism software already useful). There's practically no way you, as a student marker, busy professor, or someone reviewing hundreds of academic proposals has the time to slowly wade through each paper you get by googling choice sentences manually--something the plagiarism checker software can do just fine. I'm more-so confused, by the pair of statements that 1) "Software cannot determine plagiarism [...] That decision must be taken by a person" but also 2) "Only if a text is somehow off, and online searching does not help, should software systems be consulted". Isn't the author's whole point that plagiarism software false flags all the time? Isn't this, then, just "hey this sentence sounds funny, time to fail this student on some plagiarism."

If their argument, however, is that you should use plagiarism software for curatable results, then this seems like the _opposite_ order of what should be done. Why waste all your time fruitlessly finessing Google if the software will straight up just find the OG source for you? You're not going to have read every single piece of writing conceivably connected to the essay/etc. you're reviewing (unless it's a field you know much about and also so narrow that you'd never consider using plagiarism software in the first place), so you're bound to be missing actual plagiarism all the time.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think the idea that they work is more important than these systems actually working. The hope is that these systems scare students enough that they don't try to plagerize in the first place.

I don't think these systems are nearly as egregious as the 5 paragraph essay scoring system they used around 2010 when I was in 9th grade back in 2009. I thought it was fine back then, but now I wonder how that thing had even the appearance of working some of the time.

<comment><USER23> Heh, in my English class in 9th grade (2005-2006) for one essay our teacher had us try one of those new automatic essay scoring programs. The scores were all over the place, for mine it claimed I didn't even address the essay subject at all. Anyway the teacher was reassured of his skepticism and continued with the practice of manual grading and feedback.

I'd rather be the victim of a computer's bogus score than the victim of a computer's bogus accusation of wrong-doing. On the other hand it's important for everyone to experience the latter (by computer or not) at least once, and at least with plagiarism even if it's true you're not going to go to jail...

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The university where I'm studying for my MS uses such a system and, interestingly, has it integrated into their course management system such that I can actually see the reports on my own assignments. I've noticed that on a number of lengthy papers I've turned in it marks nothing at all, which is conspicuous considering that I tend to quote from other literature very heavily.

I'm not sure if the plagiarism service is just not very effective or if the fact that I turn in mostly LaTeX-generated PDFs is causing a problem with their text extraction. I actually suspect the latter, because a couple of times I've turned in MS Word files it's marked one or two random phrases as suspect.

</comment><comment><USER25> As a founder of an startup that uses AI to paraphrase text ([https://quillbot.com](https://quillbot.com)), I find that this article is hitting a very valid point. As fluency enhancing tools become more prolific and higher quality, submissions will be more standard and thus there will be more unintentional overlap. Plagiarism detection software will become increasingly less reliable.

<comment><USER26> Sounds like good territory for implementing a GAN. You end up with one network that aggregates and summarizes, and another that penalizes for lack of originality. Though I suppose theres a good chance the GAN would drift away from human patterns as it trains.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've worked a bit in this space, porting Dr Bloomfield's WCopyfind [0] algo to js [1] for a small non profit (& other proprietary solutions). One of the harder forms of plagiarism over copy-paste issues is that of ideas. It's easy to cross reference phrases in text A to text B, but what if it's reworded in such a way that it's conceptually the same? In some areas of research this is a huge ongoing problem and although there are some small inroads being made, it's still a huge problem. It's also compounded by the issue of language translation. eg. text A (in English) was reworded in text B (in Chinese)

[0] [https://plagiarism.bloomfieldmedia.com/software/wcopyfind/](https://plagiarism.bloomfieldmedia.com/software/wcopyfind/)

[1] [https://github.com/cmroanirgo/pl- copyfind/](https://github.com/cmroanirgo/pl-copyfind/)

</comment><comment><USER28> Michael Crichton (somewhat famously) retyped and submitted a George Orwell essay for an undergrad literature course at Harvard. Orwell got a B- and Crichton decided lit wasn't for him and ended up in anthropology/pre-med.

Today he'd just be expelled!

</comment><comment><USER29> The CS department at my university does the same with code submissions using a tool called Moss[0].

Is this the norm?

[0] [https://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/](https://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/)

<comment><USER30> Yup, my university used Moss and caught a ring of cheaters with it. Funnily enough at my first job I actually worked on a product that was essentially Moss with a slicker UI, and it would also check online sources such as Github. It worked fairly well, essentially we highlight areas of code that look suspect and it is up to the professor to determine whether it is copied or not.

Haven't worked there in almost a year so I'm not sure if the product took off or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> What is sad is that this could be a great tool for students. It would be really nice to have something you can have it check your paper and give you warnings about missing citations etc. The ones I've seen you can only check your work after you submit it for grading. I'm not saying that people don't deliberately plagiarize, but it's also easy to make a mistake when you're under pressure.

</comment><comment><USER32> I used to work in a helpdesk at a university. I don't know how many times I had to explain how to interpret the plagiarism scores they would get from the plagiarism program we had. Many times they wanted to trust the simple number in front of them and not do the leg work needed to interpret that score.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is funny because I've talked to multiple computer scientists who teach classes where all the programming projects are gated by a plagiarism detector and they all insist it has 100% TP and TN rate, 0% FP and FN rate.

</comment><comment><USER34> Some of these tools use our company SerpApi.com as a data backend.

To be fair, they seem to be doing a good job and they are good a detecting copy/paste from online sources. But, of course, results are to be taken with a grain of salt.

</comment><comment><USER35> I think it is all just a data grab. They HAVE to identify students on their computers, then link with lots and lots of other companies which tie everything together. Look at the turnitin privacy policy.

</comment><comment><USER36> Plagarism Detectors for Code, like MOSS, are a major issue. Take a simple getter/setter method. MOSS will mark these as duplicates unless you explicitly go in an say "no, its okay for THIS to be the same". This adds a degree of bias to what is justifiably "expected" and "unique" for student submissions. As someone that uses MOSS, I regularly look at any flags, "eyeball" them, and in only 2 instances did it result in a legitimate integrity violation. Not to mention that I have to hunt for all possible solutions across the internet and add them to the pile to ensure students didn't "copy it from a website".

I think current CS is doing itself a disservice because we want students to collaborate, but discourage them from even looking at each other's code (that is literally how students have spoken to me about it). I don't know if English or History students refuse to look over each other's work, but I doubt it.

Soloway described programmers as having "recurring basic patterns". If you accept his theories, we literally have tiny little rolodexes in our minds and when we encounter a problem we go "hang on, I've done this before" and pull out some code we've worked on in the past. We literally have tiny snippets of code we try to reuse if we can.

Instead, for well known algorithms, just give them the code! My research [1] require them to at least do it once, but either way - what good is it to have a student reinvent how A* search works? What about inserting into a Linked List? There are only a finite number of ways to implement these things. Instead of discouraging StackOverflow, and letting students try to sneak that type of work into their code, control it through the use of additional examples. They are less pressed to copy and paste code from a 3rd party if you've literally given it to them.

We want students to understand how to take something like a programming language and use it to solve a problem, but then we confound the entire process by not training them on the language. Even among SIGCSE, people can't agree what CS1 should be and somehow everyone wants it to be "more than just learning to program" like its a bad thing.

Back to plagiarism detectors for code, I think our current track discourages students to be open and help each other because they fear if they describe how they solved the exact same problem, there goes college. The result is encouraging the loner stereotype instead of reducing it. Hell, paired programming has to be forced on us because we can't "work with other people". I recognize some simply don't like it, however, my point is we've trained ourselves to not work together for so long that we designed a coding paradigm to have "controlled helping someone code".

[1] [https://research.csc.ncsu.edu/arglab/projects/exercises.html](https://research.csc.ncsu.edu/arglab/projects/exercises.html)

[2] [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978093461...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780934613125500422)

<comment><USER23> There are just too many competing tugs. Something has to give. The problem of plagiarism goes away entirely if you make the course grade consist entirely of the final in-person exam. That doesn't mean you have to give up assigning homework and scoring it, but for mysterious reasons probably related in part to modern students and teachers not wanting to do anything unless forced to by the system colleges have moved away from the "final is everything" model.

<comment><USER36> This is something that I emphasized in my CS1 courses (I haven't taught them in a few years). Homework was 50% divided into 10% for Typing Exercises (my research), 10% for Lecture Exercises (MCQ, TF, Fill in the Blanks), and 30% Programming. Exams accounted for the other 50% (Midterm 20%, Final 30%). The big thing is that if you look at 20% of their grade was simply on drilling. Explicit cheating wouldn't help for them and they are just enough to still impact your grade if you don't do them.

Exams were in class, 2-3 hours long, and with a coding without Internet section. This approach does become more difficult with a 75 minute course (which is what NC State has), simply due to time constraints, so I can agree with you there.

However, your point about "Something has to give" is one of the reasons I argue that we expect too much out of CS1. In other technical skills, like cooking, music, martial arts, dance, etc., the introduction is much more about accumulating the technical skills necessary. Music theory isn't as prominent in an Intro to Singing class; however, in Intro to CS, I don't think we do that. As my course structure should indicate, I think intro courses should be more drilling to build the neuromuscular memory because then at higher levels we can do more critical thinking with the trust that students "know how to execute the plan". I do think that something like Problem Solving should be given its own separate course where its skills can be trained and honed parallel, but separate, from Programming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Is this what they meant when they told me software would eat the world?

</comment><comment><USER38> Por que no los dos? The _real_ problem is that academics aren't reading the papers, couldn't the solution here to use both the automated tools, _and_ to pay better attention to what they're consuming? Maybe improve the UX of the plagiarism tools as well.

"Throw it all out" doesn't seem like a real solution to me, more of a flashy headline.

<comment><USER39> Do you mean not reading the plagiarism checker's output, or the paper itself? Because the latter isn't sufficient; you'd have to have read anything the student might've (presumably found by googling), and pattern match the plagiarized text. If its not blatant/poorly inserted, there's not really any tell.</comment></comment>


Theology and Metaphysics in Sombre, Scientific Times [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.05339 <comment><AUTHOR> Karl Svozil ∗ Institute for Theoretical Physics, Vienna University of Technology, Wiedner Hauptstrasse 8-10/136, 1040 Vienna, Austria (Dated: July 2, 2019)

"In view of the sobering findings of science, theology and to a lesser degree metaphysics is confronted with a humiliating loss, and a need for reinterpretation, of allegories and narratives which have served as guidance to the perplexed for millennia. Future revolutions of world perception might include the emergence of conscious- ness and superhuman artificial intelligence from universal computation, extensive virtual reality simulations, the persistence of claims of irreducible chance in the Universe, as well as contacts with alien species and the abundance of inhabited planets. As tragic and as discomforting as this might be perceived for the religious orthodoxy and by individual believers, a theology guided by science may lead us to a better and more adequate understanding of our existence. The post factum theological options are plentiful. These include dualistic sce- narios, as well as (to quote Kelly James Clark), a curling or bowling deity, that is, creatio continua, or ex nihilo. These might be grounded in, or corroborated by the metaphysical enigma of existence, which appears to be immune and robust with respect to the aforementioned challenges of science."</comment>


Does anyone else feel that Reddit is becoming increasingly hostile as of late? - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/vQUv6.png

<comment><AUTHOR> I wanted to start off by saying that I do not support the actions of the Israeli Government, however this response is beyond unacceptable. I have only been on Reddit for a year, but I feel that World News and even Pics, is becoming a haven for hate speech, only worsened by obvious support from the Reddit community. Does this sicken anyone else?

</comment><comment><USER2> Sickens me. Interesting how the Internet has made "dealing with anti-Semites" a common problem.</comment>


Ask PG: is there analysis on and effects on karma based on how people vote? - <AUTHOR>

In an older thread, there was a discussion about how removing comment scoring (among other things) in an older thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2465002
I'm curious if there has been any analysis bucketing accounts across threads read, up votes, and down votes.
Are most people averaging out in how they generally vote (both threads and comments) or are there obvious skews? Ie, some accounts are almost all positive, others negative, and does it vary by longevity , activity, etc. <comment><USER2> Or even better(if this is relatively easy to do) would be to release voting data(sans sensitive userIDs) and let everyone here analyze it.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's a heap of info and analysis on Reddit, which has a similar system. Try /r/theoryofreddit for example.

</comment><comment><USER4> Please proofread your submissions before you post them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. I was typing on a phone, so I don't always catch typos.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Simple Weather - <AUTHOR> https://simpleweather.ascher.dev/ <comment><USER2> My two cents:

1) It should attempt to detect location and display that to the user.

2) You can save locations but, these are lost on refresh.

3) No way to specify Celsius.

4) It's not a very simple service. I should be able to bookmark this and click on the link to view the weather. Instead, I need to type a location every time. Right now, I just have a bookmark to "[https://www.google.com/search?q=weather"](https://www.google.com/search?q=weather").

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the honest and direct feedback. I agree that these would be good features to add. I'll keep them in mind as I continue work on the project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> For some reason this domain is blocked by the company firewall. What is ascher.dev?

<comment><AUTHOR> "Ascher" is my last name. I purchased the "ascher.dev" domain a few weeks ago. Currently, I'm having it redirect to my GitHub profile, but for some reason the redirect only works in Safari (working on fixing that).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very nice - please add Celsius!</comment>


Paying People to Be Healthy Usually Works, If the Public Can Stomach It - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/07/upshot/paying-people-to-be-healthy-usually-works-if-the-public-can-stomach-it.html?rref=upshot

<comment><USER2> ... if the money keeps coming in. AND the behaviour is simple.

"Many of the studies I've cited show that behaviors change while incentives are offered, but that once they are removed, people go back to old habits. Others show that while we can get patients to comply with some simple demands through such incentives, complex behavior change is harder, and not as easily influenced."

:(</comment>


Ask HN: When, around this time of year, would you launch a new product? - <AUTHOR> Now? Late January? Wait till early February?<p>When are people back and alert after the holiday break? <comment><USER2> I'd launch asap. you can't worry about that game.</comment>


Show HN: Scooget – Community for discovering new and past products people love - <AUTHOR> https://www.scooget.com <comment><USER2> I just gave it a try. It's amazing. I haven't thought about a social platform like this before. We can share the perspectives, articles, discussing about any pros and cons of any products to give other people advices before they really decide to buy them. I found It benefits us a lot. This product is still growing. I believe that it would bring much more values to community. Let's give it a try guys. You will love it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN,

I'm Chiang, the co-founder behind Scooget ([https://scooget.com](https://scooget.com)) - a social platform for the discovery of new and past products that people love. It's a dedicated place for product enthusiasts to blog, review and share their product collections online in racks.

We are launching the public beta of our new social platform in order to gather feedback and we hope that it'll be useful and informative to every users. We're really looking forward to hear your feedback or hopefully good criticism!</comment>


Show HN: Triage Ebola like an Expert - <AUTHOR> http://ebola.snapdx.co

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone - I built this tool with a couple of doctors and an infectious disease expert. We realized CDC protocols for handling Ebola were complex and wanted to put some simplicity to it, without losing on the medical rigour. Now anyone in the world can triage ebola almost like an expert.

Would be curious to hear if you like this format of answering medical questions. We're considering expanding it and doing it for more common conditions (flu, pregnancy, etc..).

<comment><USER2> I enjoyed how simple this was to use!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that was the goal :). The official guidelines can be found here ([http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/hcp/case- definition.html](http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/hcp/case-definition.html)). And while they're great, they're not really usable. It's a ton to read through.

We wanted to go with a "Don't make me think" approach.</comment></comment></comment>


When does inspiration become theft of the idea? - <AUTHOR> http://betsylerner.wordpress.com/2011/06/16/she-walked-just-like-you/

<comment><USER2> I would argue that ideas can't be stolen - only the execution can.

Improving someone else's idea by improving the execution is the primary way innovation and business works, there are rarely completely new ideas/products. Most "new" things are just improvements on old things/products.

The execution can be copied however, and if too much copying with not enough differentiation is taking place, it's theft.

I can't clone Facebook completely, change the logo, add a dislike button and then call it my own. That's theft, not innovation. However, I could take all the best ideas from Facebook, from Twitter, Gowalla etc. and create a unique social network I could call my own. That's innovation.

Pownce was a good example. It was Twitter with new features, but they didn't copy Twitter. They copied the idea and improved on it, but they didn't copy the look and branding. It would be theft if they tried to immitate the graphical profile and user interface of Twitter down to the smallest detail. Twitter won the battle, but it wouldn't be wrong if Pownce did even though Twitter was the first.

Theft: [http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/16/war-zynga-sues-the-hell- out...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/16/war-zynga-sues-the-hell-out-of- brazilian-clone-vostu/)

Borderline (compared to Halo): [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/n-o-v-a-2-near- orbit-vanguard...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/n-o-v-a-2-near-orbit- vanguard/id400901088?mt=8)

Okay (compared to Groupon): <http://livingsocial.com>

<comment><USER3> Theft means you take something away. You don't take something away when you copy the execution. As such, it cannot be theft. The counterargument that you take away revenue is hypothetical at best, and still not taking something physical directly away from the owner.

You contradict yourself when stating innovation is improving current executions of ideas. Too much of this, and suddenly it's something called theft?

If you merely copy the execution of the competition 1:1, you won't win over your competitor. You need to offer a key advantage. That's where the innovation takes place: the small step differentiating your execution from the original. In doing so, you don't steal, but add something. Adding something can never be stealing.

<comment><USER2> If we're talking about the term theft in the practical sense (and not the legal sense), I don't agree that theft necessarily have to take something away from those you steal from. Theft is the illegal taking of another person's property without that person's consent. This doesn't have to be physical stuff, it can also include digital properties like copyrighted material.

> You contradict yourself when stating innovation is improving current > executions of ideas. Too much of this, and suddenly it's something called > theft?

No, you got it all wrong. I argue that too little improvement of current executions is theft. I can't clone Facebook completely, change the logo, add a dislike button and then call it my own. That's theft, not innovation. However, I could take all the best ideas from Facebook, from Twitter, Gowalla etc. and create a unique social network I could call my own.

> If you merely copy the execution of the competition 1:1, you won't win over > your competitor. You need to offer a key advantage. That's where the > innovation takes place: the small step differentiating your execution from > the original. In doing so, you don't steal, but add something. Adding > something can never be stealing.

Well, you actually don't necessarily need a better and improved product. The only thing you need to succeed as a clone is better marketing.

I think we actually agree that innovation is just improvement on the current execution.

<comment><USER4> I'd argue that "copyright" isn't a natural right like possession of property, and therefore you really can't steal copyrighted material.

If I grab your book while you're not looking, and xerox a few pages, I've copied some copyright material. Once I put the book back, YOU CAN'T TELL I'VE DONE IT. That's unlike actually removing the book from your posession. You can tell I've done that.

If you can't tell I've done it, it isn't theft. It's something else. All the laws in the world don't make it otherwise.

<comment><USER2> Agree, but that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about copying something and calling it your own.

Copying a book for yourself is one thing, releasing a copy with another name and some minor additions and calling it your own is another thing.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Some societal implications of combining sensors for location evidence - <AUTHOR> http://workstuff.tumblr.com/post/60933191518/some-societal-implications-of-combining-sensors-for

<comment><AUTHOR> i.e.: Everyone seems to be focusing on whether it's a security risk to use fingerprints for authentication, but there's been very little discussion of the implications of combining a positive biometric auth with reliable location data.</comment>


YouTube Channels That Will Make You Wiser - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@kevindeasis/14-youtube-channels-that-will-change-you-260c60798170#.snjz13kqd <comment><USER2> deleted by author.</comment>


Wicked - <AUTHOR> http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/07/wicked-1.html <comment><USER2> I was in total agreement up to this point:

 _there really is no 'right' formulation and no 'right' answer. These are problems that cannot be engineered._

On the contrary, engineering is 100% about addressing these kinds of problems (not all engineering problems match all 10 criteria, but most match at least some of them). Those people who think the engineering approach to problems is "define it, decompose and scope it, solve it, implement it" - or, as we call it, the Waterfall Method - have mistaken homework problems for engineering problems. They really have no idea what engineering is.

Then there's this:

 _our biggest challenges are ... issues of communication, coordination, and cooperation. These are, for the most part, well-studied problems that are not wicked._

That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.

Incidentally, although he inexplicably doesn't link to it, Ritter and Webber's original paper "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning" is quite readable and well worth the time: [http://www.uctc.net/mwebber/Rittel+Webber+Dilemmas+General_T...](http://www.uctc.net/mwebber/Rittel+Webber+Dilemmas+General_Theory_of_Planning.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> it feels a bit like: damn those scientists/engineers trying to solve complex problems with a one one-size-fits-all analytical/reductionist toolbag; some problems are really hard! What we need is to use our one-size-fits-all Structured Dialogue Design!

<comment><USER4> I don't think that's what he is arguing. The problem isn't that scientists aren't solving problems well enough: the problem is that those solutions don't get technologized, combined and put to use, through lack of communication, cooperation and coordination between scientists, other scientists from other sciences, industry, politicians and some in between.

A staggering amount of knowledge is being produced and most of it sits gathering dust. We've already reached the point where many new inventions/discoveries turn out to be rediscoveries of something already conceived of, or even thoroughly figured out, in the sixties. This happens all across the sciences, because there is too much relevant information for a single person, or even a single university department, to know of. We need tools to help with that.

My God, as I'm writing this I realize this is the most powerfully insightful thing I've read this year!

<comment><USER5> To put it another way: scientific positivism allows one person, working alone in a laboratory, to discover something fundamentally new, by simply ratcheting along in tiny increments from what has already been discovered. This can be good—something new inevitably gets discovered over time—but it also has a fundamental weakness, in that most scientists toil in obscurity with the public never understanding the relevance of their work, and thus never applying it outside their original domain.

I'm not sure the output of scientific positivism _can_ be well-indexed, to the point where anyone can find all the relevant pre-existing work they could build upon in their own: as there is no one big point where something new is discovered, but rather a lot of little facts and confirmed/refuted hypotheses that snowball until a meta-analysis of several studies can actually say something for certain, there's no one thing for a scientific expert system/communications tool to return to you. I expect, to have such a thing at scale, we'd need an actual human-level AI that "read" and understood the significance of every study in every field, and could see all the cross- correlations.

Before the advent of scientific positivism, though, we had a sort of ritualized science, where we would get large groups of people all studying one thing or another, out looking for proof or disproof of whatever particular thing they currently believed, leaping around wildly in hypothesis-space rather than just edging forward and taking whatever facts came along. There would be scientific belief "movements," in the same way that there are artistic "movements." Because it was ritualized, science was able to be made an entertaining talk of at the time, similar to celebrity gossip—everyone would have their own opinion on whether the currently-researched belief held true or not, and would debate it constantly, increasing public awareness of the subject; a "named hero" scientist would later come with a sweeping experiment and prove one or the other group right, and would be heralded by that group and have some unit of measure, chemical element, or heavenly body named after them.

Ritualized science didn't necessarily advance human knowledge "as a whole" very quickly—the iterative assembly-line process we have now seems to work quite well for that—but it did seem to get each new scientific fact thoroughly embedded in the public consciousness, because of what is basically good _social game design_. Perhaps we need some more of that, some hybrid model where scientists _can_ still be "heroes" with "rivals" in the public eye, entertaining and informing in conjunction and raised up with social status, rather than simply workers for government grants raised up only with citations in journals?

As a screwy tangent: perhaps this could even be a facade on top of current science, a sort of staggered release of scientific knowledge in high-assurance bursts, with the rest of the "development" going on in some scientific "closed alpha" where the public wouldn't be constantly bombarded with overzealous summations every time the ratchet was turned (basically a justification for Yudkowsky's "Bayesian Conspiracy.") When a scientific hypothesis was made theory, it would be handed off on stone tablets to a researcher well-trained in rhetoric with a nice-sounding last name, and they would become, to the public, "the one who discovered the theory of X." Only the conspiracy would know that it was the work of thousands.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "What we need, in other words, is a Facebook for collaborative decision- making: an app built to compensate for the most egregious cognitive biases and behaviours that derail us when we get together to think in groups."

I think what he's referring to may have already been proposed by Robin Hanson in the form of "Futarchy," a system of government that uses prediction markets to enact laws:

<http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.html>

<comment><USER7> The sole reason I'd like to get leadership in some group with a goal is to implement futarchy and see how it works.

That said, there are other frameworks built to improve collaborative decision- making. I also like the Persian method: If an idea comes up while the group is drinking together, discuss it sober as well, and vice-versa. Only implement ideas that meet approval both times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Anyone else having trouble finding a good definition of "Structured Dialogic Design"? Apparently it's been used in the Cypriot peace process, but I can't find a good description of how it differs from "getting a bunch of people in a room to talk about a problem".

I'm hoping he threw that term out as a teaser for part 2.

<comment><USER9> There's a link to a subpage of <http://dialogicdesignscience.wikispaces.com/> in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Some projects I've done failed precisely because of a desire to tackle wicked problems. When I heard that I wanted to "boil oceans", it was an apt criticism. However, I learned a lot.

The article need not be taken as a criticism of engineering or scientific reductionism. These approaches to problem solving are correct for certain phases of tackling a problem (like implementation).

The problem we collectively have with wicked problems is that they are vastly interconnected, and so many small moving parts rapidly changing that we collectively can not keep up. Even if climate is slow moving, all the parts that affect it are not, and we are not fast enough or smart enough to keep up.

It is our self-righteous stance against nature that helps us survive, but admitting that a problem is bigger than us isn't ... natural.

My belief/hope is that computers will increasingly tackle wicked problems.

</comment><comment><USER11> I actually like this idea of an app to help craft arguments, but needs to be implemented on a smaller scale. Just a tool to help identify common logical fallacies would be pretty useful. Might be a way to ultimately leverage IBM's Watson technology, analyzing semantics to determine likely logical fallacies or cognitive biases.

</comment><comment><USER9> _"[...] surely we can build a simple app that everybody can use that does even one useful thing, like, say, mitigate the Erroneous Priorities Effect when you're attending a meeting."_

This, I believe is a good old engineering problem. The hard (maybe not wicked) problem is getting people to use it. Ah yes, and if you really want to help solve the wicked problems, it can't just be _any_ people but rather those who make/influence important decisions.

</comment><comment><USER12> >Climate change is a great example of a wicked problem: Quick, somebody tell me what the acceptable maximum amount of CO2 in the atmosphere should be, in parts-per-milion! Provide me with the answer to that question, and you win a pony!

We don't know. At some point 450ppm was considered acceptable, but at this point the maximum acceptable level may well be 350ppm (pre-industrial revolution it was around 275ppm).

Right now we're at around 390ppm, so whatever it ends up being we have to reduce emissions from their current levels on at least a per-capita basis if not overall.

<comment><USER13> "We don't know" is the answer he is looking for to his rhetorical question. It's a value judgement. The island nations that are losing land to rising oceans have a very different idea of what is acceptable to northern nations enjoying longer growing seasons and milder weather.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Web search is the same way.

This sounds like a lot of meta-level confusion.</comment>


Can I interst anyone in a t-shirt or t-shirt concept? - <AUTHOR> http://passportshirts.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN. I am a Graphic designer/Wordpress designer exploring an idea. I didn't put an SSL cert on the store but I'm curious if you think the idea is worth pursuing.</comment>


Can the Enterprise be Consumerized? - <AUTHOR> http://allenc.com/2013/07/can-the-enterprise-be-consumerized/

<comment><USER2> What if most business software gets replaced with SaaS?</comment>


Show HN: People Food - $7 Office Lunches for Hungry Startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.pplfood.com/# <comment><USER3> 1\. Make it $10 or $11. It's the most a lazy and cheap person will pay and it's a lot more than $7. You're still _way_ cheaper than most other options. Use most of the money on delivering great food.

2\. Cleanliness! Make sure you put in serious effort to ensuring the things you're delivering were prepared properly and cleanly. That they arrive nicely (tape soup lids well!). One round of office food poisoning...

3\. Target _individuals_ and _teams_. Get groups of people in companies to start "Lunch Pooling" (thelunchpool.com available :D). Make a minimum subscriber count of 3 or even more, so it's worth your while and people are forced to spread the word. Or even use the PayPal/Dropbox technique, people inviting others could get a free lunch. If enough employees do it on their own some companies will decide to just do it for the whole company. The Apple approach to "enterprise" sales.

4\. Come to Santa Monica, CA.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. We've though about it, but we really want to support the scrappy little seed-stage startups who can't afford $11 lunches, but want to eat lunch as a team.

2\. No problems with that so far, but thanks for the tip!

3\. That's a good idea! We've been suggesting to really small startups (<5 people) that they order lunch along with other companies in their building.

4\. You got it!

<comment><USER4> Shouldn't the scrappy seed stage startup be hitting up Safeway and buying bread and cold cuts, pb&j, or...ramen, if it wants to be "scrappy"?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's definitely the traditional idea. Here are two reasons that I think $7 is worth their money:

1\. Foods like pb&j and ramen aren't exactly going to keep your brain in tip- top condition all day. Unbalanced meals can make you feel very tired.

2\. Many of these scrappy startups can't make the time to even order groceries online. (source: I lived in a hacker house for a year)

<comment><USER5> I think the $7-$8 price point is ideal. It is affordable enough for most companies to be able to justify it. Over $10/meal starts seeming a little extravagant to me.

Source: Startup founder who is about to sign up with the service to give it a try because I've been looking for something like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A few questions:

      - Do you have a minimum/maximum order size?
      - What sort of commitment do you require (the FAQ mentions a commitment but doesn't give details)?
      - Can you accommodate my low carb/dairy-free/gluten-free/MOKO* lifestyle?
      - Are there any feedback mechanisms so I can let you know what I thought about the food?
      - Is there any choice in what I get, or is it all chosen for me?
      - Do you guarantee my food will arrive when I want it and not two hours late?

*MOKO: will only eat 'meat of known origin'

<comment><AUTHOR> Minimum order size: 2. We didn't really set a maximum, but so far, nobody has asked for more than we can handle.

All of our current customers have a repeating weekly order. If they want to change it, they have to tell us by Friday the week before. That's really all a 'commitment' means.

Right now, only 1 meat meal and 1 vegan meal a day. We're thinking about adding a GF option.

I was supposed to add a feedback button today, but now my email inbox is overflowing :)

All chosen for you. Current customers love the 'surprise factor' and haven't had any complaints about food choices yet.

Yes. We did have our delivery schedule run 15 mins behind one day and apologized with a 5% discount for our customers.

Hope that answers everything :)

<comment><USER7> > Right now, only 1 meat meal and 1 vegan meal a day. We're thinking about > adding a GF option.

One emphatic suggestion: make sure your vegetarian/vegan meals have as many calories as the meat meals. This is something that so many caterers get wrong.

Low-carb and MOKO strike me as not something you should take into consideration but options to avoid dairy and gluten make sense for when you expand your menu, as those can be serious allergies for some people. I would add nut allergies to the list, as they're quite common.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion! We've been leaning on lots of different beans to make sure the vegan meals have enough calories & protein :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 8 new Outlook windows on the other monitor later, I realize it's a mailto link. And show me some pictures of the food!

<comment><AUTHOR> I totally feel you about the mailto link - It was just a quick way to get everything up and running. Will definitely change soon :)

P.s. Know any good food photographers?!

<comment><USER9> Try this, someone showhn'd a while ago. [http://squaresend.com](http://squaresend.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice, I like it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Jesus, Iowa is cheap I think I averaged $2 a meal last month. Sandwiches and cereal FTW.

</comment><comment><USER11> You made a well designed front page. The colours are nicely fitting and the logo is great it associated with some kind of food immediately (made me think of spring rolls or something like that)! Just wanted to say that after a day of repeatedly stumbling upon extremely annoying hip, identical, scroll-untill- you-die sites, yours made me smile a little. And now I'm hungry.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much for the lovely compliment :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Just ordered and tried the food. It was very good.

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/z5232fgpj0xs77g/DSC_0461.JPG](https://www.dropbox.com/s/z5232fgpj0xs77g/DSC_0461.JPG) [https://www.dropbox.com/s/bczdlrf4gp1szp7/DSC_0452.JPG](https://www.dropbox.com/s/bczdlrf4gp1szp7/DSC_0452.JPG)

</comment><comment><USER13> How can I be sure you source from local markets? This doesn't scale easily either. How do you plan to combat carelessness when demand goes up and you all of sudden need to push out 1000 or 10,000 meals at lunch time?

<comment><USER14> Cryptographically signed receipts, of course.

 _sigh_ sometimes I hate the people on HN.

<comment><USER13> I... don't know where the sarcasm or hatred came from. Do these questions seem unfair to you?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I love that you folks - in contrast to so many other catering companies - <USER2> transparent with your pricing!

Come to NYC?

(question: what are our options in NYC? Besides seamless, which basically means we eat from the same 3 places every week?)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Hopefully we'll come to NYC sometime in the future :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If I lived in SF I'd totally jump on this. I was so productive in college because I lived right next to a gym and my dining hall had unlimited eating from 7am until 8p, every day.

</comment><comment><USER17> Questions: Why did you pick $7? Why not $10 or $15? What diet will the first meal plans be for? Will it be all organic? Is it freshly prepared each day from raw ingredients?

<comment><USER18> $7 will buy you a couple tacos and a bottle of Coke at the taco truck. $7 is a pretty good price for lunch.

Now, given that it's for startups in San Francisco, the demand for local- sourced organic quinoa meat substitute may make $7 harder to do.

<comment><AUTHOR> "local-sourced organic quinoa meat substitue" hahahaha so true

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm all for more lunch options. Can you _please_ offer a healthy snack solution as well? I'd pay out of pocket for this. 4pm is my hunger-witching time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ooh good idea. How much would you pay for a 4pm snack?

<comment><USER19> I got a Naturebox ($20/month) for my mom and she loves it. I'm considering doing the same this year for her and myself and I think its the right price point. If my company stocked Naturebox treats, they would be a huge hit. Most tech companies seem to be using the same service for their snacks. Whenever I visit another office I always see the same assortment of Popchips, Doritos, Pirates Booty as well as Vitamin Water, Crystal Geyser mineral water, Odwalla, and soft drinks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What a wonderful idea. Just FYI, I went to share this on facebook, and the thumbnail was white on white. You might want to put a few metadata tags in there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ahh thanks for noticing that! Just added it to the infinite to-do list :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This sounds promising. I upvoted just because I want SF folks to afford cheap and healthy lunch. I hope it all goes well and you can expand to Seattle area.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much for the support! I also hope all goes well and we can expand to the Seattle area soon :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> -Whats the approx nutritional value for all your combos, crude figures on the lower side of estimate would be a good thing to know.

<comment><AUTHOR> We aim for 600-800 calories per serving, but we don't make any promises about the exact nutritional value

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> FYI, it seems like the email you have listed (email@example.com) is bouncing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm just tested it and it seems to be working. Also, my inbox is overflowing haha. Try again and let me know if it works!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> What a great idea. When will you support Palo Alto/peninsula area cities?

<comment><AUTHOR> Why thank you! Once we get settled in SF, the rest of the Bay Area is next (~6 months) :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> any plans to expand to Seattle soon? Would love to give this a try for our team

<comment><AUTHOR> We're still getting settled in SF, but I'll add Seattle to the list :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Good idea. But I think pricing needs an update. Usually eating out is $5 a meal.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Just curious, but where can I get a $5 meal in SF? (Not trying to sound rude, I just can't find anywhere that cheap :)

Also, I would say that most popular catering option in SF is ZeroCater, and their website says that meals start at $12-14/person.

<comment><USER27> Not many places. You can get a good Bahn Mi in the inner sunset for < $5. Also, Mehfil in SOMA has a $5 lunch special, but it's not a balanced meal.</comment></comment></comment>


Plex Releases Client for Non-Jailbroken Apple TVs - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2013/06/05/plex-releases-client-for-non-jailbroken-apple-tvs/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is crazy ingenious. By using your computer as the Apple TV's DNS server, you can essentially replace the Trailers app with a Plex client.

More details here: [http://forums.plexapp.com/index.php/topic/69410-please- read-...](http://forums.plexapp.com/index.php/topic/69410-please-read-..).

I've been using the iPhone Plex app and sending the video to my Apple TV via AirPlay so far, but I'm really looking forward to trying this.

If enough people start using this, I wonder if Plex will just integrate it into the main Plex Server software?</comment>


GeoParsing, reaching accuracy down to POI's. A disambiguation issue - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mapplas.com/post/131147015214/mapplas-geoparser <comment><USER2> This looks interesting. For HN purposes, you'd be better off converting that slide deck to a blog post that explains the problem and how you approached it, with as much technical detail as you can.

If you do that, please email us at email@example.com and we'll send you a repost invite for this (an experiment we're running to give good stories a second chance at attention on HN).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I will do it!</comment></comment>