A Drinking Glass That Can Prevent Sexual Assault - <AUTHOR> http://www.core77.com/blog/object_culture/a_drinking_glass_that_can_prevent_sexual_assault_25343.asp <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6122049](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6122049)

</comment><comment><USER3> _some 400,000 women are rendered unconscious and subsequently raped each year_

This is unbelievable. If this is true, and assuming most of the victims are not repeat ones, it stands to reason that almost every woman that goes out drinking for more than a few years will be raped. How can there be _that_ many rapists out there?

<comment><USER4> The 400,000 figure does not seem to exist anywhere else online. Searching "400,000" and "rape" returns no results regarding date rape, the closest results I can find relate to the number of rape survivors in the Congo (400,000). This wikipedia article on date rape suggests that roughly 2% of date rape victims have been drugged, so if the 400,000 figure is to be believed that means there are 20,000,000 date rape victims every year? That seems... unbelievable! This figure seems to be pulled out of nowhere. Also worth mentioining that the #1 date rape drug is... alcohol! This article smells a lot like FUD. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_rape_drug#Frequency_of_occ...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_rape_drug#Frequency_of_occurrence)

edit: and in the video the project creator claims over a million people are victims every year, again no citation.

edit edit: found a study that claims 4% of rape victims had been drugged[1] and according to RAINN there are ~200,000 rape victims every year[2]

[1] [https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/212000.pdf](https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/212000.pdf)

[2] [http://www.rainn.org/get-information/statistics/frequency- of...](http://www.rainn.org/get-information/statistics/frequency-of-sexual- assault)

So assuming the RAINN figure is accurate and the study figure is accurate that means there is ~10,000 drug involved date rapes per year.

<comment><USER5> I would not be surprised if a factor was mixed in for the "most rapes go unreported, especially date rapes," estimates.[1] Given these figures, either the 3% conviction rate or the 46% reporting rate, a person could take numbers that may or may not already include these adjustments and apply the most helpful. 10,000 x 33 = 330,000, might as well round up to 400k.[2]

I'm not saying that's what happened in this case, but abuse of confidence intervals is an common problem, even among those with good intentions and little idea that what they're doing is misleading.

[1] [http://www.rainn.org/get-information/statistics/reporting- ra...](http://www.rainn.org/get-information/statistics/reporting-rates)

[2] This guy says 400k, but we know that less than half are ever reported, so it's probably closer to a million. And so on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This would be great if drink spiking was an actual problem, but the overwhelming evidence is that in most cases the victim simply drank too much alcohol and then blamed their subsequent problems on their drink being spiked. (Your drink being spiked also provides a socially acceptable excuse for being out of control in a way that irresponsible alcohol consumption does not.) Furthermore, better detection & prevention of drink spiking will only serve to exacerbate this problem, as young women will have less reason to monitor their alcohol consumption, safe in the knowledge that their drink won't aid in their subsequent abuse.

The way to prevent substance-related rape is easy: (1) don't drink excessively and (2) drink with somebody who will look out for you, preferably someone who is sober.

<comment><USER7> > The way to prevent substance-related rape is easy: (1) don't drink > excessively and (2) drink with somebody who will look out for you, > preferably someone who is sober.

Maybe some people _want_ to drink excessively (1) and with friends who also want to drink (2). For that matter, if you want a really easy way to prevent rape, why not just lock yourself alone in a room all day?

An excessive comparison, perhaps, but I think we shouldn't be so quick to blame the victim here. The thing is, people should be able to drink excessively on occasion if they want to without having to justify it. It's a problem with society that needs to be fixed if they can't do that.

And whether you personally intended it or not, comments like "the overwhelming evidence is that in most cases the victim simply drank too much alcohol and then blamed their subsequent problems on their drink being spiked" are misguided (victims, by definition, don't need to "blame" anything other than their attacker). Also, citation needed.

<comment><USER8> Those glasses are a pragmatic solution to a moral problem, so there's not point in discussing the moral problem, and your parent is presenting a pragmatic (as depressing and curtailing to personal freedom as it is) solution in counterpoint to the glasses.

The moral problem is _some people rape people who are intoxicated or who they got drunk with the intent to rape_. The ideal, moral solution is _people stop raping_. The number of people of who rape (EDIT: and the number of rape episodes) should absolutely be reduced, but ending rape altogether isn't going to happen in our lifetimes.

So, to reduce the number of rapes we can use things like the cups (which could avoid intoxication by date rape drugs) but also try not to drink too much, especially if you don't have someone to watch out for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is spiking of drinks really that common? I've only ever seen GHB or Ketamine used recreationally. I've never heard anyone say they'd been intentionally and maliciously dosed, although I've seen people ingest by accident.

<comment><USER10> Does it matter if its common? If its something we can prevent, why not?

<comment><USER11> Focussing attention on something scary but rare leads people into danger when they ignore the much more common risk.

We know that people make mistakes when drunk, and we know that some people use alcohol as a rape-drug. In England it's much more common for people to make bad choices about sex when they're drunk than for a predator to deliberately spike a drink with a drug.

Having a shot glass with whiskey in it and the label "safe" is just weird.

<comment><USER12> Indeed. Most common thing to spike drinks with? More alcohol.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ummm...why not create disposable (or reusable) testing strips or something instead?. You can carry them in your wallet/purse and you don't have to rely on the bar/club to buy new glassware.

<comment><USER14> Because this is automatic, and doesn't require that inebriated people maintain their own quality controls.

With a strip, ignoring the fact that it's a socially awkward thing to do, when are you going to test your drink? Before you take every single drink? I know people who have been drugged this way and they _swear_ they never left their drink alone.

<comment><USER15> it would be simpler and more effective to integrate this technology into drink straws and other paraphernalia. Bars will be hesitant to replace their entire glassware supply.

<comment><USER14> It _is_ in drink straws.

<comment><USER15> Sorry, where did you see that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Cool tech, but what bar owner is going to buy these?

Assuming they cost more than regular glasses, why would you want to advertise the fact that your glasses are Roofie-proof? That's a creepy precedent to set

<comment><USER17> I'm wondering how well it survives repeated steam-cleaning, and whether it somehow indicated when it's aged too much.

<comment><USER5> I hadn't considered the extra-high heat used in bar-grade dishwashers. I was thinking about how great a solvent alcohol is.

If these were single-use plastic glasses, I think that would be a best case scenario, but then you're pretty much limited to ballgames.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I remember an Australian study into drink spiking found that out of a pool of women who claimed to have been drugged, not a single one actually showed evidence of drugs other than alcohol. Now the definition of "drink spiking" includes having extra spirits added to a regular drink, or maybe just drinking too much.

A true urban legend that makes good headlines in a society prone to moral panic (not to say it _never_ occurs, but the prevalence is grossly, hugely distorted).

</comment><comment><USER12> Security mindset time!

This invention is cool, but relies on either staff telling customers, or customers all being informed. In the former case, it is unrealistic to expect to staff to be able to carry this out at a busy bar, and weird stuff happening to uneducated customers would only either freak them out, or make them go "cool new glasses!".

In the case of customers being informed, I go and acquire a range of interesting drugs that might have the desired effect, and test them until I find one that isn't caught. Or, y'know, just go back to surprise extra alcohol and a bit of social coercion when that alone isn't enough (discounting here any extra kicks from the other effects of any drug on the victim).

<comment><USER17> People would pick it up over time. I think a more serious issue would be that once these glasses entered the public's mindspace, people might expect that their glassware has it when it doesn't, creating a false sense of security.

<comment><USER12> Ooooh, nice addition! Also, surprise glass swap-out!

</comment></comment></comment><comment> mh- that's certainly one of the more productive $50k projects I've seen crowdfunded.

[http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/drug-rape-prevention- drink...](http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/drug-rape-prevention-drinksavvy- color-changing-drinkware)</comment>


Ask HN: Why some people don't read books? - <AUTHOR> I think a large part of the world don't read books because they haven't met someone successful who reads lot of books. <comment><USER2> I think time constraints is one reason. Most books take multiple hours to read and it takes a while to find out if it's a book you like.

The bottom line is that most people read books for entertainment. I argue that fiction, self-help and nonfiction books are all entertainment. Unless the content is put into practice. The time to read 1 book is about 4+ movies. If your time is limited what do you choose. Additionally movies can be enjoyed with multiple people. These days you can find many ways to entertain yourself. Books are just one of many possibilities.

Yes, I know you can learn a lot by reading but it's only helpful if it's put into practice. Also, people forget, I hear of people that read 100's of book a year but I challenge most to recite a summary of what they've read. I bet most people will fail. Therefore that's why I say that most book reading is for entertainment.</comment>


Ask HN: Young devs vs. Older devs salaries - <AUTHOR> I'm 24 living in NYC working for a big tech company making ~$120k/year, combining bonuses, stocks and salary.
My question, if I'm making this at age 24, how much are older devs in their 30s/40s making?
We recently hired somebody who's around 40 and is only a level higher than me. The same level that other devs in the company get to by the age of 26-27, making around 10%-15% more than me.
My intuition tells me that my overall compensation won't increase that much even by the time I reach to Principal Engineer.
I feel as if no matter how much more experience you have, your overall compensation is quite similar to that of a graduate, or at least is not significantly higher.
Any thoughts? <comment><USER2> $120k/year at the age of 24 is already pretty high. I wouldn't expect a crazy %-increase at that level.

<comment><USER3> But the 120k/year he quoted includes bonuses, stock, and salary. Especially in NY, that isn't all that ridiculous. My annual combined salary in Austin, TX is very close to that at a similar age.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's pretty good for Texas, right? I've heard it's really really cheap down there. Hence, relatively speaking you're making more than me. Who do you work for? Do you think it's possible to get a similar salary in Dallas too? Any companies down there?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You are probably within a 1.5-2x of your total annual comp based upon current trends. I am in my late 30's and most friends that stayed in dev roles are making mostly in the < $200k range regardless of location. The way to increase it is to work on exiting a development role and moving into other roles or work on becoming a founder. Sadly, engineering is still not as respected in a financial sense, I think partially because US based companies feel they can off shore work for fractions of a dollar, thus keeping engineer salaries artificially capped.

In your early-mid 20's you are doing well and should be proud. In my 20's I did very similar but found that I hit a ceiling that just couldn't be breached until I left pure development roles. Not saying you can't do better, just that it has been a trend in software for a long time.

</comment><comment><USER5> As an employee your intuition is largely correct. You can expect to max out at about 2x of that (inflation adjusted). The way to make dramatically more than that is to be compensated as part of the revenue stream of a business in some way, and then to increase the amount of revenue that is funneled into that business.

Owning your own business is the simplest example of this but other options are available. Startups model this via equity, finance typically does this via bonus payouts, and consulting does this via bill rate.

Usually this comes with an increased level of risk or less guaranteed income. It would not be surprising to move from one mode of compensation to another many times in your career.

</comment><comment><USER6> Throwaway account for the purposes of workplace anonymity. I just wanted to add an anecdotal data point.

I am also a mid-20s year old living in NYC working in tech, although not for a large company. My cash compensation is currently around $200k/year, salary + bonus. I also have some options which may or may not ever be worth anything. I would parrot what a3voices said, and say that I probably got to where I am by having a slightly-more scarce specialty in tech, and also by being one of the people with a full grasp of the company stack.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's going to be highly location/talent dependent, but from a quick glance at salary sites, NY,NY seems to pay about 20% more than the area I'm used to. Thus, I could see a reasonable salary of $150k at the Senior (10-12 year level.) Obviously, there are specialties where you could do much better.

That's a high salary at 24, so you will either grow significantly, or you'll see that level out quickly.

</comment><comment><USER8> I would have to agree with you. The most career/salary growth that professionals see is between 25-34 years of age. Being 24 years old and make 120K a year, I'd say you're off to a great start.

</comment><comment><USER9> Pretty much echo what everyone has said, as an individual contributor if you double up you're doing good.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think the best you can possibly do is 2x your current compensation as an engineer given ideal circumstances. The older engineers who make a ton are probably really good at job hopping and/or negotiating, in addition to working hard consistently and being smart. I also suspect they orchestrate situations where they work for managers who they have a good relationship with, so the chances they get promoted are greater. I think another key factor is they become a scarce resource to the company, i.e. the only person who really knows the entire stack, which gives them leverage. Another possible factor is day- to-day they prioritize visible work for which they'd get future recognition. One highly paid engineer I knew also seemed good at building relationships with everyone.

The only way to truly beat the system financially is to get early equity in a startup that becomes very successful.

<comment><USER11> > The only way to truly beat the system financially is to get early equity in > a startup that becomes very successful.

Or ignore compensation as a route to wealth. Invest in real estate on the side. The job provides security. The investments create wealth in the more distant future.</comment></comment>


Dwarf Fortress starting during apt-get upgrade - <AUTHOR> https://askubuntu.com/questions/938606/dwarf-fortress-starting-during-apt-get-upgrade <comment><USER2> The real WTF is that APT spawns an external process to check disk usage, instead of invoking statvfs() on its own.

Some cases are less clear-cut, however. For example, the Debian 'nodejs' package installs node.js binary as /usr/bin/nodejs and not /usr/bin/node because it conflicts with another package: [https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=614907#108](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=614907#108)

And let's not forget rename(1) from util-linux versus the Perl rename(1)...

<comment><USER3> It isn't `apt`. See how they mentioned that `mysql` packages were installing? Well, in the `preinst` shell script, in the .deb, there is the line:

`if LC_ALL=C BLOCKSIZE= df --portability $DATADIR/. | tail -n 1 | awk '{ exit ($4>1000) }'; then`

There's `df` being called without the full path and that's what would be spawning Dwarf Fortress.

<comment><USER4> That doesn't make it much better though. Parsing the output of df (with a useless tail -1) is kind of awful when you can use something like stat -f -c %a.

<comment><USER5> That has the same problem, just with a different name. So your solution solves a style complaint, not an actual functional problem.

<comment><USER6> I agree with your comment about it being functional. But wouldn't removing tail from the pipe remove complexity and speed up the processing(Arguably, most likely only by a small fraction)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Using aliases in `~/.bashrc` rather than putting scripts or symlinks in $PATH is a good mean to avoid those kind of problems, provided bashrc includes code to quit if ran in non-interactive mode (default at least on ubuntu).

Many use aliases only to specify default command parameters, but it works just as well to provide an execution path, like, in this case:

        alias df=/home/my_user/games/dwarf_fortress/df

It would only be executed in interactive sessions, this way, which should guard well enough against system code interpreting it.

Of course, this still means user can't use system's `df` easily, but I guess they don't use it anyway since they did not realize the problem until that upgrade.

<comment><USER2> > this still means user can't use system's `df` easily

        \df

There you go.

<comment><USER7> Awesome, didn't know about that. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The fact that the dwarf fortress binary is just 'df' was asking for trouble. In hindsight seems amazing nobody reported this before.

<comment><USER9> That's how i feel about "convert" from imagemagick

<comment><USER10> Which is why I use graphicsmagick [1] instead. The imagamagick executables becomes options behind the 'gm' executable.

[1] [http://www.graphicsmagick.org/](http://www.graphicsmagick.org/)

<comment><USER11> Can't believe I never heard of GraphicsMagick. Thanks for the heads up. I wonder if it has a Ruby interface.

<comment><USER12> IIRC yes but, since it leaked memory like a sieve, I did everything via _system( "gm ...")_

(This memory is a few years out of date.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> When I did my first few programming courses we were using C and on Windows, and using system("pause"); was our way of keeping cmd from closing. So as a joke over the years I've made a pause script for Linux in Python, Perl and even bash just so I can make such code valid.

But putting a whole game in place of a standard Linux util sounds like awesome menace, reminds me of the sl command (steam locomotive) which you can install on Debian (and maybe other distros?) for those who may typo ls they'll get a fun surprise :)

<comment><USER9> wasnt getc() available on windows?

<comment> Const-me It was and still is, the name is _getch() from <conio.h>

However, I can see how for a beginner programmer system("pause"); is more intuitive than printf/_getch() combo. Especially if said programmer is already familiar with windows shell and its commands.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why not have some Fun while waiting for upgrades to install? The bug is that apt doesn't carry on in the background ;-)

</comment><comment><USER15> Just wait till they release "Ground Control Center" (gcc) :-) For a long time there were two things called 'git' and installing the 'wrong' one invariably led to similar hijinks.

<comment><USER16> What was the other one?

<comment><USER17> I'm guessing the interactive fiction interpreter [1], which predated the version control system by a couple of years.

[1] [http://web.archive.org/web/20120826174233/http://diden.net/i...](http://web.archive.org/web/20120826174233/http://diden.net/if/git/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> [https://bugs.debian.org/752114](https://bugs.debian.org/752114)

</comment><comment><USER19> Don't trust $PATH in scripts. Use `/bin/df`.

<comment><USER20> df is a standard utility, like ls or cd. Invoking df on a POSIX system should do the expected thing, and if it doesn't it means something is broken.

<comment><USER21> On Unix/Linux, there is very little stopping the superuser from introducing new and inventive kinds of breakage, such as in this case. This one is just a little more amusing than most. But seriously, if root wants to install a new command called df and have it higher up in the PATH than the standard utility, why should the OS argue?

<comment><USER7> Note that the OS doesn't argue :)

But actually, it would be cool to have some kind of warning, like a POSIX linter that warns the user something broke the standard, and they can decide to ignore it and never hear about it again. I'm not a big fan of linters, usually, but it would make sense for end users tweaking their system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I didn't know Dwarf Fortress was packaged in Debian. The last time I tried playing it on Linux, it was annoyingly 32-bit.

<comment><USER9> > I didn't know Dwarf Fortress was packaged in Debian

well, goodbye productivity.

I wonder if I can run it on a production server without anyone noticing...

<comment><USER23> The text renderer seems to use considerably less CPU that the graphics one. I've been tempted to set up a docker image...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I just spilled my coffee</comment>


Once dismissed as fake, Maya calendar is Americas' oldest manuscript - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/09/08/once-dismissed-as-fake-maya-calendar-is-americas-oldest-manuscript-say-brown-university-scientists/ <comment><USER2> For those who aren't aware, the Catholic Bishop Diego de Landa burnt almost the entire written history of the Maya in 1562.

[http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=1896](http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=1896)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_de_Landa#Suppression_of_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_de_Landa#Suppression_of_Maya)

<comment><USER3> ISIS and Taliban eat your heart out... the Catholics perfected religious extremism centuries ago.

<comment><USER4> Lots of things disappeared around Christianity -- the Dionysos cult and all the Roman/Greek worship, the druids, the Asa religion, Catharism, etc, etc.

The Christians stopped supporting that type of thing after they lost most of their worldly power.

Now it is just the rest of the murderous and intolerant religions and ideologies left...

<comment><USER5> Christians are still calling, regularly, for the blood of their enemies. Don't kid yourself that there aren't Christians who believe the society and its powers that they created shouldn't be used to perpetuate their religion. States all over the world have to deal with this extremism..

<comment><USER4> News to me, despite that I think Dawkins is soft on religion. :-)

Which Christians -- and where -- are calling for the blood of their enemy _because of_ Christianity?

How many are killed? Google tells me it was eight people in total regarding abortion clinics in the US. Over decades.

(Edit: I can tell you that the main Swedish church refuses to criticise the people oppressing, murdering and expelling Christians from Gaza and Egypt. They criticize Israel literally thousands of times more. This seems to be more because they were pirated by left wing extremists than by nazi influence.)

<comment><USER2> [https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/tens-of- thousand...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/tens-of-thousands-of- muslims-flee-christian-militias-in-central-african- republic/2014/02/07/5a1adbb2-9032-11e3-84e1-27626c5ef5fb_story.html)

We could talk about the Balkans wars too if you'd like. Or the NLFT in India. Sadly I'm sure there are plenty of other examples.

<comment><USER4> Those are rounding errors if you compare with the 30 year war, the Huguenots or what Cromwell did on Ireland...

Or that the total non Muslim population is being forced out of the Middle East _right now_!

The Central African Republic was revenge for what a Muslim militia did -- "Those evil groups are taking revenge in the same way we did to them!" Seriously... that is the worst you have? :-)

From your own article: "... the former Muslim rebels, known as Seleka, who carried out deadly attacks on Christians after they grabbed power in March, prompting the birth of Christian militias called the anti-balaka, or "anti- machete" in the local Sango language. The armed vigilantes have used the power vacuum to step up assaults on Muslims."

And civil wars have always been incredibly horrible and dirty. The Balkans were also more ethnic than anything else -- and not exactly one sided either. :-(

According to Wikipedia, that Indian group had less than a thousand members. In total. That is a joke, compared to European history. (Or what goes on in Pakistan and Afghanistan today, for that matter. Check percentage Hindu of the population of Pakistan and Bangladesh over the last 50 years; it is not only the Middle East.)

<comment><USER2> I'm confused what point you think you are making? Religion = bad, yes I agree. Some magical quality of Christianity makes it better somehow? I disagree.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, being a day late -- the point I'm trying to make is that we pulled the claws and fangs out of our priests in the west. It was not a nice experience, but now it is done.

Globally, at least the Catholics are heavily influenced by the West, too.

We just need to guard against a recurrence of the bad old days and the Islamists.

My point, to put it another way, isn't that Christianity is nice -- my point is that those clowns are relatively harmless today, compared to history and the Islamists.

<comment><USER5> And you are incorrect. There are insane Christians who want more than ever to usher in the 'new era of Christ' by bringing their Armageddon down upon us all. Those people should not be part of the US Military-Industrial complex, nor should these extremists be allowed access to power.

However, they are in power today.

<comment><USER4> There are crazies of all religions. But to go from that to your claims about US (I assume?) need really good references.

I'd say the Obama time contradicts your claims.

The intervention in Syria for example, was just symbolical -- despite systematic torture, bombing of civilians and repeated chemical attacks that resulted in hundreds of thousands dead.

The problem wasn't exactly too much spoiling for trouble...

As I noted above, 8 dead in total over decades from the abortion clinic violence. That is a slow Tuesday morning in the muslim world. :-) :-(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Americas'? America's.

<comment><USER7> _the_ Americas: North, Central, and South.

<comment><USER6> Not if you ask someone from Mexico like myself. And since this is a Mexican heritage thing we're talking about here...

The whole America-means-US thing didn't happen until well into the 19th century.

<comment><USER8> This has always been puzzling to me. Is it not just more-or-less a linguistic thing? In the Anglosphere, "America" refers to the US. Nothing about it is malicious or in contempt of Mexico or any other states in the Western Hemisphere, that's just how the terminology evolved.

<comment><USER6> > Nothing about it is malicious or in contempt of Mexico or any other states > in the Western Hemisphere

It _is_ malicious, but so ingrained into the psyche that the malice is forgotten by those into whom it was perpetuated. It is saying that the rest of the continent isn't American, somehow, that when you talk about American dreams and American ideals and the promise of freedom that America once meant to Europeans, you are definitely not extending those promises, dreams, and aspirations to the rest of America. Even the Lebanese diaspora that arrived in Mexico and Colombia (Salma Hayek, Shakira Mebarak, Carlos Slim, Demian Bíchir) were travellers aiming for America and her promises.

"America" is a very loaded term, even when used to refer to the United States. People use it differently. United States is more formal, America more aspirational. Well, the rest of America also has these aspirations. Like Morelos wrote, "That prohibit slavery forever, as the distinction of caste, being all equal and only vice and virtue distinguish an American from the other."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentimientos_de_la_Naci%C3%B3n](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentimientos_de_la_Naci%C3%B3n)

A whole immense garden, this is America:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SL3u7qU_09w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SL3u7qU_09w)

<comment><USER8> None of that changes the fact that, in English, "America" typically denotes the US and not the Western Hemisphere as a whole. You're splitting hairs over people using a word differently in English than they do in Spanish.

<comment><USER6> But you can't forget where the meaning comes from. I'm sure lots of people use "nigger", confederate flags, or "banana republic" without any malice too, but it doesn't mean that the people who hear it don't hear the malice.

It's not about English vs Spanish. It's not just a false cognate like "compromise" vs "compromiso" or "preservative" vs "preservativo". It's a term loaded with political meaning. It's about US vs America. Sure, the US is powerful and has managed to convince most of the world, even the parts that don't speak English, that the US is the only America worth talking about. On the other hand, Canada isn't entirely happy about not being America either:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29g57XTYgLE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29g57XTYgLE)

<comment><USER8> You don't get it. Singular "America" in its common usage in English to refer to the US is absolutely not a politically loaded term, at least not in the sense that you are saying. Your assertion to the contrary because you were taught differently in a non-Anglophone country does not change that. Language cannot be divorced from culture.

<comment><USER6> It is politically loaded to many people who hear it. Testament to the fact: "Murica" is used as a joke word to refer to things such as giant hot dogs, big guns, or invading other countries. Further testament to the fact: the song America the Beautiful, the saying "God bless America", America, land of the free.

Using "United States" in any of these would sound awkward and wrong, right? "United States the beautiful"? That is because "America" is overwhelmingly used with positive connotations, but _only_ for the US, and _that_ is what I'm protesting. The rest of America also wants these positive connotations, but instead we get not-quite-America such as _Latin_ America, _South_ America, or some other-adjective-America.

<comment><USER8> It has political connotations in those specific contexts (and "Murica" is ironic critique of those political connotations).

Now:

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

You're essentially arguing that it's a _bad_ thing that this outdated nationalistic concept is not widely attributed to non-US states in the Americas.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


ES6 JavaScript Destructuring in Depth - <AUTHOR> http://ponyfoo.com/articles/es6-destructuring-in-depth

<comment><USER2> Nice article! Just linked it in my recent post about getting started with ES2015: [http://juristr.com/blog/2015/08/jump-start- es2015/](http://juristr.com/blog/2015/08/jump-start-es2015/)

Thx

</comment><comment><USER3> the destructuring for optional arguments is a very useful use-case I had not thought of. Nice post!</comment>


Forgoing College to Pursue Dreams - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/business/the-thiel-fellows-forgoing-college-to-pursue-dreams.html?_r=1&hpw

<comment><USER2> I always find it ironic that Thiel, who followed one of the most risk-averse career tracks possible after high school (top undergrad + top law school + top law firm = guaranteed six-figure salary), is so whole-heartedly encouraging kids to not follow in his footsteps.

I question what the risk-weighted expected return for these kids ends up being, and how that compares to more traditional career paths. Thiel himself at least had the fallback option of a traditional career in case his entrepreneurial aspirations didn't work out. It looks like most of these kids already have a top college acceptance in had before accepting Thiel's fellowship, which gives them a backup option in the very likely scenario their "dreams" don't pan out. For kids who didn't have such backup options, I'd really question the rationality of pursing something like this.

I do question the broader movement to push kids from college to startups. I had the option of dropping out during college to work for a startup, and in retrospect I'm tremendously thankful I didn't take the opportunity. There is just so much risk of permanently prejudicing yourself for traditional types of work, and it's just a fact of life that very few startups are going to be successful to the point that it would justify forgoing those other opportunities.

The cynic in me is inclined to believe that the only ones who really benefit from this push towards startups, in the expected return sense, are the VCs. The VCs can hedge their risk between a number of startups to maximize their expected return. An individual startup founder cannot do that. An individual startup founder who is 19, fresh out of college, and has no safety net can do even less to minimize his risk, and has a lot to lose in the likely event that he fails.

<comment><USER3> A lot to lose, like what? At most they're out a year or two of their time, when they're young. There's nothing to stop you from going back to college at 22.

<comment><USER4> It's so much easier to say that when it isn't your life you are talking about.

<comment><USER5> I started college when I was 20, having spent an extra year in high school (startup high school, they didn't have a graduating class the year I was supposed to graduate) and then worked at a dot-com run exclusively by teenagers for a year. Or actually, I worked at a dot-com run exclusively by teenagers for 3 months, then our funding got pulled and I worked as a software engineer for the parent company for 3 months, then the parent company realized their was no money in its primary line of business and pivoted to a completely different idea, then I continued working for them for another 6 months.

Had I not done that, I probably would've stayed a physics major in college, done well, gone to physics grad school, and then realized I hated it when I was around 26 and suddenly ended up with no experience doing anything else and no clue what I wanted to do, a far worse outcome.

I think that there is, in general, far too much fear in contemporary American culture. Fear that if you don't do everything perfectly and don't follow the sequence laid out as a "safe" career track, you will end up screwed for life. Yes, if you end up following your own path, you _will_ get burnt by bad decisions at time, and you'll have to scramble to fix them, and some opportunities will close themselves off to you because you didn't pursue them. But you will also gain practice & confidence in dealing with those bad decisions, and learn how to fix them and that there will be other opportunities that open themselves up to you because you screwed up with what you _thought_ you wanted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The last few paragraphs of the article really brought an interesting light onto the subject. Most of the people I know who left college to start a business or to work somewhere in Silicon Valley had a remarkably privileged upbringing. They never had the worries about the financial or temporal investment into an education or any experience taking risks. I'm not trying to berate people who drop out of college for these reasons, but it's an important factor to keep in mind when truly analyzing their success.

<comment><USER7> While there is a <lot> of truth in this statement, one notable exception is worth mentioning: steve jobs. who apparently quit school in part because he thought college was too much for his familiy to pay for.

But I think you are more right than wrong in your observation. There are a lot of soft social skills and such that you need for business that could be learned in school. May not be news to some depending on there background and natural talents, etc.

<comment><USER8> Jobs grew up in Silicon Valley, and had connections to people in the industry that helped in the beginning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just because you can get into Princeton doesn't mean it's a good idea to pay to go.

Full scholarship? Go

Parents paying for everything? Go

Otherwise, you really need to consider an in-state school, and living at home. You work your ass off to be in the top percentile of students (obviously not a global solution), finish in 3 years, and get a full fellowship for grad school to a place like Princeton.

That's how we did it back in the day anyways.

Startup Idea

You only sell the University Certification, no courses, no teachers, no buildings, no Office of Strategic Management.

You only have incredibly hard tests that only 5% of the population can pass. They learn on their own. You guarantee that they are amazingly smart, or will pay their severance.

<comment><USER10> While elite schools like Princeton have very attractive financial aid packages, even if they didn't, the connections you'll make as an undergrad there are well worth the price of admission. It's not just the education you're paying for.

If you replace Princeton with another expensive private school that's _not_ a feeder system for America's upper class, I completely agree with your point.

<comment><USER11> According to the article, one of the main advantages of Thiel's program is the contacts they make. So how different is it from the Ivy League?

<comment><USER10> The comment I replied to suggested that an in-state school followed by grad school at Princeton would be a better alternative than paying for an undergrad degree at Princeton. I was responding to that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thiel Fellowship draws stellar applicants who I suspect would be successful, college or not. I do wish more regular American high school students got the opportunity to do something similar, i.e., put off college for two years to work and explore passion. I won't go as far as to say college is a waste of time (it's still the most sure-fire route out of poverty for example). But a lot of people go at 18 because it's the next step and end up floundering. I believe we'd get a better return on higher education in the US if there were more regular and accepted opportunities for students to work for a year or two, then decide if college is the right next step.

<comment><USER2> > I believe we'd get a better return on higher education in the US if there > were more regular and accepted opportunities for students to work for a year > or two, then decide if college is the right next step.

For once the problem isn't with the colleges. Colleges, by and large, don't care how many years you took off between high school and college as long as you bring the right GPA and SAT scores to the table. At colleges that care about more than that (Harvard, etc) having interesting experience after high school can only help your admissions chances.

The problem is social acceptance. Too many parents have this silly notion that if a kid doesn't go immediately to college, he'll spend life as a barista. My wife studied in Europe for a year after high school, and she absolutely wants our kids to do something similar. She said that living independently for a year really allowed her to focus on school in a way she could not have otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Rather than looking at traditional 'smarts', I would look at personality factors to assess if someone of college age should drop out - their levels of entrepreneurism, emotional intelligence, communication and persuasion skills, resilience, and sheer grit and determination. These traits can be found in people from any background, and will help them go the distance.

</comment><comment><USER14> Article in single-page: [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/business/the-thiel- fellows...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/business/the-thiel-fellows- forgoing-college-to-pursue-dreams.html?_r=2&hpw&pagewanted=print)

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm so sick of the continuing Peter Thiel hypefest. I don't like college either but his 20 for 20 program is just some ridiculous bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER16> College was supposed to prepare me to pursue my dreams.

</comment><comment><USER17> As someone said, these are bright people and will probably make it, if not they can still go back to college.

But for 99.99% of "smart people," college is probably the best bet. Even if you had a few $million, that can go very easily over the course of decades with a few bad investment decisions, medical bills or whatever. A safe job usually provides a steady income for decades and decades.

Thiel is set for life and then some, but even if he loses the money he has a top college education to fall back on. So it's easy to make experiments with _other_ people's lives.

No matter what, do not expect to work for Thiel's funds without a degree and from a top college [http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-05-14/wall_street/3...](http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-05-14/wall_street/31696189_1_global- macro-new-hedge-fund-job-market)

<comment><USER18> > But for 99.99% of "smart people," college is probably the best bet.

Perhaps not. In the USA: Of the top 1% earners, 49% have a postgraduate education[1]. From what I could find, There are 600,000 doctors and 11,000,000 lawyers in the USA which could be said to cover the vast majority of the 49% group.

Of the remaining 51%, 23% have a college degree leaving 27% _without_ a college education. Unless you are looking at very specific fields, it seems you are slightly better off without a degree at all if you are striving for financial success.

If your sights are not set so high, and you're happy with just a regular job: Only 30% of the population have a college degree. That means that 60% (discounted 10% to account for unemployment, which isn't even fair as many college graduates are unemployed) of the population are doing just fine without one.

With that said, you should still go to college. It is an amazing experience that comes with countless positives. Whatever happens in your future career with respect to said education shouldn't even be a consideration.

[1] [http://www.gallup.com/poll/151310/u.s.-republican-not- conser...](http://www.gallup.com/poll/151310/u.s.-republican-not- conservative.aspx)

<comment><USER19> > Of the remaining 51%, 23% have a college degree leaving 27% without a > college education.

Consider that some individuals who are members of households in the top one percent of income earners and have not completed a four year college degree will have married a high income earner who has completed a college or postgraduate education.

<comment><USER18> Sure, but it goes the other way too. Melinda Gates comes to mind as a prominent example. She has a degree, but Bill, who made the family's fortune, does not.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Live Ships Map - Vessel Traffic and Positions - <AUTHOR> http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/ <comment><USER2> This is just AIS Live. AIS (Automtic Identification System), or UAIS (Universal AIS) is now required by law on all vessels over 5000 tonnes. The original idea was to help prevent collision at sea under the SOLAS (Safety of Life at Sea) convention. It uses self-organised time-domain multiplexing to broadcast GPS Lat/Long (usually WGS84) and current SOG (Speed over Ground) and COG (Course over Ground), augmented by heading, cargo, port of departure, next port of call, and waypoint information.

It also broadcasts the ship name, registration number, physical size, tonnage, loading and other information.

Interestingly, although it's required by law that it be carried, it is not required by law that it be turned on.

Note, the above is all from memory, and some may be a little out-of-date or inaccurate. It's close enough to give you the idea, and if you want more accuracy it's easy to look up.

<comment><USER3> The captain of the marine salvage ship Odyssey complained about this system on one of the Treasure Quest TV episodes because it allows competitors and amateurs to know the location of his ship. He has to employ countermeasures, such as not staying over the location of a promising site for too long. That suggests it cannot legally be turned off.

<http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/treasure-quest/ome.html>

<comment><USER4> "Ships fitted with AIS shall maintain AIS in operation at all times except where international agreements, rules or standards provide for the protection of navigational information."

From "The December 2002 amendments" [http://www.imo.org/Conventions/contents.asp?topic_id=257&...](http://www.imo.org/Conventions/contents.asp?topic_id=257&doc_id=647#43) (about 2/3 of the way down)

<comment><USER2> Yes, but in international waters there are no real sanctions, and no patrols to check. When closer to shore it sometimes gets checked, but in my experience very few vessels are caught, and even fewer are fined, if their AIS is simply off.

However, the amendment is news to me - thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks, this will be a huge help to my business! -A Somali pirate

<comment><USER5> No data available nearby Somalia. GL pirate :)

<comment><USER6> Yet another reason to move your piracy startup to the Strait of Malacca

<comment><USER7> Or to California, so that you can get invested in by YC.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Gogo sells commercial in-flight WiFi business to Intelsat - <AUTHOR> http://gogoair.mediaroom.com/2020-08-31-Gogo-Announces-Entry-into-Agreement-to-Sell-its-Commercial-Aviation-Business-to-Intelsat-for-400-Million-in-Cash <comment><AUTHOR> > As part of the transaction, Gogo will enter into a 10-year network services > agreement under which Intelsat will have exclusive access to Gogo ATG > services for the CA market in North America, subject to minimum revenue > guarantees of $177.5 million.

Interesting approach here, seems to just be offloading the service to Intelsat only to have a rev guarantee which would make the sale profitable with a pretty quick turnaround.</comment>


Show HN: Why Non-Technical Founders Should Launch Their Startup for $300 - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/dusthq/why-non-technical-founders-should-launch-their-startup-for-300-5541acbf14db <comment><USER2> Because the technical founders know better.

</comment><comment><USER3> Bravo ! You made an article without the dust.com link congrats :)</comment>


Things to Know Before You Accept Another Privacy Policy - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/6-things-to-know-before-you-accept-another-privacy-policy.php#.T6BBOvTSC9E.hackernews

<comment><USER2> Those are 6 things that would be nice to know in a perfect world, some of them aren't going to help you very much in this one though.

Really there's just one thing to know ... does Ghostery's alert bar span half your screen?

<http://i.imgur.com/mFqGy.png>

That's a great sign that the site does not respect your privacy.</comment>


Lou Zoom - <AUTHOR> http://loureed.com/louzoom/

<comment><USER2> At first I thought here's a guy who's name happens to be Lou Reed but holy cow, it's actually the Lou Reed. This app definitely has a velvety feel to it (groan.)</comment>


1 + 1 = 1 or how you can get anywhere using your imagination - <AUTHOR> http://1p1e1.tumblr.com/post/12637305300/imagine

<comment><USER2> Repunits: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repunit>

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed. The whole blog is based on repunits. The name: 1 + 1 = 1. The date it was started 11-11-11 11:11:11 UTC. You can find them in the page source as well. Almost everywhere in the CSS (1px 11px 111px 1.1em, etc).

<comment><USER3> _The date it was started 1111-11-11 11:11:11 UTC._

Er, I doubt anyone started a blog nine centuries ago. (And neither UTC nor the Gregorian calendar had been invented.)

<comment><AUTHOR> You got me there. I got a little bit too excited with the 1's. :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Spike in Autism May Be Linked to Preservative in Processed Foods, Study Suggests - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertglatter/2019/06/28/spike-in-autism-may-be-linked-to-preservative-in-processed-foods-study-suggests/ <comment><USER3> Or maybe the "rise" in autism rates is due to the fact that our diagnostic tools have become more advanced in the past 20 years which has resulted in more people getting their diagnoses.

In particular older people (i.e. 30+) are getting diagnosed just now because doctors previously didn't know what they were looking for.

<comment><USER4> Do you not think that the highly competent researchers didn't account for this very well know the rise in the data. Their findings here are novel, critically important and are related to a host of other works revealing the intricate links between the gut biome and neurobiology previously unknown. Parkinsons is another disease that recently has been shown to potentially be related to changes in the gut biome.

<comment><USER5> The highly competent researchers have to answer the question:

"why have the number of children diagnosed with ASD increased?"

They can't "control" for changing diagnostic rules: that would literally mean "controlling" the exact thing they're trying to analyze.

What they are doing (as medicinal chemists?) is identify a compound(s) that correlate with the increased diagnoses.

Another study might investigate the method by which ASD is diagnosed - <USER2> applying modern diagnoses to old diagnoses, and vice versa.

There are also definitely sociological factors that could contribute - in the US specialized educational support for kids diagnosed with ASD is much better funded per-capita than most other learning difficulties, so there is a clear advantage to pushing for (or shopping around for) a dr that will give an ASD diagnosis - eg If you can get FAS diagnoses as ASD you'll get much more financial and educational support.

Personally I expect there to be a parental age component (which would explain the increased prevalence, relative to overall average, of ASD in middle and upper class Caucasian families, at least in the US).

I suspect however it's going to be a combination of all those factors, and probably a few more for good measure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm no doctor or biochemist but propionic acid seems way too natural and common a chemical to be a likely cause. It's not the first preservative I'd investigate either. For example, why not investigate benzoic acid?

<comment><USER7> I can't speak about benzoic acid, but the article notes that propionic acid is the most common compound produced by bacteria unique to the gut microbiomes of ASD children:

>Previous studies have demonstrated increased levels of PPA, a short chain fatty acid (SCFA), in the feces of children with ASD; we also know that the gut microbiome in these children is also quite distinct in terms of the type of bacteria that inhabit their intestines.

>Clostridia, Bacteriodetes, and Desulfovibrio bacteria are unique to patients with ASD. What's interesting is that these bacteria are also known to be fermenters of carbohydrates that produce PPA, and other SCFAs as well. Ironically, while PPA is the most common compound produced by bacteria in ASD patients, it is also widely used in the food industry as a preservative due to its ability to inhibit grown of fungi (mold).

So following up I found an article on the etiological history of the PPA link [0]. From that article, there was a 2008 study of PPA injections in rats (spoiler, observed to cause ASD-like symptoms)[1], and a case study in 2012 of an ASD child with propionic acidemia, a rare metabolic condition that affects PPA metabolism [2], which led to more recent studies establishing a connection between behavioral disruptions and propionic acidemia, even in children who did not meet the diagnostic criteria for ASD [3].

ASD can also exhibit GI tract issues like constipation and IBS as symptoms, which would have supported some kind of gut microbiome hypothesis. Regarding what you're saying about how common PPA is, one research group speculates a "two-hit" mechanism behind ASD:

>Al-Owain's group suggests that PA may thus act as one of the drivers of developing ASD under the two-hit model of ASD pathology, which posits that two separate factors must be present before ASD is developed. Under this model, one problem—such as PA in isolation—is insufficient to cause ASD, but when paired with another problem—such as another metabolic disorder affecting the gut-brain axis, like biotinidase deficiency—the combined detrimental effects of the two pathologies can cause ASD.

[0]: [https://www.foundationalmedicinereview.com/blog/the-link- bet...](https://www.foundationalmedicinereview.com/blog/the-link-between- propionic-acidemia-and-autism-spectrum-disorder-may-offer-etiological-clues/)

[1]: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18395759](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18395759)

[2]: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3573175/pdf/978...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3573175/pdf/978-3-642-32442-0_Chapter_143.pdf)

[3]: [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109671921...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1096719216301779)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The preservative in question is propionic acid (PPA):

> In the current study, Saleh Naser, PhD and her team at UCF found that when > neural stem cells were exposed to high levels of PPA, the neurons incurred > multiple changes resulting in cellular damage and inflammation. One of the > major effects of PPA they noted was the overproduction of glial cells, the > protective outer cells making up the sheath covering neurons, with a > corresponding reduction in the number of neurons themselves.

Here's another article covering some more of the etiological history behind this finding: [https://www.foundationalmedicinereview.com/blog/the-link- bet...](https://www.foundationalmedicinereview.com/blog/the-link-between- propionic-acidemia-and-autism-spectrum-disorder-may-offer-etiological-clues/)

On a side note: at the risk of both being slightly off topic and/or spreading bad science, there was that controversial assessment of Einstein's brain which noted that he had a higher proportion of glial cells than other brains studied (see Wikipedia for potential issues with the findings): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein%27s_brain#Glia...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein%27s_brain#Glial_cells)

I'm noting this only as a layman's speculation about glial cell concentration as a potential mechanism behind the phenomenon of higher intelligence and occasionally savant-like abilities in some of the high-functioning ASD population.

<comment><USER8> Were the "high levels" of PPA food level, or 100x total human lifetime exposure?

This is very preliminary speculative science that shouldn't be oversold.

<comment><USER7> The elevated levels of PPA are linked to a dysbiotic gut bacteria imbalance, with ASD children exhibiting more bacteria that produce PPA. I'd imagine if you're not eating PPA in excess of your body's ability to metabolize it you're fine.

Regarding the second half of your comment, I'll cite from the etiology article I linked:

> In the concluding sentences of their analysis, Witters and Debold make their > strongest argument for the connection between propionic acid and ASD by > observing that, given the rates of PA [proprionic acidemia] and of ASD > occurrence in the general population, the probability of there being no link > between the two pathologies is 4.34 in 10 trillion. Put differently, > comorbid incidences of PA and ASD are far more common than should be > expected between two unrelated diseases, meaning that there is most likely a > link between the two.

<comment><USER9> How did they make the calculation? From the same article:

> _Research produced in 2016 by Drs Peter Witters and Eric Debold corroborates > the link between the two conditions in a longitudinal study of 12 patients > investigating blood metabolite balance in patients with PA and behavioral > disruptions._

From [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propionic_acidemia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propionic_acidemia) the incidence of PA is 1/3500 and from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism_spectrum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism_spectrum) the incidence of ASD is 1/100, so assuming independence it's expected that you can find in the word 7000000000/3500/100 = 20000 person with both illness, and they are analyzing a group of 12 patients with PA and only 5 have clear ASD and other 3 have only some symptoms of ASD.

<comment><USER7> You're right that it's a low sample size, and the authors themselves do warn that diagnostic rates of ASD in children may be inflated:

> With the increasing reported frequency of ASD in the pedi-atric population > one cannot rule out a possible coincidence of the diagnosis of ASD in > patients with propionic acidemia.

Regarding the calculation, Wikipedia says 1 in 35000 for PA the US, rather than 3500, and the researchers use an incidence rate of .5% for autism rather than 1%. So the number of people is 1000, not 20000. The researchers say they're calculating off a 5/8 ASD/PA incidence rate, so the calculation is something like (1000/7 billion)^5*(some negligible amount)^3.

<comment><USER9> * 1000 cases in the word instead of 20000

OK. I'm fine with that. My idea was to show that if we assume independence, it is not difficult that someone can find 12 cases with both illness.

* About the calculation:

Is that in the paper? [I assume that "some negligible amount" means "close to 1".]

This calculation is the probability that if you pick 12 persons at random from the whole word population you find a group with 5 person with PA+ASD and 3 PA+dubiousASD and 4 with PA+noASD. There is a missing (1-epsilon)^4 that doesn't matter. And you need to add some combinatorial number, like (12! / 5! 3! 4!) ~= 30000.

Even assuming that "1-epsilon" and "some negligible amount" are equal to 1, the result of your calculation is 6E-35 that is much much much smaller than the reported result 4E-13 (after using the combinatorial number you get or 2E-30 that is still smaller). So they clearly used another calculation.

Anyway, your calculation is wrong because you can't use the probabilities of the general population in a calculation of a group that you cherrypicked.

<comment><USER7> They mention the 5 ASD out of 8 PA sample size, and they explicitly cite the .005 rate of ASD, but I think their PA incidence number is different than the one available on Wikipedia, and I couldn't find it in the paper so that may be where the discrepancy is from. I may be wrong but I don't think we need the combinatorics for this particular calculation since their calculation is trying to disprove that these events are independent rather than calculate the joint conditional probability. Obviously I can't comment on whether any cherry picking was done, or if these just happen to be the available sample of available children with this rare metabolic disorder. I'd agree and I think the authors of the study would agree that the sample size is too small for any definitive conclusions, but I think the body of evidence when considering the rest of the available PPA studies make a reasonable case for it to be a finding of interest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Should change the link to the actual, open access paper: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-45348-z](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-45348-z)

The Forbes summary contains some things that appear to be misunderstandings at best.

</comment><comment><USER11> Interesting how it's not listed for food use in EU: [https://echa.europa.eu/substance- information/-/substanceinfo...](https://echa.europa.eu/substance- information/-/substanceinfo/100.001.070)

<comment><USER11> Never mind, it's classifies separately in additives: [https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/efsajournal/pub/3779](https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/efsajournal/pub/3779)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How and if people got autism before processed foods?

<comment><USER13> You don't directly say it, so maybe I'm reading you wrong, but you seem to be suggesting that this hypothesis is nonsense because autism existed before this preservative was used.

The article isn't saying that the only cause of autism is the preservative. It is suggesting maybe part of the _increase_ is due to this preservative.

Although people died before cars existed, it doesn't mean that cars aren't the cause of some deaths today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Even if this isn't rock-solid I'd rather see a backlash against processed foods than against vaccines.

<comment><USER15> Thinking about this a lot lately. Biggest thing is getting people ready to put in the time needed to process food themselves. Reducing packaging and eating better food takes A LOT of time, and I don't think anyone except the portion of us that like to hunt recipes and cook are ready for that.

<comment><USER16> Basic cooking taking a lot of time is a myth. Sure, if you don't have a kitchen and a fridge at all, that is a problem.

And I suppose if you don't know how to turn on the oven then the whole endeavor looks like marathon running (and winning) looks to a bed-ridden person. But your goal is not to be a professional chief in 5 star restaurant, it is to cook some soup from whatever is in the fridge, boil some pasta, fry some eggs and chop up some greens. Cook enough to last a week and you are set.

Ask your first generation immigrant coworker to teach you what they cook (or ask them to introduce you to their parents :)).

<comment><USER15> It is absolutely not a myth. Every convenience you see represents time and "value" added by the food industry making it easier to put food into yourself. Of course it comes at the cost of health and the health of the environment.

Compare a fresh head of broccoli to a package frozen; with fresh, you've got to clean it, trim it, clean up after your trimming, and finally cook it. With frozen, snip a bag open and you're on your way. Much simpler, but of course now you're using something that was shipped from afar, wrapped in plastic, and held in a freezer and it won't even taste as good when you're done!

Now compare ordering delivery from your phone. Compare shopping, storing, chopping, wiping up etc. to building a Blue Apron dinner. In terms of convenience, it's not even close. This is coming form someone who prepares 2-3 meals per day for my family.

<comment><USER16> That's the problem -- you are preparing 2-3 meals a day instead of two big pots once a week and simply reheating them for your meals. At this point time and effort investment starts being significant (you get to eat different freshly cooked food each day so it might be worth it, if that's your preference).

For example it took me 1-2h (including cleanup, but not counting shopping) to prepare 7 liter pot of stew from random veggies and some meat. It will last us whole week in lunches to take to work. Another day we'll make a pot of soup (our old one wasn't done yet) and that would be all dinners for a week. Takes 3 minutes to reheat each day, no delivery can beat that, unless you live above fast food place or something.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Get things from one computer to another, safely - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/warner/magic-wormhole <comment><USER2> Great idea, but needs to massively improve its security margin; the current 16-bit margin does mean that any particular use has a 1:65,536 chance of being MITMed, but that means that as people use it the odds of no-one being compromised get exponentially smaller; if 1,024 people use it 16 times ever, then there's only a 78% chance that none of them is MITMed.

The developers should target 128 bits. Yes, this means longer phrases.

edit: Also, it'd be cool if someone were to add this capability (with a sufficiently-strong passphrase mechanism) to OpenSSH, thus making it easier to distribute initial SSH keys.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, the 16-bit "wormhole code" means that each active MitM attack has a 2^-16 chance of success, and a 1-(2^-16) chance of causing a broken connection. The error message you get (which also happens if someone simply mistypes the code) is:

      % wormhole receive-text
      Enter receive-text wormhole code: 9-babylon-typo
      ERROR:
      Key confirmation failed. Either you typed the code wrong, or a would-be
      man-in-the-middle attacker guessed incorrectly. You could try again,
      giving both you and the attacker another chance.

On average, you should expect to see 32 thousand failures before there's a 50/50 chance of a successful MitM attack. If your transfer attempt fails 10 times in a row, you're probably under a persistent attack, and you should stop using this tool.

Since failed attacks are so visible, I decided that 16 bits was a good tradeoff. Note that you can make it longer: "wormhole --code-length=4" uses 4 words (32 bits), etc. There's also a --verify option that displays a full- strength SHA256 session key hash for comparison, after the PAKE exchange but before transferring any actual data. Finally, since the words are coming from a fixed list, there's tab-completion when you input the codes, which turns out to be really handy.

PAKE codes are single-use, and not subject to offline attacks, so I don't think 128 bits codes are necessary (it'd be a different story if they were hashed directly into encryption keys :-). Incidentally, magic-wormhole uses (my) "python-spake2" library, which implements SPAKE2 ([http://www.di.ens.fr/~pointche/Documents/Papers/2005_rsa.pdf](http://www.di.ens.fr/~pointche/Documents/Papers/2005_rsa.pdf)) over the Ed25519 elliptic-curve group.

The magic-wormhole python package includes a library to use these codes in other tools: in the long run, I'm hoping to get PAKE more visibility as a "pair two computers together" primitive, and transferring SSH keys would be an awesome use case for that. Also, I'm planning to add a "\--persistent" flag of some sort, which records the generated session key somewhere, indexed by a petname, so the second time you want to send someone a file, you just say "wormhole send-file --petname=bob", and you don't have to transcribe a wormhole code at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How does it compare to rsync? Or scp? (scp is at least mentioned)

<comment><USER5> Very different use case. Both of those require that one party know the IP address of the other and is able to make an inbound TCP connection. This seems to be more like a STUN system for creating such a connection.

<comment><USER4> Well, not "very". If both computers don't see each other you need to either set up a mediator (no matter if scp or this tool), or you need someone else to set up a mediator for you. The first case is more secure, the second case is easier. Getting more secure and easier at the same time is simply not possible.

<comment><USER5> I think we're talking past each other: this tool is a mediator which uses a low-entropy key seemingly to do both discovery and authentication. The author is running a mediator server.

"Make this system accept inbound scp from the internet and provide discovery" is currently something that requires quite a bit of configuration. It's not really something that I'd want to walk someone through on the phone. Mind you, neither is "install this from github", but it could be rolled into an installer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This seems similar in concept to pushbullet ([http://www.pushbullet.com](http://www.pushbullet.com)) which I've been using for a few months and find extremely useful. I'm glad an open source version of that is in the works, I'll keep an eye on this. Keep up the good work!

</comment><comment><USER3> Author here.. didn't realize this made it to HN yet, I was wondering where the spike in traffic came from :). Sorry to miss the initial questions, but feel free to ask me more.

</comment><comment><USER7> See also: [https://github.com/mafintosh/webcat](https://github.com/mafintosh/webcat)

</comment><comment><USER8> How does this compare to using webRTC?

<comment><USER3> webRTC is an awesome way for getting data from one web browser to another, but you must bootstrap it by copying a webRTC "offer" message in both directions first. Most of the webRTC-based videochat services (Firefox Hello, talky.io, etc) use a server to deliver the client page and also relay these offer messages to the right party. So ultimately the security depends upon that server deciding to deliver the offer directly, and not inserting itself as a man-in-the-middle.

The PAKE-based wormhole setup would be a great way to get those offers delivered safely. In a future browser-based magic-wormhole.js library, I would use webRTC as the default data-transfer mechanism, and then I wouldn't need to run a STUN-like transit server (at least if you're talking to another browser, or client that can speak webRTC).</comment></comment>


Bayesian Inference for Hiring Engineers - <AUTHOR> https://triplebyte.com/blog/bayesian-inference-for-hiring-engineers <comment><AUTHOR> Companies seem to be adding more screening steps to try to reduce their false positive rate -- the rate at which they interview people who aren't hireable.

But most don't seem to understand that mathematically, there's a tradeoff for a higher false negative rate.

Screening false negatives are people who would have done well in an interview, but don't make it to that stage. These are more hidden to the company because the interview never happens, but quite expensive for the hiring process, and painful for people who are wrongly rejected. If we put this in probabilistic terms, I hope we can have a deeper conversation about what's happening and how this issue impacts engineers.

<comment><USER2> Agreed. When I read the above article, it was one OMFG followed by another. How much more complicated do we want to make hiring? How much more complicated does hiring have to get before non-existent "training" or "probation" practices would become a more efficient use of resources?

IMO we're already there. Everyone's doubling down on hiring complexity instead of thinking of other solutions to create a great team.</comment></comment>


French blogger fined over review's Google search placing - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28331598

<comment><USER2> > Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

It's astonishing how backwards a seemingly modern country can be.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think they [0] are getting Streisand'd [1] pretty badly

[0] [https://plus.google.com/116041780482133327447/about?gl=uk&hl...](https://plus.google.com/116041780482133327447/about?gl=uk&hl=en) [1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect)

</comment><comment><USER4> While I don't agree with the way this ended up I really do sympathise with the owner of the restaurant or any other future owner for that matter. Things can get better on the side of his business but that article will stay there for who knows how long and, in these times, a few words on a website can bring a slow and painful death to a local business pretty easily. I could also be mean and start using such practices against my competition (not that it's not done already) chewing their customers bit by bit. I don't have a solution...just saying.

</comment><comment><USER5> In the context of the EU this makes perfect sense. Leaving a bad review, regardless of the merits, is mean. Being mean should be illegal.</comment>


Picade: The arcade cabinet kit for your Raspberry Pi - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pimoroni/picade-the-arcade-cabinet-kit-for-your-raspberry-p

<comment><USER2> Hi, this is Jon (the tired looking one in the video) from Pimoroni :)

We were the first campaign to launch on Kickstarter in the UK. We brought forward our plans for Picade to align with the launch because we felt the interest it would generate was worth it!

<comment><USER3> Good Luck! Would love to collaborate with my DeskCade project for the Raspberry Pi.

<comment><USER2> Nice! I saw that when it was featured :)

You might be interested in the custom PCB we're putting together to offload all the input, sound, power, and lighting requirements!

<comment><USER3> Would love to check it out. I'm currently using a Teensy Arduino to offload as much as I can. I have a huge space constraint, so the smaller the PCB the better :)

<comment><USER2> More than happy to discuss details with that (we have thought about an Arduino being involved there too) :) I'm firstname.lastname@example.com, things are a bit crazy right now but do get in touch if you want to chat!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've been working on the DeskCade for a while now:

[http://blog.sheasilverman.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/10/des...](http://blog.sheasilverman.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/10/deskcadeproto4buttons.jpg)

It's been featured on the frontpage of RaspberryPi.org and the Orlando Sentinel.

Good luck with your kickstarter!

</comment><comment><USER4> I already have one <http://imgur.com/4LOiA> ;)

\- Selfmade \- Mini-ITX \- 200G HD \- ...

More photos/info upon request.

<comment><USER2> Nice! One of our stretch goals is to look at compatibility for other platforms (Mini-ITX included!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks interesting. You show street fighter as your first game, yet you're not using Happ nor Sanwa/Seimitsu parts? :-p

With most arcade sticks, swapping out the buttons for your own isn't too tough; will that be the case here?

<comment><USER6> >> You show street fighter as your first game

I think that one would also need 8 buttons to play Street Fighter on MAME/FBA, since you also need buttons for the player 1 coin and player 1 start.

>> Happ nor Sanwa/Seimitsu parts

I imagine that would easily add $20 to $40 to the cost of the unit. Personally, I'd love to see a version that just had cutouts for the stick and pushbuttons so that I could add my own stick parts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anyone else getting nothing but a 404 from Kickstarter today?

If most of you are OK then I wonder if it's linked to the UK launch of Kickstarter. Any Brits successfully connecting to their site at the moment?

<comment><USER2> Been fine for us all day - weird!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Backed! And the guys seem to be working in my city so I've asked for a sneak peek, and got a very quick positive response!

<comment><USER2> Hi again Lewis! No problem at all :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does this run MAME or some kind of preloaded emulator? Mortal Kombat II would be so tight on this :D

<comment><USER2> We're currently running RetroPie on it which includes MAME.

Essentially you load up whatever you want, the Picade is just a cabinet, arcade controls, amp + speakers, and screen :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Funded! Looks very well done from the prototypes, can't wait to see what you guys end up with.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the support :)</comment></comment>


Uber says it's reviewing incident of self-driving car running a red light - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/14/13960836/uber-self-driving-car-san-francisco-red-light-safety <comment><USER2> here's the original YouTube footage of the Third Street red light violation: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CdJ4oae8f4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CdJ4oae8f4)

<comment><USER3> and already some discussion on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13180172](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13180172)</comment></comment>


Sir Ken Robinson has died - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/sirkenrobinson/status/1297227635253223424 <comment><USER2> British author, arts advisor, and educator reformer.

Personal blog, contains a brief obituary: [http://sirkenrobinson.com/](http://sirkenrobinson.com/)

Likely most known by his 2006 TED talk, "Do schools kill creativity?"

[https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_do_schools_kill_c...](https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_do_schools_kill_creativity)

Some previous HN content. Active discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3064256](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3064256)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1895437](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1895437)</comment>


Show HN: Passwordless Authentication Wallet (PAW) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jrjr/paw.js <comment><USER2> I tried the demo. And got an error "Timestamp outside of window threshold."

I tried to click Signup and enter an email. That seemed to stick around but I see the error message each time I try to log in with PAW.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for letting me know. It looks like it was a bug in demo for the timestamp checking if statement. It should be fixed now

Changed `if (dif > 0 && dif < timestamp_threshold)`

to `if (dif > -timestamp_threshold && dif < timestamp_threshold)`

I also increased the timestamp threshold to 30 seconds instead of 10.</comment></comment>


Computers Create Recipe for Two New Magnetic Materials - <AUTHOR> http://pratt.duke.edu/about/news/predicting-magnets <comment><USER2> We did something pretty similar in a nearby field of materials science, using support vector machines rather than linear regression and focusing on a less specific target:

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v533/n7601/abs/nature17...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v533/n7601/abs/nature17439.html)

<comment><USER3> Nice work! Any plans to branch out to other materials?

<comment><USER2> I'm not with the lab any more, but last I heard they were soliciting data from nearby but related subfields (our lab was doing mostly vanadium templated tellurides, but there are a lot of other things to explore in the space of inorganic–organic hybrids, and there are labs working on them). The problem really is data sharing; the most active collaborators were willing to give us lab note-books as long as we paid to digitize them; it was very hard to convince other labs to digitize their own notebooks. TBH I think that's the hard part of a lot of this (collecting the data).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I know Moore's Law is basically dead but I think that advances in applications of existing computing power like this will resurrect it, or something like it, before too long. Basically, there's a less dramatic version of the AI snowball where faster computers lead to even faster computers. Whether someone manages to build strong AI on top of that is different question.

<comment><USER5> There's at least a 10x speedup potential in existing hardware if people stop doing silly things like Electron apps and shoehorning everything into web browsers.

<comment><USER6> What is your recommended tutorial/book for learning to build well-designed desktop UIs that work on Windows, OSX, and multiple different flavours of Linux?

<comment><USER5> 1) documentation of any chosen cross-platform UI framework

2) any decent software book that teaches to separate the presentation layer and platform layer from the rest of the program (that way, you have much less to port between platforms and maintaining it is not as costly as people fear)

<comment><USER6> > of any chosen cross-platform UI framework

such as...

EDIT: my purpose in this line of questioning is to assert that if you are trying to persuade someone to _not_ do a thing, you will be more effective if you can give someone a straightforward alternative.

I likewise think that the folks trying to get people to stop writing python2 should pick a release of python3 to become an LTS release in the same way that in 2014 python2.7 was effectively declared an LTS release with support until 2020.

<comment><USER5> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_platform- independent...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_platform- independent_GUI_libraries)

EDIT to parent's edit:

I'm not really trying to persuade anyone; not anymore. I understand the incentives that push people toward wasteful solutions. This won't stop until we hit a resource limit. All I'm saying is that there's a lot more we can do with current hardware once Moore's law is definitely dead. The mostly untapped potential is conditioned on people not doing extremely wasteful things just to shave off a little development time.

<comment><USER7> That list seems to be useless.

Skia is not a GUI library for example. CEF is not a GUI library, it's a WebView.

And there should be at least a column indicating whether the library has support for usual desktop applications and/or for multimedia full screen things (such as games, or a movie player with OSD and custom graphical design and elements, textures).

And the GUI debate is about "where are abstract libraries that compile to native apps", after all, anything else is just for prototyping a "native app". And usually people just answer but Qt is nice enough, yet everyone uses Electron :/

<comment><USER8> Luckily it's a wiki, so you can improve it :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> That's impressive. Co₂MnTi could be very useful. Cobalt, magnesium, and titanium are all easily obtainable. 665C Curie temperature, which is above neodymium magnets (400C) but below samarium-cobalt (720-800C). Any drawbacks to this material? Hard to compound? Low coercivity? Hard to cast or machine?

<comment><USER10> Mn is manganese, not magnesium (Mg).

<comment><USER9> Even more plentiful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> With all the hype usually flying around, a little surprised that it didn't say "AI Creates Recipe..."

<comment><USER12> After all, every search problem is an AI waiting to break free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Site has been hugged to death for now. [http://archive.is/6ZZv1](http://archive.is/6ZZv1)

</comment><comment><USER14> When in doubt - use brute force.

</comment><comment><USER15> What I think we are starting to see is the beginning of widespread use of computer based discovery through essentially machine learning techniques. I think AI is pretty far off but utilizing all the computing power we have to discover new materials and create useful things isn't very far off. I wonder what will happen if we can eventually tell computers to create us a better laptop, bike, phone, or lamp.

<comment><USER16> I think we need to rename AI. It's not really intelligent. It probably won't be for a long while. The machines don't know, in an existential sense, what they are looking at or making. We need to call it Artificial Insight.

They spot facts in byte streams that we don't see. We can then contextualize the info into another part of the domain, or drive it deeper.

<comment><USER17> In what sense do you "know" what you're looking at but a machine doesn't?

<comment><USER18> Ask humans to tell you what "cat" means, and you'll receive as many answers as there are respondents. Some will derive from science, some from common experience; some will describe the relation of cats to their environment, others will talk about personal emotional connections with particular cats.

Ask a convolutional neural network what "cat" means, and the best you can get is a probability distribution of pixels on a grid. It's not intelligence, but just an encoding of facts provided by an actual intelligence.

<comment><USER8> Ask neural networks that were trained on different inputs what a cat is and you'll get as many answers as there are neural networks.

<comment><USER18> No, you'll get the same kind of answer. It's not like one of the neural networks will write me a poem in response, on its own initiative. The form of the answer was decided by the human intelligence that created the neural net encoding.

<comment><USER8> The form of the human's answer was decided by the genetic code that led to the formation of the brain and the experiences the brain was exposed to up to the question. The brain is more complex by many orders of magnitude than your garden variety artificial neural network, so it is only expected that the range of possible answers is also broader.

<comment><USER18> And that's the rub. Why call these simplistic systems intelligence at all? It's like calling a watermill a fusion reactor.

<comment><USER8> Because they do tasks that people think require intelligence. It's like calling a water mill and a fusion reactor both devices that can generate energy.

<comment><USER19> Intelligence is required for handling novel tasks, not combinatorial optimization or search.

Once they stop tweaking Watson (example) for every tasks, I'll declare it an AI.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How many hours of work do you put in on an average day? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> 8-10 depending on how much work I have and how close I am to completing it.

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://www.thesuccessfulcontractor.com/coachs-corner-a- plumb...](http://www.thesuccessfulcontractor.com/coachs-corner-a-plumbing- story/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Perhaps 3 on a bad day, 6 on a good one. All the while I still spend more or less 7 hours at work heating my chair.

<comment><AUTHOR> Remote developer job?

<comment><USER4> FTE, on-site, I spend most of my time at the office not working.</comment></comment></comment>


Moving Forward with Firefox - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/02/18/moving-forward-with-firefox/

<comment><USER2> "Moving Forward"

"achieved positive growth again and dramatically reset our global search strategy"

Did anyone else find those phrases to be a bit too much corporatese for Mozilla?

<comment><USER3> "achieved positive growth" is pretty self-explanatory. "dramatically reset the global search strategy" is a bit weirder but they are (most likely) talking about their search deal with Google which they terminated in favour of Yahoo! and yes, that is a pretty dramatic reset.

If you don't want to read corporatese, well, don't read a corporate blog. Mozilla is a great company and a great presence for the web, but Mozilla Corp is still a corp, even if the Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit.

<comment><USER4> That's posted on mozilla.org, not mozilla.com tho. There's a fine balance between the two.

<comment><USER5> There's currently no meaningful distinction between the two domains. mozilla.org is the standard domain for all mozilla sites (developer.mozilla.org, addons.mozilla.org, or, in this case, blog.mozilla.org). I think we maybe use mozilla.com for a handful of internal things.

The corporation is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the non-profit, so the .org domain isn't necessarily a misrepresentation, either.

<comment><USER4> The argument for being corporate cant go both way tho.

What matters is how public perceives this, too. Posting corp stuff on the org domain/site means that then they are fully corporate-like. Which maybe is simply the case.

You can't justify that its not the case because Mofo owns Moco.. then say both Moco and Mofo share everything without implying its all just a corp. (or the opposite, but not both).

<comment><USER5> All I was trying to clear up was that mozilla.org is our standard domain regardless of what's being posted, and thus there was no conscious decision to put "corporate speak" on a .org domain. I dunno exactly why this decision was made, but I'm almost certain having .com and .org both in active use would be really confusing for users (is it addons.mozilla.com? addons.mozilla.org?) and, to a lesser extent, our ops and developers.

If I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying that the tone of this post is too corporate for a .org and is a bad choice if we want to imply that Mozilla isn't just some for-profit company (which we don't, we like talking about how we're non-profit and open source and mission-driven).

Honestly I don't think anyone cares. We'd get the same trouble for posting corporate speak on a .com vs a .org because by the time you care about that, you already know enough about Mozilla to be bothered regardless of the domain.

<comment><USER6> I don't really think the problem is that "it's a .org" domain. But this _is_ posted in what's essentially a place where a lot of people who understand why "positive growth" is not only wrong, but a load of brainwashed crap, spend quite some time :).

Phrases like those belong in press releases, not a blog post from an organization intelligent people respect.

<comment><USER5> > a lot of people who understand why "positive growth" is not only wrong, but > a load of brainwashed crap

I mean it's sort've a redundant term, but in context (positive growth of Firefox users, something that has been falling for a while now) it makes perfect sense to me. What did you think he was saying?

<comment><USER6> > I mean it's sort've a redundant term

Sort of a meaningless term?

How about we replace it with "negative decrease"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What is this, a press release or a blog article?

"...a much stronger foundation from which to build, grow and pursue our mission"

"Moving Forward with Firefox"

"Firefox turned a corner"

"Mark's entrepreneurial drive coupled with his holistic thinking, market orientation, and exciting vision for the future of Firefox make him the ideal person to lead this new team."

I'll probably be downvoted for this, but whenever I see something like this I wonder why the other individual got pushed. There are far too many things unsaid.

</comment><comment><USER4> "A bit about Mark: he is well known as an elite technical leader not only within Mozilla, but in our industry."

Anyone knows him outside of Mozilla?

<comment><USER8> He is a former CTO of Joyent.

<comment><USER7> Oh, that's a GREAT choice for an open source project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _> today we combined our group focused on cloud services with the group focused on our Firefox desktop_

What are some examples of Mozilla products created by the "cloud services" group that will now be taking ownership of the browser? E.g. Persona, Sync, ..?

Is the cloud services team separated from the advertising (tiles) team?

<comment><USER10> These are separated teams.

Cloud services: [https://wiki.mozilla.org/CloudServices](https://wiki.mozilla.org/CloudServices)

Content services (tiles): [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Content_services](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Content_services)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > recently we have been exploring how we can integrate client software on > desktops and mobile with cloud service approaches to evolve what Firefox can > do for people.

It will be interesting to see how the deliver those services while providing end-user control and confidentiality, and even monetizing the services at the same time. Even if they don't gain a lot of market share, the solutions to those problems could be very valuable socially, and Mozilla of course will liberate their tech and ideas so that everyone can benefit.

</comment><comment><USER12> I sure hope they've vetted Mark Mayo to ensure that he doesn't hold any problematic political opinions.

<comment><USER13> That was sure a crazy situation in light of the fact that they have now partnered with (i.e. receiving money from) Yahoo. And it'll be interesting to see what happens in the future with the Yahoo / MS relationship.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wish there was a page on mozilla.org with the title, 'This is how Mozilla makes money'.

<comment><USER15> I believe Mozilla should start an advertising network and offer cloud services like webmail, docs, blogs, photos, etc so people create an everlasting bond with their properties while maintaining the open web motto they are already known and praised for.

An extra couple billion dollars a year wouldn't hurt either.

<comment><USER16> And, you know, buy a video service and make some glasses too. All in the name of not doing evil, right?

<comment><USER17> Dont forget maps, reviews, and a social network.

<comment><USER18> Also, cars.

<comment><USER19> And drop the services we like a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> For the first time ever I had my sleaze senses tingling after a recent Firefox install. There is now advertising on the new tab page. And why was I forced onto yahoo search instead of giving me the option?

<comment><USER21> You were forced into google search for the last 15 years but did you complain? It's simple enough to just switch it.

<comment><USER7> That's hardly advertising.

<comment><USER3> But Yahoo is?

<comment><USER7> Advertising on the tab page is advertising.

<comment><USER3> You need to fully read what OP wrote.

<comment><USER7> As do you!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>