Ask HN: Should I focus on my job or my degree? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a student studying in my final year of a Computer Science degree in a second rate department. My own time I spend as the lead web developer for a small, but focused software startup. It sure as hell, is an exciting world.
I can't help wondering, which of the two should I be prioritising? It's not a run-of-the-mill startup (so far we've worked with the NHS, the RAF and a whole raft of local businesses and innovators). I've had the chance to play with a lot of cool technologies (Nodejs, Go, MongoDB, Redis, Phonegap etc) and thoroughly enjoyed the entire experience. If we get off of the ground, there is a directorship waiting for me when I graduate.
Succeeding as a company however, is going to mean working hard for it this year, not something I can do alongside studying at uni. I can probably coast my degree and get a 2:1 or 2:2 or I can focus and almost certainly end up with a first. Which is going to count for more in the long run? The classification, or the experience?
Thanks for taking the time to read this. Thoughts and advice are very welcome. <comment><USER4> I would prioritize relationships over experience. Relationships cannot be metric'd - and that is why they are so important.

If what you are getting in your job experience is valuable - that is excellent - however, if you are building true relationships (where relationships are built on trust - almost approaching - perhaps beyond a romantic level) - then. Don't rule out the CS program - there has to be at least one or two professors in the department that you hit it off with - and if not in CS, maybe in another department. When you are in college, there is an open-door policy with professors - depending on how persistent you are.

Avoid burnout by _not_ putting everything into one area of your life. Its inevitable (depending on your focus, type-A ness) but you can hedge by doing stuff where no one cares what you do outside of that sphere (e.g. drawing portraits in a drawing class)

Ultimately, as you progress in your life, you build your own community. The size and strength of it depends on you, your leadership ability - and your ability to inspire others to do what they want to do (the true Internet superstars like Zenhabits, Problogger et al. build communities in the millions).

I've been in my small share of companies/long-term projects (with friends) that sometimes end up - the friendship isn't strong enough to survive the problems that may arise.

And, as others said, the degree is an important quasi-legal HR credential (look up Griggs v. Duke Energy) and signal that you were able to start and finish a large project

Also, diversify your basket - take a theater or short/long-form improv class or art class. All CS and coding makes for a boring Jack once you get outside that bubble - and you will - especially for romantic relationships with Jill - and you want to run up the hill...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I agree, relationships are the priority, but I can then extend the phrasing of the question to ask: are academic relationships more important than their industrial counterparts? I have engaged with most of the professors in the department (it was actually through one of them that I got the job), but almost without exception (it seems that) they are neither driven nor motivated and only a tiny percent of them have had any academic success.

Outside of CS I am a focused musician and graphic designer and I like to use that as both an escape and as diversification, so I'm not too worried about ending up as a boring Jack.

Somewhat due to my poor wording, it seems like people got the impression that I would be dropping out (or giving up on my degree), this is not the case. I just need to know how important it is that I achieve a good grade? Is it worth the sacrifice of job experience and possibly the position within the company?

<comment><USER4> The true test of relationships are when something is at stake. It is does not matter what realm they lie in for your life. So my revised advice is to pursue relationships that go beyond superficial friendliness. The company you are working for falls in that area. You seem to be a renaissance individual with diverse interests. That is very good to hear. Be open to everything. Much of success (and its sometimes corollary -,financial success) is due to how much leadership you take on - which runs the spectrum from being a senior developer on a project to the guy (or girl) responsible for all software development projects or being your own business owner. The beauty of business is that if you start one - you will be exposed to all aspects. The flip side is working for a quasi-stable company will pigeon hole you into a slot - for that is how they operate.

So to answer your question - I have had many project-based relationships. When the project ended, the relationship ended. However, in a few cases, I remained friends, however loose, with a few individuals. The answer to your question is to try to work with and be around with individuals you want to be around with. And do not let the work be the only definition for the relationship.

Truely extroverted connected people have multiple circles of friends with concentric circles of trust and intimacy. For example, this means, many people might want to have some of their time but they get to choose who they spend time with. And having known a few of these successful individuals (who I need to clarify are not always extroverted - but passionate for their cause), they make you feel important when you meet with them.

So in closing of this ramble, do not be biased who you spend time with - <USER2> make the most of it - and if you do not like each other, it is natural and ok to drift.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Finish the degree, it's amazingly helpful visa wise if you ever want to apply to jobs in other countries. I left the UK for Canada and it would have been way harder without a degree (I believe there's some amount of 'years in the industry' that adds up to a degree for work visas, my memories foggy but i think it was around 10 years..)

</comment><comment><USER6> In my experience, it is absolutely worth having a degree - by all means, don't give that up, you should graduate, especially since you've come this far.

In terms of grades, I found that only my first two jobs cared about GPA - <USER3> took it off my resume shortly after because work experience became much more important. That's not to say you should give up on your GPA entirely, but in my experience companies care far less about GPA than they care about whether or not you can actually code.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd make sure I finish the CS degree with a good classification as your job is _just a job_ and with a degree you can do more than just code for a living.

</comment><comment><USER8> For God's sake, please at least get a 2:1. Otherwise, should anything happen with your current gig, you are unemployable by grade cut off.

</comment><comment><USER9> Do both; but the job should be more important to you (unless you're planning on staying in academia).

</comment><comment><USER10> I _slightly prefer_ advocating job experience over academic experience, usually. There are a lot of things that factor into that, but at least for me, graduating high school, I knew good and well that I'd never be able to commit to caring about college, and that despite the multiple scholarships I had offered to me despite an abysmal graduating GPA (I graduated 148th in a class of 150), I just knew that if I'd gone, I'd have pissed it away.

Moreover, I was really excited about technology (I'm 36 now, and it was a very different field then), and even tech support seemed like a way to learn more/faster/better than whatever I might have learned in school -- partly due to how sad CS education was back then, but partly because IT was still a developing field, and real world experience trumped college experience, at least in my mind, and at least at the time.

That said, if you've already gotten to your final year, it would be literally foolish of you to abandon your current investment for a job, especially when that job will be there later, and especially when that job isn't already paying you ridiculous amounts of money.

In short, if you aren't already a millionaire, finish your degree. Even if it's just to have on paper, throwing away > 75% of your current education costs is just a silly investment.</comment>


SHA1 sunset will block millions from encrypted net, Facebook warns - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/12/sha1-sunset-will-block-millions-from-encrypted-net-facebook-warns/ <comment><USER2> Those same people run Android devices with dozens of vulnerabilities that can own their devices. It's probably for the best that we force them to change them. Otherwise it feels like we may as well continue to support Windows XP because there are still a few million people out there who use it and are vulnerable to all the latest XP exploits.</comment>


Nifty hack tools for developers - <AUTHOR> https://www.hacktools.io <comment><AUTHOR> Hi folk,

As my pet project, I myself as a developer created this new website for the developer community to help with our day to day jobs in developing and maintaining applications by providing tools such as JSON lint, XML formatter, SQL formatter, test credit card generator, epoch time converter, timezone converter, SSH keypair generator, and many other tools in total of 20 right now all in one place.

You can also personalize the dashboard for these tools. So please check out at the URL provided and please feel free to leave a comment here or at the website for any suggestions or bug reports.

Thanks a lot!

Regards, Kevin

<comment><USER2> Would you consider to make it open source so others could contribute?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question! Yes, I've been thinking about making t available as open source so that other developers can also contribute to making new widgets (aka) tools. Right now, I need to clean up the code and define a workflow for collaboration across multiple developers. So I will you posted here once it is ready within 1.5 months or so.</comment></comment></comment>


Singular Value Decomposition Tutorial - <AUTHOR> http://www.puffinwarellc.com/index.php/news-and-articles/articles/30-singular-value-decomposition-tutorial.html

<comment><USER2> After I learned all the details in grad school, I found out how to implement it in a real world setting:

      [U,S,V] = svd(X)

<comment><USER3> Unless X has 17,770*480,189 elements like the netflix dataset. Then you can use something like this: <http://sifter.org/~simon/journal/20061211.html>

The site is currently down, google chache link: [http://188.8.131.52/search?q=cache:h4Ljyun3gUcJ:sifter.org...](http://126.96.36.199/search?q=cache:h4Ljyun3gUcJ:sifter.org/~simon/journal/20061211.html+simon+funk+try+this+at+home)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The SVD connects the four fundamental subspaces of a linear system. I was fortunate to receive this great insight from one of Strang's lectures. I highly recommend you watch one of his videos online on this particular topic.

This post doesn't do full justice to the beauty of the SVD. Intuitively, you are trying to compute a transformation that diagonalizes the covariance matrix of the data. Computing the covariance has two problems: 1) this is a O(n^2) operation and 2) can lead to big numerical errors for really small values in the matrix.

By creative use of elementary matrix operations, the SVD gives you the transformation on the original matrix. If you are interested in just the first few singular vectors, certain math libraries also support an _economical_ mode that does just this.

</comment><comment><USER5> I messed around with analyzing US senate votes using a SVD several years ago: <http://saweis.net/svd/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, this is really great. The data seems to to support the claim that politics has gotten more divisive over the past 2 decades. (I get unreasonably happy when data actually supports a broad claim). Very creative way to show this.

Have you thought about going further back? I'd be curious to see this on voting records as far back as possible, just to see what trends might have happened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> For anyone that finds the posted site painful on the eyes, here's another introduction to SVD that is all on one page by default and isn't crowded by advertisements.

[http://www.igvita.com/2007/01/15/svd-recommendation- system-i...](http://www.igvita.com/2007/01/15/svd-recommendation-system-in- ruby/)

<comment><USER7> Or you could just use the print version.

[http://www.puffinwarellc.com/index.php/news-and- articles/art...](http://www.puffinwarellc.com/index.php/news-and- articles/articles/30-singular-value-decomposition- tutorial.html?tmpl=component&print=1&layout=default&page=)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Another good one: <http://www.ams.org/featurecolumn/archive/svd.html>

and its HN thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=736618>

</comment><comment><USER9> Don't most people use NNMF instead these days?

<comment><USER10> What is NNMF?

<comment><USER9> Nonnegative matrix factorization. It was the advantages of keeping a sparse matrix sparse, can be iteratively created and generally the bellkor team's matrix factorization of choice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> everyone loves to reference the SVD because the concepts are principled and intuitive. but i've found that, as often as it is brought up in conversation, its rarely used in practice. anyone here used SVD in a production setting?

<comment><USER12> Rarely used in practice??? Dude, are you being facetious?? SVD is the sledgehammer that cracks any problem you come up against...

<comment><USER11> really? it doesn't scale and is not amenable to online updates. unless... wait... are YOU being facetious?

<comment><USER12> SVD solves most problems I need to solve. But then, I conjecture we are in different fields.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


It seems that GitHub is down - <AUTHOR> Is it just here or github is down? https://status.github.com/messages <comment><USER2> I can't get to it from Zürich, London or Atlanta. Newark, NJ and Fremont, CA works.

</comment><comment><USER3> Status page reports elevated error rates: [https://status.github.com](https://status.github.com) I can't pull and push from terminal either

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://status.github.com/](https://status.github.com/)

> We are investigating reports of elevated error rates.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable [https://status.github.com/messages](https://status.github.com/messages)

</comment><comment><USER5> Can confirm (Poland), albeit it's not completely down for me, some requests are served.

</comment><comment><USER6> For me it's down as well. This seems to happen every week now.

</comment><comment><USER7> same...</comment>


Twitter co-founder Biz Stone relaunches Jelly as a human-powered search engine - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/28/twitter-co-founder-biz-stone-relaunches-jelly-search-engine/ <comment><USER2> > _Users can sign up to answer questions on Jelly. People can rate whether > responses were helpful. If someone receives a lot of positive feedback on a > certain topic, they are more likely to be selected to answer future similar > questions._

I wonder how quickly the gap between "positive"/"helpful" and "correct" will widen.

edit: Looked at some of the questions and answers. An "unhelpful" button is definitely necessary, as currently the answers are about as helpful as the contents of Yahoo Answers.</comment>


I was too lazy to start a startup so I did this instead. - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2013/11/12/too-lazy-to-start-a-real-startup-play-hipster-ceo-instead/

<comment><USER2> All of those "type" of startups should have the word 'Another' infront of them make it more appealing to the comedic crowd. _chuckle_</comment>


IBM explores 67.1m-core computer for running entire internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/05/ibm_bluegene_web/

<comment><USER2> I'm going to assume that because this is on theregister.co.uk, it's likely about as accurate and meaningful as a randomly-chosen comment on slashdot.

<comment><USER3> At least they provided a link to the primary source. From my reading of the paper, Kittyhawk is more of an EC2 competitor; it's not intended to run "the entire Internet", but pundits can't resist the hyperbole.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should I learn ASP.net? - <AUTHOR>

Do a lot of companies still use ASP.net? I have a chance to learn it if I dont get an internship. I'm wondering if its worth my time to learn to use in the future. <comment><USER2> If you start learning ASP.NET, I'd recommend skipping WinForms and start with ASP.NET MVC. The latter is a really good framework for .NET projects. It shares many features with popular frameworks (RoR, Django…) and doesn't get too much in your way. No _postBack() and horrible viewstates.

If you like corporate culture, once you've acquired a moderate level of expertise in .NET, finding a job should not be too difficult — depending of where you live of course.

<comment><USER3> I agree 1000%. I am currently trying to get my team to rewrite several WebForms apps using ASP.Net MVC. I am almost to the point of not allowing them to use the toolbox to create a single UI element, too. Autocode is crippling and encourages developers to stop thinking about what they're doing (or be afraid of overriding Visual Studio's decisions).

<comment><USER4> It is definitely useful for a corporate career path, but there is a lot of development work, freelance and otherwise, for those experience in LAMP, open source, java, etc.

I agree about the autocode... I wonder about the repercussions on development in general. It is like sampling in music or those libraries that come with Reason...some use it to make original and compelling work, but that is the edge case, not the norm...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >I'm wondering if its worth my time to learn to use in the future.

Not sure if it's worth learning on your own, but if you get hired to do it, a lot of the skills are applicable elsewhere, if not the knowledge of the libraries.

I'd have no problem hiring someone proficient in .NET for a java job, and vice versa, presuming they were smart and hard working.

</comment><comment><USER6> Microsoft shops.</comment>


Code Must Be Clean. And Clear - <AUTHOR> https://www.yegor256.com/2018/09/12/clear-code.html <comment><USER2> I have worked projects where the most senior developers barely understood cs 101 data structures and lacked good taste in there own code.

Any time they did not understand they would insist comments were added. Then later would sneak back in and rewrite.

Mind you they would shorten variable names, remove pre condition checks on parameters because the thought it was useless code. Remove helper/util methods/functions and refactor from short methods into long ones Etc...

This was all in the sake of clear code. Clear to whom? Not everyone has the same level of skills or can recognize why code is structured the way it is.

I spent more time teaching than I did anything else because the senior and lead devs were senior by title not senior in skills.

My advice, when you run into a piece of code in a review, and it's not clear to you. Before you knock it down and comment all over it, this is the moment for you and them to learn.

When you ask why are you using switch cases like that or why are you checking parameters passed in for validly or other safety critical patterns, or don't understand template, or dependency injection, mixins, runtime type inspection. You may not be qualified to even comment.

So again clear to whom?</comment>


No Evidence of Disease - <AUTHOR> http://idlewords.com/2012/09/no_evidence_of_disease.htm

<comment><USER2> That triptych of chemo round photos in the middle. Christ.</comment>


President John F Kennedy Secret Society Speech - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhZk8ronces

<comment><USER2> wow! very interesting in the light of the current US's reaction on wikileaks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly. I see WikiLeaks as test of free speech. Test at which US is failing..</comment></comment>


Netbooks and iPhones anticipated in "The other road ahead" (2001) - <AUTHOR>

Paul Graham wrote, in "The other road ahead" (2001):
"All you'll need will be something with a keyboard, a screen, and a Web browser. Maybe it will have wireless Internet access. Maybe it will also be your cell phone. Whatever it is, it will be consumer electronics: something that costs about $200, and that people choose mostly based on how the case looks."
http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html
I find the above paragraph an extraordinary prediction of both netbooks and iphones.
That's all. You may now resume your browsing routines. <comment><USER2> The Apple Newton was hacked with WiFi right around that time:

<http://www.deleet.de/ray/newton/802.11b-FAQ.html>

</comment><comment> onreact-com In 2001 we already had netbooks and iPhone like devices, the Nokia communicator has been around for ages and I remember using a netbook sized Windows 98 laptop in 2000.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Incidentally, I submitted this post from my eeepc, in firefox, using an online app.</comment>


Yahoo sucks - <AUTHOR> http://blogial.com/2009/01/31/yahoo-sucks/ <comment><USER2> This guy should read HN. He complains about problems with Yahoo domain renewal, and talks about how much better Google has their act together. However...

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=453350></comment>


Ask YC: What are the most profitable online markets? - <AUTHOR>

I've been looking but i can't seem to find any information as to the size of different online markets.
for example. The size in revenue of Travel (expedia,kayak,priceline) The size in revenue of Gambling(pokerstars,fulltilt) The size in revenue of Rentals (gamefly,netflix) and so on..
also the spending of ad dollars and how they pertain to the web ad based economy as a whole. <comment><USER3> There is a TON of information out there. If even one firm in an industry is public, you can look up their SEC filings at Edgar. You can then look up their web traffic at Alexa, and look up that of their competitors. Hand wave a ratio between the two,and assume that the competitors have the same ratio.

Google the business press for interviews with founders, and press releases.

Find industry wide statistics ("hunting is a 12 gazillion dollar per year industry").

Call up a wholesaler who sells to the competition and say that you're thinking of launching a firm, and you want to know the process to purchase from them, and what their maximum discount tier is. Chat with the new accounts rep and ask how many folks qualify for that top tier. If you're thinking about selling shovels online, and Shovel Wholesaler Inc. has a maximum discount tier of 40% off retail for $1 million/yr in purchases, and they let drop that "just two or three" retailers qualify for that tier, then you can figure out that shovels.com, allshovels.com, and ishovels.com (the three biggest retailers) likely come in at 1.5, 2, and 4 million per year (or something like that...if the top seller was a light year ahead, they would have negotiated a higher tier).

Although I've not used this approach, you can call up SCORE and see if anyone there has info.

Ping your network on LinkedIn for contacts with info.

I note that your example (gamefly, netflix) is one that I've actually done, because one of my two firms (SmartFlix) is in this space. Their numbers were easy to get from the SEC. I've got a spreadsheet comparing all of their financial ratios to ours (cost of customer acquisition, lifetime value, revenue, profit, revenue per employee, etc., etc., etc.).

Never before in the history of mankind has it been as easy to get info on competitors.

Put on your Sherlock Holmes hat, pop that pipe in, and get to work!

<comment><USER4> Nice post. Talk about lighting a fire under someone's butt...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I could be wrong, but I think you're asking the wrong questions, if you plan on being a startup. The question you should be asking (yourself) is: "what do I have a competitive advantage in"? Call it what you want and classify it however you will -Zipfs law, paretos curve, The Long Tail, Common Sense - <USER2> you will find that competing in the "most profitable online markets" is no sure way to profitability. Its winner-take-all (almost), so don't let the dollars distract you.

<comment><USER4> You're not wrong.

You could also say, "What do I HAVE to do?"

If there's something you just have to do (for whatever reason), forget about market size. Do it.

SuccessProbability = (Ability + CompetitiveAdvantage + Preserverance) * Passion

If Passion = 0, nothing else matters.

Market size doesn't affect the probability of success. Only the magnitude of it.

<comment><USER6> "Market size doesn't affect the probability of success. Only the magnitude of it."

Best thing I've read all day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would suggest finding and targeted underserved markets and becoming the big fish in a small pond rather then a small fish in a big pond. Of course, if you can enter into a market that already has big players and actually push those players out then that is even better. If they need money they can come and work for you.

</comment><comment><USER8> Not that I know anything about this, but at least for the bigger industries you could look at their financials. Add up the market capitalization for the companies in an industry (Google says Expedia is $9B now), and that should give you the overall value of the market.

Unless, of course, you think there's another bubble...

<comment><AUTHOR> Unlike the 2000 "bubble" The current bubble i would say is in private equity. the first time around there were more IPOs so the market took a big hit. If the current bubble; if indeed their is a bubble; bursts then it shouldn't affect the market as bad.

my 3.4 cents

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I should imagine its something like this

porn retail gambling travel news</comment>


Cosmic voids - <AUTHOR> http://www.askamathematician.com/2017/06/q-where-is-the-middle-of-nowhere/ <comment><USER2> A not-really-spoiler-alert for Iain M. Banks' "Against a Dark Background", whose title turns out to be a bit of foreshadowing itself: The planet system where the novel takes place is extragalactic, surrounded by no stars. If I remember correctly, they can see their nearby galaxy, but nothing nearer.

<comment><USER3> An extrasolar (if not extra-galactic) planet is a subplot in Becky Chambers' kickstarted[1] _The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet_[2], too.

1: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/beckychambers/the- long-...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/beckychambers/the-long-way-to- a-small-angry-planet/updates)

2: [http://www.tor.com/2015/08/14/excerpts-the-long-way-to-a- sma...](http://www.tor.com/2015/08/14/excerpts-the-long-way-to-a-small-angry- planet-becky-chambers/)

<comment><USER2> I thought the titular planet was just near the core, not extra-galactic? Or am I forgetting one?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The existential loneliness of a void is weird. We're privileged to look up at the stars and ask who's out there.

A species living in a large void would have to develop extremely (compariable to modern humans) technology to ever prove there was another galaxy within the universe.

<comment><USER5> This reminds me of Douglas Adams' Krikkiters, whose home planet is completely surrounded by black dust. It blocks out everything in the sky and so they had no concept of anything at all existing beyond their world.

[http://aliens.wikia.com/wiki/Krikkiter](http://aliens.wikia.com/wiki/Krikkiter)

<comment><USER6> It'll have to go...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I found the video linked at the bottom interesting too: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rENyyRwxpHo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rENyyRwxpHo)

I'd never heard of Laniakea before.

</comment><comment><USER8> I found the answer disappointing because the argument has a huge hole in it: it discounts the atmosphere. The article says the farthest objects earth-based naked-eye observations can detect are ~70 million light years away, so if you're in space in the middle of a billion light year void, you won't see anything. But if the atmosphere has just one order of magnitude attenuation (or rather you could see 10 times further without it), then maybe you could see to the 500 million light year edge of your void bubble.

That's what bothers me about these pseudo-scientific columns: they aren't rigorous and the reader doesn't know it. In this particular case, the author even changed the reader's question, and then didn't even give a satisfactory answer, just wanted to write about "cool" things.

</comment><comment><USER9> These voids change moving up the distance scale - while our star system is visibly not inside a void, there is evidence that the Milky Way is inside a galactic-scale void.

[http://news.wisc.edu/celestial-boondocks-study-supports- the-...](http://news.wisc.edu/celestial-boondocks-study-supports-the-idea- that-we-live-in-a-void/)

[https://www.universetoday.com/135954/largest-scales-milky- wa...](https://www.universetoday.com/135954/largest-scales-milky-way-galaxy- middle-nowhere/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Horrifyingly lonesome - almost complete sensory deprivation. It would be interesting to experience though.

<comment><USER11> If you were here in a space suit, would you be able to see anything at all? I would think not, but am not sure.

<comment><USER12> The linked article answers this. If you had no other sources of light, so that your eyes could fully acclimate, you might be able to see the faintest smudges if there were galaxies within 70 million light years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think we underestimate the importance of a starry sky for the development of intelligence. A species looking up at complete blackness will probably never develop higher reasoning or curiosity.

<comment><USER14> Would it? There are plenty of curiosity to be had on the ground, in the air and under water. Birds flying, insects digging, fishes swimming.

Sure, they might not feel the need to visit space if they had no stars, no moon and no sun but who knows? They might end up going there anyway due to population and create their own superstructures.

<comment><USER13> The existence of stars gives us (humans at least) an idea that we actually live in a vast and varied universe and that I think is crucial psychological motivation to push boundaries and explore. If we lived within a void and believed that our one planet (and its star) were the universe, we would be content to develop only those skill & intelligence needed to survive on the planet. It might stagnate after a point. Of course, even a small telescope would reveal the distant galaxies, but would a hypothetical intelligent species get to that point at all?

And even if they could glimpse the distant galaxies, what could conceivably motivate them to develop space travel?

Am just wondering aloud. Astronomy was (and is) a pretty fundamental pillar of our scientific development and all that it has brought us. An inky black sky would have interesting effects upon nascent, intelligent species.

<comment><USER15> The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy actually explored the concept.

One planet is in a dust cloud. The sky was completely black, and thus the people of that planet led insular lives and never realised the existence of the Universe. They eventually built a small ship and managed to exit the dust cloud. Upon first witnessing the glory and splendor of the Universe, they casually, whimsically, decided to destroy it, remarking, "It'll have to go."

The race changed from a peaceful one to the most violent warfaring race of the galaxy.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Every HN headline: Think you know something?  the opposite - <AUTHOR> Does it have to shake our very foundations to be interesting enough to click on?  This seems to only result in people grossly exaggerating the results. I'm simultaneously immune to surprise and cynical about anything claiming to be novel. <comment><USER2> Thank you. I wasn't sure if you were asking something, I think it's a 'mini- rant'. _Immune to surprise_ doesn't sound normal/common. So..how would you prefer things were? You don't like how things are, (I think), can you imagine and describe a better situation?

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't even argue with this. EDIT: To elaborate, you seem to be correct.</comment>


Everything You Didn't Want to Know About Lua's Multi-Values - <AUTHOR> https://benaiah.me/posts/everything-you-didnt-want-to-know-about-lua-multivals/ <comment><USER2> I do not really agree with the article's (implied?) statement that multivalues are an ugly part of Lua. It's subtle yes, but like most of Lua, is incredibly consistent.

For example, let's compare with Python: In Python, you can return multiple arguments as a tuple; it's not possible to have an optional return value without a lot of painful type matching and unpacking. In Lua you can:

      local result, errmsg  =  do_stuff()
      if not result then
        error("Error in do_stuff:"..errmsg)
      end
      print(result + 5)

If you don't want the error message, just remove ", errmsg", and it will work as expected. This is incredibly flexible, which is exactly what I want in my dynamic languages. In Python, you would get an type error when attempting to add together a tuple and an integer.

<comment><USER3> But why not just use a table in this case? Indexing a value that doesn't exist will give you nil as well.

<comment><USER4> Tables require dynamic allocation--as do Python tuples--which cause GC churn even when optimized. And accessing a table performs a lookup operation just to put it onto the value stack, anyhow. While insertion and index operations are fast, they're nowhere near as fast as not doing them at all. If you want stack semantics, just use the stack! Multiple return values (return lists) are one reason why Lua is often faster than Python and JavaScript in an apple-to- apples (i.e. comparing ad hoc application logic that doesn't rely on Python's hundreds of megabytes of C modules, no JIT (though return lists make JIT'ing easier), etc). The article says that they "don't perform notably better", but in my 15 years of experience with Lua that's just absolutely not true, especially on hot paths.

But return lists are more than an optimization. Lua is a first-class functional language with guaranteed tail-call optimization. And Lua maintains strong semantic symmetry between its C API and in-language constructs. In both cases return lists provide an extremely elegant way for composing function calls, including composing mixtures of Lua and Lua C functions.

For example, returning a list in C is as simple as `push; push; return 2`, whereas in languages that require an array or tuple you need to need to create a separate object and then insert your value (by index or name). It's worth noting that Lua can handle allocation failure gracefully, throwing an error back to the more recent protected call while maintaining a clean state (e.g., OOM from an event loop client handler won't crash your app and the hundreds of thousands of other connections). Many simple functions that operate on the stack (e.g. lua_pushinteger) are guaranteed not to dynamically allocate. Such guarantees can make writing OOM-safe Lua C API code _much_ easier.

If you look at it from the perspective of the C FFI, return lists make a _ton_ of sense. Indeed, they're integral to the C API semantics, which is defined in terms of an abstract invocation stack--which is in fact implemented as a contiguous array.

<comment><USER3> This explanation went far more in depth than I expected it to. Thanks for writing it out!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Shopify Tumbles After Citron Calls the Company a 'Get-Rich-Quick Scheme' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-04/shopify-tumbles-as-citron-calls-company-get-rich-quick-scheme <comment><USER2> Comparing a company that gives individuals and small businesses the easiest path, to date, to launch an online presence to reach consumers directly, to a pyramid scheme is ridiculous and transparent when coming from someone who has publicly shorted the stock.

If you're paying attention, there is definitely a trend of smaller individual makers creating successful products and companies around those products that would otherwise not have been possible to bring to market without the ease which Shopify's platform provides.

Citron's report, bases much of their scare tactic on...a Google search? While I do agree Shopify might need to get a tighter control on their affiliates (every affilate marketing program runs into this problem in the beginning) and how they're promoting Shopify, comparing Shopify to Herbalife is ridiculous and a transparent attempt on Citron's part.

Andrew Left's rant (with his used car salesman delivery) and the report ([http://www.citronresearch.com/citron-exposes-the-dark- side-o...](http://www.citronresearch.com/citron-exposes-the-dark-side-of- shopify/)) in general reeks more of bad affiliate marketing on his part than anything he presents against Shopify. The report itself resembles a classic long form sale page more than a reputable report on a company's prospects.

It's unfortunate the market reacts to such stupidity and he's able to profit off of it.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is really weird. I am in a lot of ecom groups and it's ALL shopify... Nothing else

</comment><comment><USER4> Step 1: Short X stock

Step 2: Trash talk company X

Step 3: Profit!

It must be great having such a strong bully pulpit when you're in the business of shorting stocks. Hard to believe this doesn't worry regulators at all.

</comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone have any more information about Citron Research. Have they made ridiculous claims that turned out to be true in the past?

<comment><USER6> Yes. He's quite well known and respected. Here's a profile the New York Times did of him last year: [https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/06/08/magazine/the- bounty-hu...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/06/08/magazine/the-bounty- hunter-of-wall-street.html)

He's often been right, but like any investor, he's also often been wrong, of course.</comment></comment>


Self-absorption in programmer culture - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI8tNMsozo0&feature=youtu.be&t=12m35s <comment><USER2> Note that this is an excerpt from Rich Hickey's (creator of Clojure) keynote talk entitled "Simplicity Matters" at Rails Conf 2012.</comment>


Firefox Better Web with Scroll - <AUTHOR> https://firstlook.firefox.com/betterweb/ <comment><USER2> I'm glad to see Mozilla giving a bigger platform to this style of revenue generation. Not only is the price reasonable, it's on my favorite web browser.

Brave's BAT has always appealed to me, but the browser's too niche and the UX just isn't there for me. I think Mozilla has the resources to make this realistically become a realistic part of the dialogue with respect to monetizing the web, and only wish that they'd tried it earlier.

I'd like to learn more about Scroll's policies with respect to partner selection before I consider investing however.

The current crop of Scroll's partners is a strong whose who of some of the best and/or most well-known publications available online, but it's a pretty homogenous group. Can I run a web forum that supports scroll? Is membership content gated? Can porn sites join? Would fringe outlets like Project Veritas or Unicorn Riot (I'm not suggesting moral or qualitative equivalence, just notability) be allowed to join if they so chose?

If the Intercept dropped a set of documents that the state or a large interest group disliked, would they lose their (theoretical) membership, or would their funds be witheld?

If I'm going to invest in a service like scroll, I'd like to know that it's an open payment platform which allows for content irrespective of its moral worth provided that its content legal in _my_ jurisdiction (meaning if a foreign country decides to outlaw _x_, my consumption still supports it).

I'm also curious to know if they have any privacy protections in place to divorce my identity from the distribution of my funds at whatever interval.

</comment><comment><USER3> If nothing else this is a really good landing page.

I think they put forth a very good value proposition for the consumer who values adfree consumption and also want to pay.

</comment><comment><USER4> I fear this could create website silos. Where certain webpages can only be accessed by a given browser because visits from that browser could be more profitable than running ads. But this is probably a long shot...

<comment><USER5> "Scroll" is the name of the company that Mozilla is partnering with, and they actually do the integration with sites to disable their ads, manage subscriptions, and manage payouts. See: [https://scroll.com/about](https://scroll.com/about)

Since Scroll is a separate entity, they can freely make the same extension available on other browsers.

So all the heavy lifting is being done by Scroll. Firefox Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) is the "second half" of the offering here named "Firefox Better Web with Scroll". But ETP is just a regular feature of Firefox now. So the real thing that Mozilla is adding here is their size. By attaching their name to it, they legitimize the concept of replacing ads & trackers with subscriptions and payouts determined by engagement not clicks. Though, I might wish they had come up with a catchier name.

This is GREAT! It's something I've wanted for years now! [1][2] Thank you Mozilla, for daring to approach the biggest problem facing human communication this century. I've never heard of Scroll before, so I'll need to do some research, but I'm just happy that someone is trying this again.

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9721917](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9721917) [2]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11622050](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11622050)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't know if this is going to take off, but we desperately need something like this.

</comment><comment><USER7> I feel the problem is that this really doesn't provide actual value to its user.

It's one thing if they are getting contents behind the paywall, but it really only appeal to relatively small subset of users who has cause to support these sites. For the rest, they will keep using content blockers...

I understand providing access to paid contents would probably costs more than $4.99 collectively, but I feel this will be a hard sell without tangible benefits.</comment>


Show HN: Metascore ranking of Phones - <AUTHOR> https://www.techpulser.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all! This is a project I have decided to build after a long frustrating week of trying to find the next _perfect_ phone I was going to buy. I had to manually search and find reviews on each model and create a comprehensive mental image of the each phone. My girlfriend always makes fun of me getting obsessive about which one to buy, but it makes perfect sense to me as I spend 1-2 years intensively with my phone, both for work and in everyday life.

I made this project as "lean" as I could: The project runs on Gatsbyjs and sources the data from Airtable (which is easy to manage). Each deployment fetches the rows in the Airtable base and builds the static sites.

I welcome any feedback on what to improve or change (or what you love)! (I am planning on expanding it to Tablets, Smartwatches, Laptops and Headphones)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I will be here answering questions if needed!</comment>


NASA and Widom-Larsen Theory: LENR Inside Story - <AUTHOR> http://blog.newenergytimes.com/2012/05/24/nasa-and-widom-larsen-theory-inside-story/

<comment><AUTHOR> LENR power: the end of Stephenson's "Low Innovation Era"? ([http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/04/opinion-fox-net- innovat...](http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/04/opinion-fox-net-innovation/))

</comment><comment><USER2> Meanwhile, "edisonian" approaches continue to make progress:

[http://ecat.com/news/news-update-from-andrea-rossi-and- ecat-...](http://ecat.com/news/news-update-from-andrea-rossi-and-ecat-com-in- may)</comment>


React Static - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nozzle/react-static <comment><USER2> static.. that reminds me of something.. oh yeah, laying html files in some directory on a server..

Whatever you call it, this has nothing in common with a "static website". It's a bunch of Javascript to fetch some text or similar data. Which may be static. But fetched by a web app. So it will display just empty on devices without JS..</comment>


Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework (1962) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/papers/scanned/Doug_Engelbart-AugmentingHumanIntellect.pdf <comment><USER2> For those of you interested in getting a replica of NLS/Augment, there's a windows program that mimics it pretty well: [http://www.ndma.com/resources/ndm8543.htm](http://www.ndma.com/resources/ndm8543.htm)

A one-handed "keyset" is also available here for those of you who want to experience NLS the "engelbartian-way": [https://www.infogrip.com/bat- keyboard.html](https://www.infogrip.com/bat-keyboard.html)

Unfortunately, the software was written in the early 90's and it's only 32-bit so you have to run it in an emulator to make it work on modern systems.

It's a real shame that NLS didn't catch on. The big issue with it is that it's like emacs in a sense - there's a learning curve involved in using it which makes it intimidating to use. This makes it hard to market to commercial markets (lotus notes took over in the '90s). It's too bad they didn't open source this back in the '70s, this is a "could have been" software project.

<comment><USER3> Very cool stuff.

From what I've read, I gather that the actual keysets developed by Engelbart's team for NLS differed a bit in style from the one in that link, but more interestingly/importantly(?) could also provide haptic feedback by puffing air up from under the keys. (i.e., as a very basic example, one could mouse over a toolbar button and the keyboard might provide a physical cue by bumping the "hotkey" for that given command - immediately teaching the user how to bypass using the mouse next time).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks, this was the first time I came across this study. Will have to look more carefully into it - but, coming from an engineering background, I just love the engineer's approach behind this study:"... the intellectual effectiveness of a human can be significantly improved by an engineering-like approach toward redesigning changeable components of a system." (page 128)

<comment><USER5> How convenient!

And what would the artist, or sociologist, or musician say?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The "processes" defined here remind me of Minsky's "agents" (which came later), and the "hierarchy" of his Society of Mind -- which also happens to be hierarchycally organized, like most (all?) human societies so far. All of these systems are involved in the realization of tasks requiring intelligence.

Within this framework, one of the interesting approaches to me here is: once you define which processes/agents are involved in a human activity, how can one augment/externalize it? Software that effectively does this is useful by definition. We might be missing lots of utility here due to lack (or just inherent difficulty) of introspection.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is almost all of the software we use, I guess :) (that isn't strictly for entertainment)

The most notable productivity boosts/cognition boosts found so far have got to be Google [search engines] and Stack Overflow. Yes you could use books but the speed is incomparable. I can accomplish something extremely complicated that would require lots of thinking with just a few queries, reading solutions and glueing them together. I can get expert advice on anything instantaneously. Interestingly this augmentation is mostly 'oracular', just giving you the right answers on demand. Though sometimes the rationale behind an answer is well explained and you can somewhat incorporate the general solution model.

Should we value more augmentation devices that are less oracular? E.g. maybe a high level programming language is a non-oracular augmentation device; you still have to correctly encode all logic, only now you can glance over some details (in sacrifice of some performance).

Do we risk of atrophy from this practice of getting everything almost ready? The productivity increase would indicate you can just use your time to accomplish more; but we all know sometimes "wasting" time is needed to learn or maintain useful skills (e.g. you could always use a calculator, but we chose to learn arithmetic; you could use wolfram to solve integrals instead of learning calculus; we spend time exercising).

It does sometimes feel like I'm almost a god at the computer, and a naked mortal away from it.

<comment><USER8> In addition to search engines and Stack Overflow, I'd include open-source software (and easy access to it via package managers, GitHub, etc.) as a massive productivity boost. I think that's in line with the process you described, of gluing together existing modules/solutions to accomplish purpose-specific tasks.

From the perspective of augmenting the intellect via computers and software, I feel quite blessed to be living in the current historical time - at the same time, we're still far from Doug Englebart's vision, especially for the general, non-programming public.

I also wonder about the "atrophy" that may come from depending on external augmentation, that we may be losing the ability to do things directly with "raw" intellect, without machines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The most interesting part is de-augmentation experiment with a brick and a pen. Contradictio in contrarium!

</comment><comment><USER10> In 2019 we've only scratched the surface of how tools can potentially augment our cognitive capabilities.

Simple word completion in the shell or in your $EDITOR saves some cognitive buffer. Completion in Gmail feels a bit too creepy at the moment. Outsourcing personal responses to a bot seems wrong. What comes next?

Imagine if you and your recipient(s) could toggle a setting "always accept Gmail completion" \- in theory the Gmail "agents" could then proceed to have a conversation between themselves.

<comment><USER11> Which is not really that different from those Google demos that called businesses for you to book specific dates for hairdressers and the like.

It is entirely possible that we'll end up with a highly inefficient network of systems interacting with each other by mimicking human interaction as a de facto standard of communication.

<comment><USER12> At which point Google will see an optimization strategy in replacing those human conversations with Protocol Buffer based protocols. Anyone who doesn't grok protobuf will be assumed to be a filthy meatbag and meatbag conversation will be used as a fallback.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great, I have been looking to experience the original NLS system. Apparently there is an issue with ownership of the code. A derivative would be close enough though.

Anyone bought this?

</comment><comment><USER14> This is very cool. But please add (1962) and fix the typo in the title. ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> ah sorry about that. with 'doug engelbart' in the title, i was under (the mistaken !) impression that time period would be approx. self-evident :o)</comment></comment>


Preview HN: our research tool, Archivd - <AUTHOR>

Hi, all -- we're launching our app in a few days and I wanted to give Hacker News a sneak peek:

    www.archivd.com
 Archivd lets you pull together useful and detailed web research very quickly. For example, here's a survey of 70-odd Y Combinator companies:

    dev.archivd.com/public/detail/goy8uFXNKe2xGK?o=30
 I'd love to hear what you think. HN's response to my old Dowser project is what got me seriously thinking of having a go at this startup. Thank you! <comment><USER2> The interface looks wonderful (although the login link is covered by the nav menu in Firefox 2). Nicely polished.

One practical suggestion: when adding a bookmark my eye moves from left to right. I thought the green + button was a continuation of the data entry form and was surprised that clicking it didn't add the bookmark to my project. Similarly, after tabbing through the four form fields, the tab order sends me to Firefox's address bar, not Save as I expected. Both of these make adding bookmarks more difficult.

Also, the description field is hit or miss. Sometimes it's empty or the pre- filled data isn't very relevant. The thumbnail images in the Card and List tabs also have this problem.

You're really pushing the paid plans. I understand why, financially. But you need people to use and love the product first. I almost skipped signing up until I saw the link to the free plan in tiny type below the three big paid options.

As a small business founder, this is too much for my needs. Delicious isn't as fully featured, but its simpler and it's already habit to use it. But with more iteration your product could be good for bigger teams in larger organizations, which looks to be where you're headed with it. Best of luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

A few people have missed the free link entirely. That'll be fixed soon. Good catch on the tabindex thing as well.</comment></comment>


Seedbombs - <AUTHOR> http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2011/04/13/seedbombs/ <comment><USER2> As an owner of a house with a garden, I'm not sure of the advisability of throwing these "seedbombs" into sidewalk cracks or similarly constricted places, as many plants, if left uncontrolled, can turn into pretty destructive suckers.

<comment><USER3> This is what I'm thinking. It's all fun and games until someone trips on an uprooted pavement slab.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a commercialized version of a technique used by the "guerrilla gardeners" movement that has _taken root_ in many blighted cities. The idea is that there are many vacant, ugly, fenced-off, lots that the owners/flippers have no plans to do anything about—so you might as well try to add some nature since local residents are the ones who have to look it at.

That's some background, I guess it's HN worthy if you are looking into various sub-cultures for ideas to mainstream in a popular marketplace.

</comment><comment><USER5> This seems like an idea that could only come from Portland or San Francisco. Disregard for property and a brief personal self-esteem boost for tossing a ball of dirt and seeds somewhere, so you can feel like a game-changing rebel on your way to buy your next chai tea.

On the other hand, I would rather have this in my neighborhood (as long as it doesn't have any sort of invasive content that is going to drift into my yard that I'm going to have to deal with for years to come) than live in a neighborhood with a bunch of those annoying urban "I raise chickens in my backyard" people.

<comment><USER3> _> Disregard for property and a brief personal self-esteem boost for tossing a ball of dirt and seeds somewhere, so you can feel like a game-changing rebel on your way to buy your next chai tea._

If you're going to go appropriating other people's property and sticking it to the man, at least go the whole hog. This is how we roll down where I live:

<http://www.lewesroadcommunitygarden.org/>

<http://www.lewesroadcommunitygarden.org/gallery.htm>

The Man won out in the end unfortunately. It was brilliant while it lasted though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> #1 question: What kinds of seeds are in there?

Other questions: are the plants an invasive species? will they crowd out other plants? I imagine if they can be thrown "anywhere" they don't need much water/soil to survive. Like most of the weeds growing around my backyard.

</comment><comment><USER7> Here's the link to the vending machine: <http://greenaid.co/pages/Greenaid- Vending-.html>

Their prices are $15/lb of seedbombs. I don't know how much each weighs, but: if it has clay, soil, etc. then it can't be light. I'm guessing about 10 bombs/lb. So I'm not sure how many people would pay $1.50 for a seedbomb with questionable efficacy.

If the price was lower (by an order of mag), then this could have serious potential.

</comment><comment><USER8> The product is neat, but I'm having a horrendous time navigating their site, trying to find, for instance, how much they cost vs how long they last vs the price of the vending machine, which should be some sort of available thing...

Can't say whether I'm willing to buy one and put it up in my shop if I can't run some numbers..

<comment><USER9> Here is their store: <http://greenaid.co/pages/Store.html>. But the vending machine doesn't seem to be featured, not sure if that's "yet" or if the vending machine itself is not a product. I guess you can contact them and ask, especially if you're interested in hosting a machine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I saw one of these vending machines a while ago in SF about half a block east from Dolores and 18th, I think near the Bi-Rite.

</comment><comment><USER11> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masanobu_Fukuoka>

<http://www.onestrawrevolution.net>

Great book, and definitely a "guerrilla gardener" and Permaculture technique.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm kinda wondering why this is on Hacker News

<comment><USER13> It's a great way to "hack" your physical space.</comment></comment>


Kotlin Goes Open Source - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2012/02/kotlin-goes-open-source-2/ <comment><USER2> While Clojure remains my favorite JVM language, I think Kotlin is the first language to have a fighting chance at replacing Java as an industry-wide blue- collar language. It doesn't try to solve programming's problems with new approaches like Clojure and Erlang; on the contrary - it's meant to let programmers continue thinking more or less as they have been thinking so far, but it has all the modern features and a good balance of power vs. ease of use/learning. It's what Java was 17 years ago.

<comment><USER3> Can you compare Kotlin with Ceylon [<http://www.ceylon-lang.org/>]? I'm very interested in what's the core/main difference between them and will be better in which use-cases.

<comment><USER2> I think the main difference is Java interop. Kotlin is fully compatible with Java and Java libraries, while Ceylon is not quite (the Ceylon FAQ says: "since Ceylon will be based on its own modular SDK, making a clean break from the legacy Java SDK, Ceylon will require new frameworks designed especially for Ceylon").

<comment><USER4> How does it compare with Scala?

<comment><USER2> Well, this is a sensitive subject. Scala is no doubt more powerful and has some awesome features, but I'd say that Kotlin has 99% of the features 99% of Scala developers choose Scala for in the first place (in other words, those Scala features that Kotlin is missing are not the ones that made most Scala developers choose Scala), while it is far easier to learn (in its entirety). Also, IDE support is far superior, and will remain so (because some Scala features, like structural types, make some actions like refactoring impossible at times). Also, it compiles to Javascript as well as to Java bytecode.

<comment><USER4> Sorry I wasn't more specific. How does it compare with Scala's Java compatibility? I know that Java compatibility is one of Scala's strengths, but the more I read, it also seems like it's one of its biggest weaknesses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice to see them dropping the silly "System.out" prefix for println. A minor point, but it was rather silly. See other Kotlin examples here: <http://kotlin-demo.jetbrains.com/> Kotlin copies much of its design and syntax from earlier Scala versions e.g. the use of companion classes, constructor syntax etc. but leaves out some of the most useful features found in Scala today. Kotlin, unlike Scala cannot make existing classes implement a new interface, nor can it do structural typing (<http://codemonkeyism.com/scala-goodness-structural-typing/>). It would be great if they added these features, without them I feel like I'm getting a poor man's Scala. The only consolation is that Kotlin does string interpolation, something which is being added to Scala 2.10 anyway.

<comment><USER2> I don't want to get into an argument over Scala, but let's just say that Scala has some _really_ cool features from a language design perspective, but many of them come at a _HUGE_ cost to ease of learning or reading code, or to IDE support. Scala's power, which is without a doubt very impressive for a statically-typed language, comes at a price which many organizations are unwilling to pay.

<comment><USER5> Do you have data to back up that claim? The only example I've come across is Yammer. Real world adoption data paints a different picture, one of rapid adoption of Scala by both start-ups and more traditional organizations like banks: see: [http://thecodegeneral.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/scala- adoptio...](http://thecodegeneral.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/scala-adoption/) and [http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/2/13/tumblr- architectur...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/2/13/tumblr- architecture-15-billion-page-views-a-month-and-harder.html)

<comment><USER2> I just compare Scala's growth to that of Java or even Ruby (since RoR). I also think that this adoption is not the result of Scala's power features but in spite of them (really, there was little choice in the statically-typed JVM languages). But I really have no skin in this game, and Java does need a modern replacement to fill a certain niche, and I have a hunch it will be Kotlin.

<comment><USER6> Is this a theoretical thought or a practical consideration?

I think the Java ecosystem needs a good, mature language now ... and I fear Kotlin is still at least half a decade away from being stable. While Kotlin compares nicely to Java 7, we need to keep in mind that both Java and Scala won't stop being developed. So pragmatically speaking, it will need to compete against Java 12 and Scala 2.16.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I feel like we see the same things with languages as we had with version control. For a long time, you had only CVS, then you had (too) many options to choose from: monotone, darcs, mercurial, git, and I certainly forgot some.

Now, we see new languages appear (and get some exposure) at a frightening pace: Rust, Go for system programming, and on the JVM: XTend, Ceylon, Kotlin, Clojure, Scala, Groovy, etc

It's great to see things move, but when you have so many option, it can be hard to make a choice. I expect some of these to take the lead, like git seems to be doing in the DVCS space.

<comment><USER8> Every company wants to have control over its own programming language. Even more since Oracle sued Google over Java.

Microsoft -> C# Google -> Go, Dart Apple -> Objective C Oracle -> Java VMWare -> Groovy Red Hat -> Ceylon JetBrains -> Kotlin Mozilla -> Rust

Facebook and Amazon should invent their own languages as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oracle hasn't sued Google over the usage of Java the language. And going with Kotlin or Groovy won't protect you from Oracle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great job, JetBrains! `Going open' (as either OSS or FOSS) seems to be the only logical decision for a programming language. Proprietary programming languages rarely stand the test of time, even when they're awesome.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm suspicious of ANOTHER language. There are too many already.

Regulation XKCD: <http://xkcd.com/927/>

<comment><AUTHOR> What's a "meta-language"?

<comment><USER10> A description of a language in another.

<comment><USER11> Kotlin compiles to bytecode - it's no more a meta language than Java itself by that definition.

<comment><USER10> I've revised my original comment now. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hmm.. so in essence Kotlin could be used as a drop in replacement for Android programming.

</comment><comment><USER6> If the language is "much simpler than Scala", why do I get stuff like this? :-)

<http://imgur.com/EaxXZ>

<comment><USER5> That's quite an error for such a small piece of code... None of the following functions can be called with the arguments supplied: final fun <T:Any?,R:Any?> Array<T>.map(var result:Collection<R>,var transform:Function1<T,R>):Collection<R> defined<java_root>std final fun <T:Any?,R:Any?>Interable<T>.map(var result:Collection<R>,var transform:Function1<T,R>):Collection<R>defined in <java_root>.std</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are your goals for the 2020's? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Staying healthy and working on some side projects

</comment><comment><USER3> Make enough money to support my family.

Not dying / staying healthy would be a nice bonus. Although, if I die that would probably satisfy my primary goal via life insurance.

</comment><comment><USER4> Continue to behave in ways that successfully made I wanted to happen happen, prune away the behaviour that got in the way of what I wanted to happen, and figure out the differences.</comment>


Cancer reproducibility effort faces backlash - <AUTHOR> http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2015/06/feature-cancer-reproducibility-effort-faces-backlash <comment><USER2> This is the same behaviour I've seen time and time again in biology labs.

People there are re-doing the same experiment over and over until it gives them the result they want, and then they publish that. It's the only field where I've heard people saying "Oh, yeah, my experiment failed, I have to do it again". What does it even mean that an experiment failed? It did exactly what it was supposed to: it gave you data. It didn't fit your expectations? Good, now you have a tool to refine your expectations. But instead, we see PhD students and post-doc working 70h hours week on experiments with seemingly random results until the randomness goes their way.

A lot of them have no clue about statistical treatment of data, making a proper model to try and test assumptions against reality. Since they deal with insanely complicated system, with hidden variables all over the place, a proper statistical analysis would be the minimum expected to be able to extract any information from the data, but no matter, once you have a good looking figure, you're done. In cellular/molecular biology, nobody cares about what a p-value is, so as long as Excel tells you it's <0.05, you're golden.

The scientific process has been forgotten in biology. Right now it's basically what alchemy was to chemistry.

I very happy to see efforts like this one. Sure, they might show that a lot of "key" papers are very wrong, but that's not the crux of it. If there is a reason for biologists to make sure that their results are real, they might try to put a little more effort into checking their work. And when they figure out how much of it is bullshit, they might even try to slow down a little on the publications and go back to the basics for a little while.

I'm sorry about this rant, but I've been driven away from a career in virology by those same issues, despite my love for the discipline, so I'm a bit bitter.

<comment><USER3> Spot on with the alchemy remark, I've made similar comparisons before. Coming into bioinformatics/computational biology with a strong discrete math background I found a lot of professors excited to work with me until I started telling them how their ideas and models and experiments didn't imply what they wanted them to. Just like the startup world is awash with "it's like Uber for X" the biology world is full of "let's apply X mathematical technique to $MY_NICHE" and somehow this is supposed to always generate novel positive results worthy of publication. Then you tell them that you applied such-and- such mathematical/statistical model to their pet system and that the results contradict their last 10 years of published papers . . . and they ask you to do it again.

I remember one professor studied metabolic reaction networks modeled with differential equations. The networks themselves were oversimplifications and relied on ~5N parameters (N being the number of compounds in the network). The problem was that while all the examples in publication converged on a nice steady state (yay homeostasis is a consequence of the model!) it was trivial to randomize the parameters within their bounds of experimental measurement and create chaotic systems. Did this mean the model wasn't so great? No, it just meant those couldn't be the real-life configuration of those parameters . . . sigh. And now I'm a data engineer and no one asks me to get data from an API that doesn't actually provide it and I'm much happier.

<comment><USER2> I hoped that it wasn't as bad in computational biology, or ecology, or any other biology field where systems and models are actually defined. It saddens me to read that your experience was as bad as mine...

<comment><USER4> I'm a CompBio PhD student, and my experience is that folks in that field are much more careful with statistics than in, say, molecular biology labs, but it varies from lab to lab. My PI is exceedingly meticulous about stats -- for instance, we don't report p-values, but rather entire distributions -- but that's because our work is all in silico, so it's easy to run tons of replicate simulations. Wet lab work that's finicky should definitely be held to high statistical standards, but I don't think it's fair to presume everyone in the field guilty until proven innocent.

<comment><USER2> But wet lab scientists should be even more careful! They have way less control over the system they're trying to study than you do, so stats are the only security net we have to even attempt to do anything with the data we produce.

I also agree on the innocent until proven guilty part, but by now I've seen and talked to hundreds of people with the best intentions, who do not realise how important careful examination of the data is, so I'm growing a bit disillusioned.

<comment><USER5> I think it is entirely fair to presume biologists incompetent and sloppy until they have proven otherwise.

(My impression from admittedly limited contact with biology students and from browsing through the occasional paper is that most of them barely approach mediocrity from below.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looking at this through the lens of drug discovery is the wrong way to do this. The problem is with our drug discovery strategy, generally, not with the reproducibility of our research.

STK33, for example, is _definitely_ implicated in cancer through a wide variety of mechanisms. It is often mutated in tumors, and multiple studies have picked it up as having a role in driving migration, metastasis, etc.

This doesn't mean we can make good drugs to it.

Making drugs is hard - they need to be available in the tissue in the right concentrations, often difficult to achieve with a weird-shaped, sticky molecule. They need to have specificity for the tumor, they need to have specificity for the gene target(s) of interest. They need to be effective at modulating the target.

More importantly, though, the drug is modulating a target (gene) that is involved in a biological system that involves complex systems of feedback control, produces adaptive responses, and otherwise behaves in unexpected ways in response to modulation.

In my experience this is usually underappreciated by most drug discovery strategies, which merely seek to "inhibit the target" as if its involvement in the tumor process means we can simply treat it as an "on-off" switch for cancer. This assumption is asinine, and of course will (and does) lead to frequent failure. STK33 is not an on-off switch, and attempting to treat it that way will likely result in a drug that does nothing.

<comment><USER7> This is absolutely correct. Pharma companies are running into a wall and are flailing to figure out what to do. It's quite clear that from first principles bathing the entire body in trillions of little molecules hoping that they _only_ and _completely_ shut down a single kind of protein, at the right time, in the right place, of the right cell, and do nothing more, is insane. There is some logic behind the ability for a small molecule to help against invading diseases (the antibiotics of the 20th century), but the same strategy will philosophically not work for entire classes of cancers or other innate biological problems. Though we all somehow just assumed that it would.

The pharmacy of the future will be entirely curative to non-invading diseases, will repair the DNA that's been mutated, will express or inhibit the proteins that need to be expressed or inhibited. And small molecules will be the payload of these fancy protein-based nano-machines. But this hunt to bring down the cost of those small-molecule targets at the cost of the reputation of the science itself might be foolhardy when the cost is near-infinite in the first place because they're looking from the wrong perspective.

tldr; Pharmaceutical companies' hammer that worked so well against the nails of bacterial infection is in no way suited to the plumbing of cancer. And now they're 'investigating the plumbers' to figure out why their fancy new 50-billion-dollar "water-hammers" don't work so well to unclog pipes.

<comment><USER8> I agree it's challenging to create small molecule treatments for oncology. That said, there have been some recent, massive successes recently. Look at Imbruvica which is a massive jump forward in treating MCL and CLL.

Even if you drop small molecules and focus on antibodies, it's not like it's all that easier.

<comment><USER7> Certainly there are success stories when so much effort is put forward. But look at all the things even Imbruvica does in addition to helping treat cancer [1].

If you want to fix MCL you figure out how to engineer a genetic payload that targets B-cells IFF they express particular genes, and reengineer those cells' genomes to either no longer reproduce abnormally, or shut them down. You do NOT covalently turn off an entire class of kinases in the ENTIRE body...

And that's the success story. Antibodies are just the tip of the protein- iceberg. They're the 'same things as a small molecule' but in protein form - baby steps into a whole new world. Sure, they can bind to stuff tightly, but if that (alone) is what you're aiming for, then they're not being used to try to fix the problem or engineer a way to the solution. There's lots more that we could do if we started actually engineering the proteins and their interactions, and delivering them in directed ways. We have access to those primitive engineering tools, but instead of focusing on those nascent tools, we're polishing up the old hammer.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibrutinib#Adverse_effects](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibrutinib#Adverse_effects)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > This past January, the cancer reproducibility project published its protocol > for replicating the experiments, and the waiting began for Young to see > whether his work will hold up in their hands. He says that if the project > does match his results, it will be unsurprising—the paper's findings have > already been reproduced. If it doesn't, a lack of expertise in the > replicating lab may be responsible. Either way, the project seems a waste of > time, Young says. "I am a huge fan of reproducibility. But this mechanism is > not the way to test it."

One swallow does not make a spring. With a belief like 'one replication is enough', I'm not sure Young actually appreciates how large sampling error is under usual significance levels or how high heterogeneity between labs is.

<comment><USER10> As far as I can tell from the article, Young's stance is that the contract lab doing the reproduction doesn't seem competent enough to correctly reproduce the experiment.

I don't know enough to know if that's true or not. But it seems at least possible that in the rush to reproduce much, the project is cutting costs by using less-skilled contract labs.

<comment><USER11> Presumably the replicating lab will record and document their approach and results so that it can be compared with the original experiment.

<comment><USER12> Am I missing deliberate irony here?

<comment><USER11> The results will either be replicated or they won't.

There will either be sufficient documentation to show whether the experiment was repeated accurately or there won't be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As a complete outsider reading the attitudes behind the original scientists, it seems to me that they resent the oversight and hate to do extra work. In defending their practices they fall back on "expert work" and essentially are arguing that what they are doing is too complex for anyone else to do and they should be left alone to continue to do it.

And from their point of view, it seems all very reasonable. But from the rest of humanity who is being asked to materially support them, and waits for their conclusions to make the world a better place, it seems ... frankly... lazy and selfish. 30 emails, wow! 2 weeks of a graduate student's time -- these are the people who are the least paid right? Below minimum wage even? The demands on their time seem so low, yet the complaints are so high, that one can't help but wonder if the concern really is that their results are too 'magical' and irreproducible and they just fear other people learning about it.

I've seen this behavior in professional settings, and ultimately it comes down to a lack of confidence in oneself, the tools and technology and the quality of work being done. Careers are at stake, but is the alternative to just give people a free pass?

<comment><USER14> Sorry, but how is this not just anti-intellectualism?

 _> 30 emails, wow!_

It can take up to half a day to reply to an email containing even one fairly technical question. Obviously the time invested depends on the content of those 30 emails, but it's not at all difficult to imagine this eating a week worth of a PI's time.

 _> 2 weeks of a graduate student's time -- these are the people who are the least paid right? Below minimum wage even?_

The typical attitude is that this is a justification for _not_ making them spend their time managing these sorts of tasks. You don't get to say "we get to pay you crap because your job is exciting and rewarding" and then load that same person down with a bunch of grunt work (on top of all the normal grunt work). That's how you bleed students and kill the lab's productivity.

Also, grad students are not well paid but they are typically no cheaper than post docs; PIs pay tuition.

 _> The demands on their time seem so low, yet the complaints are so high_

So let's imagine a world where people calling for massive improvements to reproducability get their way. Let's say it is a month worth of time for the lab. For each paper. Multiple papers a year. That's a pretty massive time investment. If you're a top lab, that could become a full-time position. And believe me, you're not going to be able to fill that position with a grad student. That person will have to be well-paid, because their job is going to suck.

So it's reasonable that scientists are peeved when they invest all this time and don't perceive their collaborators as acting in good faith, or feel like their collaborators are trying to cut corners to pinch pennies.

<comment><USER15> If an engineer builds the worlds greatest new engine but says "unfortunately it'll only run in my lab, no one else is competent enough to run it or build a copy" then what good is it to society?

If the researchers in a lab are such geniuses that they are doing experiments almost nobody else can duplicate and it is therefore impossible to determine the veracity of their claims, how is that helping society and why should society fund them?

Isn't the onus on the researchers to focus experiments that are also reproducible by non-supergeniuses?

<comment><USER14> _> If an engineer builds the worlds greatest new engine_

There is more to science than advanced product development. Conflating the two is wrong-headed.

 _> but says "unfortunately it'll only run in my lab, no one else is competent enough to run it or build a copy" then what good is it to society?_

It's fantastically good to society. A company interested in monetizing the research could provide that researcher with a multi-year sabbatical to come to their company and turn is _Research_ into a _Product_.

Incidentally, that happens. It's also not unheard of for phd students to carry an adviser's idea forward toward application in the context of a permanent position at a relevant company.

 _> almost nobody else can duplicate_

There's a difference between not being able to duplicate, and duplication being expensive.

 _> and it is therefore impossible to determine the veracity of their claims_

Again, reproducibility should focus on the veracity of the claims, not the economics of reproducing them. Nothing is wrong with calling for better reproducibility. The problem is in expecting to get it for free, and assuming that it's always appropriate at every stage of research.

Investment in reproducibility should be in proportion to the degree of trust the scientific community puts in the claim, and it is absolutely reasonable for that investment to grow over time. But, don't kid yourself, it's an investment. And society would have to be stupid to invest enormous amounts of money into ensuring every single scientific paper ever published is held to an extremely strong standard for reproducibility.

 _> Isn't the onus on the researchers to focus experiments that are also reproducible by non-supergeniuses?_

If by "super genius" you mean "someone else who does research in the same or a closely related field", then Hell. No. The onus on the scientists is to focus on experiments that push science forward in service of mankind.

Sometimes this means helping mega-corps figure out how to reliably reproduce your research without expert help and thereby increase profit by decreasing required investment. Sometimes this means focusing on discovery.

<comment><USER16> " _A paper that Young, a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, had published inCell in 2012 on how a protein called c-Myc spurs tumor growth was among 50 high-impact papers chosen for scrutiny by the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology._ "

That hardly sounds like "every single scientific paper ever published".

<comment><USER14> You are correct; I was being hyperbolic. But still, not sure Nature/Science/Cell is a high enough standard for "anyone should be able to replicate with little effort" \-- lots of "non-late-game" results that aren't necessarily ready for industry applications get published in those venues (which, I guess I've been arguing, is a good thing.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It seems like a sensible check is for this collaboration to include original studies, like the one mentioned in the article lede, that have already been replicated elsewhere. (Ideally they would keep blind the relevant members of the collaboration to this fact.) Then when you say "we failed to replicate X% of the studies" you also say "of the subgroup that had already be replicated, we failed to replicate Y%". If Y isn't much smaller than X, you know the replication collaboration is probably botching this.

</comment><comment><USER14> I can't state how strongly I disagree with the conclusion that papers should be providing excruciating detail about protocol just because "pharmaceutical companies can't reproduce key cancer papers [without the help of the original scientists]". Science has rarely been done like this.

It would be like Google complaining that they can't copy psuedocode verbatim out of a paper and have a highly performant algorithm. Or Microsoft complaining that a static analysis defined in a paper wasn't accompanied by a production-ready implementation.

Producing protocols that literally anyone could replicate without expending effort is not the business of Science.

Replication should focus on the veracity of the underlying truth claim, not the economics of reproducing the results.

<comment><USER18> Your analogies are completely off the mark. It is not the same at all. The cornerstone of science is that other people can reproduce your results. Period. There is no use publishing otherwise. Withholding key information, which is so ubiquitous now, is a great disservice to the scientific community.

<comment><USER14> The question is not whether reproducibility is good, it's how much labs should invest upfront in producing descriptions of protocols. My argument is that they should probably invest more than they do now, but not enough that pharmacutical companies are able to reproduce a given experiment without talking to the lab.

Science is a collaborative process. There's nothing wrong with collaboration being part of the reproducibility process, as long as the person doing the reproduction maintains their objectivity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Jeff Settleman, who left academia for industry 5 years ago and is now at > Calico Life Sciences in South San Francisco, California, agrees. "You can't > give me and Julia Child the same recipe and expect an equally good meal," he > says. Settleman has two papers being replicated.

Uh, Julia Child WROTE FREAKING COOKBOOKS. The entire point of Julia Child was that she tried to develop recipes in such a way that another cook could produce an equally good meal. Now, yes, if I went into a boiler room at Goldman Sachs and picked 10 guys at random, I doubt that most would be able to duplicate the recipe. If I picked 10 professional sous chefs at random and none of them were able to make a dish as good as Julia Child's from her recipe, I would start to have my doubts about the recipe.

By the same token, I don't expect rank amateurs to be able to duplicate state of the art cancer research. But if labs run by pharma companies and academic institutions are having the failure rate at reproducing research that the article claims, I think it's more than reasonable to start questioning the paper that documented that research, if not the research itself.

<comment><USER20> Analogy doesn't hold up. The complexity of cancer research is vastly greater than cooking. But anyway, chefs claim that there is special, non-reproducible elements about their environment and creations, e.g., oven, ingredients, etc. all the time.

> none of them were able to make a dish as good

Defining "good" is the problem for both cancer research and cooking. You can have two experts saying this is "good" or this is "bad" and not really be able to prove who is right. Fine, maybe for cancer research you can ultimately prove who is right but its not realistic in most cases given the resource constraints of even top-flight labs.

<comment><USER19> Well, it's not my analogy. But I think it's a good one, it just undermines the point of the person who made it.

If I go into Momofuko, I'm looking for a good meal. A good meal is one that tastes good, in this case. If I'm looking at a Julia Child cookbook, I'm looking for a good recipe. One of the criteria for a good recipe may be that it tastes good, or that it produces a healthy meal -- there's several different criteria you can use here. But one criteria for a good recipe is reproducibility -- in order for a recipe to be good it must contain enough information and be accurate enough for me to create the dish that the recipe is for. A recipe for a tasty meal that does not contain the right ingredients or enough detail in the steps to prepare it is a bad recipe.

By the same token, an experiment that cannot be repeated is a bad experiment. It may not be false. But its explanatory value is limited -- if a reaction can only take place in water that's treated a certain way or has/lacks certain minerals, then a paper that doesn't tell me that is leaving out important information. Regardless of whether or not you define the point of cancer research in purely scientific terms -- that is, to learn more about cancer -- or in more pragmatic terms -- that is, to allow us to create better cancer treatments -- omitted information about the circumstances surrounding the test that has a significant effect on the test result gives us less information and is less likely to lead to better cancer treatments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > It's unrealistic to think contract labs or university core facilities can > get the same results as a highly specialized team of academic researchers, > they say. Often a graduate student has spent years perfecting a technique > using novel protocols, Young says.

Then they need to spend the time documenting those protocols.

My dad worked in biological research, and his attitude has always been: if you don't write it down, you might as well not have done the work at all. ESPECIALLY in research.

</comment><comment><USER12> So hold on a moment. These researchers are doing experiments so badly that they can't find the actual procedures they used to get their results? And now they are tracking down old postdocs and lab technicians just to pick their Brian's as to what they actually did?!?

How the heck did this stuff get through peer review? Surely I'm missing something critical?

<comment><USER22> Academic peer review has nothing to do with quality control and everything to do with maintaining the status quo. Don't take my word for it, read Retraction Watch: [http://retractionwatch.com/](http://retractionwatch.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Interesting... Over the past year I was tickling the idea of making an organization/company/website which automatically would give tax dollars to research. The idea being, you can maximize the amount you right off in taxes and donate to research you desire (i.e. more NASA, less children killed around the globe).

The idea stemmed from the the idea that people want access to research (public) AND reproducible. The funds would go directly to research groups, and as an incentive, reproducibility would have bounties based on what people were willing to donate. Because virtually every research group with public research is supported by a non-profit, no one losses additional money, but more funds go towards public interest research GROUPS not organizations with bureaucracy.

Somewhat off topic, but this seems another reason for me to start the project.

</comment><comment><USER24> I tend to agree that the biology papers often lack proper documentation of procedures and methodologies. This is a wonderful effort to reproduce some of the key experiments. That being said, I think it's also very important to look at the quality and qualifications of the labs doing the reproductions.

I don't have any direct link to cancer research, so I can't speak with authority on the subject, but I have been involved in the past with a company working in the Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis field.

The basics of their procedure is to create one or more human embryos via IVF, incubate the embryos for up to 6 days, than either freeze them, or transplant them into the prospective mother. On day 3 or 5 of incubations the embryo is biopsied, and the genetic material is tested to make sure there are no aneuploidy defects. We were also able to test for some other types of genetic abnormalities. This is for people who are having problem becoming pregnant.

In any case, some time in the mid 2000s there were 3 papers published in Europe claiming that performing biopsy on Day 3 is extremely detrimental to the embryo, and their conclusion was that PGD with Day 3 should not be performed. The experiments were conducted by people who were unskilled in micro manipulation.

They did follow proper protocols, and I am sure they did their best to replicate proper procedures. But micro manipulation is as much skill as it is knowledge. For instance, I can write a detailed procedure on how to shoot a compound bow, and you can follow that procedure exactly. But, without practice, you are not going to hit the bullseye on the first try.

Because we were in the business of providing services to doctors, not publishing papers, we constantly tracked our embryo mortality rates, birth rates, and accuracy of testing. The better our results were, the more business we would get. And we couldn't fake the results, because clinics ordering the test would be the once recording all of those statistics for us.

Any way, long story short, none of our data agreed with the papers claiming that Day 3 biopsy was detrimental to the embryo. In fact, quite the contrary, many of our statistics suggested that Day 3 biopsy and Day 4 or Day 5 transfer would result in better implantation rates. But, the papers were published, and referenced, and then it became "common knowledge" that Day 3 biopsy is bad, and the medical industry moved on to Day 5 biopsy and embryo cryopreservation, and so has the company I worked with.

To the company I worked for it's all the same, money is money. Day 3 or Day 5 biopsy, they make money all the same. But the patients are not more limited. From the stats we have seen, it doesn't look like Day 4 or 5 biopsy is worse for the embryo, but being frozen isn't a walk in the park. With Day 5 biopsy you have to freeze the embryo, in order to allow time for the test results to come back.

Any way, it's my 2 cents. Reproducibility is important, but I think it's just as important to change the incentives of those who publish papers. If you goal is to be published, then of course your research will suffer. It's the publish or parish mentality in academia that is the problem, I think.

<comment><USER25> Why didn't your company publish their data. If day 3 biopsy is better and you have the data to show it get it out. This is not some meaningless result - this is a matter of life and death.

<comment><USER24> Because things in medical science function a lot differently from the rest of science. Take a look at this video to see what I mean: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VArT6Kj_x_8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VArT6Kj_x_8)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I agree with the overall sentiment, the scientific community working on cancer cure(s) is failing us, the patients and their families.

And they are failing us because of some fundamental gaps in how the research, and subsequent review/dissemination/presentation of finding is done. I suspect there are multiple failures in the process. The standards of scientific proof and repeatability, used by mathematicians, physicists and chemists are not followed

The net result is the following disappointing statistic:

"... In 1971, President Nixon and Congress declared war on cancer. Since then, the federal government has spent well over $105 billion on the effort (Kolata 2009b). ... Gina Kolata pointed out in The New York Times that the cancer death rate, adjusted for the size and age of the population, has decreased by only 5 percent since 1950 (Kolata 2009a)." [1]

And this was just the US federal government investment. Not counting the private donations, and private company research. Today the annual fed investment is 5bln annually [3] I do not mean to sound totally discouraged, as clearly the screenings have helped many to detect cancers before they metastasized. And I would say the science results are showing that that part of the research is working well.

However,for the cancers that can be rarely be detected before the spread (eg pancreatic cancer and others) -- the investment our country and other societies have put in -- simply has not payed off.

What worries me is that our research quality gates are not able to improve the QoS of the underlying research.

And with my 'management hat on' \-- I am reaching out for this quote by Einstein.

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

The OP paper is not the first one pointing at the lack of reproducible results, and it not just for cancer research "... But it may also be due to current state of science. Scientists themselves are becoming increasingly concerned about the unreliability – that is, the lack of reproducibility — of many experimental or observational results. ..." [2]

There needs to be a bit of a revolution in the science of the cancer research and the way money is allocated to it. Clearly the current model does not work and likely is encouraging the pseudo science to prosper.

[1] [http://www.csicop.org/si/show/war_on_cancer_a_progress_repor...](http://www.csicop.org/si/show/war_on_cancer_a_progress_report_for_skeptics/)

[2] [http://www.forbes.com/sites/henrymiller/2014/01/08/the- troub...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/henrymiller/2014/01/08/the-trouble-with- scientific-research-today-a-lot-thats-published-is-junk/)

[3][http://blogs.reuters.com/stories-id-like-to- see/2014/09/09/t...](http://blogs.reuters.com/stories-id-like-to- see/2014/09/09/the-money-spent-in-fighting-cancer-and-alibabas-risk-factor/)

</comment><comment><USER27> _the group clarified that they did not want to replicate the 30 or so experiments in the Cell paper, but just four described in a single key figure. And those experiments would be performed not by another academic lab working in the same area, but by an unnamed contract research organization._

sounds like someone wants to quietly weaponize this.</comment>