What has happened down here is the winds have changed - <AUTHOR> http://andrewgelman.com/2016/09/21/what-has-happened-down-here-is-the-winds-have-changed/ <comment><USER2> Good scientists should welcome this challenge with open arms, sunlight all of their data and code in a repository, and show how proper statistically rigorous research is conducted. That's an elevator right to the top of the field.

If I wrote code that messed up, I'd patch it. If someone else points out a bug? Even better, now I don't have to find it myself. But I would definitely not feel attacked or nor would I blame the QA engineer. It's my mistake, and so I must own it. These researchers need to do the same.

I believe full publication of code and data should be required for peer- reviewed research. If I can't look at your raw data or your algorithm, it is simply not possible to determine whether the study is correct. The social sciences must adapt to more statistically rigorous methods.

After all, the only two choices are adaptation or extinction.

<comment><USER3> > sunlight all of their data and code

This is not always possible. For example, if you are working with proprietary subscription-only datasets where the researcher has no redistribution rights.

<comment><USER4> If the community demands the ability to review code and data then the usage of closed data sets will simply decrease until they comply. We should not base our standards of research on the ease of complying. We should do what we can to produce the most accurate results.

<comment><USER5> The problem is not one of convenience, the problem is that you are depriving yourself of huge amounts of valuable (closed) data, and this may cause large gaps in what is researchable.

<comment><USER6> This was the point. You have to pay the price for the principles and hope that the tide turns one day.

If you take your suggested easy route then this day may never come.

<comment><USER7> Are you a researcher and following those principles? Because it is very easy to demand _other_ people pay the price for what _you_ believe are the right principles.

The reality of the way research funding and academia is set up (at least in Europe) is that the price you pay is likely your career. You can go through all the work and effort to follow those principles, and all that will happen is that the politicians will give the research funding and tenure positions to competitors that published more and told more exciting stories.

Academia and research will necessarily reflect the incentives put in place by the people with the money (i.e., politicians). And right now they are giving money for exciting stories and publication counts. _That_ is where the change must start.

<comment><USER6> I did not _demand_ anything. I just explained that when everybody complies, nothing will probably change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Susan Fiske's name came up the other day, I wonder if the context for this essay in the article is the Statcheck bot that found errros in published papers. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12643978](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12643978)

Apparently (I gleaned from the comments) Susan was very vocally opposed to that project and said it was an attack.

She's painting a bleak picture of widespread social attacks and commentary causing the problems in academics that I don't think matches reality, and she's also suggesting the public shouldn't comment on publicly funded research.

I don't know of a single academic that has left the field due to negative commentary coming from outside the peer review system, and I know a lot of people that have left academics and a lot of people still in academics.

Some ambitious academic peers are vicious, and people are leaving due to infighting, trouble getting funding, academic stealing, difficulty getting tenure, and general departmental and university politics. The single biggest threat to education is our funding model and the exploding costs stemming from exploding amounts of administration.

The paper review process not only isn't one of the major problems, I personally believe it's actually working better now than it ever has, and that the quality and standards are higher than they've ever been.

The comments on Statcheck were wildly in favor of having automated bots fact- checking publications. I contend that it's best use is before publication, and not after, but otherwise I agree - it's awesome.

</comment><comment><USER9> I love this essay. Also relevant, _the Control Group is out of Control_ : [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is- ou...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of- control/)

<comment><USER10> Oh yes. This should be required reading.

I have a long-term bet with a friend on the truth behind Wiseman & Schlitz (I think I bet 1 dollar on "beyond known science" to his 50 on "methodological error", but maybe the odds were different, and the amounts were definitely more. Maybe we will try to reproduce it at home, because otherwise who knows if it will be resolved at all in our lifetime.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This original editorial by Fiske, especially the "methodological terrorism" soundbite, reminds me of the NEJM data sharing editorial where they described people who use datasets that others shared as "research parasites".

Both editorials are written by people in positions of academic power (Fiske is a PNAS editor - PNAS editors have a unique and often criticized ability to unilaterally review and approve publication of articles without a peer review panel; NEJM editors wield great power in medical sciences).

Both are originally directed toward a narrower audience of their journal, but taken out of the confines of their academic cloister, start to sound ridiculous in a world where the public starts to point out where their funding is coming from, and poke holes in their reasoning.

<comment><USER12> > _start to sound ridiculous in a world where the public starts to point out > where their funding is coming from_

I have to say I disagree (did I misunderstand you?): they sound absolutely ridiculous even if your only goal is to do good science and you don't care one jot for the public or funding. That was always a key problem with _research parasites_ and Fiske's _methodological terrorism_ : apart from everything else, it's just bad science.

<comment><USER13> "sounds ridiculous in a world where X" does not mean "sounds ridiculous _only_ in a world where X". It doesn't imply that the thing wouldn't be ridiculous if X wasn't the case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> First, I don't understand why rapid feedback is bad. Communication adapts to new mediums all the time, and academia goes with it. The arXiv pre-print system is a great example of a field adapting well to a new technology.

Secondly, addressing the article's main point, I'm being told that social media comments about their studies are so traumatic and detrimental that they leave their careers. That's a problem with the researcher's ability to handle digital hate mail. Doctors, lawyers, dentists, and veterinarians all get massive amounts of digital hate mail.

Finally, after the failure to replicate studies, "self-appointed data police" and "methodological terrorism"[0] sound like exactly what the field needs.

[0] I have to say, only an incredibly insular community could come up with such an insensitive name. Checking your methods is not terrorism. Someone doing preliminary reviews on research data is not terrorism. To compare data critics to terrorists both insults the victims of actual terrorism, and dilutes the definition of the term so far as to be almost meaningless. They may as well call them "Methodological Nazis."

<comment><USER14> > I don't understand why rapid feedback is bad

She doesn't say rapid feedback is bad. She says online personal attacks and abuse are bad.

<comment><USER15> You are falling for a classic argumentative attack. Everyone agrees "abuse" (e.g. beating your wife) is bad, so Fisk just redefines "abuse" to mean "earnest, blunt, non-sugar-coated feedback" but you keep on using the connotations of the real definition.

<comment><USER16> What about "earnest, blunt, non-sugar-coated feedback" that is useless, uninformed, and counterproductive to researchers? I was under the impression that that was the concern here.

Just because someone says something non-sugar-coated doesn't mean it has any truth or value to it. In my experience, a lot of the people who publicly congratulate themselves on never pulling any punches and telling it like it is and keeping it real, etc., aren't motivated because they feel like they have valuable feedback to offer (they usually don't), but rather it's just a way to act out and maintain a tough-guy public persona that they want everyone to believe in.

I'm 100% in favor of public peer review, I just question the value of stereotypical Linus Torvalds-style "I'm just telling it like it is, you idiot" feedback that some people fetishize in these parts. The best course of action here is by definition whatever leads to more and better research, with whatever the appropriate amount of public and private peer review is that leads to that outcome.

<comment><USER17> > _Linus Torvalds-style "I'm just telling it like it is, you idiot" feedback_

Torvalds never starts out that way, and if you look at any given episode where he's shown to have done this, the historical commentary will show Torvalds trying to politely educate the other party, and the other party just not getting it (often wilfully).

As for fetishising it, I've _never_ seen anyone here on HN laud Torvalds for doing that; quite the opposite, it's only ever brought up to denigrate him. Ironically, de Raadt's behaviour around OpenBSD _does_ get fetishised by some around here. I've never really understood why de Raadt gets a reasonable amount of respect for that behaviour whilst Torvalds is a pariah for it here on HN.

<comment><USER18> That caused a lot of pshycological damage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Gelman is being a bit modest (for him) because he only mentions in passing probably the biggest recent example of the "social media takedown of psychology research" phenomenon: he was the first person to publicly raise questions about the LaCour and Green study on changing people's support for gay marriage, and he did it in his washingtonpost.com blog five days after the study was published.

<comment><USER20> Thanks for providing that context. I believe this is the article you mentioned: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey- cage/wp/2015/05/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey- cage/wp/2015/05/20/fake-study-on-changing-attitudes-sometimes-a-claim-that-is- too-good-to-be-true-isnt/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > _When the authors protest that none of the errors really matter, it makes > you realize that, in these projects, the data hardly matter at all._

<comment><USER22> I think my personal favorite is the Kahneman quote about how you have NO CHOICE BUT TO ACCEPT.

<comment><USER23> I also find this quote remarkable, and not in a good way; but I recall that Kahneman's studies do replicate pretty well. (This is not to say that all their claimed implications are true - this is the part where "no choice but to accept" rubs me the wrong way.)

<comment><USER12> The full _no choice but to accept_ quote was specifically about priming studies, IIRC, and I guess what irked Gelman (a statistician) the most was that Kahneman got _statistics_ wrong by overestimating the strength of evidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I was a big fan of "Thinking fast, thinking slow", like pretty much everyone, until the replication crisis came along. Now I see a lot of the work in this field as a sort of scientifically informed stereotyping that might someday end up on par with phrenology, but it's still fun to read and consider as if it were true. It's really awful how pseudo-science can get so far though.

<comment><USER25> Did it turn out that research in the book is flawed or not reproducible?

<comment><USER26> Yes, some of the studies haven't been reproducible. I don't have references right now, unfortunately.

<comment><USER27> Here is one: [https://www.psychologicalscience.org/pdf/StrackRRR_manuscrip...](https://www.psychologicalscience.org/pdf/StrackRRR_manuscript_accepted.pdf)

<comment><USER28> Wow, the plot on the bottom of page 11 really drives home the point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Oh, free speech and criticism is okay as long as it's moderated and appropriate... Well played.

The work of psychology researchers influences our LAWS. They influence how I can live my life. It's a very personal thing. I will criticise them however I want and as much as I want until this branch of 'science' has cleaned up its conduct.

If your work cannot withstand criticism, it's worthless. Get out of science, Susan T. Fiske, you give it a bad name. Or rather, what you were doing was probably never science in the first place. Your attitude fills me with disgust.

This is not a Russel's Paradox situation that can be patched up. The crisis in social 'sciences' is of such a magnitude that the only reasonable course of action is "start over" in many cases.

<comment><USER30> > The work of psychology researchers influences our LAWS. They influence how I > can live my life. It's a very personal thing.

While I agree with the above sentiment:

> If your work cannot withstand criticism, it's worthless. Get out of science, > Susan T. Fiske, you give it a bad name.

I think the tone is very much incorrect. While researchers should be responsible for bad science, you may it sound like it was necessarily done with malicious intent - I think this attitude is unproductive for everyone involved.

<comment><USER31> Does the intent matter? Even if it was just a career-long run of incompetence, "getting out of science" would seem a reasonable starting point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Excerpt from post on Robin Hanson's blog covers this well[0]:

"In the rest of society, however, we often both try to hire people who seem to show off the highest related abilities, and we let those most prestigious people have a lot of discretion in how the job is structured. For example, we let the most prestigious doctors tell us how medicine should be run, the most prestigious lawyers tells us how law should be run, the most prestigious finance professionals tell us how the financial system should work, and the most prestigious academics tell us how to run schools and research.

This can go very wrong! Imagine that we wanted research progress, and that we let the most prestigious researchers pick research topics and methods. To show off their abilities, they may pick topics and methods that most reduce the noise in estimating abilities. For example, they may pick mathematical methods, and topics that are well suited to such methods. And many of them may crowd around the same few topics, like runners at a race. These choices would succeed in helping the most able researchers to show that they are in fact the most able. But the actual research that results might not be very useful at producing research progress.

Of course if we don't really care about research progress, or students learning, or medical effectiveness, etc., if what we mainly care about is just affiliating with the most impressive folks, well then all this isn't much of a problem. But if we do care about these things, then unthinkingly presuming that the most prestigious people are the best to tell us how to do things, that can go very very wrong."

The winds may have changed, but landscape erodes very slowly…

[0] [http://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/06/beware-prestige- based-...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/06/beware-prestige-based- discretion.htm)

<comment><USER33> Oh, this is apt. Apt I tell you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The phenomenon described here is one of many side effects of what I think is the greatest disturbance in the zeitgeist since at least 9/11: the disintermediation of information itself.

We live in an era where authorities of all kinds are under greater scrutiny than ever before, because the Internet's made it so much easier for everyone to learn about and discuss what they're doing. And to believe that we know better than them. The mass media gatekeepers who once shaped public opinion are still present but have a fraction of the influence they had in the 20th century.

Nassim Taleb discussed this recently from a more political angle: [https://medium.com/@nntaleb/the-intellectual-yet- idiot-13211...](https://medium.com/@nntaleb/the-intellectual-yet- idiot-13211e2d0577#.ju4yyfr3y)

But it is really the same thing. From the post-Snowden privacy movement to Brexit to the Trump campaign to "the destructo-critics" referred to in this article, all of these things are a product of people becoming more informed about what authorities are really doing, getting pissed off about it, and taking action.

You can make your own value judgments about whether all of these things are good or bad (we surely know what the predominant opinions will be among HN's audience of left wing tech people: pro-Snowden, anti-Brexit, anti-Trump, pro destructo-critics). But I think the overall trend is good. And intensely destabilizing to society, in no small part because even as we approach this information equality, wealth inequality is soaring.

I think one important thing to understand about this trend is that _numbers win_ -- you can be right but if a large enough part of the population disagrees with you, you're going to be on the defensive anyway.

Another thing is that while people are rapidly becoming better informed, they're becoming more confident in their opinions even faster. So again we are not necessarily always going to see better decisions being made -- but they are going to be made with more public input.

I know that might sound a little crazy when we seemingly hear about a new secret conspiracy or abuse of power every day, but that's the point: _this stuff was always going on and we just didn't know._

<comment><USER33> Very little of the scrutiny is any good at all. It's riddled with mood affiliation and confirmation bias. The incentives simply are not with thoughtful, considered analysis. It's too easy to create moments for people to be swept up in, and to use the tools of persuasion to raise the persuader's stock. Where social media could be an agent for reason, it had not taken that role very much so far.

Take the stories around Ferguson - I think Alex Tabbarok won the internet the day he released "Ferguson and the Modern Debtor's Prison" but that point of view only appears in other references to the situation sparingly if at all.

I just have to flatly disagree with the idea that better information leads to higher confidence in conclusions - there's simply no way that can be true unless the subject is inherently trivial or unless some methodological advance has made the previously intractable tractable. More information means more uncertainty unless you're dealing in convergent statistical situations.

What's needed overall is for more people to listen with respect and genuine curiosity to people with whom they disagree.

The effect of social media so far has been decidedly uncomfortable, especially in the Middle East. Perhaps that is the Islamic Protestant Reformation, with social media playing the role of printing press, but I doubt it - people who know Islam much better than I claim it's actually riddled with deep apostasy and not the kind that seems overall a positive thing. Ignoring deeply normative Koranic instructions for the application of Islam in favor of violence ( perhaps even war-crime-shaped violence ) cannot be a good thing.

<comment><USER35> I agree. Argue with your peers, not with the internet—but open data your sets after you publish the several studies you get.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Fiske's Cognitive Miser theory: "The theory suggests that humans, valuing their mental processing resources, find different ways to save time and effort when negotiating the social world." ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_miser](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_miser)) Such an indictment that this "science" can debate these topics with a straight face.

As Feynman said: "We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science."

</comment><comment><USER37> > once an article is published in some approved venue, it should be taken as > truth

And I agree with the author that it shouldn't.

A good point is made about the arguments for releasing study findings in blogs, where discussions can be had in comments and perhaps the content of the blog amended as needed.

I definitely think that the old way of publishing studies needs to change. They need to allow discussion. Those that publish the studies and those that read them need to critique and possibly conclusions be amended. And to get this to happen at an intellectual level, students and others in academia and research should be funded more by taxes and possibly be required to do critiques and duplicate other studies to some extent.

For too long we've assumed the bodies of accumulated knowledge in the sciences to be fact without dispute; that's not science. Science is all about finding models that work and gathering data and trying to draw conclusions from it. Science was never meant to be about facts; it is all about understanding. Though some understanding may be innate, much of human understanding comes from experience. While we can build upon previous "knowledge", time over time we've seen what we held to be science fact proven false, e.g. earth is flat -> it's round but the sun goes around it -> it goes around the sun, and flies spontaneous generate from feces -> flies lay eggs in feces. If we'd never allow criticism, we'd never have progressed.

Science should be about keeping an open mind and accepting there is much we don't know, even if you believe and have faith in something. Einstein believed in God, and Hawking is an atheist. Both are scientists, and both have had theories proven and disproven. We are human, and we must continually strive for understanding knowing some ideas may be right, some may be wrong, and that ideas will change.

<comment><USER38> > For too long we've assumed the bodies of accumulated knowledge in the > sciences to be fact without dispute

Who is this "we" who has assumed such a thing? Certainly no working scientist I know would agree that a result being published means it is necessarily correct. Nevertheless, some knowledge of the world scientists have accumulated has very strong support, and those who challenge it have invariably turned out to be in the wrong.

<comment><USER39> The 'we' could be a bunch of people who are no longer even alive. No longer alive in body but alive in spirit through the application of the law. I was listening to a building science podcast the other day.

In it they were talking about how they used to use, and still use, a 100 year old assumption about 'make-up air' in houses which is part of setting up an air conditioning system.

Turns out the original scientific papers were formalized into regulation or ASHRAE standards without double checking whether they were true.

Practically this means every single household in the country has a AC unit which is overpowered by 30% or 50%. For 100 years.

It also meant tens of millions of buildings suffered from dry rot because the systems weren't balanced correctly if I remember right. I'll look it up if anybody's interested.

<comment><USER39> [http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/c/7/c/c7c82959d816327d/BuildingPer...](http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/c/7/c/c7c82959d816327d/BuildingPerformance33-LewHarriman.mp3?c_id=5012376&destination_id=14420&expiration=1476583667&hwt=f23360bced4c0559a85ce1b766cbadb9)

Looks like it becomes a bigger problem as buildings become more airtight. Something to do with peak dewpoint in makeup air being all wrong, not sure because I'm not a HVAC expert.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Psychology as a science has far fewer reliable results than it claimed it did. It's not that the winds have changed. It's that the field was broken.

Realizing this is a good thing. It's going to set back careers and reduce funding, though.

Next, economics?

 _" Science is prediction, not explanation."_ \- Fred Hoyle

<comment><USER41> "Next, economics?"

I vote for that field's BS to be thoroughly dismantled next. Like psychology, they often stray too far from the real world almost as if the goal is just citations, funding, and academic prestige. Common in general in academia but the connection to reality is thinner with a lot of economics. The amount that try to understand what's going on in U.S. economy without factoring in bribes to politicians and self-forming cartels in oligopolies might be a starting point for the filter. The first thing anyone should think of about a government subsidy, law, or regulation is, "Did someone pay for it? And how would that affect things in local and global sense?"

Same with media reporting. "In todays news, this chemical company and these specific drug companies paid this amount of bribe money to the following Congressmen for the following law to be passed drastically reducing what they have to pay you if they maim you for life, pay your family if they kill you, or pay your town if they mess a whole town up."

A little reality check might change both purchasing and voting behaviors. It's gotta be presented in the model people are reading or hearing. If the effect exists & is not in model, then that's just politically or scientifically dishonest. Often for a reason. ;)

<comment><USER40> It matters more for economics, because economics influences policy. This despite the demonstrated lack of predictive power.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> >If Fiske etc. really hate statistics and research methods, that's fine; they could try to design transparent experiments that work every time. But, no, _they're_ the ones justifying their claims using p-values extracted from noisy data, _they're_ the ones rejecting submissions from PPNAS because they're not exciting enough, _they're_ the ones who seem to believe just about anything (e.g., the claim that women were changing their vote preferences by 20 percentage points based on the time of the month) if it has a "p less than .05" attached to it. If that's the game you want to play, then methods criticism is relevant, for sure.

</comment><comment><USER43> Interesting use of the lyrics to Randy Newman's classic "Louisiana 1927"

[https://youtu.be/MGs2iLoDUYE](https://youtu.be/MGs2iLoDUYE)

If you only know about him as the guy who does Disney/Pixar music you're really missing out.

<comment><USER44> Kind of fitting but I wonder if last few lines will turn out to fit too: "The President say ... isn't it a shame what the river has done to this poor cracker's land."

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." \-- Max Planck

<comment><USER46> A pithy quote, but it does not have to be. There is no reason or law that prevents us from acknowledging our failures in the past and updating our beliefs to the corrected findings of the present. Death is just the minimum bar, the floor, for progress, not the ceiling.

<comment><USER47> _> There is no reason or law that prevents us from acknowledging our failures_

I'd argue that there is. That law is Goodhart's law. [0]

As long as there's a benefit to having people _think_ you're right—in terms of credit, money, power, fame, or even just the satisfaction of believing that you've solved a problem—actually _being_ right will tend to take a backseat to _appearing_ right.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> > 2011: Daryl Bem publishes his article, "Feeling the future: Experimental > evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect," in a > top journal in psychology. Not too many people thought Bem had discovered > ESP but there was a general impression that his work was basically solid, > and thus this was presented as a concern for pscyhology research.

> In retrospect, Bem's paper had huge, obvious multiple comparisons > problems—the editor and his four reviewers just didn't know what to look > for—but back in 2011 we weren't so good at noticing this sort of thing.

I was a postdoc in a Psychology department when this was going on, and "obvious multiple comparisons problems" isn't a good characterization. Any competent psychology researcher in 2011 (a) understood multiple comparisons and looked for them as a matter of course (b) knew there was something wrong with Bem's paper (see the editorial disclaimer).

Here is the main takedown of it: [https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1018886/Bem6.pdf](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1018886/Bem6.pdf)

That is some pretty advanced statistics, not just "correct for multiple comparisons".

What was ongoing then, and continues now, is that psychology and social science in general is coming around to the realization that the tools of the past 50 years are flawed, and to correct them, they need to become better statisticians. But it isn't a matter of "take stats 101 noobs", these are people who have been doing statistical analysis routinely for years. I think there is anxiety that to really do things right you need to _primarily be_ a statistician.

So there is some defensiveness in social sciences about this, certainly not helped by the fact that every jackass on the internet whose taken an undergrad math class thinks they know better.

In the end I quit my psych research job to be a software engineer since all the stats hurt my head and I needed something less quantitative to do.

<comment><USER49> I too am coming from psychology looking to make the transition into a career in tech, and would be very interested to hear more about your experience making the transition*. But I would like to offer my experience having just got out of school.

I agree that there is absolutely a need for a transition to more advanced statistical methods in the field. In cognitive psychology at least, you are starting to see growing interest in adopting Bayesian techniques and moving away from null hypothesis significance testing. But unless you come across it on your own, the difference between Bayesian and Frequentist statistics is unlikely to be referenced until the graduate level. I believe Bayesian methods may alleviate some issues. For instance, one of the studies we were starting up towards the end of my time at the lab had an interesting property in that using Bayesian methods the study expected to do what could be thought of as corroborating or supporting the null hypothesis. If Bayesian methods start seeing wider adoption, I have to wonder how careful people will be thinking about their choice of priors, but it's a step in the right direction.

With regards to the statistics that are being taught. Quite a few of the K300 (Statistics for Psychology) courses are now being taught using R, but my own K300 course emphasized learning to do it by hand and didn't allow calculators. An interesting point brought up on a podcast I was listening to [1], was that we still teach statistical methods in the order they were developed/discovered and not the order that makes the most sense. I could see how teaching ANOVA as a special case of linear models might be less hand wavy. Interesting podcast, the professor they're interviewing is advocating a technique called structural equation modeling which I would love to find time to read up on.

However the research the lab I was with does specializes in building mathematical models of category learning, and has a relatively strong quantitative focus, so I can't say how this extends to other subfields or other universities. I no longer have the paper, but I saw a survey of psychology departments awhile ago that I believe found the number of methods courses being required in graduate programs was declining and fewer universities having researchers that specialize specifically in methodology. The paper made an interesting point that when you're specialized in methodology, you may play an important role increasing the quality of everyone else's work. However if your work specifically targets researchers, you're unlikely to see the same kind of funding or high profile journal publications seen by people in more applied areas. We can't all be like Tversky, but hopefully we'll start seeing some of that return now especially after it kind of declined around whenever psychophysics decreased in prominence.

I guess part of where the apprehension of increasing the complexity of statistical methods may be coming from is (1) that people might be worried about decreasing the accessibility of their work or (2) if you don't have a strong understanding of the math, you run the risk of pushing complexity somewhere you aren't as equipped to deal with it. With regards to (1), I know that one of our frequent collaborators had developed a quantum dynamics model of decision making that was showing impressive results characterizing the data, but I do not envy the amount of effort I'm sure he has to put into explaining the math in his papers. (2) might be addressed through more interdisciplinary collaboration, but I think you need both the support for development of methodology and adoption.

If you don't mind me asking, what area were you working in? And how did you go about transitioning to becoming a software engineer? I started out programming doing simulations like Conway's Game of Life and the like in a course that taught programming for cognitive scientists, and along the way kinda fell in love with it. When I decided to do an honors thesis, I got the chance to do way more programming than is expected in an undergraduate psychology degree: Using an OWL ontology in the planning stage to help with the experiment's implementation, debugging the experiment, doing analyses, and writing a visualization program to simplify recovering the orientation of Multidimensional Scaling Solutions. Coming out of my undergraduate, I'm thinking a career writing software either as a developer or engineer looks preferable to going back to school right now, but python junior-dev positions are proving tricky to find in Indy.

[1] [http://methodologyforpsychology.org/mfp017-mathematical- psyc...](http://methodologyforpsychology.org/mfp017-mathematical-psychology- dr-von-oertzen/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> It's good that these issues finally get a bit more attention, however I fear that we're still only seeing the tip of the iceberg. There are so many fields of science that don't care about replication at all, work with far too low numbers of subjects and don't bother about issues like publication bias. I don't think it's a stretch to say that the majority of stuff that's done at university is cargo cult science.

And don't get illuded about your own field: Pretty much all of this is also true for computer science when it comes to quantitative research. How often have I seen studies like "we have tested this with 10 users which we divided in two groups".

<comment><USER51> That's interesting. What kind of computer science research is done with control/experimental groups of users? I haven't paid any attention to academic computer science in, well, decades, but I kind of assumed it was all "we got this algorithm to do this thing," like math, with not much of a human element.

</comment></comment><comment> barry-cotter Reading Susan Fiske's Wikipedia article makes this even more depressing. But please resist the urge to write off all of psychology, or even all of social psychology. Psychophysics and psychometrics both replicate very, very well, and they're not the only areas of psychology to do so. This is true even if you file biological psychology and neuroscience somewhere other than psychology. And social psychology makes sociology look really rigorous.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Fiske](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Fiske) A recent quantitative analysis identifies her [Susan Fiske] as the 22nd most eminent researcher in the modern era of psychology (12th among living researchers, 2nd among women).

^ Diener, E., Oishi, S., & Park, J. (in press). An incomplete list of eminent psychologists in the modern era. Archives of Scientific Psychology

<comment><AUTHOR> Fiske's Wikipedia article reads like PR material. It should be edited to be more somber, and reflect the extant criticisms of her research performance. I suspect that that would lead to an edit war though.

       Psychophysics and psychometrics
       both replicate very, very well,

It might be good if researchers in those sub-fields lead the drive of improving psychology's research methodology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Who is paying for all this bad science? Do they even have a choice in what they are funding?

We have so many "industries" now whose function is to exploit the taxpayer. We wouldn't have all this bad science or bad risk taking if there weren't a huge patsy willing to pay for it all without regard to actual results.

<comment><USER53> Like start-ups's main function is to impress VC's so researchers main purpose is to impress their funders. Ideally this should be equivalent to producing great companies and research, but it often isn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It reminds me the other day I read a 2012 NLP PhD paper where there is no contact information(email, etc) all over. Frustrating. And recent news about a new genetic editing technology claimed by a seemingly 'nobody' unrecognized in bioinformatics community before is causing great controversy that the research could not be replicated, lacking critical detail about process and data. When asked why he does not want to disclose who indeed replicated, the author said it would let them down. I just don't understand the reasoning. All about social pshycology in science?

</comment><comment><USER54> I was just in a work setting this past week where someone brought up ego depletion as a justification for a decision. The damage that these people do with their bad science is real and widespread. If "methodological terrorism" is what it will take to get them to take their damn jobs seriously then I'm all for it. Stop publishing garbage!

</comment><comment><USER55> All of this goes on to confirm my belief that social science is a hokum.

</comment><comment><USER56> After reading the first paragraph I still only have a vague concept what this wall of text is about. Can somebody summarize it with a TL;DR?

<comment><USER57> Psychology must get used to the idea of transparency and to the reform made possible by how the Internet (as a broad term to generally describe the current change in communication) has made it easier to scrutinize and challenge scientific results.

<comment><USER56> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Why does he keep referring to PNAS as "PPNAS?" It's clearly the former, and I don't know what the latter stands for.

<comment><USER42> Possibly a joke? The first occurrence in the text(emphasis mine):

>Meanwhile, the _prestigous_ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PPNAS) gets into the game

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Brutal. What a fantastic read, thanks.

</comment><comment><USER14> > In short, Fiske doesn't like when people use social media to publish > negative comments on published research.

This doesn't at all match Fiske's article. As people on HN know very well, there's a difference between, on one hand, serious, constructive criticism; and on the other, the trolling, abuse, and just endless barrage of nonsense that buries any signal in noise, all of which is common online. It's clear Fiske is talking about the latter; the following is very recognizable:

 _... uncurated, unfiltered trash-talk, In the most extreme examples, online vigilantes are attacking individuals. Self-appointed data police are volunteering critiques of such personal ferocity and relentless frequency that they resemble a denial-of-service attack ..._

It's not discussion, it's abuse, and we know well that the latter have tried to hide behind the former as a justification. And we also are very familiar now with the consequences:

 _Only what 's crashing are people. The unmoderated attacks create collateral damage to targets' careers and well-being, with no accountability for the bullies. Our colleagues at all career stages are leaving the field because of sheer adversarial viciousness._

\----

Then our author fabricates and attributes ideas to Fiske that she never mentions or even alludes to:

> She's implicitly following what I've sometimes called the research > incumbency rule: that, once an article is published in some approved venue, > it should be taken as truth.

The word 'implicitly' is not a license to fabricate the rest of the sentence. And he goes on to criticize the whole field, despite saying at the beginning,

> it's pretty much all about internal goings-on within the field of psychology > (careers, tenure, smear tactics, people trying to protect their labs, > public-speaking sponsors, career-stage vulnerability), and I don't know > anything about this, as I'm an outsider to psychology and I've seen very > little of this sort of thing ...

 _I don 't know anything about this_; enough said. Also, his characterization of her article makes me wonder if he read it; her article is about trolling and abuse, and the things he mentions are only second-order effects.

The above behaviors are all familiar, and also telling is another habit we'll recognize:

> I was inclined to just keep my response short and sweet, but then it seemed > worth the trouble to give some context.

Maybe we found one of the trolls.

<comment><USER59> If she's complaining about trolling and abuse, she should probably say so, and not use terms like "methodological terrorism". That is a) a rather unprofessional accusation and b) a term that brings to mind scientific criticism , not abuse.

<comment><USER14> > If she's complaining about trolling and abuse, she should probably say so

She does, clearly and explicitly, and I even quoted some of it.

<comment><USER59> She also says, "We agree to abide by scientific standards, ethical norms, and mutual respect" while throwing around terms like "terrorism", "destructo- critics", "vigilantes", "data police".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Is Fiskes article related to the replication crisis?

Remember that whole cultural appropriation thing last year? Or the safe space movements on campus? There are plenty of movements that abuse political correctness to bully anyone around. On the opposite side there are plenty of 4chan types who love to shamelessly bully anyone who dare come out with a feministic message.

I imagine academics in related fields are ripe for being targeted by Internet bullies and trolls.

Isn't it this kind of abuse that Fiske is referring to?

<comment><USER61> I don't think she's talking about personal abuse. Some people just get upset when mistakes are pointed out in public. There is a crisis in social psychology: its status as a science is crumbling. Naturally, feelings are raw; many careers are precarious.

<comment><USER62> It seems they're "precarious" because massive amounts of research is "fraudulent" or _at minimum_ plagued with errors.

If my code was in a similar state, I would consider my career "precarious" or "at risk" too.

<comment><USER61> Indeed. It seems likely that there are prominent people in these fields, with decades of research and publishing behind them, almost all of it based on bad statistical methods. Naturally, there is a certain amount of panic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> The author says:

 _" In short, Fiske doesn't like when people use social media to publish negative comments on published research. She's implicitly following what I've sometimes called the research incumbency rule: that, once an article is published in some approved venue, it should be taken as truth. "_

after citing an article of Susan Fiske. The sentences in quotes are blatant lies, obvious if the cited article is read. She says, in the cited article:

 _" In contrast, the self-appointed destructive critic's role now includes public shaming and blaming, often implying dishonesty on the part of the target and other innuendo based on unchecked assumptions. Targets often seem to be chosen for scientifically irrelevant reasons: their contrary opinions, professional prominence or career stage vulnerability. "_

Shame on you Mr. Gelman.

</comment><comment><USER64> Not sure who this guy is but he seems to have completely missed the point about what Fiske was saying. Sure the internet has heralded a new paradigm but that doesn't mean that we have to just accept the negatives. And the negatives with the internet are just as severe as the positives.

Go spend time on any politics forum for example and it is downright scary. Conspiracies run rampant and are unchecked, experts are personally vilified and viciously attacked and facts come second to feelings and opinions. And all evidence to date suggests that this is not helping society but actually making it more polarised and less cohesive.

And exactly the same thing has happened in other fields e.g. climate change. Legitimate criticism is always useful and welcomed but it needs to be constructive.

<comment><USER65> I think Fiske met that constructive criticism with negative hyperbole and vague counter arguments that were not on point. People protect their vested interests and status quo by praying on people's decency and politeness, but ignore the fundamental facts in the criticism brought against them, and that leads to a proportional negative reaction from the other side. This situation reminds me of the Eastern European political systems where failure to recognise and deal with basic problems like fairness, corruption, nepotism, etc leads to a progressive degradation of trust that in turn leads to more violent/drastic changes, with total disregard for decency. So, if you want to be treated decently, than you'd better act decently as well, and not only superficially.

<comment><AUTHOR>
       reminds me of the Eastern
       European

That's interesting, but maybe not so surprising, because the techniques that people like Fiske use stem (at least in parts) from the communist tradition of undermining and taking over institutions (e.g. Trotsky's entryism).

<comment><USER66> (e.g. Trotsky's entryism) - known in modern times as diversity advocates. Let me in your group. Then change your group culture to suit me instead of me blending in.

<comment><USER67> Trotsky's entryism was pretty specific, I don't think particularly related to your beefs. His argument was that forming small far-left workers' parties didn't make sense if there already existed large mass workers' parties, and instead communists should work within those, even if they were more moderate than you'd like, rather than forming new parties, which would be ideologically pure but not contain the actual masses of the working class who would have to form the basis of any workers' government. In most Western European countries, the majority of the working class supported various kinds of Labour and Social Democratic parties, so that's what he advocated joining.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> TL; DR: uncurated social media is used to critisize scientific peer-reviewed publications in psychology. This hurts scientists (peer reputation / society reputation?).

IMO this is not specific to psychology: climate change, biology, computer science, physics, etc. research is exposed to the same phenomena. The hotter the topic, the bigger the flames get.

However, if publication is clear about methodology, data collection and conclusions those flames do not hurt -- the published work stands on its own and anyone can go back to it as a sanity check on whether accusations have merit. If I disagree on methodology I will not think worse about the author. However, if I suspect he manipulated the data I will; and real quick.

Being clear on what was done is, IMO, a practically foolproof way of protecting your reputation. Researchers unnecessarily making publications readable to only a tiny minority of field experts (sometimes hoping to minimize criticism -- "I just need this published; and 3 more for a postdoc") or being vague about how they collected data shoot themselves in the foot. And this, IMO, is a major source of self inflicted wounds that are most frequent in the fuzzier fields like psychology.

<comment><USER69> This "TL;DR" is _very_ misleading, even wrong! Source: I actually read the whole article and much of the discussion.

Instead of looking for an TL;DR, _this time_ I suggest actually reading it. I would say it's well worth it.

<comment><USER70> Well this comment isn't really helpful too.

I'm intrigued. I haven't read the whole article, but if I did and say something like you did I would explain myself.

If it's very misleading, even wrong why don't you expose your reasons?

<comment><USER69> > Well this comment isn't really helpful too.

I would claim it is: My only reason to make it was to prevent people from going away with that TL;DR. I don't want to make one myself, because why not just _click on the link_ and _read the article_? The comment is not a summary of that article _at all_ , that is all.

This is a complex subject and details matter very much. I don't think it is healthy to have people get only a caricature of the whole thing. I also recommend reading at least some of the many comments, and even to follow some of the links provided there. For example, I found this one in the comments and I've just reached the comment section: [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is- ou...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of- control/)

<comment><USER71> _> TL;DR. I don't want to make one myself, because why not just click on the link and read the article?_

There's an essentially infinite amount of information out there on the internet, and people have a finite amount of free time; thus, many of us try to glean the thesis of an article before committing an hour to reading it -- particularly slow readers and non-native English speakers.

Especially in articles like this one, with a vague headline, no pull quotes, section titles that are too symbolic to actually describe the sections they head, and a break from the convention of using the opening paragraphs to provide a summary of what's to come, a TLDR comment is greatly appreciated to give a potential reader at least some clue what it's about.

TLDR: You oppose TLDR comments because you feel they keep people from reading the full article, but in cases like this, the _lack_ of one is doing so.

<comment><USER72> No, the post you replied to opposes incorrect TLDRs. Not TLDRs in general.

<comment><USER71> Reread the part I quoted.

<comment><USER72> The poster was suggesting an argument and then refuting it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wikipedia Still Works For emergency needs of course - <AUTHOR>

Wikipedia is using a JS trick to load the blackout page.<p>You can still access it if you disable JS, or access it from your phone, or get Chrome to translate it to another language, or just hit ESC right after the text loads. <comment><USER2> Yes, this is pointed out in their FAQ about blackout [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Learn...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Learn_more). No need to post about it here.</comment>


How to Price US Citizenship  - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/quelch/2009/11/how_to_price_us_citizenship.html <comment><USER2> Maybe the price is a factor, but I suspect it's just this: there isn't much difference between a green card and citizenship. You can do "almost" everything with a green card that a citizen can do.

The green card process is extremely long: years and years of bureaucracy, lots of forms and lawyers that cost money, and even a medical exam and fingerprints. Becoming a citizen means another form, another fee, and studying to answer questions that (if Jaywalking is any indication) natural born citizens don't even know the answers to.

<comment><USER3> Not only that, but INS treat green card applicants (and really all other members of the public) like crap. I know lots of Indian software engineers in Silicon Valley who earn hefty salaries, manage large teams, and start companies -- and they can all tell you stories about how terribly they've been treated by the INS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Things you cant do with out citizenship:

1\. Stay out of the country for more than 2 years at a time. Some people say that you have to be in the country at least 6 months in a year. So sailing across the world etc is out.

2\. Bring your aging parents to this country to live with you on a permanent basis.

3\. Marry someone who is not an american and have them live with you immediately. (They have to wait till their visa is approved - usually a 1-2 year process).

4\. Vote.</comment>


JSTerm, Firefox JavaScript terminal - <AUTHOR> http://paulrouget.com/e/jsterm/

<comment><USER2> So, it's something like Firebug's console but with :chrome mode and syntax coloring. Am I missing something obvious here?

<comment><USER3> I believe that Mozilla are trying to recreate most of the functionality of Firebug, but as small, lightweight, addons, rather than the monolithic structure of Firebug.

Firebug has a reputation for being heavyweight, and having memory leak issues, so making similar functionality available in smaller pieces which are simpler to debug/maintain is a definite win.

<comment><USER4> But Firebug is firebug. It's arguably the best tool available right now.

<comment><USER5> Actually I find the Chrome developer tools better, specially with the integrated editor and V8 tools.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. When helping other developers or QA people, it is frustrating that when they use Firefox they may not have Firebug installed and thus we can't research the issue right there.

When they are usng Chrome, the damn thing is built in so I know 100% of the time that we can debug it in the browser where the issue was found.

Breaking down Firebug into separate add-ons seems like a very inconvienent move. Its optimizing around the maintainer, and not the consumer - this is bad.

So if a QA guy is using Firefox, worse case sceario is he downloads Firebug and restarts the browser and reproduces the issue again. In this new model, he could download the one add-on we think we need to figure out the issue, but could end up going back multiple times to install other missing components.

At this point, it needs to be a "developer SDK" or "developer mode" which comes monolithically (For ease of use). If this ends up being a bundle of dependencies of smaller add-ons in the back so be it, but do not require the user to install more than one add-on to get the developer environment.

Chrome did it right in my mind by shipping the whole thing with the product. This also helps garuantee that it doesn't have memory leaks, API integration problems, or other bugs which crop up when delivering what I consider basic functionality as a plug-in.

<comment><USER7> All the new firefox dev tools ship installed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Look great!

In the meantime, I am still waiting Chrome to support true multiline editing in the JS console ( <http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=35487>)

</comment><comment><USER9> Looks well-done. If possible, Id love to be able to extend it with a custom set of non-js-syntax commands for the current document. If also possible, Id love to embed it in the document-- independent of mozilla.

Id help with a fork if you think that could work.

</comment><comment><USER10> Oh man, I got really excited because I thought somebody had picked up work on <http://jsterm.com/> . Maybe not the best idea to call this one jsterm as well.

</comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone know what's new in Firefox 16 (that's currently the nightly releases) that makes it a requirement for this?

<comment><USER12> Firefox 16 has a graphical command line feature that is described at length here: <https://wiki.mozilla.org/DevTools/Features/GCLI>

Oh and Firefox 16 is now Aurora as of this week. 17 is the new Nightly.</comment></comment>


What the IBM Acquisition of StrongLoop Means for the Node.js Community - <AUTHOR> https://strongloop.com/strongblog/node-js-community-ibm-acquisition/ <comment><USER4> former IBM dev here (6 years in different areas). I hope they let you work on an island and don't force you to use their tooling/approve listed of open source software.

IBM has long embraced the OSS community (I loved LTC), but the process to release/use anything OSS was not good (to put it nicely) and was one of the many reasons I left.

I worked on a project that was on an island, and while it was more efficient than normal IBM dev, it was still 10x slower and tons of red tape then what was required to make a competitive product (and stay competitive). IBM is big and ultimately has to protect themselves - IMO ultimately it gets in your way of making a good/competitive product.

I like what StrongLoop does for the node community, and I do indeed hope you are successful and nothing changes. But to be honest I am very skeptical.

<comment><USER5> Current IBM dev here (but only speaking anecdotally for myself and my project), can confirm that when we were acquired they let our product and policies remain and did not "blue wash" the project. I would assume the same will occur for StrongLoop and their software practices will probably continue mostly unfettered.

<comment><USER6> I hope it works out for StrongLoop. When a company I worked for was purchased by IBM, about 3/4 of the engineering staff left once we heard about "Work Life Integration (tm)". It's really hard to work inside Big Blue when you are used to the freedom provided by a small company.

<comment><USER7> Huh. When Blekko got acquired by IBM Watson, all of the employees thought that IBM's policies about flexible working hours and locations were great. So far I'm the only techie who's departed.

<comment><USER6> We were in their software services vertical (I forget the name)...the one that had never turned a profit and wasn't sexy. I've known one person who had a great experience on the Watson team. So maybe its a different experience?

<comment><USER8> Were you on a CAMSS team? That seems to be the best area inside of IBM right now as it's a strategic growth area. This includes the Watson PS team I'm on.

<comment><USER9> As an IBMer, many of the complainers I've heard and much of the heartburn around layoffs come from outside of CAMSS. It's like folks at Apple complaining that the iPod team isn't treated as well as the iPad team. Of course, your group isn't making money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As much as I fear this will drag StrongLoop, I feel that this is an excellent fit. StrongLoop has been focused on building "Enterprise" tools and module around node, as well as working on whitelisting/reviewing various modules... This is a good fit for IBM and their clients who are inclined to also want to have "approved" or "certified" modules to be able to use separately from the rest of npm.

As much as I like the power/openness of npm, a lot of corporate environments move more slowly... modules need to be cleared by legal and usually limited to specific versions. Having more resources to do this is a good thing and can only help people who are working for financial institutions (as an example).

</comment><comment><USER11> > _And it's not just Node.js. Maybe you haven't looked at what IBM is doing > with open source lately. I was surprised when I dug in. For example, did you > know they are leading contributors to:

Linux OpenStack Cloud Foundry Docker plus many Apache projects like Spark, Cordova and Hadoop and of course, Node_

They are? (keyword => "leading")

[https://github.com/docker/docker/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/docker/docker/graphs/contributors)

[https://github.com/apache/spark/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/apache/spark/graphs/contributors)

I find this claim dubious. Maybe I'm not digging hard enough.

<comment><USER12> What is it about these posts that bring out the HN contingent who think themselves firebrand skeptics? This is basically a marketing piece, what good is fact-checking it

<comment><USER13> _> This is basically a marketing piece, what good is fact-checking it_

Not sure about the US laws, but here in Germany, all marketing claims must stay to the facts, or the company can be sued.

(Which is why most marketing speak uses fuzzy terms that sound nice but don't convey any information. But that's a general trend anyway.)

<comment><USER14> Es musst die Wahrheit sein!!!

<comment><USER15> Ah, Hollywood German. How lovely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> From the customer side - I dealt with Netezza and Softlayer before and after IBM acquisition. In both cases an almost palpable drain in support and intelligence. I hate to say it like that as i know that there are brilliant folks in IBM (Watson, etc)

Softlayer and Netezza in different ways were smart, nimble and fearless companies. You had real relationships with the engineers. I got to know Netezza folks in Massachusetts, Poland and Australia - some of the smartest folks I've met. They shared scripts and passionate expertise.

IBM took it over and the bureaucracy set in. The term "TAM" brings tears of rage to my eyes... Opening a support ticket is about as hard as applying for a mortgage online. And they want to have these endless conference calls with 7 or 8 folks from their side. And nothing gets done.

I am embarrassed about the way I have acted on these calls. I have called folks out and out liars. I have screamed at and bashed conference phones.

Maybe it would have been better if I hadn't known the Netezza folks - <USER2> were good.

And Softlayer...

I used to be able to call a guy down in texas and after a 20 minute phone call have a cluster of servers ordered. Once did a hadoop cluster this way. Go off and have lunch come back and the servers would we ready by the afternoon.

And now: 2 major outages in the past 2 months. No communication - in both cases entirely their fault. Power failure and network misconfig causing an arp storm. Ignored for hours while we submitted tickets and called support... Nightmare.

And an absurd situation where their security dept threatened us with taking an haproxy server offline due to a clean-mx false positive - even after the tireless guy running clean-mx emailed to that effect...

It became apparent in the discussions following this event that the TAM and sales support which has had our account for years, knew nothing about our business.

Just horrible bureacracy and bad service.

So I have had really negative experiences with 2 IBM acquired companies. Hopefully it will be better for StrongLoop.

For anyone affected - watch for the good folks shedding off.

<comment><USER9> I hear you on the support side. I used to work for a company that used a product that was bought by IBM. Before that, you could pick up the phone and talk to the lead developer. After, you opened a support ticket online and waited 24-48 hours for a response from someone in Costa Rica or India. Now I work at IBM with this same product, and even I as an employee who supports the product, even I have to go through the same Level 1 tech support crap.

However, the cash injection made the core product worlds better, and it was good to begin with. Support got worse, the product got better. It's almost an even balance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I used to work with an old IBMer who used to say "it's no accident that IBM nearly collapsed at the same time as the Soviet Union did". Lou Gerstner famously rescued IBM from oblivion by turning it into a consultancy led company, and moving the focus away from mainframes. This is just a case of IBM snaffling up the latest cool thing so they can sell consulting services.

<comment><USER18> What is the connection to the Soviet Union? Were they a large IBM customer?

<comment><USER17> Both IBM and USSR were bloated, inefficient, slow moving, hierarchical, bureaucratic organisations. Gorbachev failed to save his org, despite heroic efforts. Gerstner did rescue IBM. Maybe if Gorby had saved the USSR Putin would still be working for the KGB in Berlin...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you're trying to relieve fears, the first paragraph does not help.

"IBM has identified Node.js as an important part of the future of enterprise middleware and StrongLoop's technology and expertise as pivotal to their strategy to help companies fully unlock the value of their existing IT investments and legacy data with APIs."

<comment><USER20> Seems like too much fluff - both the acquirer generating it and the acquisition itself. It would be helpful to see why/where one would use node.js when other platforms support many more workloads well than just pure I/O bound ones. In the "enterprise middleware", going native (C++) or managed (JVM/CLR) brings with it a much richer ecosystem alongwith a more robust runtime that can better support other workloads that entail for example cpu binding. It's hard to see a real need for node.js as it seems to not do anything significantly better than other platform options.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Recently I got heavily into node-red[0] after playing with a ti sensortag[1], and I'm really amazed at what it can do, and that it is open source and actively used by IBM in bluemix.

Now they acquired another heavy weight in the js world, I wonder what is their next step.

On a side note, to the audience: have you looked at node-red, what do you think of it?

[0]: [http://nodered.org/](http://nodered.org/) [1]: [http://www.ti.com/sensortag](http://www.ti.com/sensortag)

ps. if you run node-red locally note by default it is insecure, you need to setup the config. But really it is a must try!

</comment><comment><USER22> IBM recently bought out Softlayer hosting and support went from great to glacially slow and all but uncaring in about 28 seconds.

<comment><USER23> Damnit! That's one of the companies I found searching for a physical version of cloud hosting. Looked promising. Now they're IBM. (sighs) Going to have to delete them from my bookmarks...

Sucks that IBM has this effect. If they didn't, esp if had opposite effect, they could be the biggest and most awesome tech company in existence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Once I worked in a project which IBM was also involved. And everything in IBM related to that project was slow, very slow.

<comment><USER25> It's a gigantic organization that makes hardware, software, and does consulting. Does one anecdotal story really characterize it?

<comment><USER26> It is not just one anecdotal story. I used to work for IBM, then have them as a client, then was a business partner, and have worked on their software for over 20 years.

Based on all my experience, they are slow and expensive, and over-build their teams. They do deliver the final product and it will work, which is why people hire them, but they do not do it efficiently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Congrats , I know nothing about "modern" IBM but it seems like they are trying interesting things with Bluemix. Let's see what happens next.

</comment><comment><USER28> This announcement fits along with Node.js 4.0's release containing a commitment to an 18-month roadmap in giving Node.js a greater maturity.

As much as I like to think I have chosen Node.js purely for its merits, having a wide community who adopts a platform brings a few perks:

\- Hiring developers requires less of a gamble on their part. Elixir looks very promising and probably has a lot of advantages over Node.js thanks to it's Erlang foundation but it makes it harder to assemble a team—I hope this changes as I wish the Erlang/Elixir folks all the best.

\- There is a great amount of wealth contained in the package repository NPM. Before Node.js, this was a great strength of Perl's CPAN (and TeX' CTAN before that).

\- Having large organizations adopt a platform will eventually increase OSS contributions.

I could be mistaken but I don't see Node.js following the bureaucratic of Java's JSR if it continues to adopt a lean and mean approach akin to UNIX tools (do 1 thing well).

</comment><comment><USER29> Anybody?

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

<comment><USER15> Despite both being big enterprise corporations, IBM is nothing like Oracle. Oracle is pretty much one huge ego trip swallowing everything like the Borg.

<comment><USER29> You clearly have never dealt with the Professional Services & Consulting arm of IBM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> If anything this is a strong validation of Node.js in the enterprise space. This is actually good news for anyone working within the enterprise trying to use a different technology set. It makes selling Node to a CTO a bit easier (even if you choose not to use StrongLoop).

<comment><USER31> "Enterprise" is already using node.js This is IBM tryng to stay in touch with their customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I realize this blog post is full of optimistic "nothing will change!" statements, but that doesn't seem super-IBM-like.

</comment><comment><USER33> Congratulations Issac! Happy for you and the team.

<comment><AUTHOR> Woot thanks Kord. I'm excited for Node.

<comment><USER34> Hmm, that the acquisition would mean anything for node directly seems off. At least, the blog post seemed to indicate that this wasn't meant to be about IBM buying influence. I wasn't a customer and not particularly keen on the enterprise focus of strongloop but I thought you had a really good thing going with loopback. Not sure what to think of it now... I was in a startup that got acquired by a huge multinational and it was shocking how quickly we went from nimble to gridlock.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> If IBM screws ExpressJS up (wishfully not), Hapi[1] is a good alternative.

[https://github.com/hapijs/hapi](https://github.com/hapijs/hapi)

<comment><USER15> Considering the development history of Express mostly consisted of cutting down on features and streamlining the core, it should be easy to notice whether the acquisition has any effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> > _Making sure that Node.js is a first class citizen on Softlayer and BlueMix_

BlueMix is a Cloud Foundry installation. Is there a separate BlueMix-specific thing that is distinct from the Node.js buildpack?[0]

[0] [https://github.com/cloudfoundry/nodejs- buildpack](https://github.com/cloudfoundry/nodejs-buildpack)

</comment><comment><USER26> It is hard to say what this means at this stage...

IBM develops products that it acquires based on where IBM needs the product to go. Sometimes that matches where the user community wants it to go, sometimes it does not. But they will put resources behind it, and it will change - <USER3> just need to give it time to see what direction that change takes things.

</comment><comment><USER37> Just a question -might be dumb- is the merger of io.js and node.js which happened a couple of months ago related to this news in anyway? Anyways IMHO this good news and I hope it will make node.js much better, who knows maybe replace V8 with something even better.

<comment><USER38> I can't imagine it wouldn't be. This kind of decisions aren't made very quickly. I'm more curious if the IO team was aware of this...

<comment><USER39> HA! Hahahaha. hahaa.... _wheeze_

Acquisitions are thoroughly NDA'd. A few of the core team may have been told (but relationships are not universally cordial - recall that Strongloop and Nodesource are direct competitors). The io.js community in general was absolutely not told.

I expect there are a few people who feel a bit betrayed that one of the major movers in a supposed grass-roots community-oriented fork appears to have done it only to make themselves a better acquisition target.

While they're not wrong to feel that way, StrongLoop have been telegraphing this particular intention for a long time (at least since hiring Roth).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> What node.js needs is a better way to manage packages. Right now, upgrading can fail with no way to roll back. Also, reproducibility is missing. E.g, it is not easy to download sources, and deploy those exact same sources on different machines.

<comment><AUTHOR> Please check out slc build and slc deploy from StrongLoop which attempt to solve exactly this issue and are being used by major deployments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> What's a good book to learn about the new stuff? Async et al..

I learnt Python from "Dive Into Python 3", but that hasn't been updated for few years now. Any similar book with recent updates?

</comment><comment><USER42> I imagine it doesn't mean much beyond some more b2b uses of Node. Node has its own independent governance and nothing about this acquisition changes that.

</comment><comment><USER43> Well, at least it's not Oracle…

</comment><comment><USER44> IBM Nodesphere.

</comment><comment><USER45> Sorry for the joke but how many callbacks did they need to make this transaction?

<comment><USER46> I promise it wasn't that many.

<comment><USER47> async I saw what you did there.

<comment><USER48> I don't get it and await an explanation

<comment><USER49> This is starting to look like Reddit.

<comment><USER50> Nothing wrong with a little bit of humor, imo. It's not like a thread is full of puns.

<comment><USER51> make it then-able... like so:

doSomeAsync() .andThen(doSomeOtherAsync1) .andThen(doSomeOtherAsync2) ... .andThen(SomeOtherAsync10) .noAndThen(finalize)

<comment><USER52> callback hell

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> so how much was it acquired for?

<comment><USER54> 3 souls and a rabbit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> guess i will move to php

<comment><USER56> said no one EVER

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Dislike

</comment><comment><USER58> JavaScript is eating the world, part XXIV.

</comment><comment><USER59> This has some awesome implications for open source. If a huge company like IBM openly supports and dedicates resources to FOSS, I think we can expect these products to get way more attention and receive the full treatment of corporate testing and development which would really offset the ephemeral nature of projects like Node. Not saying the current foundation guys aren't doing a great job already, but IBM's expertise in software can only be a plus I think!

<comment><USER60> IBM has been an open source supporter for a long time. Their first Linux kernel contributions came no later than '99 (when they started upstreaming changes to support Linux on their mainframes, available since 2000).

You can see some details about their open source contributions here: [http://www-03.ibm.com/linux/ossstds/oss/ossindex.html](http://www-03.ibm.com/linux/ossstds/oss/ossindex.html)

<comment><USER61> And Eclipse.. When it was open sourced, it was one of the largest project to be open sourced.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there an open source social news platform? - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone know of a good open source social news platform? Similar to HN?<p>Thanks! <comment><USER2> I know of one that's extremely similar: <http://www.arclanguage.org>

<comment><USER3> So is the new Indian sub-site (used for the lack of a better term) of HN: hackerstreet.in

</comment></comment><comment> alan-crowe Scoop, <http://www.scoopdev.org/>, was fashionable for a while. I've not been involved technically, so I cannot say whether it counts as mature [http://vkpedia.com/touchline/doc/scoop_admin_guide/1_3_Syste...](http://vkpedia.com/touchline/doc/scoop_admin_guide/1_3_System_Requirements.html) or neglected <http://www.scoopdev.org/story/2008/1/22/43049/0753>

</comment><comment><USER4> Reddit's open source, as is Slash (the code behind Slashdot).

</comment><comment><USER5> pligg is a good one.</comment>


Walk Faster and Ignore the Roses - <AUTHOR> http://summation.typepad.com/summation/2007/09/walk-faster-and.html

<comment><USER2> That's horrible advice.

Listen, as much as we all want to get rich and be ultra-productive, none of our accomplishments are coming with us on that fateful day.

Make sure you enjoy life for enjoyment's sake alone sometime. That doesn't mean not to work, but it doesn't mean you should only work either.

<comment><USER3> Agreed.

Look -- you can't succeed unless you're in it the whole way, but you're a person, not a robot. Unless you balance your life somehow, you won't make the race. The coder who works a 24-hour day is not necessarily any better than one who watches a movie and codes for one hour. That's the crazy thing about this business. You have to make sure your brain is as tuned up as possible. Running fast is never going to get you as far as running smart.</comment></comment>


Nerd Fonts - <AUTHOR> https://www.nerdfonts.com <comment><USER2> By the way, for those on macOS, Apple recently introduced a huge set of icons/symbols that you can resize like any other font and use anywhere within text (in macOS) or images (iOS).

Just copy and paste the symbols like any other emoji, from the SF Symbols app:

[https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface- guideline...](https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface- guidelines/sf-symbols/overview/)

Not only you can use them as is in your final app, these are absolutely great in UI mockups and even placeholder game sprites.

<comment><USER3> I'm getting massive use out of Symbols in my Apple platform personal projects, where they're already a huge time saver but I never thought to use them in this context. Great comment!

<comment><USER2> It should look like this: 􀈂 􀈒 􀈖 􀈠

[https://i.imgur.com/b1T6p9r.png](https://i.imgur.com/b1T6p9r.png)

Of course they will appear like blank squares on most webpages and iOS, but you can copy those squares back to the symbols in native macOS text fields.

It's a little inconsistent; in iOS/tvOS/watchOS/Catalyst apps you have to use `Image(systemName:)` but it's not available on macOS, where you have to copy the symbols from the SF Symbols app into regular text, like emojis.

Apple, why?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nerd Fonts is a terrific resource. The project does more than just aggregate, all Nerd Font variants are patched with extra glyphs and icons allowing for much more expressive and informative (and fun) terminal prompts. It's also a great source for text editor fonts. All fonts are offered in multiple formats making it easy to match your workspace across platforms.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand at all.

Can someone explain why you'd want icons in the monospace font you use for development?

I thought those icons were mainly for building websites. But those are usually triggered with a CSS class, not embedded in source code.

What am I missing?

<comment><USER6> Watch this 30 second video and you will see why it is awesome to have icons in your terminal.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NESi45Q2mHg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NESi45Q2mHg)

Apologies in advance if the music is not to your taste.

<comment><USER7> Video seemed to do the opposite effect to me. Information overload and clutter made me wonder what I was looking at. Plain old terminals without these special symbols convey a lot more meaning with a lot less.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> surprised this wasn't posted on here much before ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19132033](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19132033)) Upwards of two years old

</comment><comment><USER9> The definitive nerd font is Computer Modern[0], i think.

Certainly it is true that i trust anything with lots of math in it more if it is typeset in CM. Problem sets feel downright homey after a while.

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

<comment><USER10> I've found source code sans to be an excellent font for LaTeX, and the companion source code pro for code blocks. They are significantly more readable to me and to most people I know, though that may have to do with screens being much higher-resolution than when computer modern was created.

Here's my arm-chair hypothesis: the thin connecting lines (don't know the technical font term, though I'm sure one exists) showed up fine on low-res screens because they simply couldn't be made thinner than a certain amount. On high-res screens, they get much thinner, and my eyes have trouble tracking them. Easier to read on paper, though.

<comment><USER11> Personally I prefer IBM Plex Mono and family. [https://github.com/IBM/plex](https://github.com/IBM/plex)

<comment><USER12> Yes! Such a great font. I recently spent too much time reviewing mono fonts for programming and IBM Plex Mono was my top.

Office Code Pro was my runner up.

They would be more popular with cooler names like Fira and Hack. ;)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Article Bay, for collecting articles and sharing them with your team - <AUTHOR> https://www.articlebay.co.uk

<comment><USER2> Alex, I looked at articlebay.co.uk, read through it, and wondered why would I want this browser plugin when I have email?

I'm sorry if that comes across too harsh, but it was actually what I was thinking, and when boiled down it simply means; I missed something.

Your marketing message missed the mark with me. It could be that I'm just not your target market, or I'm a little dense, or I'm a curmudgeon who likes email too much. I'm not sure what the answer is, but hopefully this admission of mine qualifies as "useful feedback" in some way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep that's a fair comment, we built it because we were sharing so much stuff that it became difficult to remember who had sent which link, and what exactly was in the article. Plus we're super-lazy and saving that 5-10 seconds 20 times a week seemed worth it. Ultimately I see the value in this being the summarization of articles - there's too much stuff to read, so anything that helps in that area could be cool. But thanks for the feedback, we may need to improve that message :-)</comment></comment>


Have you updated the year in your site's copyright footer? - <AUTHOR>

Just a reminder to update the footers of your sites to 2010 (unless that bit is dynamic in your site). <comment><USER2> Aside from wholly static sites, I can't imagine a sensible app/caching setup where that wouldn't be worth making dynamic.

Even for static sites, you could cheat with a touch of Javascript.

</comment><comment><USER3> Clueless asks: How do you make that dynamic?

<comment><USER2> Depends on the language you're using. ColdFusion, a language I spend too much time using, would just require putting

        #year(now())#

within a cfOutput tag.

<comment><USER3> My websites are currently (X)html, CSS and a smattering of Javascript. I have no knowledge of ColdFusion. But thank you for replying.

<comment><USER2> Sure. In jQuery, something like this would work, if you have a span in your footer with the id "copyright":

        $(function () {
            var today = new Date();
            Q("#copyright").text(today.getFullYear());
        });</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Unity3D has also been backdoored by XCodeGhost author - <AUTHOR> https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=zh-CN&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fdrops.wooyun.org%2Fpapers%2F9024&edit-text= <comment><AUTHOR> Chinese security engineers from Alibaba and Baidu have discovered backdoored Unity3D (v4.6.4 to 5.1.1) in the wild. The infected SDKs share the same behaviors as the infamous XCodeGhost trojan. Four types of malicious attacks have been uncovered and PoC'ed:

* Targeted phishing by prompting an alert box.

* Downloading apps with enterprise certificates.

* Opening a phishing web site in the browser.

* Launching App Store to promote specific apps.

(The last two attacks are exploiting the same vector.)</comment>


Is GDPR Being Enforced? - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/24/ireland-data-privacy-1270123 <comment><USER2> Regulatory capture. EU regulators, yet again, failed to understand what and how they were regulating when it comes to computers. I find it surprising that few talk about the collateral damage of GDPR. The EU wasn't doing great in terms of internet companies. I can't imagine GDPR improved things.</comment>


YouTube Does Away with Its Wretched Practice of Displaying "301+" Views - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/05/youtube-does-away-with-its-wretched-practice-of-displaying-301-views/ <comment><USER2> I'm pretty sure that the "301+ views" being for "verification" wasn't the entire story. What likely happened was that the first 300 views were recorded inline in the record for the video, while views beyond that were regularly updated in a batch job that included some anti-bot scanning.

You don't want to be updating an unsharded counter at YouTube scale, but they had a tradeoff where you could count the first few hundred views (which were likely low-concurrency) in an unscalable manner.

</comment><comment><USER3> next, Google will do away with it's inflated search result count (ie: "About 171,000,000 results" turns out to really be 322 results if you search for: youtube 301, on Google, on my computer)</comment>


Experience of phantom limbs lets amputees control real replacements - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2018/12/01/experience-of-phantom-limbs-lets-amputees-control-real-replacements <comment><USER2> [https://outline.com/ZabeAq](https://outline.com/ZabeAq) bypass paywall</comment>


Why Japan didn't create the iPod - <AUTHOR> http://blog.gatunka.com/2008/05/05/why-japan-didnt-create-the-ipod/ <comment><USER2> Japan does have an Apple though. It's called Nintendo.

<comment><USER3> Not a bad comparison, but I feel like there's something off about it that I can't quite put my finger on it.

I think maybe it's along lines of the fact that Apple is the type of company to create an object that you kind of revere for how it makes you feel to own it rather than for what it does for you. For example, the N64 controller is the definition of ugly, but it was a great step forward in controller design. I can't see Apple releasing anything ugly or uncool looking, no matter how advanced the technology or the ideas behind it.

<comment><USER4> I don't know... I think the DS Lite and the Wiimote are approaching Apple's level of simplicity in design, although they lack the premium in cost.

As for ugly Apple products, there are probably some out there that qualify (mostly non-Jobs stuff)...

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lisa>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_II_series>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMate_300>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twentieth_Anniversary_Macintosh></comment></comment></comment>


Grand Canyon Tourists Exposed for Years to Radiation in Museum Building - <AUTHOR> https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2019/02/18/grand-canyon-tourists-exposed-radiation-safety-manager-says/2905358002/ <comment><USER2> > Stephenson said the uranium threat was discovered in March 2018 by the > teenage son of a park employee who happened to be a Geiger counter > enthusiast, and brought a device to the museum collection room.

No words...

</comment><comment><USER3> If (when?) one of those kids gets cancer, this will be quite a lawsuit.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is an interesting question, because cancer is not super uncommon to begin with, so "when" is correct. Almost certainly a number of kids who were in this building will get cancer. But will they remember if they were in this building? Will they remember this story when they get cancer? And most crucially: Can the cancer they get be accurately blamed on this exposure in both a scientific and legal sense?</comment></comment>


What Bill Gates is afraid of - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AEMKudv5p0#t=23 <comment><USER2> Link to the story (if you'd rather read it than listen to Bill Gates talk about it). "[http://www.vox.com/2015/5/27/8660249/gates-flu- pandemic"](http://www.vox.com/2015/5/27/8660249/gates-flu-pandemic")</comment>


Real Crypto Has Broken Curves - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAhLPiGc3kA <comment><USER2> The comment/abstract on this says:

        Streamed live on Mar 25, 2016

        "I'm going to try to go from zero to enough
        elliptic curve so that you can understand and
        possibly implement an important real-world
        attack on elliptic curve cryptography."

It's long, but promises much. I hope to get the chance to view this some day.</comment>


Eric Schmidt is stepping down as Alphabet's executive chairman - <AUTHOR> https://abc.xyz/investor/news/releases/2017/1221.html <comment><USER2> Previous Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15983211](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15983211)</comment>


Ask HN: How do you stay focused? - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,
I guess this is just a pretty open ended question: How do you stay focused on your project?
I feel like I always have problems staying focused. It's not that I get distracted and go play video games, or anything. The thing that usually ruins my focus is my project itself. This is something I find myself having to deal with on every project that I start. I think it may be because when I'm starting a fresh web project, there isn't much to it and it's very easy to get side tracked and work on other aspects of the site.
For example, the one thing that usually always steers me off track is Javascript. In my current project that I'm working on, I want to have a Google map and allow users to pinpoint their location on the map. Simply click the map, and update something else with the latitude and longitude of the click. I got this working, but just like every other project, instead of stopping with the rough, but working, code that I had, I continued messing with the Google map API and started to add markers and stuff to the map. Before I know it, I've got a big bad mess of Javascript that I just ended up scrapping in the end anyways.
That's just an example. I also get easily side tracked by CSS (I'm never satisfied with the way my pages look).
So, how do you all stay focused on implementing only your core features initially? Or even after the core is mostly done, how do you stay focused on whatever single thing you're attempting to implement at that time? Have you found that using things like Git help, for some reason? Do certain editors, or work flows help this?
I will admit, I don't usually map out my psuedo code or flow diagrams or anything before starting these. I will jot some things down in my composition book and organize my thoughts, but I don't ever do wire frames, or anything. Has anyone found that these help you stay on track?
Just curious! Thanks. <comment><USER2> I use the Pomodoro technique of applying absolute focus to small tasks for 25 minutes. A lot of people use it with the GTD methodology.

There's a nice website (<http://tomatoi.st>) that lets you start a Pomodoro timer right in your browser. It's pretty convenient.

As far as planning projects out, it's a well known adage that minutes spent planning saves hours stuck in the position you seem to be describing. I used to be a hack-and-slash coder myself, slinging bits and pieces here and there until a final (albeit mangled) product emerged. Trust me, it's a lot cleaner and easier to plan things out in significant detail before sitting down at your IDE.

</comment><comment><USER3> i try to bite off small chunks, and get them done quickly, instead of tacking a huge item all in one blow</comment>


Jobless Rate in U.S. Falls Below 6% as Hiring Picks Up - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/04/business/economy/monthly-jobs-report-september.html <comment><USER2> But the workforce participation rate also fell.

"Notably, part of the decline in the unemployment rate was because workers left the labor force. The share of the population with jobs or hunting for one fell to 62.7 percent, its lowest level since 1978."

[http://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/unemployment-rate- dr...](http://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/unemployment-rate-drops-6-year- low-5-9-percent-n217491)

Another article I read earlier today also said that the average wage fell by 1 cent.

<comment><USER3> I don't buy it. For myself and other employers I know, we're just having an incredibly difficult time hiring low skilled employees. $15 an hour for menial work? Maybe 4-5 responses from craigslist. Contrast this with a couple years ago when there would have been dozens of applicants. Labor seems tight.

<comment><USER4> Hey, I'm an iOS developer desperately seeking work. I am also a vet, and I've had no luck finding work. Where can I go to get this work? I'll even do menial work.

<comment><USER5> Location?

<comment><USER4> Austin, TX

[http://randydillon.net](http://randydillon.net)

<comment><USER5> I know someone looking for an iOS dev, I'll pass that along. Can't really promise anything but maybe something will come from it.

<comment><USER4> Thanks. My email is randydillonnet AT gmail DOT com and my github is [https://github.com/NSausage](https://github.com/NSausage)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For those interested in details about participation rates, demographics, etc, you can start diving in with Calculated Risk's info and analysis here:

[http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2014/10/september- employme...](http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2014/10/september-employment- report-248000-jobs.html)

[http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2014/10/comments-on- employ...](http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2014/10/comments-on-employment- report-party.html)

<comment><USER7> To the people dissatisfied with the headline unemployment rate, we can also look at the U5 unemployment rate, which includes discouraged workers. It tells roughly the same story as the headline rate, U6 which includes part-for- economic-reasons workers seems to be falling a bit faster than the headline rate:

[http://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment- rate](http://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The mandate of the fed should be changed to correct for the data problems evident here.

The "easiest" way to increase (inverse) metrics is always to move people from the measured bucket (unemployed) to the not-measured one (non-participating).

If we shift inflation from assets < 1 year life to those of longer duration, we can manipulate that metric pretty well too.

Until composite metrics are better disseminated and understood, these things will remain underlying problems.

<comment><USER9> Reposting dead reply from BobCat:

 _> The statistic that should be used is full time job equivalents over the preceding year - any other statistic can be misused, but actual hours worked is pretty reliably determined and increases and decreases have real meaning._

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Others here have touched on some of the issues with the headline number, such as quality of jobs created, full-time employment rate, the real unemployment number (counting discouraged), and the labor force participation rate.

Another aspect to the current situation that really bothers me, is that we're only starting to claw down the real unemployment rate after five years, approximately just in time for the next recession to hit. GDP growth has basically been falling for three years now. Getting slammed with another recession, with 11% real unemployment, is going to hurt a lot.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've been tracking the U6 unemployment rate which is much more pessimistic and it is also tracking down steadily. [http://portalseven.com/employment/unemployment_rate_u6.jsp](http://portalseven.com/employment/unemployment_rate_u6.jsp)

<comment><USER12> U6 is quite optimistic, actually. [http://i.imgur.com/x1duiaG.gif](http://i.imgur.com/x1duiaG.gif)

<comment><USER5> shadowstats is junk science. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8235378](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8235378)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Predictable "good news" on unemployment with elections looming.

</comment><comment><USER14> Thanks for all the free money!

<comment><USER14> cant wait for the inflation to pick up -.-</comment></comment>