We're Incentivizing Bad Science - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/were-incentivizing-bad-science/ <comment><USER2> From a previous HN comment [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14022158](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14022158) by dasmoth

"If you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible result being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate a different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary. The position is this: You want one kind of research, but, if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it."

\-- Attributed to J.J. Thomson (although I've not been able to turn up a definitive citation -- anyone know where it comes from?)

<comment><USER3> Taken to an extreme, this is UBI, and I think we would all benefit to some degree from a system like that if we could get from here to there. On the other hand, I imagine there's quite a bit of research that requires expensive tests and/or apparatus to get right, and I'm not sure how you feasibly come to a situation where you have a bunch of hobby physicists on staff and provide them with a particle accelerator, but just for funsies.

I think allowing people to explore their passions is essential to bringing new ideas into fields, and will likely bring a renaissance to some areas of study, and at least portions of other fields, but I'm at a loss as to how it can help at the forefront of fields that require a lot of investment. Rocketry, for another example. Can anyone make a realistic case that another 10,000, or even 100,000 passionate people could achieve what Space X has over the last few years? I don't doubt they come up with many or all of the same ideas, but the testing of those ideas requires a lot of money.

<comment><USER4> There have been suggestions that doing science funding via lottery (with some caveats) would be more effective and more efficient than our current grant proposal based system.

<comment><USER5> There should first be a good base of teaching assistant funding with enough free time to do research work. A lottery for extra PhD grants would indeed work well on top of this. Often the key is simply top-k grades now for those grants.

Fun fact, most historical republics and democracies elected political offices by lottery. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's worth distinguishing between different types of bad science.

1\. The first and most egregious type is outright fraud. This is when you intentionally manipulate or fake data. Everyone agrees this is bad, and honest actors are enough to prevent it. In some cases, other honest actors are sufficient to determine if the claims are fishy.

2\. The second more subtle type is not paying attention to adaptivity. For example, maybe an investigator wants to look at the data before coming up with a hypothesis to test. This is dangerous because the investigator is already overfitting, so any p-values the investigator computes afterward do not mean what they're supposed to mean. This is less egregious because it's easy to do this just by not being careful or not knowing your statistics very well. A scientist can be honest, but imperfect, and do this. It's also not easy to sniff this out as a reviewer -- the scientist might just omit all the stuff that didn't work. But there appears to be growing awareness of this kind of problem.

3\. The third, and hardest to solve, problem is not factoring in the whole population of experiments. This is where 100 labs independently try an idea and one of them gets a genuine (from their limited view) result with a genuine p-value. It's novel and that lab has (in the limited view) been careful about adaptivity and keeping their hypotheses carefully generated. Maybe they've even used carefully generated noise to ensure their conclusions generalize [1] (which would definitely cut down on this problem). So it's pretty much impossible for a reviewer to tell there's a problem, because they don't know about the 100 other people that tried this and failed because the randomness didn't go their way. Short of a public experiment registry, this one is hard to fix, especially because it may be that nobody's being malicious or ignorant.

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1411.2664](https://arxiv.org/abs/1411.2664)

<comment><USER7> My advisor was guilty of pushing me to do #2. "Your original hypothesis was disconfirmed? Find one that the data does not disconfirm and that'll lead to a follow-up paper!" I dropped out of grad school because I assumed this was the norm.

<comment><USER8> I feel like evidence dis-confirming a hypothesis is as valuable as confirming it. How many other grad students are going to attempt the same experiment/concept if null results are never published?

I wish there was more praise for negative results in publication, because whether confirmed or not, the knowledge has value.

<comment><USER9> I think it's partially embarrassing when that happens. Hindsight is 20/20, and people will think it was obvious that it wouldn't be the way you expected.

It's hard to argue that I had justification to think that novel intervention X would have an effect. It turns out it doesn't. Science is often very specialized, there's little chance others would have the very same idea. If it works out, the argumentation would have to be reversed: my idea was very novel and non-obvious but as I show it actually works, which no one would have guessed.

The negative result story only works if the research community would have very strongly expected to see the effect, almost reversing the role of the null and the alternative.

<comment><USER10> >The negative result story only works if the research community would have very strongly expected to see the effect, almost reversing the role of the null and the alternative

Depends what you mean by "works". If you mean "is reasonably publishable in the current academic climate, then I agree. If you mean "has value", then I disagree.

<comment><USER9> I mean "sufficiently impresses and/or catches the attention of others, especially other scientists".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The real problem with science is the same as in politics.

We, the other scientists (just like the voters) incentivize certain behaviors and with that favor a certain type of scientists (and politician) to prosper.

There are all kinds of scientists (and politicians) competing for your trust (and votes). There are good and bad among them. As long as we reward the bullshitters more, they are the ones that will outcompete the others.

All these rules and regulations that people propose are ineffectual, as long as a certain level of self-criticism is not being applied:

\- Stop believing and propagating the bullshit even if it seems to support your preconceived notions (or even the truth). This is very hard to do in practice.

As sad as it sounds: the greatest enemy of good science are the other scientists.

feels like some sort of prisoners's dilemma, it only works if all do it, otherwise, it is best to just not admit anything

<comment><USER12> A different framing of this is that politics is, more and more, intruding into science.

Paul Romer:

> Politics does not lead to a broadly shared consensus. It has to yield a > decision whether or not a consensus prevails. As a result, political > institutions create incentives for participants to exaggerate disagreements > between factions. Words that are evocative and ambiguous better serve > factional interests than words that are analytical and precise.

> Science is a process that does lead to a broadly shared consensus. It is > arguably the only social process that does. Consensus forms around > theoretical and empirical statements that are true. In making these > statements, a combination of words from natural language and tightly linked > symbols from the formal language of mathematics encourages the use of words > that are analytical and precise.

from [https://paulromer.net/mathiness/Mathiness.pdf](https://paulromer.net/mathiness/Mathiness.pdf)

<comment><USER13> He also left as World Bank chief economist after he complained that the "Ease of doing Business" index suspiciously went down for Chile while a socialist party was in power.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Al-Khwarizmi I agree with everything except for the jab at (paid) open access, which looks quite gratuitous to me. It may be true that "authors are willing to pay more to get their articles published in more prestigious journals. So, the more exciting the findings a journal publishes, the more references, the higher the impact the journal, the more submissions they get, the more money they make". But this is also true of non-open-access journals. Journals live off their prestige, and before paid open access was a thing, publishers still wanted to have high-impact journals so that university libraries would subscribe to them. It was a very distorted market (as it is now), but a market nevertheless.

While I often bash for-profit journals for being parasites that do little actual work and profit from withholding access to science that should be public, and for this I would open a bottle of champagne if they disappeared, I don't think journals have much to do with this particular problem of incentivization of bad science. Journals just respond to the demand of publishing more, and shallower, papers. That demand comes from hypercompetitivity in academia, where researchers need to fight for scarce positions and scraps of funding, often paired with too much bureaucratization (selection processes that look at "objective" and "verifiable" metrics like number of papers published at a given impact factor quartile, etc., instead of just asking a bunch of neutral experts whether the person is doing good research, which may be more opaque but also much more meaningful).

As evidence that journals are not the problem in this particular case, in fields like machine learning, where publication happens mostly in arXiv and conferences that don't charge for publishing or reading papers, the problems pointed out in the post also exist. Published models that only beat previous ones because they were lucky with random seeds or data splits are widespread.

<comment><USER14> > researchers need to fight for scarce positions and scraps of funding

there is quite a lot of funding

> often paired with too much bureaucratization (selection processes that look > at "objective" and "verifiable" metrics

this is the problem.

The whole OP reads like a bizarre hit piece on open access. How could scientists _paying_ to publish their work incentivize them to publish more? How would spamming the world with more publications inflate a scientist's impact factor? (It wouldn't -- impact factor would be diluted by the spam)

It was always possible to self-publish and to cite self-published work, and even without journals, a modern scientist can publish on a free webhost for even cheaper than an open-access journal.

<comment><USER15> _How could scientists paying to publish their work incentivize them to publish more?_

I assumed that the point was that the _journal_ is incentivized to publish as many articles as possible, and hence to lower review standards.

<comment><USER16> Sure, but if the journal publishes too many articles it'll lose prestige. Nature publishes what, 8% of submissions? And that's apparently what they consider financially optimal -- they're a for-profit corporation, they could publish more if they wanted to. I guess the question is just whether this applies equally to open-access and traditional subscription journals.

<comment><USER15> But Nature doesn't make its living by publishing articles, it does it by selling subscriptions. This requires having high "prestige" so people want to subscribe to it.

If you're just charging for _publishing_ articles, you don't care about whether anyone reads them or about what your "prestige" is, since you don't make any money off of that.

It's true that if I publish a paper it's better for me if it's read and thus cited, but that's much less of a difference compared to published vs not published at all. The entire problem starts with authors not being incentivized to publish a few good articles over churning out as many as possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've noticed a trend across many scientific fields where publications are basically irrelevant since nobody reads them. Status is conferred by high profile talks, which tend to be invited. The material discussed in high profile talks is eventually published in a journal or conference proceeding (in the case of CS) and will get citations, but ideas only spread if they are picked by the program committees. The academics who publish many low impact papers are not really relevant.

<comment><USER4> This is _not_ applicable to a lot of fields. Generally, only CS and ancillary fields are ones I've encountered where talks and conferences are the primary "currency". In biomedicine, talks will only follow _after_ publications, and are often intentionally paired.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think we also need to facilitate the work of reviewers. With so many papers and vast literature, reviewing is a PITA and errors keep slipping through the cracks. I d like to use a simple wiki of "argument refutations" , where we can look up previous objections to arguments being made. This is useful work that is currently being lost in the email archives of journal editors.

It would also help if we could open up science to people outside the academia, and begin the process of de-pedestalization of academia altogether, but not in an unregulated, completely flat way - academic discourse cannot be done in facebook. We know it has to happen and it will happen but we pretend the current situation can last forever. Academia is turning to a place that sells indulgences.

</comment><comment><USER19> Television incentivizes forgetable reality TV, the radio incentivizes meaningless poppy music, social media incentivizes bickering about the controversies of today.

But, nowadays, you can also use your TV to watch a French arthouse film, to go to Youtube and be recommended a Japanese jazz album from 1974, to join the conversation on Twitter and ask questions to leaders in their respective fields.

Now you can swim against the current: Force all these power - and money - hungry institutions to fundamentally change their tune. Or you can find one of the many new waves to surf. Life is good, science is good, progress is good. The choice, as a scientist, is up to you. Can't write one groundbreaking paper a year? Write two or three mediocre ones. No amount of foundational change is going to make you a groundbreaking scientist. And change the channel once in while: the world is only getting bigger and more connected.

</comment><comment><USER20> I agree with this article and have always thought about this but never voiced it.

I think a few things could improve the quality and discovery of published papers:

-After so many publications, could it be mandatory for random samples in that author's publication be tested? I get that there is a limit on resources, but some advanced undergrads could do this with guidance.

-I would love to see some version of a journal of failures. That is, well intentioned research that had poor outcomes. It was so frequently in Chemistry research that my compounds were useless or the methods to synthesize them did not work, and it would be helpful to document that. Unfortunately, there is no "Journal of Failed Chemistry." Only research that ostensibly make a contribution with a clear outcome get published. So much time wasted experimenting where you could save another scientist time and encourage them down another path.

<comment><USER21> >It was so frequently in Chemistry research that my compounds were useless or the methods to synthesize them did not work, and it would be helpful to document that.

This mirrors my experience where a lot of the post-docs carried war stories of things like lab/country-specific humidity playing a role in synthetic methods succeeding (or failing). There were a lot of dark arts/tricks of the trade that people carried around with them: stuff like going that extra mile to dry things of water super thoroughly (even if it was not mentioned in the paper we were referencing).

<comment><USER22> Many "dark arts" aren't known as dark arts to the people who know them. They're just the things you always do, because if you don't do them, nothing works.

An approximate CS analog: Writing great commit messages, and using an SCM.

You don't have to do them, nobody writes it up because those who know regard it as trivial, but if you don't do them, almost nothing works. Everyone who knows what they're doing does it.

<comment><USER21> >An approximate CS analog: Writing great commit messages, and using an SCM.

This is definitely not the analogue. The analogue is always doing a clean install of the OS before running your experiment. Or only ever using Arch version x.y.z for replicating lab 1 and maybe a.b.c for replicating lab 2.

It's knowing all the magic undocumented JVM flags ahead of running the application.

Some you know to use as part of war scars/best practices. Some are just pure inside information from working in that lab or having a personal relationship with people in that lab.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> There are other ways in which the incentives are misaligned. Granting agencies that prefer to fund researchers who nearly always "succeed" in proving their hypothesis will find that research proposals are low-risk and low-information. At in at least one sense, the ideal experiment is one with a 50/50 chance of failing.

Disconfirmation is also important.

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't want to sound too triumphant, but over here in fundamental physics we have decades-old safeguards in place against all these problems.

The big experiments don't have publication bias: they proudly say exactly what they did, even if 90% of the time there are only negative results, because exclusions are important too. Experiments are inherently replicated, with multiple independent simultaneous experiments (LHC) or multiple independent analyses (EHT), data blinding throughout, and even occasionally a further layer of blinding using decoy signals (LIGO). The statistical standards for discovery are, in terms of p-values, about 10,000 times more stringent, and even still people are moving away from p-values entirely.

The resulting publications are put out for free, publicly, on the ArXiv. Later they are submitted to a relatively small family of low-cost journals, which everybody knows the reputations of.

Hopefully some of these lessons can be adapted to other fields.

<comment><USER25> CERN and the LHC are to me prime examples of bad science. You build huge machines at incredible cost, wasting hundreds of thousands of man hours of brilliant young people's time. They are paid almost nothing (a checkout clerk at a Swiss supermarket makes more than a PhD student at CERN). Then you string along a subset of those for years, exploiting them for further cheap labor, somehow making them believe they are "lucky" to get that opportunity (a postdoc at CERN pays a fraction of what you can make at Google Zurich). In the time between experiments people only ever see simulated data, leading to a rude awakening when actual experimental data comes in (c.f. ALICE's desaster of a analysis Pipeline). Then there is literally decades of over promising on ground breaking discoveries right around the corner (super symmetry, extra dimensions, dark matter). Defunding the super collider in the 90s in the US was probably one of the best science policy decisions they made.

<comment><USER26> > They are paid almost nothing (a checkout clerk at a Swiss supermarket makes > more than a PhD student at CERN). Then you string along a subset of those > for years, exploiting them for further cheap labor, somehow making them > believe they are "lucky" to get that opportunity (a postdoc at CERN pays a > fraction of what you can make at Google Zurich).

That's not unique to LHC, or CERN, or physics. It's a general problem of academia, where PhDs and postdocs are paid a pittance compared to what they could otherwise earn in the industry. This problem is especially bad in high energy physics of course, since jobs are especially limited, and it's the brightest people competing against each other, who could easily land jobs on Wall Street or Silicon Valley.

> Then there is literally decades of over promising on ground breaking > discoveries right around the corner (super symmetry, extra dimensions, dark > matter).

Standard Model works exceedingly well at LHC. No one was actually sure about BSM (beyond Standard Model) so there was no "promise" really. Or the promise is: we may see something interesting, or we may disprove some otherwise interesting theories.

> Defunding the super collider in the 90s in the US was probably one of the > best science policy decisions they made.

Cancelling SSC was such a stupid waste of labor and money, it's painful to see someone touting it as a triumph. Two words: defense budget. Enough said.

Disclosure: I worked for CMS for a while. (Not physically at CERN; was doing data analysis for CMS in the U.S.)

<comment><USER25> I'm pretty positive that people made firm predictions and bets that the LHC will see super partners (because otherwise the "naturalness" argument would go away). Whether it would be the MSSM or something else was up for debate, but people thought it would be more likely than not that they would see them if the Higgs was found in the predicted energy range. In any case physics departments at top universities all over the world are stacked with phenomenologists that made their careers on working out these predictions.

Anderson made an argument against the SSC [https://www.the- scientist.com/opinion-old/the-case-against-t...](https://www.the- scientist.com/opinion-old/the-case-against-the-ssc-63734), which I pretty much agree with. Science funding is finite and physics talent in a country as well. Many really good students are funnelled into dead end careers in high-energy physics (whether theoretical or experimental). It's just a huge waste of human potential, especially given the fact of how ruthlessly they are exploited. I know people in the field, a hiring decision between three people was recently described to me as a choice between a 'social case' and two competent workers, one of which happens to be a friend of mine.

Funnily enough lot's of institutions doing fundamental research in high energy physics either also do military research or receive military funding. Most of Witten's work for example has been funded by the Department of Energy. The whole reason CERN was build in a neutral country was because people worried that a post nuclear arms race would break out otherwise. In France one of the major institutes contributing to particle physics (Saclay Nuclear Research Centre) also developed their nuclear arsenal and is located next to a major arms manufacturers research center (Thalys).

<comment><USER26> > more likely than not

Yeah, "more likely than not" isn't a promise. Sure, a lot of people firmly believe in their theories, so me saying "no one was actually sure" seems wrong, but I was talking about a different kind of "sure". The community overwhelmingly agreed on SM, whereas there were huge divides on where the BSM bets were, or even on roughly the same bet, where SUSY scale lies, etc.

> Mant really good students are funneled into dead end careers in high-energy > physics, ...

I was one of the funneled. We signed up because we were drawn to the fundamental questions, not because of glowing job prospects, which were largely laid out for anyone paying a little bit of attention. Cancelling things and decreasing funding certainly didn't help, only lead to worse "exploitation" in your words.

> Funnily enough lot's of institutions doing fundamental research in high > energy physics either also do military research or receive military funding.

Institutions do lots of things. Most also receive funding for medical research, so?

In general, modern day HEP in and of itself hardly contributes anything to the military sector. On the more practical side, powerful magnets, computational methods etc. should be useful in military applications, but a lot of different areas have such second-order effects. Nevertheless, I'm neither knowledgeable nor enthusiastic about killing machines, so I could be missing some obvious connections.

> Most of Witten's work for example has been funded by the Department of > Energy.

Why would you put all DOE funding under defense budget? It's not DOD. Or would you characterize all renewable energy spending as military spending too?

> In France one of the major institutes contributing to particle physics > (Saclay Nuclear Research Centre) also developed their nuclear arsenal...

Particle physics has largely moved on from nuclear physics. (I know, many particle physicists are still interested in cold fusion etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > Self-regulation by scientists of decades and centuries past has created > modern science with all its virtues and triumphs. However, much like the > bankers of the early 21st century, we risk allowing new incentives to erode > our self-regulation and skew our perceptions and behavior; similar to the > risky loans underlying mortgage-backed securities, faulty scientific > observations can form a bubble and an unstable edifice. As science is > ultimately self-correcting, faulty conclusions are remedied with ongoing > study, but this takes a great deal of time.

> Unless and until leadership is taken at a structural and societal level to > alter the incentive structure present, the current environment will continue > to encourage and promote wasting of resources, squandering of research > efforts and delaying of progress; such waste and delay is something that > those suffering diseases for which we have inadequate therapy, and those > suffering conditions for which we have inadequate technological remedies, > can ill afford and should not be forced to endure.

I agree.

</comment><comment><USER28> Yes well every solution we come up with invariably favours well established scientists... how can a new scientist get anywhere if it takes 10 years to produce substantive work?

There is a conceit in the final paragraph, where it is implied that we are missing out on cures for diseases etc due to wasteful scientific endeavours. This is not necessarily true. There have been many successes in the current era of medical science. Generally these are driven by technological advances such as monoclonal antibodies or next-generation sequencing.

</comment><comment> dr-detroit Applied research has always been in fashion. Theoretical is always rare and underfunded. Many books on this subject have been written I recommend "A University for the 21st Century"

People in glass offices run everything in 2019 and the more of an expert you become in your field the more professional managers will feel you are a pest to be silenced/hated/removed.

</comment><comment><USER16> The article makes some fair points, but strangely seems to imply that open access is somehow opposed to rigorous peer review, which certainly leaves an odd taste in my mouth.

> _Of course, scientific publication is subjected to a high degree of quality > control through the peer-review process, which despite the political and > societal factors that are ineradicable parts of human interaction, is one of > the "crown jewels" of scientific objectivity. However, this is changing. The > very laudable goal of "open access journals" is to make sure that the public > has free access to the scientific data that its tax dollars are used to > generate._

</comment><comment><USER29> First issue: publications. I think this is not a big problem in the USA relative to China. Is there evidence of American scientists who have greatly benefited in reputation and prestige, despite doing very shoddy work? Many scientists have been rebuffed and rejected from grants/awards due to not having enough publications. American scientists, though, are more attuned to the quality and integrity of journals in which publications appear. Whether for tenure or grants, a Nature or Science or Cell paper will mean a LOT, and many scientists evaluating other scientists wouldn't care much about a journal publication with Impact Factor under 1.0.

Meanwhile in China, there are numerous article-factory-journals that are pay to publish, you can put your shoddy work in those and amp up your publication count easily. Surely, these exist in the USA, but are career scientists at major institutions utilizing these shady Chinese journals? There is evidence that some of these Chinese journals are publishing straight up BS, which is especially easy to do with data analysis where you could "clean" your data easily. Perhaps it is a cultural or political difference, but I don't see nearly as much rigorous self-reflection of Chinese scientists on this front?

Second issue, grants: publications are a small slice of this story. Science departments (not humanities) in universities are MAJOR revenue generators for the University. My university took 1/3 of your grant straight off the bat, to cover overheads like shiny facilities and administration and marketing. Meanwhile, the scientists themselves may make huge salary bonuses or advance their tech/staff substantially when they have substantial grants. So, getting a grant is great for you personally, and improves your chances of further grants.

So, is it really that surprising that there may be pressure to publish at all costs, to p-hack, to reach for those low-impact journals despite their lower reputation/impact, given both universities and scientists are BOTH massively financially benefited from this incrementalism? Does it really pay to reach for pie-in-the-sky, fundamental sea-changes in your field? It seems like a high variance, high risk strategy that only very bold, well-funded, devil-may- care scientists would employ.

<comment><USER30> I can't comment on China and other fields, but in the US for AI and robotics, in which I do research / publish in, there is definitely a growing trend of an over-emphasis on novelty research that disregards reproducibility in favor of "wow" factors and fancy demo videos. A lot of highly cited research papers/labs tend to be the most heavily promoted ones (on Twitter, in the press, etc), and they're not necessarily impactful/useful for the rest of the field.

<comment><USER31> Amidst this worrying trend of shallow research, begging for petty cred and grants more than knowledge, you have to wonder what has become of ethics, of integrity in science. Globalized academia needs some soul-searching, IMHO.

<comment><USER32> _" you have to wonder what has become of ethics, of integrity in science"_

When was there any more ethics or integrity in science than any other time? The AIDS crisis was a shitshow of choosing prestige and recognition over the lives of a generation. The discovery of DNA was off a woman who was hardly recognized. Henrietta Lacks' cells. The syphilis experiments.

<comment><USER33> The discovery of DNA was done by Friedrich Meischer, a brilliant Swiss biologist. At the time, nobody knew what the nuclein he purified did (and, the results were considered so surprising that his own thesis advisor redid all the experiments manually before letting the data be published).

What you are referring to is the use of Rosalind Franklin's X-ray fibre diffraction images by Watson and Crick to elucidate the 3D structure of DNA, and, depending on the accounts you read, whether she got due credit is arguable. She did publish in the same Nature journal issue as W&C ([https://www.nature.com/articles/171740a0.pdf](https://www.nature.com/articles/171740a0.pdf)), she got credit for the photos (see the acknowledgements in the W&C paper, [http://www.nature.com/genomics/human/watson- crick/](http://www.nature.com/genomics/human/watson-crick/)), and she was dead by the time the Nobel Prize decision was made (so she could not have received the prize).

I understand many feel very strongly that she was cheated, and while I do believe she was definitely slighted and not given enough credit, the underlying story is fairly complicated. I recommend reading both Dark Lady and Eighth Day of Creation and then forming your own opinion. personally I thought her personal diaries, which she willed to Aaron Klug and were used in the writing of Eighth Day, were really illuminating.

<comment><USER32> Sorry, you're right, the story is complicated, but that it is so complicated draws further the question- _where are we getting the idea that science was full of ethical humans doing purely ethical things_?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> A previous Great Leader decided that he would improve our research output in a simple way: we should stop doing humdrum work, and only do work which would succeed famously.

Of course, there is some difficulty in determining which work is going to be brilliant before it is done. But he decided that he could do that, seemingly based on how PR worthy the proposal was.

At any rate it did immense damage and set back deep research by years. Naturally he left when he could wangle a better job elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER35> Every time an arxiv paper gets published to HN, I wonder whether it's even worth reading until findings are peer reviewed..

<comment><USER36> *worth

<comment><USER35> thx

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> How do you quantify rigor?

<comment><USER38> In mortises?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Partially can be solved with technology - all data and programs should be self-contained, interactive, edition and modification process should be visible for general public, better connections between papers rather than current citation mechanism.

</comment><comment> cde-v Market demands Bad Science, market supplies Bad Science. I do not see a problem here.

<comment><USER11> A cynical view - alas it captures the truth.

It is very easy to point fingers, to blame it on funding, blame it on journals, blame it on media, but in the end:

\- scientists decide who gets funded

\- scientists decide who gets published

\- scientists make exaggerated claims in the media

The source of the problem is the scientists, not understanding the damage they are doing to themselves.

I do foresee downvotes, because scientists do not like this idea at all :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Not surprising when science has become a tool for political and industrial purposes.

</comment><comment><USER41> Actually, i think some part this bad science and low innovation rate- is conciousness. Goverments everywhere realized, that unless they have total social control, people can not be trusted with exponential powerfull technology of all kinds. So, i predict, that unless we as humans are not totally surveilanced and controlled- we will not see great leaps of technology in the forseeable future.

<comment><USER42> When I was doing laser spectroscopy research as an undergrad my prof said there was an informal physics "association" that had taken an oath not to develop anything like another atomic bomb. He asked if I wanted to join and I said yes. So I certainly see some basis for people being scared of fundamental advances in science and technology and wanting to control and place limits on what is developed. There have been a lot of advances in astrophysics (little potential harm to things here on Earth) and not much research in gravity (big consequences if we could actually control gravity.) That doesn't require "total social control", just a strong influence at key checkpoints (like funding). Whether there is an active effort to reduce investigation in specific areas of science might be discoverable by a meta-analysis of papers showing what areas of research tend to not get funding and see if there is a correlation with the potential for social disruption.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> At this point, what even is the point of good science if nobody believes it?

<comment><USER44> If what you said was literally true, that nobody believes it, then there would be little point. But "nobody" is an exaggeration. Scientists are likely to believe it, or at least are in a much better position to evaluate the truth and utility of it, and build upon it.

When it comes to abstract science, eg, the ultimate origin of the universe, it doesn't materially affect anything if it is believed or not. But if someone produces a cheaper or longer lasting battery, the proof is in the pudding, and that basic research will have made a difference.

Then there is the category of hard science which is disbelieved because moneyed interests wish to discredit it, and/or it has become a political shibboleth to discredit the science. Those aren't due to bad science.

<comment><USER43> The problem is that significant portions of the population refuse to believe anything that comes out of science. This directly affects what politics decides to do about real problems like climate change. This isn't some abstract issue, it's something that's affecting us on an everyday level because people are unwilling to listen to the evidence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> We need to incentivize thorough reviews as well.

</comment><comment><USER46> I've always found it distasteful that the Clay Math Prize offers a million dollar reward for proving that P=NP but nothing for revealing the truth should it be otherwise.

<comment><USER9> I think you misunderstood something. The problem itself is sometimes referred to as the "P=NP" problem, but that's just a name, it is also called the "P vs. NP" problem. If you can prove either P!=NP or P==NP, you get the prize.

Can you give a reference to back up your interpretation?

<comment><USER46> > Can you give a reference to back up your interpretation?

Alas, no. I do recall being astonished at my claim, and then being convinced by a colleague (which was backed up by plain language on the CMI page, in my memory...) but now that I'm re-reading (current and archive.org'd) I cannot find such a thing. Disturbing. Yet relieving. Fuck my memory.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple, Ford, and Disney push back on Trump's WeChat ban - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/13/21366171/apple-wechat-ban-ford-disney-push-back-report <comment><USER2> One thing in common with Apple, Ford, and Disney is they all do business with China.</comment>


Ask HN: OpenOffice or LibreOffice? - <AUTHOR>

Which platform is more viable? Have you used any of these programs extensively? Is LibreOffice any better than OpenOffice in terms of equations handling? My experience with OpenOffice with respect to equations was at best terrible. I wish there was an open platform to replace Word but it seems that we are still far from that( with the respect to the developers of OO and LO).<p>Please do not suggest LaTeX as alternative for practical purposes(file sharing with colleagues that do not use it) <comment><USER2> If you need the features of Office, a couple of hundred dollars is probably money well spent. Particularly when your colleagues rely on your formatting.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with that. But imagine having to buy licenses for a group of people and at the same time giving up some of the advantages in using Linux. On top of that having 2-3 machines and getting Office for all of them is not the most trivial of expenses. I am a recent convert to Linux and the only thing that keeps my connections to MS is Word.

<comment><USER2> Free is the price, not the cost. It's easy to burn through $1000 in lost productivity - with a team of three it will take less than a day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> As of now, LibreOffice is equal to, if not better, then OpenOffice as it was only forked off of it about 4 months ago. If you're already using OO.o then switching to LibreOffice will be a snap and you won't have to worry about Oracle.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you have any idea about the future of these products?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> LibreOffice feels somewhat more fast than OpenOffice. Of course, I never had much of a problem with OO (except for speed.)</comment>


$1B TSA Behavioral Screening Program Slammed as Ineffective Junk Science - <AUTHOR> http://www.allgov.com/news/where-is-the-money-going/1-billion-dollar-tsa-behavioral-screening-program-slammed-as-ineffective-junk-science-150323?news=856031 <comment><USER2> I've observed the horrible nature of this program in person while traveling. During the practice, the TSA staff talked loudly to threaten passengers and then also made "jokes" to passengers about finding chemicals on them. Essentially they try to escalate the fear among all the passengers and then single out someone who responds the most poorly. Not to mention the fact that anyone who has protested or complained about any of these controversial programs are being targeted without any basis. Psychological warfare is being conducted on American soil against innocent Americans.

<comment><USER3> Consider this counterpoint experience posted on Slashdot...

"I recall going through security at the Charlotte, NC airport once, a few years ago, and noticed TSA agents out in the queue making smalltalk with all of the passengers. "Hey, how are y'all doin' today?", "Goin' someplace warm?", "Be sure to take off that belt buckle sir.", "Were are y'all headed?", "Y'all fly much?", and so forth. At first I thought that this was a misguided effort at public relations. But then it occurred to me that those agents were probably pre-screeners looking for nervous and evasive passengers who would then be subjected to additional traditional screening. I don't know what SPOT is and have no opinion of its effectiveness. But it seems to me that chatting up passengers in order to spot potential trouble-makers is probably the single most effective part of the whole TSA process."

<comment><USER4> >it seems to me that chatting up passengers in order to spot potential trouble-makers is probably the single most effective part of the whole TSA process

I don't understand this. I assume that its meant from an intuitive 'I feel like this would be effective' standpoint. Because as far as actual effectiveness is concerned, we know that it has stopped 0 attacks. The only way we could know it to be effective is if there were people actually trying to carry out attacks and being caught. Neither of those things are happening, though, so we really can't tell. Thus far, it's just a massive waste of resources.

Really, 9/11 guaranteed that there will never be another airline hijacking for a very, very long time. No passenger will fight with anything less than every fiber of their being to stop any hijacker now. It doesn't matter what kind of weapon you've got, the instant you stand up and say 'I'm taking over this place', you immediately have the entire crew and passengers willing to die to stop you. Before the idea of planes as weapons was tried, everyone presumed a hijacked plane would just fly to Cuba and everyone would be OK. But now that they know the possibility everyone is going to die in an intentional crash, hijackers have no chance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe someone should suggest the study of physiognomy to the TSA. Over a hundred yrs ago, they could already determine intellect, moral fortitude and other important parameters just by looking at a human's face and skull form. Had the term "terrorist" been invented by then, they would have doubtlessly detected that, too.

So we may just as well say, the TSA is about 100 yrs out of date. But then, not letting people board a plane because you don't like their nose or the way they scratch their head is the only hope of fighting "terror" that we have, isn't it?

<comment><USER6> > Over a hundred yrs ago, they could already determine intellect, moral > fortitude and other important parameters just by looking at a human's face > and skull form.

Do you have anything more about this?

<comment><USER7> The OP is making a (presumably) tongue-in-cheek reference to phrenology -- [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology)

<comment><USER5> Yes, that can be regarded as part of the field. See also: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropological_criminology](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropological_criminology)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So this is codified racial-profiling and intuition-profiling (that singles out people with dreadlocks, arabs, sick people, stressed people etc.) unlike all other un-codified profiling employed by virtually all agents of all border security things all over the planet. If you don't believe me, try flying visually sick and you'll be questioned over and over again (not about being sick or having ebola, mind you).

<comment><USER9> SPOT is based on the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), a method developed by Paul Ekman to read faces (familiar to fans of the show Lie to Me): [http://www.denverpost.com/editorials/ci_24533526/face-it- tsa...](http://www.denverpost.com/editorials/ci_24533526/face-it-tsa- behavioral-screening-is-failing)

While the data behind using FACS to spot emotions (EMFACS) is solid ([https://books.google.com/books?id=W_npWdrHGFcC&pg=PA47&lpg=P...](https://books.google.com/books?id=W_npWdrHGFcC&pg=PA47&lpg=PA47&dq=EMFACS+studies&source=bl&ots=LauXrYExMj&sig=srjWc94XJma8hnFmZWPihXYdvZI&hl=en&sa=X&ei=n3wRVYLwKIiayASdj4LABg&ved=0CCEQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=EMFACS%20studies&f=false)), the record on using it to spot lies, terrorists, or otherwise discovering the intentions behind those emotions is not good ([http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/gao-...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/gao- says-there-is-no-evidence-that-a-tsa-program-to-spot-terrorists-is- effective/2013/11/13/fca999a0-4c93-11e3-be6b-d3d28122e6d4_story.html)).

One huge issue is that a scared terrorist looks the same as a scared person singled out for screening, and there are many times more of the latter. This is a specific issue Ekman brings up in his work when using FACS for lie detection. FACS is much better in finding out how someone is feeling rather than what they're thinking. But you need to know intentions to figure out if someone is a terrorist.

<comment><USER10> What if I'm scared I'm going to miss my flight? Or I have to go to the restroom urgently and I'm afraid all these questions will have unintended consequences? LOL. As you say no way to read intent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Reading "microexpressions" is charlatanism. The results are as vague as a Tarot card reading, for the same reasons. We've been defrauded by the purveyors of this junk. Among the places it's been debunked: [http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/article/2013/06/25/emotio...](http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/article/2013/06/25/emotions- facial-expressions-not-related/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Sadly there isn't one good site running with this story so I am not sure how we get the facts in the case. It seems the one problem standing in the way of getting the facts is the TSA itself; an agency whose screeners may soon be armed

<comment><USER13> Armed screeners? That's ridiculous. I don't hear too many stories of shoot outs at the airport. The last thing we need is to turn TSA screeners into a police force. Customs agents are often armed, but they are trained law enforcement as opposed to the misfits making $10 per how searching for smuggled barbecue sauce in a carry on.

<comment><USER3> What about machetes and Molotov cocktails?

[http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/03/21/new- orl...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/03/21/new-orleans- airport-attack-scene/25136201/)

I don't think the TSA agents should be armed, but I'm sure everyone (even the TSA agents) were happy deputy Slyve was.

<comment><USER14> At every airport screening point I've been to there's always been at least 1 deputy there on post. I feel that is sufficient. The tsa screeners are not the kind of people I would trust with a firearm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This should be a very easy test. In the years since these 3,000 behavioral observation officers have been hired, how many people have they identified as dangerous?

If this number is greater than 0, the number of actual terrorists which existed to be stopped, then we know that it is an ineffective program. If they did identify 0 people, then we know it probably works!

It's like school counselors looking for 'warning signs' of school shooters. If this is a reliable tactic, the counselors would identify 2 or 3 people every several years across the entire US. As it is, they identify dozens of students at every single school every single year - proving that they are monumentally incompetent.

</comment><comment><USER15> I have flown to Israel many times from different countries and I can tell you that the Israelis, who are probably the world's authorities on airport security, do have conversations with passengers where they ask questions and look for the passenger's affect when responding. The questions and brief discussions are not direct, eg, "How are you feeling?" but indirect such as conversations about NYC where I live or Israeli tourist spots, etc.

</comment><comment><USER16> Not arguing that it effective, as I haven't done any research on this, but the article does little to show that it is ineffective or that it is "Junk Science".

Not a big fan of TSA, so I can reasonably believe that they screwed up, but would like to see at least a little more data if they are going to pull the "Junk Science" card.

<comment><USER17> From the ACLU⁰:

 _" Both Congress' Government Accountability Office¹ and an independent scientific advisory group² found that there is no evidence that people can identify deception by observing the behavior of others."_

Claiming the opposite without showing any proof, like the TSA is doing, looks disturbingly like _" junk science"_ to me.

0: [https://www.aclu.org/national-security/aclu-sues-tsa- records...](https://www.aclu.org/national-security/aclu-sues-tsa-records- discredited-behavior-detection-program)

1: [http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-14-159](http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-14-159)

2: [http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100526/pdf/465412a.pdf](http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100526/pdf/465412a.pdf)

<comment><USER18> Maybe the TSA screening is junk due to lack of training or proper implementation, but behavioural observation is hardly junk science, Israel does exactly this and has one of the safest airports in the world due to their security screening processes.

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-wagner/what-israeli- air...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-wagner/what-israeli-airport- secu_b_4978149.html)

<comment><USER17> There is not a single word in the article about any scientific research supporting these methods.

Of course you can say _" look, the airport is safe, it must be working"_, but this is no proof.

Moreover, these _" security screening processes"_ you mention look very much like racial profiling to me. The article states that the duration of security interviews is _" based on such factors as age, race, religion and destination"_.

<comment><USER18> Racial profiling is an evil word in the USA, but not so much overseas. If cops are investigating a serial killer possibly living in my neighborhood, I'm not going to be offended if they look closer at me since I'm a youngish white guy who fits the profile and is more likely to be a serial killer than other demographic groups.

I don't see why doing the same thing and focusing on groups in airports whom are statistically more likely to do harm on airplanes is a bad thing.

The reason why the TSA is a joke is because it is wrapped up in politics and tries to tiptoe around the whole profiling aspect, where if they just focused on behaviour and also people who are more likely to fit the bill of someone whom might commit a crime, a lot of the other annoying crap that comes with screening could go away and still have improved screening results.

Also feel free to explore references outward from here: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_profiling](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_profiling)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm just going to say this out loud since no-else has: A BILLLLLION DOLLARS! A billion! One. BILLION. Dollars.

Aghhhh!

I'd have done it for half that.

<comment><USER20> That is cheap compared to the cost if the scrapped rapidscan systems

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm just glad that I seem to have passed through whatever set of factors that caused me to be "randomly" selected every time I entered the US for years on end.

<comment><USER22> Do you usually dress the same, and go through the full body scanners? My wife was upset that she got patted down _every time_ at logan, and then she looked at the display and found out that the TSA didn't like the buttons on the hoodie she liked to fly in. Now she just wears the grey one instead of the red one and flies through every time.

<comment><USER21> This happened pre-TSA and pre-body scanners too.

Literally _every_ time I went UK->US 1996 to 2010 I got "randomly" selected by some/all of immigration, security, and customs. I can only assume I looked/behaved dodgy in some way, was on some kind of list, or was just darn unlucky!

Incidents within the EU. Zero.

I've only just got the point where I've stopped scheduling a couple of extra hours of security-slack into my travel schedule ;-)

<comment><USER23> Maybe it was something you habitually wore, triggering the scanner to single you out (as another poster in this thread had happen).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I thought this was common knowledge for a while now.

<comment><USER25> Gov takes some time.

<comment><USER26> And the people who defend gov even longer.</comment></comment></comment>


Friedrich Hayek's recollection of his cousin Ludwig Wittgenstein (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://notesonliberty.com/2016/05/08/friedrich-hayeks-recollection-of-ludwig-wittgenstein/ <comment><USER2> This time in Vienna was really rather interesting. So many intellectual projects and groups going on in Vienna. Economists, philosophy and of course Freud and so on. Hayek came in contact with quite a few interesting characters, including Bukharin who would be the leading economist among the Bolsheviks. They didn't agree on much unfortunately.

<comment><USER3> If you can, read Zweig's The World Of Yesterday, a memoir on life in Vienna before WW1. It's surely rose-tinted, but the amount of culture and intellectual life was outstanding, what an enormous loss.

(Hitler also lived there at the time, going to the same class as Wittgenstein for a year or two, neither remembering each other later)

<comment><USER4> There's also a good recent book by Karl Sigmund called "Exact Thinking in Demented Times" which is about the Logical Positivists in Vienna during this period (and the later interwar period) which included Wittgenstein.

<comment><USER3> With a preface by Douglas R Hofstadter, nice! I'll get it, thank you :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love the last line of this recollection: "But I simply could not find him. Whether he regretted having become so deeply engaged, or had discovered that, after all, I was just another Philistine, I do not know. At any rate, I never saw him again."

That seems to reinforce the philosopher as enigma, perhaps fitting for the philosopher who thought all philosophical problems had been solved with the publication of Tractatus.

<comment><USER6> >philosopher who thought all philosophical problems had been solved with the publication of Tractatus.

people repeat this all of the time but it's not true. he wrote Philosophical Investigations in 53 approximately 32 years after tractatus.

<comment><USER7> Maybe he changed his mind.

<comment><USER8> Yes he eventually decided the tractatus had some oroblems

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The anecdote of Wittgenstein brandishing a fireplace poker at Karl Popper at a meeting of the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club is quite well known—but that incident happened after World War II was over. So if Hayek's recollection here is accurate, he apparently made something of a habit of it.

</comment><comment><USER10> Thanks for posting, I know both of these fellows have significant followings on this site.

It's a shame they never talked politics, that probably would have made for some very intriguing material

<comment><USER11> And also very difficult to comprehend. Concretics of politics had been much different back then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> problems

</comment><comment><USER12> _> Every convention was dissected and every conventional form exposed as fraud._

This kind of blanket criticism is counterproductive and harmful. Our conventions 'know' more than we do and should be criticised only where they themselves seem to be causing harm.

<comment><USER13> That's just, like, your opinion, man.

But it is a deeply distracting activity. Not finding something worthy of concentrated attention might be a character flaw.

<comment><USER12> No, I explained it, Lebowski! I myself have been involved in circles where this strange form of philosophical posturing or virtue-signalling has reigned. They are short-lived circles. It may or may not have something to do with the total and rapid collapse of intellectual life in Vienna or the suicides mentioned in the article. I don't know. But it is a sign of decay. (OK, that last bit _was_ opinion.)

<comment><USER13> The real problem is that the activity hinges on objectivity, but it is at all points apparent to an observer from any distance that objectivity is overwhelmingly harder to attain than any of the goals of the activity. The goals themselves are tainted.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Gold prices fall below $900 an ounce - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2008/04/01/markets/gold_prices.ap/

<comment><USER2> Why is the dollar going up? I can understand that the Fed's actions are good for Wall Street. Is it going to take a while for the rampant printing of money to catch up?

<comment><USER3> Simple: every other major currency block is also pursuing a highly inflationary policy. For instance, the Chinese central bank prints money to buy US bonds. It does this to keep its own exports strong. This is a terrible way for China to maximize its standard of living. But that's not the goal. The goal of the Chinese government is to maintain strong employment and prevent a second coming of the Taiping rebellion. If that means subsidizing Joe Sixpack's HDTV, then so be it.

<comment><USER4> _Simple: every other major currency block is also pursuing a highly inflationary policy._

Hmm, I don't know, in the Eurozone inflation is high (~3.4%) at the moment, but it doesn't seem to be _policy_ as much as they've been unable to prevent it. Target inflation for the ECB continues to be 2%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sweet. I dunno why this is titled so pessimistically...the dollar is finally rallying.

</comment><comment><USER6> And here I was thinking this was an april fools joke :)

</comment><comment><USER7> Total hacker news!

<comment><USER2> A lot of people here are interested in general business and the markets.

<comment><USER8> Price movements aren't that interesting though, IMO. I might vote for some kind of in-depth analysis type of article, of the kind you might find in The Economist or FT, but this sort of "look, a round number!" thing is boring.

<comment><USER9> And a round number in base 10 at that. Now when gold falls through an interesting binary number feel free to post.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Yahoo lost its way - <AUTHOR> http://origin.mercurynews.com/google/ci_8592114?nclick_check=1?source=sb-reddit

<comment><USER2> "The tech industry's giants - like Microsoft, Intel and Oracle - are famous for ruthlessly dealing with competitors. Not Yahoo."

This is not a universal rule. Google and Apple didn't deal ruthlessly with competitors.

<comment><USER3> i heard second-hand about a theory/hypothesis saying that companies who focus on countering their competition perform poorly compared to those who focus on their market/potential market. it's pretty obvious i think. focusing solely on the competition and the current market restricts the field of view to a tiny subset of possibilities

i imagine it's related to what leads companies into performing feature-by- feature comparisons of their products, as opposed to, say, creating an mp3 player whose design and construction completely ignores every other mp3 player on the market, yet still manages to saturate it</comment></comment>


Features of a successful therapeutic fast of 382 days' duration (1973) - <AUTHOR> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2495396/ <comment><USER2> I recently finished a forty day, forty night water fast and while I wouldn't recommend anyone do it, it was effective. At the end I was down roughly 40lbs/18kg, around five of which came back relatively quickly as my body began retaining water.

I supplemented sodium and magnesium during the fast (which is essential), but otherwise only consumed water. During my first few days of re-feeding, I also supplemented sodium diphosphate to avoid hypophosphatemia - which is really only a problem when slamming carbs after an extended fast, but I wanted to be careful.

The most interesting thing for me was that after the first couple days (I've done shorter duration fasts ranging from one to five days intermittently for a few years), my desire to eat was entirely mental - the physical pangs had gone. After about the tenth day I was simply not hungry, at all.

<comment><USER3> What was the effect on your sleep like? Do you still need your normal 8 hours?

Also could you maintain a normal libido? My wife won't let me do fasts because it impacts our sex life too much. But I wonder if I would break through after a couple days and get things back to normal in that department.

<comment><USER2> Sleep-wise, it took me some time to fall asleep during the first couple days. After which, my mind calmed considerably and I slept normally for the rest of the fast.

Libido-wise, I couldn't tell you. My sex-drive has been abnormally low for my entire life. Your wife's suspicion would seem to make sense. 'The Science of Fasting' \- a movie available on Amazon Prime - goes into some detail about the metabolic changes a body undergoes during the process. It would make sense that reproductive urges would diminish during a time when one's body was focused on conservation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Fasting was a nice tool for me to break my food addiction. I didn't use it specifically to lose weight but to change my mindset around food.

The mindset change for me was basically what I believe most overweight people suffer from: To start eating so much and so often that they forget what 'hunger' really is.

With that change, now knowing for real when I'm hungry and when I just 'want to eat', my weight started to drop naturally, and in 3 years (slow descent, which was good as well for other reasons __) I ended up losing 50 kg, going from a "morbidly obese" BMI to a now healthy "slightly overweight" :-)

 __Losing weight slowly meant 2 good things to me:

1- the mind changed, so now I'm simply unable to get back to that weight, I can't eat so much, all my portion sizes were slashed and I can do that while eating normally - no fad diets or crazy restrictions. yes I eat pizza with a coke sometimes, I just don't eat a whole pizza anymore :) That level of control and balance was what I was striving for, because I think that's durable. I knew I could lose weight by being angry and brute forcing it for 6 months, but I don't believe I'd be able to keep the weight down without a proper mindset break.

2- losing weight slowly also meant I don't have heaps of loose skin, I didn't need plastic surgery or anything and besides still being a bit chubby, I can take my shirt off just fine without getting strange looks :-) I know people that lost the same 50 kg in 6 months through insane diets and overexerting themselves at the gym and their skin just couldn't shrink as fast as they lost weight, they have these folds which usually give away you 'lost too much weight'. I'm proud I don't have these features!

TL;DR: Change your mindset around food, your body will follow. Don't bruteforce it when you're angry, you're just gonna have a temporary weight loss like you probably have and tried countless times if you come from a fat background/upbringing. o/

</comment><comment><USER5> I did fast for 5 days once. Also did 2 and 3 days. The most surprising thing is that you get back the sense of smell.

It's very curious but fasting improves your smell a lot and I am not the only one to observe this phenomenon.

Maybe it's an old biological mechanism to make it easier to find food? In any case it's pretty impressive.

<comment><USER6> I've observed this too

Seems possible it is inflammation related

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why is this a bad idea, supposing you are fat enough to do it?

<comment><USER8> You can't live off of just fat.

Also, you are a collection of organisms that work together to keep "you" alive. Punishing your gut bacteria/etc just because you can is not healthy.

<comment><USER9> > You can't live off of just fat.

He had electrolyte maintenance and periodic monitoring. Fasting is a remarkable component of the cure for all sorts of things.

> Punishing your gut bacteria/etc just because you can is not healthy.

Your gut bacteria don't care. They exit as poop and the remainders will be selected for survival, not "punishment". How does one "punish" bacteria? What does that even mean?

<comment><USER10> I do not think he was speaking literally, suggesting that the fellow was taking his naughty gut bacteria out and spanking them but rather suggesting that long fasts could disrupt the balance of your gut flora and cause issues when you start a natural diet and start feeding a different ecosystem of bacteria.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can anyone recommend a good book on the subject of fasting? My (admittedly shallow) exploration of the subject tends to lead to pseudoscience/bro science.

<comment><USER2> Dr Jason Fung's "The Complete Guide to Fasting"

You can get most of the same information from his online output, for free. I found this video especially interesting: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIuj-oMN- Fk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIuj-oMN-Fk)

<comment><USER11> Thanks! This looks like a good start.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> the comments in the health posts on hacker news are always a fun read

<comment><USER12> We already had the "simple, just lick some vomit afterward" post, so there's really nowhere else for this thread to go.</comment></comment>


Imagpic makes Internet advertising beautiful - <AUTHOR> http://startupdope.com/imagpicreview/

<comment><USER2> _We are looking for beta testers which is our biggest hurdle right now._

Startups in a nutshell right there. For the majority of technical founders building tech is _easy_ compared to getting people to try it, talk about it, and ultimately buy in to it. If you can't solve that problem then your startup will fail, regardless of the code you can write.</comment>


Automated Program Repair - <AUTHOR> https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2019/12/241055-automated-program-repair/fulltext <comment><USER2> One case where this is already eminently possible, is automatically keeping a codebase's dependencies up-to-date. We already have CI scripts that find out- of-date dependency specifications and notify the developer of them. It's not far from there to having said CI script generate a PR for an update to said dependency, hypothetically apply it, and then actually merge it in if all the tests still pass. (And, rather than just giving up if the absolute-newest dep version doesn't work, such a system could easily be extended to bisect the dep's version history to find the newest version it _could_ update to without breaking the build, perhaps constrained by the dependency's version-constraint string.)

<comment><USER3> You can do this with Dependabot [0], recently acquired by Github.

We use Dependabot, and I love it for our backend repositories, but anything with node dependencies ends up being easier to manually update (because there ends up being so many dependencies that get updated every day, that opening a PR for each one essentially launches a denial of service attack on our CI system)

[0] [https://dependabot.com/](https://dependabot.com/)

<comment><USER4> Their homepage states:

>Live, daily, weekly or monthly updates

>Choose to receive update PRs live, daily, weekly or monthly. We make an exception for security patches, which you'll always receive immediately.

<comment><USER3> Configuring it to open pull requests less frequently doesn't help, since dependencies still get updated one by one, rather than in batches. I've found it easier to just run an interactive yarn upgrade every so often.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> michael-ax e.g. the true state of AI today suffers from our pedestrian ability to actually specify what we're trying to do?

<comment><USER5> Actually specifying what we are trying to do is nearly the whole of the programming.

Describing things correctly and with all necessary detail is genuinely hard, because building a _mental picture_ required for that is hard, even with all the information tools we have.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Tools for building high performance REST API in 2019 - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
I was wondering what tools can I use to build REST API from scratch.
EDIT: I was planning to setup my own server. Have an API gateway and use PostGreSQL.
Thanks, <comment><USER2> Could you be a little more specific about your requirements / constraints? Otherwise, you aren't asking anything here that couldn't be answered with a trivial Google search.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I have edited my question. I'm planning to build something from scratch. Setup my own server, have an API gateway(similar to AWS) and use PostGreSQL. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Lumen (PHP, micro-framework by Laravel): [https://lumen.laravel.com/](https://lumen.laravel.com/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I would use Golang and Postgresql. Possibly add the Chi library for routing and may be GORM for ORM (if you don't want to deal with more direct SQL).

</comment><comment><USER5> Give golang, gorm, and fresh a shot

<comment><USER6> Sorry to ask, but what's fresh?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Bare metal or VM - Loopback.io PaaS - AWS Lambda, Firebase Your own cluster - Kubernetes

<comment><AUTHOR> Bare Metal. I was thinking on setting up my own server.

<comment><USER7> [https://loopback.io/](https://loopback.io/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It might help to mention what skills you already have, or languages you already know?

<comment><AUTHOR> Java, Python and Nodejs. But I'm not fixated to use these. I can learn new tech if its better.</comment></comment>


My New Strategy for Teaching Kids How to Code - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/116160612483689327039/posts/WnwqbgAqewP <comment><USER2> The "Don't Patronize!" lesson is new and interesting to me. Come to think of it, I remember being first introduced to programming with Logo and its "drawing turtle" back in elementary school. While fun, it didn't spur much exploring for me then because I didn't see its possibilities out of that sandbox.

Only when I encountered C, a "real language used by adults!" did I really get interested...

<comment><USER3> Logo is misused. It was never intended to be a tool to teach programming. It was designed as a tool that made the conceptions of Euclidean geometry available to direct experience and interaction -- and I think it succeeded passably well. For instance, if I were asked to calculate the internal angle of a heptagon, the first thing I'd do is reach for my mental turtle.

Still, I think starting kids with C is a bit much. What's wrong with Python?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Based on limited experience with younger kids and [http://scratch.mit.edu/](http://scratch.mit.edu/) the "cuties" (i.e. cat image etc.) are a distraction. I have a hunch the real browser apps idea is not as crazy as it sounds for kids who can type.

</comment><comment><USER5> I haven't read the article yet as Google+ is blocked at work. I'm coaching young kids for First Lego League tournaments this year and witnessed that the Legos Mindstorm robot platform ([http://www.lego.com/en- us/mindstorms](http://www.lego.com/en-us/mindstorms)) makes the kids really excited about programming. Here, one is introduced to programming through very easy graphical environment and can progress to high level language based programming in C, Java etc over time.

</comment><comment><USER6> i'm pretty sure this will work.

Weren't most of us old school nerds programming with 'real tools' when we were 9-13, after all?

Of course, the 'real tools' were a lot simpler then. But the motivation of actually building something real should not be underestimated.

<comment><USER7> I'm not a proper programmer but I started on the BBC micro's BASIC with:

        10 PRINT 'I AM AWESOME '
        20 GOTO 10

What's the current equivalent to that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Jason, this is amazing stuff.

As the father of an 8 year old, I'd love to know how you got the kids to the point where "Create a web page called big-green-circle.html" and "Hint: use the events onmousedown and onmouseup" made any sense to them.

(alternatively, just put your curriculum in an ebook - I'm sold already)

</comment><comment><USER9> I learned basic first, then c++, THEN the web started and seeing how a little markup and some javascript or vbscript (yes, that was in ie back then) could make an interactive experience, my interest in programming and creating things exploded. I vividly recall the first time I made a static site, the first time I ranked in altavista for a term, or other things that people could related to. It connected a freakish hobby (telling a computer what to do) with the real world that other people could consume and relate to.

Building static sites, I completely endorse.

I don't understand why they should use a VPS to do it.

</comment><comment><USER10> 100% agree with #1! I would have written the heading as something like "Be relevant," though-- a little more focused on what you were saying about using real tools.

I remember thinking this while watching a TED talk by a guy who created one of the programming-for-kids websites. Like, cute game and all... and I suppose it ingrains concepts like variables and "for" loops and whatnot, but how intimidated will these kids be when they see real code files in an IDE? That's the real barrier to learning to code, I think-- especially for little girls.

<comment><USER11> My 10 year old daughter, who expressed an in interest in coding is currently churning her way through Codacademy and really enjoying it. As I am.

<comment><USER10> Awesome!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I taught Kindergartners to code using "Project Europa" it was truly Object oriented, didn't require them to learn syntax, and they loved making Robots do things. TC Lego Logo is a good choice as well.

The problem with most devs trying to teach kids is they don't know how to make it approachable, and to have draw. "I can make the robot dance" is both. "I can make a web page pretty" doesn't appeal to every kid, and the amount you have to do to see something do something is a lot.

</comment><comment><USER13> Jason, if you're reading this: bravo. Finally finally _finally_ an article about teaching by someone that is actually doing it and seeing it through. Your words ring true because you have such extensive first hand knowledge. I used to teach, and the amount of general misconception about the craft is very frustrating.

Embarrassingly: how do you create a color changing circle on the screen? A div with border radius?

Anyway, big fan of your podcast also.

<comment><USER14> Not the author, obviously...

You mean the photo? It's an img with a border radius and a shadow.

<comment><USER13> No, I was referring to one of the challenges he presents to his students. There's a link in the post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I like these types of things and for someone who picked up an interest in coding while in college. I wish I had resources like this when I was a kid.

I wish the programming community in general was more friendly to newcomers. I see people tell others that only CS people should be doing this don't even try a lot.

</comment><comment><USER16> I started teaching kids Ruby on Rails with Nitrous IO virtual web environment and it's pretty good. [https://www.nitrous.io/join/ByKc2ypawx0](https://www.nitrous.io/join/ByKc2ypawx0)

</comment><comment><USER17> Maybe you could check out teen2geek.com when its released? It's mainly for students like yours, so that could be helpful to them.

</comment><comment><USER18> This deserves a mention of the "Scheme Story" [1] linked in PG's essay "Beating the Averages" [2]. Conceptually similar to "don't patronize".

However:

 _> Unsurprisingly, I've found that gamification works._

I suppose it does for plenty of people, but personally I'm not a fan. Saying "don't patronize" and then adding badges, points, and the like as enticements triggers some non-trivial amount of cognitive dissonance in me. Then again, I'm an adult, maybe it provides a structure children need and I've long since lost touch with that.

But a deeper problem with it is that to gamify something you have to measure it exactly, you get more of what you measure, and it's all too easy to measure the wrong things (or even to measure the right ones but still have undesirable untintended consequences).

It strikes too much of teaching to the test, which isn't the best way of cultivating creativity and innovation in students. Students will optimize for that gamification system, instead of optimizing for depth of understanding and creativity and, perhaps, self-efficacy in real world unstructured situations.

Which also begs the question, when teaching young kids, should we be focusing on drilling them in a body of knowledge, or first developing a hacker mentality - curiosity, resourcefulness, and determination to figure this thing out and make it do what you want?

In that light, I find the recent Wired article on the "radical new teaching method" [3] of just giving kids computers and seeing what they do with it much more interesting.

It's well documented that children pick up foreign languages much quicker than adults by mere exposure, might it be the same for computer languages?

How about try giving the class a bunch of Chromebooks w/ a terminal app and SSH, and their own AWS t1.micro, and see if they can figure out how to set up a website, using whatever means they're able to (even Amazon's excellent documentation).

Get a static site up, then build on it from there - HMTL -> CSS -> JS -> backend whatever.

Web development is not exactly hardcore programming, but few things are as exciting and captivating as seeing your own website on the Internet for the first time, and the combination of that plus the relative ease of figuring it out would be perfect for 9-13yr olds, I think.

[1]: [http://www.trollope.org/scheme.html](http://www.trollope.org/scheme.html)

[2]: [http://paulgraham.com/avg.html](http://paulgraham.com/avg.html)

[3]: [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6553155](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6553155)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a valid sentiment / concern that was also raised in the comments section of the Google+ post. Here's a mildly edited version of my response.

...

When you don't formalize the challenges, the kids just kind of meander, don't get much accomplished and things start to devolve into chaos. I know there's been a bunch in the press lately about how if you just poke a hole in a wall and stick a computer in it the kids will teach themselves differential equations or something and then of course teach it to a bunch of the other kids (believe me, I'd love it if it were that easy), but that's not been our experience at all. Not remotely. We've tried that a number of times in a number of different ways (because you know - it's easy) and when you're feeling burned out from work or didn't have time to write up a bunch of challenges, it's something you can rationalize trying, but we've NEVER seen that work. Occasionally, one of the kids will look something up on the web or figure something out on their own and tell the other kids about it, but that rarely gets them very far.

...

Just to add to this a bit in the form of a slightly different technology. I bought a few Mindstorm kits last year for the class, wrote up a bunch of easy to read documentation and examples and basically told them to go at it, but even with that and the occasional soft intervention, not a whole lot happened in terms of learning. And we tried this a number of times throughout the year. Sure, they learned a few basic concepts, but the efficiency was extremely low, and nothing much was learned that was transferable. This is also pretty much the same story I heard from every well-meaning, thoughtful and supportive parent who bought their "gifted" kid a Mindstorm kit. They basically played with it a few times, mostly with the legos and then gave up and left it in the corner.

...

In regards to the concern about teaching to the test, I make up new challenges every week based on how the kids are progressing, what they're struggling with, what they're excited about, what the next logical learning step might be, etc., so it's not like there's something static that they can optimize against or cynically "game" without actually learning how to code.

Also, while we're very focused on whether they're having fun, exploring and being creative, at this stage the primary goal is to give them enough fundamental skills to be able to do ANYTHING interesting. I mean it takes a lot of work to get them even to that point, and we're not there yet. And the thing is that we're competing against very attractive distractions like Mindcraft and YouTube, as well as all the homework they have to do and the other activities they're involved in, so it's not like being relentless task masters would even fly with them. They'd simply quit.

To sum it up, what we're attempting to do is extremely hard. We're not idiots. And we're really trying. I've probably read just about every related article that's popped up on HN over the past two years, plus 100 others on learning theory and creativity, but a lot of these articles are just people spouting off who've never really tried it in the real world for any length of time or with kids this young, and I can tell you that a lot of it just doesn't work, or not to the degree that you may have been lead to believe. Look, I can't speak for what works for a every group of kids in every context, but what we're doing seems to be working, the kids are having a blast, and if we keep up this pace I think the kids might actually be able to do some real stuff within the next few months, which, in my opinion, would really be something.

<comment><USER18> Great answer, thanks, glad to hear you've tested the alternatives and it's just that I've been away from the child learning picture too long.

Out of curiosity, in your research, did you ever come across any material on how to teach symbolic logic (be it math, CS, music, or linguistics) specifically to children not naturally talented in it? This is a problem I've become interested in recently, but haven't dug into the research yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Honestly, I can't remember if I have, but it would be interesting to read something about it. I wonder if it's kind of the same problem as trying to teach concepts to kids that are just at the limit of their ability to comprehend even if they are naturally gifted. It's tough, man. My experience of trying to explain functions, arrays, loops and conditionals to young kids is tricky, but I think you just have to apply the same techniques as you would teaching math and eventually you'll figure out some techniques that work. You can try breaking it down into the smallest of steps and go very slowly with lots of practice. Sometimes analogies help, but sometimes not. Sometimes, you can just show them a bunch of simple examples which they'll be able to pattern match against until they can absorb it, but sometimes not. More than anything, I think you just have to be patient and experiment.

As an example, my daughter Izzy, who's 7 and in second grade, is really struggling with her math and it's pretty frustrating frankly. But my wife has been trying lots of stuff with her like watching Khan Academy videos, doing practice problems on www.ixl.com, working through Singapore and JUMP math workbooks, working with physical objects as examples - counting change, poker chips, or whatever.

The bottom line is that every kid is a little different and what works for some may not work for others, unfortunately. ;)

Edit: In regards to how to teach symbolic logic to children who may not be naturally talented, you might want to check out JUMP Math: [http://jumpmath.org](http://jumpmath.org). They seem to be doing some innovative things. Here's an interview with the founder: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3YWnbxOxMQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3YWnbxOxMQ).

<comment><USER18> Thanks for the info, great interview and site, good start to what I was looking for, much appreciated!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Phusion Passenger 4.0 supports JRuby, Rubinius - <AUTHOR> http://blog.phusion.nl/2012/10/30/phusion-passenger-4-0-supports-jruby-rubinius/

<comment><USER2> We are in the process of switching a project from Torquebox to Passenger. We spent a lot of time having to fix issues here and there, tweak our chef recipes, and, on top of it, the startup time of JRuby was painful. I'm a _huge_ fan of JRuby and Torquebox, and I hope they do really well. We're a startup, so we need the devops effort to be minimal and the development time to be extremely speedy. I hope we're able to migrate over to JRuby one day in the future after we release.

<comment><USER2> There are a few reasons we're making the switch, and I'll try and jot down a bunch of them here. I'll also duplicate this information and let the JRuby guys know as well. A little background, I've used JRuby on a few projects, have contributed to the project, some gems, have attended some JRuby conferences, etc. I'm a huge fan of JRuby and its community. That said, here are some reasons we're making the switch:

\- Start up time. It starts to sting after a while when frequently firing up console and compiling assets.

\- Gems compatibility. For the most part, this is a non-issue, but we had to do some JRuby related patches to some gems (hstore support for postgres, and some others that I can't think of off the top of my head).

\- Torquebox. It's a solid project, but we had a bunch of small issues that we can into that made it a bit painful. Weird terminal buffering on console (same thing for ruby-debug), requests dropping on restarts, and some other issues. The baked in backgrounding and the stomplet support is really nice, but we decided to sacrifice these things for something that we understand a lot better (we have a lot more experience with the ruby servers than the JBoss and other java application servers).

A lot of it boils down to us not having the time to learn and fix the issues we were running into w/ the JRuby deployment. We need to focus on building our application, so we don't have the luxury of learning a new deployment ecosystem. That said, we are using AngularJS, so there is "one" thing new that we're all learning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Really glad to hear this, but IMO, one of the greatest advantages of going JRuby is gaining access to the "Java way". TorqueBox, in particular, is interesting because it includes many of the ad hoc add-ons that Ruby devs source from various locations. There are environments where you really want a single-source stack, rather than pulling from multiple sources.

<comment><USER4> In principle I agree with what you're saying but Torquebox has been something I've had to constantly work on whereas Passenger has always been, more or less, deploy and forget.

I've been using Torquebox since version 2.0.1 (not that long really) but I've never really had a completely stable server. Deployment has always been somewhat of a hassle and recently the HA cache has been so broken that I have not been able to use torquebox in a cluster.

In the end, I'm just happy to have another option. The more the merrier.

<comment><USER3> Interesting, but not all that surprising. People are often perplexed by the fact that we continue to stick with Passenger, as opposed to jumping on the bandwagon with the latest and greatest. Passenger is the one piece of my infrastructure that I never have to touch. It also comes with a great toolchain for instrumenting (status and memory usage tools). I've been tempted by TorqueBox in the past, but never made the jump to actually build an app with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Tomcat deployment is also pretty easy, can package a war file and then there are even context parameters if you want to use the same war for multiple instances. That being said this is a nice option which is already integrated with apache or nginx so don't have to setup a proxy, and this will handle static assets automatically if you are not using a CDN.

<comment><USER6> Yep. Coming from a different background, Phusion Passenger is not as J2EE-ish as the other Java app servers. We do things a bit differently, for example:

\- We don't run multiple apps inside the same JVM. We strictly run each app in its own JVM, no exceptions. As I've understood, running multiple apps in the same JVM can cause garbage to leave behind when you try to uninstall an app. And the JVM does not always perform optimally when the heap is large.

\- We integrate directly into Apache and Nginx, so no need to setup AJP reverse proxies. I don't think Nginx has an AJP connector.

\- Phusion Passenger is also a great option for people who want to take advantage of JRuby (whether it's for the speed, or the threading implementation, or whatever) but aren't intimately familiar with the J2EE stack.

\- Our support for multiple Ruby versions (and even multiple languages) allows you to easily mix and match things. No need to commit 100% to Java, or MRI, or any particular implementation/version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not sure I agree with their Phusion Passenger vs J2EE. I use torquebox and deploying is just as easy, if not easier. You can instantly deploy an application by executing "torquebox deploy /path/to/your/ruby/app/" or by placing a 2 line .yml file in the JBoss AS deployments folder. Torquebox also comes with Capistrano recipes you can use for automating deployments.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is also a great news for Rubinius, it will probably boost Rubinius adoption and I'm eager to observe how it behaves compared to MRI.</comment>


The Magic Room: Smart Playroom for Children with Autism, ADHD, and Down Syndrome - <AUTHOR> https://publications.computer.org/pervasive-computing/2018/04/24/magic-room-smart-space-autism-adhd-ndd/ <comment><USER2> Fifty BILLION people worldwide who suffer from neurodevelopmental disorders?

BILLION?</comment>


What are some programming languages that no longer use major design patterns? - <AUTHOR> To quote Paul Graham: "In the OO world you hear a good deal about "patterns". I wonder if these patterns are not sometimes evidence of case (c), the human compiler, at work. When I see patterns in my programs, I consider it a sign of trouble. The shape of a program should reflect only the problem it needs to solve. Any other regularity in the code is a sign, to me at least, that I'm using abstractions that aren't powerful enough-- often that I'm generating by hand the expansions of some macro that I need to write."<p>This was written 17 years ago. Since then, how many languages have cropped up that don't need to utilize most design patterns?<p>[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html <comment><USER2> Common Lisp.</comment>


Notionink's Adam (Android tablet) - Impressive demo - <AUTHOR> http://notionink.wordpress.com/2010/12/24/break-from-eden-ui-the-hardware/

<comment><USER2> "Adam looks more male and industrial than other softer tablets out there"

Is that really a "key hardware feature"? Why would you use such an overtly sexist and insulting statement to define your product?

<comment><USER3> I suppose they're targeting the non-sissy segment of the consumer ;)</comment></comment>


Learning from Data: Caltech's Machine Learning MOOC - <AUTHOR> http://work.caltech.edu/telecourse

<comment><AUTHOR> According to an e-mail sent to alumni like myself, this will be the last session offered.

>Caltech's Machine Learning MOOC is coming to an end this spring, with the final session starting on April 2. There will be no future sessions. The course has attracted more than 200,000 participants since its launch last year, and has gained wide acclaim. This is the last chance for anyone who wishes to take the course (<http://work.caltech.edu/telecourse>).

My guess is is that they will switch to another platform (coursera ?), but I might be wrong.

I have personally taken more than a dozen MOOCs by now and I can say that this is hands down the best that I've taken so far. The content will feel more mathematical than Andrew Ng's ML class but Professor Abu-Mustafa's teaching style makes anything crystal clear. I encourage everyone interested in the subject to take the course (even if you took coursera's ML class before): you will learn a lot.</comment>


CryoPID - A Process Freezer for Linux - <AUTHOR> http://cryopid.berlios.de/ <comment><AUTHOR> The way I've used this is saving my python repl process. Sometimes when I'm just hacking stuff out I will define things in the repl without writing out to a file. But then if you kill your process or it dies or you move to another server you lose anything that you defined. With this I can save my repl state and restart it later, move it to another box, and make pancakes.

</comment><comment><USER2> It used to be common practice to coredump a Perl script and edit it in debug so that you could skip the initialiastion phase of a frequently run script. This was most commonly performed on CGI scripts. CryoPID would make it trivial to do this task in any language via the script itself.</comment>


In an Ancient Burial Place, 3 Centuries of One Woman's Descendants - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/science/chaco-canyon-new-mexico-maternal.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> > between 800 and 1130 A.D.

That should be 'between A.D. 800 and 1130.' It's pretty sad when even the New York Times gets such a simple thing wrong.

<comment><USER3> Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN.

I'm pretty sure the NYT have punctilious policies down to the nth degree about this stuff, but even if they don't it doesn't matter. Comments here should focus on the substance of an article, not one-up a newspaper's punctuation.

<comment><USER2> Obviously I thought it _was_ substantive (I still do), as another example of the traditional media getting sloppier & sloppier as its margins have eroded due to Internet competition (which, to be fair, started out sloppier and isn't necessarily getting better). I think it's relevant, because we're at a point where the profession of journalism is severely resource-starved.

No, it's not relevant to the topic of a pueblo burial, any more than a Bloomberg article's broken JavaScript or autoplaying video is relevant to the article's topic, but I contend that it's relevant to HN, and I had hoped it might spark some discussion on how to improve online journalism (unfortunately all it sparked was some folks defending the error, but that's life).

<comment><USER4> How do you think language, spelling, and punctuation evolve over time?</comment></comment></comment></comment>