Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day - <AUTHOR> http://www.righto.com/2014/09/mining-bitcoin-with-pencil-and-paper.html <comment><USER2> I'm probably going to do one step wrongly and get laughed at, but here goes:

7 000 000 000 humans * 0.67 hashes per day = 4 690 000 000 hashes per day (or 54282.4074074 per second)

54282H/s would give us a daily profit of: 0.00078760 BTC ($0.30)

So when the evil space aliens conquers the human race, they can put us to good use to generate 30 cents worth of Bitcoins for them every day (not counting human electricity cost aka food).

<comment><USER3> With the reduced output the difficulty would lower, and we would generate whatever the demand would be.

<comment><USER2> You are assuming that the evil aliens would stop our machines from earning them Bitcoins? I was obviously operating on the assumption that these 30 cents would be the little extra they milk out of the useless human population after they have annexed our infrastructure and technology.

<comment><USER4> The latency would be way to high for any of those hashes to be added to the network.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reminds me of Xiaoyun Wang's discovery of MD5 (and other hash functions') collisions, which was allegedly done mostly manually:

[http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/7-1-11/50336.html](http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/7-1-11/50336.html)

Given that the output conditions for a Bitcoin hash are essentially a limited form of preimage attack, I wonder if this "human uses properties of hash function to reduce the problem space, lets the machine bruteforce the rest" method could have any advantage. Machines are great at doing operations quickly, but human brains tend to be far better at noticing patterns and using ingenuity.

<comment><USER6> This method is how most (if not all) cryptanalytical attacks work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a big fan of Ken Shirriff's blog. If you're interested in learning more about bitcoin I would also recommend reading his post titled "Bitcoins the hard way: Using the raw Bitcoin protocol".

<comment><USER8> > "Bitcoins the hard way: Using the raw Bitcoin protocol"

You mean:

[http://www.righto.com/2014/02/bitcoins-hard-way-using-raw- bi...](http://www.righto.com/2014/02/bitcoins-hard-way-using-raw-bitcoin.html)

Also this one:

[http://www.righto.com/2014/09/mining-bitcoin-with-pencil- and...](http://www.righto.com/2014/09/mining-bitcoin-with-pencil-and- paper.html)

<comment><USER9> >Also this one:

Didn't you just link to the main target of this post?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I assume there are mathematician farms where they are no longer born but grown for the purpose of finding any possible ways to cut steps from hashing.

Do the chips still run this plain vanilla sha256 algo, or have they found some steps that can be skipped? Things like not calculating the final steps if you notice that there won't be enough zeroes.

<comment><USER11> I do pay a lot of attention to these things, and to the best of my knowledge, nobody has considered something like this. I'm not sure it would be possible, but it would make for some interesting hardware level optimizations. There's always a chance that some company has figured something out but is keeping it secret to maintain a margin over their competitors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I once calculated the Mandelbrot set on graph paper. This article makes me feel _slightly_ less dorky. :)

<comment><USER13> Super cool! Did you know about the Monk who did that hundreds of years ago? Except it was a hoax.

<comment><USER12> I didn't know about that, neat! In fact I'm rather proud to say I _couldn 't_ have known about it at the time, because it was... hmm... I'm gonna say 1993, give or take a year.

My version had considerably lower resolution, though, since I used quarter- inch grid paper at 8.5x11", so it was 0.125 units per square. :)

Meanwhile, look what I just found while verifying my memory that the core set fits in y = +/\- 2.0:

[http://www.wikihow.com/Plot-the-Mandelbrot-Set-By- Hand](http://www.wikihow.com/Plot-the-Mandelbrot-Set-By-Hand)

<comment><USER14> It's too bad they do an arithmetic version. If you do it by hand, going the geometric route is much more fun.

You can interpret the squaring and adding as geometric operation to be done with ruler and compass. If I'm not too lazy, I might write a blogpost about how to do it.

<comment><USER15> I'd appreciate such a blog post.

I've used the geometric route for drawing Julia sets, but I don't know how you would do that for the Mandelbrot set, what with a different constant being added for each point and all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hmm... I kind of want to figure out a way to make CAPTCHA-coin work now. Cryptocurrency mining for the people!

I just can't think of a good way to generate CAPTCHAs (or something similar) from a block in a fashion that would give human beings a significant edge over computers.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is really interesting! I'm tempted to borrow this and use it as a lecture for my intro CS students.

<comment><USER5> I agree; it's a great demonstration that machines, despite being many orders of magnitude faster, are capable of only the same types of very simple operations that humans can do.

That is one idea intro CS students certainly should get used to, as I've found that manually executing algorithms is good for debugging and learning too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "The SHA-256 algorithm is surprisingly simple, easy enough to do by hand"

made my day !

</comment><comment><USER19> I once coded a Turing machine program that multiplied two numbers. It was almost as remarkable as OP's exercise in its sheer uselessness :)

<comment><USER20> Everyone did it! This is a standard assignment project in CS 101.

<comment><USER19> In my uni it was for an extra credit :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Fantastic project! It reminds me huge nanograms ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonogram](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonogram)) I used to solve 20 years ago ;)

</comment><comment><USER22> This makes me want to reread "Souls in the Great Machine" again

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0312872569/](http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0312872569/)

</comment><comment><USER23> To keep the theme wouldn't you have to submit them by snail mail?

</comment><comment><USER24> This is the first thing I did when trying to hack the blockchain.

Working out any algorithm by hand first (even though you might not complete all the steps) was how we approached learning in college.

</comment><comment><USER25> Nerds :-)

We tried to draw Mandelbrot set 'manually' at university. It included some alcohol so napkin with results got lost.

</comment><comment><USER26> Yesterday I encrypted a password I couldn't afford to lost by hand with a one- time pad on paper. It took a long time to XOR all the letters - I probably should have used a WWII-era style alphabet mod 25 or something , but I needed symbols, and ended up just doing hex-ascii.

<comment><USER27> Did you double-check your result using a different method, or at least after some hours (to prevent you from replaying an erroneous calculation)? A calculation error could be disastrous.

<comment><USER26> Of course. I blind-inverted each step without looking at the result a couple times to be sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> A fun future alt-coin gimmick could be to arrange for the first N blocks to be pre-mined by pencil & paper – by invited teams, inside a controlled venue, who have to show their work.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is beautiful and quintessentially quixotic.

<comment><USER30> This kind of demonstration is not completely useless, it can be used as part of an argument against software patents.

(We did RSA by hand at my university, and RSA is an obviously mathematical algorithm; to this day, I still don't understand how RSA could be patented in the USA.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I once was an intern in a startup where the founder one day decided we all shall stop using computers one day a week. I could tell a dozen funny stories that arose from it.

You know, it where the golden 90s. Startups did all kind of crazy stuff. Paint their walls pink and what not. We had the wildest parties. The CEO often brought in a bunch of prostitutes and hired well known DJs.

The days of the week with the "no computer" rule slowed down things unbelievably. And has been abandoned after the founder has been kicked out of his own company. To my surprise, it did not kill the company. The company strives on to this day.

<comment><USER32> _prostitutes_? I could actually believe what you said until that point. Making a day computer-free is something a crazy startup CEO would do (I could actually see myself doing it but once a month maybe, definitely not once a week).

<comment><USER33> Google has on-site masseuses. They also have dedicated massage rooms with no windows. (I've seen one.)

I hope that I'm wrong, but I'm suspicious about what happens in there.

<comment><USER34> A fairly normal spa massage is done unclothed with a towel covering (the client disproves and covers up while the masseur or masseuse out of the room.)

So, while a massage room might have windows, if it does they almost certainly would be covered completely when in use. So no windows isn't odd for a massage room.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Artisanal bitcoins!

They're 67 quadrillion times more expensive, but they're all natural and locally-sourced.

<comment><USER11> Dropping a comment here because of all the down votes. I agree with them. I come to HN for interesting and thought provoking articles, or for interesting news. Pen-and-paper mining is awesome and is totally in the spirit of HN, but single word jokes about "organic" and "fair trade" Bitcoins are clever, but HN is just the wrong place for that. I'd much rather read comments about attempts of other types of cryptography on paper, or perhaps some history about paper based crypto, or anything that adds factual or newsworthy value to the article. Jokes are neiter factual or newsworthy, and I feel are out of place here on HN.

Thanks for understanding.

<comment><USER36> Your complaint adds neither factual nor newsworthy value to the discussion. Arguably, it's even less relevant to the subject than the joke comments you're discussing.

The productive thing would have been to simply ignore them and move on, if you had nothing relevant to add.

<comment><USER37> Your complaint about the complaint adds neither... ya, it's hypocritical. Posts are not out of bounds simply because they are meta.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I've been dreaming of this art project where I put up tables in the Mission and hire a bunch of Task Rabbits to manually mine Bitcoins while they eat food delivered by ZeroCater

<comment><USER39> 10/10 would fund. Replace ZeroCater with Caviar and you have a deal.

<comment><USER40> I would seriously help fund this on kickstarter. Please someone make this happen. It's the highest form of satire and art.

The "funded by Kickstarter" adds another dimension to this artistic masterpiece.</comment></comment></comment>


The Fall of Academics at Harvard - <AUTHOR> http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/2/28/fall-of-harvard-academics/ <comment><USER2> I am a Princeton graduate ('12) that is currently a graduate student at Harvard.

I have a few thoughts on this, but first I wanted to share an experience I had during a mandatory course I am in on "TA'ing at Harvard". The professor of one of the largest undergrad classes discussed with us how it is very, very clear that the students' #1 priorities at Harvard are _not_ academics, but rather their extracurriculars. Despite this, they will still curve the class up so that a very large percentage of students get A's (I don't have a number here, but I was told that in his class, the median grade on an exam is curved to a B+, and that is very harsh by Harvard's standards). At the very least, I think that this small tidbit falls inline with "The Fall of Academics at Harvard".

Personally, I think one thing that has to change is this perception that many overachieving highschoolers bring with them as they become undergradautes at these universities: that is, that college is a stepping stone to a prestigious, well-paying job. Furthermore, these historically high-achieving students aren't going easily let go of their stellar grade track record. Together, I think it's then easy to miss part of the point of the undergraduate experience all together, and there's an incentive to cheat.

Lastly, I wanted to include that I think this is also largely a cultural issue. I agree with others in this thread that there is this mentality of just feeding into these "prestigious" jobs (Finance, Consulting, etc.), and I think that greatly contributes towards the degradation of the school's ability to foster an academic environment.

</comment><comment><USER3> Disclosure: I graduated from Princeton in 2007

This article (which I skimmed) seems to use Princeton as a counterpoint to Harvard's supposed cheating culture and lax attitude towards academics. I have no idea whether students actually treat academics with more respect than their Crimson counterparts "on average".

 _However_ , I can definitely say that the kind of collaboration/copying/cheating that is described for Harvard's Econ10 course happens throughout Princeton. Whomever is being quoted from Princeton, casting it as this supposed utopia of higher learning, is either bubbling PR nonsense or is just completely out of touch with what goes on in the field.

<comment><USER4> I am a current student at Dartmouth, and it's the same here as well. Especially in a class with a curve, a student is at a serious disadvantage if he/she doesn't collaborate, copy, or cheat.

<comment><USER5> Setting a strict curve is probably the laziest way to grade a class. It doesn't tell you anything about how well you did (do you get the material? Can you solve problems on your own? Or are you the 27th "best" person in the class?) Of course, with a curve, a professor doesn't have to actually think over what a passing grade is. Which causes all kinds of negative incentive (such as cheating, or almost worse, anti-collaboration). I'll take a class where 10% of the class get an A because the standards are exceptionally high over a class where a strict 40% will get an A, as one implies I'll get a lot out of it, and the other implies I'll stress needlessly over unimportant trivia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Of course this is the Harvard Crimson writing about Harvard, but the words in the article could be applicable to damn near any institution, at least in the U.S.

> The institution and the community condones, if not promotes, academic > dishonesty, emphasizing prestige over intellectual growth. Academics are no > longer the priority of the students or teachers at Harvard College.

<comment>~~

> This prevalence of academic dishonesty is symptomatic of a pervading > mentality on campus that neglects the classroom.

> Nicolaus Mills '60, a literature professor at Sarah Lawrence College, points > to a weak emphasis on undergraduate teaching as an underlying factor that > enabled the scandal to take place on Harvard's campus.

> ... As professors invest less time in the classroom—a product of pressures > to establish themselves primarily as researchers—so too do teaching fellows > and students.

The above attitude unfortunately has been (and will continue to be) copied by any institution hoping to place itself among prestigious names. My alma mater, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) made a huge shift in recent years (2006-) towards firing much of the "clinical faculty", which was the name reserved for faculty who did not engage in research, and instead merely taught.

Unfortunately for students, faculty who do engage in research often consider the teaching component of their careers as an afterthought (or worse, an annoyance).

<comment>~~

The single most important thing I learned when I was a child tutor is this: Without enthusiasm you've got nothing - zero - to work with in a student. And if they don't have it coming in you've got a non-trivial problem. You can't teach enthusiasm, it's imparted only one way.

Enthusiasm is contagious. It's part of the draw of being in a school in the first place, around so many other bright people who are willing to be there and spend the time learning. Then you get to this:

> "The modal Harvard student takes their courses as seriously as they think > the instructor is taking the course,"

And it's painfully understandable that the experience will be damning for the average student, regardless of institution.

<comment><USER7> Some random anecdotes:

I went to Pomona College, which was a very different place than the one described in the Crimson article. While I'm sure cheating did take place, I was never witness to it, nor was there any cultural expectation that it occurred. Students tended to view cheating as just screwing yourself over in the long run (paying that much money to avoid get an education is a waste of time).

Harvey Mudd College, which was right next door, had an even more aggressive stance on cheating and honorable behavior -- one which was woven into the way pretty much everything was structured over there. Students were endowed with a huge helping of trust and were expected to act responsibly (and the actual student culture seemed to actually reflect this).

Both institutions provide excellent educations. However, PC and HMC are both small and neither of them have graduate students or research faculty. The faculty that are there are very accomplished in their fields, but their focus is on teaching.

I've also been the equivalent of an RA at MIT, where things are obviously a bit different. I don't think they're as bad as at Harvard, but it's clear that for many faculty the priority is not on teaching. Combined with the large size (~200 students) of many intro classes and this can create an environment where students do not feel that their success or failure is either cared about or monitored, which I'm sure makes it easier to cheat. However, MIT's technical focus may help to alleviate this problem since all of your later classes will depend on the stuff you're supposed to be learning now, so you'll be screwed later on even if you cheat. Sadly, I don't have a ton of data here -- all I can say is that out of the population of 40 on my hall there wasn't a culture of cheating. Getting bad grades was a shocking right of passage for many first-years.

Finally, my mother taught at a large research institution for many years. There cheating in the form of copying papers was rampant and the university seemed loathe to actually punish students caught in the act. My mother eventually gave up trying. These problems were worst in the large intro classes -- once things got down to smaller (<30 students) seminars and classes, cheating became both extremely easy to identify and rare.

<comment><USER8> Do you really think nobody was cheating at Pomona & Harvey Mudd? Perhaps those schools follow educational philosophies that deemphasize relative performance like Brown's gradeless system or emphasizing "cooperation" over individual ability. If your performance did not matter then perhaps there would be no incentive to cheat (or study). However these students are still humans and humans are lazy, greedy and proud - thus prone to cheating.

Maybe because they are small and there is no incentive to publicize episodes of cheating and damage their brand no stories have come out yet. Still a quick search finds several articles indicating concerns at these schools. And sister school Claremont McKenna has had several major scandals in recent years.

I wish there were angels who we could trust to always be honest (imagine how well government would run!) but we only have humans. Many are honest much if not all of the time but how can we ever know who or when with any certainty. Sadly this is a curse we cannot escape. These and the other human weaknesses are ultimately responsible for so many of our persistent problems.

[http://blogs.pomona.edu/eng87-2012f/2012/11/12/what-does- pom...](http://blogs.pomona.edu/eng87-2012f/2012/11/12/what-does-pomona-think- of-my-work-i-have-no-idea/)

<http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/23/essays>

[http://www.claremontportside.com/print- edition/april-2011-is...](http://www.claremontportside.com/print- edition/april-2011-issue/plagiarism-in-paradise/)

<comment><USER9> I graduated from HMC last year.

>Do you really think nobody was cheating at Pomona & Harvey Mudd? Perhaps those schools follow educational philosophies that deemphasize relative performance like Brown's gradeless system or emphasizing "cooperation" over individual ability. If your performance did not matter then perhaps there would be no incentive to cheat (or study). However these students are still humans and humans are lazy, greedy and proud - thus prone to cheating.

I can't speak for Pomona, but many HMC classes have timed, closed book take home exams. It would be trivially easy to cheat on these. On homework, collaboration was usually encouraged, with the caveat that problems sets should ultimately be written up individually -- what policy to take was the choice of the professor.

We certainly had grades.

>Maybe because they are small and there is no incentive to publicize episodes of cheating and damage their brand no stories have come out yet. Still a quick search finds several articles indicating concerns at these schools. And sister school Claremont McKenna has had several major scandals in recent years.

I'm appending data collected in a survey last year. The data was shared with students, but not AFAIK published outside. My personal perception is that cheating is uncommon, and I did not know of anybody I knew doing so. I believe very few people I knew would be open to cheating if approached by a friend. I agree that the administration has no incentive to publicize issues, but I do honestly believe that the issues were few.

With all due respect to Claremont McKenna, their culture is very different. I would not extrapolate from them.

...

There was a survey of student and faculty perceptions of cheating on campus. Unfortunately I don't have details of how this was conducted. Presumably it was anonymous.

In response to : "I believe nearly all HMC Students respect the Honor Code"

Students: Agree: 84% Neutral: 8% Disagree: 8%

Faculty: Agree: 88% Neutral: 5% Disagree: 7%

"Most HMC Students adhere to the Honor Code in their academic work.":

Students: Agree: 92% Neutral: 4% Disagree: 4%

Faculty: Agree: 90% Neutral: 10% Disagree: 0%

"Most HMC Students adhere to the Honor Code in matters unrelated to their academic work.":

Students: Agree: 66% Neutral: 22% Disagree: 12%

Faculty: Agree: 53% Neutral: 33% Disagree: 14%

(For this question, I do not know the number of respondents): Faculty: In the past 3 years, have any of the following Honor Code violations occurred in the classes you teach:

Plagiarism: 18 Cheating: 10 Collaboration: 10 Other: 3

Faculty: On average, how frequently have Honor Code violations come to your attention?":

1/yr: 77% 2-3/yr: 23%

Faculty: Do you currently give take home exams in any of your Core classes"? [Core classes are required for all students].

Yes: 32% No: 42% N/A: 26%

Faculty: Do you currently give take home exams in any of your non-Core classes"?

Yes: 86% No: 14%

Students: "Have you ever violated the honor code?"

No: 80% 1x: 15% 2x: 1% >2x: 4%

Students: "Did you self report?

Yes: 17% No: 83%

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I thought that the quality of writing in the article was very poor. As a side note, I also found it funny that many are worried that the "prestige" of Harvard is besmirched, because the original meaning (now obsolete) of _prestige_ was

      An illusion; a conjuring trick; a deception, an imposture.

EDIT: Even the title of the article is unintentionally funny. Because _academics_ may also be the plural of _academic_ (better described as an _academician_ ), the title may be taken literally.

>As professors focus on their research, and students worry about securing career opportunities, both sides become increasingly disinterested in the classroom.

This sentence is atrocious, not only because of the use of "disinterested" for "uninterested" (Bryan Garner classifies this usage as Stage 4 on the language change index, meaning that it is ubiquitous but still not quite accepted [1]), but because the meaning is ambiguous. Are the views of the students about the idea of classroom learning changing, or do the students feel apathetic inside the classrooms of professors who ignore cheating?

Another poorly written sentence:

>The roughly 30-member committee was established in the fall of 2010 and includes about eight student members.

This sentence would be fine in informal speech. In formal writing, especially in a respected newspaper such as the _Crimson_ , it is unacceptable.

Somewhere, John Simon is muttering under his breath.[2]

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Garners-Modern-American-Usage- Garner/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Garners-Modern-American-Usage- Garner/dp/0195382757/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1362270376&sr=8-1&keywords=bryan+garner+modern+american+usage) [2] [http://www.amazon.com/Paradigms-Lost-Reflections-John- Simon/...](http://www.amazon.com/Paradigms-Lost-Reflections-John- Simon/dp/0517540347/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362271756&sr=1-2&keywords=paradigms+lost)

<comment><USER11> "As a side note, I also found it funny that many are worried that the "prestige" of Harvard is besmirched, because the original meaning (now obsolete) of prestige was An illusion; a conjuring trick; a deception, an imposture."

Great point...

Of course prestige _is_ the primary product for sale at such a place of business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Homework is how one prepares for tests. Long form take home assignments should be designed with collaboration in mind.

Students explaining their understanding of a topic to each other is one of the most powerful ways for them to learn. I am fond of the saying that one doesn't truly understand a topic until one has explained it to another.

In class tests should be long, brutal, and test student's ability to come to their own conclusions based on concepts that were covered throughout the class.

<comment><USER13> I fully agree, and I had professors at my school that also believed in this. Educational institutions need to modernize their teaching methods to ensure that students are actually committed to their education and have disincentive to cheat.

The fact is that we live in a world where people almost always work in a connected fashion and you have to expect that the students are going to work together and the course should be designed around this. Team based learning is a fantastic tool for teaching, and by designing assessments properly you can make it practically impossible for cheating to occur, both due to open ended nature of the problems and because your fellow students that you are working with keep you from being dishonest.

I had one course where you worked in a group of about 6, and the assignments were all design problems where you needed to optimize your solutions, which always meant working closely with your teammates to make everything work together. You learn so much more when you have to explain and understand what everyone's MATLAB code does. It was in your best interest to make sure you knew everything inside and out because there was going to be something like that problem on the exam and they were so long that you had to know exactly what you were doing or else you weren't going to finish (but were always short enough to finish). I can without a doubt say this was one of the best courses I took during school, and the course I remember the most about 2.5 years later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's no different at Carnegie Mellon. I spoke to a former SCS dean who revealed that cheating rates in CS courses are as high as 70%, yet most professors turn a blind eye (which as the Crimson article points out, may be attributed to apathy or inability to enforce class policy at a large scale).

The fact that academic dishonesty is so prevalent these days makes me inclined to believe that cheating is symptomatic of the state of higher education (and maybe the way pedagogy is approached in the modern classroom), especially in light of rising tuition and unemployment rates. When a majority of students across institutions resort to compromising their integrity and learning for a letter grade, at which point do we start reassessing education at large?

<comment><USER15> I disagree thoroughly. I've been to both Harvard and CMU, and assisted classes at the latter. CMU SCS undergrads work much harder than Harvard undergrads, and their work is more honest.

Actually, CMU students are perhaps a bit too isolated. This leads to some academic stratification, because the smart kids hang out with one another. There is less support and camaraderie. Lots of promising students struggle at SCS and drop out. The attrition rate, not cheating, is actually the primary academic concern.

Harvard is at the other extreme. The stratification isn't academic, it's social (via finals clubs and such.) Everyone collaborates. There are two common practices I find especially distasteful. Harvard has a very long, class-free study period right before exams. Also, Harvard provides students with Adderall at no cost with essentially no questions asked. A lot of students blow off the assignments then cram with loads of amphetamines. They're smart, so they succeed, but they don't really learn anything.

<comment><USER11> "Harvard provides students with Adderall at no cost with essentially no questions asked."

Can you elaborate on what this means? Can you pretty much just roll into the nurse's office and get some amphetamines?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Academia is broken as a mechanism for education and learning. And MOOCs, despite their advantages, really can't reclaim what has been lost.

Nowadays many--most, I'd suspect--universities aren't really distinguishing themselves as the places for the building of men and women into better people and citizens of the world. Instead, they serve at the lower end as a credentialing mechanism to corporate society that someone has acceptable impulse control and willingness to embrace the system, and at the higher end as a finishing school for the finance and government elite.

Certainly at both ends some people interested in intellectually appreciating the natural and social worlds come out, but that's despite, not because of, its actual current social function. I remember the second lecture in my quantum class the professor literally reading straight out, word-for-word, from the Griffiths textbook and ran out of the classroom as soon as it was scheduled to be over. Which is an extreme example, but certainly the majority of my major classes got their value from the problem sets and textbook they forced us to work through and the people I worked with on them, not through the value-add the professor or university provides.

Why shouldn't people cheat? Our society is fine with it outside the academy (maybe not explicitly, but you can tell by how it values and punishes who do cheat). If universities exist to serve it commercially, might as well inculcate its values while it's at it.

<comment><USER17> "And MOOCs, despite their advantages, really can't reclaim what has been lost."

The contrary, in fact - MOOCs take this kind of situation (inaccessible, out- of-touch professors; overworked, underqualified TAs) and generalize it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Regular 'ol state school grad here:

I observed that cheating, especially in the first year or two was pretty common among certain groups of students. But it was treated especially harshly. Most of the students who were caught cheating were given a scare and a second chance, but by and large the systemic cheaters were kicked out or changed to an easier major by the 3rd year.

By the 4th year, the average class size was around 10% of the average 1st year.

My school was so strongly into fighting cheating, that they invested heavily into licensing cheat detection software when it was available and spending quite a bit of money researching and selling/licensing anti-cheat tools to other schools.

It turns out to be an interesting CS problem that cut across most majors and definitely made an impact on killing off endemic cheating in the school.

Academics were taken _very_ seriously at my school.

</comment><comment><USER18> Is it possible to craft a course that assumed that students would collaborate/copy from each other and the internet while completing any take home assignment (so homework and projects but not in-class tests), allow for it explicitly, and still teach as much as the existing courses would have if students didn't collaborate/copy?

<comment><USER19> Yes, absolutely possible - it's just a lot more work. As simonsarris points out above, this will be the exception rather than the rule in a system where universities and faculty are not measured/rewarded for quality of teaching.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm astonished that commenters are generalizing the issues in this article to U.S. in general. I never encountered anything remotely at this scale when I attended the College of William & Mary ('00). I'd guess that the culture of cheating written about in this article is simply a byproduct of amassing the kind of people who can get into Harvard in the first place: straight A, hyper competitive achievers.

<comment><USER21> Or maybe colleges are diverse and you had a well behaved group of friends.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Plus ça change. Communal work on weekly/monthly assignments was basically ubiquitous when I went to university mumblemumble years ago. (OK, fine; electrical engineering at the University of Waterloo, graduated 1996.)

It didn't really _feel_ like cheating to anyone, including me, who rarely-if- ever participated, fwiw. (Not due to any moral high ground, but because a) I was not particularly social at the time b) "100% of your grade is based on your final exam score" was usually an option, and (relative to other students) my exams were far better than my assignments.)

Was it? Mmm. Probably yes, in the end, but it seems to me that you could make a reasonable prescriptive/descriptive case that it wasn't.

Was it evidence of a serious moral flaw pervasive throughout that generation, or excessive pressure to excel (Waterloo is basically Canada's MIT), or anything like? Hell no. It was just a grotesque but essentially harmless cultural artifact. With twenty years of hindsight, I'd advise against reading too much into it.

</comment><comment><USER23> As a Harvard '04-'05 grad (two numbers meaning I left early) I think The Crimson, as per usual, misses the mark.

It is indeed partly the part of the faculty for not engaging with students (e.g. teaching) enough. But even if some of the faculty had engaged more with us as students when I was there, I might have run for my life even faster than I already did, because some of the faculty just weren't that great. In fact, some were awful. (I've written a not-very-popular book in which this is a major theme.)

Harry Lewis's attempt to protect the students from blame here is admirable, but similarly mistaken. Harvard's admissions office (which used to be run by his wife, I'm not sure if it still is) selects for the best and the brightest, but inevitable in such a selection process is a tendency to pick what William Deresiewicz calls "excellent sheep"--kids who do (or appear to do) what they're told _extremely_ well. When you pair that with an Office of Career Services (OCS) that acts as a funnel to Wall Street--many people in my class ended up destroying the world at Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs--what do you expect to happen? You've got a huge population of smart kids whose end goal is a place in a culture where success at any cost is not just appropriate, it's encouraged.

A large portion of football team cheated on a midterm in Economics 1010a in 2003 (they took advantage of a scheduling conflict with Statistics 104 to get extra time on the exam), but no one ever got in trouble for it. My guess is that half of the people who knew about it wished that they had been so "smart."

The cheating scandal is major, but in a way, I think it's the least of Harvard's problems. They haven't even touched on the Adderall problem, or the kinds of faculty conflicts of interest highlighted in Inside Job, and they've only slightly addressed the draconian, opaque and backwards nature of the Ad Board. Even knowing about some of the important research that goes on there, in my opinion, Harvard's real problem is that its general role of late has been pretty far from a force for good, let alone truth. It's just been a rubber stamp for the broken society we read about in the headlines daily. Correcting that problem requires actual leadership which, since Larry Summers was President, has been sorely lacking.

P.S. If you think the Valley or even YC is disconnected from this dynamic, don't kid yourself. CS50 enrollment is way up because everyone thinks that they'll be the next billionaire like Mark. But CS50 is not why Bill Gates, Mark, Sheryl Sandberg (Summers's former assistant) or Nathan Blecharczyk sit atop billion-dollar companies (see <http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=70>). And with Jim Breyer of Accel now elected to the Harvard Corporation... You get the picture. Cheating has its rewards.

<comment><USER24> Disclaimer: I was a '12 grad, and currently doing a PhD in CS there.

> because some of the faculty just weren't that great

I think this is anecdotal evidence against anecdotal evidence. In my case, a lot of the faculty were that great. A few concrete names that immediately pop to mind would be: Margo Seltzer, Mike Smith, Greg Morrisett, Matt Welsch (now at google), David Malan, Howard Georgi, ...

> admissions office [..] selects [..] "excellent sheep"--kids who do (or > appear to do) what they're told extremely well

Au contraire, my anecdotal evidence is that the admissions office tends to lean a lot on the "liberal arts" side. I come from a background with a strong respect of science and academics, and would often get very surprised to see some people not focus on those areas as much. But then I'd see them play their instrument, direct a play, qualify for the Olympics, etc. Most of those people ended up in consulting or teaching (TFA and the like) actually.

But no, I am not going to argue that a lot of people don't end up on Wall Street. And quite frankly, I don't see anything wrong with that. In the tech sector, we are quite fortunate that a large fraction of funding is provided through VCs. But a lot of other sectors don't have that luxury and need to resort to other sources of liquidity, private equity firms and i-banks. In those areas, it is much harder to define an actual measure of product goodness (in CS, we can always say that app X runs Y% faster or that Z% of the large number of users prefer it), and individual performance is evaluated much more based on _soft skills_. This is the exact skill set that is developed by the non-acacdemic parts of college. As tech people, we might feel cheated in some sense by that (the same way we feel cheated by a good salesman who "doesn't contribute anything"), but as long as there are requirements for capital, I don't see any alternative.

edit: grammar

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The amazing thing to me are the comments. There is little disagreement on the existence of rampant cheating, and more about how and why.

Quotes from the comments:

"Harry Lewis can also be part of the problem. He is, along with Bob Scalise and Tom Stemberg, one of the three biggest cheerleaders on campus in favor of lowering academic standards to produce a championship basketball team."

"Not only are "less than As" at Harvard occasionally seen as a sign that the student isn't smart or isn't working hard, but actual As aren't recognized or appreciated that much because they've been set as the status quo. This means that no matter what the grade, students here can feel the need to keep pushing themselves and striving for that elusive recognition and appreciation."

"Here's my thought on why cheating is so widespread here: I think that the motivation is simple, and is rooted in the fact that before coming here, we were among the very best at our high school. Then, when we got here, most of us still wanted to be among the best, to still get all A's while being a leader in extracurriculars, and so on. However, courses here are probably much harder than what we dealt with in high school."

It was also strange seeing Mankiw under the bus. Like or dislike his politics, he is a prolific blogger which generally suggests being in touch. <http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/>

Again from the comments: "Harry Lewis is correct in stating that students cheat more in classes where they themselves feel "cheated" by the professor. It is baffling and inexcusable that Harvard continues to let Mankiw "teach" Ec 10 which affords him a credential he does not deserve. Talk about lying on your resume."

</comment><comment><USER26> From the article: "The institution and the community condones, if not promotes, academic dishonesty, emphasizing prestige over intellectual growth."

This institution has employed, as professors, various characters including Henry Kissinger and Dave Winer. This assessment is in line with the impression that gives me.

<comment><USER27> Heh, but Winer's one year as a research fellow at the Law School, which is a distinct part of the Harvard "empire", doesn't quite put him in the same league as a young Henry Kissinger.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm really surprised that the people teaching at Harvard don't seem to be putting forth any effort to make assignments that are at least somewhat difficult to cheat on. I'm only a grad student at a Big Ten school but I always try to make my assignments require something that they can't just copy down from someone else even if it is just randomized questions. Obviously this is easier in some disciplines than others but even when I was an undergrad back in the early 90s I took an intro-level Physics course where every student's test was randomly generated from a bank of questions (admittedly it wasn't very good. One test I remember getting the same question 3 times!).

</comment><comment><USER29> Colgate alum here-- cheating was just as bad when I was in school as it seems to be at Harvard now. All you had to do is look in your fraternity's 'library' and how about that? the test hasn't changed in 15 years?

Edit: I'll add that there was an honor code that all students were required to sign, but it seemed that the gist was 'we'll give you a ton of leeway, but if you are dumb enough to get caught, the consequences will be extremely harsh.' That way both sides win: students can share test questions and answers with little risk of being caught, and the school can seem serious about cheating by occasionally expelling the most egregious violators.

</comment><comment><USER30> On the point of Harvard professors being more concerned about research than teaching, Sean Carroll has a blog post from a few years ago that is relevant: The Purpose of Harvard is Not to Educate People ([http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/05/29/...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/05/29/the- purpose-of-harvard-is-not-to-educate-people/)).

To quote: "the purpose of Harvard is not to educate students. If anything, its primary purpose is to produce research and scholarly work."

</comment><comment><USER31> Why do we care about cheating undergrads at Harvard again? I'd care about an article on Harvard undergrads if they were actually doing _something_ I care about! Post about that if you want to.

</comment><comment><USER32> I mean...you go to Harvard for the connections... You go to like a Washu if you're interested in academics.

</comment><comment><USER33> The comments on the Crimson site are insane. These are some jaded people.

</comment><comment><USER34> Cheating is a complex subject to speak of, especially in US. Let me share my experience with some of these cheaters.I would like to point out that I do not admire them nor I take their side, yet I am trying to understand the problem and find some reasoning behind these actions.

Everyone thinks you are stupid or evil if you cheat yet it has a deeper meaning here.We have to ask ourselves, why would someone cheat?Does it matter if it's Harvard or Stanford?No, it doesn't.The reasons are usually the same wherever you go.

The first one I can think of is Lack of Interest.The student simply doesn't give a ____about a certain course, and he knows he will never use it after graduation so he decides to cheat on the exam.Cheating himself?No, because he doesn't like that course at all and he will not use it in the future, so why wasting his time.No benefits, nothing coming out of this course.

An example would be the GE in the first 2 years of college.I believe it's a waste of time and money. That's why other countries don't use it.

The second one is Lack of Enthusiasm. Maybe the student doesn't like the professor or the way he teaches.Maybe he knows more than the professor.Maybe he needs something extra.Who knows...But surely this can lead to cheating as well, although this would definitely impact your future if the course is connected with your job aspirations.

The third one is No Social Life/Seeking Popularity among certain groups.Some students think that by cheating they can get in some fraternities or joining famous campus groups or getting the "girl next door" etc. A shortcut to something which they cannot obtain through other means.You don't see a movie where cheating is not cool, do you?Look at some of the commercials.Nothing negative about cheating.

Forth would be the so called "corporate mindset".They look at some billionaire stories and unethical companies that make a lot of money through schemes and cheating.I mean look at the Wall Street movies.I don't think there is one movie where characters make money by being ethical.So students think that's cool.Heck, they even drop college thinking they can become a SJ or BG.There is no other way...

I think I'll stop here but there are many more.Should we consider all of them stupid?Well, not really.The truth is the world today is not the same as the one 10-20 years ago.And yes, companies don't play fair.How can you encourage someone to be ethical when most of the top 500 companies are on the other side of the spectrum.

How can you survive as a business if most of the competition is cheating in some way?You cannot.

Let's take an example here:

Student A = Cheating/Unethical Student B = Studying/Ethical

A gets a 4.0 GPA by cheating through college.* B gets a 3.5 by playing it fair.

*Assuming Student A is not retarded or anything and he cheats when he needs to, not to the point where he couldn't bring any value to a company after graduating.

Who will get the job at a top company? Probably A because if a 4.0 is a requirement, the recruiter will completely ignore B.Can you blame the recruiter?Not really.It's impossible to ask 1000 people if they cheated or not and so on. Not fair for the hard-working student.

That's just my 2 cents.Sorry for my bad writing.

</comment><comment><USER35> The real story: How much better CS50 is than all of the other offerings.</comment>


Dell response regarding insensitive comments from Mads Christensen - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/117161668189080869053/posts/5Zg5FdFEydi

<comment><USER2> Hey, an actual apology! Too bad it took so long to get through legal, but hey, better late than never.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this the new PR tactic for apology? Post it only on G+ where nobody will see it?</comment>


Shadow banned in Google Play (or the joys of being an indie app developer) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@cercaapp/shadow-banned-in-google-play-or-the-joys-of-being-an-indie-app-developer-14ffbfd223db#.yq9ydpocb <comment><AUTHOR> OP here: if you have any question just shoot.</comment>


Ask HN: What was the developer looking for a $3500 project? - <AUTHOR>

Hey, I saw a thread earlier about someone looking for a 3500 dollar project for this week. Can't find the thread now, does anyone remember who this was? <comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4846962>

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm sure it was an ask post but I can't see it in the last few pages, perhaps it was removed?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Who was the developer* haha</comment>


Core Reporting API: Access AdSense data from the Google Analytics - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/108507234714924381127/posts/bKRnfkpd29L

<comment><USER2> Thanks Gauravmarketer for this News, I think this ll prove as a big befit for marketers.</comment>


Dedicated bitcoin hardware miner based on the "Open Graphics OGD1 dev board"  - <AUTHOR>

These guys http://asicminer.net/?p=32 seems serious about disrupting the bitcoin market and make a profit out of it. I've heard in the past about the OGD1 device, does this seem real ? i'm interested in investing a respectable sum of money on their products. <comment><USER2> OGD isn't a good idea for graphics and it isn't a good idea for Bitcoin mining either; they even admit that it's too expensive. I haven't seen anything that looks credible on that site.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> <http://asicminer.net/?p=32></comment>


Amazon no longer puts order information in email confirmations due to scraping - <AUTHOR> https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/06/01/product-info-in-amazon-emails <comment><USER2> The reason is actually because orders are not a static resource, they change as new information becomes available.

An email saying "Your order is confirmed, here's what it contains" is very resolute. What if it gets cancelled? A line item get cancelled? One thing ships separately?

Source: run a B2B commerce platform, worked at Shopify (same argument).

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess no. They don't even put order information in emails when items are in the delivery vehicle and determined to be delivered that day. You just see the price information, not the items. That feels indeed a bit inconvenient for me particularly when I ordered a couple of things and this order is split up in different deliveries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Seems wise not to give that information to competitors (e.g., many people have @gmail.com addresses).

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder if that is really such a big thing ...? Is Google (the Ad and online service company) really a competitor of Amazon (the online retailer)? In what way does Google make use of trends in online shopping? And furthermore: how many companies out there are harvesting emails, and what technology are they using? Most emails are sent using e2e encryption/Tls nowadays. Gruber mentions Edison Mail in the article ... are there more? And do webmail/freemail services sell these data to big data companies?

In that light, I think I like that move by Amazon. It protects their data and my data as well. Win-win.</comment></comment>


Neo4j NoSQL Graph Database raise further $10m in funding - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/20/nosql-database-company-neo-technology-raises-10-6-million/

<comment><USER2> For more background info on what's holding back NOSQL in the enterprise and why we raised $10M+, feel free to check out this post:

[http://blogs.neotechnology.com/emil/2011/09/nosql-the-web- an...](http://blogs.neotechnology.com/emil/2011/09/nosql-the-web-and-the- enterprise.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been using neo4j for a while now for a new project and i'm very impressed so far - especially if you have typical graph problems to solve (social networks?). I especially like the fact that it's ACID compliant and has an embedded lucene search to solve non-traversal type queries. Good for them that they raised some cash to further develop their product.

Their beta module on Heroku is another win win for me :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Is anybody using this DBMS for anything?

<comment><USER5> One of my customers is using it. I also use it for a side project.

It is a robust graph database that seems to be optimized for exploring graphs from any given starting node. This is different from RDF graphs with SPARQL queries that are highly indexed and optimized for queries. There are also more hybrid systems like AllegroGraph that are both optimized for queries and graph traversal from a starting node.

<comment><USER6> There's also Stardog (stardog.com), from the makers of the Pellet OWL reasoner, which just entered this space. AllegoGraph is pretty cool, one of the best examples of commercial LISP success, and they have a pretty rich ecosystem around AllegroGraph (Jena, Sesame, etc support).

<comment><USER5> I have tried out two beta versions of StarDog, which is also very nice. If you ask, I think that they will provide you with the beta system.

<comment><USER6> already on the beta list ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> not only does this prove an upward moving trend in NOSQL databases, but that neo4j is ahead of the curve. I know some of the guys behind Neo4j, and they work harder than anyone to make sure the database is stable, reliable, and all around kick-ass.

</comment><comment><USER8> Congrats, guys!</comment>


Why Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee Works  - <AUTHOR> http://thirdocean.com/2012/10/01/comedians-in-cars-getting-coffee-works/# <comment><USER3> Am I getting this right, that there is no attempts what-so-ever to monetize the series? Well, if the only intention of the series is "to get the word out" that Jerry Seinfeld is still around, then it is definitely a success.

At one of Seinfeld's Late Night Show appearances, the way he described the process, seemed as if he had a full professional crew, cutting and editing working on that project. Somehow I am not really surprised, that a professionally produced show, with a decent hook (cars/coffee), well known guests and an entertaining host - that doesn't need to be profitable - <USER2> successful on the internet.

</comment><comment><USER4> Some people find more value in watching a video of 2 friends get coffee together, than in actually getting coffee with a friend.</comment>


A Smart Plan to End the U.S. Lockdown Arrives Just in Time - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-30/a-smart-plan-to-end-the-u-s-lockdown-arrives-just-in-time <comment><USER2> So AEI's solution is mass surveillance of citizens, their movements, and who they came into contact with? And they directly call for that to be a national database:

> The AEI authors also call for a national surveillance system to tie local > systems together and enable contact tracing throughout the country

This is like the 9/11 and the Patriot Act all over again. Why is it that so called conservative organizations who proclaim to love "small government" always push the most privacy invading and draconian solutions? I'd call it turn-key authoritarian but I'm pretty sure the key will start out in the "on" position.

Keep in mind this is NOT a solution to keep people safe, this is a solution to allow US businesses to re-open sooner. It actually makes people less safe, and seeks to compensate by robbing people of privacy all so that business can resume.

<comment><USER3> I agree. It sounds like an awful solution. Imagine if they did this for herpes.

<comment><USER2> If this ever comes online, I imagine they'll use it for all and any social "ills." Including herpes. It will be like McCarthyism on steroids; guilty by literal proxy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For a privacy-preserving alternative, see Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing ([https://www.pepp-pt.org/](https://www.pepp-pt.org/)) which was announced today.

</comment><comment><USER5> And... that right there would also be a very sufficient surveillance system. As much as I want this to be over, it's really scary hearing about a system where everyone's physical interactions with everyone else is intentionally logged and alerted upon. Even if this app was only really used for a couple months to get us past this hurdle, it'll both condition people to detailed contact tracing and will inevitably remain installed on many devices.

<comment><USER6> You don't need surveilance. All recorded contacts can be stored locally and only informed once a positive test is returned.

More information here:

[https://www.pepp-pt.org/](https://www.pepp-pt.org/)

<comment><USER7> My understanding of what you just said - status and contacts are stored locally, and the user will manually mark themselves as "infected" after a test. Presumably the receiver of that notification will have a local status saying "get tested".

But when you mark yourself to infected, how does that resolve to notifications for all your contacts? At some point that must hit the cloud and fan out to everyone, meaning the contact list is shared at that point, and with a large enough network becomes identifiable info. Esp if you combine that with skimming contacts.

Is the GDPR compliance and on the wire encryption what keeps it private?

<comment><USER6> You exchange a one time id with each close proximity.

If you test positive, you publish your recorded close proximities ids on a public server. Authorities can supply you with a one time tocken with the test result to append said server.

There are certanly more efficient and elegant ways to solve this problem, but it is solvable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wtf this sounds like nero burning of Rome level grabbing of power. Why not just roll out anti-bodies test. I for one will not be participating in this.

</comment><comment><USER9> Just give us a mass produced anti-body test we can take already.

This is ridiculous. If people can just take an anti-body test to show they are immune to covid-19, they can safely return to work.

<comment><USER10> It's unlikely that even 1% of the United States has been infected at this point. What does the other 99+% do? Infect themselves?

<comment><USER11> > What does the other 99+% do? Infect themselves?

Yes, sooner or later.

You need to get to something like 60%-75% of the population infected and with developed antibodies before you can obtain _herd immunity_ in a given population. Unlike the majority of our politicians, Angela Merkel was praised several weeks ago when she told the German public, no BS, that 3/4 of the population would end up getting the virus, eventually.

It's not certain we will even develop a vaccination anytime soon. Corona viruses have been around in live stock for a long time, and no vaccination has been created, even though it'd be very profitable. They've been promising the elusive HIV vaccine for almost 40 years, and we've still got squat.

The virus is out. It cannot be locked away again, at least till the vast majority of us are immune or dead. Waiting 'till next season is neither feasible for the economy, nor society, and it's likely you'll just end up getting infected with a stronger mutated version instead of this one a la Spanish Flu Season #2.

We cannot keep our population inside cowering in fear forever. If we had unlimited doctors, nurses, ventilators, etc. we wouldn't even bother having this lock down, social distancing, or waiting. We'd carry on as normal, and let the virus take its best shot. There is literally no other way to get out of this.

<comment><USER10> The problem is the hospitalization rate is too high even for a younger population. If you could target even 2% hospitalized at 60% of population, you would still need >4+ years at current capacity to get through this. You'd also still lose 1/1000 lives (of younger people) which still is unacceptable.

Why is it guaranteed you need to get herd immunity? Can you not take the Singapore/SK route indefinitely - heavy contact tracing + mask wearing + limit mass groups to keep basic reproduction number under 1 indefinitely?

<comment><USER12> I'm in Singapore, and I can assure you that although we're not locked down, no one wants this to last longer than it has to.

<comment><USER10> Agreed. But to the point above, is it better to have 5000 people under age 50 die or just keep the current regime (which will probably start emerging mostly as a ban on leaving the city) up for 18 months?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This assumes everyone has a cell phone that can run these apps. I personally know a few people who chose not to have one, and a few more who use old or weird phones. And there are plenty more for whom no phone isn't a choice.

<comment><USER14> In Moscow, they just announced a plan and said for those who don't have a cell phone, they'll offer a device.

Here's the source: "But starting Thursday, Muscovites will have their movements tracked through a mandatory app required on their smartphones. Don't have one? The city says it will lend out devices." [0]

[0]: [https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live- updates/2020/0...](https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live- updates/2020/04/01/825329399/moscow-launches-new-surveillance-app-to-track- residents-in-coronavirus- lockdown?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=nprblogscoronavirusliveupdates)

<comment><USER15> They've been doing this in both Israel and Norway for weeks. Norwegian police will actually pull over busses and physically separate passengers if they're not observing adequate social distancing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A smarter plan is to do what has worked in Czech Republic, and just have everyone start wearing masks.

Masks are even privacy enhancing!

[https://www.marketwatch.com/story/should-all-americans-be- we...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/should-all-americans-be-wearing-face- masks-to-protect-against-coronavirus-these-scientists-say-yes-2020-03-31)

<comment><USER17> Why on earth was this downvoted? This crazy avoidance of masks in so many western countries is disastrous. We've killed thousands of people, and for the life of me I can not figure out why. Just cutting up old shirts and tying them to our faces would prevent thousands of deaths, why are we still being told "don't wear masks"?

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/03/28/masks- all-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/03/28/masks-all- coronavirus/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sounds like the beginning of the surveillance state.

<comment><USER19> Because it is. The tidbits all these articles conveniently leaves out about these successful responses from (more) democratic countries is that they are closer to Chinese techno-authoritarianism than not: Korea (health officials cross reference credit card bill, location data), Taiwan (tracking bracelet), Singapore (bluetooth app), Hong Kong (out-of-home quarantine). China is basically all of the above piped straight into police big data on top of various human and environmental layers. That's what is required because enforcing compliance doesn't scale with labour and quarantine dodgers are a statistical inevitability. Many of these countries started off with human monitoring. One of the key findings in Wuhan where there is magnitude more spread than these countries is that you have to isolate positive cases from whoever they cohabitate with (family, roommates etc). It requires forced out- of-home quarantine or infected persons WILL infect everyone they live with. These are known lessons that western MSM have deliberately overlooked until it becomes too costly to ignore because it involves interrogation of whether it's politically or culturally possible.

E: It's starting to feel like this entire process may reveal itself to be liberal democracies equivalent of "Why Arabs Lose Wars", too many contemporary cultural and political factors that makes effective quarantine impossible.

</comment></comment><comment> kube-system Just ask Facebook, they already have this data, don't they?

</comment><comment><USER20> Sure, just legally privilege the PII data and its derivatives so that using it for any other purpose than pandemic control sends the CEO of the responsible company to prison.

If they aren't willing to include an explicit legal protection for the data, it's bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER21> Not the worst idea(and i mean this in the context of the current situation) and been done in other countries but i have a feeling someone's going to abuse this in the end for other "needs" as it always happens.

</comment><comment><USER22> For those who might be skeptical when they see AEI, don't be. The article is not a partisan think-piece. It's clear, straightforward, and based on science and reason. Highly recommended. I've been sharing it with people in my city who are concerned about "what happens next?"

[https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/national- corona...](https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/national-coronavirus- response-a-road-map-to-reopening/)

<comment><USER23> I would prefer it to be based on science, reason, and human rights. Any plan that relies on a "national surveillance system" needs revision.

<comment><USER22> I have a right to know if I've come into contact with someone with COVID-19.

See: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22753425](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22753425)

It's not 'surveillance' as in eavesdropping on all my calls and emails, it's contact tracing.

And it should definitely all come with a 'self destruct' mechanism for when this is over.

<comment><USER23> Your assertions about the manner of surveillance are not supported by the given documentation (and are implied to be incorrect in other parts of the document). If they are diligent about that 'self destruct' aspect, I would have a different opinion -- hence "needs revision" instead of a knee-jerk "needs rejection" attitude.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> GPS data is pretty accurate outdoors, but the second you step inside a store the trace goes completely haywire and bounces round hundreds of meters in all directions. So any warnings will end up so broad as to be useless. Even if just 0.1% of a population are infected, you'll end up with everyone getting multiple alerts everyday. How does that improve our situation?

<comment><USER25> It says bluetooth

<comment><USER26> Permanently disabled on my phone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> That man is a genius: let's do wide scale testing & contact tracing!

Exactly what everyone has been saying for a while now.

</comment><comment><USER28> What percentage of the population is it worth losing in order to preserve privacy and resist surveillance? 0.1%? 1%? I'd probably pick a much higher number than you would. Does that make me a bad person?

<comment><USER29> How much higher are you willing to go? Where does herd immunity start, maybe at 70% immune? With a 3% death rate (optimistic with those numbers) that gives you about 7 million dead. Absent a vaccine or effective, cheap and widely available antivirals then we could all stay at home for 1.5 years. That might cost more than we can collectively afford. That's probably a no, which leaves aggressive quarantining and contact tracing as likely the only other way to prevent that exponential explosion with its dreadful potential for death.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Take ques from other countries that has it under control and it expand on it. The entire country need to be as one when enforcing not by local laws etc, it will be too slow to propagate new orders

</comment><comment><USER26> Welp, guess I'm not going anywhere for a _long_ time.

</comment><comment><USER31> "Smart" should be in quotes.

</comment><comment> ur-whale [https://archive.is/iMVKi](https://archive.is/iMVKi)

</comment><comment><USER32> NO THANKS!

</comment><comment><USER33> Despite being from the american enterprise institute, I think this is the basis of the only sane thing to do. In broad strokes it's what I've seen as the only thing to do for the last several weeks: this is what "flattening the curve" gives us time to line up.

I'd like to also see:

\- wide and free distribution of NPI in the civilian population. At this point i think masking everyone up is sensible.

\- efficacy data for blood serum transfusions. If that can help provide some immunity in critical populations like delivery people, grocery and pharmacy staff, emergency responders and hospital staff: friggin' great. Keep people we actually _need_ alive and working and remove them from the vector pool temporarily. We're underway with frontline trials with this as of last weekend in NYC.

\- maybe theraputics to reduce the duration of the disease, if we get lucky. This is the choloroquine/favapadir/... fight that we seem to enjoy having.

Do that, and optimistically we can wind up to about 80% normal by fall. We'll get the 20% rest back over the next several years it takes to crank out a vaccine.</comment>


Rideshare website ruled illegal - <AUTHOR> http://www.thestar.com/business/article/535185 <comment><USER2> Whenever I think of taxi medallions and taxi licensing, I think of a corrupt protectionist cash raking scheme that make taxis way overpriced.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wouldn't be surprised if sites like airbedandbreakfast.com get targeted as well.

<comment><USER4> probably one murder away from being shut down

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The solution is to move this website somewhere else. Last time I checked, Sealand didn't have car-sharing regulations.

Anyway, if people want to do something, you can't stop them from wanting to do it by adding a disclaimer to a website. Sorry, that's not how the world works anymore.

</comment><comment><USER6> This kind of makes sense: if _ever_ there was an industry that needed regulation, it's taxi/car service. PickupPal is basically the Napster of taxi dispatchers. I'm not saying I think it should be outlawed; I'm just saying, it's not crazy that others do think that.

<comment><USER7> Really? Why? What makes driving a stranger around in your car so much more dangerous than driving your wife and kids around?

It's absolutely crazy. The bus company asking the government to protect it from delivering the service that their customers want and need.

<comment><USER6> Hmmm. Start here: the "threat" is that people will set up businesses offering rides to people full-time. Those people are, in fact, nothing less than unlicensed cab companies. Now, let's go with:

* There's an official definition for what a "fare" is, and cab drivers can't change it in the middle of a trip.

* Cab drivers lose their medallions if they drive people around in circles to rack up fares.

* Cab drivers lose their medallions if they randomly drop people off halfway to their destination.

* The insurance requirements for cab drivers are much more strict than for noncommercial drivers.

* Cab drivers are more stringently licensed than normal drivers; in fact, with "P2P car service", there's no incentive to be licensed at all. Reckless driving is a huge problem with urban cab drivers.

* Taxis themselves are inspected for safety, and cab companies risk their licensing by fielding cabs with bald tires and fucked up brakes.

There are two obvious reasons why you'd want to be careful about using the Internet to route around taxi regulation:

* There is no incentive whatsoever for "P2P car services" to follow safety, insurance, and fair business practice rules, because a bad actor can simply re-register their car with a new account.

* The P2P system cannibalizes the regulated taxi system, which offer far more consumer protections.

That's a start. I don't think it's crazy at all --- though again, I'm not arguing that this Internet service should be outlawed.

<comment><USER8> The most important aspect of the regulated taxi market to the status quo is that all the fares are set the same, preventing competition on price/quality. Also, medallions are rationed, ensuring that the supply of cabs is always heavily utilized. The demand always outstrips supply on weekend nights and rainy days, but the market cannot adjust to meet it.

You could make an argument for the licensing of any profession. In practice, most markets get by with some basic safety regulations and reputation incentives. The licensing only serves to stifle competition and innovation.

<comment><USER6> Most rational people probably agree that the medallion caps should be lifted; they were a deliberate attempt to stifle competition during the Depression. So, fix that problem. It's not a strong argument for deregulating taxi service. The regulated taxi service has huge problems as-is without making rules impossible to enforce:

* Taxi drivers tend to be unsafe drivers

* Taxi drivers tend to rip off their customers

* Taxi drivers tend to drive unsafe vehicles

There are so many cabs on the road, it's infeasible to address this problem car by car. One thing the medallion system does is to try to inject some accountability into the market, so that there's more to lose for being a scofflaw than just one car.

Note also that there's apparently a trend towards leasing medallions on a per- shift basis instead of in long-term leases, and that trend --- which is a step towards deregulation --- correlates with a decline of compliance and and increase in service complaints.

Whether or not I believe we should outlaw shadow cab dispatcher services, I think it's easy to make the argument that there's a real risk that they will hurt cab service for most people in the long run. But I mean, as long as they keep them out of New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, I don't really care.

<comment><USER7> > * Taxi drivers tend to be unsafe drivers

> * Taxi drivers tend to drive unsafe vehicles

That's for the insurance companies to settle. It's easy to imagine that "regular" liability insurance policies will prohibit commercial transportation of humans in the vehicle.

> * Taxi drivers tend to rip off their customers

Your "P2P Car Service" rating will plummet if you rip off your customers. By the same measure, eBay and Craigslist should be blatant failures.

<comment><USER6> That's obviously true, but I think you might be missing my points. Right now, they are:

(1) If you lose your million dollar medallion, you are out a million dollars (and likely the ability to ever get a medallion again). If you lose your P2P car service rating, you do what every scammer on every online market has done since 1995: you fake up a new one and game it with BS reviews.

(2) Many of the most severe costs of running a bad car service are externalities. I haven't had a valid drivers license in (checking...) THREE YEARS, and I drive every single day. I drive in a car with invalid plates. I get pulled over (checking...) NEVER. Take me, but make me a foreigner with no knowledge of the rules of the road, no knowledge of the city I drive in, and a record of hit and run accidents. _I would do just fine in a P2P cab market_.

Any system that would have me as a cab driver is one we should be skeptical of.

<comment><USER7> But these are all issues that a well-established P2P Car Service could handle. Require drivers to submit a current copy of their license, insurance claim history and registration for the car in question every 3-6 months. Make this information available on the website (except driver's lastname and address or whatever for privacy). Put a GPS logger in each car (if it's not on, you don't get paid). Charge exclusively on a point-to-point basis (e.g. let the driver carry the risk of going in circles).

<comment><USER6> Fine, but these are all issues that _this_ P2P car service _doesn't_ handle. You basically just designed a new privatized medallion system. Plenty of car services do exactly this; it seems like you just want them to have a REST web API, so someone can build the Kayak of private car service dispatchers.

<comment><USER7> Well yeah. That would be cool.

Anyway, in a point that relates to the OP, it would be that I hope lawmakers will see this as a cue to reform and privatise taxi-regulation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nothing to see here, just a complaint from a bus charter company trying to protect their turf. It's obviously not fair for us peons to vanpool in private vehicles because some looter isn't getting his cut.

</comment><comment><USER10> time to put the site as a "hidden service" <http://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-hidden-service.html.en></comment>


Two Decades of Recommender Systems at Amazon.com - <AUTHOR> https://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/ic/2017/03/mic2017030012.html <comment><USER2> 20 years and they still think I need more than one vacuum.

ht: [https://twitter.com/kibblesmith/status/724817086309142529](https://twitter.com/kibblesmith/status/724817086309142529)

<comment><USER3> Reminds me of Netflix recommendations. They keep recommending I "continue watching" the ~45 seconds of credits I missed from the last dozen shows I watched. Most lists have movies/shows I've already seen at the top still.

I'm sure there's some reason behind it all, whether technological, user behavior, or obscuring a small catalog. I wish I knew what it was.

<comment><USER4> Or if I watch a couple episodes of a show and decide I don't like it and click the "Stop recommending this show" button, it'll still show up in the "Continue Watching" list. What's the point of the button?

<comment><USER5> You can go into your viewing activity (only available from your account page on the desktop site, I think) and delete the show from there, and then it should remove it from "Continue Watching".

It's not an obvious or straightforward thing to need to do, but seems to work.

<comment><USER6> That's definitely available in the app as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I had read this paper, last week and took notes. Here is my summary of the paper. It was a fun read. [http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2017/07/paper- summary-two-d...](http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2017/07/paper-summary-two- decades-of.html)

<comment><USER8> > initially I was worried I wouldn't understand or enjoy the article

Surprised to read this coming from an engineering professor. I guess we mortals have more in common with professors than we think :) thanks for the humility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> 20 years, and I still can't see a chronological listing of the other books in a series when shopping for my Kindle.

</comment><comment><USER10> Sometimes it works surprisingly well, I think I remember a presentation where somebody demonstrated that searching for components of a meth lab on amazon would have amazon recommending to you other components to help you finish the lab.

</comment><comment><USER11> I remember this one: [https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/beyxJM_pM6jH8AKDU0ITxXn9W1...](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/beyxJM_pM6jH8AKDU0ITxXn9W1KhJ4waSwJrRx59Lg1qzZql- LPpZF3frXZzq7mbSs- Wv11qOJhHZUSZdWiUH3wMkaLUvUgB9nBCujQcFYmvOBcMb-0vodY_R8BDaKJ72NvgJS9rr- UlczwSjY7_V0zfQryz5z88o4CBNOCW6YPgkdwdp2wsVbbjFM47nTHMgGlCUFwLR5jLhAxsiWciVaepGrXl63yHNNtN6PNDJwzvg9RX3NiKWk6AzFD2OzCx- euu7UH_KAEx8JfPtYtbUvCTeQ2NDxx6zEpc2dwZuFPmD_BD6VGBjrBHELd9PNwNXs3_alMi- zIhPZo0Fk3w-K0JEmMsOFmpcFmj30b-T10zgQB9cxskexQBX1Ux- zRlEHcLRq_7Y2O4IgHAx5uWD29fimIurQYvqfggFH7IvLkJI9BTvFc4-HVsKQY9Tt2lx7eRGy4bwHe2O6QcIyL3TWwcvGCKOhVerqdH02YfuRbd3NKX7bE1i-uLCzzgG6Poi0bsgj99tDlDxHX6Pvc_Wn3G7Mp9KzZiPzjXukMNGi0uqMqo3BE3FOKMmVb2nkN10GmRj5ngTrpk3c4mdXSf9DB6N_k5qn-u23MtAgWJjX0lTKQg1FkV2MGs=w573-h499-no)

Not very old.

</comment><comment><USER12> I investigated different algorithms for recommendation systems once and was astonished to find that the best one was also the most simple one: Jaccard similarity. No other similarities nor a proprietary custom built algorithm (which was the actual target of the investigation) could beat it.

<comment><USER13> This implies that you know all the relevant attributes of the items you're recommending. For something like music, books, or movies, there might literally be thousands of them, most of which are unidentifiable, any of which might differ in importance from one item to another.

I built a collaborative filtering system ([http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/morse/MORSE.html](http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/morse/MORSE.html)) and didn't have to worry about who directed a film, when it was released, where it was filmed, its budget, who starred in it, or what its genre or plot elements were. All the relevant information was implicit in how the people who saw it rated it out of ten.

<comment><USER14> Thank you for the link, I intend on studying it carefully this weekend. I may want to implement something similar using board game data from boardgamegeek.com (I've already been working on a recommendation system). BGG has a 1-10 point rating scale (using floating point numbers), so I suspect the method described will fit.

My only concern is the number of mutually rated titles between users in board gaming is probably lower than movies. Which I suspect will reduce confidence rates.

The current approach (with a Jaccard system), requires a degree of human intervention and only works on some users. It meets the goal of recommending titles for me, but it'd be nice to expose the system externally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Yep, I am definitely going to buy a $800 camera the day after I bought a slightly better one!

</comment><comment><USER16> Related: Deep Neural Networks for YouTube Recommendations [https://research.google.com/pubs/pub45530.html](https://research.google.com/pubs/pub45530.html) (Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12426064](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12426064))

</comment><comment><USER17> anecdotal, but I've been their customer for all those years, and besides the few books early on, absolutely one hundred percent of their recommendations was utter useless.

</comment><comment><USER18> I bought some embedded system accessories two years ago for college and I am still getting offered embedded system accessories.

Amazon's recommender system is garbage (for me).

</comment><comment><USER19> I use the amazon app to price match at another retailer.

The last scan or search always is somewhere in a recommendation (& one of my game apps)

</comment><comment><USER20> If you want to see a truly terrible recommendation system try aliexpress.

<comment><USER21> Indeed. But then I end up looking at things I would never have searched for. Today I was looking for a UV sensor module and searched for "8511", a portion of the part number for a commong one. First 4 results were UV sensors. Next one was " Women Police Costume Uniform Secductive Role Play Sexy Lingerie Sex Outfit Babydoll Fancy Halloween Costume Sexy Cop Outfit", followed by "Synthetic Druzy Mineral Stone Double Flared Saddle Ear Gauge Wood Flesh Tunnel Plug Piercing Body Jewelry Expanders". To be fair, I should have included "uv sensor" in my search phrase. But then I would have missed that cop outfit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Just in the event someone out there is looking to work on these types of problems, Amazon's Personalization teams are absolutely hiring.

Homepage: [https://www.amazon.jobs/en/teams/personalization-and- recomme...](https://www.amazon.jobs/en/teams/personalization-and- recommendations)

Applied Science: [https://www.amazon.jobs/jobs/372996](https://www.amazon.jobs/jobs/372996)

Software Engineering: [http://www.amazon.jobs/jobs/549950](http://www.amazon.jobs/jobs/549950) [http://www.amazon.jobs/jobs/402127](http://www.amazon.jobs/jobs/402127) [http://www.amazon.jobs/jobs/430623](http://www.amazon.jobs/jobs/430623)

Software Managers: [http://www.amazon.jobs/jobs/385902](http://www.amazon.jobs/jobs/385902) [http://www.amazon.jobs/jobs/437405](http://www.amazon.jobs/jobs/437405) [http://www.amazon.jobs/jobs/489879](http://www.amazon.jobs/jobs/489879)

If one of those don't strike your fancy but you are passionate about working in this space, feel free to send me an email: ${firstname.lastname@example.com.

<comment><USER23> Just think: all those things you can't stand the Amazon's recommendation engine does, here's your chance to fix it for everyone.

<comment><USER24> Given how long some of these problems have been going on, it may be a chance to learn why it's not possible to fix them within their current organizational structure.

<comment><USER25> "Oh wow, so you have discovered that after someone buys something, and you keep recommending the same thing, a large number of people go out of their way to buy other stuff to remove the recommendation. So we actually make more money recommending the last thing that they would want to buy?"</comment></comment></comment></comment>


"Shiny Balls of Mud" (William Gibson, 2002) - <AUTHOR> https://www.gwern.net/docs/japanese/2002-gibson <comment><USER2> If I ever get to visit Japan, Tokyu Hands will be on my list.</comment>


Eric Meyer's Reset Revisited - <AUTHOR> http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2011/01/03/reset-revisited/ <comment><USER2> Aside from the focus-outline issue people had been talking about, some tweaks that are pleasing to see. As I get the time, I'll test swapping this out for the old reset code in my .less includes.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's great to see the HTML5 element reset added in.</comment>


"Joy of Cooking" versus the Food Scientist - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-gastronomy/the-strange-uplifting-tale-of-joy-of-cooking-versus-the-food-scientist <comment><USER2> It's kinda amazing that Wansink has so much reach when his work has been the subject of an upsetting amount of retractions: [https://retractionwatch.com/2017/12/28/another-retraction- ap...](https://retractionwatch.com/2017/12/28/another-retraction-appear- cornell-food-scientist-brian-wansink/)

<comment><USER3> > It's kinda amazing that Wansink has so much reach

it's kind of amazing that he has a job

<comment><USER4> Research metrics measure quantity, not quality :(

<comment><USER5> I don't see how that works, retractions hurt quantity too, don't they?

<comment><USER6> Nope, the publicity is still there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > his famous "Bottomless Bowls" study concluded that people will eat soup > indefinitely if their supply is constantly replenished.

Huh? That's not what the study concluded.

 _Participants who were unknowingly eating from self‐refilling bowls ate more soup […] than those eating from normal soup bowls. However, despite consuming 73% more, they did not believe they had consumed more, nor did they perceive themselves as more sated than those eating from normal bowls._

Source: [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1038/oby.2005.12](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1038/oby.2005.12)

<comment><USER8> Perhaps not "indefinitely" but the description doesn't seem unreasonable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Tl;dr

1\. Dishes with the same name are conflated despite being completely different.

2\. Many dishes don't have a serving size they simply yield things like "1 cake".

3\. The researcher choose a particularly small sample size (18 out of ~4500)

As a cooking enthusiast I find it frustrating that a researcher forces a narrative that home cooked meals are the problem when the reality is that all the fast an processed foods we have today are much more likely the culprit of obesity. We need to be encouraging people to cook for themselves with fresh ingredients and not publishing dubious studies that suggest to do the opposite.

<comment><USER10> 'Fresh ingredients' are not the problem, slathering everything in oil and butter is. People do that in home-cooking too, because it is the easiest way to make things taste delicious.

It really doesn't matter that your potatoes have been sitting in the fridge for two weeks, or that your steak's been in the freezer for a month, or that heaven forbid, your onions did not magically arrive from a farmer's market to your plate. The problem is that you fried your potatoes in half a cup of butter, and that you're eating steak.

<comment><USER11> Per-capita butter consumption in the US peaked in 1911, so we've all gotten slimmer since then /s.

More seriously: correlation is not the same as causation, but one of the obvious correlated changes is the increase in consumption of sugary beverages: soft-drinks, fruit juices &c.

<comment><USER12> What's interesting is my parents and their parents before them, had multiple slices of white bread+butter and glasses of whole milk with almost every meal. It was cheap and filling. And they were thinner than we were.

<comment><USER13> I've got a working theory that the problem isn't necessarily just in how we've changed eating, but in what we do in our free time.

I don't know about your parents, but when I look at what was done for free time when my grandparents(born ~1930s) and my parents (born in the 1950s) did in their free time vs what my friends and I did I can't help but see a significant difference in the time spent active. I'm not just talking about going out to ride a bike/play basketball with my friends, but later in life. When my grandfather went to work, school, and even to a bar he always walked and my father had a similar relationship with mobility during his early to teen years. Of course that changed when they both were old enough to own a car, but for both of them that wasn't until they're late teens.

Combine that with the only entertainment being other places or outside you have a populace who expends significantly more calories every day than my generation (Millenial).

As time progresses I think you might see parents from the earlier generations feeding their kids at the level they were fed as kids not recognizing that little Billy watches youtube for 3 hours after finishing his homework instead of going and playing basketball with Tuk-Tuk leading to a daily calorie surplus. Over time a daily intake of +200 calories can easily add up to a significant amount of weight.

I don't have any data to support this other than my anecdotal story and how I approached weight loss (by decreasing intake and increasing passive/everyday calory burn rate), but I think it'd be a cool thing to see studied.

<comment><USER14> You have to do a really pretty extreme amount of exercise to burn off a hamburger.

<comment><USER13> You're definitely right, but 200 excess calories a day is 74,000 a year which can translate to 21 lbs a year in weight gain. It doesn't take much to get fat over a few years with a calorie surplus like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> [https://nutritionfacts.org](https://nutritionfacts.org) has some of the most understandable analyses of published food and nutrition research. Really well done. I use just by searching an ingredient or topic of interest and see whether he's covered it. Then compare with other sources, of course.

He'll often point out the conflicts of interest behind the funding of various studies as well as analyzing them on their face.

<comment><USER16> There is an obvious vegan bias from anything by Michal Greger. In nutritionfacts.org, it is blatantly obvious cherry picking and editorial bias. For example, he goes through great lengths to show which studies are funded by the various animal product industries when they contradict his viewpoint, but makes no such effort for studies on plant-based foods. He also has a habit of highly weighting small sample or small effect studies that have never been replicated when they agree with his viewpoint, but requiring much higher rigor when contradicting it.

[https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/death-as-a-foodborne- illnes...](https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/death-as-a-foodborne-illness- curable-by-veganism/)

<comment><USER17> > _but makes no such effort for studies on plant-based foods_

. . . specifically _whole_ plant-based foods. He describes the health problems of hydrogenated oils, sugar, and products made from them.

Is there a whole plant based food industry funding studies on broccoli and collard greens? If not, is he biased or simply stating what his research implies?

<comment><USER16> Yes there is. Almost every major class of produce has an industry association (or several) which promote the interests of their industry, including funding research. In fact, a family member of mind sits on the board of two such associations in California, one for peach growers and one for tomato growers, both of which have funded tons of research out of UC Davis.

That isn't to say that the research is flawed, but somehow Greger only sees this funding mechanism to be fundamentally bad when they contradict his predetermined conclusion...he conveniently doesn't see any reason to question a study on kale funded by the kale industry.

And yes, Greger is biased. His opinions start with the premise that vegan==good and anything else is bad, and he works backward from there to shape a view of research that bolsters that premise. It's no different than Mormon scientists attempting to prove that coffee is bad for you, or Muslim scientists that attempt to prove that pork is bad for you. The idea that humans shouldn't eat animals or animal products has a valid philosophical foundation, and while a vegan diet is likely far more healthy than the _average_ diet, editorializing the science to attempt to prove _nutritional superiority_ of that philosophy is irresponsible pseudoscience.

<comment><USER14> > It's no different than Mormon scientists attempting to prove that coffee is > bad for you, or Muslim scientists that attempt to prove that pork is bad for > you.

Assuming the proper procedures are observed I don't think I see something wrong _in principle_ with these examples. Certainly if they're massaging the data we're talking about something different.

<comment><USER6> > _Assuming the proper procedures are observed I don 't think I see something > wrong in principle with these examples. Certainly if they're massaging the > data we're talking about something different._

Already "trying to probe X" is a bias. And if you have a religious or monetary interest on top, you shouldn't be doing such research in the first place.

Even if you intend to follow all correct procedures, your prior beliefs might still affect your results subconsciously.

<comment><USER14> Everybody has some kind of bias. Should a scientist be barred from studying greenhouse gas emissions if he is a known advocate of curtailment of fossil fuels? If not, why is that different?

<comment><USER6> > _Should a scientist be barred from studying greenhouse gas emissions if he > is a known advocate of curtailment of fossil fuels?_

Probably.

> _If not, why is that different?_

It's not.

(Now, sure, they could do it. In fact, they do do it. It's not like my opinion is law. That said, historically, researchers with some personal bias had all kinds of problems related to that in their research -- many examples).

<comment><USER14> Clearly we're seeing some real-world issues with the actual practice of science, but the concept is that if researchers are carrying it out properly it doesn't matter what their personal beliefs are. You start out with a hypothesis, design an experiment, and it either proves you right or wrong. I don't think it's necessary or even desirable to start interrogating beliefs and only selecting scientists we somehow judge completely unbiased; if we followed that to extremes we'd end up with a case where the same scientist could not even continue studying the same subject.

<comment><USER6> > _but the concept is that if researchers are carrying it out properly it > doesn 't matter what their personal beliefs are. You start out with a > hypothesis, design an experiment, and it either proves you right or wrong._

Yeah, but note how this presupposes that its equally easy to "carry it out properly" in either case.

Whereas what I say is that

(a) it's less likely for biased researchers to carry their research out properly (I say less likely, not impossible).

(b) so for that, we should try to have less research from biased researchers

(That's because I don't think that "(c) biased researchers should try more to handle their research properly" is an option -- because of how bias works, biased researchers will always be more prone to not handling their research properly).

<comment><USER14> It strikes me that there is a crisis of rigor more generally. I don't think targeting religious believers would fix all the problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> [http://archive.is/VsIV7](http://archive.is/VsIV7) works for me.

</comment><comment><USER19> > (When my parents' ragged copy of the 1964 edition succumbed to water damage > a few years ago, my mother delivered the news as if a relative had died.)

I'm willing to bet my life that the author has taken liberties with this "delivered the news as if a relative had died" part. I bet if there still exist actual record (say an email) of the delivery that it would be something he wouldn't want us to see. It's a small lie, sure, but it's so unpleasant. In an article whose supposed topic is honesty no less.

<comment><USER14> Beep boop does not compute</comment></comment>