Blood platelets activated during exercise increase neurogensis: mouse study - <AUTHOR> https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/a-new-role-for-platelets--boosting-neurogenesis-after-exercise--65630 <comment><USER2> The neverending mouse studies that rarely apply for humans.

"Misleading mouse studies waste medical resources"

[https://www.nature.com/news/misleading-mouse-studies- waste-m...](https://www.nature.com/news/misleading-mouse-studies-waste- medical-resources-1.14938)

"Why animal studies are often poor predictors of human reactions to exposure"

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2746847/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2746847/)

"Drugs That Work In Mice Often Fail When Tried In People"

[https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2017/04/10/5227754...](https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2017/04/10/522775456/drugs-that-work-in-mice-often-fail-when-tried-in- people)

Not sure what the answer is to human medical testing and research since experimenting on humans is unethical. But mice shouldn't stand in for humans for human research since mice and humans are very different. I wonder how scientists in the future will look upon using mice for human medical research.

<comment><USER3> My current favourite twitter account is [https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice](https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice)

<comment><USER4> Yes, that's a great way of staying on the cutting edge of basic science in mammals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What is interesting is to see effect size. For example, exercise would produce huge effect in blood content that transports oxygen and relatively small effect on brain-derived neurotrophic factor. For humans BDNF measures in 39 nanogramms per millilitre [1] - it is highly dissolved. I seriously doubt that masspectrometry can handle this.

[1] [https://www.hindawi.com/journals/bmri/2013/901082/](https://www.hindawi.com/journals/bmri/2013/901082/)

Also, [2] - the BDNF level for sprint runners is more than 5 (five) times higher than of sedentiary people for Olympic team members.

[2] [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51658551_Increased_...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51658551_Increased_basal_plasma_brain- derived_neurotrophic_factor_levels_in_sprint_runners)

I guess the ability to run marathon every night can easily put one into Olympic team. ;)

</comment><comment><USER6> My take away from all the 1000's of articles and studies I've read on health is:

Eat __real food __(Not processed. (ex: eggs, fish, meat, fowl, vegetables, some fruit)) and __not so much __.

Don't smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol.

Exercise daily (even if it's just a brisk walk for 30 mins).

Find time to meditate (rest your mind) for a few minutes a day, even day dreaming for 5-10 minutes is great.

Try to get a good nights sleep (approx 7 hours for an adult).

Try to Fast at least 12-16 hours a day (typically over night while you sleep, 6 pm to 10 am).

Seems like it should be easy but somehow we still make it complicated.

<comment><USER7> I am not convinced on the fasting point, still feels like a fad to me. What made you adopt it?

<comment> 1e-9 There is an accelerating level of evidence that fasting results in decreased rates of disease and increased longevity. In particular, it appears that having the body in a fat-burning mode during sleep facilitates more effective cellular maintenance and repair. Note that fasting is not calorie restriction. Calories can still be normal. The key point seems to be having long periods of no eating. There is even evidence that having just one meal a day (breakfast) might be the best schedule of all. I would not call any of it definitive, but I have found the studies more than compelling enough to change my own eating habits and encourage friends and family to do likewise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> (There's a typo on HN's title, the last "e" is missing in neurogenesis)

</comment><comment><USER9> The study suggests that platelet 4, which is elevated when running, influences neurogenesis.

Do we know if platelet 4 is only increased during running? What about weight lifting for example?

<comment><USER10> Weight lifting mice! Now that I would like to see. Ethics be damned

<comment><USER11> It's not a bad question. Does it have to be cardio? Isometric exercise? I've heard a lot of buzz about high-impact interval training; does that work? The questions do need answering, and though mice may not provide the full answer, they can still provide _some_ information, and maybe enough for more research to be funded.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if someone has ever applied some of these studies (that sometimes show an increased lifespan from 30% to 60%) with the sole intent to obtain a super mouse with incredibly long lifespan and some other incredible characteristics.

<comment><USER13> I think you'll be interested in [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methuselah_Foundation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methuselah_Foundation)

In 2003, the organization was made public as the Methuselah Foundation at the 32nd Annual Meeting of the American Aging Association,[7] where they awarded the first Methuselah Mouse Prize to Andrej Bartke for his work on mice that lived the equivalent of 180 human years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> There are so many things that cause neurogenesis. It's not really that impressive unless the effect is strong. In that case though it could be dangerous or not optimal to intelligence.

</comment><comment><USER15> ... in mice.

<comment><USER16> ...that are running the equivalent of a marathon every night.

<comment><USER17> I don't know how they can claim to make this comparison.

Do an image search for _mouse skeleton_ and compare to _dog skeleton_.

These creatures are hyper specialised to _run_ pretty much nonstop all day every day, as evidenced by the fact that lab mice will _voluntarily_ run 10km when present with a mouse wheel and _no prior training_.

Human running is bound to be _way more laborious_.

The comparison is nonsense.

I agree with your broader point though.

Edit to add: My previous pup, a Border Collie x German Shorthaired Pointed, after only five introductory sessions, would _voluntarily_ get on the treadmill we had set up for her.

There is something inherently different about these creatures. One of my pet theories of why they don't live as long is because they're brains are hardwired to make them act like they're on MDMA and amphetamine all the time.

<comment><USER18> My prior reading contradicts this idea.

It's my understanding that humans, being bipedal rather than quadrupedal, are more efficient runners[0]. Quadrupeds have the advantage over short distances [like dwarves, they are natural sprinters [1]], but their metabolism is not suited to endurance running. They lack sweat glands necessary to cool their bodies over long periods of exertion as well.

There are hypotheses of early humans hunting by purely chasing down their prey during the hottest part of the day and into hyperthermia.[2]

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

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4qZrPX60bw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4qZrPX60bw)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting#In_humans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting#In_humans)

<comment><USER17> Is there any evidence to suggest that humans have ever preyed upon other apex predators?

I'm finding it hard to imagine humans would hunt down wild dogs / cats for food.

Additionally, if lab mice can _voluntarily_ run 10km in an evening, doesn't that alone shoot holes in this theory? My understanding was the theory indicated humans could outrun grazing animals.

A quick search shows the Australian Kelpie can run 60km in a work day, and apparently the Australian Dingo has been know to travel 40km in a day.

Here's an article[1] about long distance runners having canine companions because their human friends couldn't keep up.

1\. [https://www.runnersworld.com/advanced/a20836779/super- distan...](https://www.runnersworld.com/advanced/a20836779/super-distance- dogs/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


If you are worried about "hacked" democracy, quit Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://meshedsociety.com/if-you-are-worried-about-hacked-democracy-quit-facebook/ <comment><USER2> You should also quit watching fake news: NBC, ABC, CNN, CBS, etc.</comment>


Mlpack – a scalable C++ machine learning library - <AUTHOR> http://mlpack.org/ <comment><USER2> mlpack was accepted into Google Summer of Code this year and there are some really cool projects going on right now:

[https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/organizations/5376684740...](https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/organizations/5376684740050944/#projects)

See also the project's github: [https://github.com/mlpack/mlpack](https://github.com/mlpack/mlpack)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is interesting, I like the way that each algorithm can be compiled to a command line executables.

However, the benchmark looks a bit confusing, how does it compare against some more popular libraries like tensorflow?

Also, while on black document is not very good for the eyes :)

</comment><comment><USER4> How does Mlpack relate to tensorflow?

<comment><USER5> Tensorflow is aimed at ML architectures that are fully differentiable (just close your eyes and say "deep learning.") and performs automatic differentiation (you just define the architecture, tensorflow figures out how to update parameters). MLpack is less flexible but provides robust implementations of several class ML algorithms that you wouldn't necessarily want to write in Tensorflow, even though you probably could.

<comment><USER6> Sorry if this sounds like a dumb question, can it be used for deep learning?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is there an example of multiclass text classification with mlpack? I couldn't find any.

<comment><USER8> Not a user, but I saw this in the documentation: MulticlassClassificationLayer</comment></comment>


Review my startup / help beta test BreezyPrint for iOS - <AUTHOR> http://www.breezyprint.com

<comment><AUTHOR> BreezyPrint (<http://www.breezyprint.com>) is a service that lets you print from mobile devices. It's easy to set up (~2 minutes), incredibly easy to use (printing takes ~10 seconds), works with practically every printer ever made and supports nearly 500 different kinds of attachments. You can watch an introductory video here if you like: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBENYGv9rj4>

We launched in April on BlackBerry only, and have just crossed the 1000-user mark. We offer a 14-day free trial, and so far, about 30% of users seem to be converting to paid once their trial ends.

Everyone's first question: "When's the iphone app coming?" It's coming very soon. If you want to participate in the beta (hopefully launching late next week), click here: <http://www.breezyprint.com/iosbeta> (redirects to a google docs form).

Everyone's second question: "How does it work?" BreezyPrint consists of a mobile app, our server in the cloud, and a small piece of client software the user installs on his PC (Mac client yet to come). Through the PC client, the user selects printers to use with BreezyPrint, and the list is uploaded to our server. When the user initiates a print job from his mobile device, the device queries the server for the list of printers and displays it to the user. The user selects the printer he wants, and the document is encrypted and sent to our server, where it awaits download/decryption/printing by the PC client associated with the selected printer.

I'm very aware of the various competitors in the market and have some (proprietary) plans for beating them, but I would love to hear any feedback from the HN community on what we can improve.

In particular: 1) Any suggestions on how to make the use process clearer, without adding a ton of extra pages to the site?

2) Is there anything on the site that just doesn't make any sense to you?

3) We're pricing at 4.95/mo or 29.95/year, and the fee is for the service, not any one app itself (it's a per-user, not per-machine, license fee - so if you switch devices, somehow lose everything, etc., it doesn't cost you anything). Any thoughts on this?

4) Any other suggestions? What question(s) should I have asked, that I missed?

Thanks very much in advance for any feedback. I've been lurking on HN for probably about six months now, and have learned a ton. Looking forward to hearing what you all think.

</comment><comment><USER2> I was taken back a bit by the monthly fee. I was thinking it was a one time purchase kind of app. $29.95 a year is not to expensive but still it seems like a tough sell. Obviously you are not having an issue if you are having a 30% conversion rate.

What I was looking for and didn't see right away was how did it work. I think a diagram would be worth a 1000 words in this case. In order for this to work, your computer has to be on that is running the client software. How often is it checking in with the cloud server to know something is ready to print? It has to be alot in order to be able to 'print in 15 seconds' as you claim. I'd have an issue with that, but I'm protective over what is running on my machine.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback.

On the fee: because the software checks in, we have fixed monthly per-user costs, so I am very hesitant about offering a one-time price. Obviously there's quite a bit of margin in the offering right now, but that's why it's not once-and-done.

On the architecture: definitely agree that we should put up a "how it works" diagram. And to answer your question: right now, it checks with the server once per minute. We do it that way, as opposed to having the server ping your machine whenever there's something waiting for it, in order to make it easier to deal with firewalls and the like -- setup is a one-click process.

As a result, the act of printing a doc takes less than 15 seconds, really (usually something like 8), but it can take up to 1 minute for the doc to arrive at the printer.</comment></comment>


Dont be afraid to be hype #js dev with #reactjs #babel #webpack and #webpackserver - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/leocavalcante/The-Minimal-React <comment><USER2> what do hashtags even mean anymore?</comment>


Mithril Introduction - <AUTHOR> https://mithril.js.org/index.html <comment><USER2> Mithril.js is awesome. It is incredibly easy to set up and reason about: it feels like I am only one step away from manipulating the DOM directly, but this is precisely the step away I wanted to make. Then I can concentrate on updating my data in a correct and timely way, and everything just works.</comment>


In Grim Job Market, Student Loans Are a Costly Burden - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/18/your-money/student-loans/18student.html

<comment><USER2> I never understood why students took out the loans for the private schools. Public schools are much more affordable if you aren't on scholarship and have great career prospects.

It's even worse when there are some teachers telling students in high school to completely disregard debt and go to the "best" school they can to get an education that will last forever. Honestly, what's that education worth if you struggle for years (decades?) afterwards trying to pay back for it?</comment>


The iPad juggernaut is gaining momentum  - <AUTHOR> http://ipadwatcher.com/2010/10/07/the-ipad-juggernaut-is-gaining-momentum/ <comment><USER2> It's pretty hard to NOT be the leader when you're pretty much the only game in town.

Yes, there are other devices around, but not many of them are providing the same level of performance at $500 as the base iPad, nor do they have the luxury of being sold in high traffic Apple stores and Best Buy.

As much as I love my iPad, there absolutely needs to be real competition in the marketplace to keep Apple honest.

I had high hopes for the Galaxy Tab, but I'm not convinced Samsung's marketing team knows how to market it. The Playbook is really impressive, but it seems a little vapour-y right now. It would have been nice if the press had a chance to physically use one at the announcement.</comment>


The beauty of functional languages in deep learning – Clojure and Haskell - <AUTHOR> https://www.welcometothejungle.co/fr/articles/btc-deep-learning-clojure-haskell <comment><USER3> I have spent a lot of time experimenting with the Haskell bindings for TensorFlow and a little time with HLearn. Sorry for a negative opinion, but as much as I don't particularly like Python, I would suggest to almost anyone that they stick with Python for deep learning for now. In a year or two, I might recommend TensorFlow implemented turtles all the way down in Swift, but let's wait and see how that project progresses.

I have only spent a few evenings playing with Clojure and mxnet and while I appreciate the efforts of the Clojure mxnet subproject team, I think you are still better off for now with Python, TensorFlow, and PyTorch.

A little off topic: I had a deep learning example for Armed Bear Common Lisp (implemented in Java) and DeepLearning4j in the last edition of my Common Lisp book. In the latest edition of my book, I removed that example and the chapter that went with it and replaced it with two examples of Lisp code using REST services written in Python, SpaCy, and TensorFlow - I think that is more practical right now; the situation may change in the future.

EDIT: I also added REST examples using Python, SpaCy, and TensorFlow to the second edition of my Haskell book.

<comment><USER4> How quickly is Swift progressing for Deep Learning?

In this podcast, Jeremy Howard ([https://www.fast.ai/](https://www.fast.ai/) ) also sounded excited about Swift:

[https://lexfridman.com/jeremy-howard/](https://lexfridman.com/jeremy-howard/)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the link for Lex's interview. I watched it last week, a fascinating conversation. Jeremy is teaching a class with the Swift version of TensorFlow, which I experimented with but setup on my Mac sometimes worked, but a update broke it for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some observations:

* Parallelism in Clojure is cheap

Parallelism is Clojure is not cheap if you are using ordinary threads, due all machinery necessary to setup and start OS thread (the same applies to Java/C(++)). If you are using core.async, you will get cheap green threads.

However, parallelism in Clojure is extremely easy, especially switching between non-parallel and parallel implementations (map -> pmap or using reducers).

* (Lack of) Libraries and Limitations

This is common misconception between Clojure novices or someone wanting to start with Clojure. Clojure embraces Java and, using Clojure primitives, you can easily make your Java code functional and safe. Lack of ML libraries in pure Clojure just means that wrapping TensorFlow java code will require couple of more Clojure functions.

For me, TensorFlow API isn't the most friendlier API out there and I have impression it is specifically designed for Python by C++ programmers. You may want to check alternative DL4J [1].

[1] [https://deeplearning4j.org/](https://deeplearning4j.org/)

<comment><USER6> > due all machinery necessary to setup and start OS thread

The machinery to start an OS thread is on the order of magnitude of nanoseconds. Starting an OS thread far cheaper than printing a line to stdout, for example.

OS threads are only a problem in interpreted languages, because all of them have a global interpreter lock of some sort.

For compiled native languages OS threads are more efficient than green threads.

<comment><USER7> OS threads means context switching which means relinquishing the cpu from user space to kernel space for a time.

Green threads is pure user-space. No expensive context switch.

<comment><USER6> > OS threads means context switching which means relinquishing the cpu from > user space to kernel space for a time.

No. The OS will switch contexts regardless of how many threads you have. Even with zero threads the OS will be context switching between processes anyways. That's just how pre-emptive multitasking works.

What you're trying to say is that threads might get starved due to imperfect scheduling; but even that is wrong - you're never going to write a better scheduler than the one in the Linux kernel. I mean that seriously.

If you want a deterministic scheduling routine without unpredictable delays, then just use one of the realtime schedulers provided to you by the kernel. That's what they're there for.

<comment><USER7> > The OS will switch contexts regardless of how many threads you have

With IRQs pinned (via CPU mask given to the kernel at boot time) and application process pinning, there will be no preemption of the application process.

> Even with zero threads the OS will be context switching between processes > anyways

No, this is what pinning is explicitly for.

> What you're trying to say is that threads might get starved due to imperfect > scheduling

No, you've misunderstood

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> While I don't know that much about deep learning, last year I had a student who did, and he implemented a deep learning library in Futhark, a parallel functional language. Performance was decent on the small networks we ended up with, but I'm skeptical about the ability of functional languages to compete directly with specialised languages like TensorFlow (although I find TensorFlows Python API to be bad). In particular, the assertion in TFA that implementing multicore parallelism in Haskell is "easy" is a gross oversimplification. It is by no means easy to implement deep learning directly in Haskell (or most other functional languages) with any kind of acceptable performance, and parallel computation in Haskell is in general a tricky subject (easy to get right, very hard to make it run fast).

In practice, people do who machine learning with Haskell seem to treat it more of an instrumentation language, for putting together building blocks written in other languages, kind of like Python is for TensorFlow.

code: [https://github.com/HnimNart/deeplearning](https://github.com/HnimNart/deeplearning)

paper: [https://futhark-lang.org/publications/fhpnc19.pdf](https://futhark- lang.org/publications/fhpnc19.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER9> I want to pitch in to suggest the Book by Dragan Djuric [0]: Deep Learning for Programmers: An interactive Tutorial with CUDA, OpenCL, MKL-DNN, Java and Clojure"

[0]: [https://aiprobook.com/deep-learning-for- programmers/](https://aiprobook.com/deep-learning-for-programmers/)

<comment><USER10> I love how he mentions "no C++" four times in his pitch :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > at each layer of the neural work

This article is poorly written, with mistakes and lack of domain knowledge.

> in deep learning, when functions are applied to the data, the data does not > change

Except for in-place operations.

> Clojure doesn't replace the Java thread system, rather it works with it. > Since the core data structures are immutable, they can be shared readily > between threads

Missing the point - basic ops in DL need to be optimised to an extreme level, and that implies using C.

<comment><USER12> so I'm not the only one wondering how some threading examples (in Clojure?) generalize to (suggested) applicability of these language for ML...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Thread level parallelism is different from GPU parallelism. Different threads can perform completely independent operations at any time. GPU threads must do exactly the same operations, but on different memory locations, at all time. In exchange for this rigidity, we can pack a lot more of them on silicon than CPU. A CPU thread is like a complete individual that can do anything they want. A GPU thread always is part of a pack, and they all move together.

The nice parallelism allowed by Clojure is for CPU threads not GPU threads. It would still need to rely on an external library for tensor operations, for instance ATen [1], the C++ backend of PyTorch.

On the other hand, Functional Programming can be useful to describe the model at a higher level and better handle the scheduling of each component (Convolution, LSTM, etc) on GPU. When training model, the batch size already allows near optimal usage of a GPU cores, however when doing evaluation, this becomes more relevant.

[1] [https://pytorch.org/cppdocs/](https://pytorch.org/cppdocs/)

<comment><USER14> While Clojure code itself is not running on the GPU, we still do have Deep Learning in Clojure enabled by Neanderthal/OpenCL.

/u/dragandj is quite active here, you can ask him!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would suggest using partition-all, not partition (in Clojure), unless you are sure that the number of items is an integer multiple of the partition size. Otherwise you are in for a surprise as some of your items will end up unprocessed.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is pretty much the reverse of what happened in mainstream deep learning. Most people learned with Tensorflow, which is arguably functional, and then decided PyTorch (which is like numpy, imperative) was a lot more straightforward to work with, to the point where Google decided to make Tensorflow 2.0 imperative by default in order to stop losing ground

</comment><comment><USER17> Someone please correct me if I'm wrong but this article suggests to perform training of DL models in production on the CPU?

Also why does the choice of language to specify my DL model matter that much if the low level number crunching is abstracted away anyway into a highly optimised component running on whatever processor / accelerator is most suitable?

<comment><USER18> > why does the choice of language to specify my DL model matter that much

because model specification is also code that needs to be amenable to change, tuning, refactoring. it needs to be expressive enough to test new ideas quickly without hassle.

basically just list all the reasons that drove language design in past half a century.

<comment><USER19> Language doesn't matter; just use linpack, right ;-) You can use any language you want as long as you do the real work in FORTRAN.

Is TF the new linpack?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I was hoping that this would be related to Colah's "Neural Networks, Types, and Functional Programming" [https://colah.github.io/posts/2015-09-NN-Types- FP/](https://colah.github.io/posts/2015-09-NN-Types-FP/) (but it is not). In it, he establishes correspondances between different NN architectures and different FP tricks like `Zipped Left & Right Accumulating Map = Bidirectional RNN`.

Does anyone know any other resources that take this approach?

<comment><USER21> Backprop as functor ([https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.10455](https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.10455)) is a paper that explores similar ideas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I get the overall idea _why_ they make sense. But the fact that the author does not address GPU acceleration either means that she's not thought about that, or that she thinks its implementation is trivial.

Either way, I would need a deeper dive along those lines to be convinced of that the argument has real-world merit, and can actually be implemented in practice.

FWIW my estimate is that 90% of production training loads in the wild are done on GPU. Please correct me if my assumption is wrong.

</comment><comment><USER23> always wonder why functional languages or constructs are often described as being beautiful or using other aesthetic terms. just strange that they are the only ones we ascribe such attributes, among the few paradigms and the many coding styles out there.

<comment><USER24> this is a pet peeve of mine - the use and abuse of humanist terms in stem. you see this a lot in a math - beautiful proofs, beautiful formulas, etc. I think it's a really weird perverse even thing to look at something purely formal (mechanical) and call it beautiful - like brutalist architecture - I think it says something about the person making the claim (that they appreciate structure to an inhuman extent).

<comment><USER25> Humans naturally associate aesthetic qualities with all sorts of things. An appreciation for the things around you makes life richer. Maybe you don't like the word beautiful in this context (or feel like it's overused), but I wonder if you'd argue with using the word elegant to describe something like quicksort or a cleverly composed fibonacci function? Beauty takes many forms, and getting hung up on nomenclature seems silly TBH. Characterizing this appreciation as perverse and inhuman is essentially taking offense to someone else's enjoyment in something they appreciate. Seems pointless.

<comment><USER24> elegant is fine. beauty and elegance aren't the same thing.

>Characterizing this appreciation as perverse and inhuman is essentially taking offense to someone else's enjoyment in something they appreciate. Seems pointless.

it's a humanist critique of the use of language for rhetorical purposes...? the purpose is exactly to investigate what the significance of that particular word choice is.

<comment><USER26> Does elegance describe well-defined observable properties that are independent of the observer?

The point being, that if not, we're still within the domain of the subjective. It seems arbitrary to allow one set of subjective descriptions and disallow another.

<comment><USER24> elegant: "the quality of being pleasingly ingenious and simple; neatness."

definitely less subjective than beautiful. and it's not arbitrary - i've alluded to an argument that can be made. i'm not going to spell it out because as usual no one on here is receptive anything that doesn't valorize stem.

<comment><USER27> Beauty: "a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight."

So I cannot like the shape or form when I look at a proof or function? I cannot have my aesthetic senses pleased by looking at STEM field things?

<comment><USER24> i'm sorry but what is the shape or form of a proof? a function maybe - <USER2> calligraphy is certainly an art but what's wholly different from what the function encodes.

<comment><USER28> Proofs have structure, i.e., shape or form.

<comment><USER24> they have a logical structure (claim, lemma, lemma, proof, etc.). they do not have a shape in the sense that the person i responded to intends.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Related: TVM's ([https://tvm.ai](https://tvm.ai)) intermediate representation Relay is a functional, ML-like (ML as in ocaml) language. It's being actively developed here at UW, with constant improvements to support the latest models (eg dynamic models including language models and graph convolutional networks).

Disclaimer: I'm doing my PhD at the University of Washington and work with the Relay people.

</comment><comment><USER30> The first versions of Gorgonia[0] (obvs not called Gorgonia) was written in Haskell.

I found it difficult because Accelerate wasn't there yet when I wrote it. And cofounders found it difficult to understand (because Haskell was a strange language).

On the one hand it is easy to implement a computation graph in Haskell. On the other hand it is not so easy to implement an efficient kernel for which the computation of the values would run - you end up writing weird looking C that looks like Haskell, which I submit is not necessarily a good thing.

Working with Gorgonia IMO has been the clearest thing for deep learning for me. Granted it's a bit biased because I wrote the damn thing.

Nonetheless, writing it first in Haskell had its benefits, the structure was clear and hence it has imparted some design decisions in the Go library.

From time to time I still have to add new features to Gorgonia, so I still plot out roughly using Haskell. Nowadays I recommend Grenade for anyone wanting to play with deep learning in Haskell

[0] Gorgonia is a TensorFlow/PyTorch equivalent written in Go. [https://github.com/gorgonia/gorgonia](https://github.com/gorgonia/gorgonia) if you are interested.

</comment><comment><USER31> I wanted this article to convince me, but they really don't acknowledge the reason that everyone currently uses Python - the libraries. Do linear algebra using lightly wrapped C? numpy. What about NLP? spaCy. Implicitly specify a computation graph with high level code? PyTorch. Explicitly specify a computation graph using leaky C++ abstractions? TensorFlow. And using either PyTorch or TensorFlow, you get to interact with CUDA.

For now, if you want a functional language for doing deep learning, IMO that language needs Python interoperability. Long-term, I'm hopeful that GraalVM [0] can provide a way of calling Python from the JVM, but until then, I think the best option is coconut-lang [1], "a functional programming language that compiles to Python." You get pattern-matching, TCO, the pipe operator, and ADTs, all while being one AOT compilation step away from Python.

[0] [https://www.graalvm.org/](https://www.graalvm.org/)

[1] [http://coconut-lang.org/](http://coconut-lang.org/)

<comment><USER32> If you haven't checked it out already, you should take a look at Jython _. As the name suggests, it's a Java implementation of Python.

_ [https://www.jython.org/](https://www.jython.org/)

<comment><USER20> I think the reason the parent mentions GraalVM instead of Jython is that Jython can't use C libs like numpy. But GraalVM lets you compile JVM to a native binary, so maybe there is some way to use Cython in JVM.

<comment><USER32> JyNI* was created to bridge Jython to Numpy. I don't have any personal experience with it, but one need not wait for a GraalVM solution.

* [https://www.jyni.org/](https://www.jyni.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> There is a lot here about performance - but I think much more important aspect here is the training - in python its extremely easy to manipulate with files and other data sources - sometimes its quite ugly but its simple, whereas using for example Haskell for data processing wont be as simple...

</comment><comment><USER34> One of the most striking difference between Clojure and Haskell:

In Haskell Immutability is an Abstraction, not Implementation. Clojure data structures and INTEGER & FLOAT object wrappers are expensive. Haskell build toolchain produces much-optimized code which preserves the functionality at high level and reasonable performant mutating code at a low level.

<comment><USER35> Yes Haskell performance can be impressive. Check out this one for instance [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6964392/speed- comparison...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6964392/speed-comparison- with-project-euler-c-vs-python-vs-erlang-vs-haskell), and don't forget to read the comments section.

<comment><USER34> Thanks for the link. I have seen it before.

I am very much in love with Haskell build toolchain and different sort of build flag options it provides.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> As far as I know, Clojure usage is on the decline at Facebook. It was only used by an acquired subsidiary (Wit), and lack of internal support meant migrating to another supported language.

<comment><USER37> I certainly don't know what the future holds for clojure, but I feel that when the community adopted Slack, they lost a fundamental learning resource and talent attractor.

Why do I say this? Because very interesting and deep and enlightening conversations and explanations and questions used to be in a forum environment where threads of conversation, topically organized, were easily followed and might be resurfaced and continued years after they had gone dormant.

All that is lost now. Slack was embraced, no doubt for the immediacy of response, and topical history is vanished. Everyone jumped onto slack to try it out, and people stopped checking the forum altogether.

The forum is a wasteland now populated with occasional version bump announcements. Nobody bothers to post there because nobody reads it anymore. And the wisdom of the community is vaporizing as soon as it forms.

It's a massive loss, and deeply tragic. Beyond the insight and wisdom, the forum had a cohesive effect. It was a grounding, a center and base. Slack is transient stream of consciousness.

Even with logs, the slack history is worthless by comparison.

Until a medium of exchange develops that the community wants to adopt, which can serve as a useful knowledge aggregator, I think clojure is on the path to obscurity.

<comment><USER38> I didn't like the adoption of Slack either.

I think [https://clojureverse.org/](https://clojureverse.org/) is a much better place for discussion.

<comment><USER37> Thanks for that! I wasn't aware it existed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Data has to be modified and saved.

</comment><comment><USER40> The author seems to be confused and uninformed about how parallelism is implemented in ML libraries. Libraries don't mostly rely on spawning threads for parallel execution! Parallelization happens at the hardware level using SIMD by running the calculations for backprop on a GPU/TPU/DSP. Not by creating new threads on the CPU. Because of this, you get the same type of isolated execution you would have with a functional language.

Which leads to the second point. Libraries like TF are already designed around a data flow execution model and provide functional APIs. It is nonsense to assert these libraries are missing something fundamental that Clojure and Haskell would magically fix.

<comment><USER41> This is beyond my level of understanding but I believe there are physical implementation paradigms in all languages that make them either capable or not of performing certain things. While you can always bend a turing-complete language to do the logic, it doesn't mean your abstractions carry all the way down to hardware — there is "overhead" or "loss of efficiency" if you will. You get the convenience, and perhaps organize the safety; but it only goes so far.

For instance Go was designed based on SCP (notably), a theoretical language designed by Tony Hoare in 1978 which implements a workable and fairly efficient concurrent paradigm. At the compiler then runtime level (low-level things you'll never be able to 'change' with libraries), when the program is built then executed, the implementation is directly able to translate into the physical topology of multi-core machines (Go design began in the late 2000's, shortly after Intel released the Core Duo, first multi-core CPU).

Now you can do parallel and/or concurrent in other languages, of course, but since they were not designed as such, it's a convoluted programming exercise to say the least. For proof, observe how little software is able to multi- thread efficiently today, how very little is built in a concurrent approach — it's just a mess in most languages, the added complexity not worth the cost.

This is an example of how you can get the functionality of a fundamental feature but the cost, the implementation curve is so steep that it doesn't really fly — reality, money, skill pool, all these things.

On topic, functional languages like Haskell _do_ indeed "fix" or rather implement some features in more efficient ways than e.g. Python; it's always a trade off you know. No best tool, only tools best suited to a given case.

<comment><USER40> The point was that the concurrency model of these ML libraries is not dependent on a CPU for backprop (ideally), so discussing language level concurrency as an advantage is irrelevant. The parallelism is not implemented at the language level, nor does it rely on language constructs for synchronizing shared memory. The parallelism happens at the hardware level (e.g. with SIMD). And in the model architecture (e.g. with convolutions).

So the advantages you posited in your lengthy diatribe are meaningless, because you failed to take into account the problem domain, along with utterly failing to grasp what gets calculated during backprop. Plus, backprop doesn't get calculated in Python.

The argument about functional vs imperative languages is old, tired and is not relevant to the subject. Please at least learn some fundamentals about NNs and ML frameworks before contributing a long, uninformed response.

<comment><USER41> > the concurrency model of these ML libraries is not dependent on a CPU

Gotcha, my bad.

> Please at least learn some fundamentals about NNs and ML frameworks before > contributing a long, uninformed response.

My apologies. It's not like I enjoy wasting people's time, starting with mine. It was an honest mistake, point taken, and thanks for explaining.

If you have a somewhat 'definitive' book or chapter/resource to share on "understanding concurrency"... please do so. I'm eager to learn, and I'd wager many reading such a thread.

<comment><USER40> See Udacity's course on parallel programming:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F620ommtjqk&list=PLGvfHSgImk...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F620ommtjqk&list=PLGvfHSgImk4aweyWlhBXNF6XISY3um82_)

I don't think it touches upon ML, but it is relevant for understanding the difference between GPUs and CPUs. You can go through the intro to backprop lectures on deeplearning.ai for ML.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Musicthatmakesyoudumb - <AUTHOR> http://musicthatmakesyoudumb.virgil.gr/index.php

<comment><USER2> Obviously this is a little light hearted data analysis. However it could lead to a more detailed correlation analysis. Just for an exercise in data analysis.

What I would be more interested in is an analysis of the lyrics used. I get jarred on a song that uses double negatives and colloquialisms that I have no reference to, it should be interesting to test the reading level of songs to determine how smart the writers/artists are.

</comment><comment><USER3> correlation != causation</comment>


Why straight-A's may not get you into UW this year  - <AUTHOR> http://o.seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2014670294_admissions03m.html

<comment><USER2> And then if you _do_ get in, good luck getting into the next filter, the CSE department's admissions system.</comment>


Simula and Smalltalk: A Social and Political History - b-man http://www.cebollita.org/dugan/history.html

<comment><AUTHOR> An interesting read, but it seems very strange to me that so much could be written about how Smalltalk came to be as it is without any mention of the influence of LISP.</comment>


Major piracy group warns games may be crack-proof in two years - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/01/major-piracy-groups-warns-games-may-be-crack-proof-in-two-years/ <comment><USER2> Great.

We are about to get some great data on the impact of piracy and it's network effects on both revenue and overall value perception.

On the piracy and network effects, the industry position is lost sales and complete denial of positives, such as people sharing resulting in purchases and greater minds are related to the game.

I submit entertainment dollars are largely fixed for the vast majority of players. Will they just play fewer new games, or will the dollars some how magically be found, or will they come from other, lower priority entertainment forms, or...

On value perception, will games remain at $60 plus DLC, or will the value perception fall as people struggle with inability to archive, trade, etc?

This, coupled with available entertainment dollars may see the price of games fall, or other entities willing to play differently compete better, attracting share.

All very interesting to watch.</comment>


Opportunity for Photo and Other File Sharing - <AUTHOR> Dropbox has decided to eliminate their Public Folder capability.  The response from their users has been, well, filled with unhappiness.  Given there are currently 17 pages of forum responses to their move to "improve the Dropbox sharing experience", an entrepreneur wanting to create the "next Dropbox" has an opportunity that has been created by the original Dropbox.<p>https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Sharing-and-collaboration/Ending-support-of-public-folder/td-p/197906 <comment><USER2> I think there are other cloud services like google drive, box, OneDrive. And when is dropbox planning to drop the public folder capability. My public links are still working.</comment>


Why Aren't there More Paul Grahams? - <AUTHOR> http://www.emergentchaos.com/archives/2008/04/why_arent_there_more_paul.html <comment><USER2> we should build a Paul Graham generator.</comment>


I Fooled Millions into Thinking Chocolate Helps Weight Loss. Here's How - <AUTHOR> http://io9.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolate-helps-weight-1707251800

<comment><USER2> One of the interesting bits is how to hack experimental science to promote a substance. Pick a substance, pick a small test group and watch as many variables as you can during a limited test span. The interesting bit is not only that the media got took for a spin - this hacking is often accidental and real problem in contemporary science publication as it creates an ocean of pure noise that gives the first impression of good data.

Until this situation clears out I'm not holding high hopes for pure data mining based medical research.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good, Cheap, Fast - pick two.

Our present information delivery systems incentivise speed of delivery and click-bait titles and this was setup to exploit both.

Good still exists as an option but I see no evidence that the masses are willing to wait (or pay) for it as they scroll through their feeds.</comment>


Seaborn: a high-level Python interface for drawing statistical graphics - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mwaskom/seaborn <comment><USER2> While we're talking about stats and Python could I convince someone here to implement a fast medcouple for statsmodels? I can't do it myself because I read R's GPL'ed code in order to understand the algorithm. Using my understanding, I wrote the following high-level description of it:

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

This should be taken as the design spec of a clean-room reverse engineering, so that we can have a free, fast and non-copylefted implementation. It's not that I have a problem with copyleft (in fact, I prefer it), but I really want statsmodels to fix their implementation, and they're GPL-phobic.

Since Seaborn has boxplots, implementing an adjusted boxplot seems relevant.

edit: Oh, one more thing. I'd love any feedback on how to improve the "design spec", in case I wasn't able to make it clear enough.

<comment><USER3> Are you really suggesting that it's not possible for you write an independent implementation of an algorithm from the version you once read? Is this sort of "clean room" approach typical? It strikes me as absurdly cautious.

<comment><USER2> It is what is known to be legally safe. We do it all the time in GNU Octave, and we always tell people to not read Matlab source code when implementing Octave functions.

Besides, I just don't feel like it's fair to the R copyright authors. They worked hard to produce an implementation and they copylefted it, and I _heavily_ relied on their implementation in order to reimplement it myself.

According to the United States Copyright Office[1], the algorithm itself can't be copyrighted, so that's why I wrote a high-level description of the algorithm.

\----

[1] "Copyright protection is not available for ideas, program logic, algorithms, systems, methods, concepts, or layouts."

[http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ61.pdf](http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ61.pdf)

<comment><USER3> I agree -- you shouldn't read sources you don't want to treat as derivative _while_ you're writing an independent implementation. So yes, the code you've already written is GPL.

But suppose you decide to reimplement the algorithm now, months later (based only on the notes you wrote on Wikipedia). I'm not a lawyer, but I would say that's almost certainly independent, unless you have extraordinary memory.

<comment><USER2> I don't know. Maybe. I don't know how a judge and a jury would interpret that situation. They might agree with you or they might not. The only safe jurisprudence I know of is clean-room design, and it's what the SFLC documents I have received recommend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> tl;dr:

I'm new to Seaborn and matplotlib in general, but Seaborn is a wrapper on top of matplotlib, and from what I can tell, was borne partly out of frustration with how hard it is to get matplotlib graphics to look decent out-of-the-box. Which makes it, in one sense, kind of like what ggplot2 was to R's standard plotting tools.

However, Seaborn has a more object-oriented API, among other things:

[http://stanford.edu/~mwaskom/software/seaborn/introduction.h...](http://stanford.edu/~mwaskom/software/seaborn/introduction.html)

> Seaborn's goals are similar to those of R's ggplot, but it takes a different > approach with an imperative and object-oriented style that tries to make it > straightforward to construct sophisticated plots. If matplotlib "tries to > make easy things easy and hard things possible", seaborn aims to make a > well-defined set of hard things easy too.

There already is an attempt to port ggplot over to Python, and its authors' opinion is that its API should look like R's ggplot2, which means the syntax is not Pythonic: [http://ggplot.yhathq.com/](http://ggplot.yhathq.com/)

<comment><USER4> Also matplotlib recently added stylesheets

[http://matplotlib.org/users/style_sheets.html](http://matplotlib.org/users/style_sheets.html)

which gets you ~75% of the way there to ggplot style plots. I've found a number of edge cases where the plots don't turn out right when using the ggplot sheet. BUT the important part is you can set your own default plotting style with a single line of code and keep everything nice and pythonic (well kind of pythonic since you're using matplotlib...)

<comment><USER5> There is also [http://ggplot.yhathq.com/](http://ggplot.yhathq.com/) which is buggy for complex graphs but rapidly getting better - indispensable for me.

<comment><USER6> Is this still being developed? The last commit on github was 6 months ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Seaborn is fantastic--it produces high-quality plots with a minimum of code. The aesthetics are great and easily tuned.

Check out the gallery for examples: [https://web.stanford.edu/~mwaskom/software/seaborn/examples/...](https://web.stanford.edu/~mwaskom/software/seaborn/examples/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> I've used this forever, i love it.

You can setup pandas and ipython and write automatic data anlysis scripts that pump out absolutely beautiful graphs with hardly any effort at all.

Thanks so much to all the people contributing to this awesome python project

</comment><comment><USER9> Seaborn is my favorite statistical plotting package in Python. I wrote an astro plotting package that digs deep into the Matplotlib internals and it was not easy. Big props to the developer behind Seaborn and the great aesthetics he imbued it with.

</comment><comment><USER10> I love using Seaborn for my plots, I find myself referring to the color palettes for other data visualizations too! I wish there were more of a variety, but thanks to those who have contributed to the project.</comment>


Algorithms (free book draft) - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/algorithms.html <comment><USER2> Good deal, Papadimitriou is the author of this well-regarded book,

      http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0486402584

that somehow luckily wound up with Dover.</comment>


Blood from human teens rejuvenates body and brains of old mice - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/2112829-blood-from-human-teens-rejuvenates-body-and-brains-of-old-mice/ <comment><USER2> Again, Peter Thiel was onto something: [http://www.inc.com/jeff- bercovici/peter-thiel-young-blood.ht...](http://www.inc.com/jeff- bercovici/peter-thiel-young-blood.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Now vampires know who to target lol</comment>


Show HN: I created a CS:GO game server hosting platform and launched an MVP - <AUTHOR> https://csgoservers.xyz <comment><USER2> While it looks nice, the video seems unprofessional to me. Not sure if a video like that is the standard for cs:go server hosts?

Also, I saw the password field had a placeholder that said: your strong password. But then the requirements are just 6 characters, nothing else. That doesn't seem very strong to me.</comment>


Others may be unconsciously judging your features in ways you don't realise - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150707-is-faceism-spoiling-your-life <comment><USER2> Being swayed by superficial cues is not irrational if they correlate to the underlying qualities you are trying to judge. And, of course, prior information should change the way you view new information. I don't see how it can do more harm than good if you can do better than chance. Neither would I be so confident that I can do better than millions of years of evolution, especially by reading resumes.

We can guess what particular traits make people seem less trustworthy. For example, supposedly men with wider faces are more likely to act immorally (deceive, cheat). [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21733897](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21733897)

<comment><USER3> > Being swayed by superficial cues is not irrational if they correlate to the > underlying qualities you are trying to judge.

I'd be pretty careful about this line of argument. What we think of as a clue to underlying qualities is cultural... for example, one of the biggest superficial differences in people is the color of their skin. What underlying qualities does skin color clue us in to?

In the US and Europe, we have a long history of trying to find the ties between visible and non-visible qualities. Phrenology, eugenics, Blacks as having "inferior intelligence", the belief that women are prone to hysteria - all were attempts to find that link.

<comment><USER4> > What underlying qualities does skin color clue us in to

What underlying qualities does height clue us in to? Are you sure that, even though traits regularly correlate with other traits, skin color is the one trait that has no correlation with absolutely anything else? I don't find that very likely, personally.

<comment><USER5> >What underlying qualities does height clue us in to?

Possibly more than you think.

[http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1820836,0...](http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1820836,00.html)

<comment><USER4> That's my point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The author completely glosses over a crucial fact: an individual's face is representative of the lifestyle that he or she lives. Fat; thin; tan; pale; bearded; bald. Is your hair buzzed military grade, or does it spill over your shoulders? Do you take care of your skin? Do you wax your eyebrows?

Our faces certainly tell some sort of story, but there's more to it than bone structure and brow size.

<comment><USER7> Absolutely. I'd also add that your face is a reflection of your personality and average emotional temperature.

Your "neutral expression" will, over many years of muscle memory and habit, settle into some particular arrangement. People who tend toward bitterness, mistrust, anger, or anxiety - will look it, and inspire vague anxiety in anyone who deals with them. If, on the other hand, your neutral expression broadcasts poise, optimism, peace, wit, or good humor - the subtle good will that this generates will eventually add up to a significantly better experience of humanity. In this way, the way we look can be self-reinforcing.

In a way, we all get the face we deserve.

<comment><USER8> > People who tend toward bitterness, mistrust, anger, or anxiety - will look > it

This is total pseudo-science, like a modern phrenology. Your resting face and how that's interpreted is meaningless. For example, in some cultures no one smiles in photos and smiling at others on the street or in the workplace is a very weird thing to do, but here in the US its extremely common. If an American went to one of those cultures, he'd think everyone was an angry murderer.

Not to mention, many cheery and upbeat men and women having what's comically called "resting bitch face." They just don't look particularly cheery when not making an expression, usually people with "ethnic" features like deeply set eyes, chubbier jowls, wider faces, darker eyes, natural 'bags' under eyes, etc that compared to an Anglo person makes them look angry or annoyed. As someone with this ethnicity (Mediterranean descent) its something I have to constantly work on as to not intimidate others.

I think your take on things is a very "white" and Western view. Different cultures and ethnicity have different facial standards and its impossible to make broad statements like these.

<comment><USER9> > This is total pseudo-science, like a modern phrenology.

How do we know? I haven't heard of any studies that compare people's first impressions against the person's actual disposition or personality.

For example, this article pointed out that honesty was a trait people tend to read from faces, but it didn't ask the question: are people's reading accurate? It assumes that an honest-looking face has no bearing on a person's actual integrity, but maybe it does. We haven't actually measured.

To be clear: I'm not trying to agree or disagree with you, just point out that we don't have any strong evidence either way. As far as I know both positions are unsupported scientifically.

<comment><USER10> When making up theories, the burden of proof is on you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Couldn't help but be reminded of Ted Chiang's "Liking What You See: A Documentary" [http://www.ibooksonline.com/88/Text/liking.html](http://www.ibooksonline.com/88/Text/liking.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> If you accept that our brains automatically make these judgements and therefore we're unlikely to be able to train ourselves out of it, then the most interesting question is:

"How do you hack this?"

What can an individual do to maximize good judgements? How can you influence the amount of competence or dominance or trustworthiness others automatically attribute to your face?

</comment><comment><USER13> I really don't like the sound of this, just how far does it need to go? The end result is everyone being exactly the same as everyone else right? Same DNA even? But somehow if you made that society they would find a way to tell each other apart, and make snap judgments.

 _In the past, this "face-ism" (as Olivola and his colleagues call it) was considered an unfortunate fact of life. But the more they come to understand its pervasive influence, the more they are beginning to wonder if it should be treated like any other prejudice. If so, it could be time to take action._

<comment><USER14> While wanting to wipe innate human tendencies borders on dangerous, it's not a bad idea to be conscious about it.

We should not want to begin proscribing people's behavior in minutiae --we have enough laws telling you what you can't do, but modifying psyche to counter these tendencies can cut both ways.

Imagine people suing for someone not liking them because they had mentioned something about their appearance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I suppose applicants with faces judged as competent and dominant (and looking like Zuckerberg, etc) tend to come out on top after video pitches in startup incubator applications.

</comment><comment><USER16> In this video Dan Ariely mentions some interesting research about the effects of beauty: [http://bigthink.com/videos/dan-ariely-on-advantages-of- physi...](http://bigthink.com/videos/dan-ariely-on-advantages-of-physical- attractiveness)

Apparently research has shown that while taller people tend to earn more money, it depends on their height during puberty. People grow at different times, so some people who are tall later in life might not have been so in puberty, while others where already tall in puberty.

The hypothesis is that the effect of tall people earning more might actually be the result of them being more confident, due to already having been tall in their teens. Some effects of beauty might show the same relation.

</comment><comment><USER17> This article seems to be talking out the reality that our brains handle the big data of life by generalization, ignoring that in small samples things can be quite different than the group average.

When I see a big, tattoo covered individual I feel more nervous than unmarked, average sized individuals. Having grown up with a sister who eventually majored in photography I know plenty of tattoo'd people who are amazing people and often artistic and creative, but my brain still sends the signals.

We are very likely judged whether we like it or not by appearance, but I feel there is plenty we can do about some of it. I take this article to remind myself to own my appearance and what is says and be conscious that it may be deciding things for me.

<comment><USER18> > When I see a big, tattoo covered individual I feel more nervous than > unmarked, average sized individuals. Having grown up with a sister who > eventually majored in photography I know plenty of tattoo'd people who are > amazing people and often artistic and creative, but my brain still sends the > signals.

I'm a fairly large individual, and I discovered recently that my resting face is normally somewhat of a scowl. I've had instances where I will be walking around a neighborhood which I feel somewhat nervous and unsafe in only to have people walk across the street when they see me coming. I was perplexed by this until I realized much to my amusement that I am actually the type of person that people are afraid of bumping into based on appearances, and so my fear was unjustified.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can anyone share actionable tips about how to make a better first impression?

Of course, much of beauty, attraction, first impression, etc is genetic, as this article points out. But what are some aspects that can be controlled? Anything from daily preparation stuff (what types of clothes we wear, what colors, to shave or not to shave) to the way we walk, or the way we talk, our facial expression, how we greet someone new, etc...

If anyone knows of some research or has any anecdotes, I'd like to hear of it!

</comment><comment><USER20> So, how to beat the game then? Say, an instruction how to apply a touch of makeup before going to the business meeting or to the interview.

<comment><USER16> Makeup is certainly a traditional way to game it - that's essentially the point of makeup. Supposedly in medieval times women even took laudanum to make their pupils wider.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wait, we judge people by their looks, more often than not subconsciously?!

</comment><comment><USER22> Maybe we are not born this way, and it is our life and work experiences that make our faces that way. There is the obvious, construction worker, out in the sun, their face it going to get weathered and a more "hard" looking individual will come out. And perhaps he got into construction as a result of somewhat challenging life, which made him frown all the time so he got frown lines, which makes a person look a certain way, even distrusting.

Many things can influence how we look. And from this article it seems the markers are very subtle. I would almost expect to see people getting minor cosmetic surgery, where some lines are removed, some accentuated, an eyebrow tuck here, an eye pull there, a lip push here, a wrinkle added there.

All these are minimal invasive compared to full on look altering cosmetic surgery. We just have to figure out what to polish and what to prematurely age and distress.

</comment><comment><USER23> People ask me for directions all the time, and I've always been convinced this was the reason. I also think body size and appearance plays a part

Wouldn't it be neat if you offered a service that would rate you on some important dimensions so you new your relative score?

</comment><comment><USER24> This was submitted with the title of the article and then changed to this ("Others may be unconsciously judging your features in ways you don't realise") in the time it took me to read it. Isn't the policy here that article submissions _should_ be submitted with the title of the article?

<comment><USER25> I agree, this seems like mod intervention solely aimed at discrediting the article (ie. making it appear shallow and unscientific). I'm not saying this is a great article but the edit is unnecessary.

<comment><USER26> Keep in mind that the submitter can edit the title for up to one (two?) hours after submitting it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately I did not edit it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Category view versus inside view, as expounded upon in another link on HN today: [http://edge.org/events/the-edge-master-class-2007-a-short- co...](http://edge.org/events/the-edge-master-class-2007-a-short-course-in- thinking-about-thinking)

Funny how category view seems to work for everything EXCEPT human beings </sarcasm>

</comment><comment><USER28> More PC rubbish. Soon we'll all have to wear brown paper bags over our heads and speak through a gender-neutral, computer generated microphone voice lest someone gets upset or gets an "unfair" advantage.

<comment><USER29> The article didn't suggest that people with more "desirable" faces do anything to prevent an unfair advantage. It merely brought to attention a universal prejudice, with a suggestion that people, especially those making decisions wrt employment, be aware of the prejudices, so that they don't unfairly disadvantage candidates, and so that they don't dismiss someone who might be a better candidate solely on the basis of their looks.

<comment><USER28> Sure it did. How about here: "The question is, do we want to spend government money protecting bad looking people when – it's my personal view – other groups merit more attention?"

Thats as much of a hint on government regulation as it can be.</comment></comment></comment>


Pushing back against the bullies - <AUTHOR> http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5651

<comment><USER2> The comments thread is magical.

"I would feel ashamed of myself if I was part of bullying Hitler out of his job at Mozilla" ~ESR</comment>


Leisure Luxuries and the Labor Supply of Young Men [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/maguiar/files/leisure-luxuries-labor-june-2017.pdf <comment><USER2> When I volunteered at a suicide prevention center, I dealt with a ton of college grads who couldn't find jobs, and were depressed, suicidal and deep in debt. They said they felt alone, and their parents just thought they were lazy.

Maybe videogames are their only way to eke out some self-proclaimed happiness being a hero in some fake reality. But that happiness will quickly fade as they age, and they are forced to face reality in terms of resources needed for survival.

I think this also explains the rise of the extremist youth groups antifa and the alt-right. Both are dominated by young men looking for purpose and value.

edit: maybe also explains the rise of that jordan peterson guy.

<comment><USER3> Does anyone else see huge similarities between what this paper is describing and the freeter/hikikomori/herbivore men trends going on in Japan since the late 1980s?

I don't have the time or inclination to look into it more deeply but it almost seems like the West is just living through a social reality that has been going on for decades in Japan. Maybe there are some interesting social and economic insights that can be gleaned from that change to predict the future in the west.

<comment><USER4> I was saying this in the late '90s. I would get out the relevant posts but they are in Italian anyway; I believe in Italy we saw the phenomenon a bit earlier because of a number of factors (the economy braked earlier than elsewhere, it's a more traditionalist country than average, etc etc).

On the other hand, media and academia are always out to sensationalise. It's entirely possible that a certain degree of social disaffection has always been there (see "young Werther", Leopardi and so on), but the overall population growth was such that a small but constant percentage of a community is now a big number in absolute terms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This paper is interesting but I don't think it really gets at the core of the issue. It associates the decline of young men in the workforce with so-called "leisure luxuries" such as video games. The paper even admits that, "For other groups - younger women, older men and older women - recreational computer is not a leisure luxury."

I would like to submit a complimentary hypothesis. While it may be true that young males are more interested in video games, video games are not necessarily the cause of the decline of younger males in the workforce. Perhaps games are simply a tool of escapism, utilized by a demoralized section of the population (young males). This could explain why young females are not influenced as drastically by the same leisure luxury. As with anything, the underlying reason behind young male decline in the work force could be a variety of things (e.g. males have more interest in games compared to young females or are more addiction prone to game than young females), but I believe that the case for escapism in young males in a society which is increasingly anti-male is a strong one to explain them seeking refuge in video games.

<comment><USER6> "...This could explain why young females are not influenced as drastically by the same leisure luxury..."

Or...

Maybe young women just don't like video games? Let's be honest here, most of the "hobby" type video games that require dedicated time to be allocated to them are not filled with content that women like to consume. I'd wager that the male/female split in a game like CoD is nowhere near 50/50\. (Even though many in the video game industry claim it to be.)

Add to that the fact that many young women likely wouldn't want to fire up PUBG, CoD, or Fortnite and have obscenities hurled at them...

and it's pretty clear why women seem to be less interested in that content.

I think a more helpful strategy would be to attempt to discover why older MEN seem to spend less time in these pursuits than younger men? This might shed some light on characteristics specific to younger men that would explain why they love these sorts of activities so much.

That answer might be a whole lot more pedestrian than we'd hope for. ie - Younger men just have more time. (No kids). Or it could be truly novel, and provide some great insights into human psychology. (But more probably, it's somewhere in the middle.)

<comment><USER7> Women are 52% of gamers, even if they don't like those particular genres and _certainly_ don't like the nastier kind of competition: [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/18/52-per...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/18/52-percent- people-playing-games-women-industry-doesnt-know)

Older men vs younger men: cohort effect? if you're over 40-50ish you didn't quite grow up with games.

<comment><USER8> I'm speculating in a subject I don't know all that well, but....

Aren't women-focused games generally less long-term engaging than male-focused games?

At least in my experience, the games that I perceive women generally want to play are more "5 minutes here and there" type games vs "3 hours straight" type games. So perhaps there are more women playing games, but they individually spend less time doing it?

Does anyone have stats on this either way?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In a time where millenials are deeply, structurally pushed down economically [1] Video games make a lot of economic sense to play as they're an incredibly inexpensive form of entertainment on a dollars per hour of entertainment basis.

1 - [http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor- millenni...](http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millennials/)

<comment><USER10> It goes deeper than this but yes this is the right track.

The US is a wildly inequal society. Each year it becomes more and more inequal and the latest tax cuts are going to dramatically accelerate the rising inequality.

Such widespread inequality has powerful knock-on effects and these effects are converging on these young (likely rural) males. Everything from suppressed wages to supressed business formation to extraordinary economic rents (housing, healthcare) all come together to produce more losers and less (but richer) winners.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A propensity for video games is more a symptom than a cause imo.

If you look at the state of the modern American man, analyze trends and extrapolate forwards things are not looking good. The ratio of men:women in colleges is nearing 60/40\. We are moving to a more service based economy which favors women. Lot's of folks are simply dropping out of the economy and are trending towards being strains on society.

<comment><USER12> I believe you must mean 40/60.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's this huge class of video games that feature: skill-building, leveling- up, acquisition, and when networked, involve team dynamics, assessing other's skill, leadership, earned respect, and a social hierarchy that's based on a meritocracy. Have these type of games become incredibly good over the last ten years? Yes. Have jobs / "the world" gotten less good at providing these rewarding type of experiences? I'm not sure.

<comment><USER14> A good example of this is the recently released game Monster Hunter: World. It features everything you mentioned.

Some players have spent an undeniably unhealthy amount of time in that game in just a few weeks. They boast "I'm High Rank 100 after only 200+ hours!" as if playing a video game for 15+ hours a day was something to be accomplished and proud of.

I feel sad for these individuals when they realize all that time was meaningless.

<comment><USER15> Someone would literally have to _pay_ me to get me to play a game like that. It's literally like work. Except for some volunteer activities I don't work for free.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Woah woah woah. I mean video games are a drop in the bucket of the conversation here.

WHO actually has 60 hours a week of leisure between the ages of 31-55?! How is that the average?

6am: wake. shower sometimes. 6:15am-7:45: take care of kids, eat breakfast, get dressed. 7:45-5:45: commute and work. 6-7: eat dinner 7-7:30: kids to bed. 7:30-8: cleanup house 8-10: maybe leisure, often home production. 10: bed.

Weekends have _at most_ 6 hours of leisure per day.

That works out to 22 hours, best case scenario.

I asked around the office. No one else is getting 60 hours.

<comment><USER17> >Weekends have _at most_ 6 hours of leisure per day.

Why?

<comment><USER18> Mow the lawn, do laundry, clean the house, maybe maintenance on a vehicle with a trip to the dealership or self-work, rake leaves, take the kids to sports practice, run errands, pay bills, do taxes, deal with family problems, deal with being sick or having a child that is sick, fix a broken sink, pick your husband up at the airport an hour drive each way, fix the garage door motor that has been acting up, help your son improve at math by working with him for hours on it over the weekend, and approximately 807 other things that need to get done at some point with weekends being ideal.

Simplify life? Oh, sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think that younger men are going into video games because computers have made us so productive that we don't need as much as a labor supply anymore. We have seen a drop of labor participation for men since the 60s which is invariant under any economic conditions .

People forget that to disrupt an industry someone loses and it appears we can see some of this in the male labor participation rate .

Since women have unfortunately had restrictions on their ability to be employed that information could have been lost.

<comment><USER20> That is very much addressed in the content of this paper. from the introduction

> An obvious candidate for this decline in younger men's hours is a decline in > demand for their labor, resulting in a corresponding reduction in their real > wages. There is evidence that declining demand for manufacturing and routine > employment has contributed to a secular decline in wages and employment > rates for less educated workers.2 However, we show in the next section that > real wages of younger men have closely tracked those of their older > counterparts since 2000. This suggests that the greater decline in younger > men's hours is not readily explained by a differential decline in labor > demand for younger versus older men.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've been noticing a number of similar articles on HN recently. Exploring why men aren't interested in working seems to be in vogue.

<comment> hi-im-mi-ih I'll venture a guess: We've been talking about rights for so long, as a nation, that we forgot to discuss responsibility.

The major media and political narratives are focusing on the rights of women, the rights of trans folks, the rights of minorities, and the rights of immigrants. They are all well and good, but we should equally talk about the responsibility of our well-represented young white males to bear up under some responsibility and push themselves to improve their country. Responsibility to provide and protect is a very masculine idea, and if we fed ourselves an equal diet of responsibility as we do rights & freedoms, the young men of today might be a lot more energetic and engaged.

I also venture that it has something to do with the sharp rise in atheism. Christianity espouses responsibility. Carry your cross and accept suffering without malice. Atheism says that the world is meaningless, we were created from entropy. One of those belief systems might work better for getting young guys out of the house!

<comment><USER22> > I also venture that it has something to do with the sharp rise in atheism. > Christianity espouses responsibility. Carry your cross and accept suffering > without malice. Atheism says that the world is meaningless, we were created > from entropy. One of those belief systems might work better for getting > young guys out of the house!

Build up atheist straw men much? You know what you know if I tell you I am an atheist? You only know I lack belief in deities (likely yours, whatever they may be, but no different than another deist in that they lack believe in all the other dieties as you, but they believe in N that you don't). Thats it, it doesn't tell you anything about what I find meaningless or meaningful, or that we believe we were created from entropy. That is pure projection on your part, and entirely without merit.

<comment> hi-im-mi-ih Sure it has merit to say that, generally speaking, Christianity espouses responsibility and atheism does not. Where are the tracts of Atheist values and dogma that carry a deep message of responsibility? Point me to _any_ symbolic representation of central atheist values - There is nothing. To be atheist is to be not associated with any belief system, and without any coherence among atheists, I can't say anything about atheists in general, but I certainly cannot say that they all think the world has a deep meaning that they're directly involved in.

So basically you're saying that as an atheist I have no idea what you're up to... Right, because you're not up to _anything_ that other atheists are up to. You're a heterogeneous mix of feelings and ideas that are mostly based in Western values but are held together loosely. I can look at a devout Christian and know that he's guided by his faith to taking up hard tasks and completing them diligently as part of his commitment to his faith.

<comment><USER22> > Sure it has merit to say that, generally speaking, Christianity espouses > responsibility and atheism does not.

How can a lack of belief espouse anything? Atheism isn't a religion. The rest of your post seems to lack that fundamental understanding.

> I certainly cannot say that they all think the world has a deep meaning that > they're directly involved in.

You also can't claim the converse, as noted atheism is a lack in belief systems, not a belief system unto itself. You're attacking straw men versions of atheists. Its like asking how many amps a battery has, or how many miles of work you can get from a gallon of gas. Without context the statements make no coherent sense.

<comment> hi-im-mi-ih I know you don't understand me but I'm basically saying that there is a religion that espouses responsibility, that has ancient relevance to the human race.

Then there is atheism which basically means follow nothing, do what you wish, which might mean that you're a great person nonetheless.

<comment><USER22> Atheism is a category. Aka those without diety is the literal definition.

Just as it would be wrong of me to say "All deists believe in the same god, that is why they don't take belief in different dieties seriously", its wrong to attach belief in responsibiliity to a category like atheism.

An example of the disparate groups that qualify as atheists: \- Antitheists \- Nihilists \- Some Agnostics \- Some Buddhists \- Some Stoics

Etc....

How you arrive at "atheism which basically means follow nothing" being attached to a category is beyond my ability to understand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > "We calculate that innovations to gaming/recreational computing since 2004 > explain on the order of half the increase in leisure for younger men."

And the other half is explained by the ready availability of free porn.

</comment><comment><USER24> Interesting. What effects might result from young men spending less time working?

<comment><USER25> They have less income to spend. This has mostly negative consequences. Lower economic stimulation is the most obvious. Of course, less income means other things too. Young men are living at home with their parents for longer, or in flophouse conditions. At least in the US, this is not a desirable quality to most females, meaning they are getting married later if at all. This means less children, which could mean a demographic crisis depending on which camp you believe. Also these people could be an eventual drain on society as they get older or retire.

<comment><USER26> Then again, depending on whether men worked too much or too little before, it could mean better work life balance. Unless you believe the proper amount of time to work is "all the time", there will be a point where people work a bit less and it is not end of world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> If only everyone had the luxury of time. Universal basic income FTW.

<comment><USER25> Someone still has to plant, grow and harvest the crops to make the food you eat. Someone still has to ensure the sewers work, the garbage is picked up etc. Most necessary jobs will not be done by robots for decades if ever. And they certainly wouldn't be done by humans for "funzies" until then.

In a fantasy world of perfect human virtue perhaps basic income will work, or maybe once Skynet becomes self aware. But it's a pipe dream on any kind of meaningful scale.

<comment><USER28> We could still pay people to do those jobs. We just might have to pay more for less desirable jobs, instead of what we seem to have now--the worst jobs are also the worst paid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hand wringing about perceived weak virtues of the youth. I expect an article referencing this in the new york times style section within the week.

<comment><USER29> Presented with data that youth today are falling behind in traditional markers for success, and you're response is mockery?

These are young adults who are not accomplishing anything with their time and will have little to show for their time when older. This is a serious social illness worthy of study.

<comment><USER3> It's interesting to note which social science papers hacker news decides to treat with reverence vs skepticism.

It's not a coincidence that a website which treats economic success as the apex cultural trait would cling to a study that validates their own feelings.

The startup narrative is a nasty one. If you don't see the economic results you expected it's easy to look outward and try to rationalize why video game playing losers seem to be content or indifferent while you struggle to solve the Big Problems only to be met with mediocre success.

The lack of introspection and wholesale othering that leads to completely subjective statements such as: people who play video games are "not accomplishing anything with their time" and they "will have little to show for their time when their older" \- are worse than depressing, they're the seeds of resentment, anger and aggression. Ironically it's this irrational hatred that's a social illness worthy of study.

<comment><USER29> I think you missed your mark by some ways. There's a mountain of options in between toiling away 80 hours a week on a startup and living in your parent's basement playing video games. Economic success is the measure of how people are able to provide for themselves and those they care about. Families cost money, houses cost money, living costs money. Someone has to provide the things people consume to live, and they don't want to be slaves to a basement dwelling slacker. If they want to do anything with their lives, and we all do if we want to have good mental health, they'll find a career, be it in startups or working their way up at the local supermarket.

<comment><USER3> The startup is a representation of social virtue, not just working but doing it independently and in service of personal goals. It's something people on this site deeply value. Work for people here _is who you are_. They don't get that's not true for everyone else. Worse than that, they want to pretend that's not true and prescribe a solution.

In regards to the rest of your comment: Do these economic dropouts want families? Do they want houses? What exactly are their lifestyle expectations and why exactly are they wrong?

The projection of deeply _personal_ values not just in your comment but in this thread are breathtaking. The inability to see that just because _you_ want something must mean that that's true for other human beings is disturbingly common here.

Why are people so concerned and threatened by people they consider to be losers? That's not a rhetorical question. Are you afraid these people are going to ruin your lifestyle by doing.....nothing? If they're happy and they have close to zero impact on your life why exactly are they scapegoats for so much wrong in the world? And before you say "well they're not happy", many of the examples of unhappy "basement dwellers" in this thread are described as people close to suicidal because they want to live one way but society says their expectations should be another. It's all such a big mess and I really feel for these kids calling into suicide hotlines over thinking they're failures by some bullshit external standard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Not sure I buy a xbone one as a leisure luxury playing polo, skiing or a season ticket to Man U id agree.

</comment><comment><USER31> My observation is that teens are taking jobs that were previously done by undocumented immigrants who have left due to the current political climate. I expect immigration policy could be more closely correlated with young men's labor than video games.

<comment><USER18> Well let's get right to the facts.

Fact: the US is not losing undocumented / illegal immigrants at an abnormally high rate. That's a myth. Trump has hardly moved the needle at all when it comes to illegal immigration. Everything to the contrary is propaganda pushed by the media for pathetic political points / ratings.

Obama deported more people in an average year than Trump has in his first year. He was known in immigration circles as the deporter in chief for it.

[http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obamas-deportation-policy- num...](http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obamas-deportation-policy- numbers/story?id=41715661)

"Illegal immigration on border surges back to Obama levels"

[https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/dec/15/illegal- imm...](https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/dec/15/illegal-immigration- border-back-obama-levels/)

<comment><USER31> Those are relevant facts but they leave out immigrants who are leaving voluntarily. I couldn't find anything within the last 6 months but there was recently a net outflow of undocumented immigrants [0]

[http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2017/apr/26/r...](http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2017/apr/26/ron- kind/yes-experiencing-net-outflow-illegal-undocumented-/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Someone linked me to this roughly a year ago, and it seemed like the most obvious example of correlation != causation. I'm not sure how it got published, really.

<comment><USER26> This article is from July 2017. It did not existed a year ago.

<comment><USER33> Here's an older version dated September 15, 2016 (which is 1 year, 5 months ago):

[https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~nwilliam/Econ702_files/abch.pdf](https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~nwilliam/Econ702_files/abch.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Uh-oh. This is the kind of thing the popular fakenuz press reads, misunderstands, and turns into bogus headlines like "All millenials are slackers."

<comment><USER21> I don't think that it's that they misunderstand.

I think that it's because they make more money by making it divisive and emotion driven.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is pointing out that young men are spending more time on the computer, particularly playing games. Obviously because online games have gotten much better in the last 15 years. If people choose to spend more time doing a thing because it is more compelling that is not bad.

<comment><USER36> I wouldn't assume that was the only cause. It could be that online games are more addicting (they are), or maybe that they're using it as a tool to cope with depression (I definitely know people that do).

Just because people choose to spend more time drinking, doesn't mean it's not bad. They could just be turning into alcoholics.

<comment><USER37> The narrative of coping with depression by playing video games seems reasonable but the data in the paper seem to show that there was an uptick in self-reported happiness in the segment playing the most games. That seemed to read to me as, crudely, "games make you happy and lazy" (namely they lower workforce participation). Happy to hear of a better way to read the data.</comment></comment></comment>