Arrived – a new model of home ownership - <AUTHOR> https://arrivedhomes.com/ <comment><USER4> This is not only not new, but is the standard model for how home loans work in Islamic finance.

Since Islam forbids collecting interest, Sharia-compliant banks and lending institutions instead _buy_ the asset (in this case, a house), and lease it out to the would-be borrower on an installment basis until a predetermined sum has been paid. At that point, ownership can either remain with the bank (but with zero installments) or transition to the would-be borrower.

About the only thing Arrived seems to be doing differently is allowing homeowners to change houses without affecting how much they're paying towards any house - in other words, you're really purchasing a subscription to a collection of homes.

I find this latter concept intriguing, but hard to reason about competitively. Wouldn't the subscription price point have to be higher than interest on a single home loan to offset the average cost of all of these houses?

<comment><USER4> After reading more closely, it looks like it's not a full-fledged subscription model. Your "subscription" is your monthly rent, which goes from 1k to 10k per month. I don't understand if these "rents" are negotiable or come pre-attached to any specific house.

Further, "home equity" is a weird term in this context. Home equity is a mark of ownership and makes clear sense in the cass of a single home - 100% home equity in a single house means you get 100% of all the profits after that house is sold. The total number of "shares" for a single house is fixed and never changes, meaning home equity never dilutes. For a collection of homes in this model, it's murkier because new renters and new houses would impact the number of "shares" available.

Does Arrived plan to distribute profits to renters after any home is sold to all of its renters? Does Arrived plan to sell houses in the first place? Does my "home equity" dilute as more people sign up to use the service?

I wish there was an FAQ page to really address these risks. As it stands, I would be interested since I like the idea of being able to move from any property to another property without negotiating a new lease or contract - <USER2> means I'm not locked to any particular economic region.

<comment><USER5> > Further, "home equity" is a weird term in this context. Home equity is a > mark of ownership and makes clear sense in the cass of a single home - 100% > home equity in a single house means you get 100% of all the profits after > that house is sold. The total number of "shares" for a single house is fixed > and never changes, meaning home equity never dilutes. For a collection of > homes in this model, it's murkier because new renters and new houses would > impact the number of "shares" available.

If I understand correctly, I think they're thinking of it more like credit. When you make payments to them, you accrue "equity credit". You may exchange that equity credit for a given home, if it reaches whatever value threshold that home has. You can apply your equity credits to any home in their collection, however each home will require a different amount to purchase, and a different monthly payment to live in.

I think it's a really clever and really interesting idea, if i'm understanding it correctly.

<comment><USER4> Then I have even more questions, because in order to offset operating recurring costs for Arrived, that "equity credit" can't be a one-to-one mapping to the house's actual value - it has to offset costs for maintaining the house for you.

In other words, if you use your "equity credit" to take a house for yourself, you could end up paying more than the house is actually worth.

<comment><USER6> Of course you end up paying more than the house is worth, just as you would if you paid down a mortgage with interest.

<comment><USER7> Moreover, you'd have to pay for maintenance even if you outright owned the house.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's going to be one hell of a "our amazing journey" email that informs customers they don't have a home any more...

<comment><USER9> Indeed. If (when?) these guys fail, their assets, i.e. your home, will be liquidated. And you probably won't get your "investment" back either, you'll just have paid inflated rent for awhile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm curious why no one's tried a modern spin on housing co-ops. The big advantage of owning comes from locking your housing costs against inflation/future price increases, as one is naturally short housing. Why can't I buy into a general fund with similar benefits?

e.g. Write a contract such that equity is accrued over time, while I pay dividends on the "financed" portion of the home. This would also provide a hedge for home owners against their home price going down as the fund's assets would be spread across multiple markets.

As an individual I'd net out to the same investment position as if I sold the equity portion of my home to a REIT, then re-invested the money into the same REIT.

<comment><USER11> Disagree that the big advantage of owning comes from locking in housing costs.

That's part of it, sure, but the biggest reason for me is permanence. I want a place I know that I'll be able to call home in 20 years. Homeownership achieves that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's a whole slew of home ownership startups recently; I was recently buying a house and checked them out.

Board ([https://board.live](https://board.live)) lets you make a cash offer instead of a

Zerodown ([https://zerodown.com](https://zerodown.com)) and Unison ([https://unison.com](https://unison.com)) I believe have a similar models to Arrived, with some different specifics.

Generally, they seem to be a response to how hard it is for millenials to buy homes [1]. I did the numbers on ZeroDown, and it seems to be a good deal for someone early in their careers who is faced with high rent and student loans to pay off, given their other choice is waiting 15-20 years to save up a down- payment (during which time prices will have tripled again).

[1] AFAICT, this is due to the complete refusal of every city in the US to zone and build enough homes to keep up with demand, as well the student debt crisis, general wealth inequality, and similar stuff.

<comment><USER13> Also Haus ([https://haus.com/](https://haus.com/)) founded by Garrett Camp (Uber co-founder, StumbleUpon founder)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> On the surface it looks like a bad deal, because you could rent, put the same 7% of your rent into a mutual fund and/or get compound interest on your investment. By what mechanic will the effective in-network rent be lower than the market rent, and there's also the question of selection.

The biggest concern is what happens when the company folds? What if after liquidation they don't have enough value to pay out everyone's investments. Do seed investors get paid out first?

</comment><comment><USER15> Hi HN, I'm Ryan, one of the co-founders of Arrived. Feel free to ask us anything about the service and I'll try to answer some of the questions that have already been posted. And of course all of your feedback is deeply appreciated!

<comment><USER16> \- have you defined what would happen if Arrived went bankrupt?

\- would I buy homeowners insurance or renters insurance?

\- Who has authority/responsibility for major work on the house?

<comment><USER15> > have you defined what would happen if Arrived went bankrupt?

I posted this above, but thought it might be helpful to repost here. Arrived the company and Arrived the fund (which owns the homes) are separate entities. Arrived the company is the manager of the fund, but the fund assets are protected in it's own entity. Members of the service invest as LPs in the fund and would have the option to exchange their shares based on the income and value of the homes. If all fund LPs wanted to exchange their shares, the fund may need to sell its ownership position in the portfolio of homes and each member would receive their share accordingly.

> would I buy homeowners insurance or renters insurance?

The Arrived fund carries homeowners insurance and our members carry renters insurance.

> Who has authority/responsibility for major work on the house?

Currently improvements on the house can be performed by the member with approval from Arrived. Members can submit an improvement project request and go from there. For major home maintenance items: New Roof, HVAC, Plumbing, Electrical, etc., these are the responsibility of Arrived.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> 100% guarantee that this is a mediocre-at-best deal now, and that it will gradually get worse over time as tech bro MBAs hit their quarterly targets by tweaking the terms to be shittier, shittier, and shittier.

reference: uber driver pay over time

<comment><USER18> Actually if you're referencing uber driver pay, it starts out excellent, and goes down gradually.

We've also had something similar with Islamic style insurance/takaful. Money is put into a pool and the takaful fund managers take a service fee for managing it. The people who joined early got awesome plans. The ones who joined later got mediocre ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Looks a little sketchy to me. Seems there is almost no real information on the site.

<comment><USER18> Typical of startups. Make landing page. Get email adresses. Pitch to investors. Actually build the product later.

<comment><USER20> I completely understand that sentiment, but lot of the work an industry like this is actually offline. Working through securities and real estate laws, building the data model to evaluate property purchases, raising capital to purchase the properties, and managing/supporting our residents. We had to put in all of that leg work to get to where we're at now.

<comment><USER19> There is just no way I would trust the people who put up that website with something as important as the place where I live and the amount of money that's involved. I think the site is a negative. It would probably have been better to stay silent until you can put out real information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Recently had a startup school interaction with this startup -- congratz on making it to the front page!

Pretty interesting concept, although I don't know how it'll work long term, I'll be keeping an eye on this. Personally, I have my doubts that it'll really impact renters, but we shall see. Definitely _should_ incentivize renters to be more careful to their homes, but for a few dollars back a month, I don't know if materially it'll impact poor renters.

<comment><USER14> It could work if they have a very large portfolio in high-demand areas and can save on administration costs.

<comment><USER22> Sounds like they are buying the places that people wanted to move into so the fund will naturally own houses in demand to some extent.

<comment><USER20> Correct. It's a little bit of both. We both select housing markets that meet various criterium we've set as well as seeing where customer demand drives us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Essentially this is a loan without requiring down payment or credit score, and you can quit the loan anytime in the middle. There is no commitment therefore no need of qualification.

The trick is this must be in an amount much higher than rental. While you may choose to leave the lease with some "equity", the truth is landlord borrowed money from the renter in the meantime and earn interest.

The only question is, what's the law and regulation around this model?

</comment><comment><USER24> How is this better than just renting and also putting some money into a reit each month?

Edit: I suppose one reason would be if you want to rent, but you like a house that's not on the rental market. Any others?

<comment><USER25> There are other startups in this space. I am not sure that it is better than renting. For example, one risk that seems under-appreciated is the possibility of Arrived (or similar startup) going bankrupt. In a general market downturn, it is possible that Arrived would become insolvent. In such a scenario, you are their creditor. That means you will lose some or all of your investment, and probably your home.

<comment><USER26> That's a big question. As in "who really owns the property" and "is this a a real investment fund?"

They filed with the SEC.[1] But just a no-info Form D.

If this was legit, I'd expect it to be set up as a Real Estate Investment Trust. The REIT would own the properties, borrow at bulk rates, tenants buy shares in the REIT, and the company behind the web site is the fund manager. That way, if the management company goes bust, the tenants still have their equity.

[1] [https://sec.report/CIK/0001780774](https://sec.report/CIK/0001780774)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> When I started down the path of buying my current home I'd wished for a "Buy the house I want and give me a lease on it" service. Buying, owning, and eventually selling come with hassles and risks that I'd rather have avoided but the available rental inventory in my area didn't really have what I wanted.

Kudos.

<comment><USER15> Thank you! This is exactly what we wanted as well :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Interesting model towards home ownership that might work for certain clients - those who wish to own with flexibility and those who wish in invest in residential real estate with minimized risk. Clever.

BUT, not sure if this is a good investment vehicle. how is this different than investing with a PE firm or hedge fund without diversification (real estate only)? What is the rate of return here; all subject to the real estate market condition. I

</comment><comment><USER29> It sounds great... But it probably isn't, at least for the "client".

The only way Arrived can build a sustainable business is by doing what Opendoor is already doing - either buy low, or sell high.

It might be good to build equity... But you start with a big disadvantage, and statistically you are going to be worse than if you simply invested in other types of funds.

</comment><comment><USER30> Nowadays the home mortgage interest deduction is, for some homeowners, overshadowed by the new large standard deduction. I think that fact makes this model of home ownership a little more acceptable since this model does not seem to include the mortgage interest deduction anyway.

But it seems sort of like buying shares of an REIT or something.

<comment><USER31> I wonder how the pricing affects taxes on this.

On a home, the salt is capped. But if you are not directly paying salt, maybe it is different?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I don't understand the math. I put in 2000 monthly rent, initial investment 50000, and 36 months of stay. That spits out a return of 72784, so my capital grew by 22784 dollars. In other words, in this particular example, 632.89 dollars per month were saved up for me. How is this 7% of something? What's the formula for calculating this?

I first thought the system might be crazy and promise 7% _monthly_ compound interest since 2000 * 1.07 ^ 36 = 22847.88, which squares pretty well with the number above. But doubling the time to 72 months only grows to a "profit" of 63000 dollars rather than 261000. So that's good, but then I don't understand how this is calculated.

<comment><USER15> The Initial Investment and 7% of rent are two separate mechanisms that contribute to the ending investment value at the end of the term. Your initial investment will grow at an annual rate based on the performance of the fund + 7% of your rent will be contributed.

<comment><USER32> OK, so most of the return is based on the initial investment, not the rent? And it's based on an assumed annual rate that you cannot guarantee and that you don't even disclose in the example? That doesn't inspire confidence.

<comment><USER15> It depends on the initial investment size, if the initial investment is large enough then it will make up a larger portion. The projected annual returns are listed on the /invest page.

<comment><USER32> > The projected annual returns are listed on the /invest page.

Gotcha, thanks. It would be really good to have a bit of that information next to the calculator on the landing page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This looks like a lease option with extra steps.

</comment><comment><USER34> Curious what happens in the event the company folds?

</comment><comment><USER35> Great company name.

</comment><comment><USER6> The example given is approx. $5k equity from $54k of rental payments, or around 15%

Obviously the rental payments will be inflated to account for this.

</comment><comment><USER36> I was curious what mathematics this startup uses to calculate your return on investment. Based on my research (you can verify it by plugging in identical values on their site), this is the formula they use (written in Python):

</comment><comment>===

STARTCODE

</comment><comment>===

annual_interest_percentage = 9.75

duration_of_stay = 36

rent_back_percentage = 7.

rent_monthly = 1500.

seed_investment = 3000.

invested_rent = round(rent_monthly * duration_of_stay)

monthly_investment = rent_monthly * (rent_back_percentage / 100.)

appreciate = seed_investment

for _ in range(duration_of_stay):

        appreciate = appreciate + monthly_investment

        appreciate = appreciate + (appreciate * annual_interest_percentage / 1200.)

appreciated_investment = round(appreciate)

roi = appreciated_investment - <USER3>

</comment><comment>===

ENDCODE

</comment><comment>===

We can gain a few valuable insights from this:

1) Arrived will be investing some portion of the money you provide them (no surprise there).

2) They are assuming they can get 9.75% annual returns on their investment.

3) For the values plugged in above ($1500/month rent, living in same place for 3 years), the ROI is $-45,579.

4) With the values from item 3, if your "seed_investment" is $37,601 or higher, your ROI is positive.

5) For a place like SF ($4000/month rent, living in same place for 3 years), the ROI is $-121,545.

What pisses me off about Arrived is the snake oil. All the language on their site makes it seem like you're going to be having a stake in the ownership, but you never will. They use the term "home" not as something you own but as the place you live, yet the context makes it sound like ownership. Arrived will keep the home after you're done. Know what they don't say? If you're liable for repairs on the property. Because they're selling this as a way to "build home ownership," I'd wager the leaser will be responsible. If so, they're trying to be landlords who shirk responsibility.

They're a financial investment firm buying up property without the obligations of being a landlord.

At first, I thought this was an example of a land contract [1]. However, this is almost more nefarious. At least with a land contract, the buyer is guaranteed the deed. (Unfortunately, land contract firms often target the poor. Contracts may have a clause where the buyer forfeits their right to the deed if they miss a monthly payment. These contracts will also often require the buyer to pay for upkeep on the property.) With so many large companies snapping up real estate and driving prices higher and higher, it seems likely there's a bubble that could pop.

References:

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

</comment><comment><USER37> So... It's a landlord whose tenants invest into an investment fund on top of their rent.

IMHO, these are things that don't mix.</comment>


Show HN: I created a (hopefully fast) C++ lib to find words in ASCII sequences - <AUTHOR> Hi,
to provide a bit context, I'm the author of a small causal android game called "Squabbel"[1] which is a modern take on a merge of tetris and scrabble.
Its core is based around the idea to find strings within a sequence of characters, which is accomplished by using a deterministic finite automaton.
Currently I'm working on the successor of Squabbel and I was optimizing the internal search engine and refactored the code to a c++ library which is now available on github
https://github.com/0x10/fastdict
The search times are to my needs pretty good and I would love to get some feedback on the performance.
Thanks.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cc.deadlock.squabbel.lite <comment><USER2> Cool! Seems similar to the Aho-Corasick algorithm, which was designed for exactly this task ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aho%E2%80%93Corasick_algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aho%E2%80%93Corasick_algorithm))

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow.. I'm a bit ashamed as I searched for algorithms on that topic but was obviously unable to get the right keywords to find that one. Thanks for pointing it out. I will look into that one more deeply, but on the first glance its basically the same algorithm.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: easy noprocrast loophole - <AUTHOR>

There is a frustratingly easy way to circumvent "noprocrast", defeating its purpose. For example, in Firefox, you can use "private browsing" (Shift-Apple-P on a Mac).<p>Would it be a good idea to track IP addresses to make it a bit harder to work around the noprocrast delay? <comment><USER2> If you are that addicted already then you'll probably need to use something like this:

<http://visitsteve.com/work/selfcontrol/> \- For Mac OS X

<http://www1.k9webprotection.com/> \- For Windows, designed to block porn but it can block any site you want.

Have fun!

<comment><USER3> <http://www.opendns.com> is another way to block sites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> An easier loophole is to go straight to <http://news.ycombinator.com/logout>. Then you can continue reading.

If you're really struggling, seriously try working on a computer without an internet connection (See <http://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html>).</comment>


The Amiga Demoscene Mixtape Vol. 1 [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7WyhlRetU0 <comment><USER3> Scoopex has a video series of Amiga demo programming starting all the way from the basics of using an assembler: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p83QUZ1-P10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p83QUZ1-P10)

I would have killed for this back when I had an A500. It seemed like dark magic and all I could find was a book on ASM game programming tricks, which was too advanced for me.

<comment><USER4> In a sense, Amiga demos were actually open source. Coders wrote in assembly, which is a short step from machine code. As most demos were compressed, it required an additional step to get to the actual machine code before you could disassemble. Alternatively using a cartridge like Datel's Action Replay makes it possible to dump the relevant routines to disk. Granted that reading disassembled code is a little more difficult than the original code, it is enough to learn how various demo routines were implemented.

<comment><USER5> Ever since the term "open source" was coined in 1998, it has had a precise definition[1], and according to that definition, most (all?) Amiga demos are _not_ open source.

1: [http://opensource.org/definition](http://opensource.org/definition)

<comment><USER4> It should have been clear I was referring to the spirit of sharing in the Amiga demo scene itself.

It was no secret people were looking at each other's code. Reviewing the code was a way to learn about how to implement demo routines. But it was also a practical way to learn about programming the machine itself. Things you will not find in any manual.

I was not making a claim about licensing. Perhaps you are not familiar with the notion of a metaphor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Oddly it makes me sad, one because I remember it fondly (the BADGE group some of the early demo contests) and it was fun to code them up, but today its not nearly so fun even though you can make things look so much better. Writing code for the Amiga was so much more fun than writing code for the PC. I'd love to figure out how to create such a fun environment again.

<comment><USER7> I have never played with an Amiga so I am curious as to what made it so fun to write code for?

<comment><USER8> Consider that when the Amiga arrived most PCs had monochrome text only displays, and the PC speaker was the only sound option. In 1987 VGA arrived and you would start to get the opportunity to compete with still images, but it still took a while before most PCs would use more than 16 colours. And prior to the Soundblaster in 1989, most PC users still had no proper sound. And until 1995 most PC users had not used a pre-emptively multitasking OS.

Meanwhile the Amiga shipped with a fully multitasking windowed OS, 4096 colours, higher resolutions (until VGA), the copper (a coprocessor that let you update things like the palette and video registers synced to the raster beam, e.g. to let you combine multiple graphics modes on the same screen, or duplicate hardware sprites multiple times on the screen without involving the CPU), the blitter (letting you move areas of memory; geared towards moving graphical objects while the CPU did other things), 4 voices of sampled music, and a CPU (M68000) that was simply far more pleasant to program for.

For most of us who saw Amigas in the early days, the PC looked like a dinosaur.

<comment><USER9> The Amiga was ridiculously ahead of its time until 1995, when Windows 95 came out and pretty much crushed everything else.

That year is when I realized it was time to sell my Amiga and buy a PC because the future had just jumped to a different hardware architecture.

To me, booting Windows 95 was as jaw dropping as seeing the ray traced juggler demo and Marble Madness on an Amiga 1000 Kickstart 1.0 in 1986.

<comment><USER10> And if you weren't impressed by Windows, by that time Linux was quite good on the PC if you built it with Linux in mind. And you could still dual boot to DOS games.

<comment><USER11> Linux was horrendous on PCs in 1995. First of all, OP is talking about hardware support: switching OSs doesn't give you a copper, or a soundcard with four voice wavetable synthesis.

Linux was slightly convenient on PC in 1995 if you really cared about: (1) a basically Unix-y userland, with all the good and bad that implies. Shells and stuff worked better than cygwin (2) tcp stack (3) gcc

That's really it. X was a fucking nightmare to get to work "correctly" and then, as now, "correctly" on X means "it handles a remote networking case no one cares about better than the alternatives but still poorly, and everything else about it is totally broken."

Hardware support for every feature that was becoming interesting in PCs in 1995 (basically anything where economies of scale were making interesting stuff cheap) was absolutely terrible on Linux. Drivers for PC hardware, even the kind of PC hardware nerds liked (SCSI CD-ROM drives) were super flaky or non-existent. Application software was horrendous. There was no support at all for anything that still had a licensing regime around codecs, which, at the time included all the media software.

Linux was "quite good" in that you could set it up in a corner of your house and run httpd. That was dope in 1995. But compared to Amiga as a user-facing hacking desktop, it sucked shit. Hell, it sucked shit compared to a PC running Windows or a Mac.

Seriously, find a 486SX/25 w/ 4MB ram, a 160MB disk, a decent modem, and an S3 video card and put like, Yggdrasil on it. It will be way less fun to fuck around w/ than an old Amiga/Mac/NeXT/BeBox/SGI....at least in 1995 an Intel machine running DOS could run DOOM. It's probably the least-fun hardware/os combo from 1995 you could dredge up to play with.

<comment><USER8> In 95, I ran X on 486's w/16MB RAM, and an Amiga 3000 with a Picasso II and an Apollo (?) accelerator. While I still held on to the Amiga 3000 and loved it, I don't agree Linux was that painful hen.

And of course it would be worse than BeBox, SGI, NeXT. SGI and NeXT were high end work stations (or above). We had SGI Indy's at uni that they'd gotten at near cost from the distributor at about 3x the cost of the my souped up Amiga 3000... BeBox was a PPC SMP box - it was where many of us had hoped the Amiga was headed.

I held on to the Amiga 3000 for 2-3 more years, but mostly out of loyalty and nostalgia at that point. I still loved (and love) the OS, but already in '95 it was on borrowed time and it cost a fortune to tack on enough third party add ons to make it viable. And the lack of software was becoming a problem - <USER2> colleague and I even spoke o Escom at the time about writing a browser for them, because the available Amiga web browsers were already then lagging behind he times.

And in '95 people _did_ care about the "remote networking case no one cares about". At university, we also had old Sun servers that served up apps for dozens of dumb X11 terminals each. At work, by '96 5 of us ran all our applications off a single 120MHz Pentium w/128MB RAM, using our 486's as terminals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Something modern on Amiga: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsJnMWX1qa0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsJnMWX1qa0)

There is a Bad Apple on an oscilloscope and a TI calculator so obviously there would be an Amiga version. Not as impressive as the Commodore C64 version which is an insane feat of compression: [http://csdb.dk/release/?id=131628](http://csdb.dk/release/?id=131628) (reminds me of the famous state of the art amiga demo).

Briefly Bad Apple was a sport akin to porting Doom to the most unexpected platform you could think of.

<comment><USER13> That shadow demo is all pre rendered though right? Like stats of the art?

<comment><USER14> The file extension was .anim, It's probably a standard IFF ANIM file. It's a format that contains RLE encoded diff-XOR-data(so you can play the video backwards).

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are still a number of groups making amazing Amiga demos for the original hardware. For example, this is Rift by The Black Lotus (2014): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXDlWHqzSTg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXDlWHqzSTg)

</comment><comment><USER15> It's strange but when I see a video of the Amiga demoscene I feel nostalgia for a time I didn't experience (I started with a 286).

</comment><comment><USER16> It was this kind of demo-scene programming in which DHH was utterly _uninterested_ in.

"I had a bunch of friends who I loved dearly, but in many ways were exhibiting all the traditional programmer stereotype themes of being just overly focused on things I didn't think mattered and at that time programming perhaps also was a little bit different. Growing up, programming was assembler and C. I had a lot of friends in what was called the 'demo scene', which is mostly an European thing where you had all these guys on the Commodore 64 and on the Amiga writing these really awesome visual displays of various kinds, and all that stuff was usually in assembler. I had absolutely zero interest in learning or doing anything with assembler, it just didn't make any sense to me at all.

I only really got interested in programming when I stumbled across languages that made sense to me on the level that makes sense to me, which is at the very least high level languages like Java, PHP, or whatever have you, anything that's above the "I have to dick around with pointers" or I actually have to move memory spaces around; that stuff has absolutely zero interest to me at all.

I didn't start programming until I was in my late twenties, and even then I didn't start programming because I wanted to be a programmer. I started programming because I wanted a few programs. And that was apparently the easiest way to get there because the other way of getting programs is that you actually have to talk to programmers, which is surprisingly painful at times. I found that the easiest way was just to pick it up and learn it myself."

Source: [http://www.transcribed-interview.com/dhh-rails-david- heineme...](http://www.transcribed-interview.com/dhh-rails-david-heinemeier- hansson-interview-randal-schwartz-floss.html)

<comment><USER17> Thanks for the DHH quote. When I first watched the vid, I couldn't figure out what was going on and what the purpose was. The DHH quote was perfectly timed because it explained the context of these types of demonstrations: to make cool looking stuff for its own sake, rather than writing super practical programs.

I first got into programming in high school when I took AP Computer Science. To be honest, I hated it and didn't pick up web development until several years after that experience. I thought programming sucked. I literally said multiple times, "I will never program. This is the worst!" I think there were two reasons for this: the programs I was writing were impractical combined with pressure to perform well in the class. It's tough teaching a beginning programming class because most start at the CLI. Although the CLI is great at helping students learn the basics of programming (e.g., loops, conditionals, OOP, etc.), it still left me wanting more. Back then, I was still at a loss as to how someone would write a GUI program, similar to the programs I used all of the time on a computer, not the CLI "junk" I was writing for class.

Nonetheless, I picked up web development on my own time and the experience has been incredible. I even developed a preference for the CLI in the practical productivity CLI tools afford a web developer (e.g., git, touch, mkdir, ssh, psql, etc.) And I must admit that basic programming skills that I learned in AP Comp Sci gave me a leg up in getting started, thereby making the path to writing practical stuff for the web a lot shorter.

I guess it's kind of vain for me to share my personal story here, but I bet others had a similar experience. If you took an intro programming class in HS or University and you hated it, give programming another shot. This time, you won't have to worry about a grade or writing shitty programs you don't care about. Start a project, get coding, and I think you'll fall in love.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> For those interested in digging deeper :)

WinUAE Demo Toolchain 5: [http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=65625](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=65625)

And here you can find plenty old and new demos for all sorts of platforms: [http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php](http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php)

Enjoy!

</comment><comment><USER19> My favourite demo, blows me away even now...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Jdi3I3Ep6k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Jdi3I3Ep6k)

</comment><comment><USER20> If you like this, you would probably appreciate [http://www.mindcandydvd.com/](http://www.mindcandydvd.com/)</comment>


We tried to publish a replication of a Science paper in Science - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/technology/2019/06/science-replication-conservatives-liberals-reacting-to-threats.html <comment><USER3> The Associate Editor of Science who rejected this paper when it was submitted happens to be my wife's friend. They have been having long discussions about this issue. My understanding is that although it's a valid study, it just doesn't bring anything new to the table that is worthy of publication. This paper refutes a 2008 paper that has already been refuted. So the Associate Editor decided there is no reason why this new refutation deserves to be published in Science. That's all.

I don't think there is any case of scientific malpractice here. Keep in mind a high-profile journal like Science is extremely competitive and receives many paper submissions. They _have_ to filter what they choose to publish based on some reason. And it seems to me their reason is perfectly valid.

Now this is turning into a bigger dispute because the researchers started arguing with the Associate Editor on Twitter (I heard the verb "harass".) So he blocked them on Twitter. And this is making them more upset. Etc.

<comment><USER4> This paper refutes a 2008 paper that has already been refuted.

Could you cite?

<comment><USER3> I don't know, sorry. I'm just repeating what I heard from my wife. I will ask her.

<comment><USER5> I think this would be strong evidence for _why_ this should be published, even if some no-name journal happened to publish a refutation at some unknown time in the past. I just searched for the paper 'Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits' on Google Scholar and found a large number of papers citing the paper in question, and searches on regular search engines turn up an even more vast number of mass media references to the paper. Yet I'm unable to find any reference to any replications of such including with keyword tuning.

Whatever replication come refutation there may have been seems to have eluded not only society, but also scientists at large. I do believe both her and Science that the study was refuted at some point, but if nobody knows this and people keep assuming the study is meaningful - then this refutation is completely meaningless. Science as a journal brings the eyeballs and thus has, in my opinion, an obligation to publish data indicating that extremely influential studies they have previously published are likely flawed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting. The fundamental question is: do journals have an ethical obligation to publish credible results which refute previously published results in the journal?

The authors argue yes. I'm not sure myself -- what is a refutation vs. a different perspective/interpretation or other addition and where do you draw a line?

But it's intriguing to think if this would be a meaningful force for better results -- and could be an incentive to replicate findings you think might not hold up, just from being in a prestigious journal.

<comment><USER7> No. This belongs in a journal dedicated to the field of study, not a general issue journal like Science.

The authors are silly to think otherwise. It is also not surprising that Science published a flashy article without a lot of oomph behind it. It's what they do.

<comment><USER8> So a journal can get a free pass on an obvious violation of scientific ethics just by saying that they're a general issue journal?

The field of study has nothing to do with it. If a journal publishes a result, they are ethically obligated to publish further work that refutes that result.

<comment><USER9> "If a journal publishes a result, they are ethically obligated to publish further work that refutes that result."

Too general. Few in science would accept this. The claim here is the weaker one that journals are ethically obliged to accept failed replication studies - and even that is non-obvious to me. (Should Science also be obliged to accept _successful_ replications? No? So it should accept papers on the basis solely of the results? Hello, publication bias.)

<comment><USER10> Nice attempt at reframing there, but if this new paper is correct then it's not a 'failed replication', it's a refutation. Big difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Science is facing a 'reproducibility crisis' where more than two-thirds of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, research suggests."

[https://www.bbc.com/news/science- environment-39054778](https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39054778)

As such, this would seem to be a common occurrence and Science would have to decide whether to devote equal attention to every failed reproduction.

<comment><USER12> > this would seem to be a common occurrence and Science would have to decide > whether to devote equal attention to every failed reproduction

I think the answer to this is a rather blatant "of course!"

If Science has the time to support false studies that retrograde the scientific cause, it certainly has the time to publish their corrections and refutations. The scientific process is not about how much stuff you can publish, it's about how much _true information_ you can convey. A journal half the size of Science but twice as trustworthy is at least as valuable, if not vastly more.

<comment><USER13> > I think the answer to this is a rather blatant "of course!"

It's not as blatant as you think. It takes experienced scientists to review submitted papers, and their time is an expensive resource. Is it interesting that a research team with a sloppy adherence to a methodology failed to replicate a study? Not really. Should Science give resources and a platform to people who are just careless researchers? Obviously not. It's easy to fail to replicate an experiment; just do a bad job.

<comment><USER14> There's an implication in your argument that the science posted in the journal is of a good enough quality to be published - otherwise why wouldn't you apply the same standard you are applying here? Doing a bad job isn't limited to just reproduction.

Considering the reproducibility crisis, is it your position that people are worse at reproducing research than they are at conducting it? An alternative interpretation would be that people have more incentive to publish hastily- made "failed to reproduce" papers than they have "findings" papers, but I don't think that's the case either, especially considering the reply from Science to this case.

<comment><USER15> I think the rationale for Science to say they already fulfilled their obligations the first time around is that they thoroughly scrutinized the methodology used the first time around. This is asking them to now scrutinize two methodologies used and for less payoff than the first time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The original paper was an n=46 study, and they have regression equations there with 5 coefficients. It has been known for a long time that you can't successfully adjust for confounding variables with such small data. The fact it didn't reproduce is easily predicted and hardly noteworthy. Everybody in the field is aware of this issue. This article is just a bunch of academics tooting their own horn. The Journal's response to their request was 'Who cares?', and this is the right answer.

<comment><USER17> They published it. Clearly everyone didn't know that was nonsense or they knowingly published garbage because it would make for nice press and now they refuse to retract it. Either its shameful behavior in the past, or shameful behavior now, or maybe both.

If my friend asks me what the score in lasts night's game was, and I tell him 4-3, but then later realize that it was actually 4-2, I'll send him a txt to correct the mistake. If your argument is that a lower standard applies to one of the premier scientific journals, I think that's pretty messed up.

<comment><USER16> There is a reproducibility crisis in psychological research. The main reason for this is that the experimental methods they use are not robust (although they might be rigorous). A second reason for this crisis is that the things they are measuring are often hard to actually define (eg is there a definition of 'conservative views' that we can all agree on, and does any such categorization in an experiment really mirror external reality?).

In reality what happened with the first paper is the editors of the journal sent it out for review, and whoever reviewed it was happy that it met the methodological standards considered sufficient at the time. This is not the same as being happy that it was true. You might consider that 'messed up' (and you are right, it is messed up), but that was how the sausage was made in psychology research in 2008. There is no galactic council that imposes standards of evidence in a journal. They rely on the reviewers, and the reviewers are active researchers in the field.

As an aside, publication in a top journal is not a guarantee that results are water tight, and should never be considered as such. If you want to believe a result, you need to read the paper and think about it carefully. Even then, this approach is susceptible to outright fraud, which also does happen.

<comment><USER17> If we have a reproducibility crisis in psychological research, it seems to me like one of the best things we can do to address it is to incentivize people to try reproduce other group's findings. It's not sexy and it won't earn headlines, but it is important. The absolute best way to kill such an effort is for a journal that published a bad study to refuse to even consider publishing a study that refutes it.

<comment><USER16> You've misdiagnosed the problem. The best thing we can do is incentivize research psychologists to produce robust research in the first place. This is unfortunately at odds with publishing lots of papers, making money off pop- psych books and giving TED talks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Replication might suggest they obtained the same results.

A better title for laypeople would be "We _refuted_ a Science paper that can't be replicated and Science won't publish it"

<comment><USER19> Except that's not how science works. Publishing a paper with contradictory result is not a refutation. It's a data point.

<comment><USER18> I'm not educated in how it works for this kind of (sociological? Psychological?) experiment but finding repeated instances - as per the trials reported in the article - seems like more than just a data point. They have many more negative data points than the original paper had positive ones

In pure formal logic they have at least proved it is not true for all cases, so it's a refutation in that sense at least

But in any case, "refutation" is closer in popular lingo to what happened than "replication"

<comment><USER19> This gets into deep philosophical questions. Logic can be deductive or inductive. Your use of formal logic implies deductive logic, but empirical science is inductive.

With induction, one can only have negative knowledge (this is know as the problem of induction or the black swan problem), but it gets more complicated than that. Most studies are trying to look at probabilistic outcomes and are trying to get significant p-values. There is a myriad of problems with this beyond simply the existing probability that their sample was bias. E.g., their methodology could be improper, or even just less than ideal. There could even be unknown problems with the underlying assumptions and the model being used by researches.

To suggest that an opposite result _refutes_ a previously obtained result deeply mis-characterizes how science and human understanding works, and the problems inherent in this thought process deeply overvalues the knowledge we have and undervalues the more-than-likely seriously uncertain data we work with every day.

If you're interested in these problems, i'd suggest Karl Popper's work on philosophy of science.

<comment><USER18> Thanks for your comment, I see it can help frame the conversation, but I meant to say I'm not versed in the terminology for social sciences. I'm about to finish my Doctorate heavily involving formal logic and logic programming, and have read a sufficient bit about the philosophy of science

This is an interesting discussion but I'm unfortunately out of time now. I'd only point that most of science is abductive, rather than inductive, and that the whole concept of refutation will take us to discuss what is scientific _advance_

<comment> your-nanny best just think in terms of Bayesian update.

<comment><USER18> Indeed, abduction is a way to base your priors in Bayesian nets!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The thing I find most interesting about this is that I think people's responses here are being driven in significant part by _what_ was refuted. In particular the bad science was, as is frequently the case, on a political topic and one that I think affirmed the biases of many. In this very thread you can already see people literally arguing that the study that refuted it "was just a data point" which is a direct attempt to try to ignore the far more substantial data provided by the replication effort in showing that the original study was unsupported.

Imagine if the paper that was refuted was one that claimed to show that e.g. humans were not playing as significant a role in global warming as thought. And then Science refused to publish a study that seemed to show conclusively that the original study was, at best, deeply flawed. Would people be responding in the same way?

</comment><comment><USER20> Given that publishing an article costs money publishing an attempted replication is not likely to happen - if it succeeds it won't happen because we basically already gave you the information, and if it fails it probably won't happen because so what - a replication failed, should they publish it, what if someone comes along and says no we succeeded in our replication should that be published as well because someone else had a replication fail?

How much of the journal should be given over to replications that fail, and then the replications that succeed where another failed, and any potential back and forth?

At any rate a replication study while important for the process of science is not so important for the process of news and as Science is a business and using their resources for publishing replications does not seem likely to increase their profit (but maybe even reduce it) while increasing their cost, I am surprised anyone would even think it should or would happen.

Perhaps what there should be is a reproducibility column, where studies attempting to replicate previously published studies are noted. A paragraph summation could be given. As reproducibility of a finding becomes accepted further replications would be dropped from the column as redundant.

on edit: grammar fix.

<comment><USER21> If you don't publish replications and failures to replicate, you aren't publishing science. If a study is worth publishing once, it's worth publishing enough times to establish its result as conclusive. Otherwise, you haven't discovered anything, and the whole scientific process has failed, since the purpose of the scientific process is to discover conclusions.

You're right that in business, there's a disincentive to publish replications, because business treats science publication as literary nonfiction: they're trying to publish the most sensational results, because the most sensational results sell journals. This is one of the strongest arguments that scientific publication shouldn't be a business: making scientific publication a business creates incentives for scientific publications to not publish science.

<comment><USER20> that's all very well and good, please show how the needs of science to publish all these studies will correspond with the needs of Science to make money to continue publishing studies. My assumption is that the need to make money will beat the need to publish replications.

on edit: because it seems like your argument really is that Science the business should shut down.

<comment><USER21> I don't care about the needs of Science the business.

Science the business should shut down, not of their own volition, but because the scientific community shifts away from for-profit publications and Science has the respectability of a tabloid.

<comment><USER20> Great, that's an honest response - an honest argument to be made.

A dishonest response is saying they should publish things that makes no business sense for them to publish, and the logistics of which really makes no sense for their business model, with the seeming purpose of upbraiding them when they fail to do this thing they would never do.

<comment><USER21> You're basically saying that Science (the business) should do whatever makes the most money, always, and anyone who criticizes them for doing that is "dishonest".

Science (the business) is being dishonest by pretending to publish science (the method for obtaining facts). It's not okay just because it makes them money, and it's not dishonest to upbraid them for their harmful behavior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> um, what? It isn't the obligation of Science to publish any random piece, that the authors conveniently argue is foundational. Null results are useful, but not the most useful thing.

"Best Actor nominee argues why his performance is the most impactful," etc, etc.

<comment><USER23> The original article was published in Science, so this isn't a "random piece". It's a specific refutation of something they saw fit to publish.

<comment><USER22> I'm not sure "refutation" is the right word.

> "We still believe that there is value in exploring how physiological > reactions and conscious experience shape political attitudes and behavior, > but after further consideration, we have concluded that any such > relationships are more complicated than we (and the researchers on the > Science paper) presumed."

That sounds more like a clarification or a letter to the editor. I don't disagree that nuance is important, but I assume Nature believes they can get more nuance out of visiting new studies than reinterpreting old ones.

<comment><USER24> They failed to replicate the study over multiple attempts, 1 with four times the sample size.

Using the time reversal heuristic, if we flip the order, so the replication came before the original, how would you feel about Science publishing a paper with a positive result, when multiple studies--with larger samples and the same materials--had not obtained the result?

If you think the original should still be published in Science in that case, why? Since the original is published and highly visible, it's dangerous that Science won't correct the highly publicized, unlikely-true result.

<comment><USER25> > ...publishing a paper with a positive result, when multiple studies--with > larger samples and the same materials--had not obtained the result?

That happens _all the time_. Papers with null results tend to either sit in drawers unpublished, or never get written at all. Nobody knows about the multiple studies because nobody will publish them.

<comment><USER26> And that is a huge problem. Are you arguing that because null results are rarely published, we should publish them _even less_?

<comment><USER25> Where are you possibly getting that from?

<comment><USER27> We agree that currently it happens all the time.

Some number of people (including eg. Roca) say that this is a problem - <USER2> "replication crisis" if you will.

Those people say that perhaps papers with null results _should_ be published. Perhaps -they say- publication of null results could be (one possible) (part of) the solution.

Your reply sounded like you don't completely agree? Is that true, or did Roca read you wrong? Could you clarify?

<comment><USER25> I agree that null results should be published. I was making the point that some otherwise reasonable people disagree, for career or other reasons. If I were a researcher, I probably would not attempt to get a null result published; I'd work on something else that actually had a chance of going into my tenure file.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Getting into _Science_ is about their editorial board's wacky definition of notability. It has little to do with quality or even impact.

</comment><comment><USER29> Perhaps it's the political nature of the study but everyone seems to be missing the basic flaw in the argument for publishing this reproduction, that the flaws of the original research ( small sample size, weak correlation, etc ) were published for everyone to see. We're talking about a science journal here and the general mindset of the comments seems to be equating it with a magazine or something. Educated readers, the real audience of this journal, would've read the research 'against the grain', if you will, and immediately saw that there was little or nothing there. This begs the question of why publish in the first place, to which an answer might be that it was unique research at the time. The methods pass muster and the data is there to be scrutinized by the reader. These guys are basically taking advantage of the obvious and attempting to, as they say themselves, 'make their careers'.

<comment><USER30> But "we" didn't see the flaws. It has been a high impact study, and people both inside and outside of academia have been working off the assumption that it is true.

<comment><USER29> There's no reason not to have seen the flaws ( chief among them the minuscule sample size particularly for such a broad conclusion ) if one read the study critically. This gets at a symptom of our culture's lack of understanding of how research works. That's why one of the most powerful marketing techniques today is to merely state: 'reasearch shows xyz' with only a footnote referring to the underlying studies that no one will read, and then those that do will do so with specific predjudice rather than general skepticism. Those who work under the assumption you mention are making the same mistake of reading the headline and taking it as knowledge, usually because it supports some bias of theirs or some point they'd like to make one way or the other, just like those who are unnerved by the journal not publishing the replication study.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> What's the modern peer review process for science? Is there an open forum filled with reputed researchers who are willing to write their reviews, ask questions or give suggestions to young researchers who are submitting their work for review in a well-formed format? And is there a role for other bystanders who are observers out of curiosity and may be inspired to become scientific researchers or reviewers themselves? In this age of Internet, isn't this kind of online collaborative open forum going to scale much better?

Why are these age old print journals still in charge of this process with print era processes??

</comment><comment><USER32> In my opinion, the most reliable science comes from mid-tier journals. The highest impact journals are mixed with the absolute best OR the absolute hyped.

<comment><USER32> as well as top sub-discipline journals, which often have an impact factor of around 4-5, but within the sub-discipline e.g., developmental psychology, these journals has both respect and influence

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm somehow both surprised at the comments here and also not surprised. A remarkably large number of people posting find no problem whatsoever in a supposedly top journal claiming "the field has moved on" from a major and famous study that turns out to be wrong. Heck, I'm not a psychologist and I've heard of this study!

All sorts of important questions are raised by this:

\- Should we trust anything published by Science or other top journals at all?

\- Is the lackadaisical attitude related to the subject matter? I've read that studies casting conservatives in a good light get replicated almost immediately, and psychology is completely dominated by liberal voters (>90%). Which leads to:

\- Why did it take over ten years for such a widely cited study to be replicated? Nobody cared because it fed their own political biases?

And finally:

\- What do we do about it? Can academia reform itself at all or is that a lost cause? If so perhaps psychology isn't really worth studying, given the large expense involved and the fact that the outputs so often seem to be noise.

<comment><USER27> As an (old/ex-ish) wikipedian, I often hear people say "Wikipedia is unreliable"; which is indubitably 100% technically correct.

But the statement is highly misleading, because what are you comparing it with?

Put another way: There's no such thing as a 100% reliable source for anything. You need to apply judgment in all things.

'Science' is actually a pretty decent journal. It didn't get its reputation for nothing. This doesn't mean that you can just assume they are a magical source of all truth; just like you can't assume 'Wikipedia' is (_definitely_ not), or 'Nature', or 'Britannica' or etc.

\- Should we trust anything published by Science at all? Only to a degree. One must always be skeptical and think for oneself, no matter what the source.

\- Why did it take ten years for the study to be replicated? Maybe it didn't. Perhaps these are just the first authors to speak up about it.

\- What can we do about it? Continue working to improve the process, as we have done over the past centuries or millennia. The authors of this particular paper spoke up. That's part of the process too.

<comment><USER33> Whilst I see your point, the problem here is not "people want Science to be a source of truth" but rather "people want Science (and other journals) to strive for the truth", which is subtly different. A part of striving for truth is being interested in cases where you were wrong as well as right. Science has given the impression here that they don't care if astonishing claims turn out to be false. This is the sort of behaviour associated with tabloids. Is Science an entertainment magazine or is it striving for truth? The standards of behaviour expected are different.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> On one hand their research is important and should be published. On the other hand, do they have a right to demand it to be published in the most prestigious journal in the world? High-profile journals reject good articles all the time for various reasons. Especially "the field has moved on" is a grating reason for rejection but is used all the time.

<comment><USER35> In general they don't have a right to demand it. However, in this case it is a direct refutation of a previous article that the journal published. At the very least their refutation deserves to be evaluated by a peer review process and considered for publication. In fact, I will go further, if a paper directly refutes older work in a journal, then that journal probably DOES have an obligation to publish it as long as it is done at least as well as the original.

The claim that the field has moved on is complete garbage and nonsense. It is farcical on its face. The older work is still being quoted.

<comment><USER34> Maybe you are right, but Science isn't an outlier here. All journals are loathe to publish direct refutations of previously published articles. Conference papers are even worse in that regard - zero room for refutations. "The field has moved on" is probably, second to "The article contains factual errors" the most common reason for article rejections. This problem is not limited to Psychology either. It is just as prevalent, if not more so, in Computer Science.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> TL;DR: they replicated the famous study about liberals and conservatives reacting differently to threats, finding no difference. Science (a famous journal) refused to publish the null replication.

>We believe that it is bad policy for journals like Science to publish big, bold ideas and then leave it to subfield journals to publish replications showing that those ideas aren't so accurate after all. Subfield journals are less visible, meaning the message often fails to reach the broader public. They are also less authoritative, meaning the failed replication will have less of an impact on the field if it is not published by Science.

Agreed, but maybe the issue here is journals shouldn't be prestigious. I understand journals' historical usefulness, but the Internet has made them obsolete.

<comment><USER37> > Agreed, but maybe the issue here is journals shouldn't be prestigious. I > understand journals' historical usefulness, but the Internet has made them > obsolete.

Prestige and historical usefulness are practically synonyms. You're arguing that prestige shouldn't command respect, but this is like arguing against human nature.

"Science" should recognize its importance to the world at large and take extra care to publish failures of replications of papers that it reports. The more prestigious the journal, the more carefully they ought to follow this proscription, especially if they wish to maintain their prestige.

<comment><USER38> Agreed, the whole narrative of the internet democratizing things has been largely overstated and poorly supported.

So many of the existing social and industry hierarchies were merely replicated on the Internet. As we see with all the popular print newspapers and magazines often being equally or more successfully online.

Maybe there were hierarchies for a reason and they were a good thing. Rather it's about building the better hierarchies rather than replacing them entirely with some academic idealistic pipedream (ditto for markets in economics).

<comment><USER39> Widespread adoption of the internet has dramatically changed the world. "Democratization" was an early term used to describe the opportunities of the early internet and it remains ongoing. There have been many great collective accomplishments in the last 20 years that are indicative of that democratization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> > We should continue to have frank discussions about what we've learned over > the course of the replication crisis and what we could be doing about it (a > conversation that is currently happening on Twitter).

What's this twitter conversation they reference?

</comment><comment> your-nanny failed to replicate != refutation. the latter is definitive, as in deductive logic, bit science is inductive. Retractions of articles that are no longer convincing in light of new data is the wrong way to go.

</comment><comment> your-nanny I applaud authors for doing a laborious attempt at replication. But, this comes across as sour grapes. They dont make a convincing case for imposing an obligation on Science to peer review their paper.

</comment><comment><USER41> While I keep my mind open to the idea that science might have new results in this area, there's a certain degree of ideology that goes into coming up with these studies in the first place. If this study had come out at a different point in history, its significance would be less important. However, because of the breaking down of the political order in the United States, people (and especially liberals) are scrambling to explain it. Why are they different from us? How could they believe something different?

While people do have varying anxieties, knowledge, and reactivity to aversive stimuli, there's a stronger prior that political beliefs are based on a few different things.

1) Class Position: People with money or whom believe they are likely to ascend classes trivialize the struggles of others and ascribe problems to individual character rather than systemic design flaws. If an airplane crashes, do we blame the pilots?

2) Culture / Milieu: What ideas are floating around? What do people whom you speak to on a regular basis believe?

3) Personal Experience: Have you had a powerful experience that confirms or contradicts the broader culture?

4) (often but not always most importantly) What will personally benefit you or people you care about?

There's a few other things you could throw in there as well, but Marxists would say to liberals that the reason they are different from you is:

1) They aren't that different from you. You both believe in the integrity of the capitalist system.

2) Often they are from dominant racial or economic castes.

3) There's an intentional campaign on the part of the elites to divide the working class against each other, and one way is via scapegoating minorities and women. Everyone likes to say "No matter how bad it is, at least I'm not X".

4) There is an intentional campaign waged on the part of elites to tie American national identity to its military campaigns overseas.

5) There is an intentional campaign on the part of elites to use race and religion as a wedge issue to divide the people so they do not blame the people causing their problems.

That's not a scientific explanation, but my strong prior is that there's variation amongst people, but we're basically all the same and we're mentally flexible enough to think through adversity and come to our own conclusions.

</comment><comment><USER4> Imagine if refuting a famous study is guaranteed to get you a publication into a prestigious journal - it's impossible to disentangle the conflict of interest.

<comment><USER4> Edit to my own comment to clarify: while I believe replication should be encouraged, because statistics!, this might set a precedent that gives incentives to scientists to replicate high-profile articles AND refute them since the original journal would be guaranteed to publish them. If you've been in academia, a publication like this could grant your grant, pardon the pun.

<comment><USER42> You don't think there is a problem with it being that easy to convincingly refute articles in the most prestigious science journals? I think that encouraging those refutations would be good, both to force the reviewers to do a better job and as you said encourage opportunists to poke hole in existing papers. It would be good if a significant amount of scientists built their entire career around poking hole in bad papers like this.

<comment><USER4> Technically, not a refutation because a statistical analysis never refutes a hypothesis, only supports it with a certain probability or does not support it. That is, a negative result is inconclusive. No, I do not think "poking holes" should be incentivised - I believe REPLICATIONS of studies should be incentivised, because every study = a sample. Statistically, the more samples, the better able we are to filter through the noise. What you suggest will encourage scientific sensationalism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Perhaps what should happen is that replications should be published beneath the paper it replicates, as an addendum.

</comment><comment><USER43> What did the original paper imply? I didn't see a clear explanation in TFA. I suspect that it implies that conservatives are more likely to ignore threats but I'm not sure.

<comment><USER44> It was more of the opposite. The study claimed that conservatives had a more physiological reaction to threats.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> misleading title

</comment><comment><USER46> * I just failed to read the next paragraph, and should have finished the article first. Just ignore this.

"We conducted two "conceptual" replications (one in the Netherlands and one in the U.S.) that _used_ _different_ _images_ to get at the same idea of a "threat"—for example, a gun pointing at the screen. Our intention in these first studies was to try the same thing in order to calibrate our new equipment. But both teams independently failed to find that people's physiological reactions to these images correlated with their political attitudes." Emphasis mine.

Why they didn't used the same images?

<comment><USER47> Continue reading down the article - they did do a study with the exact same images.

<comment><USER46> Just in the next paragraph. I should have finished the article first.</comment></comment></comment>


We've Passed the Carbon Tipping Point - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/z43wpx/goodbye-world-weve-passed-the-carbon-tipping-point-for-good <comment><USER2> Given how important this topic is, this has to be classed as a very poor article. Maybe 6 paragraphs of news, followed by over twice as much scaremongering and speculation.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> surprisingly there are low-tech ways to reverse the heating.

watch Gwynne Dyer's closing arguments: [https://youtu.be/Mc_4Z1oiXhY](https://youtu.be/Mc_4Z1oiXhY)</comment>


Tracking Joy at Work - <AUTHOR> http://begriffs.com/posts/2015-03-15-tracking-joy-at-work.html <comment><USER2> "You can't improve what you can't measure, and what better to measure than an activity that consumes your waking life. Work."

Does anyone else think the phrase "you can't improve what you can't measure" is nonsense? I think that most improvements are qualitative and inherently unmeasurable.

I'm not downplaying the importance of measuring, but we have to be careful when trying to reduce qualitative changes down to metrics. Too many times I've seen businesses or teams try to measure qualitative changes, and then spend so much time optimizing for their metrics that they qualitatively regress. Measurements are not magic bullets that remove the need for good intuition.

<comment><USER3> He is referencing a famous quote often attributed to W. Edwards Deming. He actually never said it. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming)

I've seen it attributed to Peter Drucker as well.

I think the general notion that it is more difficult to improve things that you can't/don't measure is fairly accurate.

<comment><USER4> > I think the general notion that it is more difficult to improve things that > you can't/don't measure is fairly accurate.

To be somewhat pedantic:

The difficulty of improving a thing does not change based on you measuring it. If I, say, measure the response time of a service, it's still just as difficult as it was before to improve the response time of the service. Furthermore, any improvement you do make will not change based on you measuring it. If I do improve the response time of the service, it will be just as improved whether or not I measure the change.

So, measuring does nothing but allow you to quantify the improvement you have made. It doesn't make improving a thing easier, and it doesn't make improvements better.

That said, there's plenty of scenarios where impartial measurements are critical. If you don't know what to improve, broad measurement across the entire system can provide an answer. If there's indecisiveness about which action will provide the _best_ improvement, then impartial measuring will provide an answer. If you don't trust your perception, or cannot perceive the result, then impartial measuring can also provide an answer.

<comment><USER5> Taking measurements will usually prompt questions of "how do I change the results over time?" So, although the difficulty of improving the thing doesn't change; the chance of taking action to improve the thing does change for the better.

Measurements will usually encourage attention and effort to change in a way that non-measured things are unlikely to.

On that basis, I'd argue that even things that are very difficult to measure quantitatively would benefit if a suitable proxy was found that could be measured.

Of course, you do have to be careful that your proxy is suitable!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I did something similar for myself based on TagTime [1] from the same folks who made beeminder.

I'd suggest not enforcing a minimum spacing between samplings. The minimum spacing tends to push samplings towards the ends and center of the day. It also gives the randomness memory. I noticed when I was sampling myself, my behavior would subtly change after a sampling when I knew I wouldn't be sampled for a little while. Although, I don't think this would cause a meaningful problem in your context.

Thanks for the writeup! Very interesting.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for pointing this out! In addition to not wanting a minimum, it's also bad to fix the number of samples. Then you know that the more you get sampled the less likely additional samples are. Might not matter for some applications but, as you say, it can subtly affect your behavior.

The right way to do the sampling is as a Poisson process, ie, where the gaps between samples are drawn from an exponential distribution. Details: [http://tagti.me](http://tagti.me)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Back in 2012 we were also curious about that topic and developed a service called CompanyMood ([https://www.company-mood.com](https://www.company- mood.com))

It tracks the mood of invited employees on a weekly basis.

We thought, instead of asking for specific feelings it would be more intuitive to estimate the mood from 0(lowest) to 100.

Furthermore you can organize your team/company in departments, use an anonymous complaint/suggestion box and get an overview via a dashboard that shows all metrics in a graphical overview.

<comment><USER9> Another tool on the same topic is [http://www.nikoniko.co/](http://www.nikoniko.co/)

I'm a big believer of tracking mood, although it must be very easy to integrate into the daily workflow.

How did your project evolved?

<comment><USER8> It evolved (and still does^^) very well.

With almost no paid advertising, more than 100 companies use CompanyMood (mostly in Germany over [https://www.company-mood.de](https://www.company- mood.de))

We have lots of new features (and Apps) in the pipeline and we're currently working on making a business out of it.

<comment><USER9> Sounds good! I also added the mood tracking to my personal time tracker ( Haptime.in ) .

I think the ability to determine the overall mood status and understand the correlation between projects and work will be a key to improve the employer AND employee AND client happiness.

It's nice to see I'm not alone :) keep going with the work ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sort of reminds me of what we've done at my first work: [http://blog.lunarlogic.io/2013/measurable- happiness/](http://blog.lunarlogic.io/2013/measurable-happiness/) ;)

</comment><comment><USER11> This is great! I love to see people exploring mood tracking and looking for correlations and insights. I hope you write more about what this helps you discover.

<shameless plug> I built Moodprint ([http://moodprint.com](http://moodprint.com)) to do the same sort of thing. It's using random sampling as well, though it's personal as opposed to team- based, and it allows free-form mood entry. Some people have been using it for >6 months, and it's helped find patterns around work and relationships, for instance.

</comment><comment><USER12> Interesting, see this blog from NYT two days ago: [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/14/business/dealbook/when- emp...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/14/business/dealbook/when-employee- engagement-turns-into-employee- burnout.html?mabReward=R6&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&region=CColumn&module=Recommendation&src=rechp&WT.nav=RecEngine&_r=0)

"What companies really need to measure is not how engaged their employees are, but rather how consistently energized they feel."

</comment><comment><USER13> While this comment does not offer a tracking mechanism or a tool, I do believe you can measure and feel when an environment gets better. More subjective than most would like...but you can definitely observe a difference in behaviors.

The UN also thought that this was important. There are more details at liveHappy.com and #HappyActs. There is an upcoming International Happiness Day on March 20th.

In our office we are celebrating the day with everything from team walks, Jenga competitions, popcorn, and managers serving the employees ice cream, as well as building a Happiness Wall.

I can tell you over a year of diligently addressing team morale...it is nothing Big Bang it is consistent small steps and paying attention to the employees and their needs.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder: Do you derive value from the use of a 1-5 scale? Do you have set definitions for each level, or is that left up to the responder?

I have a certain curiosity sometimes about the use of 1-5 or 1-10 scales, where it seems like a simple boolean response could be appropriate. In this context, I could see an interesting experiment in simply asking, as a yes/no question, "Are you content?"

<comment><USER14> why not take a poll :

On a scale from 1 to 5, how much value do you derive from the use of a 1 to 5 scale?

True or False - it's OK to limit subjective questions to Boolean responses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> At Osper we use an electronic Niko Niko[1] board to track daily mood. I find it helpful for uncovering issues in the company early though of course it isn't the only source.

[1] [http://agiletrail.com/2011/09/12/how-to-track-the-teams- mood...](http://agiletrail.com/2011/09/12/how-to-track-the-teams-mood-with-a- niko-niko-calendar/)

</comment><comment><USER16> This is basically the idea of the algedonic meter that was set to be part of Chile's project Cybersyn in the 1970s [1] before a military coup overthrew the Allende government.

[1]: [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning- machin...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machine)

</comment><comment><USER17> Linden Labs, the company that built Second Life, used to have a "Love machine", used to "give" love points to other co-workers (as a result of a good interaction or contribution).

I found that concept extremely fascinating.

</comment><comment><USER18> Did you use any libraries for the dashboard? I'd be interested in setting something like this up at my company, too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, it's mostly just open source software inside. Grafana for the charting which gets its data from InfluxDB. The happiness bot is broken into three haskell programs, a scheduler, a soliciter, and a server which listens for slack responses.

The services are wired together with [https://github.com/begriffs/microservice- template](https://github.com/begriffs/microservice-template)

Send me an email if you want help setting things up. firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Hawthorne effect: "Feels good to track mood."</comment>


Stitcher (podcast app) does not encrypt user passwords - <AUTHOR> http://peg.gd/3cv

<comment><AUTHOR> I am hoping that this gets enough attention to shame them into better protecting their users. They have gone through millions and millions of dollars and have not taken the most basic steps towards protecting the people who trust them. Can we show Stitcher this is not OK?</comment>


Vim Graphical Cheat Sheet - <AUTHOR> http://www.quicklycode.com/cheatsheets/graphical-vivim <comment><USER2> It doesn't include, for example, Ctrl-N and Ctrl-P for keyword completion.

Do you think those could be integrated?

<comment><AUTHOR> mmm... You could write this as comment post on quicklycode, so I can forward it to the author :)</comment></comment>


Snap launches Spectacles 3 with dual HD cameras for 3D capture - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2019/08/13/snapchat-spectacles-3/ <comment><USER2> Small, limited production run at a high price.

They're just iterating their R&D in public. Not a bad idea. The new higher price offsets losses of experimentation in a way the first version didn't.

Ultimately the play here is slowly building up strategic hardware expertise (which takes a long time). Specifically expertise in camera and AR hardware/software integration.

I expect HN to be needlessly cynical about this and overstate the role this product intends to play for now.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think Snapchat has a lot of potential, but they just need some more focus or an identity.

It's definitely an interesting space, and a more convenient and fast way to take pictures is a great idea.

I just feel like snap has been releasing a bunch of 'beta' hardware for a while now, but they should be at the stage where they can put out a real device with a sensible price, targeted at the average user.

</comment><comment><USER4> How are these useful?

Do you actually build 3D models with the video that is recorded?

Do you leave them running 24x7 so that you can then rewind and capture the important bits you might otherwise have missed?</comment>


Inspired by nature: the science that could transform medicine - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/25/bioinspiration-thrilling-new-science-could-transform-medicine <comment><USER2> Right, we've never looked at nature before, Penicillin just happened. /s

The difference isn't that people are looking for natural inspiration, although that makes for a great headline. Really, the changes are in the ability to engineer materials, tissues, and the like to fit those paradigms. People had great ideas in the 'naturalistic' vein for a long time, but lacked the means to make it work.

</comment><comment><USER3> love the article. hydrophobic glue and so on. interesting stuff. i upvoted it.

but i'm not convinced that inspiration from nature to medicine is a new thing.

haven't researchers been looking at the techniques plants and fungi use to combat bacteria for a long time, for example?

or didn't Pasteur get inspired by nature to create vaccines with the cowpox vs smallpox phenomenon?

or weren't more recent attempts to derive an anti-coagulant from the substances used by blood sucking leeches also inspired by nature?

<comment><USER4> Velcro was inspired by burrs stuck in a dog coat. Took the inventor ages to commercialize.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I went to TED 2005 in Monterey where most talks were related to that year's theme, "Inspired by Nature". For those interested, I do recommend a wonderful talk by prof. Robert Full, "The sticky wonder of gecko feet": [http://www.ted.com/talks/robert_full_on_animal_movement#t-24...](http://www.ted.com/talks/robert_full_on_animal_movement#t-244505)

</comment><comment><USER6> Love this. Evolution has had a very long time to arrive at a huge corpus of various nanoengineering solutions, we should use as much of it as we can.

</comment><comment><USER7> And the future was under our nose all along. Finally.</comment>


The Secret Life of Photons: Simulating 2D Light Transport - <AUTHOR> https://benedikt-bitterli.me/tantalum/ <comment><USER2> This is way cool, and the writeup is excellent as well. Very much worth the read :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Good job! The UX is top notch and the results are inspiring</comment>


Show HN: Find directions to the nearest fried chicken in the UK - <AUTHOR> https://chickenchec.kr/

<comment><AUTHOR> There are plenty of apps for ordering takeaways online, but what if you are somewhere new and want to get directions to the best local chicken (or other food)? Google maps is the best for finding takeaways but the ratings are way off compared to sites like Just eat or Hungry House.

This is hopefully going to aggregate these ratings and listings from a bunch of sites, but I keep wondering if this even a problem that needs to be solved?

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure it does - sorry. Half the fun of being in a new place is trying out random venues to find something you like. If you only want to eat a minimum quality of food, then why not just check into an expensive hotel and eat in the restaurant? That's why those things exist in the first place. Ratings are helpful up to a point, but the more efficient they are the faster they undermine themselves as everyone crowds out the cool place and the quality suffers. What you really want is the good place that not too many people know about, what you get is the list of places popular with people who like talking about themselves and telling everyone their opinions about everything.</comment></comment>


Unautenticated Remote Code Execution in D-Link DIR-859 Routers (CVE-2019–17621) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@s1kr10s/d94b47a15104 <comment><AUTHOR> D-Link posted this advisory and a bunch of updates for this and other vulnerabilities: [https://supportannouncement.us.dlink.com/announcement/public...](https://supportannouncement.us.dlink.com/announcement/publication.aspx?name=SAP10147)</comment>


'Could have prevented 9/11' is the new 'Hitler' - <AUTHOR> http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/06/13/could_have_prevented_911_godwins_law_hitler <comment><USER2> This requires some kind of subscription or account to view.</comment>


Eliminate These Distractions And Your Productivity Will Become Unstoppable - <AUTHOR> http://danleavitt.com/2012/12/11/eliminate-these-distractions-and-your-productivity-will-become-unstoppable/ If you consider the time spent harvesting your imaginary farm productive then I suggest you stop reading now.  Everyone knows that life is full of distractions.  How you handle distractions has a direct impact on your personal well-being, productivity, financial success, and the relationships you develop.  My goal is to encourage everyone to take a closer look at how you spend your time.  WARNING:  Be prepared for a harsh reality check! <comment><USER2> You forgot to add 'constantly checking HN' for new info to the list :p</comment>