GoDaddy issues free SSL certificates to OSS projects - <AUTHOR> https://www.godaddy.com/ssl/ssl-open-source.aspx

<comment><USER2> I'd rather pay a decent company good money than give GoDaddy my name and email.

A short list of reasons I refuse to use GoDaddy and actively encourage people to get away from them:

* Sexist advertising.

* The founder has repeatedly gone to Africa to _kill_ elephants.

* They actively supported SOPA

* The founder expressed support for torture in Guantanamo Bay

* The customer support is a nightmare at best

* Hosting is inconsistent, slow, and of general poor quality.

* Constantly trying to upsell you the customer

* Godaddy mocks developers in its advertising

<comment><USER3> Sexist advertising: I don't think there's been a racy commercial in a few years now... Not that I thought they were actually all that bad to begin with, especially compared to most advertising in general.

The founder is no longer a part of the company.

Agreed on SOPA, and think there are some cultural changes, and not sure where things like this will fall... I know Go Daddy has been militant on many, and similar issues.

Again, Bob Parsons doesn't run Go Daddy today, and hasn't iirc for over a year.

I have mixed feelings about support and sales being the same people. In some ways its' good, in others its' bad, and it really depends on the specific person you talk to.

Hosting, there's changes under way, but agreed as a general rule.

See above on sales/support.

I'm not sure that I've seen advertising really mocking developers.

I will say I've been a GoDaddy employee for about three months now, and the culture really isn't what it used to be in a lot of ways.. I was really apprehensive coming in, considering some of the above comments, as well as other insights into GD's past. That said, things have and are changing.. it's not quite my ideal, but then again what is.

<comment><USER2> >it's not quite my ideal, but then again what is.

Many of GoDaddy's competitors. I don't have, and have never had, such complaints about Hover, Gandi, Digital Ocean, Dreamhost, or any number of other domain/hosting companies.

My trust in them as a company is gone so far that excluding some truly revolutionary changes I'll never touch one of their services again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> GoDaddy's plan was to use SOPA to give themselves a monopoly as a domain registrar.

Don't forget it.

<comment><USER5> Hyperbole.

[http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/10/24/godaddys-chief-sopa- su...](http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/10/24/godaddys-chief-sopa-supporter- christine-jones-running-for-arizona-governor/)

<comment><USER6> The rumor internally is that she helped write the law and was trying to use it as a way to gain political points for a potential future political career.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've worked happily at GoDaddy for years in Hosting and can say I don't get caught up in the politics. What's good is millions of customers and thousands of servers, which translates to plenty of development challenges. The performance of hosting these days is actually really good. In the past it might have been good or it might have been bad, just depended on whether you landed on an overloaded server or not. It was never our intention to overload servers, we simply grew faster than we knew how to maintain. Until we launched a performance team to tackle this issue, and now the performance is really good. Takes time for customers to recognize this. Performance is one of those things most people don't notice unless it's bad.

The company's history has a few blunders, but there is also a lot of good - millions donated to charities, thousands employed - creating jobs in a down economy, great benefits, and from the inside, I can say, customers come first. There has always been a do right by the customer mentality. For every poor customer support story, there are a hundred positive ones, untold. I've liked working at GoDaddy because the value of the product I help create is high. This is no rip off, everyone wins and I can be proud of who I work for.

The new CEO and new executive leadership team are leading a great new vision focused on helping small businesses kick-ass. It's really very moving and makes me proud to work as developer at GoDaddy.

</comment><comment><USER8> Why would anyone use this when startssl.com issues free certs that are not only limited to OSS projects?

See [https://konklone.com/post/switch-to-https-now-for- free?hn](https://konklone.com/post/switch-to-https-now-for-free?hn) for a walkthrough.

</comment><comment><USER9> GoDaddy should give free domain registrations to all the small businesses and individuals they've taken advantage of over the years. Their website is still deliberately confusing to trick less than tech-savy customers into spending more than they need to.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'd rather pay.

</comment><comment><USER11> CAcert.org issues free certs as well, though not every OS/browser have this CA installed by default... it's a shame because they provide a nice service imo

[http://www.cacert.org/](http://www.cacert.org/)

</comment><comment><USER12> We all hate GoDaddy still, I get it. That said, this is actually a pretty brilliant plan for them to begin to get back into the community's good graces.

<comment><USER13> It's a pretty good plan if people STILL don't heed the advice of others to stay the fuck away.

Even if you ignore the whole SOPA mess, and the scumbag CEO, and the shady marketing techniques, all in all you still end up with shit service, which is the thing you're trying to buy.

<comment><USER3> Parsons hasn't been CEO or even an executive in the company for over a year now iirc. Also, there's been a fair amount of effort to support FLOSS (including contributing back to the community) as well as internal movement away from proprietary solutions towards open-source software.

It's worth mentioning that I just joined GoDaddy a few months ago as an employee, feeling a lot of the same concerns. Hosting really needs to get their changes under way, I don't work in that area. I also have mixed feelings about "sales and support" being the same people.

I will say the checkout isn't nearly as bad as it once was, and there's movement to improve things.

As to the advertising, most of that's pretty much changed the past couple years as well.

Don't get me wrong, for my own projects, I'm far more likely to use linode or digital ocean if I'm hosting somewhere... I also feel that movement towards things like docker.io are far better in terms of direction than a lot of enterprise VM infrastructures being implemented. It takes time to change course for an aircraft carrier.

If it weren't for a lot of the internal changes coming from the top down, I would not be here at Go Daddy today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Godaddy signs with a low exponent (3), so you might find you have to lower the security on your app server (like we had to on weblogic)

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow, did this really get flagged off the front page?

</comment><comment><USER15> Free first year - that's the catch.

</comment><comment><USER16> No thanks, GoDaddy is a slimy, incompetent organization.</comment>


Yelp Dataset Challenge - <AUTHOR> http://www.yelp.com/dataset_challenge/ <comment><USER2> Interesting challenge. I just attended a meeting of data science professionals at linkedin, microsoft, netflix and lean plum they all were talking about the need for more data science professionals. This might help you out if you're thinking about entering this challenge. [http://www.verious.com/board/AKumar/the-hive-a-b-testing- inf...](http://www.verious.com/board/AKumar/the-hive-a-b-testing-information- session/)</comment>


How Much Air Pollution Is Produced by Rockets? (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-much-air-pollution-is-produced-by-rockets/ <comment><USER2> The implication in the article is that the exhaust gases may not be as significant as the metallic debris that vaporizes in the atmosphere. It sounds very unnatural for the atmosphere to have to deal with this, but here's an interesting quote regarding meteorites (natural metallic debris):

"Estimates for the mass of material that falls on Earth each year range from 37,000-78,000 tons. Most of this mass would come from dust-sized particles." [http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/75-our-solar- syste...](http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/75-our-solar- system/comets-meteors-and-asteroids/meteorites/313-how-many-meteorites-hit- earth-each-year-intermediate)

<comment><USER3> I do think that it's a good idea to do some research in the area, a really good idea. We've assumed far too much about the resiliency of our environment.

With that said, I would be quite surprised if unspecific metal debris/dust is going to have any major effects, except as it already is as a threat to the functionality of satellites, space stations, and rockets.

The meteorite argument is quite strong, but not unassailable, as meteorites in general has a chemical composition that is quite different from space hardware.

Not that we use a lot of Antimony in rockets, but it works as en example. If I interpreted the numbers correctly, we can put an upper limit on the contribution of atmospheric Antimony from 78000 tons of meteorites at ~16 kg, or roughly 35 lbs.

Thus, it's not entirely impossible that some of the space hardware over it's life, and death, can contribute more of certain unusual elements to the atmosphere than meteorites do in the same period.

Organic molecules however, those are a bit more concerning, as we already know that some species can greatly affect our atmosphere!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> OP is a 2017 article that mentions an upcoming 2018 report that has since been published here [https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/csd/assessments/ozone/2018/executi...](https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/csd/assessments/ozone/2018/executivesummary/)

<comment><USER4> Here's the executive summary on rockets:

Rocket launches presently have a small effect on total stratospheric ozone (much less than 0.1%). Space industry developments indicate that rocket emissions may increase more significantly than reported in the previous Assessment. Their impacts will depend on rocket design (particularly the altitude of emissions), launch vehicle sizes, launch rates, spaceport locations, and fuel types. Important gaps remain in understanding rocket emissions and their combined chemical, radiative, and dynamical impacts on the global stratosphere and in projections of launch rates. These gaps limit the confidence level of predictions of present and future impacts of rocket emissions on stratospheric ozone and suggest periodic assessments are warranted. The lifetime of the most important rocket emissions is limited, and the stratospheric accumulation of rocket-emitted black carbon and alumina particles varies in correspondence with global launch rates and altitude of emissions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is it time to recalibrate rocket technologies with added metric of pollution. Does this mean that Project Prometheus (plopping out nukes sequentially and riding the nuke push [https://youtu.be/njM7xlQIjnQ?t=544](https://youtu.be/njM7xlQIjnQ?t=544)) might be back on the table?

To reach the moon requires \- By chemical rocket: 1000 tons of chemical fuel for each 1 ton of payload with 1000:1 ratio roughly linear with increasing payload. Max capability today is on order of 100 tons per launch. \- By nuclear detonations: fuel:payload closer to 3:1 with prototype design of 400 ton payload for single rocket, and later designs aiming for 100,000 ton payload/rocket.

Is 30x less waste by mass better even if that waste is in part radioactive? Water waste still seems pretty good to me.

[https://newatlas.com/orion-project-atom-bomb- spaceship/49454...](https://newatlas.com/orion-project-atom-bomb- spaceship/49454/)

<comment><USER6> Really, who gives a damn? Unless we are launching orbital flights at the rate we launch commercial airliners, emissions from rockets are a pisshole in the snow.

If we do ramp up to that kind of tempo, economics will spur on efficiency advances. Nipping progress in the bud now because it might be a problem some undefined period of time down the line is cowardly and depressing.

<comment><USER5> Gotta agree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does it matter?

Space travel seems like it should be a priority for humanity. More so than the latest iPhone and all that other crap that produces pollution

<comment><USER8> Exactly - at the current phase of our civilization space travel is pretty much the only thing that makes sense & we shoould use every opportunity we have to make our species (at least) multi-planetary before and internal or external catastrophe closes the currently open window of space travel.

This way we can protect our species from getting wiped out with our single habitat, as well as likely solving all our resource and energy issues with the _wastly_ bigger resources of space compared to what we would have available if we never leave the planet.

<comment><USER9> > _space travel is pretty much the only thing that makes sense_

The _only_ thing that makes sense? You can't think of any other problems that we might work on first?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Over the last 6 years, 29 people have gone into space or about 5 per year. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_travelers_by_nam...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_travelers_by_name)

Globally, babies are born at the rate of about 145 million per year. So at the current rate of space travel a baby's chance of going into space would be about 1 in 30,000,000.

Even if space travel were increased by 3 or 4 orders of magnitude, only an insignificant percentage of people would ever travel in space. The energy requirements and expense make it a pastime for only the stupendously rich.

<comment><USER11> Reminds me of this quote.

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."

Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943

<comment><USER10> Given the price/performance characteristics of electromechanical relay computers, he was probably about right. The introduction of vacuum tube electronic logic, subsequently replaced by discrete transistors, and the integrated circuit logic changed the price/performance ratio by several orders of magnitude. There's the old joke about how your 1940s car would now go a million miles an hour and several million miles on a tank of gas if it had improved like computers. But we know it is a joke because physics sets bounds on the energy need to move a 1.5 ton mass, while the bounds on the energy to operate a logic gate are much lower. The same is true for spaceflight, where the formulas for rocket propelled vehicles are well understood.

<comment><USER11> The point I was trying to make is that we are only at the dawn of commercial space flight. Compare the first commercial airplane flights, technology and cost, to today's 20 euro Ryanair flights. The same will happen with space.

>The same is true for spaceflight, where the formulas for rocket propelled vehicles are well understood.

You are assuming there never will be a replacement for rocket technology. I think you're wrong.

<comment><USER10> It took about 11 years to go from Kitty Hawk to the first scheduled passenger flights in 1914. On the other hand, about 40 years elapsed between Gargarin in '61 until Dennis Tito's paid flight aboard a Soyuz in 2001.

The interval from Gargarin to now is 58 years. 58 years from 1914 puts us to 1972. By '72 we had turbofan jet airliners of all the current layouts including 4 under the wings, 2 under the wings, 2 in the tail, and different layouts of 3 in the tail. There had been the ill-fated Comet with 4 in the tail. The Concorde SST had done its first flight already in '69\. There has been no comparable advance in space flight technology in the last 58 years.

Since '72 there has been cost reduction and refinement of the jet airliner, but prices also have come down due to higher volumes, more passengers per flight, and a reduction in service.

What is this new propulsion technology that you anticipate?

<comment><USER11> >There has been no comparable advance in space flight technology in the last 58 years.

Because there was no incentive. Space was something governments did and after the USA won the space race, interest waned. SpaceX proved there is a commercial market. Now we are witnessing the start of a commercial space boom. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_private_spaceflight_co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_private_spaceflight_companies#Launch_vehicle_makers) Look at the number of launchers in development. Competition = innovation. And once space mining has been proven as a concept, then the real boom will begin. I'm optimistic and expect all of this to happen in the next 20 years.

>What is this new propulsion technology that you anticipate?

Ion drives?, scramjets?, something that hasn't been discovered yet?, ... I honestly don't know but I doubt we will still be stuck with chemical rockets a 100 years from now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> TL;DR: "The climate impact of rockets has not really been seriously addressed as yet"

</comment><comment><USER13> >There has been a lot of buzz recently about spaceflight companies shooting for frequent "airline-like operations," but scientists, engineers and policy makers generally are not "putting two and two together with respect to the emissions that are implied by that idea,"

I wouldn't worry about that. I saw Musk's video[1] on using rockets as a way to supplant air-travel and the idea is even more ridiculous than his hyperloop and underground-moving-street concepts. There's no point in mentioning it as even a possible eventuality. Rockets will never be used for intra-earth passenger travel.

[1][https://www.space.com/38314-elon-musk-spacex-mars-rocket- ear...](https://www.space.com/38314-elon-musk-spacex-mars-rocket-earth- travel.html)

<comment><USER14> I think just the opposite. Once rocketry is cheaper, not throwing the craft away with each flight, it makes perfect sense for inter-continental flights. Have a space plane for each city fly to an orbiting transfer station; passengers switch planes and arrive anywhere in the World in three hours or less.

<comment><USER15> I believe the plan from SpaceX is for point to point ballistic travel in a rocket carrying ~100 people, not going via something in orbit.

Flight times of an hour from anywhere on the planet to anywhere IIRC

<comment><USER16> Considering something like the Concorde wasn't even possible to operate at a profit, I'm very skeptical.

<comment><USER17> Concord had a very limited number of viable routes which prevented the program from breaking even with the R&D costs. However, the aircraft was operated profitably later on after significant tick price increases.

A 1 hour US to Asia route that charged 50k a seat could likely be viable. That's ultra first class, but finding ~100 passengers each way per day should be easy. It's only expanding to more routes that would be problematic.

PS: The fuel costs would actually be comparable to a regular flight. It's mostly a question of how many trips the rocket could make and how many passengers it could carry.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pandas 1.0 - <AUTHOR> https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/whatsnew/v1.0.0.html <comment><USER2> I've had to dive into the pandas code over the last year for a project [0], and my attitude has shifted dramatically from...

      * old attitude: why does pandas have to make things so hard
      * new attitude: pandas has a crazy difficult job

I think this is most apparent in the functions that decide what "[d]type" a Block--the most basic thing that stores data in pandas--should be.

[https://github.com/pandas- dev/pandas/blob/4edcc5541ff3f6470f...](https://github.com/pandas- dev/pandas/blob/4edcc5541ff3f6470f5e3c083cb83136119e6f0c/pandas/core/internals/blocks.py#L2973)

And then, for the ubiquitous Object dtype, often figure out which of the many possible more specific types to cast it to.

If you think that is easy, ask yourself what this outputs:

      import numpy as np
      np.array([np.nan, 'a'])

Lo and behold--it produces an array where the np.nan has been converted to the string "nan".

And yet

      import pandas as pd
      pd.Series([np.nan, "a"])

Knows this, has your back, and does not stringify it.

It also has a pathological fixation on _when_ it tries to convert dtypes, since avoiding all the bad conversion outcomes is a relatively time intensive process (compared to e.g. creating a numpy array).

I realize things could be much easier in pandas user facing interface, but really appreciate the sheer amount of effort that has gone into its dtype wrangling.

[0]: [http://github.com/machow/siuba](http://github.com/machow/siuba)

<comment><USER3> I really, really dislike all the dtype wrangling and how those choices resonate throughout the API. I understand that a lot of work has been done to make that API "work", but in practice it feels like that effort would have been better avoided by changing expectations and interfaces.

Now, to be clear, that's a hard problem. Heterogenous named bags of homogenous columns with a variety of data types, storage patterns, and ideas about missingness isn't an easy domain... but instead of just trying to make everything work through hammering 6+ semi-coherent interfaces (indices, databases, mutability, immutability/chaining, numpy, dataframes) together, I'd be willing to pay a lot more in verbosity and explicitness for something simple.

        pd.Series(str, [np.nan, "a"]) => ["nan", "a"] # or even an exception!
        pd.Series(nullable(str), [np.nan, "a"]) => [nan, "a"]

Indexing is vastly over-designed. GroupBy is a very common API and is poorly documented and just _weird_ in no small part due to attempts at dtype inference. Foundational useful concepts like categories feel bolted on. There's join, merge, pivot, pivot_table.

I'd chalk this all up to just being "hard", but at the same time I can go pick up R's dplyr library and get a very nice existence proof of how a nice interface could work. Not to say dplyr has it all figured out, but it's a night-and-day improvement to Pandas.

Pandas is great. It makes doing data science in Python so vastly much less of a chore than working with straight Numpy. It steals some great ideas and tries out a few interesting ones of its own... but it is far from a joy to work with.

<comment><USER4> Hadley had the discipline to let go and start from scratch 2 if not 3 times before getting it perfect with `dplyr`.

plyr came before and I think there was something else

That's how we got the amazing `dplyr`

I think pandas is well liked by those who move from C++ or Java, but is disliked by those who move from R

<comment><USER5> I agree - R has performant and robust dataframe functions. dplyr is great for small-medium sized datasets, data.table seems to be really performant for larger sets.

<comment><USER6> And now there is dtplyr, which simply creates a data.table back end with dplyr syntax on the front end.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great accomplishment and kudos to the dedicated maintainers. That being said, I've always had a love-hate relationship with pandas. It is a very powerful library and does a ton, but yet the API is all over the place and unless you use it regularly for a long period of time, it is almost impossible to get fluent with it. Every time I am away from it for a couple of months, I find even doing the most basic things to be complicated/confusing and find myself on stackoverflow way too often.

By comparison, the API of something like Pytorch is an absolute pleasure to use and even though I'm not using it all the time, I almost have no trouble every time I begin training models/trying out new things in Pytorch.

All that being said, this is definitely a step in the right direction and hopefully the API gets a bit more coherent over time.

<comment><USER8> I started using Julia recently. It seems like Julia has been able to take the good parts of Python and iron out the quirks. For example, I'm guessing the Julia DataFrame library is a knock off of Pandas, but the syntax more intuitive and concise - and I can remember it.

For Julia itself, the syntax is very similar to Python but doesn't have the weird lambda functions. It has the Javascript style arrow for short anonymous functions and the Ruby style "do" for longer functions. And finally, Julia is fast. I have a python/pandas script that take 3 days to run. Moving it over to Julia now.

<comment><USER9> Julia doesn't feel production ready at all. Its fine to mess around in notebooks but I would never recommend it for production use. Not even at a gunpoint.

Debugger support is almost non-existent. Using Atom/Juno IDE is a D-grade experience. Julia offers little help to debug problems - errors are almost always without failure - completely tangent to what the real issue is.

Julia takes forever to start, syntax was wonderful pre 0.4 days, now the syntax just looks absolutely jarring to my eyes. Julia's speedups can be offset by using many many far better technologies - Numba, Numpy, Cython, PyPy etc.

Julia's ecosystem of libraries is a deserted land - that's expected for a new language. I hope it improves, but the core Julia experience needs to improve first.

On the other hand, I've been following Rust development and the developers made absolutely sure from the get-go to focus on debugging/errors that show what the actual problem is, provide a stack trace and figure out where the problem started. Julia absolutely sucks at this.

<comment><USER10> Just wanted to jump in here and say that for numerical computing Julia's ecosystem of libraries are absolutely fantastic! DifferentialEquations.jl alone was worth switching to Julia!

Although I spent a long time optimising numerical code with Numba the speedup I got (whilst significant) wasn't really comparable to the speed of a Julia implementation.

<comment><USER9> I love some of their libraries as you mentioned. Just that when the language itself is painful to write code and debug it, the whole value proposition is diminished.

The core developers are of Julia are very smart folks, they want to develop a great language that's fast and easy to use. They missed the opportunity to restrict syntax, provide useful exception message (just look at Rust! it is a thing of art when you get an exception, it is beautiful), and generally provide good documentation.

For example, just creating a Julia local registry requires significant overhead and time investment. Spinning up a registry should not take more than 30 mins.

All these aspects of Julia are prohibitive and in my opinion, Julia should not be used in any company or production use until perhaps version 2. People who have dealt with Julia issues will tell you the truth - not the academicians or researchers. The people that maintain infrastructure/maintenance support for Julia apps are almost ready to quit their jobs. It sucks so bad.

<comment><USER11> >The people that maintain infrastructure/maintenance support for Julia apps are almost ready to quit their jobs. It sucks so bad.

Any specific examples?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I know I'm not the only one, but it's hard to imagine doing my job the last several year without Pandas. Even though Pandas has been used in production by many people as basically a 1.0.0 release for a long time, this an amazing milestone and I think everyone in my office smiled when they saw the release news.

I think it's worth it to acknowledge the great stewardship of the community by all the Pandas developers (and the rest of people in the PyData ecosystem). It has been an inspiration for me as I create and contribute to open source libraries for data science [0][1].

[0] [https://github.com/FeatureLabs/featuretools/](https://github.com/FeatureLabs/featuretools/) [1] [https://github.com/FeatureLabs/compose/](https://github.com/FeatureLabs/compose/)

<comment><USER13> I basically owe my career to pandas - it made me the go-to resource for any data analysis that couldn't be done in Excel. Once I became useful in that respect, I was strongly encouraged to further develop my programming knowledge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I am looking forward to a decade of fewer API breaking changes. However, 1.0 introduces a new column type for strings, recommends its use over the old "object" column type, yet says it is "Experimental and may change at any time."

How are we supposed to interpret this in light of the promise that there will be no more API breakages until 2.0? It reads as if this promise does not apply to string data, which impacts rather a lot of use cases.

<comment><USER15> It states in the deprecation policy that "API-breaking changes will be made only in major releases (except for experimental features)".

<comment><USER16> That seems like a rather large carve-out. Fortunately a lot of use cases won't really need to worry about something like that (e.g. exploratory analysis), in the context of it breaking your company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Could we collect some recommendations for really good books, online guides, tutorials, and recipes for current Pandas?

There are quite a few complaints here about the interface being confusing and difficult to use, and I feel like some of this is due to there being significant differences between versions. I would love to read a medium-length online free tutorial on Pandas 1.0, but it seems like most of what turns on up google are short idiosyncratic tutorials on specific tasks in various versions.

<comment><USER18> I find pandas tutorials great

[https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas- docs/stable/getting_started...](https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas- docs/stable/getting_started/index.html)

[https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas- docs/stable/getting_started...](https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas- docs/stable/getting_started/10min.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Pandas is my least favorite necessary evil. It's always changing, far too expansive API costs me about an hour a week.

Whenever one can use a utc epoch column for time indexed data in a raw numpy array instead, one should.

</comment><comment><USER20> "We've added to_markdown() for creating a markdown table"

That's awesome!

</comment><comment><USER21> No mention of vaex?

[https://vaex.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](https://vaex.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)

It has a cleaner, leaner API + the ability to use memory-mapped files.

</comment><comment><USER22> I've been waiting for this release for years and I hoped for one thing and one thing only - for pandas to have a proper way of dealing with NULLs. And it does have it... OPTIONALLY.

It's great that the whole thing with extension arrays, custom types etc. has lead to this, but when the devs have, after 10+ years, the biggest chance for a backward incompatible change, this is the one to make. By making it optional, they are fixing it for the very few that know of its existence.

I love pandas and a sizeable part of my career depended on it - and while I don't use it anymore (partly because of the NULLs), I wish it the best and I hope there will be a future release with this breaking change.

</comment><comment><USER23> Assuming you want to use python. What's the alternative to pandas? Kind of a brew up your own code kind of thing? Csv module I guess?

<comment><USER24> Dask is one option.

<comment><USER25> Wildly off topic, for which I apologize, but whenever I see "Dask", I think of this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DASK](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DASK) . You're not going to manage any large datasets on that! :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> one of the best python | data libraries out there. For analysis alone, no tool comes close.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is a huge accomplishment. The maintainers work very hard at keeping data science running for a substantial chunk of the field. Congratulations!

</comment><comment><USER28> Congratulations to the Pandas team. You lot have saved my bacon so many times over the last few years, I owe you many breakfasts.

Long live the King.

</comment><comment><USER29> "pandas is an open source, BSD-licensed library providing high-performance, easy-to-use data structures and data analysis tools for the Python programming language."

If anyone else is wondering what this is. (Source: project homepage

<comment><USER30> The only true part is that it's open source and BSD licensed. It's one of those unfortunate libraries (like matplotlib) that are both very useful and not very fun to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I have 30K line of codes in production using pandas 0.23.4. Should I consider updating.

<comment><USER32> Do you plan to stay at 0.23.4 forever? Then no. Else, yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Any word for when the RC will be "properly" released?

</comment><comment><USER18> convert_dtypes is pretty nice. I wonder how soon the new dtypes will be the defaults.</comment>


NASA's Apollo 10 astronauts encountered floating human waste - <AUTHOR> http://www.news.com.au/technology/sci-tech/nasas-apollo-10-astronauts-encountered-floating-human-waste/story-fn5fsgyc-1226617372437

<comment><USER2> And I thought it was bad treading on a rat kidney the cat left on the floor last night (not one other bit has been found yet). Damn space turns, that's unpleasant.</comment>


Countries where cash is on the verge of extinction - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20160922-the-countries-where-cash-is-on-the-verge-of-extinction <comment><USER2> The problem with a cashless society is that if all payments are tracked or controlled by a third party, it's impossible to make black market transactions or grey market transactions.

The line between legal and illegal keeps changing, as attitudes in society changes, but not allowing people to vote with their wallets which way society should go is an incredibly bad idea.

How could you run a gay club in a cashless country where it is illegal to be gay? How could you buy marijuana in a cashless state where the legality of it is undefined? How can you donate to wikileaks when no US-based payment provider wants to facilitate payments to it?

The argument against cash is exactly the same as people not caring about their web browsing history being accessible to others, and saying 'they have nothing to hide'.

Well, one day you might have something to hide. For good reasons or bad reasons or whatever, and that's when privacy is a good thing. That's when anonymous cash is a good thing.

<comment><USER3> > The problem with a cashless society is that if all payments are tracked or > controlled by a third party

Problem for you but imho one of the key motivations for getting rid of cash.

Our civil liberties are increasingly dependent on the "good will" of governments. Globally they play-act their conflicts, but every single one of them agrees that their citizens need to be monitored 24/7.

Digital cash in combination with IoT monitoring of infrastructure such as utility metrics, and your friendly big-brother in your mobile device likely will make it extremely difficult for a bartering economy/black-market to emerge as well.

A global Permanent Establishment™ is being constructed right in front of us but alas we're all distracted by phony spats between geopolitical actors who are all (and their families as you can see) stakeholders in this Permanent Establishment™.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is rejecting cash legal in these countries ? I get they do not want handle the cost and difficulty etc. But refusing cash should be illegal for public establishments at the very least.

<comment><USER5> Technically it would negate the status of "legal tender" to the money, not really something that a state or governement can allow, not even in private transactions, but of course the article is largely exaggerating:

Title: ... cash is on the verge of extinction...

Inside:"Electronic payments in the Netherlands' shops and supermarkets overtook cash payments for the first time in 2015 by a narrow margin: 50% debit cards while 49.5% were paid for in cash the remaining 0.5% were credit card-payments. There's a movement afoot by a coalition of Dutch banks and retailers that want that ratio to increase to 60% electronic payment versus 40% hard currency by 2018. "

<comment><USER6> So not on the verge extinction at all. Also, whenever someone brings up the a northern European country as the trendsetter for the rest of the world, I can't help but be skeptical.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Helping the popularity of debit cards in The Netherlands is contactless payments for small amount. I love it, it's super efficient.

</comment><comment><USER8> Cashless societieas area dictator's pipe dream.</comment>


Cloudsigma has had five outages this week, approx. 10 hours total - <AUTHOR> http://www.cloudsigma.com As said in the title, five outages and they have been around 10 hours in total during the week.<p>Should we consider to move our servers or linger and see if they can fix their business? Seems unreliable. <comment><AUTHOR> As can be seen, their homepage is down as well right now.</comment>


Introduction to Abject-Oriented Programming - <AUTHOR> http://typicalprogrammer.com/?p=8 <comment><USER2> I worked in a place that used the "inheritance by copying working code" technique. It was a web app in ASP; each page was basically a stand-alone mini-app that had been copied from some other working page and then modified. Since we had no unit tests, there was one benefit, and that was that you could change the code on a page and be fairly certain that you would not affect any other pages.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have to wonder about the commenters that took it seriously but only objected to 1 or 2 things; do they actually use the rest of the method?

<comment><USER4> Yes; the true humour is in the comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The comments on that are amazing!

</comment><comment><USER6> Great article!</comment>


WHILL Model M: A high-tech motorized wheel chair - <AUTHOR> https://cityofhumans.com/whill-model/#.V8aAv81rlv8.hackernews <comment><USER2> Shitty site requires login to read.</comment>


Can "Free Speech" Be "Moderated"? Yes. (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/can-free-speech-be-moderated-yes-15700db2b7ab#.52r9v0b6n <comment><USER2> > While from the earliest days some forms of speech have been assumed to be > subject to potential restrictions (i.e. the risk of immediate danger by > shouting "fire in a crowded movie house") the remaining expression of > political ideas went unregulated, no matter how hateful. This led to > "expressions" such as burning crosses, flags, or effigies, often accompanied > by hateful written materials. All in all, it was a lot of work to express a > lot of hate. Still the Supreme Court upheld the right to do so, so long as > the speech did not violate other laws such as fire codes, arson, or safety > regulations.

Utterly false. The "fire in a crowded theater" quote comes from a (later overturned) Supreme Court decision that _banned opposing the draft_. I guess the authors point would be somewhat diminished if he had to include anti-war protests as things that tend to be banned when speech gets moderated, not just the catch-all 'hate'.</comment>


Why tab navigation sucks in Chrome, pt 2 - <AUTHOR> http://romymaxwell.com/why-tab-navigation-sucks-in-chrome-part-2/

<comment><USER2> I would rather want Tab Overflow in Chrome. But They already dismissed that.

That is why i am staying with Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER3> it doesn't suck. its way better than IE - complain bout that instead.

<comment><AUTHOR> First off, I don't care about IE because I don't use it. Second, how's it way better ?</comment></comment>


Rise of the High-Profit Micro Farm (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://modernfarmer.com/2016/10/jm-fortier/ <comment><USER2> I've become entranced by the Youtube videos of Urban Farmer Curtis Stone. I played around with the idea of starting a farm like this and the labor involved turned me against it, but I can listen to his vlogs for hours while doing yard work or painting through my wireless headphones.

There is something very human about one person teaching another person to produce food in the kind of detail he goes in to, and I think time farming lends itself to quality thinking and reasoning for a philosophically inclined intelligent person.

They are essentially rediscovering the way humanity grew greens before tractors and herbicides, but there are some new innovations that are making these farms work:

1) Growing things like romaine lettuce in holes cut in landscape tarping is eliminating weeding.

2) They are cutting time from harvest to plate by a few days, and the resulting quality is much better, and they are not using toxic chemicals to control pests and weeds.

3) They are using no-till methods, the only input is compost and earth worms do the tilling work.

I wish that there were more farms like this in my area, because I really hate the selection and price of organic produce in my supermarkets. It is very much lacking, or insanely expensive.

<comment><USER3> Setup a square foot garden, and get a couple of earth boxes for Tomatoes. It doesn't take a ton of time, and is very rewarding.

<comment><USER4> Tomatoes are truly one of the easiest things to grow, but they seem to be too cheap to bother with the large-scale production. They also get infected sometimes, we lost all of our plants at the end of the season a year ago. But then 2016 had been fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm assuming this was posted in reaction to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13309610](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13309610).

Interesting to see the contrast - on one side, the funded Silicon Valley "everything you need in a (very expensive) box"; on the other, just a few people sharing knowledge they've acquired through decades of practice without using any significantly new technology.

My money's on the latter when it comes to long term impact.

<comment><USER6> >> a few people sharing knowledge they've acquired I also failed to see much of new knowledge in this article.

it is not very clear from the article how these people managed to achieve such high profits. Because of a big demand for organic food? And due to their proximity to a large metro area?

As of the technology they are using, it is not that special... my parents used to have an extensive vegetable garden (as a consequence of living through a very hungry period of the USSR collapse). When I was still living with them, about 20 years ago, they already had these technologies: walk-behind tractors, vegetable pairings, composting, hand tools. They could feed 4-5 ppl family but that was it. I remember it required A LOT of manual work non-stop all year around. We, their grown-up kids, were highly suggesting them to stop brother and simply go to the local market and buy the food there. Pretty much the same price, much less labor.

I want to say people left farming for a reason and it looks like now the new generation either does not know or forgot how hard it is to grow food.

<comment><USER7> My mum still messing up in garden and bringing to my home some vegs. Because she just has no job and nothing to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hope these "micro farmers" enjoy the good times while they last as their days are numbered. Sensors, automation and intelligent, intensive and most importantly organic, vertical farming is going to ultimately decimate the small producer farming industry. The thing is produce is a commodity, not a branded good, and people ultimately don't care what "label" is on their vegetables and won't pay a premium for a given label when they can get reasonable analogs for the same or a lesser price. Consumers just want quality produce at a reasonable price.

When technology driven high intensity automated farms are able to output yields orders of magnitude greater than these people digging in the dirt with hand-tools are able to output, at a commensurate if not substantially higher quality, they'll be able to undercut the prices of these "micro farmers" by significant amounts and all consumers will care about is that their organic heirloom greens taste just as good but cost half the price. Not the mention they'll do so with a substantially reduced environmental impact, requiring less water per unit of output and requiring substantially less space allowing formerly agricultural lands to be returned back to their natural state.

Small scale agriculture is a fantastic solution to the problem of disaffected young people who want to be farmers, but doesn't really offer any practical solutions for the rest of the world.

<comment><USER9> Where can I buy these great tasting heirloom greens at half the price of which you speak?

I have no problem finding mediocre produce at a low price point, but quality produce at a reasonable price is often hard to find in major north american metros.

I'm open to the idea that technology will continue to change the landscape here, but I think you are underestimating the difficulties. I may be missing something here, but the successes I see touted in areas as you describe are things like the plethora of nitrogen bagged greens all over the continent these days from California. Certainly a commercial success and for access, but the produce itself is often pretty dismal and the process I understand is very specialized. Not a categorical win, then.

<comment><USER3> It's harder because our wacky economics make it more desirable to plant a subdivision that to farm. I'm fortunate to live in an area where prime agricultural land is relatively untouched and several prosperous farms are around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There seem to be more and more "high tech farm" threads on news.yc over the last few months, and I've got several friends who are doing the same thing I'm doing: making a living as a coder, but running a farm as a hobby.

I set up a slack a few months back for a few friends to chat on this topic, but we didn't have critical mass.

If anyone wants to chat about coders who farm at [https://codefarmers.slack.com/](https://codefarmers.slack.com/) send me an email at firstname.lastname@example.com and I'll invite you in.

</comment><comment><USER11> We're sharing some of our land this year to someone trying to make this concept work for them, on a spare acre we've never developed. I don't know if it is as viable as books and articles claim or not, but I'm absolutely willing to share my land to let people try.

<comment><USER12> In case you or the farmer post about the experience can you share a placeholder link now ?

Regardless, I am always amazed by the HN community. You aren't even the original poster and yet have a direct connection to this random non-tech story. It is so humbling.

<comment><USER13> Oh, it's a tech story. Food is the industry we will literally _never_ grow out of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The article is a little light on detail of how those high profits come to be. Is it maximizing the amount of produce you can grow, or is it choosing the highest-margin produce, or is it something you do on the sales or marketing side? Is it some combination of these things? Where does most of the margin come from?

<comment><USER15> High-margin crops, minimal overhead, and intensive cultivation (i.e., greenhouses) to get the most out the available space. Pretty much be the only way to go on a small acreage:

 _> Though his book The Urban Farmer still similarly emphasizes minimal machinery and biointensive growing, Stone sticks to the highest profit crops—baby greens, microgreens, and tomatoes, for example._

The other part of this is having a strong local customer base willing to pay a premium for fresh ingredients.

A fresh tomato, ripened on the vine, and picked and eaten the same day is much tastier than a store-bought one shipped a thousand miles. Taste-wise it's almost a completely different foodstuff.

But location is key for this type of business. If there's 200 restaurants within 20 miles of the microfarm the customer base is good. If there's only two it's going to be much more difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm not a farmer, but this reads like an advertorial to me.

</comment><comment><USER17> I love our house garden, which regularly provides us with daily sustenance/delight for the most of 8 - 10 months of the year (depending on yields and canning..) .. to me, it seems really strange that folks don't grow things in the city. A human being that doesn't grow something is truly missing out on a valuable experience - even if you live in an apartment, you can grow food. Its truly a quality of life booster.

</comment><comment><USER18> Technically not a farm since a most of their profits are from the religion of organics I'm guessing.

More a church.

Says me who earns less money than they do, religion pays big I guess.</comment>


Sunnyvale puts two Onizuka parcels (now Google's) on open market (February 2017) - <AUTHOR> http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/02/14/sunnyvale-to-take-offers-on-onizuka-land/ <comment><AUTHOR> These Sunnyvale city council voted 6-0 to sell these parcels to Google for a below-market price of $21 million. I can't find _any_ online news reports of this. The Mercury has a print article on the front page of today's "The Sun"[0] weekly enclosure, but this article is _nowhere_ on their website, even behind the paywall. It is also mysteriously absent from the City of Sunnyvale website (a search on "Google Onizuka" returns no results).

[0] "Sunnyvale to sell 5 acres to Google for $21 million", The Sun, page 1</comment>


Women swept nearly every category at the 2017 Hugo Awards - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/11/16127310/2017-hugo-awards-n-k-jemisin-science-fiction-fantasy-books <comment><USER2> After their no platforming last year, do they still have any credibility left ?

The nasty reveal of hidden politics on the right and the left in gaming the system was a rude wake up call to me.

I find Amazon best sellers list give me better recommendations than nonsense like Hugo's Chuck Tingle.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's great to see. One of my favorite authors of all time is a woman, Julian May. Isn't it funny that in a genre that so many equate with neckbeards is turning out to be the opposite of this perception.

<comment><USER4> True hackers simply care about code and true readers care about words. Take the authors name away and it is not always obvious who wrote.

I was a bit surprised that Jemisin got her second Hugo in a row. I liked the Obelisk Gate, eager for the third one but then there are other great ones on that shortlist - Becky Chambers made me chuckle more than I can remember.

Still two in a row for the same person isn't that proof for a lack of diversity? /s <\-- sadly needed these days 8-/

<comment><USER3> Ha. That's funny.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Without getting into the whole Puppies controversy, I'll say that last night's Hugo Awards ceremony was one of the nicest and classiest presentations I've seen in many years of attending Worldcons. I was delighted to see such a diverse set of nominees, award winners, and presenters.

</comment><comment><USER6> Can someone tell me what's the idea behind "best dramatic presentation - longform"? It's the only category dominated by blockbusters, and I'm wondering whether that's by design.

<comment><USER7> It seems to be movie adaptations as opposed to shortform which are TV series adaptations.

<comment><USER8> I find it interesting that longform refers to film and short form are Tv series; I thought it would be the opposite.

<comment><USER9> A TV series is like a collection of short stories, where the episodes stand alone;aA film is like a novel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Monstress is amazing! Couldn't recommend it enough.</comment>


Ask HN: How unique does a company name need to be? - <AUTHOR>

Let's say I want to start a company named "Panacea" (this is not the actual name I want, just using it as an example).  Say I want to form an LLC and leave open the possibility of switching to a Corporation down the road.
From a quick google search, there already exists: "Panacea Pharmaceuticals" "Panacea-BOCAF" education focused non-profit "Panacea University" "Panacea Clinical Research" "Panacea Consulting Inc" ... probably some others.
Assuming that there are not specifically any "Panacea Software LLC"s out there, would I be able to register that name and legally do business with it?
What are the rules regarding picking a company name?  Is it legit to append "Software" or "Technologies" to the end of a name if there is already a corporation with that name in some other field? <comment><USER2> The rule-of-thumb test for whether or not you can use a particular name is "likelihood of confusion" among customers between the name you select, for the particular market you target, and names of existing companies also serving that market. If it is clear that customers should readily be able to tell the difference, and not get confused, it is generally safe to go with your proposed name (if in doubt, check with a knowledgeable lawyer).

With respect to any trade or service mark, even if registered as a federal mark, the scope of protection generally extends only to the particular "class" of goods or services for which the mark was registered. (See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_classification> for a general description of the classification system)

If a mark is particularly strong (e.g., Coke - fanciful, well-established, etc.), it can cut across all classes.

A classic case of an in-between mark, in which the holder contended that it was strong enough to cut across classes but lost in court on the issue, was the "Lexis" mark held by Mead Data, the legal research service. In the 1980s, Mead Data sued Toyota over its planned introduction of the "Lexus" brand automobile, claiming that customers would potentially confuse the marks. While Mead Data ultimately lost the case, the case went up through the court of appeals. (A summary of the dispute is found in this article: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LexisNexis>)

For most normal cases, marks will not be strong enough to cut across classes and it therefore is generally okay to use comparatively weaker marks in different fields with slight variations in the name (or often even with identical names, as long as they are in different jurisdictions).

Thus, the answer to your last question is generally "yes."</comment>


Choosing a Port for realtime multiplayer game - <AUTHOR>

We built realtime multiplayer into a game we're developing.  The game was built in Flex, the multiplayer server is based on Apache Mina.  We're trying to decide on a port to run that server on that has the least chance of being blocked by company firewalls, school firewalls, etc. etc.
So far, we've been running the multiplayer server on port 443 assuming that no IT department would block the SSL port.  But low and behold, we've found at least 1 law firm that blocks port 443 and it has me a little worried.
So, what's the least likely port to be blocked that we could run this multiplayer server on?
Has anybody had any particular experience with choosing a port poorly or wisely? <comment><USER2> When I worked on remote-access software that tunneled through firewalls, it ran on port 443 with a configurable backup of 80. You aren't going to get something that's more likely to be open.

Really, if a law firm doesn't want its employees playing multiplayer games on company time, let them block it. And I thought my cofounder was bad for marketing casual games to Deutsch Bank employees. :-P</comment>


Ask HN: What is a reasonable response to "Why should I care if I can't help it?" - <AUTHOR> When I discuss news about problems elsewhere in the world (amazing being burned, poverty in other nations, climate change, etc), an argument that I often hear (and which can be seen in some of the downvoted comments in [1]) is "Why should I care? There's nothing that I can do about it."<p>What is an appropriate response to this? I can say that if affects all of us, but again, they always say "I can do nothing about it, so why do I need to even know about it?"<p>[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/cumrqz/ysk_the_amazon_rain_forest_isnt_burning_its_being/ <comment><USER2> My response would fall under "Think globally, act locally."

You can't solve the big problem, but you should act in a manner that if everyone does as you do, then the big problem would get tackled.

In cases where your local choices have no impact, limiting your exposure to the information can be a good idea but still keep a way to get some of it from time to time.

There has to be a distinction made between "I don't care because I don't think it will affect me" vs. "I'm not giving much attention because I don't have a way to make a difference." I try to avoid the first kind. TBH, even if a person responded with the first, I couldn't really argue their choice.

</comment><comment><USER3> Do you have good reasons for caring, reasons other people can understand? Do you do anything about these problems?

Maybe you don't need an "appropriate response." Find something of common interest to talk about, or find other people who share your interests.</comment>


The Day the Golden Gate Bridge Flattened (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://www.mercurynews.com/2012/05/23/the-day-the-golden-gate-bridge-flattened/ <comment><USER2> The day was clear, the crowds were large; the bridge was full with a festive feel. No one wanted to be the first to leave, Soon there was no retreat... As more bodies pushed in from either side an unpleasant realization spread there was no going back that day -- Golden Gate Bridge 50th Anniversary

<comment><USER3> I was there. I spent the night before in Sausalito, and we came from the north, reaching almost the middle before encountering the wall of people from the SF side.

It was damn scary. People continued to crush in from both directions, and the bridge swayed despite it not being particularly windy. People in midspan were yelling in both directions for people to turn around. The trampling deaths at the Who concert in Cincinnati were not yet forgotten.

Just when we felt in _serious_ trouble, people finally got the hint that they weren't going to make it across, and they retreated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The crowd control issues definitely sound like a good reason to not repeat this. Or at least not without making each side of the bridge one-way for pedestrian traffic and controlling the maximum number of people allowed on the bridge at each time.

</comment><comment><USER5> The bridge's advertised maximum downward deflection is 10.8 feet. Unless that's an incredibly blatant lie, I don't see how a deflection of 7 feet would almost break the bridge.

Edit: the article does go on to acknowledge that, after the point where I'd originally stopped reading out of exasperation with the typical BANG clickbait.

<comment><USER6> The bridge was designed with a maximum deflection of 16 feet vertically and 27 feet horizontally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Post-9/11 world in 1987?

<comment><USER8> >And bridge officials insist that the reason the bridge district isn't permitting pedestrians to swarm over the Golden Gate for the 75th anniversary Sunday has nothing to do with the threat of collapse and everything to do with the threats of overcrowding and terrorism in a post-9/11 world.</comment></comment>


Derek's 'desk' - <AUTHOR> http://www.tagbento.com/243/dereks-desk

<comment><USER2> Derek's post was a surprise - though I shouldn't have expected anything less than the unexpected from him. I think a 'desk' like his is something to aspire to - the freedom of not being tied to a physical location to perform what would generally be desk-bound work.

I also sometimes find that a desk as a place to work carries too much expectation and pressure - sometimes it's useful to step away from it and have fresh surroundings.

[Hi, I'm the founder of Tagbento - if you have any questions just ask. Your feedback is welcome too!]</comment>


"The World Is, of Course, Insane": An Interview with Errol Morris - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/the-world-is-of-course-insane-errol-morris-interview <comment><USER2> That was very interesting!

I really sympathize with his goal of interviewing people with the intent of getting an unforced explanation for whatever the interviewee has or is supporting. Adversarial interviews are more entertaining for sure, but how beneficial are they really at getting the interviewee to open up and share their unfiltered opinions, get them to lay out their own narrative? (with the purpose of learning about their world view)

At the same time the only movie I've watched of his is Fog of War and I wasn't a fan, felt like it was a lot of nothing.

I guess there is no "right" approach to interviewing, it depends on the interviewee.

<comment><USER3> As a student of war, history, and leadership, _The Fog of War_ is fascinating. It is a phenomenal contribution to the study of Vietnam in particular. The contrast between McNamara's eventual regret and Rumsfeld's unrepentance in _The Unknown Known_ is stark.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I started reading and got the reg wall again. So many good news sites but they can't expect everyone to create a dozen accounts just to read news and I will not use social media. I don't mind paying the price of a news paper provided I won't have to use a credit card or provide any trackable artifact.

Maybe a service that sells cards that have 24 hour expiry to access a large number of news sites would be great. I would pay $5/2days,$20/week personally. Simple business model with 10% going to the card maker/distributor and nothing more. Ever. You buy the cards at any store that sells a gift card (including gas stations and thelike). A 6 character alphanum code you can use with any number of sites! No logins,no accounts and everybody wins (except people that want to milk the surveillance cow).

I hope someone does it or I will need to start doing my homework on this.

<comment><USER5> You could also just purchase the magazine with cash at a newsstand...

<comment><USER4> I don't want to.

You want me to buy 10 news papers in case I find an interesting article posted on some site like HN or reddit? Paper waste (just more trash for me even if I don't care a about the environment). Most papers publish articles daily or every few hours too. What if I want to read an article of a paper circulated in los angeles and I live in florida?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The meta-position that you can absorb multiple world views and hold them temporarily to assess their ontological narrative is ridiculous. It bleeds from the stone of Christian reformation theology and the rationalist enlightenment chisel chipping away at it for centuries to increase the flow. What has been en vogue for the past 100 years is to fuse east and west in order to sell universality without the baggage of the past to the largely indifferent emergent empires in the Eurasian continental landmass.

Morris is a propagandist, whitewashing colonial-imperialism for the sake of posterity and progeny. Call it the bigotry of low time preference towards civilizations, call it misguided mystic zionism compounded by centuries of guilt of identity and millennial discrimination, call it international capital. The American founders understood that use of power is the trap of all great power and worked to curtail the accumulation of it by maintaining the settler ethos in the American mind. Now it has been replaced by 'a nation of immigrants'.

With Asia we see the fraying of the American ideals, betrayed and exposed as an empty power grab at cultural hegemony, a molten liquid setting into a misshapen lump, waiting to be squeezed, chipped and remelted again. A world war will be necessarily fought over this anti-human humanist idea, since people are not liquid and can only be squeezed so hard before they crack and splinter.

21st century American can only be reasoned with from an equal position of power, and the madness that spreads top down from the entrenched political apparatus is fanatical in its devotion to self-serving narratives, which will lead to more and more erratic and unpredictable outcomes, until corruption and despotism rule the day.

China has always dealt with ideological theocracies with subversion and reasoned pragmatism, it survived the mongols and the japanese and it will survive the americans too. what survives of the extended western roman empire? likely the political monuments of worship too large to tear down and a few choice words of english.

<comment><USER7> How on Earth did you get from "I don't like this filmmaker" to "China is better than Ancient Rome"?

<comment><USER8> The filmmaker fuses east/west as a gimmick, China's ability to survive is more structured. Etc. Well written comment, but too bombastic for my taste. I give this comment 3/5 stars.</comment></comment></comment>


GitHub Game Off Winners - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/1337-github-game-off-winners

<comment><USER2> Does it bother anyone else that to play one of the winner games ("Hotfix"), you have to download and install this "Unity Web Player" plugin? I also want to note that none of the other main winners had that.

Downloading a plugin to play seems counter to what HTML5 web games are trying to do?

<comment><USER3> It's not about HTML5, it just needs to be playable in a browser:

> All entries must be web-based, i.e. playable in a browser. HTML5, WebGL, > Unity, Torque 3D, Node JS, Flash are all possible - just be sure the source > is made available on your fork.

<https://github.com/blog/1303-github-game-off>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really wish I had another week to flesh out my game. I spent a bunch of time developing the platform but didn't quite get enough game mechanics in there.

My game was octoshot, a 3d FPS: <http://octoshot.jlongster.com/>

I'm currently rebuilding it with missles and other types of guns, and actual levels.

<comment><USER5> Pretty sure your company can give you an extra few weeks to work on it some more :) --> <https://gameon.mozilla.org/en-US/>

<comment><USER4> That's true! Of course I can't actually win, unless I throw some money to a certain somebody (kidding). Maybe I'll see if they want it as a submission.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is our game guys - <http://khele.in/pappu-pakia/> and we won! :D

<comment><USER7> Great work. Yours was very cute. How'd you do the sound?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'll admit it - I checked the source of "Rock Kickass" to figure out how to kill the boss. Luckily it was nicely commented.

<comment><USER9> At least you didn't fork it to kill it with a simple move.</comment></comment>


World's tallest skyscraper to be built in just 90 days - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57552186-1/developer-reaffirms-plan-to-finish-worlds-tallest-building-in-90-days <comment><USER2> This should be interesting to watch, as others have noted on the 30 story building they did it is both 'boring' since the floors are mostly identical, and largely built off site and then simply erected. I'm sure The Register will call it the "worlds fastest erection" :-).

At the MIT affordable housing design competition there were some entrants that had similar features. (pre-fab sections, erected on site relatively rapidly) By pre-wiring/plumbing the walls and floors you cut out a lot of things that slow people down. Having watched Hotels get built in Las Vegas really rapidly (for them, which is 18 months, ground breaking to opening night) you could see there are lots of things that can be disrupted. Staging carpet for example, when you start carpeting its rolls and rolls and rolls of carpet, lifted by crane to various floors, and later cut to order. If you install the floor with all the carpeting already installed at the factory you've managed to parallelize floor construction and finishing. That is a huge savings.

This building will house 31,400 people, (@ 11M sq ft that is like 350 sq ft per person so not really roomy) But an interesting way to throw together shelter. Building these things for Haiti could do wonders for that country, assuming they don't burn down.

<comment><USER3> I don't know if building cheap housing really solves any problems however. C.f., the famous housing "projects" in Chicago. You can replace those with any low-income housing project anywhere in the world and see the same effects. You might put roofs over people's heads but you create a new set of problems by throwing all of those marginally functional people together. I imagine increasing population density would just amplify those problems.

This building is supposed to have a mix of low and high income housing (how does that work?) as well as schools and other social services. Given that space in China is _not_ at a premium I don't think you can call this anything but a social experiment. Maybe if it works they can export it to HK where it might actually be useful. (Though it does conjure images of a sort of neo- Walled City.)

Given that this type of construction produces boring, utilitarian space I don't understand why they're not using it for offices. I imagine this would be much more tolerable as office space and the footprint / usable space ratio would make sense for commercial districts.

<comment><USER4> I think it may be worth considering that the discipline and follow-the-herd mentality of Chinese people is a lot different than those of Americans who would qualify for "the projects" style housing.

<comment><USER5> You may not have intended it that way, but I do find this comment to be rather racist. The stereotype that the Chinese are "follow the herd" is both untrue and damaging. Us Chinese have a hard enough time being taken seriously in the West, what with stereotypes of a hive mind and mindless obedience to authority, and this doesn't help.

<comment><USER4> I definitely didn't mean it that way but if thought it was "racism" you should read up on what racism is. To call out the differences between two cultures is not racism. Having said that, Asian culture has been, and is still very much, strongly influenced by the ideas of honor and shame. That's much less the case here in the US and that is what I was pointing out.

I find it interesting that you didn't take offense to my generalization of the "Americans who would qualify for 'the projects'". Why is that?

<comment><USER6> You may wish to follow your own advice there. Calling out the differences between cultures is a fundamental part of racism - "we're better than them and their funny ways". Yes, it can be done in a non-racist way, but the way you've phrased it is just plain wrong.

 _I find it interesting that you didn't take offense to my generalization of the "Americans who would qualify for 'the projects'"._

[http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Oppression%20...](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Oppression%20Olympics)

<comment><USER4> What?

It sounds like you've really misunderstood my comment(s).

<comment><USER6> I'm saying that you have a peverse understanding of what racism is, and that you should 'read up on racism'.

Your first paragraph is saying that calling out differences in two cultures isn't racist. This isn't true. Yes it can be done differently, but if you start talking about 'fried chicken and watermelon' (as an example), you're talking about the difference between two cultures, yours and the stereotyped one you're referring to.

The second paragraph was a straight-out derailment:"oh, if you're really against racism, why aren't you against this other kind?", the subtext being that the speaker is biased or selfish because they didn't evenly address the other potentially racist stuff.

Seriously, if you're going to be correcting others on 'what racism is', you do need to spend some more time reading up on it. There's a few subtleties that have bypassed you, from your comment above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Working on an app a while back, I watched people constructing a building outside of my office window. Watching hundreds of people working together, they got that thing up in around six months.

I looked at how far we had gotten on the software we were working on in the same time period. It was, frankly, disheartening.

<comment><USER8> In one of his talks Alan Kay compares software development with civil engineering, claiming the former is still at the level of pyramid building.

<comment><USER9> There are certainly similarities, but civil engineering when compared to software engineering methodologies is closer to waterfall. And waterfall isn't the most efficient way to turn out software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Whilst putting up a building at speed is a great marvel, it should be noted that what holds this kind of prefabrication back is not generally technological innovation but the reality that transporting prefabricated components to site is often more expensive than just building them in place. If this ever really gets built and isn't one giant PR excercise ('tallest building' proposals have a long history as such), it will require a huge factory space of temporary workers not far from the base of the building basically doing all the usual building tasks and won't be any cheaper than a traditional slow concrete construction which requires long times to dry (unless they are hiding something more fundamentally important than the headline from us).

<comment><USER11> I was under the impression it was mostly regulation holding prefabrication back (presumably less of an issue in china). Here in the UK many (admittedly somewhat low-quality) prefabs were built immediately after the war to replace lost housing, and it was seen as the way forward - then they suddenly became illegal once they were no longer such an obvious necessity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> A 220 floor building is a hugely complex engineering feat to pull off which will have little in common with the 30 floor hotel that Broad previously manufactured and erected. The difference cannot be overstated; from the structural elements needed to support something approaching 3000 feet (including the sheer loads from wind) to the highly specialised services required (lifts, water, drainage, fire services, power distribution etc.). On top of this there are the technicalities and logistics of manufacturing and assembling something this big and tall in such a short time. There will be a lot of specialist and custom engineering involved.

So what is the point? If Broad's mission is manufacture cost effective, easy to erect and energy efficient tower blocks then the 220/F monster seems an unlikely direction to take. The average tower block in any but the most crowded city is unlikely to much over 30 floors. And from a cost and energy efficiency standpoint there are diminishing returns on very tall buildings anyway.

All in all I think this is more of a publicity stunt than a reality.

</comment><comment><USER13> Using this fabrication method on a smaller/safer scale would be great for the Australian construction industry. There's so much regulation and risk- assignment involved in construction that only the biggest players can afford to bid and execute on a medium-large project. The result is little innovation, lengthy project completion times and high costs.

Forget the construction companies for a moment - the amount of training and accreditation required for a tradesman (e.g. electrician) is unheard of anywhere else in the world. My friend has three different Working at Heights tickets, and the various state licenses have cost him a small fortune.

If we could shift much of the fabrication to local factories/warehouses where working at height and weather exposure can be reduced or eliminated, we might be able to encourage more competition and speed up production times.

<comment><USER14> >Using this fabrication method on a smaller/safer scale would be great for the Australian construction industry.

Agreed (though why smaller?). Do you know people who might be interested in looking into this?

<comment><USER13> Smaller, relative to this megastructure, because its a new fabrication process - better to see how it performs on a smaller-scale both in terms of desirability (is it pretty - will people happily work/live in it) and structural integrity. Plus there needs to be demand for huge amounts space.

I know people from the engineering side of things who would be interested.

<comment><USER14> I also know people who may be interested. I put my email in my profile, if you want to look into this, send me a note.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The more impressive headline will be "World's tallest skyscraper constructed in just 90 days." The Burj Khalifa took five and a half years to complete. Even completing this new building in twice the predicted time will be remarkable.

</comment><comment><USER16> It seems to me that many (most?) rooms in that building will not have windows and most of those that do have windows will not have windows that open. So this building might as well be underground.

<comment><USER17> I bet not. Rather than just building a big "square", the image depicts a shape that provides a lot of outside surface area for windows. A significant part of the internal non-window space will be elevators.

But you could be right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Awesome feature by Wired about the man behind this: [http://www.wired.com/design/2012/09/broad-sustainable- buildi...](http://www.wired.com/design/2012/09/broad-sustainable-building- instant-skyscraper/all/)

HN discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4574100>

</comment><comment><USER19> China also has entire empty cities, some newly constructed:

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19049254>

<http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1339536/>

So one has to ask why.

<comment><USER20> Simple: Changsha is not an empty city.

<comment> mkr-hn I always assumed the stories about empty cities were like street interviews. Pick what fits the target narrative and toss the rest, even if the rest contradicts the narrative.

<comment><USER20> There is a lot of truth the empty city/empty building story, mostly just classic overbuilding. Its just not the issue in Changsha, which is a booming city coming into its own right now (though they may be overbuilding). I've only been there once about 10 years ago, but I go to Hunan relatively often. Its not like Inner Mongolia where you could just build an empty city on the plains. The area is heavily populated.

<comment> mkr-hn It's always good to hear straight from people who aren't a continent or more removed from the subject. Where's a good place to look if I want to find out more about the real estate situation around China?

<comment><USER20> I'm not sure, China is a big place and many local factors apply.

Natural resources in the west and northwest dominate, which is why there are ghost boom towns (people looking to do something with that money). Shanghai/Guangzhou are financial centers and become incredibly expensive, Beijing is the center of government but will always trail Shanghai. The south is dense but not that much arable land (compared to say India, China is mostly mountains). Yunnan (out west) has great weather and ethnic diversity; you'd think Kunming could eventually become China's San Francisco but capital and skillz are all concentrated in the east.

You could probably pick a city or region and analyze it to death.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > using 95 percent prefabricated modular pieces that are sort of similar to a > giant Lego set

What terrible writing.

</comment><comment><USER22> Isn't this the same group that had one of their '90-day' buildings collapse not long ago?

<comment><USER23> A variety of buildings have collapsed in China in recent years. Here's one good example with great pictures. I don't know if it's the same company or not.

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196064/Tumbling- tow...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196064/Tumbling-tower-China- Amazing-pictures-13-storey-block-flats-toppled-over.html)

<comment><USER24> And that's not a 90 day pre-fab building. IIRC, they had a dodgy underground carpark, which subsided. It had nothing to do with the actual building.

Also, the pre-fabs they are starting to build have a lot of steel, which is easy to engineer. Concrete can be more difficult to get right, especially when you don't trust the suppliers (bamboo rebar anyone?).

<comment><USER20> But concrete buildings are so common in China because they can be assembled with low-level migrant workers. The move to steel typically requires much higher-level expertise, and so only the tallest buildings get that treatment. But with prefab, this is interesting, they might be able to continue using low-level migrant workers in the factory and during assembly?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> That's not a building, that's an arcology.

</comment><comment><USER26> Note that the article says "90 days to finish" or "90 days to complete", NOT "90 days to build".

The site prep work like foundations for a supertall skyscraper are easily glossed over but are very important.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is being built under the same principles that we build software on. I think that it is huge that many industries are using what I would call DRY development on their manufacturing.

</comment><comment><USER19> WTF is with the phallus symbol race for biggest buildings around the world.

How about a contest for the least warmongering nation with the most free, productive people?

Denmark? Norway? Costa Rica?

<comment><USER28> That would be much harder to evaluate. Measuring tall things is pretty straightforward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm noticing this trend in numerous projects. Clients expect so much in 90 days. Sigh.

Pretty impressive if they can do it.

</comment><comment><USER30> I almost had a heart attack when I saw that picture of it in Chicago. It would be such a monstrosity and a real blemish to the the subtlety of the current skyline. Fortunately, that's just CNet being creative and this is far, far away from Chicago.

</comment><comment><USER31> Can someone summarize how they manage to do this?

I once read that it involved that they sell a product rather than a service. I don't know where I read that but I'm curious why this doesn't apply more often to other products?

</comment><comment><USER32> did anyone else notice that the two pictures show different buildings?

</comment><comment><USER33> What could possibly go wrong?

</comment><comment><USER34> Is there enough demand for office space in Changsa to support this structure?

<comment><USER35> Apparently the housing market there is doing better than much of China's real estate market, but that isn't saying much. The growth of inland cities like Changsa has traditionally been slower than the coastal giants (pretty intuitive) but now with further central government investment, an increased infrastructure the growth is really picking up. The real problem with this building though is that there are increasing costs the larger a building gets from increased maintenance, climate control systems, etc. and it doesn't scale linearly with size. The question here is whether to have one monolithic building or several large buildings. I'd imagine the latter is the better bet, but the cost savings from the modular build may largely outweigh this.

<comment><USER20> A lot of it has to do with face though. Hunan/Changsha get lots of face projects because they are the home of Mao. Changsha itself is at best a second tier city and not really even on the level as Wuhan or (definitely) Guangzhou that it lies between.

Looking at the designs, the building looks like it will be an eye soar pretty quickly, on par with the Ryugyong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I call B.S. on this

<comment><USER2> Actually not BS, see the Broad Group's web site and their timelapse of the 'demo' project [1]. They don't count the time to put in the foundation and drive the pilings, just the erection part. That part consists entirely of lifting pre-fabricated sections in place, connecting pipes and wires, welding to the rest of the building and moving on to the next one.

[1] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdpf- MQM9vY&noredirect=1](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdpf-MQM9vY&noredirect=1)

<comment><USER36> I've seen that already, and yes, it's impressive, but watch and see, this isn't going to be built in 90 days, or next year. Probably never.</comment></comment></comment>


Reduction in Firearm Injuries During NRA Annual Conventions - <AUTHOR> http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc1712773 <comment><USER2> I haven't read the appendix in full detail, but how is it okay to run a linear regression here (instead of logistic regression) when the outcome is binary?

<comment><USER3> The authors claim in the appendix that "linear models were estimated due to failure of the maximum likelihood algorithm to converge for logistic models."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cancer must have been cured, as there's obviously nothing left to study at Harvard Medical School.

<comment><USER5> I feel your comment is politically tinged. This is far from a superfluous topic of study.

It's similar to the study where patient outcomes are more positive during medical conferences.</comment></comment>


Less research is needed - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.plos.org/speakingofmedicine/2012/06/25/less-research-is-needed/

<comment><USER2> Last year a professor in my department (astronomy) suggested that he and I write a similar tongue-in-cheek paper to be published on April 1. The idea was to promote a moratorium on new astronomical data for one year. This would give observers time to reduce all the data they've already collected and theorists time to catch up to the observers.

It's facetious, of course, but there was a serious point behind it all. There is a certain tendency in science for a researcher to perform the same study over and over again just using larger or slightly modified data sets simply because that's what he knows how to do. Most of the time these sorts of Version 2.0 studies just reduce the error bars on the result without telling anyone anything new.

Now, of course, sometimes interesting results do come from such things. But much more often interesting results come from studies that attack a radically different problem or use a radically different approach. Science is a manpower-limited, not data-limited endeavor. Scientists have a finite amount of time that they can devote to research and they have to choose what projects to work on. There is still a great deal of low-hanging fruit---projects that require relatively small amounts of funding, relatively small amounts of manpower, and have the potential to yield genuinely new results. There are, for example, some really excellent projects that are being done with a telescope that basically consists of putting a commercial camera lens on a telescope mount [1]. But the difficulty of these sorts of projects is that they require creativity, and that is hard to come by. I'm not faulting anyone, though---I'm not an especially creative researcher myself!

Part of the problem is that grant agencies have a strong bias towards funding incremental science. While they say that they are in favor of funding breakthrough science rather than incremental science, the projects that actually get funded tell a different story. And it's hard to blame them because no one knows a good way to predict breakthrough results. It's an especially difficult problem to solve for theorists---in order to write a compelling theory proposal you basically have to have solved the problem already!

I've heard a number of solutions to these problems, but they're all as compelling to me as a year-long data moratorium (which, to be fair, would indeed force the community to become more creative). Hmm, maybe I'll actually write up that paper for April 1, 2015.

[1] [http://www.astronomy.ohio- state.edu/~assassin/index.shtml](http://www.astronomy.ohio- state.edu/~assassin/index.shtml)

<comment><USER3> Another problem is that funding agencies have a very strong bias in favor of large projects. Most EU money gets poured into the big pools of money available only to research teams spanning three or more _countries_. It's incredibly difficult to propose a really novel, creative, innovative -- whatever adjective you like -- project that has 14 senior researchers and a small army of postdocs and grad students collaborating on it.

Those projects tend to come from individual researchers working on an idea, and there's basically no money available for that. For some fields, this isn't feasible, of course. You can't do high-energy experimental physics in your office with a laptop. But quite a lot of research can be at least partially done without massive amounts of support, and the system is set up in a way that more or less prevents that from happening.

<comment><USER2> This is also true. The time allocation committee for the Hubble Space Telescope, for example, has a policy that projects are judged solely on their scientific merit, without any regard to the amount of time being asked for. This, of course, leads to a strong bias towards very large projects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are so many issues raised here that it hard to know where to respond.

1\. Once area we could stop is useless data-mined correlation studies that show statistical significance (assuming you ignore that data-mining has occurred) between action X and outcome Y - the sort where a retrospective study of 500,000 nurses finds that eating candied peanuts reduces prostate cancer by 15%. The rule of thumb in any of these studies is that unless the effect is 300% or greater (smoking and lung cancer is 1500%) then the result is certain to be garbage.

2\. We need less "novel" research and more replication of past results. The whole scientific system is set up to reward novelty over accuracy. It is so bad that unless I have seen two independent groups repeat something I doubt it is real no matter how famous the group.

3\. We need to reward being right over being first. Right now groups rush papers out so they don't get scooped and so don't check their results as well as they should. I would personally like to remove the date off all scientific papers to stop these silly games - after all if something is true does it become less true just because it was published last year rather than last week.

4\. We need to reward people who put the effort into replicating work. A simple proposal would be to give publication right to every group that replicated (or could not replicate) a study in the same journal. If some study is published in Nature and you go to the effort of replicating it then you should get an automatic Nature publication.

5\. Stop scientist from holding on to raw data. In theory scientist are supposed to share their data, but in practice this doesn't happen very often. It should be possible to report groups that don't share data to the funding bodies and if they are found to not be not sharing (or only sharing some of the data) then the group is banned from getting any new funding. It would only take a few banning to stop this immoral data hoarding.

<comment><USER5> I couldn't agree more with almost everything you just said (especially number 2). My only potential issue is with number 5. While I agree that raw data should be shared for purposes of reproducibility and progress, I can also partially sympathize with investigators who put in enormous time and effort to coordinate and run large studies / clinical trials.

If investigators were forced to immediately release their raw data from these studies, there would be armies of other investigators swooping in to scoop the original team on follow on studies from the data. While this would certainly be great for science, it partially punishes investigators for actually conducting the large trials. I'm not sure how justifiable it would be to put in the effort to conduct a large clinical trial and then only get 1-2 papers out of it (even if they went into NEJM / JAMA / Lancet etc).

What are your thoughts?

<comment><USER4> The purpose of 5 is to improve science not 'reward scientists' [1]. If we moved to a system where the raw data was shared automatically then the number of "exclusives" any group could get from a study would decline, but the value of each paper would go up. As long as everyone was sharing then I don't think funding bodies would stop funding groups willing to go to the effort of doing large studies. It is the funding that determines what research is done, not the how many papers a group can milk out of the study. It should be quality over quantity.

[1] For those outside of science what happen now is groups with the data hold back the data and then use access to the data to establish "collaborations" - basically they will give you access to the data as long as you put their names on any resulting papers. The people with the data often don't actually contribute anything to the new publication other than access to the data and their names - my old boss was a expert at doing this.

<comment><USER6> The encode project maybe had the right idea with this. The data was made public, but researchers who did not contribute to the data production could not use it for a period of 6 months or a year for their own publications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > On my first day in (laboratory) research, I was told that if there is a > genuine and important phenomenon to be detected, it will become evident > after taking no more than six readings from the instrument.

This is the reverse of a rule of thumb I find useful, that if you wish to measure something and get an approximate picture of your uncertainty, you should measure it 7-8 times.

The author's rule of thumb hinges delicately upon the definition of "readings", in particular upon the reach and precision of a given reading. I can look in the sky on dark nights and see Mercury, but even if I watch it through binoculars for years, I'll never resolve the "Genuine and Important" precession of its orbit [1], the first solid evidence for General Relativity.

Some important phenomena are subtle and rare. You can watch a liter of pure water for ~1500 years before you can expect a single neutrino from the Sun to interact and make a tiny flash of light [2].

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#Cla...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#Classical_tests)

[2] [http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/super- kamiokande](http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/super-kamiokande)

</comment><comment><USER8> Perhaps this is one of those white lies we tell to justify doing the right thing. A dishonest means to an honest end.

Is this maybe how researchers publish negative results without having to admit failure? We often complain about the dearth of published negative results. We talk about pre-registering studies and so forth.

It seems better to me for researchers to recast a negative result as an inconclusive positive result "requiring more study", than to not publish it at all. Just because there is a call for further research doesn't mean we have to do it.

</comment><comment><USER9> > Despite consistent and repeated evidence that electronic patient record > systems can be expensive, resource-hungry, failure-prone and unfit for > purpose, we need more studies to 'prove' what we know to be the case: that > replacing paper with technology will inevitably save money, improve health > outcomes, assure safety and empower staff and patients.

Paper-based systems are also failure-prone and unfit for purpose. They just fail in familiar ways that the old guard have accepted as just part of the business.

<comment><USER10> Bad electronic record system is probably worst then paper based one. Good electronic record system might be better then paper based one. The trouble is that quality is not the thing that wins you big contract with big institution all too often, so I would not be surprised if the common electronic systems were the bad ones.

<comment><USER11> Agreed, but we are also heavily biased towards this view as a community. I think we should try to steer the conversation away from this particular point.

But dear god... some people manage to make some awful software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Perhaps less primary research is needed, and more secondary research i.e. more reviews.

It strikes me that making the scientific literature machine-parsable and query-able may help a great deal.

Currently the literature is "scraped" to produce scientific metadata which is stored in databases such as PubMed. Of course, that's back to front. Experimental data, findings, methods, workflows, etc etc should be stored in databases of some sort, and "literature" produced by querying the data.

A pipe-dream, of course. But some steps have been taken towards something approaching this.

[https://sdm.lbl.gov/sdmcenter/](https://sdm.lbl.gov/sdmcenter/) [http://authors.library.caltech.edu/28168/](http://authors.library.caltech.edu/28168/) [http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=5...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=5476716)

</comment><comment><USER13> I really disliked that post: [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/11/links-for- july-2014/#co...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/11/links-for- july-2014/#comment-120032)

</comment><comment><USER11> Maybe smarter research is needed? It seems to me that the problem is a similar one to what data science is trying to solve. How do we make sense of all this data?

Of course more research is still needed in many areas anyway.</comment>


Final preview update, official Android P coming soon - <AUTHOR> https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2018/07/final-preview-update-official-android-p.html <comment><USER2> Any ideas if google pay (or android pay... whatever it's called) aka contactless payment works with preview?</comment>