Alexa Skills Kit Developer Preview - <AUTHOR> https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-skills-kit <comment><USER2> Lots of code examples in JS and Java (even though I believe a github repository would have been better than zip archives...), a $100M investment fund, and a real integration with their services and devices. Amazon seems to be really serious about this.

When Siri came out, I found myself wanting to build a service using it and got disappointed (even though the reasons not to open the API were obvious), so I'm now happy to see Amazon calling developers with a voice based API. I'd like to see how this will pan out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Needs to be renamed to AlexaSkillsKit.NET, but here's C# support:

[https://github.com/AreYouFreeBusy/AlexaAppKit.NET](https://github.com/AreYouFreeBusy/AlexaAppKit.NET)

<comment><USER3> AppKit sounds way too Apple-y these days. Though a tad generic compared to "HealthKit" and the like

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The "Alexa" name is starting to get confusing. Amazon already owns something called Alexa, a website/service which provide information about a website's stats and ranking.

Worse, Amazon also offers an API/SDK to Alexa via AWS [1], which offers a surprising amount of information about a website that they gather (Global Rankings, regional rankings, standard <META> tag scrapping, DMOZ info, IP/location info, email address/telephone/address and other contact info, bunch more stuff). It's actually pretty amazing, but the API and documentation is terribly out-of-date.

This got my hopes up that Amazon had done an overhaul of the Alexa rankings/info API... [sigh]

[1] [http://aws.amazon.com/awis/](http://aws.amazon.com/awis/)

<comment><USER5> It's also a camera: [http://www.arri.com/camera/alexa/](http://www.arri.com/camera/alexa/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Exited to see these new SDKs for the Echo, using it daily it definitely gives you a feeling for the vast potential of the platform given 3rd party contribution. Using AWS Lambda also makes development of Echo apps makes it extremely easy, it took me only about an hour to get a working prototype of a simple app working.

I'm looking forward to attending the Boston amazon developer day this weekend to really dig deep into all the sdks and get some questions answered from the team.

<comment><USER7> AWS Lambda definitely seems like the way to go. It looks like hosting the service yourself gets complicated very quickly when you have to factor in things like authenticating the requests. [1]

I'm also not sure how it would technically work, but I do wish there would be some way to run this locally. I would love to get more access to some of the hardware on my local network, but I would be hesitant to open the same up to the public internet. I guess Amazon is (smartly) targeting more consumer focused developers and not hobbyists working on their own pet projects.

[1] - [https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa- sk...](https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-skills- kit/docs/developing-an-alexa-skill-as-a-web-service)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's not at all clear to me how they're namespacing the invocation names.

Do they need to be unique across all skills?

Will there be a land-rush on all the good two and three work invocation names?

Do I manually select which skills will be enabled for my Echo, and only those invocation names will be accepted? What about conflicts?

<comment><USER9> it would be great if there was no namespacing, and multiple developers could register the same phrase. alexa/echo (what's this thing called?) should learn based on your usage what service you want to respond to a certain phrase.

For example, "turn on the lights" should work with whatever smart home hub alexa can find on it's wifi network, not just with whatever smart home company registers the phrase first.

<comment><USER10> That would be nice. I have LIFX bulbs and don't want to say Alexa, ask LIFX to turn on the lights.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I just ordered an echo for my hobby workshop, i'm super excited for this thing. My dream is to be able to import google sketchup models (somewhere) than as i'm working be able to ask it questions about the model.

So like, imagine i'm standing in front of a freshly milled piece of oak, and i'm roughly marking out my pieces:

"Alexa, What are the dimensions for the top side apron"

Even cooler, if i had a camera in there too

"Alexa, where did I put my tape measure?"

<comment><USER12> So basically you want Jarvis from Iron Man. Might help to connect it to cameras too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's also MindMeld--[https://expectlabs.com/docs](https://expectlabs.com/docs)

With Alexa, you have to bet on Amazon winning the IoT game. Amazon is great at ecommerce (mostly because they don't care about making money), but it's not clear they're great at platforms.

But if all you want is the functionality of an Echo that you can customize, then go with a well-funded startup staffed by some of the best AI engineers in the world offering similar and often better capabilities, and build your own so you can integrate it wherever you want.

That's MindMeld.

<comment><USER14> What a beaming endorsement of an Expect Labs product from the Director of Business Development at Expect Labs. :/

<comment><USER13> Correct.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Amazon is investing up to $100 million to support developers, manufacturers, > and start-ups of all sizes who are creating unique and innovative > experiences designed around the human voice. Whether that's creating new > Alexa capabilities with the Alexa Skills Kit, building devices that use > Alexa for novel voice experiences using the Alexa Voice Service, or > something else entirely, if you have a visionary idea, we'd love to talk to > you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Reference: [https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa- fu...](https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-fund)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Still not wanting an active listening device in my own walls, closed source, closed server APIs, not disclosed NSLs received by Aamazon etc etc.

Not for me or my family.

<comment><USER17> For every one of you, there are several that don't mind. That's not to denigrate your opinion, just a consequence of priorities in people's lives.

<comment><USER18> Probably more like 100 who don't care for every one that does. Or 1000. Not here on HN, of course, but in the potential customer base.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Looks like a product of Amazon acquisition of IVONA: [http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/24/amazon-gets-into-voice- reco...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/24/amazon-gets-into-voice-recognition- buys-ivona-software-to-compete-against-apples-siri/)

<comment><USER20> IVONA is text to speech only.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I was in the middle of building a home automation AI as a side project...seriously psyched about this.

</comment><comment><USER22> Just sold my Echo after getting little value from it - must admit I was holding out for an API, I think it will be 100x more useful once we see some good 3rd-party integrations.

</comment><comment><USER23> Can it tak without being prompted?

<comment><USER24> No. At the moment, Alexa only responds when spoken to.

<comment><USER23> i wish i could have it announce stuff via API. "garage door is open!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> How this could be better than a Dragonfly+NLTK solution in python, for example?

<comment><USER13> Accuracy and information retrieval.

The best systems--Siri, Google Now--have 95%+ ASR accuracy AND can find the right answer among millions of possibilities once they've broken down the utterance.

Combining human-like ASR & NLP with super accurate search capabilities is hard.</comment></comment>


DoorDash Buying Caviar from Square for $410M - <AUTHOR> https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/doordash-signs-definitive-agreement-to-acquire-caviar-squares-food-ordering-platform-300895200.html <comment><USER2> The price seems high for something Square presumably needed to unload. Who else would have been bidding it up? And why are food delivery businesses still in a bubble?

That's not a slam on businesses in a bubble phase, either. Many industries go through one before settling into a steady, sustainable state. Just surprised that delivery is still in one, while related industries, like ride-share are cooling off.

<comment><USER3> food delivery service is blowing up because it's still extremely inefficient in the USA. you can get _anything_ delivered in Hong Kong for about $1. some hong kongers don't even have kitchens and live like that for years.

travis kalanick is investing millions of his own cash into this space.

<comment><USER4> The density of HK is not comparable to basically anywhere in the US, except maybe just Manhattan. The labour sources are also a lot cheaper.

There's room to improve in the US, like making kitchens without the attached restaurant more prevalent, but as long as you have to get in a car to deliver the food, there's going to be the same problems the rideshare industry faces.

<comment><USER3> HK was just an example. it's true for most/all chinese cities.

<comment><USER5> Most/all Chinese cities are denser with cheaper labor than any US city so the point stands.

<comment><USER6> Metro Manila is not as dense but delivery here is so cheap. Grab and Lala are huge in Manila.

<comment><USER7> Labor costs in Manila are much lower than Europe or the US.

<comment><USER6> I mean, that's already implied if you look at the comment I'm responding to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is the kind of announcement where all three companies put out a happy blog post and no one knows the actual reasoning behind the acquisition or sale.

New business model for Square?: Acquire companies, onboard them onto Square's business platform, sell them

<comment><USER9> That's not a bad idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm so confused by DoorDash's sudden rise. I think I may have used it once. What is separating DoorDash from UberEats, Postmates, Grubhub etc?

<comment><USER11> > I'm so confused by DoorDash's sudden rise. I think I may have used it once. > What is separating DoorDash from UberEats, Postmates, Grubhub etc?

Network effects are pretty strong. Locally, I don't know anyone who uses anything other than SkipTheDishes.

<comment><USER12> How are there network effects in delivery apps? It's a bipartite graph, and the number of restaurant companies is tiny compared to the number of users.

<comment><USER13> Once an app reaches critical mass for a location, the restaurants all go where the users are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For what it's worth, the general vibe I've gotten from couriers has been that Caviar is one of the best food delivery apps for them, and that DoorDash is among the worst.

<comment><USER15> It's funny, I know almost no two people with similar experiences (user or courier).

For example as a user I have literally never had a good experience with Caviar. It almost always wrong in different ways.

As a courier one time the guy called and said that the restaurant was taking so long that Caviar would no longer pay him to wait so we ended up paying him out of pocket to cover it (he said we could cancel and get our money back but that he'd also get nothing after waiting for a very long time).

Uber Eats, as a user, has usually worked pretty well. As a courier one of them told us they constantly have out of date restaurant menus, people order from them, the restaurant substitutes or ignores it completely and now they have to deal with an angry person.

It really feels like restaurants are not equipped to handle these types of services and all of the services don't train their people if at all, as well as treating them kinda like crap many times.

<comment><USER16> I was a Caviar courier in a past life, it paid very well for someone with just a bike ($20-$25/hr before taxes).

That courier was full of shit. You get paid regardless of customer status, and you also get paid per minute over a certain delay threshold. Sounds like you just got a bad actor.

<comment><USER15> > That courier was full of shit. You get paid regardless of customer status, > and you also get paid per minute over a certain delay threshold. Sounds like > you just got a bad actor.

I mean, that's basically what he said but that it had been an hour and a half (IIRC) and he said Courier would stop paying him to wait.

I've never been a courier so I wouldn't know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Perhaps keeping it separate is a good thing technically.

DoorDash app and website are a dumpster fire with usability and bugs galore.

The issue is as a user is if you bring this up to DoorDash support they have no internal process for handling reported issues with the app and website and letting the development team know.

<comment><USER18> Sounds exactly like the Cash app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's odd, in that I never really thought about Caviar as a competitor to DoorDash -- but that's because I know them mostly as the company that bought Zesty (just before Caviar itself was bought by Square). Zesty specializes in catered _group_ meal delivery. The company I'm at now uses Zesty once a week; the company I was at before used them five days a week, and the company before _that_ used a competitor (ZeroCater, I think) five days a week.

As far as I know, DoorDash wasn't in that space before; I wonder if that's part of the reason for the acquisition. (The alternative is that they may not be interested in that side of the business at all and shut it down.)

</comment><comment><USER20> Everyone's seemed to gloss over this but this deal seems to be as much an acqhuisition as an acquisition. Do some research on who Gokul Rajaram is. He ran ads at FB and Google was a very significant leader. I don't think the margins of food delivery have changed. Remember Square couldn't get Uber to pick up Caviar for $100 million around the time Square had its IPO. Also I imagine the price involves DoorDash seems to be banking on a closer relationship with Square as well.

</comment><comment><USER21> Question from someone that's not familiar with law, or I guess specifically antitrust (anti-monopoly?) law.

How are these acquisitions not in violation of these laws. Especially from the Big Tech Cos that slurp up literally any small competitor.

From the article:

"DoorDash's acquisition of Caviar creates a highly differentiated company with a unique brand and wide-ranging selection."

How is this not a play at eliminating competition?

<comment><USER22> It is not illegal to buy competitors (commenting only on US law). It can potentially violate antitrust laws if you eliminate all competition in a market by buying out competitors. But given the existence of Seamless/Grubhub, Uber Eats, and others, plus most of the restaurants still take phone & fax orders, it would be difficult to argue Doordash buying Caviar corners the delivery market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think this is good for Square. Maybe not a good reflection on their previous, scattered product strategy but they appear to be getting more focus on fairly horizontal services for SMBs. Caviar was always a bit nichey for them.

I'm trying to figure out if their Developer API is a chasing-Stripe distraction for them or a good defensive move.

</comment><comment><USER24> Just how much VC funding does DoorDash have?

<comment><USER18> $2bn I believe. You can tell because of how eager they are to throw money away to drive customer acquisition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> We're going to see more consolidation, but are any of these companies addressing the treatment of their delivery drivers, or issues that are starting to crop up, like delivery drivers eating food that they're delivering?

<comment><USER26> Howdy! Software Engineer at Postmates here. Our CEO has put forth an opinion piece[0] on CNN talking about his views and actions concerning this very thing. You might find it interesting:

[0]: [https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/18/perspectives/principles- gig-e...](https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/18/perspectives/principles-gig- economy/index.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Imagine this headline 30 years ago: you'd think it was word salad from someone with mania (politically incorrect now but not then).

</comment><comment><USER28> This seems like a smart move and a good thing for both parties, but Square's trading lower on the news?

<comment><USER29> Yeah a bit strange. They're making about 300M on the transaction and it was never that clean a fit.

<comment><USER8> How much do you think Square invested into Caviar, though?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Was super confused for a while thinking this was about actual caviar...

<comment><USER31> Me too! $410M worth of caviar sounded like _a lot_ of caviar!

<comment><USER32> A quick online search seems to show that 1g of caviar costs $7-$10 (presumably in bulk, not retail).

$410M is about 60 metric tonnes of caviar.

Still a better deal than buying a tier-3 food delivery company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm so tired, I thought this was fish eggs.

</comment><comment><USER34> Still cheaper than actual caviar

</comment><comment><USER35> I wonder whether the timing of this is related to DoorDash finally backing down on handling of tips.

<comment><USER36> It takes longer than a month to finalize a $410M acquisition.

<comment><USER35> The other way around: if you're in the final stages of finalizing an acquisition, you might not want even a whiff of controversy tied to your company.</comment></comment></comment>


Defrozo got updated - <AUTHOR> http://defrozo.com/2014/08/18/introducing-client-galleries-new-themes/

<comment><AUTHOR> As we promised, we're adding new features and updates to Defrozo. Wonder what's in the box? Here we go! Client Galleries, new themes and more.</comment>


Announcing the .NET Framework 4.7 General Availability - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/05/02/announcing-the-net-framework-4-7-general-availability/ <comment><AUTHOR> > You must install an additional DirectX component in order to install the > .NET Framework 4.7 on Windows 7 SP1, Windows 2008 R2 SP1, Windows 2012 and > Windows 2012 R2. The installation includes a single dll that will get added > to your system. It will only be used by WPF applications. It is not possible > to install the .NET Framework 4.7 without installing this component.

Why the heck should I be forced to install DirectX on a web server?!

<comment><USER2> It's one DLL, required to render the UI components of the framework in a hardware accelerated and optimized fashion. You're not installing .NET Core, you're installing the real framework.

Talk about making a mountain out of a molehill.

<comment><USER3> It would have been a small amount of effort to bundle it with the .net installer. But it is going to create big support issue if you have to tell customers one by one to install DirectX manually. Hope they will resolve this through windows update.

<comment><USER4> Games have traditionally shipped updated DirectX binaries with their installer, most the time you don't even see DirectX setup anymore. The redistributable files can be deployed almost invisibly.

<comment><USER3> Yeah but think of a typical .net application. Probably some business application used by a lawyer or a doctor. They don't install DirectX on their machine.

<comment><USER5> They don't install anything on their machine. They don't even know .NET exists or that the new release requires DirectX.

The developer will modify the installer to include this extra requirement. End.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> High-DPI support for Windows Forms is long-overdue.

<comment><USER7> Definitely. Can't see any signs of them backporting it to Win 7 though? Those of us to maintain heavy winforms apps aren't going to drop Win7/8/8.1 support in order to get HighDPI support.

<comment><USER6> High-DPI is handled automatically, you don't have to change anything in your app.

<comment><USER8> The improvements are Windows-10-only. Of course it has worked to some degree or another for ages. More or less.

<comment><USER6> Windows 10 Redstone 2 (Creator's Update) made HighDPI much more bearable. Sad to think that it didn't even work for the device manager less than a year ago. :p

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm kind of surprised that it only supports .NET Standard 1.6. I would expect it to be the first .NET to support .NET Standard 2.0, since, you know, it should already be implementing all the APIs covered by the standard.

I wonder what's missing.

<comment><USER10> .NET Standard 2.0 isn't done yet. It will be supported once it's released.

[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/04/05/announcin...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/04/05/announcing- the-net-framework-4-7/)

> The .NET Standard 2.0 spec will ship later this year. .NET Framework 4.6.1 > and later will support .NET Standard 2.0. At the point that .NET Standard > 2.0 class library projects and NuGet packages start being created, you'll be > able to reference them from .NET Framework 4.6.1 or later projects.

<comment><USER11> This can't come fast enough! I am still pretty new to .NET Standard and how .NET Core and Framework play together, but it's frustrating trying to use a .NET Core class library in a Windows service as of today. :(

<comment><USER12> With _this_ release, you should be finally be able to do that. The 4.6.2 framework only supported the 1.3 Standard, which was the reason we were boned if a .NET Core library got released targeting the 1.6 one and didn't explicitly include a .NET Framework version in the nuget package.

At least, I hope I got that right. I'll give it a try tomorrow and if it works I might just uninstall the .NET Core outright.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Const-me I wonder have they fixed their offline installer?

[https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/...](https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/3115174/the- offline-installer-doesn-t-work-offline)

</comment><comment><USER13> How long until all Windows applications render on high DPI screens without extreme blur?

<comment><USER6> Redstone 2 (Creators Update) was a nice progress towards the goal. It's still bad at places though.

<comment><USER13> Regarding "Creator's Update"

Explorer.exe is crashing constantly on a stock system. Embarrassing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> isn't it support Linux already? or I remember it wrong, this is all for windows.

</comment><comment><USER15> Dissapointed that Windows Server 2008 standar is not supported, just R2.

<comment><USER6> Windows Server 2008 is no longer supported. (Windows Vista Server it is)

<comment><USER16> Yes, it is still supported. Yes, it has a different lifecycle from Vista</comment></comment></comment>


Oatly: The New Coke? - <AUTHOR> https://divinations.substack.com/p/oatly-the-new-coke# <comment><USER2> I'm sympathetic to marketing counterfactuals, so I wanted to like this article, but its claims did not sway me.

\- The appalling environmental footprint of the dairy industry was never addressed.

\- The canola oil claims cited were nowhere near conclusive (see twanvl and NotOscarWilde's comments below).

\- The nutritional comparison seemed to me to be more or less trivial.

Okay, it's got a higher glycemic index and similar sugar content compared to cow milk. If you share the author's concern about tacitly "health-adjacent" marketing, this is problematic, but not an outright lie. At worst the product has a pretty comparable nutritional portfolio to cow milk. Seems appropriate for a "milk substitute," no?

The author engages in a little deceptive rhetoric himself by setting a 12oz serving as the baseline. It's true that a portion that size is bad for you. Lattes are bad for you. Like many people, though, I only rarely use milk substitutes to add a dash of not-coffee to coffee that would otherwise be too hot or too burnt. Guess I shouldn't be concerned?

\- Most glaringly, the moral dimension of dairy consumption is never addressed. I won't harp on about this too much as many other commenters have already, but this seemed like a glaring omission: who cares about sugar content if the alternative is needless suffering? I guess you could have the best of both worlds by not drinking a milk substitute in the first place, but that's not Oatly's market segment, so...

Overall, this article came away as basically validating Oatly's marketing claims to me. Which is frustrating, since as I stated above, I'm biased toward marketing scrutiny!

<comment><USER3> > The author engages in a little deceptive rhetoric himself by setting a 12oz > serving as the baseline.

Yeah what is up with that? 12 oz is over 340 ml, who puts that much milk in their coffee? I had to measure the volume of my coffee cup, it's 250 ml or 8.8 oz.

I usually drink my coffee black, but if I do have milk in it it is usually a tenth of what the author uses. Unless the author is drinking a quarter gallon of coffee at a time he's not drinking coffee, but really drinking milk with a splash of coffee.

<comment><USER4> As a non-coffee drinker, I drink my oatly pure, in the same way as I drank my milk growing up. So yeah, 340 ml is apt when I use my big mug.

You make it sound as if no-one drinks pure milk in your environment? I find THAT weird.

<comment><USER5> I've never seen an adult drink pure milk, other than in some movies. I guess it's an american thing? Any Europeans here who drink pints of milk care to comment?

<comment><USER6> I lived in Finland for 5 years and it is very common there. I've seen people drinking milk at pizza place for example, like 300ml~ cups. Also at the University's cafeteria during lunch time students would drink pure milk with their meal.

<comment><USER7> Finn here, yes it's normal to drink milk. When I was growing up, the school lunch hall had big posters about how milk is important for your health.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Made for humans" also draws attention to the fact that the milk you're drinking from a cow is not being drank by the offspring of that cow like it normally would and many people don't realise you have to keep making diary cows give birth to get more milk. Newly born male cows are usually turned into veal in a few weeks and female cows are separated from their mothers so they don't drink the valuable milk. Milk giving cows are then slaughtered for meat when they stop yielding enough milk after several births.

This reality isn't obvious from milk ads. I'll admit I only learned the above in the last few years because nobody talks about it and when you try people will instinctively defend these uncomfortable facts.

<comment><USER9> I hosted a meetup on "dairy tech". Before the presentation, I think I had an implicit assumption that cattle raised for beef were treated poorly. I came away realizing that cattle used for milk production suffer more. In the most efficient dairies, they never leave their enclosure, are kept pregnant continuously via artificial insemination, and are injected with hormones.

<comment><USER8> > I came away realizing that cattle used for milk production suffer more.

I think you could certainly argue that. Beef cows are slaughtered at around 3 years and diary cows are slaughtered at around 5 years but after giving birth with their offspring taken away several times (both have about a 20 year life span).

Personally, I don't understand how vegetarians justify it as being much different in terms of animal cruelty. You're still paying into a system that's killing animals for your benefit.

<comment><USER10> > You're still paying into a system that's killing animals for your benefit

Still a net improvement over buying milk _and_ meat isn't it?

Also, people are vegetarian for all sorts of reasons. For some it's about eating meat, for some it's about animal cruelty, for some it's about environmental impact, and probably there's plenty of other reasons

<comment><USER11> I think no milk but meat would be better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> vanilla-almond I drink milk, but I think the strongest case against drinking cows milk is industrial-scale dairy farming. We (consumers) are to blame because we want milk as cheap as possible.

We've seen protests across Europe in the past by farmers who say they can't provide milk at such cheap prices and maintain welfare standards. Unfortunately, we consumers seem unwilling to pay for high welfare. Sure we say otherwise when asked, but our actions at the supermarket tell a different story.

Also, most consumers don't even know what conditions are like for dairy animals. In Europe, consumers smugly assume we have high welfare standards (maybe we do relative to other countries), but I was shocked to learned that some farms still tie and tether cows in small cramped indoor spaces [1]. In fact, most dairy cows will spend the majority of their life indoors rather than outside grazing on pasture. This is the price of cheap, industrial-scale agriculture.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/08/its- medi...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/08/its-medieval-why- some-cows-are-still-living-most-of-their-lives-tied-up)

<comment><USER12> > We (consumers) are to blame

No, the farmers are to blame. This is the kind of thing regulations solve. If we force the use of sustainable and ethical farming methods through regulation, like how we force producers to obey all other aspects of food safety and production, then the market will adjust to the new prices, whatever they may be.

<comment><USER13> Actually I think the fault mostly lies with discounters leveraging the fuck out of farmers to compete against other discounters. There's a EU directive being implemented currently that would prohibit discounters from selling below cost, and it's very necessary.

<comment><USER14> I would say the fault is with EU and its subsidies: [https://m.dw.com/en/are- subsidies-driving-dairy-farmers-into...](https://m.dw.com/en/are-subsidies- driving-dairy-farmers-into-bankruptcy/a-19289812)

Agriculture is a surprisingly difficult market. Part of that is an understandable desire of governments to maintain local production. Nobody wants to risk being cut-off their food supply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A tangent on Canola and rapeseed oil:

I have recently watched a Chinese Cooking Demystified video (I believe it was [1]) about the Chinese rapeseed oil and its comparison in taste and erucic acid contents to Canola oil, which is its only available variant in Western countries.

The video stated a thesis echoed on Wikipedia's page on Erucic acid [2]:

> Studies done on laboratory animals in the early 1970s show that erucic acid > appears to have toxic effects on the heart at high enough doses. However, > more recent research has cast doubt on the relevance of rat studies to the > human health of erucic acid. Rats are unusual in their inability to process > erucic acid, and the symptoms in rats caused by a diet with high levels of > erucic acid has not been observed in pigs, primates, or any other animals.

From what I understand, all the references in the Oatly article focus on Canola oil, which is supposed to be low on erucic acid. However, the few (~3) research sources in the Oatly article that I clicked on all do rat/mouse studies. Isn't that kind of strange, considering the erucic acid rat research controversy?

The Wikipedia page on Canola oil [3] does not mention the health risks aside from the erucic acid controversy. Still, since Canola oil is such an important product, I can imagine any negative studies or claims could be contested. (Disclaimer: I have not checked the edit history of that page myself.)

To sum up, I currently have no idea if Canola oil or rapeseed oils in general are risky, healthy in reasonable doses, or something else completely. If anyone with any expertise comes around, please educate me.

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDP9t65PVsY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDP9t65PVsY)

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

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

<comment><USER16> There's also mustard oil, which is banned for human consumption in the US due to fears about erucic acid.

Mustard oil is one of the most common cooking oils in India and Pakistan. As a result, all mustard oil in the US is labeled "for external use only". People still use it for cooking.

<comment><USER17> > There's also mustard oil, which is banned for human consumption in the US > due to fears about erucic acid.

Fun snippet from the wikipedia page on Mustard Oil: "Rats are unusual in their inability to process erucic acid, and the symptoms in rats caused by a diet with high levels of erucic acid has not been observed in pigs, primates, or any other animals"

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Great write up on debunking oatly's "health benefits". But fails to mention the the moral reasons to choose oat milk over cow's milk.

TBF lot of the meat replacements are plagued by similar problems. [1]

[1] [https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/impossible-and-beyond- ho...](https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/impossible-and-beyond-how-healthy- are-these-meatless-burgers-2019081517448)

<comment><USER19> Exactly what I had in mind.

The article does not mention cow milk's health implications, and only focuses on debunking Oatly's alleged health benefits. This creates the same "Obscure the Truth" effect the article opens with, giving the impression that there's nothing wrong with cow milk.

If both options are equally unhealthy (which is at the minimum the biased impression the article gives by not discussing cow milk), at the minimum the moral one should be chosen.

<comment><USER20> What actual proven health implications does cows milk have?

<comment><USER21> Most people have some level of lactose malabsorption.

Also cows milk has pretty grave health implications for the cows

<comment><USER22> I asked my vegan friends if they'd rather these animals would not exist at all rather than be used for milk production (because they are only bred into existence for that).

I wonder how that logic applies to humans born into living in rough countries, would vegans rather they would not exist at all?

It's not like a dairy cow has a life of eternal suffering after all. It eats, grazes, rests and socializes. It does cow things.

<comment><USER23> Dairy cows exist because we actively breed them. We inject dairy cows with sperm to keep them pregnant so they keep producing milk, then take their calf away and repeat the process. They're not multiplying on their own.

<comment><USER22> That's exactly my point. With no utility, these animals would not exist. Are their lives so miserable that we can morally assert that they should not be living?

<comment><USER24> It's like saying: these are my children, without me they wouldn't exist, I can subject them to anything and they should be happy that they have existence.

I would argue that no existence is better than existence filled with endless misery, agony and pain.

Factory farms are a disgrace to humanity. It is my opinion that until we develop enough compassion to see this and stop, humans have no hope of creating lasting peace amongst each other. Our morality has a deadly wound at its core, and it's rotting away at our souls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is Glycemic Index important for healthy people or is it mainly of concern to people with diabetes?

The NHS suggests the latter, but it doesn't seem to have a very strong position - unlike the article, which seems very sure that high GI is bad for you.

 _However, using the glycaemic index to decide whether foods or combinations of foods are healthy can be misleading._

[https://www.nhs.uk/common-health-questions/food-and- diet/wha...](https://www.nhs.uk/common-health-questions/food-and-diet/what-is- the-glycaemic-index-gi/)

<comment><USER26> Glycemic index is a somewhat deceptive measurement. A snickers bar has a lower glycemic index than a slice of whole wheat bread[0][1]. That doesn't make it better for you.

What glycemic index is actually showing you is the ratio of fat to carbs. And carbs are not inherently unhealthy. As a distance runner, I consume a lot more carbs than the average person, and I'm in the best shape of my life.

[0] [https://www.dietandfitnesstoday.com/glycemicIndexDetails.php...](https://www.dietandfitnesstoday.com/glycemicIndexDetails.php?id=1061)

[1] [http://www.dietandfitnesstoday.com/glycemicIndexDetails.php?...](http://www.dietandfitnesstoday.com/glycemicIndexDetails.php?id=198)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > The evidence for the harms of canola oil is still in its early days, but > continues to grow. Research has linked it to: Memory impairment [1], > Alzheimer's risk [1], Cardiovascular disease [2], [5], [6], [8], Diabetes > [2], Increased all-cause mortality [2], [6], [7], Metabolic syndrome [3], > Decreased brain function [4], and Oxidative stress [5], [7].

Most of these references talk about how there is no clear benefit of vegetable oils over animal oils or how "chronic canola oil consumption" results in obesity in transgenic mice. That is not really the same thing as "growing evidence for the harms of canola oil".

<comment><USER28> For completeness, I checked them all and the score is:

* Rat

* Rat

* actually about cooking _in_ canola oil

* about switching _any_ vegetable oil to _less_ olive oil

* Rat

* actually about a different oil with quite different content of the active acid being trialled

* Rat

* Rat

(Oh, and the article is written by a SEO marketer)

<comment><USER29> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24090817](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24090817) points out that rats, rather uniquely, cannot process erucic acid (part of canola oil) and the rat studies likely do not apply to most other mammals (including humans).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> When I used to go to Japan, they had some kind of artificial creamer that was _awesome_. I actually preferred it to milk. I used to look forward to guzzling cup after cup of coffee in the hotel breakfast restaurant.

It was probably 100% artificial, but it was _great_. I normally can't stand non-dairy creamers, of any kind, in the US.

They seem to have an industry that makes artificial food, and it's quite advanced.

I remember these artificial strawberries that were made of something like white chocolate. They were better than the "real thing."

I'm probably gonna drop dead, because I consumed these things, but I did like them.

</comment><comment><USER31> The author should write a similar article about himself, because the whole article is filled with dubious claims and misguided evidence. The two main claims are "Since the GI is a measure of how much of a negative response your body has to certain sugars" and "research showing harms from canola oil". Neither can be ascertained. A big problem with nutritional science is that it's complex, therefore it is neigh impossible to discover the truth how specific foods really impact the body. I'm also of the opinion that the term "healthy" shouldn't be really used. Here I go with Paracelsus: "All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison." The author invites us to his newsletter "on getting healthy, wealthy, and wise." Yeah, it's all a baseless marketing ploy by, and for, the author.

I want to note, I'm making no argument that Oatly should be considered healthy though.

<comment><USER32> Not to mention Glycemic Index of foods is misleading. If you have a lot of fiber in your gut it slows down the digestion of everything. GI can't be used in isolation. It's useful to know, but Oatly also has a lot of fiber in it. I am less keen on the Canola oil though.

<comment><USER33> No only that, its only relevant if you have diabetes/pre-diabetic markers. If you're not then it's as relevant to you as being concerned about lactose if you're not lactose intolerant.

<comment><USER32> It's relevant, but also easy to measure. GI is a guess at what the product will do to your blood sugar. A diet high in fiber they included oatly with a meal is going to give a very different insulin response than oatly in isolation which will likely be different again when compared to pure maltose. I am not diabetic and had fun measuring my blood sugar for a while. Full meals with a lot of fiber, even if they included high GI foods didn't do a lot to my blood sugar compared to high GI foods in isolation. So, as a diabetic, you just have to know how your body handles some foods and how best to consume them (or not).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> You can criticize the health of anything like this. There isn't a comparison; how healthy is it compared to cow milk? The comparison to coke is ridiculous.

Some sugar and canola oil doesn't even seem bad to me, seems perfectly fine. Especially given that I think it tastes way way better than other alternatives, without making me feel sick and having ethical/moral issues.

<comment><USER29> Agreed; this felt like an unfair hit piece - if anything, I feel more comfortable drinking oatly (though perhaps not in large quantities).

It was disappointing that the author didn't discuss how much fiber is in oatly, and how that can affect health and glycemic impact.

The coke comparison felt particularly hypocritical - what's the glycemic load of 8oz of coke vs 8oz of oatly?

If the takeaway is supposed to be, "the glycemic load of oatly is a little higher than milk", well, that doesn't exactly convince me this is going to be the new cause if a major diabetes epidemic (which drinks like coke do have a hand in).

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> > _Oatly compares their sugar to the sugar in cow's milk, but they're not the > same sugar. Lactose, the sugar in cow's milk, has a GI of 46. Since the GI > is a measure of how much of a negative response your body has to certain > sugars, the 7g of sugar in Oatly with its 100+ GI is actually potentially > worse than the 12g of sugar in whole milk with a 46 GI. We can use something > called the "glycemic load" to measure this, which gives us a GL for the > sugar in 8oz of Oatly of 7.35, and a GL for the sugar in 8oz of whole milk > of 5.52._

The "glycemic load" is just the result of the multiplication of the sugar mass by the glycemic index: 7x1.05=7.35 and 12x0.46=5.52; it would be more clear to simply state that.

<comment><USER29> The article was also cleverly worded in a way that I find a little hypocritical – they're only comparing the _sugars_ of the two beverages. Oatly also has more complex carbohydrates, including 0.8g of fiber, per serving.

A GL of 7 doesn't seem that high; a serving of almost any grain, including whole wheat kernels (11), are higher. Quinoa is 13. A ripe banana is 16.

Source: [https://dlife.com/glycemic-index-chart-and-effects-of-low- an...](https://dlife.com/glycemic-index-chart-and-effects-of-low-and-high-gi- foods/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I was looking for a second opinion, and found the comment by Glenn in that article was a good counterpoint. I won't repeat it here, but another point that comes to mind is that one may use a very small amount of milk-substitute in your hot drink, compared to drinking a much larger amount of coke. So it's not perfectly comparable, even if they were equally bad.

<comment><USER37> I think "the new coke" just refers to the misleading marketing, no? But you're right of course.

<comment><USER38> Health claims surround milk substitutes, without the necessary evidence.

Dr Jason Fung writes about an over emphasis on data gathered from experiments with mice that guide public health recommendations. I think that's an important point. A lot of effects in animal studies haven't been observable in humans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Every time I read about products like this I can't help but think back to Michael Pollen's simple phrase on the cover of The NY Times Magazine:

Eat Food. Mostly Plants. Not Too Much.

The relevant paragraph:

"Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you're concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it's not really food, and food is what you want to eat."

[https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t...](https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html)

</comment><comment><USER40> Oatley is replacing half and half and the like for a lot of coffee drinks. It's not like that dairy is good for you anyways...

There's such an expectation that plant based substitutes should be amazingly healthy when often the things they're replacing and pretty bad for you anyways.

Those products often replaced also have massive lobbying groups and ad campaigns they go up against just because they exist. Take "got milk" or "beef, it's what's for dinner" big expensive campaigns backed by big lobbies spouting dubious claims.

</comment><comment><USER41> Comparing the glycemic index of pure lactose and maltose as proxies for dairy milk and oat milk is misleading. There are values for the whole products out there. The comparison still isn't favourable to oat milk, but implying it has a GI of 105 is absurd.

Characterizing GI as a scale of how bad a food is for you is also kinda simplistic.

</comment><comment><USER42> I was surprised to see no discussion about environmental impacts.

One nasty consequence of non organic canola oil is that the industry largely uses glycophosate for pest control. The organic version of Oatly does not use canola oil, and Califa uses sunflower oil (and has less sugar!).

And yes, industrial cattle practices suck. But the cattle themselves aren't the inherent problem. In 1800 there were approximately 60 million wild Buffalo in North America. Today there are about 90 million cows, of them about 30 million used for milk. The environment has the capacity to support a similar order of magnitude of bovines sustainably. Sustainable cattle farming in some cases is even carbon negative [0]. Bovines historically played a big role in the grassland ecosystem but what industrial scale farms are doing look nothing like nature.

It's easy to vilify industrial scale cattle farming but it's not truthful to say that there are no ways to have environmentally friendly cattle farms.

[0] [https://www.whiteoakpastures.com/meet-us/environmental- susta...](https://www.whiteoakpastures.com/meet-us/environmental- sustainability/)

</comment><comment><USER43> Still doesn't seem as "bad" nutritionally as regular milk. Oat milk is quite popular here in Finland, it's my understanding people choose it because of the environmental, moral and taste aspects, which the article doesn't mention at all.

</comment><comment><USER44> What's wrong with sugar though?

I also don't buy the cartoonishly simplistic claim that "coca-cola is unhealthy". Does it cause obsesity? It doesn't "cause obsesity" in the same sense that ingesting more calories than you spend causes obsesity: It's not the coca-cola or the sugar by themselves.

<comment><USER45> The only thing wrong with sugar is overeating it to the point of ruining one's macro proportions and going into caloric surplus. Just saying that "sugar is unhealthy" is not true from a dietary perspective. A better statement would be "too much sugar is unhealthy".

<comment><USER46> Sugar and carbohydrates can severely negatively impact people, even in small amounts.

"[INSERT FOOD] for some people is unhealthy at any amount" is what should be always said. People then have to determine what those foods and level of foods are, it could be accumulative as well - where too much of a few different foods may be too irritating to your system.

<comment><USER45> Cheese has a high tyrosine content and turkey -- tryptophan. Should one always mention that those foods could cause adverse effects for people who are sensitive to those amino-acids? I think that's a bit over the top, like saying that walking is healthy, but not forgetting to mention, that it is not, for people with severe arthritis. That seems like a truism to me and if one has those type of ailments, they most likely know about it or should seek medical advice.

<comment><USER46> Do we ideally want an educated, self-aware population who have a better chance of self-regulating - or the opposite? Similarly do we want discourse to be more lazy and simplified or to be more detailed When is it coddling, when is it laziness?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I'm from the home of Oatly, southern Sweden, Malmö. Most of my friends are vegan and even I buy Oatly just to avoid milk protein because I'm getting older.

BUT a lot of my vegan friends are shying away from Oatly now apparently because they're partially funded by a large Chinese state owned company.

And we actually have more locally produced alternatives to Oatly coming out here in Sweden, one is now launched in Stockholm but still waiting to spread down here.

<comment><USER48> I don't know Oatly, but it seems to be pretty much like an Horchata, which originated at least as far back as 13th-century Valencia, Spain.

<comment><USER47> I don't know about that but it's very simple. It's just oat based milk alternatives. Oat based drink, cream and stuff like that.

It doesn't taste like milk. It tastes like oats soaked in water. But it works for cooking, coffee and blending as a replacement to milk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> > anyone who's tried a latte with oat milk can attest it is by far the best > tasting, most milk-like alternative

That's quite a bold & generalising statement. Personally I think cashew nut milk is the most milk-like alternative in terms of flavour and mouthfeel.

<comment><USER50> Oat Milk, even the very best, is syrupy and thick. I think most people looking for a latte without dairy are better off seeing the Milk Alternative's flavors as their own thing rather than trying to replicate a dairy latte. There are a lot of upsides to be found if you stop chasing an impossible goal.

Notably, I found that a Soy London Fog is actually single-handedly a better drink than a milk London Fog...but it is different and if you are chasing a milk product you won't find it.

<comment><USER51> Huh, Oatly tastes really close to dairy milk to me, but some of the other oat milks I've tried are fairly bad. There's a huge variance. I don't think "syrupy" is a way I'd describe any of them, though, except perhaps the higher fat barista blends?

<comment><USER52> All plant milks taste like dirty sugar water to me. I've tried Oatly and found it slightly less sweet than others, but still not particularly good. Nothing about it is milk-like to me. It was as watery as all the others, I don't understand how the grandparent can find it "syrupy and thick".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Not to appear petty, or to give the impression that I care about internet points (full disclosure: I am and I do), but I posted this on HN with the exact same title and link 3 hours ago. Wondering how this didn't get flagged as a dupe?

<comment><USER54> Probably because OP posted it twice, the first time was 19 hrs ago.

<comment><USER53> I guess that kind of makes sense, thanks :)

 _solemnly looks out window contemplating points that could have been_

<comment><USER54> I'm only guessing but I know that look. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I've started making oat milk. It's pretty good.

Base for my smoothies. Substitute for yoghurt. Mostly because COVID-19 has reduced my dairy and fresh leafy greens consumption. (Fiber from oats isn't the same, I know.)

For the enzyme, I use either honey or overripe banana. I generally let the oats soak in the blender for 30-60 minutes, hitting the button a few times if I remember.

For fats, I use either olive oil or coconut cream.

FWIW, this article's tone is a big turn off. It's good to point out high glycemic response, canola oil, and maltose. And I have no constructive comments about Coca Cola. But comparing oat milk to HFCS drinks is silly.

</comment><comment><USER56> I can't help but feel pity for the author here. They've correctly been able to see through all of these tactics and psychological hacks employed by the marketing industry, but then they've gone on and tried to better themselves and made a big ol fool of themselves trying to do it.

The fact of the matter is that proving things and making a strong point in an argument is HARD. To really convince people about complex issues, you can't just make claims and then cite references. Complex issues will often have aspects where both sides can make well referenced scientific arguments in favour of their side. Hell, if tobacco could do it, why the author expects to do so much better when they try the exact same thing a few paragraphs later is beyond me.

I certainly don't have a great solution either here, but I can say that the things in my life which have nudged my thinking have not been better someone who cited a better reference, or who argues harder for one side. It's been someone who explains as much as possible about the underlying mechanisms involved, and why something is BOTH good and bad which is almost always the case. This usually takes around an hour or 2 of presentation, and is presented by someone who has done years of research in a field. That's what did it for me and sugar at least: [https://robertlustig.com/sugar-the-bitter- truth/](https://robertlustig.com/sugar-the-bitter-truth/)

</comment><comment><USER57> I'm not convinced that Oatly is so tremendously bad, all things considered, and I forgive a little marketing-speak so long as they are being honest and forthcoming when engaged. That being said, I find the amount of "good for you" literature and products out there to simply be overwhelming. Do I want to know about what I put in my body? Sure. Do I want a PhD in nutrition? Umm...

There is a simple rule I follow which I, probably erroneously, call the Law of Nature. If you want to trust what goes in, make it yourself and make it with whole foods that you can see and touch. Why is a food refined? To make it easier to preserve, store, and transport or to modify it's consistency, taste, or nutritional characteristics. 99% of these refinements lead to a product which is less nutritious for you and likely bad for you in some way. Indulge occasionally but realize that _most_ forms of _modern_ food refinement is not natural, and our bodies have evolved over tens of thousands of years to efficiently consume what occurs in nature. If you need a lab or the bacteria doesn't seem to manifest magically, it doesn't meet my definition of natural.

I know this basically sounds like a Paleo plug, but my purpose isn't to define a practice you should follow. My main problem is information and deception. I don't have time to vet an entire grocery store of products, so I trust my evolution as a default. I want to feel comfortable and confident about what I consume rather than building an ideology out of it.

<comment><USER58> I think for the most part your philosophy is a good one, if you can afford it (in money and time). The problem is that for many people, healthy foods aren't as accessible. It takes more time to cook your own food, or places that sell fresh foods are not close by. Or you don't have time to make grocery trips more than once every two weeks. If you are a single parent working a full time job, it's going to be very difficult to find time to cook from scratch every night. That's why we have to move toward making food more healthful by default.

<comment><USER59> I only partly agree.

After 10+ years of baking my own bread, for example, it takes under 5 mins to drop my selfmade premix, or mix it there and then, in the bread machine. Preparing a sourdough and baking it off in the morning, takes a few times a few minutes, spread out.

Point is, baking bread, takes me less time than going to the bakers. And is cheaper. Same for making my own jams, tomato sauce, pizza, syrup, honey, veggie garden, veggy burgers, wine, beer. It all takes time, but mostly planning. Saves money if done right.

I realize that I'm priviledged with having space and opportunity to try and learn it all, but that is also because I pursued precisely that freedom and opportunity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I liked the article but it could have been much simpler and shorter. I believe that non-dairy "milk" can be healthy, but I look for a few things on the label: the package should contain almost no carbohydrates and no added oil.

I just checked out our pantry, and indeed, the oat "milk" we have has more carbohydrates than I want, so that is off our shopping list. Other milk substitutes that I just checked met my criteria (various nut "milks", and hemp seed "milk").

Goodbye oat milk!

<comment><USER61> The low fat version of Oat-ly has no oil added. It's not like the company is giving you no choice but to buy a product with "controversial" ingredients.

<comment><USER60> It turns out that oat "milk", even without oil added, has a lot of carbohydrates, some in the form of natural sugar.

<comment><USER62> Oats have a lot of carbs

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> The article makes great points. The most important one is that the carbohydrate content of Oatly is significantly greater than milk with a much higher GI sugar. It has a different sugar formulation which has double the impact (GI) on blood sugar as compared to Lactose (milk sugar). This alone makes it an extremely unhealthy choice as drinking 12 oz is certainly enough to spike blood insulin levels and cause a subsequent roller coaster effect on blood sugar. People are blindly flocking it to it because sugar tastes good and clever but misleading marketing.

We really need better nutrition education in society and better marketing controls on sugar.

<comment><USER64> > The most important one is that the sugar content of Oatly is not only > significantly greater than milk, it has a different sugar formulation which > has double the impact (GI) on blood sugar as compared to Lactose (milk > sugar).

Let's see...

* 7g of sugar in a cup of a low-fat oatly [https://www.fatsecret.com/calories-nutrition/oatly/low-fat-o...](https://www.fatsecret.com/calories-nutrition/oatly/low-fat-oat-milk)

vs.

* 12.5g of sugar in cup of 2% milk [https://www.fatsecret.com/calories-nutrition/usda/milk-(2%25...](https://www.fatsecret.com/calories-nutrition/usda/milk-\(2%25-lowfat-with-added-vitamin-a\))

So you're factually incorrect.

You're also disregarding the fact that even 12.5g of sugar isn't terrible if the rest of your diet is generally sugar free, that some people are lactose intolerant, and finally that oat milk doesn't come with the same terrible externalities associated with the dairy industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Man, what is it about SEO marketers and writing about things far out their competency?

<comment><USER65> That feels like a shallow dismissal.

<comment><USER28> The above is just a expression of sentiment, the actual dismissal is found in other parts of the comments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> One thing to think about with any oat based product is whether or not the oats are organic or not.

In North America, it is common practice to spray roundup on the oats just before harvest. This prepares the oats for harvest at a pre-determined time, and so is less risky to the farmer. However, the amount of roundup in the resulting product is quite high.

The organic oats are traditionally farmed and do not have this problem.

EDIT:

The Oatly FAQ has a lot of interesting info related to this discussion.

[https://us.oatly.com/pages/faqs](https://us.oatly.com/pages/faqs)

</comment><comment><USER67> Errors in the article.

Oatley is no longer Swedish, it's owned by China Resources Verlinvest Health Investment Ltd, which is a partnership between an Belgian investor (Verlinvest) and the government of China (China Resources).

Due to history Oatly do have considerable market in Sweden, but swedish social media are starting to question the company due to it's ties with China and the Uyghur situation.

<comment><USER68> [https://www.oatly.com/int/about-oatly](https://www.oatly.com/int/about-oatly) lists other owners as well, but I couldn't find who owns what percentage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> The article mentioned _Merchants of Doubt_. I recommend following it up with _Industrial Strength Denial_ [https://www.amazon.com/Industrial-Strength- Denial-Corporatio...](https://www.amazon.com/Industrial-Strength-Denial- Corporations-Defending-Indefensible/dp/0520296281), which documents similar practices supporting industries like leaded gas, radium (promoted for health including injecting it and using it in suppositories), and slavery.

As an alternative to Oatly, I bought a soy milk making machine (used from Craig's List for $15). Like a rice cooker, it's not _necessary_ but it does the job easily. It can work with rice, oats, cashews, etc. I make new soy milk every few days. Ingredients: soy beans and water.

The article doesn't mention the packaging, another similarity with Coke, but food packaging creates a lot of waste. Buying soy beans in bulk in reusable bags reduces a lot of that pollution.

Another great alternative to Oatly is water -- for hundreds of thousands of years the only beverage humans drank after weaning.

<comment><USER70> About making soymilk: I do like the idea of making the soymilk I consume myself. I have not yet though found a way to utilize the okara (soy pulp) that is produced in the process. Do you have any tips what to do with it?

<comment><USER69> I use it like yogurt -- usually I chop fruit and and nuts on it, or I thicken my breakfast oatmeal with it. I don't sweeten it beyond fruit, though you could. You might also check YouTube. Actually I just did and it returns a lot of ideas: [https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=okara&oq=&gs_l=](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=okara&oq=&gs_l=)

Speaking of yogurt, I plan to start making soy yogurt too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> I'm on-board with the moral aspect of minimizing support for the dairy industry (though this topic is oddly never brought up), however, I just don't like the taste of Oatly's products. They are indeed too sweet. There are better-tasting oat beverage brands out there which declare less sugar (and without salt for balance). Soy milk works great, too.

<comment><USER72> Which other brands would you recommend?

I like the creaminess of Oatly - works well in coffee.

Other brands I tried (Alpro) were a bit watery and some use guam, which is an OK thickener ingredient, but doesn't go with milk alternatives in my view.

Maybe I'll look into making Oat milk - seems like a quick and easy thing to do.

<comment><USER71> The Swedish producer Trensums Food makes great oat drink varieties that I know are sold under different brands across Europe. I'm unfortunately only familiar with one of the Swedish brands, Coop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> "So now we have to ask ourselves: What're the odds that we've learned our lesson and this will never happen again? Or could there be a new class of products running the same playbook, building billion dollar brands with clever marketing and deceptive health claims while secretly ruining our health?"

I straight up thought they were describing tech companies or the advent of social media/ad tech e.g. Facebook, Twitter, etc. and health claims being it makes you feel more connected with people, but it actually affects your mental health and creates addiction in negative ways we are just starting to comprehend.

</comment><comment><USER74> I'd just like a comforting confirmation that "big milk" (sorry) hasn't had anything to do with this article.

Apologies, got a bit traumatized by documentaries "Bananas" and "big boys gone bananas".

</comment><comment><USER75> I can't say much about Oatly but milk has a huge impact on the environment that isn't put in $ value. Cows are farmed in somewhat inhuman environments where their value is mostly for milk, meat and leather. If we did this to dogs and cats, people would never accept it but we've been desensitized that's it's okay to farm pigs, chicken and cows for human consumption as long as we don't see how it's made.

Then there's the methane produced by cows which is 20x worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.

</comment><comment><USER76> Author fails to mention that Coca-Cola (and most other soft drinks) have like 35 grams of sugar per serving, so even with maltose's higher GI, it's still nowhere near the blood sugar bomb that a Coke is. Comparing that to 7 grams of sugar per serving (of which "quite a bit" is maltose) is just completely unreasonable.

Whole piece similarly strikes me as dishonest and agenda-driven.

<comment><USER77> Yeah, a lot of claims with 0 sources doesn't inspire confidence. So milk was never shown to be unhealthy, fat+cholesterol isn't harmful but oat milk is terrible for you. Gotcha

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Any recommendations for a different good-tasting, 'healthy' milk alternative, then? Porridge or cereal with water is inedible...

<comment><USER79> what about just drinking water and eating berries? I kid you not, you will feel so much better.

<comment><USER78> Maybe I should try a serious comparison with berries specifically, but my personal experience is that I don't get the same sustained slow energy release from fruit that I'd get from porridge or low GI cereal - I get hungry faster.

<comment><USER80> That's carbs for ya

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> The new coke? No.

Until Oatly are complicit in the murders of organizing employees in countries they thought would save them billions [1], they do not deserve such a damaging comparison.

[1] [https://prospect.org/features/coca-cola- killings/](https://prospect.org/features/coca-cola-killings/)

</comment><comment><USER82> I'm reminded of the scene in the "Last Emperor" when the young Emperor Puyi is weaned at a much later age from breast milk.

Have there been any studies on long term consumption of breast milk, well into adulthood? If you think about it, breast milk has many minerals and important nutrients, including endocannabinoids like 2-AG.

</comment><comment><USER83> dang, this article is written by an SEO guy, and submitted twice over the past 20 hours, just by adding a hashbang. The history of the domain on HN shows this pattern a lot. Maybe you could look into it, but I guess this low quality hit piece is just another SEO fad and should be banned from HN.

<comment><USER84> email him with such concerns, random comments aren't necessarily seen

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> Note that the organic variety has no added oil, then again, it also has no added vitamins.

[https://www.oatly.com/int/products/oat-drink- organic](https://www.oatly.com/int/products/oat-drink-organic)

</comment><comment><USER30> Reminds me of this story: [https://www.esquire.com/news- politics/news/a29373/tobacco-an...](https://www.esquire.com/news- politics/news/a29373/tobacco-and-stress/)

</comment><comment><USER86> If you compare 100ml oatly to 100ml normal semi skimmed milk, it's lower in calories, sugar, fat, has about 5 x less saturated fat, definitely doesn't contain any hormones, antibiotics, casein, and probably doesn't raise your igf1 either

</comment><comment><USER87> 1 cup of Oatly, which is a massive amount to put in your coffee, is 120 calories. That's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. I put Oatly in my coffee every day and it's basically my breakfast.

</comment><comment><USER13> Oatly is kinda weird, because it contains more sugar than most other oat milks, yet somehow manages to taste dull, I imagine the sweat on the walls of a damp cellar has a similar note.

</comment><comment><USER88> So much hate for cow milk. I think grain-fed dairy needs to stop, but a quick look at the latest studies shows all cause mortality is lower for people that drink milk.

</comment><comment><USER89> Canola oil causes intestinal distress in more people than you know, similar but more severe than lactose intolerance, but it is often considered an allergy. My partner and her mother are unable to digest / have a violent intestinal response to it.

It's extremely unpleasant for them, and in the long run could probably cause significant health issues related to nutrition absorption and increased inflammation.

Anyway. I'm convinced that many people have this issue and don't know about it. Information about this problem is not very widespread, and I'm unaware of any studies that attempt to explain its mechanism.

</comment><comment><USER90> 12 ozs in your coffee...ohhhkay. What a dumb article.

</comment><comment><USER91> This whole article is full of wrong statements about healthy and unhealthy food. And I'm not taking only about the advertisements.

</comment><comment><USER92> This article convinced me to give Parly a try. Been looking for a milk substitute that is closer to Coe milk than nut milks.

</comment><comment><USER93> Wouldn't touch nut milks/seed milk unless I made it myself and got rid of all the lectins beforehand...

</comment><comment><USER94> I got to " maltose has the highest glycemic index, with a rating of 105 out of 100" and stopped reading there.

</comment><comment><USER95> Would compare them to Mountain Dew, but the headline wouldn't look as good.

</comment><comment><USER96> TLDR; the sugars in Oatly have an extremely high GI and it contains Canola oil which has been linked to a variety of health issues. Their marketing cleverly dismisses or minimises these concerns in a similar way to the fizzy drinks or tobacco industry.

I was surprised that the article didn't mention the comparative lack of protein in Oatly when compared to milk, and as others have mentioned, it also ignores the ethical considerations.

<comment><USER97> Couldn't agree more. I really don't get the "fad" behind oat milk. I think it's just a lot of good marketing.

Personally, I prefer no added sugar almond, coconut, and hazelnut milk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> TL;DR: Oatly (oat milk) is primarily sugar and canola oil. Both are bad in large quantities.

<comment><USER99> Oatley has loads of different varieties. The sugar content in the barista one is low enough that I can drink 3 flat whites a day and stay in Ketosis.

<comment><USER100> The sugar content in the "Barista" edition is exactly the same as their ordinary version. Total calorie content is 59kcal/100mL versus the regular version which is 46kcal/100mL.

The difference is they add dipotassium phosphate to prevent separating when the milk hits the hot coffee.

By talking about "Low enough to stay in Ketosis" you are practicing the techniques discussed in TFA perfectly. Almost makes it sound like this special edition is lower in sugar, when it's in fact the same sugar and higher calorie.

<comment><USER99> I don't buy the other ones so I never check the nutrients.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER101> I don't drink dairy due to intolerance and I find it disgusting possibly for the same reason. I also don't like any milk substitute so I'm out of any target demographic anyway. However, as far as I know according to traditional Chinese medicine milk is considered a big no no.

<comment><USER102> Try eating shredded carrots with coconut oil, olive oil and salt on an empty stomach once a day. In a couple of weeks try drinking milk again. If your milk intolerance is due to a bacterial overgrowth you should be able to tolerate it after that.

<comment><USER101> I find the taste of milk so abhorrent I rather drink piss than milk. I can only eat dairy after its been cooked.

<comment><USER102> I used to be the same. After the carrot therapy my tongue changed colour and milk tasted like the nectar of the gods.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


India's richest men lose billions - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7938646.stm <comment><USER2> Yeah I find this article meaningless as well. An exceedingly wealthy person lost half of his wealth and in relative terms to everyone else is still incredibly wealthy. I'm sure that billionaries in Russia, USA, and Middle East had similar experiences last year--who cares if the billionaires were from India?

<comment><USER3> Indeed. A year ago, Microsoft's stock was around 30$/share, and then this past year fell to low of about 15$/share. I don't think anyone said anything about Bill Gates losing almost half of his net worth (which is presumably still mostly in stock).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have to say I'm not entirely suprised - Reliance Group companies (owned by either brother) continue to lose their sheen - they became big players entirely due their father, Dhirubai Ambani. He's known for his ability to bribe and corrupt an entire political system and with little competition in the 'Licence Raj' days (where you basically had to get a 'licence' to start any business from the govt, often riddled with red-tape).

Now that those days are on their way out, and MNCs giving stiff competition in virtually all the industries they are involved in, it is time for reckoning, I guess. Though, it would be remiss to write them off. They're still very rich, and very powerful (politically).

</comment><comment><USER5> Anyone know the cause or reason for their losses? The article is kind of meaningless without that key information.

<comment><USER6> The original Forbes story has more details: [http://www.forbes.com/lists/2009/10/billionaires-2009-riches...](http://www.forbes.com/lists/2009/10/billionaires-2009-richest- people_Anil-Ambani_VX6G.html)

In short, bad investment performance and scuttled merger plans.</comment></comment>


What a Deep Neural Network thinks about selfies - <AUTHOR> http://karpathy.github.io/2015/10/25/selfie/ <comment><USER2> A guide on how to take a good selfie that others will like:

      be female
      be blonde
      be attractive

Incidentally, Christian Rudder did a really good "study" on the dating site pictures a few years ago:

[http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/dont-be-ugly-by- accident/](http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/dont-be-ugly-by-accident/)

<comment><USER3> A better guide on how to take a selfie:

        Don't take a selfie.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is neat. I bet Facebook or OkCupid are sitting on all sorts of click data that could be used to develop tools for helping people make their photos look better. (Even if, personally, I can't wait for a cultural backlash against internet narcissism...)

[Edit: Even better, he didn't use click data to train the model, just public likes.]

<comment><USER5> The idea to use a convnet to reframe the selfie is neat. Makes it 5% better. Also, if it can be run on the phone, it could possible warn people they are about to post a shitty selfie before they do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would like to see a deep dream selfie ...

Feed it an initial picture (noise, clouds, a selfie) and then backwards manipulate the input to maximize the assessed quality of the "selfie".

I guess that would look pretty funny.

<comment><USER7> He did run something like that for cropping. He showed his favourite two "rude" ones at the bottom, where the 'Net cropped out the face of the person taking the selfie.

<comment><USER8> Actually, he used random crops and selected the highest rated. A "deep dream selfie" would actually run the neural network in reverse so as to generate a completely different image.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One thing I always found interesting is Lecun is credited with developing covnets, but Hinton is apparently credited with scaling them and showing the world how great they are in the paper from 2012 - why was Hinton's group (Toronto) able to publish these ground breaking results before Lecun's group (NYU)

<comment><USER10> Geoff Hinton answers this question in episode 6 of the Talking Machines podcast. [http://www.thetalkingmachines.com/blog/2015/3/13/how- machine...](http://www.thetalkingmachines.com/blog/2015/3/13/how-machine- learning-got-where-it-is-and-the-future-of-the-field)

Geoff Hinton had grad students who wanted to work on the problem, but Yann LeCun didn't.

"In about 2012, it should have been Yann's group, but Yann was unlucky, he didn't have a student who really wanted to do it. But we had a couple of students who wanted to do it and we took all of Yann's techniques and added some of our own."

<comment><USER9> interesting - i took the course but did not notice that - thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >Be female. Women are consistently ranked higher than men. In particular, notice that there is not a single guy in the top 100.

This sounds true, but it can't be the real reason—selfies are ranked relative to the other images by the _same user_. So unless users are taking a lot of #selfies of people of different genders, we can assume the dataset is already controlled for the gender of the person in the image, no? Unless there's some confounding factor at play, such as some demographic segment being more likely to optimize for good selfies occasionally but have boring feeds the rest of the time.

would be super interesting, if the data is available, to normalize this by exposure. Of the people that saw an image, how many clicked "like"?

<comment><USER12> Well, one of the other factors is long hair and the tendency to oversaturate the face. Those factors don't seem independent to me, men are less likely to sport long hair and they're also less likely to oversature the face to measure up to some skin perfection standards (think of it as the photographic equivalent of makeup).

> but it can't be the real reason

Can't? Ontop of the above-listed aspects it is entirely possible that there is a bias that both sexes find female appearance somewhat more aesthetically pleasing.

Similar to how focus group testing for computer voices tends to result in female voices being chosen (at least that's what I often hear, couldn't find a solid source).

Even if the bias is small the correlated factors would amplify it when you're optimizing for a maximum, i.e. for the top selection.

<comment><USER11> Neither of those explain why it would rank above the average of _other female faces_ , in general.

Discussion about this with the author reveals that I was misinterpreting how they were collecting averages. I was assuming the "like" count was coming from each photo collected, but instead they collected the photos and average likes in individual steps, where the average likes were across recent posts by that user, rather then the selfies by that user.

<comment><USER13> I screwed up on this point by the way - I had done this part of the experiment a few months ago and I incorrectly remembered the details. I went back and looked through the code and adjusted the post with more regarding this important point. In particular:

"Now it is time to decide which ones of those selfies are good or bad. Intuitively, we want to calculate a proxy for how many people have seen the selfie, and then look at the number of likes as a function of the audience size. I took all the users and sorted them by their number of followers. I gave a small bonus for each additional tag on the image, assuming that extra tags bring more eyes. Then I marched down this sorted list in groups of 100, and sorted those 100 selfies based on their number of likes. I only used selfies that were online for more than a month to ensure a near-stable like count. I took the top 50 selfies and assigned them as positive selfies, and I took the bottom 50 and assigned those to negatives. We therefore end up with a binary split of the data into two halves, where we tried to normalize by the number of people who have probably seen each selfie. In this process I also filtered people with too few followers or too many followers, and also people who used too many tags on the image."

<comment><USER14> Still no men in the top 100 ? There must be something deep to learn about the difference in sexes there, I am just not sure what it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> How to take a good selfie: don't be black or dark-skinned, unless you're a celebrity.

How do we prevent our AIs from learning racism?

EDIT> Informative article, BTW. A good read.

<comment><USER16> If a given question has an answer that is due to racism, the answer is still the answer. For example, if society has some underlying racism that factors into what it considers attractive, that doesn't change what it considers attractive.

I don't think these algorithms are learning racism. They are only being blunt in revealing what already exists.

<comment><USER15> > If a given question has an answer that is due to racism, the answer is still > the answer.

That's why it's important to be clear about the question. This ConvNet doesn't really answer the question "What makes a good selfie". It answers a much narrower and more complicated to state question.

The absence of reflection in the system means that if it's used to answer a question that's superficially similar to the designer's intent, there's no way to reason around the bias in the training data.

Imagine I'm a Canadian who trains an automated turret to classify friend / foe based on data from Afghanistan and Iraq. I've not trained the system to answer "Is this group of pixels a friend / foe", in the general sense. If the system is used outside the narrow context of its validity, say in Northern Ireland, or in a civilian Muslim neighbourhood in Paris, we should expect bad results.

So you're right to point out that the racism is in the social context. But I'm arguing that we don't actually want a classifier to learn that if there's a good chance it'll be used in a way that discards or ignores that social context. Same as using an expert system outside its domain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think it's less about the head getting chopped than about having "the head take up about 1/3 of the image," as Karpathy says. So what the net is learning is composition, or balance in an image, which is really cool. The rule of thirds is actually pretty well know to people in photography:

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

(Our deep-learning framework [http://deeplearning4j.org](http://deeplearning4j.org) missed his list, but it's got working convnets, too.)

<comment><USER18> possibly, but none of the cropped examples have cropped chins. It's also well known in photography that you can cut off someone's forehead, but never their chin.

<comment><USER19> Echoing a law of video games: "nobody looks up"!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One caveat with these machine inspired knowledge: they are prone to error, probably more than humans, at least for now.

For example, if you train a CNN directly with human faces, its recognition rate comes way below what a human is capable of. Only after you apply tons of handcrafted optimizations, which are mostly black art, will you get close to or surpass a human's capability. Without much domain specific tuning, an AI's insight is far from reliable.

<comment><USER21> This is more wrong than right.

The _example_ is correct, but not for the reasons stated. Humans are very, very good at face _recognition_. However, CNNs are pretty close to human performance for face detection.

 _Only after you apply tons of handcrafted optimizations, which are mostly black art, will you get close to or surpass a human 's capability. Without much domain specific tuning, an AI's insight is far from reliable._

This just isn't the case. Take the GoogLeNet or VGGNet papers, build the CNN as described using Caffe/whatever, train as described in the paper and you'll end up with something that is pretty much on par with human performance for categorizing ImageNet images.

Take that same CNN architecture, and retrain it for another domain and it will perform roughly as well there too, for the task of categorizing into ~1K-10K image classes.

This _isn 't_ domain specific tuning. It's domain specific _training_ , which is very different (although collecting the data is a big job).

 _Only after you apply tons of handcrafted optimizations, which are mostly black art, will you get close to or surpass a human 's capability._

For CNNs, this is pretty much entirely false.

<comment><USER20> A GoogleNet or VGGNet has tons of parameters. How many convolutional layers are stacked together, the size and stride of each one, where to put the dropout layers, where to put the full connection layers, how they are connected together, global learning rate and momentum and decay, local learning rate and momentum and decay, each of these myriad parameters have an unpredictable effect on the final result. The initialization of the network also has a major bearing on the final outcome. It is almost a chaotic system where nothing small can be safely ignored. One time my result of training a CNN was swung by the `batch_size` parameter and to this day I don't know how.

Those parameters are exactly the type of _handcrafted optimizations_ I am talking about. You cannot just fill in arbitrary numbers and expect the network to fare well. In fact, you cannot even expect it to converge.

You can take those papers and build a world class classifier only because someone else has taken all the time to optimize for the specific case. Once you switch the task, the result will be OK, but nowhere close to what a human or a true AI would give you. Not until you take the time to optimize the parameters.

<comment><USER21> _A GoogleNet or VGGNet has tons of parameters._

Kinda, but they are defined for you. For example the GoogLeNet design is described in[1]. Page 5 lists the parameters, the diagram on page 6 shows how the layers are linked.

Yes, I agree that the design of a new neural network architecture is a skilled process, and there is a lot of hard work there. I couldn't agree with that more, but that isn't what we are talking about here.

It is quite possible to take a CNN like GoogLeNet designed for a specific purpose and reuse it in similar situations. GoogLeNet will always do pretty well for image classification.

I think of it as analogous to a piece of software like a database. Designing a new database system is hard, but taking something like SQLite and using it is easy. Yes, you can tune it and get better performance out of it, and yes, it will break if you use it in the wrong circumstances, but it is generally pretty reliable if used as designed.

Now this analogy breaks down because industrial use of CNNs is pretty new compared to Database systems. It's more like trying to get msql running on your Slackware 0.9 system in 1993 it is getting Postgres on Ubuntu 15.10.

Nevertheless, there isn't really a black art to using an existing CNN. Lots of schlepping to get CUDA running on your machine, though.

[1] [http://www.cv- foundation.org/openaccess/content_cvpr_2015/pa...](http://www.cv- foundation.org/openaccess/content_cvpr_2015/papers/Szegedy_Going_Deeper_With_2015_CVPR_paper.pdf)

[2] Not MySQL, msql: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSQL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSQL)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It seems this neural network has a sense of humor if you look at the "Finding the Optimal Crop for a selfie" area.

You can see it optimized the last selfie by cropping the face fully out of the picture.. :))

</comment><comment><USER23> DNN is a key technology of the future. I highly recommend the education program Professor Karpathy mentions at the end of this post. All are excellent and free.

</comment><comment><USER24> I have seen similar results before: [https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv- blog/the-algorithm-that...](https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/the- algorithm-that-sees-beauty-in-photographic-portraits-435ab8064646)

</comment><comment><USER25> A really good read. Good intro to ConvNets, a well designed and implemented test. Ad funny.

</comment><comment><USER26> looking at the top 100 one can only wonder how Hollywood has figured it out well before mighty power of computer :)

<comment><USER27> For me, this thing about having the top of your head cut from the picture is new. Who would have thought..

<comment><USER28> Makes a bit of sense, in combination with the "be female" advice, cutting off the forehead puts the center of the photograph closer to her cleavage, and typically shows off her entire chest.

<comment><USER27> Cleavage does not feature a lot in the top 100 actually, but I'm half way there, in a sense that I'm a female. I'll definitely try the half-forehead thing next time!

<comment><USER5> We could try and see if the activation for good selfies comes from the cleavage or the eyes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Well, you don't need to ask a deep neural network to say that selfies are getting stupid daily with teens sticking their tongues out

<comment><USER5> BEEP BEEP. Bad selfie detected. You run the risk of making a fool of yourself! BEEP BEEP</comment></comment>


Assembly programming in Go - <AUTHOR> https://goroutines.com/asm <comment><USER2> I'm confused, go is supported by gcc but does something very different to gcc's inline asm (ie gas) Which can do both intel and att syntax? Why? Yet another assembly language syntax seems insane at this point. Has go got an abi so you can just compile object files with your assmbler of choice then link?

Am I missing the point?

<comment><USER3> Go uses the Plan 9 syntax because its compilers are derived from the Plan 9 compilers.</comment></comment>


Graph Engine – Serving Big Graphs in Real-Time - <AUTHOR> http://www.graphengine.io/

<comment><USER2> tl;dr - Neo4j for the Micrsoft platform:

        The following prerequisites are required to follow this manual and develop GE applications:

        Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 8 (or above).

        Visual Studio 2012 and 2013.

        Windows PowerShell 3.0 (or above).

        GE Visual Studio Extension.

        An Azure subscription (not required if you do not plan to deploy GE applications on Azure).</comment>


Jerry Yang offers sneak peak of Yahoo's future: Life! - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=7503

<comment><USER2> I guess Microsoft beat them to it (WindowsLive or something like that).

Personally, I don't want a company to take over my life. Even if it effectively does, I suspect it is not a good marketing move to call it so.

I also don't want to be reminded that my life happens only on the internet.

</comment><comment><USER3> So has "sneak peak" just evolved to post-ironic usage now or what?

"Sneak peak" is more popular now than "looser" ever was.

<http://news.google.com/news?q=%22sneak+peak%22></comment>


Cocoa with Love: An Asteroids-style game in CoreAnimation, Part Two - <AUTHOR> http://cocoawithlove.com/2009/02/asteroids-style-game-in-coreanimation_22.html <comment><USER2> For those interested in this sort of thing, I recently completed a mastermind- style game implemented with Core Animation. There isn't any external documentation, but if you want it, you can grab it here:

Binary: <http://harpastum.googlepages.com/Enigmata.zip>

Source: <http://harpastum.googlepages.com/EnigmataSOURCE.zip>

If you have any questions, just direct them to my email address (in my profile).</comment>