Fake News on Facebook? In Foreign Elections, That's Not New - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/technology/fake-news-on-facebook-in-foreign-elections-thats-not-new.html <comment><USER3> I think "Fake News" is a boogey-man rationalization for what happened.

"Half of the country voted for someone else. Not someone I liked. I am baffled. What happened? Because they read about lizard people or how Obama was born in Africa" or, the officially sanctioned response: "Because of those pesky KGB agents hiding in the bushes". That is the easiest rationalization and one which leads to least cognitive dissonance and one in which the other side is completely demonized or idioticized.

All those working men and women from PA and MI who before voted for the "right party" almost religiously for years, all of the sudden have been brainwashed by sneaky foreigners to believe in lizard people, they are all now white supremacists and like Hitler (nevermind they voted for Obama just a few years ago), and will also use gays for target practice.

<comment><USER4> Did you even read the article? It's about implication of Facebook in international politics. I have relatives in India and I know exactly how this plays out. They are constantly sharing fake news that confirms their bias. For example one of the stories was how NASA has validated a religious book in India which had calculated the distance between Earth and Sun

<comment><USER3> > Did you even read the article?

Yes I did. Did you read my comment? There is a reason we are all of the sudden talking about Fake News and just a few days almost nobody thought about the phrase. It has little to do with elections in India.

<comment><USER5> > Yes I did. Did you read my comment? There is a reason we are all of the > sudden talking about Fake News and just a few days almost nobody thought > about the phrase. It has little to do with elections in India.

[2014]

[https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2014/08/30/large-the- intern...](https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2014/08/30/large-the-internet- fake-news-problem/SABBRta88xgqwEPY86oP3M/story.html)

> The Internet's fake news problem

> Some of it is satire (The Onion and, to a less proven extent, its > clickbaiting sister site Clickhole continue to bear the standard of > mastery), but the larger part of what's out there is "satire" — from the > chronically unfunny half-jokes of the Daily Currant to the shrug-inducing > falsehoods of Empire News , the toothlessly goofy sendups of Free Wood Post > , the over-the-top Christian-trolling of Christwire , and the more > pernicious race-baiting of sites like CreamBPM and Newsbuzzdaily .

[https://newrepublic.com/article/118013/satire-news- websites-...](https://newrepublic.com/article/118013/satire-news-websites-are- cashing-gullible-outraged-readers)

> Upworthy and Viralnova, at least, are honest about what they're selling: > gaudy, sentimental, life-affirming stories. But the Currant class promises > humor and almost universally fails to deliver it—because the actual goal is > SEO clickbait. Given that, you might wonder why they even bother identifying > themselves, usually in disclaimers at the bottom of the page, as satirical > news sites.The answer is simple: to avoid a lawsuit.

> But the biggest mystery isn't the identity of the conmen—it's how much > they're hauling in. Barkeley told Slate that his humor provides him with a > "tight but livable" income. A number of publically available valuation > services, which are by no means precise, estimate that The Daily Currant > brings in anywhere from mid-five figures to $130,000 dollars a year on ad > revenue alone. Finkelstein, the SEO expert, says even those numbers may be > low, as they doesn't include revenue derived from short-term revenue bumps > when a story goes viral. "I would estimate their yearly revenue from display > advertising at about $100,000–$150,000 a year," he said, noting that even > with his expertise and access to estimation tools, it's not an exact > science. "It isn't perfect, but it is close. But at most, over the few years > they've existed, The Daily Currant may have made as much as $500,000 in > revenue—split between two people who are hardly doing any work."

> The Daily Currant is likely the king of this particular con. But others may > be catching up. The same public revenue calculators place Mediamass's annual > ad revenue alone at just under $40,000; Huzzlers' is rapidly approaching > $45,000. Not bad takes, especially when you consider that some of these > sites don't even bother to write their own unfunny canards: They just steal > them from other sites.

[2016]

[http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-human-news- editors-2...](http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-human-news- editors-2016-9)

> After a Gizmodo story claimed Facebook editors had suppressed conservative > news from the Trending section, the social network fired those editors in > favor of an algorithm. As part of the change, the Trending section no longer > shows custom headlines and summaries of news topics.

> "We're not in the business of deciding what issues people should read > about," he said. "We don't create content. We're not in that business."

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- intersect/wp/2016/10...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- intersect/wp/2016/10/12/facebook-has-repeatedly-trended-fake-news-since- firing-its-human-editors/)

> Facebook has repeatedly trended fake news since firing its human editors

<comment><USER3> Ok? What was the point. You pasted a whole page full of links without a single response... Are you saying that "Fake News" was always just as popular topic and not just something that was picked up in the last 4-5 days?

Ok then, I'll just post one link:

[https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=%22Fake%20news%22](https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=%22Fake%20news%22)

<comment><USER5> Simply because people start searching for it more doesn't mean it wasn't always a topic being discussed.

Why is it people always try to argue ignorance is okay because it is popular?

<comment><USER3> What's a better way to quickly discover popularity?

You posted a wall of links talking about Fake News without explaining or adding anything to it. I never said Fake News were unknown.

The point was that the sudden popularity (of the topic) has certain implications, which I feel are not correct and too dismissive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article is fake "news" (or "coverage") in its own right. Its main purpose is anchoring[1] the reader. It attempts to impress the notions that fake information on Facebook is a significant factor in politics. Conveniently, it's published right after an American election where mainstream media like NYT took a serious blow to their credibility.

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

Ask yourself the following questions. Is this article covering some specific recent event? Is there any investigative journalism involved? No and no. So what is it "informing" us about, exactly? All I see is a bunch of random stuff pulled together to promote a pre-determined meta-narrative.

If you don't believe in meta-narratives, just look below the text to "Related Coverage" box on the page:

        STATE OF THE ART
        Social Media's Globe-Shaking Power NOV. 16, 2016
        Google and Facebook Take Aim at Fake News Sites NOV. 14, 2016
        Facebook, in Cross Hairs After Election, Is Said to Question Its Influence NOV. 12, 2016
        The Hoaxes, Fake News and Misinformation We Saw on Election Day NOV. 8, 2016

This is what high-grade propaganda looks like. It doesn't use outright lies, but rather relies on reframing, anchoring, deliberate name-dropping and rote repetition to establish certain associations and emotional responses. I find it infinitely more sinister than some outrageous bullshit appearing on Facebook.

And it's disconcerting to see just _how hard_ some outlets try to (morally if not otherwise) discredit the outcome of the elections right now. NYT is actually not the worst in this regard. Just open the home pages of Washington Post or The Atlantic. Political FUD stacked on top of more political FUD. Maybe I have a memory lapse, but I've never seen anything quite like it.

<comment><USER7> The article contains several real examples of fake news influencing foreign elections. When you live in a country where your the only data you can afford to access is Facebook and partner's "free" version of the Internet on your mobile device, the possibility of fake news influencing the election is increased dramatically.

You conveniently fail to mention that every example in the article is real, factual, and documented. Do you have any specific examples mentioned in the article that are demonstrably false?

Without any specific falsehoods, you're simply indulging in an ad hominem attack on the source as being biased in and of itself based on what you perceive to be their motives.

<comment><USER6> _> The article contains several real examples of fake news influencing foreign elections._

It has exactly _one_ example that supports its thesis. That example involved several other factors and the end result of the election was not affected. Here is some coverage from the time it was happening:

[http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia- Pacific/2014/0529/Indone...](http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia- Pacific/2014/0529/Indonesia-smear-campaign-nips-at-election-frontrunner-Joko- Widodo-video)

The rest of the NYT article is a hodgepodge of unsubstantiated statements, hand-picked opinions, pictures and social media quotes. Or do you seriously consider a badly Photoshopped picture of someone's T-Shirt to be a "fact" that illustrates the influence of Facebook on world elections?

 _> Without any specific falsehoods_

You seem to have missed the part where I specifically said that high-grade propaganda does not rely on outright lies.

...

Meanwhile, the title of the article in question was changed from "Fake News on Facebook? In Foreign Elections, That's Not New" to "Fake News in U.S. Election? Elsewhere, That's Nothing New". This serves to further illustrate my point about framing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The problem with journalism and media today is that the fierce streak of journalistic independence is long, long gone; media outposts have become too connected, too hungry at the teat of the powerful for any scoop at all now that they do not have regional monopolies on information. Because of the supply of content outlets - blogs, newspapers, magazines, what have you - <USER2> power has shifted back to those that have the information in the first place. It does not matter the industry. If you are a unicorn tech startup, you build _relationships_ with journalists that give you positive reviews, and shun those that do not -- because there are enough to go around and still get your message out, and the journos are hungry for pageviews. The same goes for CEOs and "confidential sources" on Wall Street or Main Street, or politicians gravitating toward CNN or Fox News, or respective anchors that paint them positively that ensnare the audiences they are targeting. It is the way modern PR works.

The quantity of journalists are now the surplus, and the real scoops that generate traffic (and revenue) are scarce. Because of this economic inversion, we now have the companies running the media institutions. In a mainstream economic environment, you then have two choices: media that plays into the confirmation biases of its readership (customers) - just as NYT is doing here - or investigative journalism that is digging up heretofore unknown stories people are trying to conceal (eg The Intercept, Muckrock) to get the pageviews and therefore the ad revenue.

<comment><USER9> Also, what is the incentive to scoop in today's media climate?

If one news outlet breaks a story - even if it's a multi-month, highly- researched think piece - every other website will quickly summarize it and provide one link back to it. The link back is at least citing the source, but the summary is likely good enough for most users, and the originating news outlet gets no ad revenue if the reader only reads the summary.

How can we shift that incentive?

<comment><USER10> Be careful about shifting the incentive. One way to get scoops is to cozy up to news makers, who are typically powerful people and often politicians in government.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Maybe people wouldn't believe fake news if there were any respectable legacy media outlets left. When the media does everything it can to slowly erode trust ([http://www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass- media...](http://www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media-sinks- new-low.aspx)), it's no surprise that things like this will happen.

And I find it funny how legacy media now turns the blame on Facebook instead of looking at itself and changing its behavior. This is such a bad move (as expected by people who don't know what they're doing) that will only empower alternative media even more and further diminish the legacy media's influence over people.

<comment><USER9> > When the media does everything it can to slowly erode trust

Your link provides nothing to support that comment.

Your link does clearly show people's trust in the media is extremely low, but it makes no claims as to why the trust has eroded.

There have certainly been times when various media parties have not lived up to their ethical duties, but to say blanket that the media has "done everything it can to slowly erode trust" seems exaggerated.

Do you think political party rhetoric can erode trust in the media?

One presidential candidate regularly claimed reports about him from one specific media outlet were lies, although they have turned out to be usually true [1].

One presidential candidate made claims during the debates that he did not say things which, simply, he did. The claims he denied making were well-documented on the internet, frequently from his own social media account.

Is it unreasonable to think this rhetoric had some effect on the big drop in mass media trust from supporters of that political party, documented in the gallup.com link you posted?

And would you have recommendations for ways "the media" to gain back that trust? Note that I take issue with the phrase "the media", since it's another unhelpful blanket statement.

1\. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- fix/wp/2016/11/16/do...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- fix/wp/2016/11/16/donald-trumps-gripes-about-the-new-york-times-are-usually- about-stories-that-are-shown-to-be-accurate/)

<comment><USER12> Here you go, here's one reason why nobody trusts the mainstream media anymore, -especially- CNN: [http://i.imgur.com/1Y0sN6b.png](http://i.imgur.com/1Y0sN6b.png)

And it's real.

[https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/785299709342654465](https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/785299709342654465)

Mirror: [http://archive.is/JBUzM](http://archive.is/JBUzM)

<comment><USER13> It's really bizarre that they would post this...

<comment><USER9> Precisely why is it bizarre?

The word "acid" has a clear physical connotation, and the post pointed out that there was software that deleted emails, not some physical process. I don't think it was helpful to be in a fact-check, "this is false" style, but clarifying precisely what happened... that's what news is all about.

Please clarify why you think it's bizarre, so I can have a better understanding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Al-Khwarizmi "Even in long-established democracies like Germany, Spain and Italy, false news reports and hate speech on social media have whipped up grass-roots populist movements, which have often targeted the recent influx of Middle Eastern refugees, to garner wider electoral support."

I'm from Spain and I haven't seen such a thing.

To be precise: in Spain the movement that is typically called "populist" by the establishment is Podemos, which by the way is pro-refugees, and fake news have been widely disseminated (originating in _conventional_ media, although being distributed in social media too) to discredit them. In fact they have won several lawsuits in the courts against newspapers that published absolutely made up news about supposed illegal funding, etc. (but who cares about the lawsuits and meager compensations they get, once the information has been publicized, the damage is done). I haven't seen any "pro-populist" fake news circulating around, though. The establishment parties have so many open corruption scandals that there is no need of any fake to discredit them.

As always, journalists make up whatever they need to go on with their "good vs. evil" narrative where everything the establishment doesn't like is "populist". And then the blame is on social networks...

<comment><USER14> At least in Germany the whole AfD-Pegida-komplex had significant backing and media support from foreign sources, namely Russia and Switzerland.

It's the "when they go low, we go high" fallacy that will cost more elections to moderates. If it's free for all psyops out there, the non-authoritarians need a emotional-demagogue front-outlet too.

If bot's and brigades are one-sidedly spamming controversial twitter hashtag or or comment sections it's an inflation of their presence. Hashtags are useless for anybody who wants to hear a plurality of opinions these days. As long as social media is so easy to exploit by organized actors at marginal costs, it's worse than no social media at all.

If a channel is brigaded and spammed by one party it should be spammed by all, some sort of MAD-strategy might be needed, to get past the current status.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Will the Times ever produce objective political journalism again? Or has it just forever devolved into _how can we pin this on the other side_?

<comment><USER16> How would you know if it turned out that they were already objective?

<comment><USER17> The term "biased" should be discarded, people just use it to mean "publishes things I don't agree with".

<comment><USER3> Good point.

I think there are some sources where it is defined in a more rigorous manner, Chomsky and Herman's Manufacturing Consent book is one example I like. They tried as much as possible to document bias in reporting for similar instances in corporate controlled media in US. There are a series of well documented cases.

In conversation, I agree, the term "bias" when it comes to news means "doesn't say things I like"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Fake news - not just on Facebook.

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying- wo...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/)

</comment><comment><USER19> I think we need at least two guiding principles - transparency and equality for the new politics thrust upon us by the web

Absolutely should facebook and google be forced to reveal their (ever changing) algorithms. In fact (cf Kathy ONeills book weapons of math destruction) inwould prefer a legal framework forcing this.

But as for fake news being pushed into people's feeds, well this is a direct result of facebooks commercial desire to open up my feed to as many "friends and friends of friends" as they can.

My friends don't share adverts about the Rock that lead to body building supplements - no one shares that with their friends ! That's out there as a "you might also like"

Restrict Facebook to only showing what my friends actively share and guess what - no more fake news.

No more Facebook billions maybe but then who cares. It's a peer to peer messaging site - it's not important really

Edit: I would suggest that facebooks content would stall at the level twitters did if ones feed was driven by active sharing by ones actual nearest circle of friends.

I think I would like to know more about the extent of content that appears in a feed that is not active sharing vs active - it should resemble retweets.

</comment><comment><USER20> As Joseph Goebbels wrote in his book "The Big Lie" people will believe anything if you post it in enough places including the fact that he never wrote a book called "The Big Lie".

</comment><comment><USER21> Duterte and Philippines were mentioned in the article. Yes that is true that there were many fake news in facebook during election and until now. In fact, there are sponsored FB pages posting fake and exagerated news about Duterte now. Aside from facebook we also have mainstream media that are publishing unverified or poorly written news all the time namely ABS-CBN, Inquirer and Rappler. These medias are owned by Liberal Party supporters. New York Times gets their news from these presstitutes all the time. I know because I've read several news/articles from NYT that were just pure BS.

Up to this day our news here are manipulated by Liberal Party -- they are the people that runs and plundered the Philippines after the martial law in 1986. Yes they are the same people that lost all the perks of corruption and drugs when Duterte was elected and would want to do anything to impeach him.

So what's your country's excuse of having fake news?

</comment><comment><USER22> If something doesn't exist and the NYT tells you it does, doesn't that make NYT a fake news outlet as well?

I'm talking about the WMDs in Iraq

<comment><USER23> Off-topic : Are you the puranjay from growthpub ?

<comment><USER22> Yup!

<comment><USER23> Hey, can we connect ? I would like to understand what you do there. You can send me an email : [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=udkl](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=udkl)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> A lot of the news this election was fake.

[https://sharylattkisson.com/newsgate-2016/](https://sharylattkisson.com/newsgate-2016/)

<comment><USER25> Why is this getting downvoted? Can you provide counter-arguments to her very strong case?

<comment><USER3> The "downvote and run" actually exemplifies some of the points expressed. Quickly dismissing opposite opinions, paint it all as influenced by "Fake News", throwing labels like "racists", "sexists" around is part of the issue at hand I think.

Interestingly, one would expect people here (or I would dare say liberal in general) to be the more educated ones, with better self control, more rational and local approaches to issues and so on. One thing this election has shown is that it is not necessarily the case.

<comment><USER26> It'd be great to see better self control across the board, though HN does seem better in that regard than some communities. When emotions get high and people sometimes hit submit before they've really thought through the content, phrasing, or tone of what they're posting, or down voting, or flagging. We're all human.

I've seen "down vote and run" on all kinds of comments, and I suspect for all kinds of reasons. throwaway accounts used for drive-by attacks look like they're allied with no one party as well.

<comment><USER3> > though HN does seem better in that regard than some communities.

Agreed. That's why I like to comment here even though the topic at hand is not necessarily technical. In other places it just turns into an mess much quicker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Categorizing what is truth with an algorithm has the potential to create a digital Fahrenheit 454

</comment><comment><USER28> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust,_but_verify](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust,_but_verify)

</comment><comment><USER29> You assholes spent 8+ years promoting the racist lie that our duly elected first black president was born in Africa. You tried to delegitimize him based on nothing but his skin color. And you used fake news and dishonest, bigoted, white-supremacist web sites to do it.

To pretend this is just harmless, standard politics is bullshit. Cowards are behind this crap, and you sheep eat it up.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm really curious how long NYTimes will keep their paywall down. They announced that they would take down the paywall for 72 hours leading up to the election, they haven't put it back up since.

I would guess their eroding relationship with anything Whitehouse and the potential rise of Breitbart is causing panic.

<comment><USER26> Has it not been up or perhaps you just haven't hit the limit since it's been put back in place? Isn't it 10 articles or so a month?

<comment><USER30> I've been reading it everyday for hours (its free!) for the last week. No paywall.

<comment><USER26> Enjoy it while it lasts! (Or am I supposed to say "Why are you reading the NYT anyway?" ;) )

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I personally blame the New York Times as much as anyone for the results of the election.

For the last 15 years, they've participated in the fear mongering over- reporting on extremely rare Islamic terrorism to get readers and appeal to fearful Americans who don't understand statistics and don't get told by the media just how small a threat it's always really been.

The culture of irrational overblown fear of terrorism they've helped create is what created Trump, more than emails, more than fake news.

Big media players like the NYT play up threats for views and wonder why people vote for strongmen fascists to protect them from the big bad Muslims.

</comment><comment><USER32> I have done zero research in depth on this, but one of the first (easy) things I would look at is the whois on the domains that are producing news. If they're hidden behind a proxy identity, probably unreliable. Also what about providing an inexpensive way to "verify" those whois credentials? Pay $5 and we'll send you a letter in the mail and you confirm you're the owner of the domain in question.

</comment><comment><USER33> All the handwringing over fake news on the Internet prompts within me two negative, dismissive reactions:

The first is that this is just a convenient scapegoat to avoid examining the failures of the Democratic Party in this election cycle. They can't have screwed up. Must have been FAKE NEWS which misled voters into erroneously not voting for them. Fix that and fix the problem.

Fine, whatever. Pin the blame there if you like. But…

My second reaction is that I think among what we are inclined to think of as "fake news", very little is actually outright brute falsehoods.

Such things as are actually libelous or fraudulent, perhaps they should be blocked, or dealt with in some manner. But most of what is shared is, I imagine, rather "fake news" in the sense of being ideologically shaded in a manner we find ridiculous. "Immigrants are going to murder your children", that sort of thing. And this stuff IS ridiculous, and false, and terrible… But not in a clear, mechanical, bright-line distinguishable way.

It's wrong because it's wrong, not because there's something for a fact- checker to point at.

And if we do put moderators in charge of deciding that such news is still clearly false and therefore not shareable, I get uncomfortable. Because the merit determination will just become "Whatever matches status quo consensus", which is just "Whatever pleases the status quo powers".

It was fake news when the New York Times beat the drums for war, Judith Miller speaking of WMDs in Iraq. But that would never be classified as such. The source was prestigious, and the claims buttressed the politics of the right people.

"fake" determination at any level where there is controversy would amount to simply enshrining consensus of that class of often wrong people. Indeed, I say to those liberals itching for something to be done, the same board that today puts the kibosh on articles full of conservative idiocy about global warming evidence being overblown could just as well tomorrow decide "Econ professor consensus says minimum wage hikes destroy jobs; articles arguing otherwise oughtn't be shared", or some such thing.

On the other hand, if "fake news" suppression only targets articles where there is no controversy as to their falsehood, then it is a solution in search of a significant problem. Such things exist, but did not (as far as I've yet seen any evidence to prove) play that major a role in the election. The story that fake news swung the election could itself be fake news.

Anyway, that's my skittishness over cries that communication networks don't do enough to crack down on voluntary sharing of "fake news".

</comment><comment><USER34> Who would have thunk? By feeding into biases and helping them resolving their cognitive dissonance for ad dollars is unhealthy for politics.

</comment><comment><USER35> Funny thing is that here in Brazil this is EXTREMELY common, and people doesn't seem to care. Actually, people treat fake news as real here.

</comment><comment><USER36> Most of the fake news sites listed are conservative. Don't believe the leftist propaganda.

</comment><comment><USER37> What means "foreign" in this context? I mean US elections shouldn't be considered foreign by a US newspaper like the New York Times.

</comment><comment><USER38> Twitter, Facebook and Google. All push this same agenda. They are the most corrupted organizations. They feel they can suppress, hide and delete your online profiles when they feel that you or your organization is not following they nwo agenda. Latest twitter censorship quiter is James Woods.</comment>


Kalliope: modular always-on voice personal assistant designed 4 home automation - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kalliope-project/kalliope <comment><USER2> It uses [https://snowboy.kitt.ai/](https://snowboy.kitt.ai/) for offline hot- word detection (which i hadn't heard of before, and have to look into) and then a (switchable) online API to understand the full query.</comment>


The worst volume control user interfaces (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://uxdesign.cc/the-worst-volume-control-ui-in-the-world-60713dc86950 <comment><USER2> My nomination for the Real World Interface Hall Of Shame - 2002 Toyota Camry factory stereo system volume control.

First, though, let me ask a question. When one turns the volume control down on a stereo, what are you communicating to the system? I think a reasonable answer is "I want things to be quieter." But according to Toyota engineering, that's a wrong answer.

You see, some genius over at Toyota reasoned, when the operator turns the volume control progressively lower, to the point one can just barely hear the music (whisper level), the stereo should make a loud beep through the speakers to indicate that the system is quiet.

I must repeat that. The stereo beeps loudly to indicate you have reached minimum volume.

Why? <sarcasm> Obviously because because you might not otherwise realize that the music is very quiet by simply not hearing any music while rotating the volume control. And it's well known that the universal sign for "I'm quiet" is a loud beep, like shouting "I AM VERY QUIET NOW!!" which is what everyone does, right? This is especially desirable when you have a sleeping baby in the car. Because sleeping babies love loud beeps.</sarcasm>

The beep could not be disabled.

I still cannot fathom what they were thinking.

<comment><USER3> This does not surprise me. I once worked for a automotive vendor. "We" were designing a website which had a user registration portion (I put "we" in quotes because as I later discovered, all my work I've done up to that point was treated as a set of suggestions rather than engineering solutions by our HQ in Japan).

Anyway, we discovered that pushing the back button in the browser completely messes up the form, to which there are well-documented and easy fixes. A few weeks later, the HQ says they solved the issue, and I watched their presentation in horror as they explained how the only good solution was to disable the back button on the entire site.

So, to answer your question "what were they thinking?":

Obviously, if you need to turn down the volume in the car past the minimum level, you should turn off the stereo instead.

<comment><USER2> wow. And as a result the kludges just keep piling up, one on another.

>>Obviously, if you need to turn down the volume in the car past the minimum level, you should turn off the stereo instead.

Yep, you guessed it -- that's exactly what happened. I'd just switch it off entirely. I didn't realize until the next car that I had developed an aversion to using a stereo at all as a result of this experience. It was a few years before I learned not to flinch when turning down the radio.

Sure, in the larger scale of things, it was only a minor irritation, but once it gets under your skin it's impossible to ignore. I think the fact that I'm still thinking about it more than 15 years later, is testimony.

<comment><USER3> Sometimes there may not be huge glaring problems, but rather so many little ones that it makes using the product insufferable. Death by a thousand cuts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I feel like he's touching on a fact that we in software development and UI/UX design need to take heed; know when to stop.

Case in point: Google Maps. The old version used to not be as pretty but it worked really well. The new one looks fantastic. It's also slow, buggy, and not nearly as feature rich. Someone, somewhere inside the Google Maps team said, "We need to put out an update!" and nobody asked, "But, why?"

<comment><USER5> I'm sure people asked. But you don't get promoted by not doing things. You get promoted by doing. So they do.

<comment><USER6> The median Googler works there for about a year, too, so I guess they have little interest or ability to understand existing code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The touchbar's volume control on the new mac is pretty bad. You have to click the speaker icon once to bring up the bar, then look at it and drag it to the desired position.

What makes sense is really just a up and down, or a knob. Volume isn't something most users can judge visually.

<comment><USER8> >You have to click the speaker icon once to bring up the bar, then look at it and drag it to the desired position.

Actually, you don't — tap the "button" and just start sliding your finger. Same for the brightness control.

I think it is one of those cases Apple sometimes has where they come up with a good interface, but people are so used to bad ones they don't even realise that a better way might work.

I'm not surprised that I've seen a lot of complaints about the touchbar; if you're used to physical keys, a touch-screen is no substitute. (Fortunately, I was already weaning myself off Fkeys, so I don't really miss them.) But I am surprised that I haven't seen more discussion of what it gets right. A slider that you can actually slide is a good UI metaphor for volume (as opposed to tapping fake keys repetitively). The touchbar also can show buttons from dialog-boxes, letting you "type" them instead of having to move your hand to the mouse. It isn't always used to great effect, but it's clear that some real thought was put into it, and I appreciate the attempt to take advantage of what it can do.

<comment><USER2> >>Actually, you don't — tap the "button" and just start sliding your finger.

That works (sort of) but in a way it's even worse. Now you're sliding your finger a couple of inches to the right of the actual control image, further damaging the illusion of a physical control.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What about volume control UIs that are generally thought to be OK, but still drive you nuts? Has anyone else experienced this? Some years ago, when I made the questionable decision of buying a Das Keyboard, I was surprised by how much difficulty I had with the volume wheel that they put in the upper right corner. My prior keyboards had volume up and down buttons, and I never saw any problem or deficiency in that interface. But when I mentioned my frustration to a couple friends, they thought I was just being crotchety.

</comment><comment><USER10> Fun that you can post people's gifs and images without attribution and make it the main body of your 'content'

<comment><USER11> The guy should have licensed it from Conde Nast!?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> After this started on reddit it spawned its own subreddit:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/badUIbattles/top/](https://www.reddit.com/r/badUIbattles/top/)

</comment><comment><USER13> The worst volume control? The one which utilizes a non-logarithmic function

<comment><USER14> I thought the worst was the one where you had to install the version of the OS with volume you wanted.</comment></comment>


How are PCA and SVD related? - <AUTHOR> https://intoli.com/blog/pca-and-svd/ <comment><USER2> For those looking for a more succinct answer: [https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/134282/relationshi...](https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/134282/relationship- between-svd-and-pca-how-to-use-svd-to-perform-pca)

And here is another interesting connection between PCA and ridge regression: [https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/81395/relationship...](https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/81395/relationship- between-ridge-regression-and-pca-regression)

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand why people create these webpages just re-explaining stuff that can be read in a book, lecture notes (usually available freely online), or wikipedia. It just adds more noise to the internet. Is it a kind of marketing thing to show their customers that they know what they are doing?

<comment><USER4> There's value in explaining things in a different/more understandable way. Wikipedia articles and book chapters on statistics can be hard to understand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> 6 word answer

PCA is the SVD of A'A

<comment><USER6> Actually it's eigendecomposition of A'A and the SVD of A, is it not?

<comment><USER7> The SVD of A'A _is_ its eigendecomposition (since it is symmetric semi- definite, the two factorizations are the same).

It is closely related to the SVD of A: (USV')'USV' = VSU'USV' = VS^2V'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> PCA is a statistical model -- the simplest factor model there is. It deals with variances and covariances in datasets. It returns a transformed dataset that's linearly related to the original one but has the first variable with the highest variance and so on.

SVD is a matrix decomposition. It generalizes the idea of representing a linear transformation (with same dimensions in domain and codomain) in the basis of its eigenvalues, which gives a diagonal matrix representation and a formula like A = V'DV.

SVD is like this, but for rectangular matrices. So you have two matrices to diagonalize: A = U'DV.

That SVD even performs PCA as noted in the algorithms is a theorem, albeit simple one usually given as an exercise. But hey, even OLS regression can be programmed with SVD if you want to.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've always understood PCA as SVD on a whitened matrix. Is this too simplistic of a view to take wrt implementation?

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

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually touch on the relation to whitening toward the bottom of the article. You can whiten your dataset from the left singular matrix U which is directly related to PCs. Thanks for reading!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The connection between these two has always been hazy to me. I often mixed up the two when talking about each of them independently.

This article was well-written, exactly precise enough, and cleared up the confusion. Thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER11> SVD is the decomposition of a matrix into its components.

PCA is the analysis of a set of eigenvectors. Eigenvectors can come from SVD components or a covariance matrix.

source: [http://www.eggie5.com/107-svd-and-pca](http://www.eggie5.com/107-svd- and-pca)

</comment><comment><USER12> Great article, the lecture comparing the two from John Hopkins, part of the Data Science Specialization on Coursera also offers a great explanation.

</comment><comment><USER13> "Because vectors are typically written horizontally, we transpose the vectors to write them vertically". Is there a typo in this sentence or is to just too early in the morning for me to read this?

<comment><USER14> No typo there. When we talk about vectors we mean "column vector". As it's easier to read horizontally (and takes less place in a paper), most of the time we write x^T = {a, b, c} rather than writing them in a column shape.</comment></comment>


China 'cloning factory' to produce cattle, racehorses and pets - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/12013158/China-cloning-factory-to-produce-cattle-racehorses-and-pets.html <comment><USER2> What's more impressive is that China can build a cloning factory for ~$30mil CAD, yet it costs us ~$20mil to build a small pedestrian bridge.

[http://www.cp24.com/news/city-unveils-designs- for-19-7-milli...](http://www.cp24.com/news/city-unveils-designs- for-19-7-million-fort-york-pedestrian-bridge-1.2672336)

<comment><USER3> What it sounds like you're saying is "I believe I know how a bridge is built, but I have no idea what a cloning factory entails, so the latter is more impressive."

<comment><USER2> Fair enough! I figure a cloning factory requires some expensive machinery and electronics, notwithstanding already expensive things like climate control, power, and lighting. And it's not like people have built cloning factories before, so you can't exactly look up plans on the internet. By comparison, bridges are fairly well understood and much simpler.

<comment><USER4> A cloning factory is private property, a bridge is public access.

Presumably you think the technology in a cloning factory is more expensive than bridge making equipment, but maybe you're not taking into consideration the various codes and legal requirements that are necessary to build a bridge.

<comment><USER5> Haha what about the legal mess around cloning... seems like that would be a tad more expensive process than getting a licence to build a bridge...

<comment><USER6> The Chinese government is the one providing all of the money and pushing the program. I have a feeling that red tape is not as much of a problem for them as you assume.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I believe we are going in the wrong direction.

The point should not to have more cattle, but to produce food in a more sustainable way.

In my opinion they should aim to produce meat in vitro.

<comment><USER8> These people are working on cloning, other people are working on in vitro meat. There are still plenty of problems to solve in either process.

<comment><USER7> Definitely, but one problem will bring more value to people than the other, which one ? It depends.

It depends on what is your time horizont, it depends on your values, it depends on your actual problem right now.

What I said, is that, in my humble opinion, from my perspective, is more valuable to work on a way to make meat sustainable and affordable for all than to work on cloning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just want to point out that they are partnering with Sooam, Hwang Woo-Suk's company. They'll need to avoid his reputation for fraud ethics violations.

</comment><comment><USER10> What is the value of cloning livestock? You still need to raise them from calves. Is cloning more economical than traditional animal husbandry? Cloned livestock also increases health risks from reduced genetic variance.

<comment><USER11> > Cloned livestock also increases health risks from reduced genetic variance.

Like, "animal husbandry can manage genetic variation, but cloning can't" ? Doesn't add up. In both cases you can have humans in the loop to make sure sufficiently diverse samples are preserved and used in populations.

All livestock populations should be genetically monitored, anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> We have plenty of pets already who don't have homes. The last thing we need to do is clone more.

<comment><USER13> Plenty of pets and plenty of livestock. The xkcd biomass graph is a great example of how unnecessary this kind of thing is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> RePet is now a reality. Get your ass to Mars, get your ass to Mars, get your ass to Mars...</comment>


Pentagon Tiling Proof Solves Century-Old Math Problem - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/pentagon-tiling-proof-solves-century-old-math-problem-20170711/ <comment><USER2> I love how there's a mix of simple things like why you can't tile things with more than 6 edges and really complex things like what the headline is about.

<comment><USER3> For those that don't see why it's so simple.

[https://plus.maths.org/content/trouble- five](https://plus.maths.org/content/trouble-five)

<comment><USER4> Unless I'm wrong, the link you gave only speaks about impossibility for regular convex polygons, whereas the original links deals with the more general impossibility for any convex polygon with more than 6 sides.

<comment><USER5> I believe he links it for a bit of general background, but it is older so naturally it wouldn't include the latest finding

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When it came to the description of "einsteins" (a single tile aperiodic tessellation), I couldn't help but think of the images in the 3rd edition of The Scheme Programming Language:

[http://www.scheme.com/tspl3/binding.html#./binding:h0](http://www.scheme.com/tspl3/binding.html#./binding:h0)

[http://www.scheme.com/tspl3/examples.html#./examples:h0](http://www.scheme.com/tspl3/examples.html#./examples:h0)

...Are there holes in those "tilings", or are the tiles not all the same shape, or am I misunderstanding what non-periodic means in this context?

And what is the name for those types of "self-surrounding" tiles on the cover:

[http://www.scheme.com/tspl3/canned/large- cover.png](http://www.scheme.com/tspl3/canned/large-cover.png)

<comment><USER7> The tiles in an aperiodic tiling must _guarantee_ that the tiling is not periodic simply by their shape.

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

All three of the Scheme examples _can_ be tiled periodically even though they aren't tiled periodically in the examples. How to tile them periodically is left as an exercise to the reader, but it's not hard.

<comment><USER6> Got to love this quote from the "Einstein Problem" page on Wikipedia:

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

"Depending on the particular definitions of nonperiodicity and the specifications of what sets may qualify as tiles and what types of matching rules are permitted, the problem is either open or solved."

<comment><USER8> There's definitely something Douglas Adams-esque about that phrasing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Marjorie Jeuck Rice, who was the real key to this breakthrough by finding new tilings that had been claimed impossible, passed away only last week.

</comment><comment><USER10> I didn't know about Marjorie Rice; interesting and uplifting "underdog" story.

<comment> DC-3 Me neither - then I googled her and found that she had died just over a week ago (02/07/17). As sad as this is, it seems that she was a remarkably bright woman who lived a long and fruitful life. It's satisfying that in the seemingly ultra-inaccessible world of modern mathematics that (for want of a better term) normal people can still make headway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was recently watching some Computerphile videos and was surprised to learn that several geometric problems have fundamental applications outside the physical sciences, such as geometric sphere packing and error correcting codes. Does tiling research have any known applications in CS or information theory?

<comment><USER12> Wang tiles, mentioned only at the end of the article, encode Turing-equivalent computation in their simple color-matching rule. It is unknown exactly how useful Wang tiles are to theory of computation, other than as a wonderful demonstration of how easily Turing-complete systems arise naturally.

I suspect that tiling may have applications in resource management, particularly when allocating resources like memory which have an underlying topological structure.

Edit: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.06492.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.06492.pdf) is worth considering, but I don't yet know what its relevance is.

<comment><USER13> Greg Egan explores the concept of Wang tiles as a naturally occurring computer in his excellent novel "Diaspora":

[http://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/DIASPORA.html](http://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/DIASPORA.html)

It gets a bit dense at times, but I would highly recommend it, especially if you are interested in turing complete systems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I love that pattern where the pentagons make up hexagons. When I own a house that's going in the kitchen.

<comment><USER15> Are you referring to this? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagonal_tiling#Pentagonal.2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagonal_tiling#Pentagonal.2Fhexagonal_tessellation)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> When they talk about the einstein, I assume they mean a shape that can _only_ tile the plane non-periodically. If the tile is allowed to tile the plane both periodically and non-periodically, the solution would be obvious.

<comment><USER6> >If the tile is allowed to tile the plane both periodically and non- periodically, the solution would be obvious.

Maybe you can draw a sketch for those of us who aren't immediately seeing the obvious?

<comment><USER17> Squares, but each row of squares has a random offset

<comment><USER18> That is a periodic tiling (just think about what happens if you follow the tiling along the rows instead of along the columns, you'll periodically see the same pattern).

<comment><USER17> No, you wouldn't necessarily

<comment><USER18> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclidean_tilings_by_convex_re...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclidean_tilings_by_convex_regular_polygons#Tilings_that_are_not_edge- to-edge)

It's listed as a periodic tiling. If you move the whole plane one square to the left or right you'll find that everything fits into place nicely, making this a periodic tiling.

<comment><USER17> Hm, I'm not knowledgeable about this subject but this seems like the offset on each row is NOT random, but it's instead repeating. Imagine instead that each time I added a new row, I chose the offset to be, say, a completely new value.

<comment><USER18> Doesn't matter, because your new row will still be offset with the same random value to existing rows after moving one square to the left or right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Here's [1] an article from 2015 describing Casey Mann, Jennifer McLoud, and David Von Derau's discovery of the 15th type of pentagon.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in- numb...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in- numberland/2015/aug/10/attack-on-the-pentagon-results-in-discovery-of-new- mathematical-tile)

</comment><comment><USER20> Fascinating. And the fact that it's been confirmed by a competing team makes it really believable.

</comment><comment><USER21> I wonder if it has a Conway's Life glider like Penrose tiles.

</comment><comment><USER22> Wow, these programs would make excellent screen savers.

</comment><comment><USER23> I would really like to see a website dedicated to showcasing beautiful visual manifestations of tiling

<comment><USER16> You could try Taprats: [https://sourceforge.net/projects/taprats/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/taprats/)

The UI is not perfect, especially the tiling designer (but once you master the keyboard shortcut it works okay). And sin of sins, it's written in Java! But I do think some of the built-in example are nice. I'm biased.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Chirr App  splits text into tweets and posts it as a thread - <AUTHOR> https://getchirrapp.com <comment><USER2> Why are Twitter threads so common? What makes them better than a real and accessible blog post? I don't condemn threads, but the user interface and reading experience is so awful that I cannot like them as they currently are.

It's difficult to navigate forward or backward in a thread, specially when there are a lot of tweets, as every few tweets it has to load more. Plus, every tweet can have its own replies, so it's hard to read comments or reactions.

The only thing I find useful in threads is that, since every sentence is a separate tweet, it's easy to share a particular point in a conversation by sharing the URL for that particular tweet.

<comment><USER3> #1 reason has to be the low overhead. You could say having to include a counter is overhead, but it's still less than setting up your own blog and fragmenting your online presence into some other platform that wants you to publish there all the time.

#2 is that your followers are much more likely to read a thread, since a thread of length N will appear in your timeline at least N times. I often scroll through my feed and see a (28/30) marker, view the thread and read the rest of it. (Yes, 30 whole tweets!) If you tweeted out a link to an article you wrote 30 times, nobody would follow you. Some people will tweet twice for people in other timezones, but that's all you can get away with for out-of- band links.

#3 is that a thread often evolves out of discussion that's already on Twitter, and must participate where that discussion is happening at the time. Reacting to fast-paced news is a key one. Take this example: Josh Chafetz (the constitutional law professor, not the Congressman) watches Twitter respond to the Arpaio pardoning, and tweets a thread on why people are hot-taking it wrong[^1]. The next day, he turns it into an op-ed[^2]. But what good is an op-ed about rushed hot-takes a day late?

[^1]: [https://twitter.com/joshchafetz/status/901244717115080706](https://twitter.com/joshchafetz/status/901244717115080706)

[^2]: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/0...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/08/26/the- problem-with-joe-arpaios-pardon-isnt-the-process-the-problem-is-joe- arpaio/?utm_term=.4a2c23f83c80)

Edit: I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter made thread counters a first-class feature. People use the platform how they want, and it will stretch to do what is needed.

<comment><USER4> Regarding #1, you could post it to some site like JustPaste.it (no affiliation, just found it via Google) and tweet the link. Chirr App itself could publish it on its servers and tweet the link with a single button.

#2 and #3, fair enough, though both of them sound like anti-features (spam, and fast soundbites over longer explanations) to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I guess stuff like this is the heart and soul of geekery "Look! I wrote a tool to use Imgur image descriptions as a very slow and unreliable filesystem!", but this just seems like a perfect example of why the ability to do a thing isn't necessarily a reason to do that thing.

Twitter threads are objectively terrible - they are hard to post, hard to read and hard to share; not because of some technical limitation, but because the people who built the tool designed it to resist being used in that way.

As long as there's a million places you can post text that's over 140 characters and then link to it from Twitter, this will remain a bad idea - because it's a misuse of a tool that makes it harder to use for both the creator and the consumer, while ignoring that there are trivial ways to avoid the problem entirely.

<comment><USER6> Sorta unrelated, but I wrote a tool that allows me to use Bandcamp for filestorage haha.

[https://medium.com/@__Tux/using-bandcamp-as-a-backup- solutio...](https://medium.com/@__Tux/using-bandcamp-as-a-backup- solution-3b6549d24579)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Twitter threads are somewhat broken and often in a chain of tweets, it shows only the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 8th tweet and then you have to go digging under each individual tweet to find the rest of the threads.

That happens when the 3rd tweet is a reply to the 1st and 4th a reply to the 2nd which breaks the whole thread

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey, everyone! I've built Chirr App to scratch my own itch: it's tedious to plan and post Twitter threads (aka tweetstorms).

It's built with Preact on top of Firebase. It's free and open-sourced: [https://github.com/kossnocorp/chirrapp](https://github.com/kossnocorp/chirrapp). Check it out!

<comment><USER8> The numbering is broken when using the manual splitter, see [http://imgur.com/a/HcHZd](http://imgur.com/a/HcHZd)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I really dislike Twitter threads.

<comment><USER10> I'd rather read something scrawled in blood on a bathroom stall wall than a twitter thread.

(I understand some apps make this easier than others, mine appears to be in the harder category)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I had built the same thing and posted to HN a couple of years ago.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10706270](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10706270)

Didn't get any upvotes so shut down the site. Made the same functionality available as a Chrome extension as well.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tweet- smart/cidmaf...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tweet- smart/cidmafpjjhaajnpfefgfpnnalhkepppf)

The source code : [https://github.com/singhshashi/tweetsmart](https://github.com/singhshashi/tweetsmart)

Built it as I was learning React.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think this would be really cool if you could take this text, tweet storm it out, then publish it as a blog post (on wp or someplace else).

Often, a tweet storm pulls me in, but twitter's functionality is always a bit wonky.

</comment><comment><USER13> My tweetstorm tool is Mastodon.

1\. Post something approximating a complete thought on Mastodon.

2\. Screengrab it.

3\. Tweet this image, along with a link to it, and text like "Thread".

(Today I learnt that HN ignores emoji in your comments.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Posting a thread as an image is on my todo list. It's good to know that there is a demand!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Dave Winer created something like this 3 years ago: [http://scripting.com/2014/06/06/theEasiestWayToTweetAStorm.h...](http://scripting.com/2014/06/06/theEasiestWayToTweetAStorm.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> If you can't say it in 140 chars it does not belong on twitter.

</comment><comment><USER16> Can also be used as a quick way to get people to unfollow you :-D

</comment><comment><USER17> It's good. One thing I feel is missing is embedding images into the tweets. Are there any plans for that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, it's on my todo list!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> great idea</comment>


The Herd Immunity Taboo – Tablet Magazine - <AUTHOR> https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/plague-journal-herd-immunity-doidge <comment><USER2> The purpose of the quarantine was to prevent the hospitals from being overwhelmed, right? In my state we now have more than enough resources. Why are we still locked down as if it were day 1? I really don't get it at all.

<comment><USER3> You do realise that there can be multiple purposes for an action? The most pressing at the time the lock down was implemented was preventing the hospital system being overwhelmed, but there are others like allowing time for better treatments to be developed.

Looking at the infection rates even in Europe the idea of herd immunity was always doomed. Not even Sweden is anywhere near herd immunity and their economy is as trashed as their neighbours.

<comment><USER2> Fair point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Would you rather lose your job or lose your parents? "Herd immunity" is good insofar as you can convince yourself that _your_ family is special and will be spared.

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea is the at risk isolate until herd immunity is reached. So you'd actually want the healthy to get it as fast as possible.

It's definitely an idea that's up for debate but I feel your comment misrepresents the concept.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Herd immunity is the natural immunity that builds up in a population when people (often younger and healthier members) are exposed to the virus, get ill, and then recover in large enough numbers"

... or die in large enough numbers. I am not willing to sacrifice my family and friends so people can make more money.

Instead of reopening, how about we restructure our society in a way that allows people to stay safe until we have a vaccine?

<comment><USER6> >I am not willing to sacrifice my family and friends so people can make more money.

you and your family can continue to stay locked down even after the lockdown is lifted for everybody else.

I think that at the current stage the total lockdown is kind of creates more damage than helps (among everything else there was that news that 80M children already missed vaccinations or something like this because of the lockdown). The people in the highly vulnerable group should definitely be locked down as much as possible until vaccine/treatment/etc. becomes available or until we reach herd immunity. The rest - whoever wants to stay locked down stays so, and whoever wants goes out and builds herd immunity.</comment></comment>


High protein diet not as bad for you as smoking - <AUTHOR> http://www.nhs.uk/news/2014/03March/Pages/high-protein-diet-may-be-harmful-for-middle-aged.aspx <comment><USER2> Were there really people thinking that inhaling a mix of highly carcinogenic compounds would be less harmful than eating protein?

<comment><USER3> Smoking is not as simple as many assume. Smoking actually changes the disease risk profile a lot, lowering risk for many diseases. It's probably an open question if light smoking is even bad for you. Super centenarians have disproportionately been light smokers.

<comment><USER4> I hate when people claim things as fact in comments which are entirely unsourced.

EDIT:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longevity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longevity)

Study of the regions of the world known as blue zones,[11] where people commonly live active lives past 100 years of age, have speculated that longevity is related to a healthy social and family life, not smoking, eating a plant-based diet, frequent consumption of legumes and nuts, and engaging in regular physical activity. In another well-designed cohort study, the combination of a plant based diet, frequent consumption of nuts, regular physical activity, normal BMI, and not smoking accounted for differences up to 10 years in life expectancy.[12]

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_into_centenarians](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_into_centenarians)

Many centenarians manage to avoid chronic diseases even after indulging in a lifetime of serious health risks. For example, many people in the New England Centenarian Study experienced a century free of cancer or heart disease despite smoking as many as 60 cigarettes a day for 50 years. The same applies to people from Okinawa in Japan, where around half of supercentenarians had a history of smoking and one-third were regular alcohol drinkers. It is possible that these people may have had genes that protected them from the dangers of carcinogens or the random mutations that crop up naturally when cells divide.[15]

[http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/the-secrets- of...](http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/the-secrets-of-the- supercentenarians-scientists-seek-to-unlock-key-to-longer-lives-a-719208.html)

The results are sobering: "There is no pattern," says Barzilai, 54. "The usual recommendations for a healthy life -- not smoking, not drinking, plenty of exercise, a well-balanced diet, keeping your weight down -- they apply to us average people," says the researcher, "but not to them. Centenarians are in a class of their own." He pulls spreadsheets out of a drawer, adjusts his glasses and reads out loud: "At the age of 70, a total of 37 percent of our subjects were, according to their own statements, overweight, and 8 percent were obese; 37 percent were smokers, on average for 31 years; 44 percent said that they only moderately exercised; 20 percent never exercised."

But Barzilai is quick to point out that people shouldn't start questioning the importance of a healthy lifestyle: "Today's changes in lifestyle do in fact contribute to whether someone dies at the age of 85 or already at age 75." But in order to reach the age of 100, says the researcher, you need a special genetic make-up. "These people age differently. Slower. They end up dying of the same diseases that we do -- but 30 years later and usually quicker, without languishing for long periods."

 _37 percent_ isn't disproportionate. It is about average.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevalence_of_tobacco_consumpti...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevalence_of_tobacco_consumption)

<comment><USER3> Citation needed.

<comment><USER4> Yes, citation needed, for you. When you make claims you need to back them up. How hard of a concept is that?

You can't just go around spouting "facts" without any basis.

EDIT:

Congratulations, you have just been hellbanned for your comments to me. But since you asked for a citation, here you go:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophic_burden_of_proof](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophic_burden_of_proof)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_burden_of_evidence](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_burden_of_evidence)

<comment><USER5> How is making an (possibly incorrect) assertion without providing evidence an argument from ignorance?

I can't for the life of me figure out what was so offensive or trolly about a8da6b0c91d's comments.

>You can't just go around spouting "facts" without any basis.

Really?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The NHS makes me very proud here. A well written next-day response to widely published bad science journalism of the worst sort.

That headline was plastered across the front-pages of all the newspapers I read with no caveats. Both scare-mongering of unproven dangers and diminishing of more certain dangers like smoking & dietary excess. IMHO media outlets should be heavily fined for bad science journalism. Its a grave form of libel but poor injured science isn't able to sue them for it.

<comment><USER7> I agree - I'm impressed with the NHS on their detailed and rapid response. I was pleasantly surprised.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Don't forget that it is not easy to remove confounding with smoking, drinking, low physical activity etc. as, incidentally, those who eat most meat happen to also score worse with those factors. Of course, there are statistical methods, but there are reasons to believe that not all confounding may be properly removed.

For those interested in statistics behind studies like this, I think this (not very long) video is a good explanation why it is not so easy to remove all residual confounding:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hnWaNThBFw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hnWaNThBFw)

The lector actually discusses a very similar or even the same study - mortality as a function of meat consumption. Not too complicated for a technical person even without a background in statistics, I believe.

<comment><USER9> > Don't forget that it is not easy to remove confounding with smoking, > drinking, low physical activity etc. as, incidentally, those who eat most > meat happen to also score worse with those factors.

And those who aim to be healthy will probably try to be at least moderate w.r.t their meat intake because they have heard that meat is unhealthy, which further "proves" that meat is unhealthy, while in reality it might be because of other habits that they might have, like exercising.

Things like paleo might make things a little less one-sided.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I recommend a balanced diet containing equal parts high fructose corn syrup and monosodium glutamate.

Note: this post was sponsored by High Fructose Corn Syrup and Monosodium Glutamate Industries, Inc.

</comment><comment><USER11> Smoke your meat, my friends.

A cross-sectional study of this type of data will yield crappy, linkbait- friendly results.

For confounders, they didn't look at: income, geography, genetics (self- reported ethnicity is not a good proxy), etc. etc. etc.

The time and sample scale for powerful epidemiological research often seems higher than publish! publish! publish! researchers are given time and money to do.

Any morsel of truth to animal protein having a negative effect is lost in the structure of the study and data available.

</comment><comment><USER12> Hold on - are you sure this article wasn't XSS injected by meat eaters?

<comment><USER13> Or worse, you "self-XSS" injected it while in a fugue state.

<comment><USER12> You should read HN more often, you'd know what I was referring it to ;-)

<comment><USER14> I remember hearing something about self-XSS in another story earlier today:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7350818](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7350818)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Any thoughts on why the study finds one results for those 50-65, and a different result for 65 and older?

Also isn't it possible teenagers and young adults could need way more protein than the middle aged?

<comment><USER16> I once took a class in business school on medical pricing and the instructor said that if you look at a graph of life expectancy that a large percentage of the population dies in the 50-60 age range, but statistically people who live past the age of 60 or 65 (I can't remember the exact figure) will be likely to live to be over 75. In other words, once you make it past a certain age you are sort of screened out as somebody who is high-risk to die of certain ailments like heart disease or cancer.

So if we take that to be generally accurate, then these findings make sense because I would wager that if you studied any diet or habit thought to be unhealthy, more people would die off between 50-65 than after 65.

This also explains why averages don't make sense with regard to any conversation about life expectancy since the averages really need to be observed in bands.

<comment><USER17> That has the dank stench of an urban legend. According to the CDC, death rates increase monotonically with age once you pass early childhood, and begin to increase dramatically at about age 65:

[http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/dvs/MortFinal2007_Worktable23r....](http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/dvs/MortFinal2007_Worktable23r.pdf)

Here's another breakdown from the Social Security Administration that shows each year individually:

[http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/STATS/table4c6.html](http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/STATS/table4c6.html)

The latest age where the death rate decreases is 27, and the decrease is extremely small.

<comment><USER16> I dunno the instructor was a surgeon and faculty member at the University of Michigan medical school. Not saying that makes him correct but I wouldn't be too quick to dispute him either.

Besides, death rates increasing monotonically is not at odds with what I am saying. Once a person reaches age 65, their odds of reaching age 85 are higher than the average person at the age of 50. Many serious medical problems onset between the ages of 50-65. With each passing year, people who are susceptible to hereditary illnesses, for example, will die. This leaves people less likely to succumb to those illnesses. Yes, within the smaller group mortality rates will be higher than the previous overall group because more medical complications occur as you age.

In short what I am saying is that even though overall death rates increase, the odds of each person in those groups of living to the age of 85, goes up after the age of 65.

<comment><USER17> You seem to be changing what you're saying. You previously said:

> more people would die off between 50-65 than after 65

And that is clearly untrue.

Yes, someone who's 65 is more likely to live to 85 than someone who's 50. That's extremely obvious once you know that 1) people occasionally die and 2) people don't come back to life after they die. The closer you are to an age, the more likely you are to reach that age.

I'm getting confused as to what sort of point you're trying to make. You originally seemed to be saying that there's a spike in mortality around ages 50-60. Now you seem to be saying... well, I can't figure it out.

<comment><USER16> _Yes, someone who 's 65 is more likely to live to 85 than someone who's 50. That's extremely obvious once you know that 1) people occasionally die and 2) people don't come back to life after they die. The closer you are to an age, the more likely you are to reach that age._

What you're doing here is grossly oversimplifying the statistical significance of that fact. You seem to think that all people, regardless of race, genetic profile, income, etc. have equal chance of dying the older they get. This is simply untrue.

For example, people between the ages of 50-65 have a higher likelihood of dying from cancer before the age of 85 than somebody who is age 66. This isn't simply because the 66 year old has already made it to 66 so is 1/3 of the way ahead of a 55 year old, which is what you seem to be suggesting.

The fact is that certain diseases, statistically, have a higher incidence in that 50-65 age band and once you are out of it, your odds of succumbing to those diseases are lower. Sure, the 66 year old could get a clean bill of health and then walk in front of a bus, but the odds are they aren't going to die of cancer. That isn't insignificant. Obviously the longer you live the greater the odds something will happen that will end your life, but looking at life expectancy in a black box and ignoring the causes of death is misinformed.

<comment><USER17> As far as I can tell, it's simply not true that cancer incidence decreases at 65, or indeed at any age. Here's a graph from the UK:

[http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer- info/cancerstats/mort...](http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer- info/cancerstats/mortality/age/uk-cancer-mortality-statistics-by-age#cancer)

You can get the equivalent statistics for the US here, although I couldn't find a way to link to specific results:

[http://wonder.cdc.gov/cancermort-v2010.HTML](http://wonder.cdc.gov/cancermort-v2010.HTML)

The rate of death from cancer goes up with age. There's no age where it decreases.

Perhaps there are certain diseases that have a higher incidence in the 50-65 group than in the 65+ group. Cancer, at least taken as a whole, is not it though.

If you're going to continue this, _please_ give me some numbers before calling me "misinformed" because I'm actually checking your claims.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Among those aged 50-65, those who ate a high protein diet were 74% more likely to die during follow up than those who ate a low protein diet (hazard ratio (HR) 1.74, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.02 to 2.97). People in this age group who ate a high protein diet were more than four times as likely to die from cancer during follow up than those who ate a low protein diet (HR 4.33, 95% CI 1.96 to 9.56).

The results were similar once the researchers took into account the proportion of calories consumed from fat and carbohydrates. Further analyses suggested that animal protein was responsible for a considerable part of this relationship, particularly for death from any cause.

However, the opposite effect of high protein intake was seen among those aged over 65."

</comment><comment><USER19> Kind of a low bar to hurdle, don't you think?

</comment><comment><USER20> was getting sick and tired of social media posts by militant vegeterians. NHS restores sanity to my life

<comment><USER21> Vegetarians eat protein too.

<comment><USER22> this study was specifically about animal protein

<comment><USER23> Vegetarians eat animal protein too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> [http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/statistics/observational-...](http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/statistics/observational- studies-2/)

"Researchers doing observational studies have much the same problem. They try to think of all the differences between two large populations of subjects so that they can statistically negate them so that only the observation in question – the vitamin C level in the example above – is different between the groups. Problem is they can never possibly think of all the differences between the groups. As a consequence, they never have a perfect study with exactly the same number, sex, age, lifestyle, etc. on both sides with the only difference being the study parameter. And so they don't really ever prove anything. In fact, we would all probably be a lot better off if all the researchers doing observational studies had followed my lead and fallen asleep mid study."

<comment><USER25> The China–Cornell–Oxford Project ruled out population differences by using a very large monoculture, rural China.

[http://web.archive.org/web/20090223222003/http://www.nutriti...](http://web.archive.org/web/20090223222003/http://www.nutrition.cornell.edu/ChinaProject/)

And even though it was epidemiological (statistically based), it's findings were strong and it confirmed prior laboratory results and hypotheses.

<comment><USER24> The China study's results are a massive dataset of statistical correlations, useful as input for hypothesis generation.

On the other hand, "The China Study", Dr. Campbell's best-selling popular book wherein he attempts to interpret the data causatively, has been absolutely demolished and debunked as egregiously bad science for some time now. Evgeny already linked to Denise Minger's notorious initial critique that got the ball rolling. Dr. Eades (of the grandparent post) wrote his own critique at:

[http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/cancer/the-china-study- vs...](http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/cancer/the-china-study-vs-the-china- study/)

"The web has been alive with commentary the past few weeks since Denise Minger lobbed her first cannonball of a critique across the bow of The China Study, the vessel T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D. rode to fame and bestsellerdom. Seems like everyone is now jumping into the fray and gunning for poor Dr. Campbell, who early on in the fracas made a few halfhearted attempts to fight back but has now fled the scene. I've been laying low watching it all play out, and so now figured it's about time I add my two cents worth to the debate."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> _" Information on food intake was only collected for one 24-hour period... ...this may have changed over the 18 years of follow up"_

I wonder if the researchers' and USC's ploy to use sensationalist(though outright false) PR is going to end in them getting more funding. I hope not, but they do say no publicity is bad publicity.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is another good analysis of why this study was flawed: [http://examine.com/blog/high-protein-diets-linked-to- cancer-...](http://examine.com/blog/high-protein-diets-linked-to-cancer- should-you-be-concerned/)

</comment><comment><USER28> Even more in-depth, very interesting: [http://examine.com/blog/high-protein- diets-linked-to-cancer-...](http://examine.com/blog/high-protein-diets-linked- to-cancer-should-you-be-concerned/)

</comment><comment><USER29> I like how people think one study is enough to upend an entire body of knowledge. Never mind the fact that there is an intense amount of bias in nutritional research. Never mind the fact that the results of many studies cannot be accurately reproduced. Never mind the fact that observational studies generally suck and cannot 'prove' anything. Nah, this new study, which happens to conform to my preconceived notions, this new study changes EVERYTHING.

<comment><USER30> Read down toward the bottom: the study was based upon one self-reported day of each individual's diet extrapolated over 18 years.

This study is even less meaningful than most. I'd go so far as to say that it's utterly devoid of useful information and quite probably is misinformation.

I wonder how much was spent on performing the study?

<comment><USER31> A big red flag is this -- "On average, the participants consumed 1,823 calories over the day"

That is the average amount of calories consumed in certain sub-Saharan African countries along with very poor places such as Haiti.

Alternatively, in the US the average daily consumption is somewhere around 3,770 calories and the UK around 3,440.

Scroll all the way to the bottom of this list to see countries which match the average reported in this study: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_food_energ...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_food_energy_intake)

Under reporting or just lower historical consumption combined with the age groups, it just does not match up to typical Western behavior today.

<comment><USER32> >Alternatively, in the US the average daily consumption is somewhere around 3,770 calories

Good lord, I eat pretty normally, and when I count calories it's usually closer to 2,200.

<comment><USER33> [insert bro-science disclaimer here] The volume of food you eat may be "normal" but the calorie density might be lower. The trick to increasing or decreasing calorie intake without feeling like you are stuffing yourself or starving is to keep the volume pretty much the same and tweak the calorie density.

<comment><USER17> Do you happen to have any links to descriptions of the densities of various foods? I've been aware that this is a good strategy for a while, but haven't been able to find anything that systematically discusses various food types and how they rank (as opposed to individual tidbits such as, hey, carrots have very few calories but are pretty bulky, so munch away).

<comment><USER33> I don't have a list, but I've developed a feel by tracking calories on MyFitnessPal. Over time you notice what food helps you hit your calorie goals while also being good (which is extremely subjective).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> If The Telegraph reported this as the NHS describes then this strikes me as profoundly irresponsible journalism. I'm no fan of The Telegraph, but I'm actually a little bit shocked

</comment><comment><USER35> There was an article once with the title "sitting is as bad as smoking".

I don't know why the bad health reference is smoking really.

</comment><comment><USER36> who should I listen?

<comment><USER37> Check out Wilco. Great band.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looking at "animal protein" as a broad category is dumb. The interesting health questions are specifically about muscle meat. Eating a lot of muscle meat, to the exclusion of organ meat and collagen and dairy protein, probably provides too much iron and too much tryptophan in the amino acid profile.

Furthermore, you can't just talk about "meat". The distinction between fish, pork, chicken, and ruminants matters. The question of quality matters enormously. Are we talking about really cheap meat fed on moldy corn slop and handled improperly after slaughter (aged, dyed, pumped up with water and chemicals), or totally fresh grass fed beef?

<comment><USER38> There's also a significant different between unprocessed and processed meat, which these studies don't differentiate. Processed meat also varies widely in the kind of chemicals used in the processing.

<comment><USER39> Is there a good definition of processed food anywhere? All the ones I've seen have been made by examples (eg. Processed foods like hotdogs, bologne, etc.). Is it any food that have anything added to them for preservation or enhancements (eg is oj enriched with vitamin D considered a processed food). Many articles are confusing and seem to make processed food to be wholey bad w/o really defining what makes it bad...

<comment><USER40> A good rule-of-thumb: If it's packaged in cardboard it's almost always 99.99% processed. If it's shrinkwrapped (how meat should be) it's almost always 99.99% unprocessed, or minimally at the most.

<comment><USER4> > If it's shrinkwrapped (how meat should be) it's almost always 99.99% > unprocessed, or minimally at the most.

Complete and total nonsense. Hotdogs, peperoni, sausage, bacon, and lunch meat all come shrink wrapped. Even Slimjims and jerky.

[http://blog.womenshealthmag.com/scoop/what-is-processed- meat...](http://blog.womenshealthmag.com/scoop/what-is-processed-meat- exactly/)

>Typically, it means anything more manipulated than cut or ground," says dietician Lisa Cashman, RD. "This includes most lunchmeats found in deli counters, anything with a casing or in sausage form, and, of course, anything smoked or cured like bacon."

And the American Meat Institute (that's a thing?) defines processing as "processed meats are fresh products that have been changed from their original state. Some have added ingredients like spices. Some are cooked and some are cured."

[http://www.meatami.com/ht/a/GetDocumentAction/i/94559](http://www.meatami.com/ht/a/GetDocumentAction/i/94559)

Right so even cooking is a form of processing. This should be pretty obvious. Eating "unprocessed" means eating basically food that is in its natural state, like eating a peach. Processing changes it, like cooking that peach.

<comment><USER40> Sorry, forgot about that type of shrinkwrap. When I said shrinkwrapped I had this in my mind: [http://images.sodahead.com/polls/001669275/910390199_1_packa...](http://images.sodahead.com/polls/001669275/910390199_1_packaged_meat_answer_2_xlarge.jpeg)

Not sure if there's a generic term for it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Land of the "Super Founders"– A Data-Driven Approach to Uncover the Secrets - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@alitamaseb/land-of-the-super-founders-a-data-driven-approach-to-uncover-the-secrets-of-billion-dollar-a69ebe3f0f45 <comment><USER2> "Directly Relevant Industry Experience Does Not Matter; It Matters Even Less For CxOs"

If your into building technology etc does it matter the industry?</comment>