Sheep are not stupid, and they are not helpless either - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170418-sheep-are-not-stupid-and-they-are-not-helpless-either <comment><USER2> Twenty plus years ago I was hiking on the North York Moors in England, which is an area where herds of sheep live wild on the moorland for most of the year. I came to a cattle grid (cattle guard in the US [1]) and a group of sheep were crowded at one side, obviously wanting to cross but unable to do so. Lots of baaaing and jostling.

Then one of the sheep did an amazing thing: it lay down and rolled it's body over the cattle grid, then stood at the other side staring at the rest of the group. They didn't follow, and eventually drifted away.

I've never seen or heard of that happening before or since. I sometimes wonder if that sheep was some kind of once-in-a-generation freak: a kind of Leonardo da Vinci outlier.

I like sheep.

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

<comment><USER3> From the article you linked:

> While these barriers are usually effective for cattle,[23] they can fail due > to ingenious animals. Sheep searching for food have been known to roll over > grids, jump across them, step carefully into the spaces[24] or run along the > side of grids as wide as 8 feet (2.4 m).

[24] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rIbZWblPaA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rIbZWblPaA)

<comment><USER4> The very next video youtube suggested shows two sheep, surrounded by lush green fields, climbing onto steep, wet rocks on a hillside in an attempt to reach some grass in the middle of the rocks. One of the sheep falls, presumably to its death or at least to a significant injury. They may be clever, but they seem... dumb.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m2HJpGtv70](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m2HJpGtv70)

<comment><USER5> _They may be clever, but they seem... dumb._

Not unlike us. There's a striking resemblence between that video and the many, many 'fail' videos featuring humans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> They may not lack intelligence but they are not fun. They are boring. They keep to themselves. They are very "sheepish". They are not emotional, except horny rams. They don't socialize with humans. They are scared of everything. They are herdish and their herd makes dumb decisions. Very few of them are outliers in behavior/intelligence. I grew up with sheep. I 'm sorry sheep, you are dumb.

<comment><USER7> I also grew up around large flocks of sheep and found that when you isolate a young lamb and socialize it: lots of fun. Socialized lambs will recognize human friends and will respond to a given name and hang around and play. But after a year or two, after any time spent back with the flock, they forget humans and revert to being one with the herd. Older isolated sheep just get mean and end up being lawnmowers if not mutton. I figured we'd just bred the fun out of them, with a small remaining playfulness coming out while a lamb. I'd be curious to know more about wild sheep.

<comment><USER8> Growing up an a hobby farm with 20-40 (depending on the time of year), this is my experience too. Lambs are playful and full of spunk, but as they grow older they quickly become full-time grazing machines. Rams are just vicious.

<comment><USER9> Classic HN here that no matter how obscure the topic, we have posts from 3 different people with real world experience.

<comment> vertex-four I'm not sure that sheep-farming is particularly obscure.

<comment><USER10> I imagine it is among IT people, who are the prime audience for HN.

<comment><USER9> Also, it wasn't just sheep farming. It was treating the lambs as pets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well, regardless, if one of my sheep walks to the end of a 20 foot fence and around it to the other side, then wants to come back when I wave a bucket of grain at it, it stares at me through the fence in utter consternation as to how it can pass by this impossible barrier, then starts pacing back and forth anxiously as though lamenting its misfortune at being caught in such a complex trap.

</comment><comment><USER12> Domestic sheep have been bred to produce more wool, not jump fences, and to be herd-bound and submissive. That started millennia ago.[1] Unless you find wild sheep, you're not seeing the normal animal; you're seeing a human-created meat and wool machine.

[1] [http://www.ansi.okstate.edu/breeds/sheep/](http://www.ansi.okstate.edu/breeds/sheep/)

<comment><USER13> That's a great point we should never forget with agriculture and livestock. Many of these things are a watered-down form of what's found in nature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I grew up on a sheep farm. I disagree with this article. I found them to be almost pathologically fatalistic and idiotic. Perhaps there's something to be said about domestication having a negative cognitive effect, or inbreeding, or some other factor. But these animals were not intelligent.

<comment><USER15> Heck, I've done substitute teaching in a relatively affluent suburb of Austin, Texas and I find there are some really dim human creatures amongst us. Factors you noted all potentially relevant. It's frustrating to hear somebody say "Oh just reason with them!" when sometimes a certain contingent of 14 year olds are kind of lacking whip cracking in the bigger picture.

Tenacious is good. Stubborn is not.

<comment><USER16> That goes for a large proportion of adults in such places, by all available evidence, such as electoral results

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> They are horribly dumb, especially compared to other farm animals like cows or pigs.

I worked in a farm as a teenager. Getting sheep out of trouble was a secondary duty.

Highlights:

\- One managed to hang itself from a large garbage can full of grain when a kid left it open. It literally jumped up to try and get in, and got stuck on rim.

\- Remember the Disney "chip and dale" episode where they borrowed Donald Duck's sailboat to get nuts from a tree on a little island? 3 sheep tried to do that without a boat and drowned.

\- Another somehow impaled itself on farm machinery in the middle of a 10 acre field. No idea why.

</comment><comment><USER18> > found that they can recognise and remember at least 50 individual faces for > more than 2 years. That is longer than many humans.

What? I was under the impression that humans could generally remember long- term hundreds of faces, if not thousands. You may not always be able to remember everyone's name, but you remember their face.

The idea of someone not being able to remember even fifty individual faces sounds bizarre to me, unless we're talking about a person with a serious mental handicap.

<comment><USER19> Particularly when you haven't seen countless thousands of other faces in the meantime.

As an anecdote, I used to work with large groups of children (summer camps & sports programs). I would allow myself one day to learn all of the new kids' names, which was > 50 at the start of any new thing.

I don't remember all of their names now, after 10-15 years, but I assure you that you could give me a lineup (of them at the time) and I could pick out the kids I worked with. Hundreds and hundreds of them.

I wouldn't have a 100% success rate, no doubt, but I think a very good one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> May experience is that the sheep most farmers have are quite stupid. I have grown up owning huskies and taken said huskies on trips on mountains where sheep roam free. I have been struggling to hold back a husky literally meters away from sheep before. They will just look stupidly at the lethal predator and make no attempt to get away. They have been bred to be easier to handle (aka dumb) and would likely have been eaten in the wild.

<comment><USER21> stoic in the face of aggression

like surface of zen mind

no error

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The sheep that I know are very friendly. The flock is now about 9, having been about 16 a couple of years ago. My stepsister loves them and introduced me to them. If you walk quietly and gently into the field, and kneel and look unthreatening, they will comms to you. Some are friendlier than others, some too shy. But some will come over and get petted like a lovely soft dog. Beware, some will even try to kiss you!

<comment><USER22> So that's how it starts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> My experience is sheep are fear driven and goats are lust driven. As a heard, sheep easily panic and run while goats will knock electric fence down to get at food.

<comment><USER24> I had a goat that would crawl on her side under an electric, wiggling an inch at a time, bellowing every time the fence would shock her, but determined to get at the same grass on the other side of the fence that was on her side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> My uncle had a lamb that thought it was a dog, that was serious fun. This comes close: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NmtnB2laX3E&feature=youtu.be](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NmtnB2laX3E&feature=youtu.be)

</comment><comment><USER26> there is a famous romanian legend called Mioritza where sheeps can even talk to the their master. Quite astonishing creatures

</comment><comment><USER27> (Spoiler alert!) Reminds me of Zootopia :)</comment>


Longtime Silicon Valley CEO says coronavirus could kill the open office - <AUTHOR> https://www.marketwatch.com/story/welcome-back-cubicles-longtime-silicon-valley-ceo-says-coronavirus-could-kill-the-open-office-2020-04-24?mod=home-page <comment><USER2> "She said it is also likely that more companies will continue to allow or even prefer employees work from home if they can, which could also eliminate the cost of some office space."

I'm all for allowing WFH, but I fear when the up-front cost savings become more apparent, there may actually be pressure on people to do so regardless of how well it works for them. My impression is that the widespread adoption of open offices was largely for the same reasons (costs).

<comment><USER3> > _I 'm all for allowing WFH, but I fear when the up-front cost savings become > more apparent, there may actually be pressure on people to do so regardless > of how well it works for them._

I don't think that's an accurate way to think of work from home, and the "home" part is likely the problem.

Office culture is mandatory. Work-from-home is more like "office optional". Employers will likely continue to have some office space -- just less of it.

If you like noise, socializing, and structure, you can go to your company's smaller office, a coworking space, a coffee shop, or a friend's house.

If you don't like those things, stay home. Or mix it up.

Either way, eliminating office-mandatory culture is going to lead to more freedom and individualization, not less.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yeah, I fucking wish.

Unless COVID-19 kills offices entirely, executives will continue to find ways to fit the most amount of people into the least amount of space.

<comment><USER5> Most amount of people in least amount of space = don't have an office at all.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, but then you enter the territory of "if an employee works at home and no one is around to see it, do they do work?"

<comment><USER6> There is almost a Feudal Lord timbre to the way some people talk about their employees. Must. Control. Everything. Especially. Minutiae. I've no idea how prevalent it actually is, especially since some practitioners are exceedingly loud about it. I really hope it's just confirmation bias.

At its worst I occasionally have to resist the urge to blurt out, "You know we live in a Democracy, not an Aristocracy, right?"

<comment><USER7> Well, until you go to work. Then it's dictatorship which you can leave when you chose but until you do it isn't democracy.

If you have to work, the best you can do is a benevolent dictatorship rather than one with authoritarian people who are usually clueless at top. Which sadly is many and maybe even most workplaces.

<comment><USER6> We put an awful lot of limits on what can be asked of people at work. That management bangs against these like a 10 year old testing boundaries is a little unsettling.

I've always preferred to think of myself as working on a team, but I guess even a team gets yelled at by a coach quite a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I really hope that cubicles come back.</comment>


World's highest dwelling mammal is yellow-rumped mouse at 22k feet in Andes - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/news/mouse-hanging-out-atop-volcano-called-worlds-highest-dwelling-mammal/ <comment><AUTHOR> >Discovery of the world's highest-dwelling mammal

[https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/07/15/2005265117](https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/07/15/2005265117)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://youtu.be/DGUDXs8Z31A](https://youtu.be/DGUDXs8Z31A)</comment>


Death by stuff - <AUTHOR> http://gapingvoid.com/2010/05/09/stuff/

<comment><USER2> First, the obligatory PG link you're probably thinking of: <http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html>.

Now my comment - I recently spent 3 months with my gf backpacking Europe and when I say backpacking I mean I had a satchel ([http://www.rushfaster.com.au/product.php?pProductID=BOQ- MSD-...](http://www.rushfaster.com.au/product.php?pProductID=BOQ-MSD-BLK)) and my gf had a backpack and both were small & light enough to meet carry-on restrictions for even budget airlines (e.g. Ryanair). I'm not going to tell people to abandon their possessions, but there was a certain power to having to keep your "stuff" to this limit each day and it's something that has inspired me to "focus" my possessions back home. What I mean by focusing includes:

* Donating anything (old clothes, PC hardware, not books although I would donate children's books if I had close friends with children) that might be better used by others (donation bypasses my "don't want to waste this stuff" filter).

* Actually buying/planning to buy new stuff if it means I'm not spending all day worrying about "that monitor that has to have the cable positioned so-and-so" or "that car that is always breaking down" or "those clothes that don't fit so great but I don't have a replacement for".

* Finding out-of-the-way storage locations (parents/grandparents etc. might be a good place for this, otherwise your attic/shed) for sentimental stuff that I don't want to see everyday but don't want to part with yet.

The whole idea is to streamline the role of "stuff" in my life, and avoid that "attrition" cost from stuff whose cost now outweights its benefits. In some ways it is about treating stuff in a more "liquid" fasion - it is better to throw something overboard when it starts to weigh too much than try to move with a thousand different anchors.

<comment><USER3> Traveling light works great when you're young and childless. It gets a lot harder to be "light" when you have a diaper bag and a milk pump.

There are always degrees--there are lighter ways to travel with children (being willing to carry soiled cloth diapers versus carrying a volume of one- time-use diapers), but kids often get in the way of the illusion of not needing money or possessions.

<comment><USER2> Certainly wouldn't advise anyone to take less than they were comfortable with and my message is actually about refining the quality and usefulness of your possessions over the quantity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm going out on a limb here and saying this poster doesn't have children. Because we don't collect much stuff, and we don't have a mortgage, but we do have children, and expenses like health care and college planning don't just go away because you wish you had more flexibility to do what you love.

I'll be a lot more flexible in about ten or eleven more years. That's when the younger of the two can be expected to be done with undergraduate studies. They're on their own for graduate work, at least until I get the chance to finish mine.</comment>


GitHub for Lawyers (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://jduclos.com/notes/github-for-lawyers <comment><USER2> As a corporate transactions lawyer, what I think is just as important as a "Github for lawyers" is a package manager. Contracts are fairly modular. What I'd love is some way to mix and match different contract provisions, some way to verify that I'm using the latest version of each provision, and a simple way of specifying how everything fits together.

I mean, I'd be super happy if lawyering eventually looks like this:

        import stock_sale
        import confidentiality
        import lockup
        import governing_law
        import states
        import conflicts

        export build(
          stock_sale({
            company: "Corp Inc.",
            purchaser: "Jane Employee",
            shares: 10000
          }),
          confidentiality(),
          lockup(120 /* days */),
          governing_law(states.CA),

          // If two legal terms conflict, the latter takes precedence
          conflicts.LATTER_WINS
        )

And I just type "make" and get back an e-signature URL.

<comment><USER3> If I may, as long as lawyers charge by the hour, there will be little incentive to improve efficiency.

<comment><USER4> I can't remember the company, but there was a Mixergy interview about a product to manage contracts that are in force, and he was getting little to no uptake in the legal market. And then 2008 hit, and lots of big companies pulled their legal work in house and/or demanded better results for their money, and they sell a lot to in house corporate lawyers (who do not bill by the hour).

<comment><AUTHOR> Transcript of Exari interview: [https://mixergy.com/interviews/jamie-wodetzki- exari/#transcr...](https://mixergy.com/interviews/jamie-wodetzki- exari/#transcript)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> 2014 review of open-source legal doc repos, with screenshots of each site, and ideas for improvement, [http://www.openlawlab.com/2014/08/05/githubbing- law/](http://www.openlawlab.com/2014/08/05/githubbing-law/)

<comment><USER5> That is more in depth than the posted article. Doesn't mention three things I would think would be needed though..

Live updating of document section numbers/names and references back to them. Lots of named clauses in legal docs.

Workflow and electronic signatures.

Support for rendering as word docs or PDF files.

<comment><USER6> Proprietary tools that do those sorts of things are currently penetrating the market, yet slowly. I've been called to advise on a few projects under development, but have found the mindset behind them lacking for meaning or purpose beyond commercial activity, which is perfectly ok and useful – though what interests me most in this realm is version control coupled with open access and put to use by citizen groups for legislative proposals.

Check out Contract Express from Thomson Reuters ([http://contractexpress.com](http://contractexpress.com)) for the establishment's instantiation of something that approximates the features you describe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As a lawyer and a programmer, this is a project I worked on for a bit as it makes perfect sense for things like document comparisons, or for a more senior lawyer reviewing a junior's work (just do a pull request on the contract etc).

The problem with it is, as others have said, that you are fighting an industry. The whole model is built around 6 minute units and the work is passed down to junior lawyers in order to make it as profitable as possible. There's a little bit of pushback from a company on occasion, but most pay as having your lawyer do it is, in effect, a form of insurance. You can always sue the law firm if it all goes wrong.

The better way to look at doing something like this would be to turn the legal industry on its head and make a law firm that's tech-enabled from the ground up. Most of the incumbents are now using tech (think Dentons etc) but none have been built with tech in mind. You could then massively undercut the market and have far more efficient working practices which would make you the go-to.

I actually gave a TEDx talk on all this stuff as I found the industry to be extremely frustrating and small-minded when it came to entrepreneurial activity.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is the TEDx talk online?

<comment><USER7> Sure is! You can check it out here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HakaHEDs7Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HakaHEDs7Q)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > [1] MIT (Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) / Harvard > University (HLS, Berkman Center for Internet & Society) bearing this > philosophy out in 2014.

The notion is far older than that.

<comment><USER6> Can you help us trace it further back with an older citation? That would be much appreciated.

<comment><USER5> 10 May 2012: [https://blog.abevoelker.com/gitlaw-github-for-laws-and- legal...](https://blog.abevoelker.com/gitlaw-github-for-laws-and-legal- documents-a-tourniquet-for-american-liberty/)

I assume if my google-fu were better, I could find references to "RCS for lawyers" or "SCCS for lawyers" though, that were decades old.

<comment><USER8> Late 2012: [https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze](https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze)

<comment><USER6> Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Congressional lawmaking should also be done like this, in the open. It would make accountability so much easier.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> 2014 discussion panel at Stanford Law School, with entrepreneurs building marketplaces for legal services, including contracts, [https://youtube.com/watch?v=EqR_4Xhmng0](https://youtube.com/watch?v=EqR_4Xhmng0)

</comment><comment><USER10> Can someone weigh in on the advantages of using Git for drafting legislation as opposed to a Wiki?</comment>


Teen with untreatable form of cancer writes song to say goodbye - <AUTHOR> http://www.foxnews.com/health/2012/12/17/teen-with-untreatable-form-cancer-creates-song-to-say-goodbye/?intcmp=features

<comment><AUTHOR> you can't help but feel tremendous sympathy and respect for him.</comment>


NYC proposes rule to collect GPS data on car service passengers - <AUTHOR> https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2017/01/04/nyc-to-collect-gps-data-on-car-service-passengers-good-intentions-gone-awry-or-something-else/ <comment><USER2> This is a nice AstroTurf campaign by Uber. Regular taxis in NYC already give this information. It is about tracking the taxis, not the customers.

It's kind of crazy that Uber is trying to leverage customer privacy concerns given they recently started tracking customer location data even after they are dropped off.

<comment><USER3> > Regular taxis in NYC already give this information.

All the more reason for a better service to differentiate themselves by not doing so.

> It is about tracking the taxis, not the customers.

And wiretapping eavesdrops on telephones, not people?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Before everyone cries foul, let's not forget that what the government is proposing to collect is just a small subset of the data that private companies like Uber and Lyft already have on you. There it's accessible by untold number of people for all kinds of unregulated purposes.

<comment><USER5> Uber isn't backed by an army, secret courts, and they can't decide to throw me in jail.

Edit: Fix my autocorrect word choice.

<comment><USER6> > Uber isn't backed by an army, secret courts, and they can't decide to > through me in jail.

You have it backwards (and BTW NYC doesn't have and army nor secret courts).

Yes, the us gov sadly has secret courts and of course an army et al. But it's also subject to some constraints, such as the very one that gives rise to this blog post: government agencies typically have to announce their plans and have them open for discussion.

Does the process always work? Of course not! But it's a lot more transparent than how corporations can be. People _are_ outraged by secret spying, secret torture etc. And why do governments do that stuff in secret? Because they know it will cause outrage. Some governments (e.g. DDR & Norks to name a few), do it overtly because the very knowledge of the spying is part of its value.

Whereas there are few tools to control the same actions by corporate entities.

I do expect an erosion of these secret programs over the next 20 years. However they may be overshadowed by corporate databases.

Our governments, being made of people, are hardly right all the time. But neither are our corporations (and they are indeed _our_ corporations, regardless of capital structure because they are permitted to act in the public sphere) as they are also machines operated by people. A foolish knee- jerk reaction in favor of one over the other is intellectually stupid.

<comment><USER7> > BTW NYC doesn't have and army nor secret courts

Once data is in the hands of NYC, it can be freely shared with the federal government.

<comment><USER8> What's hilarious about this statement to me is that there is a real, transparent political debate happening in NYC _right now_ because the city government wants to prevent data from being shared with the incoming federal government (look up "IDNYC"). Citizens are participating in that actual debate because they can.

I trust my city government __far more __than I trust Uber to protect my data.

<comment><USER9> Why do you trust your city government ? I cant see any one fighting the feds and winning here. I wouldnt trust either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This would be terribly evil and awful, and I hope it doesn't go through.

Eventually, trying to keep your personal whereabouts out of a government database will itself be so suspicious you'll probably be tailed.

</comment><comment><USER11> Not condoning this, but they have almost of this data from yellow cab taxi riders, with the exception of the ones that paid in cash.

</comment><comment><USER12> From the proposal PDF linked in the article:

"Although almost all TLC-licensed drivers do not drive an excessive number of hours, TLC recognized that a small number does and that some drivers may be tempted to work dangerously long hours. Therefore, in support of the City's Vision Zero initiative to reduce traffic fatalities,TLC adopted rules in July 2016 to address the risks of fatigued driving"

If "almost all TLC licensed drivers do not drive an an excessive number of hours", then this is a very minor problem which should be able to be corrected by enforcement at the FHV(for hire vehicle) level and not by a proposal that not only has potential privacy implications but also has city budgetary implications.

If New York City and the TLC's legitimate focus were on safety and quality of life(Vision Zero)issues then they could start by fixing the problem of aggressive driving by taxis - including blocking the cross-walk boxes, and intersections, blatantly running lights after they are clearly turned red as well as other general uncivil and aggressive behavior such as excessive and unnecessary horn blowing.

</comment><comment><USER13> Unrelated: the time frame to comment on this rule for residents has expired. Were it that I was aware of this earlier! How can I not miss these things in the future?

</comment><comment><USER14> Looks like I'm going to take the subway from now on.

<comment><USER15> Someone earlier made a now dead, but sensationalistic comment about how in some cities the transit police can search you before entering the subway, and if you refuse you can't enter (though usually you can enter from an entrance or station without the checkpoint).

I've even seen TSA stationed inside of busy subway stations, thankfully they were only gruffly and inefficiently redirecting passengers, but weren't doing body scans or pat downs.

<comment><USER16> I believe this is the way that it is in New York, at least when I lived there, unless the city relinquished its powers on this. Long reddit thread here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/1dm5fu/what_are_my_rig...](https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/1dm5fu/what_are_my_rights_regarding_random_subway_bag/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Between the militarization of NYPD and the increasingly bold mass surveillance they're implementing, I think I may just never go to NYC again.

<comment><USER18> In general, I tend to a agree with you. i.e. Big Brother is bad, but if Big Brother is being Big Brother to protect you against the abuses of Uber then the case is not so clear against increased govt data collection.

<comment><USER17> The article makes a clear distinction between reasonable collection for those purposes, and this plan which is clearly a catch all with plenty of loopholes for using it however they'd like. I'm all for efficiency and against abuses, but there no way they need all this data for that purpose.</comment></comment></comment>


Tinder Thinks Millennials Will Pay for Dating Apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-25/tinder-tested-by-millennials-who-won-t-pay-for-dating-apps-tech

<comment><USER2> IMHO, flirting apps and websites all fail all over the world. All of them. And you cannot correct these failures by making the apps&sites paid, you get caught yet in other issues, such as unnatural shrinking of the prospects, diverting the expectations in the wrong way (money involved) and the huge # of unpaying people still interfering with the paying members.

Also not every member is a human! Many a number of profiles are fake, most of them unnatural, unresponding and the expectations clash all the time.

Any serious flirting application should find solutions to these issues first and that cannot be done by simply making it a paid app.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you read Academic Papers? - <AUTHOR> I have never really consciously taken the time to learn how to read academic papers, because it never occurred to me it's something I needed.
I replied to a tweet today suggesting people ought to take a course how to read them, and got a great reply from Glenn Vanderberg on a starting point:
https://twitter.com/glv/status/579411305347489792
Does anyone else have any thoughts or opinions about this? I have a hard time learning things. Maybe this insight is part of the reason why. <comment><USER3> I have spent a large portion of my adult life finding and reading and understanding scientific papers. The advice offered in the tweet is good, so I won't restate it - but I will offer a couple of my own:

* Print the paper out and make notes on it by hand (this has a small mention in one of the articles) - this technique got me through university, I tried every software package imaginable but in the end having a hard copy forced me to deal with sheer amount of reading I had to do. It also allowed me to freely make notes, add sticky notes etc. Since then I have done this with any collection of papers I want to get my head around.

* Try to comprehend __something __on every read through - it doesn 't have to be big, just something - whether it is the sample makeup or part of the methodology or the conclusions etc. You don't need to understand these in any particular order, but ensure to revise your understanding as you become more familiar with the paper.

* Most papers are useless (to you at the time you are reading them) - the sad truth about research is that 90% of the stuff you devote yourself to understanding will be wrong, outdated or not useful to what you are working on. It is very hard to pick out useful papers with nothing to go on but titles, and abstract and citations. As you get more used to the field it becomes easier and familiar names, authors and institutions can guide you, but even close to a decade after reading my first paper I still probably only manage a 10% hit rate when conducting research (but hey - 10% of a lot of papers is still a lot of papers!)

<comment><USER4> > * Most papers are useless (to you at the time you are reading them) - <USER2> > sad truth about research is that 90% of the stuff you devote yourself to > understanding will be wrong, outdated or not useful to what you are working > on.

This is very important advice. Do not assume that just because it's a published research paper it is valuable, correct, or useful. In fact, especially in applied CS, I found that authors will sometimes make what looks like an intentional effort to obfuscate the methods so that the paper is publishable (peer reviewers will not try to reproduce the results anyway), but the methods are not implementable, or at least not easily.

This makes sense when you think about the competition in academia, authors doing consulting work for companies, or intending to start businesses of their own.

<comment><USER5> Usually the idea is bunk and they are trying to obscure that, more often than that the idea is great and they are trying to protect their IP for a startup.

If you know something is possible, then it is not impossible to replicate results even with obscure directions about it. Except for Paxos, you really need good instructions at that point (that guy should get an award).

<comment><USER6> Hah. I'm pretty dumb myself. That'll teach me. (I'm leaving the link, though. Great paper.)

[1]: [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/lamport/pubs/pubs.html#lamport-paxos)

<comment><USER7> Leslie Lamport is a man. You could argue something about Barbara Liskov's Viewstamped Replication, though, I guess.

<comment><USER6> Whoops. Thanks, I messed up pretty badly, didn't I.

<comment><USER7> It's an easy mistake to make. It's interesting, though, because there are at least three important women who were involved in related work at the same time -- I'm thinking of Liskov, Dwork, and Lynch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That's kind of like asking, "How do you learn how to code?"

The answer is to do it. Do it often, do it a lot, over and over. The linked tweet provided great advice, as do other resources and comments in this thread. But the bottom line is that you learn by doing, and trying hard.

I remember reading the same section of a paper at least 30 times, no exaggeration. I would read it, then go and look up the topic online, then read it again, then go do something else, and then read it again. Over and over for days. i parsed every symbol and word of every line. And then one day I was elucidated. I finally understood it, and it was a feeling of awesome communion with the gods.

I'm not sure if there's a short cut, but I'll be monitoring this thread along with you in the hopes of finding one. Do what the others said and print the paper out, and take a pencil and highlighter to it. Look up terms you don't know online and be diligent in your use of search engines. Just stay at it, and don't give up!

As an afterthought, most modern computer science papers have a graphic or figure on the second or third page that does a good job of explaining the idea visually. Older papers tend not to have this, or it's buried deeper in the paper. Look for this key graphic and use it as a guide or framework to understand the rest of what's being said.

</comment><comment><USER9> Academic papers can seem incredibly intimidating but you have to remember: they're not written to be readable to the casual reader unlike articles on the web.

Journals have strict page limits so there's no space to introduce domain specific terminology or give a brief tutorial on the topic. They only have enough room to tersely describe directly relevant background material and will assume you are knowledgable in the domain.

Read the abstract then the conclusion. If it sounds like you want to understand the rest of the paper after that, be prepared to look up terminology, read citations, follow tutorials and reread the paper multiple times to really understand it. Don't be put off if you can barely understand it the first time.

<comment><USER10> Reading the abstract and the conclusion is the most important part of reading and selecting academic papers. Especially in the beginning.

If you read the abstract and the conclusion you should have a good sense of what this paper is about, what it is trying to prove, and perhaps also a sense of how they prove this. These are the primary factors for you to see if this paper is worthwhile to you.

<comment><USER11> Agreed.

I read the abstract, if it seems relevant, then I flip to the conclusion, if it still seems relevant then I skim read it through, then print it out if it looks like something I need to dig deeper into.

Often those lightbulb moments have only come for me after printing it out, despite reading it 4-5 times on readcube.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How to Read a Paper by S. Keshav

[http://ccr.sigcomm.org/online/files/p83-keshavA.pdf](http://ccr.sigcomm.org/online/files/p83-keshavA.pdf)

<comment><USER13> Useful: Literature Review Matrix mentioned there: [https://d1b10bmlvqabco.cloudfront.net/attach/i7ax2kxrsnn3v5/...](https://d1b10bmlvqabco.cloudfront.net/attach/i7ax2kxrsnn3v5/gyqyt9p1qfs4cd/i7fydo2u2dx4/LitReviewMatrix.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The answer depends on why you're reading the papers, of course.

If it's only a dilettante's interest, then read it like you would read news: skim for a general sense, emphasizing the introduction, conclusion, and graphics.

For academics reading papers, the situation is (potentially) different. There are genuine professional consequences for failing to read or understand the material.

There are many approaches -- many good ideas here -- most of which are rehashing of basic study skills, but I would add one piece of generic advice.

Reading academic papers well takes a lot of time. Sometimes this is called active reading. If you are doing this type of reading, make sure you take _something_ away from the reading. And by "take away" I mean "memorize", not index in Mandalay or outline in Evernote. Deliberately bolt each bit of information onto the edifice you have already built. Think about it in context. Wonder about it. Doubt it. Be skeptical. If you can't summarize the paper next week at a cocktail party, you're not reading, you're just filling out a bibliography.

<comment><USER15> I have to disagree. IMHO most papers weren't written to be read with care. So you shouldn't waste your time on them. Skimming through is ok when you have to filter out the few papers that actually make a difference.

<comment><USER14> I don't think this can be true, except for experts. In the biography of Oppenheimer, _American Prometheus_ , he was described as having an uncanny ability to flip through publications and understand their conclusion and significance in seconds. That description, or anything like it, certainly isn't true for me.

I would suggest that any paper that you perceive as a waste of time or not worth reading with care probably isn't worth reading at all. If it is the case that this sort of thing is the norm, as I know full well it is in some disciplines, then that says something important about what's being published in that discipline. It says nothing about what the best way to read and understand the latest pubs in a discipline with real research going on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I try not to read primary research papers. Most of them are wrong[0]. Even the one's that are right are written for consumption by a very specialized community that I'm rarely a member of.

If I decide that i absolutely need to understand a particular paper, I start by finding a relevant review article. I look and see if the papers cited in the background section are also cited in a recent review of the state of the field. These are less likely to be flat out wrong, and they provide better context.

I try to read a paper with other people (preferably people who know the field) and we take turns trying to explain the figures and methods to each other.

But to reiterate: any given paper is most likely wrong and your default position should be persistent skepticism.

[0] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/)

</comment><comment><USER17> This is the way I learned to do it in grad school. There a lot of litterature out there and most chances are 97% is irrelevant to what you're interested in. So, a lot of "reading papers" is efficiently figuring out if it is interesting or not. You'll never realistically have time to read everything.

First read title and abstract. This is where you'll likely eliminate a lot of stuff.

Interestingly, I've found that the best point to go from there is the conclusion. A good conclusion will generally tell you the results (which is generally what interests you), plus a good summary of the motivation and approach/methods.

From there figure out what is interesting to you. Go through the background or motivation, specific areas of methodology you're interested in, or detailed analysis of the results.

</comment><comment><USER18> Disclaimer: I spend a lot of time reading life sciences papers, which are mainly about experimental procedures and data rather than theory and which are almost universally frustrating, often misleading, wrong or actually just made up.

I hope that soon reading papers will be supplanted by automated aggregation and parsing of content, and eventually almost real time dissemination of data and results. Frankly, encasing scientific knowledge in papers is now beyond a joke. Why we are still relying on parchment based technology and pre- enlightenment publishing norms drives me nuts. Examples:

1\. Genomics papers that have a table with thousands of rows printed in a PDF in the appendix. Almost willfully annoying.

2\. Two page papers in top life sciences journals that have 100 page appendices which are not searchable or indexed.

3\. Papers that are heavily criticised in letters, but none of this is obvious when looking at the original paper HTML page, the abstract or the PDF.

4\. Long clinical trials that are published repeatedly over 20 years, where the previous interim data updates are locked away in journal archives that requires extra payment or a subscription to JSTOR.

5\. Papers with 10 supplementary tables, all single file excel spreadsheets.

6\. Papers are submitted for publication 12 months before they are actually published. Bad luck if you started working on the same thing 6 months ago.

7\. If I want to show a table from your paper in a presentation, I have to manually snapshot from the PDF and paste it on my slide.

8\. Because the only way to disseminate data is with a paper, important trial results can be given as a presentation at a conference, and not become available until published much later. Until then, the only record of these results are your memory if you were there, a pay-walled recording of the presentation, a drug company press release, or sandwiched between banner ads on a 'medical news' site.

9\. Old papers get ignored, because they just aren't readily available. Life science researchers regularly 'discover' something that was published in the 1970s.

10\. It is impossible to read all these papers. One part of my research field easily has 10000 papers or more that could be justifiably relevant. Biology has now reached the absurd tipping point where it is easier and cheaper in terms of labour costs to do an experiment yourself rather than thoroughly survey the literature.

Hopefully computer science papers aren't like this.

EDIT: grammar

<comment><USER19> In life sciences, just read the figures. Papers are full of exaggerations, overgeneralizations and other self-aggrandizing claims. AFAIK it's not like that in physics, and CS is different altogether. Anyone who has tried to do research to create a model based on biological data can attest how hard it is to find reliable meaningful consensus values in the literature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think one important thing to note is the hourglass format of most scientific papers: statement of the broad problem and general importance of the question at hand, gradually more specific identification of the current challenge/contribution, down to the methods/model and results, and then widening to look at the implications and relationship of the new findings to the rest of the field.

Where you focus on the paper depends on what you want: if you are just learning the central questions and theoretical views in the field then the beginning and end are more useful; as you gain an understanding of the field you may be more interested in the particular advances in a given paper and may devote more attention to the middle.

At least in several of the fields I read regularly (linguistics, cognitive science, NLP, and developmental psychology) there are three key paragraphs that tend to have the most useful information: 1) the abstract (duh!) 2) the last paragraph of the introduction (this usually has the most concise statement of the motivation) 3) the first paragraph of the discussion (this usually recaps whatever advances they make in a usable way; actual results sections often contain a level of detail that isn't very memorable after a few days).

Citations are shorthand for entire sets of ideas--they're a means by which whole arguments can be referred to very concisely. One of the challenges in reading a new literature is in learning what set of citations are commonly reused and how, especially because the conventionalized citation of a paper isn't necessarily what the author expected it to be known for, nor what you might take from a paper on a first reading (or any number of readings). For this reason I highly recommend reading papers with inline full citations (Chomsky, 1965) rather than numeric/ indexical citations that you have to look up [1].

Finally, mock-reviewing a paper is a fantastic way to make sure you're being honest about how much of the paper you understand. Another technique at higher grad school levels is mock-reviewing a paper from someone else's (=prominent academic's) perspective--which imposes the dual constraint of understanding the paper at hand as well as the theoretical perspective behind someone else's critique.

</comment><comment><USER21> Its the citation chain game! When you first start reading papers in a new field you essentially have to read every citation present to understand whats going on. As you accrue knowledge you'll need to read fewer citations and you'll understand more of the jargon. That, to me, is the primary challenge.

It took me about 2 years before I could read a paper end to end and understand it. Of course by that point I realized that reading most papers was a waste of time. You often only need the figures, conclusion and methods section.

</comment><comment><USER22> Like anything else, figure out why you're reading a paper, what are your goals?

If you're reading for expanding your knowledge in a field, then a good area to start is by reading well known dissemination in the field in past decade or so. So, say, you're into datastrucures, read the paper that brought Red-black tress by Rudolf Bayer. This is also a great route for somebody reading for the first time. Well written papers are less off-putting. Most papers out there are very poorly written.

If you're trying to extend the field, then it helps scouting what interests you in extremely recent, interesting works. You can use sites like arxiv to find edgy works done in past month of so, and then drill down the references to understand where they came from. You can then work on improving that work.

So it depends on what you're trying to do. For software, I usually use GoodReader on iPad. Nothing fancy, but it annotates, stores all my research papers and organizes them. On computer, give Zotero a try.

If you're at a university, remember to catalog papers you read. It's so much easier now with things like Dropbox. After you get out of the college, you will need to pay huge amounts of money for them, so it behooves to maintain a steady collection safe somewhere where you can always look back to. So catalog what you read properly. Don't get overwhelmed and start losing the PDFs.

</comment><comment><USER23> As far as deciding whether to read a paper in depth, the advice I've heard is to read the abstract, and if you're still interested read the conclusion. If you're still interested after that, dig into the detail.

Don't let the "academic" format and style fool you. There's plenty of BS churned out in academia, though if you're not used to reading papers it may not be apparent at first.

</comment><comment><USER24> Besides the S. Keshav's paper on how to read papers "How to Read a Paper", take a look at the section "Reading Research Papers" by Margo Seltzer in "CS261: Graduate Operating Systems (2014)" [http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/cs261/notes/intro.html](http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/cs261/notes/intro.html)

</comment><comment><USER25> In addition to the other advice, I'd recommend starting with the "seminal" articles in topic of interest – articles that are heavily cited by other researchers – before moving on to something more fine-grained. Even though I've read a fair amount of academic literature, it'd be difficult for me to pull an article off of arXiv and understand what's going on, since much of academic writing is building off of prior work and requires context. Seminal works are usually written more clearly because the author is trying to introduce a new idea.

Google scholar makes it a bit easier to identify seminal works, as the results return a count for "cited by". You'll see that some are cited thousands of times by other researchers. Plus, these are typically the most interesting articles to read either way.

<comment><USER26> A related approach is to also start with review/survey papers in a given field. Beside giving you a more digestible overview, they'll also cite the papers describing important results that one might want to read for the details.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> With great skepticism. (I worked for years in academia and have published many papers.)

</comment><comment><USER28> A related question: How do you _access_ academic papers?

I've got a list of papers I'd like to read on the Church-Turing Thesis and Quantum Computing, but I'm just a working freelance programmer with no access to a research library. For instance how do I get this one?:

K. Steiglitz (1988), _Two non-standard paradigms for computation: Analog machines and cellular automata_ , in Performance Limits in Communication Theory and Practice, Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Study Institute, Il Ciocco, Castelvecchio Pascoli, Tuscany, Italy, July 7-19, 1986, J. K. Skwirzynski, ed., Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 173-192.

<comment><USER29> There is a reddit for precisely this purpose, I believe it is r/scholar

Mind you I have no first hand experience with this, usually just going to author's site is good enough for most recent authors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> 1) You will stand up and scream with delight when you realized that the things which were once impossibly convoluted are not comprehensible ( yes this even applies to abstracts )

2) Be cognizant of absorbtion / attention: Its easy to get stuck glossy-eyed and pacing through the lines

3) As stated elsewhere in here: They can be filled with LOTS of crap -- keep this in mind and work on attenuating your bullshit-detection.

</comment><comment><USER31> Read the abstract a couple of times. Internalize every sentence. Then you can start reading the rest of the paper. The abstract is meant to be easy to read and it'll help you form an outline of the paper in your head before you start reading. This will help you stay on track while you read the rest of the paper as it's pretty easy to get lost in the middle somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER32> Not that it's perfect, but [http://mendeley.com/](http://mendeley.com/) is the best tool I've seen for organizing and annotating papers. If you don't have a reasonable way of staying organized, then no matter how you read academic papers, you'll wind up forgetting what you read eventually.

<comment><USER33> In addition, the bulk paper renaming feature has been an invaluable time saver to me.

Throughout the years I've collected thousands of papers, many still unread, but my 'must read' ('must skim' mostly) folder currently houses several hundred of them and I can't imagine how much time I would've wasted by manually renaming using the template {Author} - {Year} - {Title}.

Mendeley is free, but a paid alternative is Papers ([http://www.papersapp.com/](http://www.papersapp.com/)), which used to be Mac-only and the reason I ended up discovering and using Mendeley. Haven't personally tried it, but heard very good things about it.

My paper reading selection process consists in reading the abstract and the conclusion. Quite a few papers have disappointing conclusions despite attention-grabbing titles. If all is sound and promising, I keep it and depending on other factors, I decide when to read it in its entirety and/or where to store it for later use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Well it really depends on your situation but I guess the main question to ask is: Do you possess the necessary background to read the paper? It takes a lot of groundwork before you can read a paper and be confident you understood the gist of it.

I personally have to sit down with pen and paper and toy with key equations, maybe take out a book or two to make sure the author and I are agreeing on specific vocabulary, or even double check symbols used which can differ from what one is used to.

And keep in mind that completely novel, truly groundbreaking papers in a field are rare. Most of what I've read is iterations on very well known basic methods, a modification of this or that, some change to XYZ etc.

Just keep reading. And re-reading. And...

</comment><comment><USER35> Accepting that I have to read a paper two or three times before I really understand it has been the biggest breakthrough I've had.

Usually this is because I just didn't have the background to understand the paper until I read it, but academic papers can be pretty poorly written. For example, a recent paper hinged upon something that I considered physically impossible - only in the last paragraph did it explain why it wasn't (they were even like "everyone is probably assuming this is impossible - here's why it's not". I really wish that had led with that as it was an overwhelmingly convincing argument.

</comment><comment><USER36> If it is a case study often there is usually a problem definition/scope/abstract (it really depends on what type and who is publishing). I often start with that and then skip to the back to te conclusion. This gives me a bit if a road map of how and what to read. If I read beginning to end I often get lost in confusing technical academic jargon.

After doing that I think about all the questions I have. Then go forth and read it through keying in on the areas that may answer my questions.

I really like data and graphs so I usually spend lots if time playing around and testing theories that I may have as I analyze.

</comment><comment><USER37> [http://ccr.sigcomm.org/online/files/p83-keshavA.pdf](http://ccr.sigcomm.org/online/files/p83-keshavA.pdf) \- this paper is actually pretty insightful.

</comment><comment><USER38> More literally, does anyone know of a way to physically read papers on a Kindle? I've never been able to reformat even simple two-column PDFs into a format suitable for ereaders. Calibre seems like a good start, but I get mangled results. I end up printing stuff out. Which is OK, but I'd like to have the option.

Even something as basic as trimming ridiculous margins seems rather difficult to accomplish. Is there a software package that'll make this easy?

<comment><USER39> I had good results with [http://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/](http://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/).

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Not start-to-finish, that's for sure. Or --- almost never.

If you're doing post-grad (or research) computer science, you should really think about learning to read the literature faster. I was very slow at this when I started, and I notice new grad students struggling at it.

A common problem is to try to read too deeply. You should get good at reading a paper for 1 minute, or 5 minutes, or 10 minutes.

</comment><comment><USER41> Try:

[http://violentmetaphors.com/2013/09/08/an-example-of-how- to-...](http://violentmetaphors.com/2013/09/08/an-example-of-how-to-read-a- vaccine-safety-study/)

And

[http://violentmetaphors.com/2013/08/25/how-to-read-and- under...](http://violentmetaphors.com/2013/08/25/how-to-read-and-understand-a- scientific-paper-2/)

</comment><comment><USER42> Read the abstract. Then the figures. Then the introduction. Then the conclusion. If you're still in the paper, read the whole thing.

</comment><comment><USER43> As seanwilson has pointed out already, academic papers are written to be intelligible to experts in the field. They're not meant to be tutorials for practitioners. So you can easily get stuck if you're reading a paper in a field in which you're not an expert.

I also see a lot of useful tips here such as making notes, rewriting parts of the paper, and so forth. I think these ideas only work when you're already getting something out of the paper. These tips are optimizers, they can help you get more out of a paper if you're already somewhat conversant in the field.

In theory, if you're not an expert, you can keep following the citation trail, read all the papers there, become an expert and finally read the paper you actually want to read. I don't think this actually works. If you're not a expert, the paper itself will seem like gibberish. You won't know what citations are actually important and what citations were just pushed in to please a reviewer. And even if you somehow do, the citations themselves will be just as difficult to read.

So what are the solutions? First, seek out accessible papers. There are a lot of tutorials that get published in magazines like the CACM and IEEE Spectrum. These are written with an explicit goal of being accessible to a technical non-expert audience, so you will get something out of these articles. Maybe if you read one such article, you'll get the big ideas in the article and _then_ you can read the technical paper(s) that the article was based on. Since you already know the big ideas, the technical paper won't seem so daunting. And maybe now, you can follow up on a few citations.

The general trick is to find alternate sources that simplify and explain the paper and then read the paper. Alternate sources can be tutorial articles, slides, blog posts, textbooks, talks and so on. This is actually how people learn to read papers in grad school. First, you go to few a masters level classes where the professors teach from papers rather than textbooks but don't necessarily expect students to read and understand all the details in the paper. Next you go to a few seminar-type classes where professors and students discuss the nuances of a number of important papers. There's a lot of non- obvious spoonfeeding that happens: the professors use their expertise to pick papers that important and accessible, they guide the discussion towards the important parts of the papers, they point out flaws and discuss methodologies, suggest projects for the students to implement and learn from, and so on. Over time, the students absorb these lessons by osmosis and become good at picking out and reading papers themselves.

If you're not going to grad school yourself, you'll have to recreate this process of slowly building expertise in a field by reading papers and comprehending them and trying to implement and recreate them. The key word is slowly because you're not going to become an expert in a day, or even a month. You'll have to keep going for a year or two and slowly you'll feel like a blind man who can see more and more of his surroundings everyday.

</comment><comment><USER44> The linked page on the tweet offers great advice, the only two things I can add are:

* Take a sheet of paper and write down all definitions for easy reference

* If you are planning to use the learning from the paper in a production system, make sure you fully understand all stated (and unstated) assumptions the researchers made when presenting their results.

</comment><comment><USER45> It depends on the difficulty of the field, but I think on average it takes about 30-80 articles to get into a divergent field. Review articles can help a lot, but you don't always get them for hotly moving fields.

I also think it helps a lot to be aware of popular experimental designs and statistical techniques.

</comment><comment><USER46> Has anyone looked at ReadCube? I found it when searching for software to help manage research papers I needed to read. You can download papers through their client, annotate and get analysis on papers. [https://www.readcube.com/](https://www.readcube.com/)

</comment><comment><USER47> Like I am dating them. Visit them again and again to learn more about them and what makes them tick.

</comment><comment><USER48> I've read thousands of papers. I read the abstract and the summary. Those tell me if I want to read the paper.

They also tell me how to write a paper because everyone else is doing the same thing. Tease in the abstract, please in the summary.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think most people forget the first step: decide whether it's really worth reading the paper. Don't spend too much time on weak papers that won't get you anywhere. Unfortunately, most papers are "weak".

</comment><comment><USER49> I don't for the most part. Don't want to deal with the paywalls and the content i need is generally also available in a more digested format already. i.e. My job doesn't require reading raw papers

</comment><comment><USER50> How I read a research paper:

[http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2013/07/how-i-read- research...](http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2013/07/how-i-read-research- paper.html)

</comment><comment><USER51> With other people! Impenetrably obscure papers really unravel in a journal club. You can understand the main thrust of a paper much faster if you find a social setting for talking about it.

</comment><comment><USER52> Reading is a skill. It improves with practice. Breadth helps with depth. It's ok not to grok things in their entirety. Enjoy what is grokked and the process of grilling.

</comment><comment><USER53> First a disclaimer: I am the founder of Qiqqa.com, which I wrote while doing my PhD at the University of Cambridge, and without which, I quite literally would have failed to complete my PhD.

I believe the key statement that has been iterated over and over here is that only 10% of scientific papers are ever worth reading. And probably only 10% of the text of those 10% are worth reading. They are they 1%.

This means that you end up with hundreds (if not thousands) of papers that you think you might have to read, but have no way of knowing whether or not you should until you have read them. Chicken meet egg.

I built Qiqqa (and wrote a PhD) to solve this from two broad directions: using human intelligence and using artificial intelligence.

USING HUMAN INTELLIGENCE: While a load of people recommend printing out a paper to read it, I believe that that course leads to a lot of future pain. Highlighting and annotating while you read is absolutely important. It allows you to skim through a paper and highlight only the important stuff. Then you can come back later to properly read the important papers – only once you have skimmed enough papers to get a more general sense of the domain you are exploring. If you have printed out papers, it is very difficult to quickly regroup and reread your annotated papers. However, if you have highlighted your papers on your computer, laptop, tablet (or even phone while travelling from Cambridge to London), free products like Qiqqa (or www.pdfhighlights.com) offers you a simple annotation report to pull out all your annotations to not only remind you of what and where the important fact are, but also to let to jump straight to them to get reading immediately.

USING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: An interesting side effect of reading more scientific research is that the more you read, the more you have left to read. Every paper you end up reading will make reference to another few papers that you probably should read; like The Magic Porridge Pot. To solve the problem of 'what should I read next' (the working title of my PhD), I built into Qiqqa the capability for it to 'automatically read the papers for you' using machine learning. To this end, when reading a paper, Qiqqa can recommend to you the most relevant papers to read using something called Topical PageRank which calculates the relevance of a paper to what you are reading not only by its similarity to what you are reading, but also by how well received (cited) that paper is in your community. Think of it as having your own personal Google where it biases results to satisfy your personal predilections. You can read about how it works at [http://aclanthology.info/papers/topical-pagerank-a- model-of-...](http://aclanthology.info/papers/topical-pagerank-a-model-of- scientific-expertise-for-bibliographic-search).

Good luck with your research! Jimme

</comment><comment><USER54> angrily while wondering why the two column style persists when most of the reading is being down on wide screen monitors.

</comment><comment><USER55> I need a guide on how to read textbooks.</comment>


Ask HN: Why do companies struggle to find relevant insights in business data? - <AUTHOR> I'm currently investigating the data analytics market to see if it is a good spot to start a business and love to get your insights.
There are myriads of business intelligence, data analytics and management reporting tools on the market. However, it seems that businesses have a hard time to find relevant (business) insights in their data. Why do you think this is? What are these tools, and the business that use them, struggling with? Please don't think just about these tools and their features, but also about the people using the tools, the processes behind, etc.
Would be great if you could state your role or position, to help me understand what your background is.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> It's been puzzling to me for ages how some AI applications (e.g., natural language processing, image recognition, self-driving cars, ...) have progressed in strides over the past years, while MS Excel still asks me to specify the field delimiter when importing a CSV file. Seems a bit 80s. Only few BI applications seem to do better.

Agreed that consultancies have been the go-to insight providers for businesses over the past decade, but I see this changing as businesses get more data-savy and consultancies struggle to attract the tech skill needed to defend their top position (compared to skilled in-house teams).

Georg, ex-consultant

</comment><comment><USER3> I agree with dribel and Georg.

@Dribel - most times it took months not weeks! And by the time the insights had been found, the opportune moment for taking advantage of the insights had passed.

The organisations that are excelling are the ones that hire competent employees and invest heavily in setting up an agile analytics architecture which allows them to test hypotheses easily and quickly - these are the companies gaining a competitive advantage through analytics.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think foremost consulting companies actually do the job you describe.

They basically try to find the right information in the data. It often takes them weeks to do so. I could imagine that especially those consulting firms as well as their clients have a strong interest in a solution like that</comment>


Your cellphone is killing you  - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/2014/04/12/your_cellphone_is_killing_you_what_people_dont_want_you_to_know_about_electromagnetic_fields/

<comment><USER2> _" many of us are holding high-powered microwave transmitters—in the form of cell phones—directly against our heads"_

The typical power output of a mobile phone is around 100 milliwatts, with the transmitting power varying depending on how far you are from the cell tower and other parameters. That doesn't really qualify as a "high-powered" transmitter. (What's your microwave oven then? A weapon of mass destruction?)

Now, it's possible that low-level microwave radiation can have adverse effects on health, but starting an article with this kind of overblown sensationalism doesn't bode well for its overall credibility.

<comment><USER3> Hasn't this myth been busted 100 times over.

<comment><USER4> What myth?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Something that always annoys me about these articles is the ambiguity behind what constitutes "usage". Idling in pocket (but actively connected to phone network)? Data, text, or voice calls? Voice calls using phone directly to ear, wired headset, or wireless (Bluetooth) headset?

Judging by most articles I've seen, the studies appear to be very typically limited to voice calls using the phone directly to ear, which isn't a common use case in for me.

<comment><USER6> True. If a cell phone (with data disabled) is in network standby mode then the paging involves only reception and never a transmission.</comment></comment>


Stuffs that are banned in India - <AUTHOR> http://dfuse.in/cafe/stuff-thats-banned-india/ <comment><USER2> Knew about most of the stuff but "Cycling in Kolkata" was a new for me.

What they don't understand is that, the more you restrict/ban stuff, the more people get fascinated and attracted by it.

Most of the stuff does not make sense either. However, it is not just India. For example, gay sex is banned in Saudi arab too.

<comment><USER3> Ban cycling makes perfect sense considered from the right angle! Who are those making the laws, huh? I just somehow guess that some influential people, the same people which can afford cars and who are annoyed by high bicycle-traffic. Hey policeman, clean me the streets!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In this wonderful country you can select the government at age of 18 but you are not allowed to drink alcohol till the age of 21.

<comment><USER5> The legal drinking age in many places e.g. Delhi, Mumbai is 25 (It's 30 in Wadhra district). And, the legal marital age is 21 for males and 18 for females.

Oh! You are a 18 year old girl, you sure can be trusted with marriage and having/raising a kid but you sure cannot be trusted with booze!!

<comment><USER6> This is an inappropriate analogy touted by many. Marriage and booze can't be equated. An over dose of booze might cause you to render harm to someone else, this cannot be said of marriage.

You may want to lower the drinking age but you need to come up with better reasons :) Also why shouldn't the drinking age be 15 or 13?

<comment><USER7> Marrying and having children before you are "ready" can adversely affect the children.

And, let's face it: Many young marriages are particularly bad matches due to the inexperience of the people involved.

In any case: I didn't know that there was a legal minimum age for marriage in India and I commend them for having it. Such a limit is an important progressive step for any country in which the parents are heavily involved in matchmaking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have heard it said of India that there are so many laws, that there are no laws.

</comment><comment><USER9> Stupid stuff. I thought it'll feature Satellite phones.</comment>


What free/open source tools do you use for website monitoring? - <AUTHOR> What free/open source tools do you use for website monitoring?<p>I'm looking for a tool that will have following functionalities: - check HTTP response status - check specific strings (regex) in response content - check response time - alerting for the above - generating SLA reports <comment><USER2> zabbix will do all of this for you....

It's not my favorite tool, but it is free and open source.

<comment><AUTHOR> Zabbix is hard to configure. Need something easier.

<comment><USER3> I'm using Check_MK as a full scale monitoring solution. It is big and powerful, but configuration is pretty straight-forward with its Web Administration Tool. It will happily monitor single service or big bunch of services.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Follow That Page, Uptime Robot</comment>


Food Startup Maple Shutting Down NYC Operations; Aquihired by Deliveroo - <AUTHOR> https://maple.com/letter/ <comment><USER2> My entire office is grieving.

Given how well received Maple was, I have to wonder if this is one of those problems where scaling actually killed the company, due to negative unit economics.</comment>


China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/11/china-clamping-down-on-coronavirus-research-deleted-pages-suggest <comment><USER2> Huge change of tone from 2 months ago, ok m guessing it's because because they fear that the lab accident theory will gain more traction academically or they fear people will reveal the scale of the damage to the public vs the clearly fabricated stats we have now.

[https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/01/30/asia- pacific/sc...](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/01/30/asia- pacific/science-health-asia-pacific/chinas-top-court-rebukes-police-virus- rumor-crackdown/#.XpNyy0EifDt)

www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/all-signs-point-to-china/

[https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8188557/amp/Did- cor...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8188557/amp/Did-coronavirus- leak-research-lab-Wuhan-Startling-theory-no-longer-discounted.html)

[https://thebulletin.org/2020/03/experts-know-the-new- coronav...](https://thebulletin.org/2020/03/experts-know-the-new-coronavirus- is-not-a-bioweapon-they-disagree-on-whether-it-could-have-leaked-from-a- research-lab/amp/)

<comment><USER3> I don't think dailymail or nationalreivew are reputable source other than presenting a story.

There is an article on Nature one month ago on this topic:

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9)

> Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a > purposefully manipulated virus

<comment><USER4> That doesn't mean it didn't come from a lab though. "Coming from a lab" does not = man made. If they were doing research on the bats in this lab, looking to identify potential scary viruses to be ready, it is entirely possible the virus jumped from bat to researcher there and that was our patient 0.

<comment><USER5> How many times do we need to repeat this... everyone assumes that "came from a lab" means "engineered bioweapon". No!

Also, people quickly forget that humans have been selectively evolving plants and animals for thousands of years without touching the actual genomes.

<comment><USER6> How did it come from a lab? I've heard "workers got sprayed with blood and infected", "someone screwed up"(vague), "mishandled lab waste".

Just saying it "came from a lab", makes it sound man made. If you don't want misunderstandings, you need spell it out and make it absolutely clear. It doesn't even sound like there is a clear narrative about _how_ it "escaped from the lab", just a lot of rumors. Rumors about a rumor, certainly doesn't sound more credible than China's official stance, and their credibility is already very low.

<comment><USER2> You get it from a bat the same way you get it from another person you touch the bat and touch your face or you clean the cage drop get . You dump out the litter box/tray and huff some particles. You draw a blood sample and a drop of it gets on your visor/goggles. You take it off late and touch your face. It's nothing sexy.

Note that that the Wuhan CDC, the lab ~300m from the market, the lab that was experimenting on bats, is not the BSL4 Wuhan Institute of Virology miles away from the seafood market, that everyone loves taking about. It's probably a level 2 or 3 lab.

Escape from a lab doesn't imply man made any more than tiger escaped from zoo implies that the tiger was born there. SARS escaped from BSL3 labs on China on multiple occasions, that doesn't imply that SARS was man made.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't buy the escaped/released from a lab theories espoused here and on Facebook and the like. Apparently the mutations within the SARS-COV-2 found in humans compared to the bat virus are purely random and hence the thing is not or very unlikely genetically engineered. My source is a recent New Scientist article. So the bloody thing is simply a virus that affects all people, everywhere, without fear or favour. Simply ...

Pretty much all stats I've seen relating to this thing are painfully awful. Here in the UK (in England), care home deaths are not reported in the main death stat etc etc ad nauseam. Scotland reports in its own way as does NI (or not bother) compared to England and Wales. We have minimal testing anyway so who knows what is actually going on?

Anyway, one thing I am absolutely certain of is that whilst the stats in Europe and the US, CA etc are a bit wonky at best they are at least a decent attempt to have a go at reporting the situation.

I think that the CN and other results that are so way off the curve that other nations and territories are reporting are complete fiction and dangerous fiction at that.

<comment><USER8> Agreed, there's basically no current evidence to suggest it was engineered, and plenty of evidence to suggest it was zoonotic and evolved naturally. One possibility that can't be totally ruled out is that maybe this was one of many viruses collected from local animals which their virology lab had stored for current or future study, and some kind of mistake led to it escaping, perhaps through an employee unknowingly getting infected or taking home something with a contaminated surface.

edit: Rewrote everything below here to make my probability beliefs more clear.

I think it's extremely likely to be zoonotic and not spread by anyone intentionally. As for the chance it was an unintentional lab escape, it's difficult to assess what the probability of that may be.

I don't think you can just simply assume "virology lab in proximity = likely source of outbreak" without looking at a lot of other factors. Wuhan is a massive city and economic hub, a lot bigger than NYC and the surrounding area. From what I've heard, there's basically every kind of facility and institute one could imagine there.

It could be a coincidence that the lab was there due to the size, density, and economic importance of the area.

Or maybe the lab could've been established there because they knew the area was biologically diverse and close to many species of animals carrying viruses which could jump to humans, and that such animals were commonly hunted and sold for food there. If that's true, then it would be a confounding variable, and one would expect outbreaks to be more likely to occur near the lab regardless of whether they originated in the lab.

There appear to be other potentially credible pieces of evidence which may support the lab escape hypothesis, but I think the whole case needs to be analyzed very robustly and carefully, with all of the possible priors and evidence taken into account.

<comment><USER9> I don't see any evidence to suggest the virus was engineered or released deliberately. why would you deliberately release a bioweapon in a densely populated part of your own country? doesn't make sense.

the lab in wuhan is not just any virology lab though; it's one of only two biosafety level 4 labs in all of china and samples of similar coronaviruses are held and studied there. it may very well be a coincidence; improbable things happen all the time in a world of ~8 billion people. it would be a pretty big one though.

<comment><USER10> So I'm definitely not advocating the lab theory overall, and even if it did come from a lab it could have escaped rather than been deliberately released...but to answer your question, China does/did have problems with A) an aging population, B) a male heavy population, and C) Hong Kong streets full of protesters. This virus "helps" with all of those.

<comment><USER11> Bioweapons are crappy precisely because of what's happening now. A good weapon discriminates, and lets you kill exactly who you want. By that measure, a virus is about as hamfisted as you can get. Besides, why unleash a pandemic on the whole world when you can just do what China normally does and use conventional military power instead? It's cheaper and easier to get some men in boots with guns to stop a protest than it is to unleash a worldwide pandemic that might last for years or longer.

<comment><USER10> This virus disproportionately impacts the elderly, and males. That was the whole point of my comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hi guys,

As a Chinese living in US. Please be mindful that a lot of people do not distinguish China the government, and the Chinese people, living in or outside of China mainland.

This type of news, are of course worth discussion.

But meanwhile, please refrain from politicizing beyond the facts. Think about not letting what a few political figures have started, i.e., politicizing the event without considering the impact, into actual hate crimes targeted at minority groups.

Thanks!

<comment> abc-xyz Foreigners all over the world are likely to be targeted as long as they stand out. For instance, in China, Africans are being kicked out of their homes and forced to sleep on the street (because no hotel/apartment will accept them), countless stores, including a McDonald's restaurant, are refusing to serve foreigners (blacks are in particular targeted).

Please be mindful that it's not just Chinese or Asians being targeted, and that the racism foreigners are experiencing in China right now is far worse than what the Chinese are experiencing elsewhere.

<comment><USER13> Here is what the parent post refers to:

[http://shanghaiist.com/2020/04/13/even-mcdonalds-is-now- turn...](http://shanghaiist.com/2020/04/13/even-mcdonalds-is-now-turning-away- black-customers-in-guangzhou/)

If we're to shift the conversation towards hate crimes targeted at minority groups, I think it's fair to consider hate crimes perpetrated by government mentioned in the article, crimes which are perpetrated for much the same reasons as the suppression of coronavirus research.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In lieu of evidence that the "wet market" story is true, the accidental lab release is pretty compelling. Interesting to see how people react to it though - as though the idea is outlandish that a laboratory working with pathogens from actual bats could mishandle things. Is there even any evidence people ate bats at the wet market?

<comment><USER15> So...evidence?

Stating it's compelling isn't evidence, just that it is an explanation that appeals to large populations of our species who are hold certain suspicions.

There is, however, a long history of animal to human transmission of diseases.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I have yet to see anyone provide evidence, only twitter rumors, and twitter rumors aren't even regular evidence.

<comment><USER16> Why is China reopening the wet markets if they know the virus came from there? I will let you ponder on that.

<comment><USER17> Because viruses jumping between species is a rare event? People didn't stop raising pigs after the swine flu, despite knowing the virus came from there.

<comment><USER16> The timing is unfortunate however. The pandemic is NOT being us. The global economy is still actively being destroyed (including China's) and the CCP's first thought is to re-open the wet markets as soon as possible? In what world does that even make sense?

<comment><USER17> I don't understand what you think keeping the wet market closed accomplishes. There isn't a significant threat that you could get coronavirus from another animal, and the host of other areas where a virus could pass between species weren't ever shut down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The the American leadership constantly calling it by the region name you can understand why an authoritarian regime would want to control discussion of the origins by experts. The risk is of their research being weaponized by said demagogues.

<comment><USER19> Bill Maher has an amusing monologue on that topic [1]. I don't think it is wrong to call it the Wuhan virus, and if the Chinese don't want the bad publicity associated with the virus, they should do something about these wet markets.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEfDwc2G2_8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEfDwc2G2_8)

<comment><USER20> On the other hand we did not call the "Swine Flu" the "North American flu"

<comment><USER21> It's called Mexican flu in Dutch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm trying to be a good bayesian reasoner here but the particulars of this specific case are all so tangled and piecemeal. The conspiracy theorists among us are having an absolute field day with the current events and it's easy to see why.

According to my bayesian analysis, I believe that the most likely cause of this virus is a wet-market infection, followed by a slip-up at a lab, with—by high margin, in very very last place at, say, 1% probability, that this was concocted by a nefarious player (the CCP being a favorite candidate). The conspiracy theorists (my Facebook friends especially) seem to rank the likelihood of this list in reverse (i.e. clearly this was concocted by the chinese government). With how secretive and disingenuous the CCP is even on a good day, it's easy to see why their argument has a few credence points (like any good conspiracy).

But I can't reconcile that there's not much for the CCP to gain on the world stage by releasing this thing. The US was already so politically tumultuous, and the 2016 Russian disinformation campaign was _so_ much more effective at breaking our democracy apart, with the added benefit of not sending our economy into a global recession as a byproduct. What has the CCP gained here? Xi's power as a leader has only weakened, and their position as the world's factory is now only slipping faster.

So this is kind of like 9/11 to me. The people who would be the most likely to profiteer off a tragedy like this would have not in any capacity been able to pull it off, and the ones who are powerful or otherwise sophisticated enough to pull it off don't have much incentive to anyways. So that's why bayesian reasoning leads me to believe that yes, we know these viruses jump from animals to humans from time to time, and this seems to likely be one of those instances. What am I missing?

<comment><USER23> The only reason I can possibly fathom as to why it would be nefarious would be trade. And that's a stretch.

<comment><USER22> I'm totally willing to entertain that argument, but their exports have suffered tremendously and any forecasters could have predicted that a global slowdown would hurt such an interconnected country like China the most. So I am just unable to connect the dots here as to what the conspiracy theorists think the motive is.

Conspiracy theories that end up actually being true generally have one thing in common: they have wide consensus as to what the actual facts of the case really are. You could sort of make this argument for the conspiracy that Jeffrey Epstein's death was not a suicide but rather a cover up. In that theory, most theorists posit that high powered individuals whom Epstein had dirt on arranged to have him killed before he could get to trial and expose them. That's actually not a completely crazy theory, in the realm of how crazy some conspiracies really get.

Whereas, the 9/11 truthers cannot internally reconcile why the US government may have flown our own planes into the trade towers. No good singular theory emerges probably because not one exists. And of the theories that are floated, they all end up being conflicting and self-cancelling. I think time will prove that the same is true for COVID19.

<comment><USER23> I agree with you, just pointing out the only thing I could come up with. Great comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Now things are starting to settle down, everyone can get back to being their usual selves, whether it is a totalatarian surveillance state or a conspiracy theorist.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is basically the end game for China. Either they buy off everything while their economy is still running, or they face isolation. They fd us all way too hard this time

<comment><USER26> People want cheap goods. They don't care if their Nike shoes come from a slaveshop, just like we don't really give much thought that most of the milk we drink come from cows in very miserable conditions.

It's business as usual for China. As long as they keep on making those affordable goods, other countries will consume.

If Apple moves off their entire production from China to US, and still is competitive, then I'll be a believer.

<comment><USER25> It is not about ethics, it is about risk

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Because academic research can't be rushed. One of the requirements for an advanced degree is publishing papers, and if coronavirus related can easily bring attention and get the paper published, students would try taking the fast track. This is not good for research in general.

There was a huge debate back in late Jan. early Feb. on Chinese social network about a paper didn't get peer-reviewed spreading all over places with misinformation. Hence the Fudan University post in Chinese was to tighten the publish review, and nothing about delaying the research.

This guardian news only showed the story without context, which is pretty misleading.

<comment><USER28> You don't "tighten the publish review" by submitting the research papers to government body for approval.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Combined with the researcher at the lab that was disappeared this is pretty convincing.

<comment> abc-xyz Her name was Huang Yan Ling (黄燕玲) for anyone who might be interested in learning more about the potential patient 0. The evidence is very compelling and this video does a good job at presenting it: [https://youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU](https://youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Tinfoil hat: I'm not keeping active track, but I passively perceived a sheer drop in mentions of the fact that Wuhan has China's first "biosafety level 4" laboratory, coinciding with an increased lambasting of the US's handling of their infections in the general media (" _The Wuhan virus is now the American virus_ "), along with a streak of random US-critical posts (" _What is the worst thing the US government has done?_ ") being massively updated on Reddit (which has a major investment from Tencent.)

This is from the country which forces foreign companies to remove flags of countries it likes to bully (Taiwan, Japan) from their products. It's not inconceivable that they are filtering the narrative about themselves in something actually serious, such as this pandemic.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology#Co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology#Concerns_as_source)

<comment><USER31> I'm not so sure I buy the Reddit controlled by CCP (or heavily influenced) argument. Simply because in /r/China, /r/ChineseLanguage, and /r/HongKong I see frequent posts that are highly critical of the CCP and China in general. They have many upvotes and it doesn't look like people are being banned or posts are being removed. It is nowhere like /r/Sino.

I'm not trying to defend the CCP here, but just trying to say that maybe Reddit isn't a CCP propaganda weapon. I'm sure there's some influence, but I see these arguments go quite far.

<comment><USER32> I've seen way more wumao type posts in subs like r/worldnews, where typical readers are much less knowledgeable about China.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Ironically in censorsed domains, the absence of information is a very clear indicator of truth. It happens everywhere - there are many true things you are not allowed to post on the internet.

You know the old saying, "Just because you read it on the internet, doesn't mean it's true"? Consider the inverse: Just because you haven't read it on the internet, doesn't mean it's not true.

<comment><USER34> Same thing happening now with Hydroxychloroquine.

Lots of interesting articles on how it might help. Media decides it's a political football. No more articles

<comment><USER35> Your "lots of interesting articles" were what made it a political football. Before it was picked up by the right-wing propaganda network there was one obviously flawed study and some fringe non-experts promoting it to people anxious for a cure, followed by a bunch of actual experts urging caution.

<comment><USER35> For the people who might not have followed this closely, here's a history of the spread:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/13/how- false...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/13/how-false-hope- spread-about-hydroxychloroquine-its-consequences/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> They are afraid where it will lead to.

</comment><comment><USER17> Given the response articles saying it would be possible to engineer the virus have caused, this doesn't seem that extreme. The "origin" of the virus has become a political issue that fringe extremists in many countries are using to attack other countries.

</comment><comment><USER37> They have been very successfully control who. With the same technique controlling access, we might never know and any whistleblower ... china not open up and free, we are playing Russian or shall we say china lottery. With humanity fate.

No freedom of press and academic research and human rights, china pose a danger to humanity. And regards to they might kill themselves, noticed that they have kill 30m+ in Great Leap Forward. Not even one Memorial Or Day is in. How many 30m we have outside china.

Wuhan virus is the 2nd wake up call. Hard to wake up people who pretend to sleep. I would try again WakeUp.

</comment><comment><USER38> My favorite theory is that the Wuhan virus lab created the virus and used bats in experiments. One bat escaped and infected other bats that eventually ended up on the wet market in Wuhan. Edit: a more plausible theory is that one researcher got bitten by an infected bat and chose to hide this fact.

<comment><USER2> My understanding is that nobody has found signs of that in the sequenced genome. By all accounts the jump to humans appears to have been natrual.

<comment><USER5> It's also "natural" to take your mare over to the prize stallion to get impregnated. Humans can control all the conditions around the "natural" process.</comment></comment></comment>