Toward the Discovery of Citation Cartels in Citation Networks - <AUTHOR> http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fphy.2016.00049/full <comment><USER2> As someone with a hardly any interest in this problem it seems to me that this isn't a great paper.

To discuss this without mentioning the multiple downloadable citation networks or any mention of basic graph analysis techniques (centrality measures or graph cut counts seem relevant here) seems a pretty big oversight.

The did mention doping in cycling through.

<comment><USER2> To make it clear to the person who didn't understand this already: bibliometrics is a special case of graph theory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > Additionally, every year, many more researchers join the scientific > community (e.g., scientists from China and India).

Thanks, guys from Slovenia

<comment><USER4> Yeah, that phrase serves zero actual purpose. That, combined with the sloppy language in the rest of the paper makes me doubt the scientific detachment of these people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You also find the same problem on link sharing services (like this one) in that they're extremely easy to game. I have yet to see a paper that proposes a good solution for that kind of thing.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a problem that Google has largely solved. Its original PageRank algorithm was prone to citation networks inflating the value of a page. Nowadays, link farms have lost much of their power.</comment>


Wunderground.com sold to The Weather Channel Companies  - <AUTHOR> http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2143 <comment><USER2> That is really unfortunate. Weather Underground actually has the weather, the Weather Channel on the other hand is just crap.

Obviously this is another "acquisition" that is intended solely and transparently at eliminating an agile competitor who makes a better product.

<comment><USER3> I don't know... I think I'm "and nothing of value was lost" on this one. Weather underground is spammy and terrible just like all the others.

Anyone know if there is a <http://time.is> for weather? Or someplace where I can easily see weather conditions on a driving route? Really just anyplace that has thought for more than half a second about the kind of weather info people want and how to present it? I mean this is simple shit.

<comment> s-phi-nl For something dead simple, there's <http://goingtorain.com/>

<comment><USER4> Similar for the UK, is <http://www.raintoday.co.uk/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is interesting. I think it's a good fit from a business model perspective (both are ad-driven, albeit TWC more so), but the fan bases are very different. The geeks at Wunderground are already crying foul ("YOU ARE GOING TO DESTROY WXUG!") and the typical fan of The Weather Channel is probably wondering why everyone is talking about weather happening underground all of a sudden. Also, Wundergrounders trust the lack of hype/sensationalism from Wunderground, but the same is never said about TWC.

Does anyone want to venture a guess as to _why_ TWC would bother to acquire Wunderground?

<comment><USER6> >the typical fan of The Weather Channel is probably wondering why everyone is talking about weather happening underground all of a sudden.

Or radical leftists:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground>

<comment><USER7> It's worth noting that's not coincidental: both came out of the University of Michigan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow. I am crestfallen. Loved the service for years and have been a paying member for a while.

Weather underground did a great job of making historical and trending weather information available. They do a great job of supporting local weather blogs, too.

I wonder how long until the "integration" occurs and it is just a memory.

</comment><comment><USER9> That's too bad. I always liked the raw radar imagery. (OK, not really raw, but the same images that real forecasters get.) The Weather Channel is too mainstream; all their imagery is editorialized and dumbed down for an audience that just wants to know if it's going to rain today.

I guess I will have to write a quick perl script to generate my own images now.

<comment><USER10> >The Weather Channel is too mainstream; all their imagery is editorialized and dumbed down for an audience that just wants to know if it's going to rain today.

Not to mention that their forecasts are presented in a way that is statistically incoherent. Look at their hourly forecasts, then click to break down by 15 minute intervals. It is common to see things like "rain during 2:00-3:00 = 30%", and then also have something like 50% during one of the 15 minute intervals within that time range. I have yet to come up with a hypothesis for what those percentages could mean, and have that scenario be possible.

<comment><USER11> 30% chance of rain actually means 30% of the area is projected to have rain covering it rather than there being a 30% chance you will be rained on.

An unlikely, but theoretically possible way to get 50% inside of 15 minute interval but 20% over an hour would be if the model prodicted very widespread rain in a band moving over an area and time weighted the percentage.

<comment><USER12> > 30% chance of rain actually means 30% of the area is projected to have rain > covering it

Common misconception. The Chance of precipitation is actually stating that historically, given these conditions x% of days produced precipitation. It is a statement of the odds that it will rain at all.

[http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/854/what-does-it- me...](http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/854/what-does-it-mean-when-x- percent-chance-of-rain-is-predicted)

<comment><USER11> That site you provide (or cite) is the only one I can find that describes it that way. Every other source describes the otherway which I still think is correct:

NOAA: <http://www.srh.noaa.gov/ffc/?n=pop>

[http://www.usatoday.com/weather/resources/askjack/wadefine.h...](http://www.usatoday.com/weather/resources/askjack/wadefine.htm)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_of_precipitation>

<comment><USER12> Even those links state the PoP is a measure of the chance that it will happen at all. That is the historical measurement.

<comment><USER11> No, that is the simplified explanation of how the average person should think about it. We are talking about the definition and a possible way to get the odd results the OP mentioned observing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I understand the lament over wunderground.com being sold, but have any of you checked out what the National Weather Service offers? It's been my go-to site for years, is pretty spot on, has no-nonsense text based emergency notifications, makes it easy to hop over to hydrographic data, and a bunch of other things.

Today I just happened across this prediction format which is about all I could hope for as well:

[http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=42.62840&lo...](http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=42.62840&lon=-83.0209&unit=0&lg=english&FcstType=graphical)

<comment><USER14> Wow. That's great. I may use that from now on.

Graphs are much more convenient for answering "when today will it probably rain"? And all the other graphs provide really nice context.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I imagine they bought wunderground for the Personal Weather Stations. They have thousands of people sending them data in real time from their personal weather stations.

I bet if someone were to quickly make an equivalent API that collected all this data from these users and presented it in a similar fashion, they'd draw a lot of those PWS contributors away from NBC/Weather Channel.

<comment><USER16> Didn't this happen with Escient CDDB and FreeDB? You can't assume the community will keep providing you data when there's a plug-in replacement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> For those looking for an alternative: <http://weatherspark.com/#>

<comment><USER18> Indeed. To the scientifically-minded, I find their graph-based model many times easier to read and more thorough than any other source, wunderground included.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Well, after trying out stormpulse, wunderground seems kind of, well, less interesting.

<comment><USER5> Well, thanks! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> According to the announcement, the acquisition will "make both wunderground.com and weather.com stronger," so Wunderground fans have nothing to worry about. Right? :-(

</comment><comment><USER21> The Weather Channel has been going through a lot of restructuring and making big improvements over the past 3 years. Knowing Jeff Masters and his passion for the Weather Underground format, I do believe this has more to do with The WxChannel leveraging Wunderground.com's treasure trove of data, including personal weather stations. Also, Jeff's Tropical Update blogs and others truly are are high-quality content that will help the general public's (weather.com's audience) understanding of severe storms. Weather Underground was kind enough to point its users to our recently-retired <http://www.onestorm.org/> for hurricane planning.

</comment><comment><USER22> Can anybody explain what Wunderground and TWC offer above the NWS? They're both just calling the NWS API and wrapping it in ads, right? Do either of them do any kind of additional analysis or processing to make the forecasts more accurate? The few times I've checked they're always been mirroring the weather.gov data. The government is known for being clunky, but I've always thought they did a pretty good job here [1], though I did like their old layout a little better.

[1] [http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?textField1=40.01498...](http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?textField1=40.0149856&textField2=-105.27054559999999)

<comment><USER23> Weather Underground did gather data from a variety of sources (<http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/index.asp>) and displayed more fine grain results that the "regular" person who cares about weather would never look at.

I have Weather Underground, The Weather Network and the default Apple Weather app (which pulls from Yahoo I believe) and I always found Weather Underground to be more accurate on both a large scale and in their hourly reports.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> On the topic of weather sites: I really prefer <http://yr.no> website lately. (Don't be fooled by .no, it's based in Norway, but they cover the whole world)

My inner geek likes the most the hour-by-hour weather graphs: [http://www.yr.no/place/Czech_Republic/Prague/Prague/hour_by_...](http://www.yr.no/place/Czech_Republic/Prague/Prague/hour_by_hour.html) \- and the statistics page - [http://www.yr.no/place/Czech_Republic/Prague/Prague/statisti...](http://www.yr.no/place/Czech_Republic/Prague/Prague/statistics.html)

<comment><USER25> When I found Yr.no a few months ago I liked it, but it only is a forecast -- at least for a US location -- and I need current conditions as well!

<comment><USER24> Oh, that's true, I haven't actully noticed it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> As a PWS (Personal Weather Station) contributor (KORTALEN1) to wunderground for many years, this concerns me. I live in Rural Oregon and the local PWS's provide a much needed micro look at local weather. Plus, I rely on wunderground's great radar presentation and access to the local Scientific Forecaster discussion. I worry that this kind of detailed scientific data and analysis will start to be lost in the inevitable dumbing down that will come.

</comment><comment><USER27> I run my own niche weather site <http://www.climbingweather.com> that focuses on weather for climbing areas in the United States. It's not full-featured like Weather Underground, but I've often wondered if it would be worth my time to generalize it for a larger audience. This story somewhat inspires me to give it a shot.

<comment><USER5> If you ever want to talk about bootstrapping a weather startup, shoot me a line.

<comment><USER28> Both of you gents are doing some neat things with the weather. We also do some ski centric forecasting @ <http://www.famousinternetskiers.com/weather/>

<comment><USER29> I'm a mountaineer and never knew of these sites. Absolutely thrilled to see them on HN. Also, I'd pay for a user friendly data centric weather app focused on ski, climb, and outdoor activity weather reporting. I've been using nws.noaa.gov and weather.unisys.com for years and the UI is lacking. Just installed the free climbingweather.com app!!

<comment><USER27> Nice! Thanks for downloading the app! My next front burner project involves another niche weather site but focused on outdoors more generally. The outdoor climbing community is relatively small, so although I get decent traffic to the site, I'd like to do something a bit larger.

I'm also working on a Python library that interfaces with the national weather service for daily and hourly forecasts. It's about 95% done, although that last 5% can be tough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I definitely hope that the site continues on as it is, I love the sheer amount of data that's available.

<comment><USER31> Weather.gov also does a nice job.

They even have modern stuff like short urls:

<http://weather.gov/20500>

<comment><USER12> The only thing they're missing is something like Weather Undergrounds easy radar map.

That provided XML for the forecast might come in handy for something I was going to do though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I hope they carry over the WunderMap. Of all the radars I've browsed, theirs is definitely the quickest, and has all sorts of layers to customize it with. (As well as a multitude of station readings.)

It looks like they'll be keeping the Wunderground site as-is, but I've learned from past experiences that those kinds of statements don't hold up too well down the road ..

</comment><comment><USER33> Greatest feature of wunder is access to local station streams like this

<http://weather.barryt.org/wdl/index.html> <http://weather.barryt.org/>

Just some guy that loves weather.

</comment><comment><USER34> It's interesting to compare the almost-unanimous condemnation of this sale with that of other HN articles about acquisitions. Not even one 'attaboy, Jeff' comment for the founder cashing out?

I wonder what the response would have been if the buyer was Google, not TWC.

</comment><comment><USER35> wow: If you're using HTTPS Everywhere please disable it for GoogleMaps since it makes the authorization request fail. Tools Menu -> Add Ons -> Extensions -> HTTPS Everywhere -> Options -> Search for 'GoogleMaps' -> Click on the green check mark to turn it into a red x.

It's too bad I can't use their service with HTTPS everywhere, but awesome that it's a user experience they considered.

</comment><comment><USER36> I hope they keep the ad-free subscription model. I've been a paying member for years. Browsing weather ad-free is such a relief.

</comment><comment><USER37> There's an opportunity out there for someone to make a weather site with a stripped down interface.

<comment><USER38> I've a feeling Joel Spolsky's comment on the 80/20 rule applies to weather sites: "80% of the people use 20% of the features. [...] Unfortunately, it's never the same 20%."

<comment><USER39> With weather it should be pretty simple. Temp and odds of precipitation are the two biggies. Have nice radar/sat images/loops easily accessible. Put the other stuff farther down.

<comment><USER5> Yep. Where it gets complicated is when the situation changes and storms erupt. Then what?

<comment><USER39> That's where the good radar/sat stuff comes in. Wunderground does a good job at this, their stuff is very customizable. Lately I have been digging the Dark Sky app, weather at its most simple. It tackles very short term forecasts with specificity (it's going to rain in 8 minutes). I live in Florida so I know it's going to be hot, the only question for me is rain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I really hope they keep the wunderground telnet server running. I find that thing invaluable.

</comment><comment><USER41> Oh shit. Good for Wunderground, bad for me. I can't _stand_ weather.com

</comment><comment><USER42> weather channel bought weatherbonk.com a few years ago, then shut it down. hope this doesn't happen to wunderground.

</comment><comment><USER43> Wunderground just repackages National Weather Service data. If you can forgive the 90s design, weather.gov is perfect.

<comment><USER25> Just replaced today* with a new design: <http://weather.gov/redesign>

* After being in preview for a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I can't believe they sold out, I thought they were underground!

</comment><comment><USER45> Nooh, now only big weather will tell us our meteorological future. First ObamaCare and now this. This country has lost its way.</comment>


Ask YC: The Value of a Degree. - <AUTHOR>

I'm currently an Electrical Computer Engineering. I've worked in the Dilbert environment and I won't do it again, I do freelance web development on the side, and I was wondering if it was still beneficial to get a degree if I don't ever plan on working for 'the man' again. I keep hearing that I'll shut out opportunities, but to me it seems that they are opportunities that I wouldn't want anyway.  Thoughts? <comment><USER2> I have a fairly new (2 years) computer science degree, from what I feel is a very good program. Even in this program, some courses were definitely more valuable than others.

Not long past the point where it was too late to change majors, something astounded me. I discovered a pattern to the valuable courses. It was as follows:

The most valuable high-level courses were the theoretical computer science courses (the foundations of CS series, AI stuff, the sort of thing where you're asked, "How would you solve this problem?"). The most valuable low- level courses were the concrete courses in things other than computer science (mostly math and physics; to a lesser extent, various engineering disciplines). If you think about it, this actually makes sense: the courses about solving problems, following the courses that give you the tools to do that.

If you think about it, there's a good reason for this: Low level courses exist to provide a foundation for more advanced courses. This means that they are not designed for people who already intuitively understand their subject matter. If you already know C, Java, and two or three other languages like Pascal, you can learn Perl, Prolog, and Scheme on your own -- you don't need a professor to teach them to you (though it might help to have someone get you to use macros). You just need to understand that language's "thing" (punctuation, assertions/derivations, first-class functions/closures/continuations) and then it will almost learn itself. If you already know how to build a pointer-based binary tree, you don't need a course to tell you how to build a radix tree, or a red-black tree, or a trie.

On the other hand, the low level courses in other disciplines are designed for people who don't already intuitively understand that area. That makes them perfect for you.

Unfortunately, most universities do try to curtail the obvious solution by enforcing prerequisite courses. This makes little sense from a teaching perspective, but it makes perfect sense from a "raising the average GPA of their students" perspective.

Almost anywhere you go, you'll find the ability to game the system somehow -- be it alternate prerequisites, testing out of things, or taking a minor in CS instead of a major. You need to be able to game the system to an extent. Yet, that's a valuable skill in itself. Just optimize what you're trying to learn, not the best way to get that piece of paper.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have no degree. I have worked for tiny startups, small businesses, Yahoo, the IRS Modernization Project, Big Co Consulting companies, with degree-heavy dev teams and with multi-talented cowboy hackers. I never planned on taking the man's money either. But I go where there is interesting work. There is a pay discount _wherever_ you go and are not a founder. I have ten years' experience but usually not the same pay as someone with 10 + bachelor's, or even 5 + master's.

Often, I have lacked the theory, the mathematics and the discipline of creating and analyzing algorithms. It is a big hole that takes years to become aware of.

Another hard-to-see hole is what you take for granted in college or a tech- heavy city: where else are you going to meet other people with the same interests, work on problems with them, have late-night bull sessions, etc?

So now that I live a few train stops from Berkeley I am taking some of the harder courses that people have said are worthwhile.

Take the good stuff. Meet people. Stay loose. Follow the interesting problems. But take neither the pros or cons of college too seriously. You are choosing the general heading of a ship, not choosing a single set of tracks.

<comment><USER4> A question for you from a graduating college senior who's trying to decide between grad school and work: Do programming work get boring in a business- setting?

I am trying to decide whether I should go to grad school or to work. My experiences at the so-called "tech-heavy" cities and companies is that the "smart people and high-tech" is all hype. Maybe my experiences are just too biased, but do people at the Valley really push the envelope, or do they just do the same Java/PHP/Ruby stuff that high school students could do, and put a Web 2.0 stamp on it.

<comment><USER3> Business work is usually boring compared to self-directed work. The reason is simple: established companies want predictable returns on investment. There is little chance you and two friends will stop working on that internal reporting app and go into VOIP, to loud applause from your boss. That is not your job.

The same applies to grad school, btw -- you are a paid research assistant, not a freebird. But the problems can sometimes be cooler.

But it's a continuum and part of being happy is being humble and learning where you fit. I know many happy people at Yahoo who do cool new things. Others are chair-warmers. A large number are genuinely interested the thankless task of supporting hundreds of millions of users and petabytes of data, every damned day. Those people are the salt of the earth, and I salute them.

As for the second part: There is a sampling problem when you say things such as "all hype" or "people in the Valley do/are X".

If you poke your nose into 20 companies, Valley or no, you will find overwhelming crap. 90% of everything is crap. But you do not experience the world as an average. The trick is to find the 10% that are not crap, and the 1% within those who are really good, and see if you can hang with them.

In every field there are people who are so awful they don't know it. There are the elites. There is a large field of the mediocre who ape the elite without deep understanding. Then way out in left field are the crazies who scandalize, confuse --and somtimes inspire-- everybody. Find them all, learn to tell the difference, and find your niche.

<comment><USER4> Thanks. Your advice have been very helpful. What I am gonna take away from this, is that it's not environment that makes the man, because the environment tends to smooth out to the averages, even if the environment is the "high- tech" startup's. One has to make one's own mark and not get too comfortable.

<comment><USER3> No problem, and good luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm a "non-degreed" guy that (IMO) has done ok so far in life.

Unless you're getting a degree in a highly specialized area, I personally think their value diminished over time. Right after graduation a degree is a valuable tool, in theory, that an employer can use to assess your value. When you're 45, your work experience and career accomplishments will/should outweigh any degree(s) you might hold. Of course, this is as related to tech- type jobs.

I sort of see this "slider" concept for measuring the value of a degree, as it related to most of the things relevant to what we discuss here. The more entrepreneurial and hard-working you are, the less value a degree holds vs. real-time hands-on work experience. The more you want to rely on a steady paycheck in a cube-farm, the more you should thing about getting that diploma.

Some of the top wealth-holders in business and technology have no college degree (Slim, Gates, Ellison, Allen, Dell). Not to mention many more "mid- level" types who have done better than their peers, on-average, by virtue of hard-work and logical thinking.

In your specific case, I would politely say that I question the potential for "freelance web development" to yield an ongoing income stream of appreciable value. My guess though is that you plan to augment or enhance those skills and continue moving forward. In which case it makes sense to start devoting as much of your time as possible to that venture.

<comment><AUTHOR> "In your specific case, I would politely say that I question the potential for "freelance web development" to yield an ongoing income stream of appreciable value. " \--Certainly, I am currently working on developing two internet based products and building my skills in other areas as well; working for other people on a salaried basis won't appreciate too well either (such is my understanding)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I tried to tutor Computer Science while I was an undergraduate. My clients were always people who would call me around finals time and ask me to help them cram. There were seniors who simply could not write computer programs-- some might have a vague notion of what a loop is, but not enough to actually write a (trivial) program using one. I often had to stop the tutoring sessions, because I simply could not help them without just doing the homework myself.

I watched many of those people graduate with B.S. degrees in Computer Science from my university. If I ever need to hire a developer, I will actively avoid anybody that graduated from my own university. Once I realized that, I quit.

Having said that, some places have rules that won't allow them to hire you without a degree. If you want to work for these kinds of places, you need the degree. However, I think that a degree requirement is a good indicator of a bad place to work.

<comment><AUTHOR> What are you doing now? What (if any) problems have you run into? I certainly realize your frustration.

<comment><USER6> I used my tuition money to live overseas for a year, and I just got back. I haven't really run into any problems yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you love what you do you will rarely find someone that can compete with you. That being said I am a non-degreed programmer of 14 years experience. Having researched this topic many times I believe Michael Spence has cornered why and how a degree is useful: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Spence>

To summarize a degree or certification is a signal of private information from an agent to a principal. Nothing more, nothing less. If you can replace that signal with another kind of signal (ie experience/references/monument made in your name) you don't need it.

<comment><USER8> I would add something to why a degree is useful: A degree forces you to learn things that you would otherwise not learn. I hate stats, but I had to learn stats. It has surprisingly proved useful in my work from time to time. The same follows with about 100 other things I was forced to learn, and that have popped up. Usually they are relatively obscure topics you have no interest in and avoid, but occasionally they are whole subjects that you just dislike.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I consider my CS degree quite valuable to myself, and it has opened a lot of doors for me. Now obviously, not everyone needs a degree; and not everyone with a degree is good. But from personal experience, it was well worth the time, money and effort to get a degree. I went to a school that is heavy on the math and algorithm side of CS, which was quite useful.

If you have already started a degree, I would consider that another motivating factor to continue, you are already pot committed (if you know poker terms).

</comment><comment><USER9> If you are not based in the USA and want to work in the USA, having a degree solves a number of visa issues. The same goes for people in the USA who would like to work overseas at some point. I've spent time working in Australia and Japan and don't think I could have legally done so without having a degree.

That said, I left university as a junior to work on my first startup and after four years of working went back for a year to finish up my degree(s).

</comment><comment><USER10> Take some courses about hard things you want/need to learn and don't worry about the degree.</comment>


Second Unexplained [Coronavirus] Case Found in California, Santa Clara County - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/28/world/coronavirus-update.html <comment><USER2> If the virus can survive in an object for 9 days, the patient zero will never be found. Can live in the other coin of the planet.

And as we did not test normally all people for common colds, the virus could be spreading around, much before the chinese discovered it. It acts like a crypto species. Maybe we would find a surprise if we start screening for antibodies in a sample of people.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe the HN title should also have "Coronavirus" somewhere in it.</comment>


Female coders are rated more highly than men, when nobody knows they're women - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/615899/female-coders-are-rated-more-highly-than-men-except-when-people-know-theyre-women/ <comment><USER2> Rehash of this previous submission: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074587](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074587)

The drop in pull request acceptance from gender-neutral to gendered is worse for men than for women. (Figure 5) Anyone can cherry-pick parts of that preprint to support their argument.

<comment><USER3> Apart from that it isn't. As Figure 5 shows. But ok..

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is why I do not believe people when they say "I hire people solely on the basis of ability" as an argument against making any efforts towards equality or equal representation.

I don't think (many) people are willfully biased, but every study bears out that bias exists. Make selection blind to race, sex, etc., and the results are different. Orchestras switched to blind interviews and hiring profiles changed dramatically. Suddenly females and minorities were rated higher and got more job offers.

Its sad, but true, that we have this unconscious bias and we need to fix it. I don't discount the conscious biases that clearly exist, I'm just saying a claim of "I'm not biased, my hiring is fair" needs to be backed up with data, not assertions.

<comment><USER5> I guess that's why, in youth orchestra contests, the judges sit behind a barrier when auditioning and making their notes.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The results seem reasonable to me: with 90-95% of coders being male, that means that this group has probably a wide distribution curve in terms of skills. The group of female coders probably has a narrower curve and likely skewed towards "good" (i.e. gifted and truly passionate about coding).

<comment><USER6> That is exactly what their study concludes:

"One explanation is survivorship bias: [...] Another explanation is self- selection bias: [...] Yet another explanation is that women are held to higher performance standards than men [...]"

Or in other words: Women who stay long enough to end up submitting PRs submit higher quality code, while the much bigger population of men, under much less social pressure, has a more well-distributed quality curve; and even women who get this far are biased against if their gender is known.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've had one female coder tell me she's picked gender-ambiguous names and doesn't show her pic online for this reason. Only once she's proven her ability does she reveal her gender.

</comment><comment><USER8> From Kon_air in the other discussion thread.

And then you discover in Questions Section; "Our analysis (not in this paper -- we've cut a lot out to keep it crisp) shows that women are harder on other women than they are on men. Men are harder on other men than they are on women." [https://peerj.com/questions/2002-do-you-have-data-on-the- gen...](https://peerj.com/questions/2002-do-you-have-data-on-the-gen..).

</comment><comment><USER9> The research paper is here if anyone is interested: [https://peerj.com/preprints/1733.pdf](https://peerj.com/preprints/1733.pdf)</comment>


World's first earbuds you will Never have to take off to listen to someone... - <AUTHOR> http://www.quirky.com/ideations/263928

<comment><USER2> Though I like the idea, I think this is a bit of over engineering.

How will the earphone decide what the outside sounds to adjust too? Does it need a microphone? Why not just design the earplug so that it allows outside noise in when appropriate (ignoring the fact that we don't know how to tell which of those noises is appropriate).

If you're going to pursue this, and have figured out how to define which noises to let in and which not to, might I suggest that you use the microphone for noise cancelling? Then you ignore the noise cancelling when you want to let in outside sounds and turn off the playing sound.

Part of the problem as I see it is that we play our music so loud because we are trying to block out outside sounds. This is the beauty of noise cancelling, everything sounds louder because you aren't trying to overpower the outside sounds.</comment>


Twitter CEO Jack and Rep. Ilhan Omar Talked on Same Day He Met with Trump - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/04/25/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-called-rep-ilhan-omar-after-trumps-tweet-sparked-flood-death-threats/ <comment><USER2> I wonder what he said.

"Something something free speech", probably?

<comment><USER3> None of those people are very bullish for free speech unfortunately.</comment></comment>


New TeX engines compared: LuaTeX, ConTeXt and XeTeX - <AUTHOR> http://tex.stackexchange.com/q/36/213

<comment><USER2> The two biggest differences I noticed when I tried XeTeX was 1) the pdf files were _much_ smaller than from pdflatex, and 2) I couldn't use microtype [1] with XeTeX.

I stuck with pdflatex to use microtype (which is awesome), and use pdfsizeopt [2] to crush the size of my pdfs.

(More details: LuaTeX also makes small pdfs and might be the way to go, but I haven't tried it much. The size advantage over pdflatex depends on the fonts in use. There is apparently microtype support for XeTeX in the works.)

[1] ftp://tug.ctan.org/pub/tex- archive/macros/latex/contrib/microtype/microtype.pdf

[2] <http://code.google.com/p/pdfsizeopt/> and my notes on it: [http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/imurray2/compnotes/latex.html#...](http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/imurray2/compnotes/latex.html#pdfsquish)

</comment><comment><USER3> False presupposition in the title: Context is not a Tex engine, it is a format, either for Pdftex (Context Mk2) or Luatex (either Context Mk4 or Mk2).

<comment><USER4> In the link the top rated comment makes the same observation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have used LaTex to write a few books. I usually use TexShop for OS X which uses XeTex so you get the unicode support, etc. Again, for the Mac, the Aquamacs version of Emacs has goot LaTex support built in, and is a good alternative to TexShop.

<comment><USER6> Your comment sounds like TeXShop only uses XeTeX, which is not true. TeXShop certainly has the option to use XeTeX, along with plain TeX, LaTeX, ConTeXt, and other variants. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If anyone still needs convincing that these are superior to, say, Word: <http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex>

</comment><comment><USER8> <http://www.kergis.com/en/kertex.html> KerTeX is nice and small.

</comment><comment><USER9> Not what I'd call 'New'---these have been around for a while and depending on you needs do quite well. I prefer XeTeX because as one of the answers said, 'fonts just work'.</comment>


The teenage hackers who've been given a second chance - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-46757849 <comment> who-knows95 i did a apprenticeship here before the SOC was set-up, not to bad.</comment>


Why Wikipedia's grammar vigilante is wrong - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/05/why-wikipedias-grammar-vigilante-is-wrong?CMP=fb_gu

<comment><USER2> That's great counter points to the "One Man's Quest to Rid Wikipedia of Exactly One Grammatical Mistake" ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8990903](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8990903)) article.</comment>


From JavaScript to ClojureScript: Which Editor to Choose? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@roman01la/from-javascript-to-clojurescript-which-editor-to-choose-a444b2f8edca#.8vymyhomn <comment><USER2> Ugh atom is so frustrating. It's slow to start up, doesn't like large files, and half the time you try and update an extension it throws about 30 errors.

Sublime text starts up immediately and has a decent backing of extensions too.

I find myself switching more and more to VSCode though, you get the benefits of a extremely rich package list, except this time it actually updates properly. It starts slower than ST but still leaps and bounds ahead if atom, and can handle larger files.t he extensions are also written in JS, like atom.

Then theres nuclide, which builds on top of atom for react apps, but the stupid little "4 updates pending" in the corner is enough to make me move back to ST/VSC.

I still find myself hopping into a JetBrains IDE fairly frequently though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed Atom has problems, but it is still the most popular editor in JavaScript community. I'm using it everyday for almost two years already and I'm happy with it. However that's my personal choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The thing is, every editor has its quirks and none are perfect. In the end you should just choose one that is Good Enough™ and stick with it. Bonus points if it's easily extendable so you can tweak it to your (later) needs in that regard.

</comment><comment><USER4> The best editor to use is the one you already use for everything else.

</comment><comment><USER5> Vim ...

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the downvote random 500+ karma person who takes HN seriously. I like the lack of reasoning you left, as well.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which vitamin supplements do you take? - <AUTHOR> I would be interested in knowing what vitamin supplements you all take and why (Include the brand name).
I currently take:
- Centrum multivitamin - Now foods vitamin D3 (2000IU)
I also just bought the Now foods omega 3 supplement. It smells rancid. I'm probably going to throw it away. Does anyone know of a good, purified brand? (Preferrably something that uses d-gamma and d-delta forms of vitamin E to prevent oxidation/rancidity) <comment><USER2> I've been studying health and exercising with an Olympic trainer for years.

First, nearly all vitamins sold at CVS, Walgreens, Costco, Walmart, etc. are cheaply manufactured. Don't even bother. These are also the vitamins pharmaceutical companies study when they wish to discredit the healthfulness of vitamins in general.

Next, health requires diet, exercise, and supplementation for nutrients that can't easily be found in our modern food supply. Supplements alone won't do it.

That said, the best quality supplement companies I'm aware of are (in descending order for price and quality) Wellness Resources, the Life Extension Foundation, and Vitacost. Prepare yourself for sticker shock. The best protein supplements I know of (fermented or sprouted brown rice base, no animal or soy sources) are from SunWarrior and Boku Superfood.

The supplements I use are mostly plants, and include chlorella, spirulina, tumeric + black pepper, CoQ10, resveratrol, and LEF's Mix Tab vitamins (9 per day; a wide range of things are included.)

I also include flax oil, maca root, and pure chocolate directly in meals, along with an abundance of colorful fruits and vegetables, nuts, and occasional good quality meats.

Previous comments on supplements and diet:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007392>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=829701>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=726914>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=585575>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516538>

<comment><USER3> What is the difference in the "cheap" supplements and the ones you recommend? Cheaply manufactured doesn't imply that they are bad/worse.

<comment><USER2> There are a thousand low level details in the answer to this question; I'll try to cover some of the basics.

A high end vitamin tries very hard to package nutrients from actual food sources (i.e. extracts and concentrations of something you would really eat) instead of just cramming in raw materials. This tends to mean that the bioavailability (i.e. how much you actually absorb instead of just pass through) is much better. For example, sourcing calcium from ground up oyster shells provides plenty of the mineral, but the absorption rate is terrible. Much research goes into finding the best bioavailable forms.

In general, the ingredients are significantly better quality. Packaging B12 as cyanocobalamin may cost 1/10th as much as hydroxlcobalamin, but isn't nearly as good for us.

The ingredients are plentiful. The FDA's recommended daily allowance numbers are WAY off in most cases. For example, my multivitamin packages over 3000% of vitamin C, and over 8000% of B1.

Finally, a high end multivitamin includes a huge range of stuff beyond just the basics. For example, look at the ingredients list for the LEF Mix Tabs. It's 4 pages long in my browser. If you're curious, I suggest Google or Google Scholar around for the specific chemical forms of all the vitamins and minerals mentioned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Dear naysayers: It's straightforward enough to take supplements at breakfast and then build on that with later meals. And it's actually quite a lot of fun to experiment with something fundamental to well-being.

I currently take a multivitamin, Omega 3, 600mg calcium + 400 IU Vit D, plus 6000IU of D separately, and variable amounts of whey protein. The multi is an all-arounder, the Omega 3 is for perceived brain power benefits. I go for a lot of Vit D because it's just been amazing for mood, confidence, general well-being, and I started with the calcium to complement it. The whey protein is used to keep me on the straight-and-narrow with the rest of my diet, by controlling hunger in a form which offers few obvious downsides.

As far as brands go, I typically get supplements either from Trader Joe's or from CVS. I don't really pay much attention to which ones I'm using as I haven't seen a quality difference yet. I've been going through some Omega 3 from Trader Joe's for ages, no problems with it. For the whey I'm currently using "Designer Whey." I don't know if I'll stick with it; every protein brand seems way different.

<comment><USER3> If you say experiment, do you protocol and measure your results?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is a lot of scientific research that shows that a balanced diet is all that is required to provide all the vitamins the body requires and that supplements at best are a waste of money and at worst in large doses can cause harm.

The only exception would be for people that have specific conditions that a doctor suggests supplements for.

Edit: I though i would add one example i read recently about Omega 3 that really stands out: [http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627601.400-omega3-fi...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627601.400-omega3-fishy- claims-for-fish-oil.html)

<comment><USER6> Isn't the point of taking of supplements that you cannot easily arrange a 'balanced diet'?

<comment><USER7> Yes, but it's actually easier than people think. You don't have to make a science of it or measure doses, just ditch flavor enhancers and avoid preservatives, read the labels on stuff you buy (yes, time-consuming at first, but you'll have to do it less and less as you gain experience), favor fresh produce over junk food and get lots of sunshine.

<comment><USER8> I think your attitude is right-on, but you proceeded to list as "easy" a bunch of things people find hard. ;)

(You might not, but many do...)

<comment><USER7> Well, what I'm saying is that the practice is easy once you muster the will. Sadly, many people realize how easy it is after a disease forces them to change their behavior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why do you take vitamin supplements?

I don't take them and would only do so if I had some reason to think I was deficient in them and then only the the particular vitamins in which I was deficient.

</comment><comment><USER10> Just vitamin D -- deficiency (if you're not getting enough by being out in the sun) may cause all sorts of mild but strange nervous system symptoms, like passing numbness in various parts of your body and weak muscles (unfortunately these are also symptoms for anything from brain cancer, Lyme disease to Multiple Sclerosis, so I recommend seeing your doctor before spending too much time on Wikipedia).

</comment><comment><USER11> If you are younger than 40 and in good health you should focus on a varied diet full of fresh fruits and vegetables rather than supplements. They will provide the vitamins and minerals you need while also providing lots of anti- oxidants and micro-nutrients which help fight cancer, and help to make better use of the standard vitamins. If you search around you will find numerous reports of daily use of supplements causing higher instances of cancer. It probably couldn't hurt to take a multi-vitamin sporadically just to make sure you get everything, but the focus should be on your diet and exercise. In terms of omegas, start throwing flax-see oil or ground seeds on your cereal in the morning. It's the best (and possibly only) non-animal source for the stuff, and it also provides you with a lot of fiber.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you want an easy way to add more greens to your diet, try a green smoothie. Just blend together a bunch of frozen spinach+banana+apple (my default), or spinach+banana+frozen blueberries (tastes chocolatey for some reason...), or whatever combo of leafy greens+fruit you want. It tastes awesome, and it makes it super easy to get a pound or more of greens every day.

Has anyone actually felt noticeably different when going healthier, though? Or is it more a long-term thing? I went from a pretty average lifestyle (macaroni and cheese everyday, and no exercise except walking everywhere) to a super healthy one a couple years ago, but I can't say I feel any different. [Though I haven't been objectively measuring myself in any way.]

</comment><comment><USER13> Kirkland's fish oil/omega-3 (this one is good enough for me, no issues)

Now/Carlsson's vit D3 (2000IU)

LEF's magnesium, taurine and super-k (vit. k1 + k2)

GNC's creatine monohydrate

I take these on and off or cyclically (some are bad combinations). I'm thinking of getting a multivitamin, but most of them have their own shortcomings.

</comment><comment><USER14> If you want omega 3, it's far easier to get it by eating 1> Grass fed beef (Didn't you know? Our beef is only missing Omega 3 because we feed them corn instead of grass) 2> Fish, 3> Flaxseed (or flaxseed oil)

It quickly goes rancid out of food, (and hell,we keep flax oil and flax seeds in the fridge). Every pill of it is going to be rancid most likely.

Uncle Sam's Cereal (which I believe was the inspiration for the SNL skit "Colon Blow", is full of flax): [http://www.usmillsinc.com/usmills/productview_description.ph...](http://www.usmillsinc.com/usmills/productview_description.php?id=124&back=UH0JJ1IiBjpXPVc9VjxVJFR9AXMGMgA3BCUENQBuVChWJAg7UyAIZlAxUiZRNlE9VjQHOwBk) (manuf website, sold in many grocery stores).

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm a terribly picky eater. So terrible in fact, that there is a single green vegetable I'll consume and zero fruits. Sure, I'll eat things comprised of processed vegies (love me some pizza), but I won't sit down and eat a tomato, pees, bananas, etc. Okay, I eat potato's too, but that's a stretch.

So while I haven't done any research on the matter, I'd say it's pretty conclusive I don't get a good portion of nutrients I probably need or at the very least would benefit from.

That said, I take a "one a day" men's vitamin and then a single 1000mg Vitamin C supplement. Maybe I'm doing more harm than good? I'm not sure.

<comment><USER16> At the risk of sounding like someone's mother: snap out of that ridiculous picky eater nonsense. Unless you've got an actual medical condition that prevents you from eating certain foods you are likely doing yourself a hell of a lot of harm by only eating processed food. And spending your $ on supplements isn't going to make up for all the complex stuff in vegetables and fruits that you are missing.

<comment><USER15> I don't really understand why people consider this "nonsense"? I agree with you that suppliments don't come close to doing what a natrually balanced diet would do for me, but why do people who aren't picky eaters think this is something that can just be "snapped out of"?

Few people I know like or would willingly consume anything put in front of them. Surely there is something out there you wouldn't eat, don't like, etc. Why is it so hard to imagine that there are people out there (like me) who don't just have this adversion to eating a few things, but rather quite a few?

I'll finish by saying that in the interest of health, I most certainly should be forcing myself to eat things I don't particularly care for or even find downright disgusting. However, to assume that the reason I don't eat such things is nonsense isn't a fair assesment in my opinion.

<comment><USER17> As a rule of thumb, by just repeatedly eating the food you don't like, you will get used to it and learn to like it. This is all it takes - just eat spinach 10 times, and you'll learn to like spinach. It's likely you'll prefer it prepared this way rather than that way, but your tastes will change.

I like to make it easier on myself by putting lots of pepper or chilli sauce on the food, until I am used to the taste.

By the way, this is how culinary schools work (at least here in Belgium). The kids arrive when they're 14 and need to learn to appreciate all kinds of food, so the rule is that they need to finish their plate, no exceptions.

<comment><USER18> You can't generalize like that. I seriously can't eat vegetables. It's the texture and not the taste. I can eat them when they have been puréed and mixed into my food and I don't know about it. But if I try to eat something and I feel the "crunch" of vegetables, my throat will close up.

It's been noted that people with Aspergers sometimes have a problem with certain food textures. So this could be a manifestation of that.

<comment><USER17> Sorry, I'm just trying to be encouraging and to challenge the belief that there is no way out of this situation. It's fun to hack the brain, and to submit your lower brain systems to the will of your conscious brain. The short term may be hard and painful, but in the long term you'll feel better for it. It's not that different from studying hard or exercising.

This is my humble opinion, and your mileage may vary...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've been somewhat weary of taking supplemental vitamins ever since reading this study that indicates taking supplemental antioxidents may "undo" some of the benefits of exercise: <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8043456.stm>

Of course there are always going to be new studies suggesting this and warning against that, but it's just a constant reminder that no one really has a full understanding of what the hell is going on in our bodies. And that makes me hesitate to spend a bunch of money on man-made supplements.

</comment><comment><USER20> As far as I understand, the vast majority of vitamin supplements have no independently demonstrated or scientifically evaluated benefit whatsoever. In fact, many supplements have been shown to do more harm than good. They are basically a huge con. Eating a balanced diet of meat, fish, staple cereals/crops, vegetables and fruit is the best thing you can do for yourself.

The _only_ supplement I am aware of that genuinely has a benefit is Folic Acid, which pregnant and planning-on-getting pregnant women should take. This is available free on the NHS.

</comment><comment><USER21> Vitamin B12 and folic acid, relatively large doses to prevent recurrence of deficiency, since regular dietary intake wasn't enough. Brand doesn't matter, since it's prescription-only. Non-vitamin supplements is Omega-3 if I haven't eaten much fatty fish lately, and fairly low doses of haem iron to keep my ferritin where it is.

I see no reason to take any other supplements, as my diet is fairly balanced, lots of vegetables, fairly good amount of fish (but could be better). I take enough pills already as it is due to chronic illness.

Besides, there's so much NONSENSE out there. NO, large doses of Vitamin C will not help for a cold. It will give you the runs, and harm your kidneys in the long run, but you're wasting your money. Get out in the sun in summer, eat vit D-rich foods in winter if you live in places such as Norway like I do, and otherwise take it easy. Eat vegetables, try to eat less processed food, remember that vit B12 only comes from animal sources (milk, eggs, meat - spirulina does NOT contain B12) and you should be good.

</comment><comment><USER22> Lyle McDonald has a comprehensive two-part post on supplements (specifically for athletes, but applicable to all) on his blog, Body Recomposition. Here's part 1: [http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/muscle-gain/supplements- par...](http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/muscle-gain/supplements-part-1.html). And part 2: [http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/muscle-gain/supplements- par...](http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/muscle-gain/supplements-part-2.html). Lyle's a good bro.

Martin Berkhan, of Lean Gains, has also written on supplements, though geared more for bodybuilders. Here's the link: [http://leangains.blogspot.com/2010/01/supplements-you- might-...](http://leangains.blogspot.com/2010/01/supplements-you-might- actually-find_09.html). Both "gurus" are legit.

</comment><comment><USER23> Purified Omega-3 1000 mg, 4000 IU Vitamin D, 100 mg CoQ10, 1000 mg Calcium, 800 mg Magnesium; thinking seriously of capping up KCl and taking that too... idiots that kill themselves with potassium overdoses mean you have to pay prescription prices for what ought to cost a few pennies a day.

</comment><comment><USER16> None

</comment><comment><USER24> I take Damage Control Master Formula from Primal Nutrition; in the last six months I've lost about 30 pounds, find myself considerably less hungry than I used to be, and have a lot more energy than I did before. (That all may also be related to the fact that I switched to a high-protein/low-carbs diet at the same time.)

Primal Nutrition also offers Omega 3 supplements, which I also take. I have not had the rancidity problem.

It's all pretty expensive, though.

</comment><comment><USER25> I take an Omega 3 pill (not picky here, I've gotten these from Whole Foods, GNC, WalMart, Walgreens, wherever) and Centrum Men's every morning. I also usually eat a protein bar for breakfast. On lifting days, I drink a Gold Standard Whey (GNC) shake w/ skim milk. On cardio days, I don't take additional supplements. If I'm doing intense cardio, I'll drink a glass of Accelerade (think Gatorade w/ added protein) after.

</comment><comment><USER26> Check out Healthforce Vitamineral Greens! They are composed of real foods, they are raw, and easily assimilated by your body. No vitamin supplements needed when you get the nutrients directly from the real food source! <http://www.healthforce.com/>

</comment><comment><USER27> Does anyone have anyone any feedback on Juice Plus? I took it for a month and didn't notice any difference and energy levels or boosted immune system.

I've heard conflicting reports - some say it's all full of bullshit studies by the manufacturer claiming all sorts of benefits and others swear by it.

</comment><comment><USER28> Magnesium. When I went on a low carb diet, I wasn't getting enough, and the muscles in my face were starting to twitch. I googled and found out it was caused by a lack of magnesium. Once I started taking the magensium supplements, the twitching was gone in hours.

</comment><comment><USER29> While we are at the subject ... Has anyone had experience or insight on detox programs ? I'm currenlty eyeing this one : <http://www.cleanprogram.com/> Comments will be appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER30> My candidate-mother-in-law (as she likes to call herself) says artificial vitamins are bad. Vitamins and minerals in the form of pills get fully absorbed by the body, even if they are not needed in such big quantities at the moment.

Examples: If you bring more calcium in the body it can subside in kydneys in the form of sand-particles.

If you bring more vitamin D into the body, the body starts to pull out calcium from the bones and sends it to the kidneys and to the heart-muscle.

She's a pediatrician and а homoeopath and feeds us (my girlfriend and me) with blue-green-algae additives, because they contain all the stuff in it's natural form, so the organism can take whatever it needs out of it and excrete the rest.

Her supplier of choice is AquaSource (a multi-level-marketing company), but there are many other companies that offer similar stuff.

Sorry for my ("medical") english, had a gard time translating it from my native language.

<comment><USER18> I got told me quite the opposite, from people with actual medical degrees. That multivitamin supplements aren't all that useful since the body tends to not absorb much of it and excretes it. It's better to get the vitamins from your food.

If vitamins get fully absorbed why is my piss bright green when I take a multivitamin?

<comment><USER31> Have you tried to take the vitamin _with_ food?

Me, I split my "One A Day" type vitamin/mineral pill into two and take one half with breakfast and lunch. I avoid dinner for minerals to give any excess the best chance of getting excreted during the day when I'm pushing a lot more water though my kidneys.

As for your problem ... are you sure that's not just some dye in the pill? I don't know of anything that would be "bright green" that you'd likely be taking.

<comment><USER18> I've tried various vitamin pills in different countries. All the same.

Now I just eat lots of different fruit. No more supplements unless my doctor prescribes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> None. I try for lots of sunshine all year round, eat fruits & nuts & veggies and live scoby-produced foods - I have a pet kombucha that produces fizzy health in potable form.

</comment><comment><USER32> Most important: Folic acid (B9).

Apparently has strong correlation with IQ. Makes me wake up instantly in the morning. Less tired. Better concentration.

Don't take more than ~400mg /day.

<comment><USER31> With all the suplimentation going on limiting it to 400 mcg ( _NOT_ mg) is going to be hard.

The key is to limit it to 1,000 mcg/1 mg; above that the symptoms of pernicious anemia (Vitamin B12 problems) can be masked until you've gotten irreversible nerve damage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Tablespoon of cod liver oil from a big bottle (Lýsi). <http://www.lysi.eu/>

</comment><comment><USER34> Daily multivitamin from Costco. Got a 500-pill tub for like $10.

I eat well, but making sure I get enough of what's necessary doesn't hurt.

</comment><comment><USER35> What do you all say about Vitamin C? Specific brands? What about issues like absorbtion?

<comment><USER36> I've heard good things about fresh oranges. They're tasty, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> <http://www.intramax.org/>

</comment><comment><USER38> Mega Men Sport by GNC. It's the best I've found.

</comment><comment><USER36> instead of extra vitamins, I just eat less carbs. Same effect ;)

<comment><USER34> Not at all. Vitamins are something you need to take in. Eating less of anything won't give you more vitamins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Vegetables

<comment><USER40> and fruits!

<comment><USER39> and legumes (they fix nitrogen too!)

You think carbon dioxide is bad news, wait until you find out about what all the nitrogen we introduce to the ecosystem does.

#timebomb

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> WRT to omega 3 supplementation (which I think is a good idea to balance out the surplus we get post-WWII of omega 6 fatty acids due to the shift to vegetable oils) I recommend Nordic Naturals. I buy half a years supply at a time (to avoid excessive heat or cold in shipping and to get a volume discount) and they maintain their freshness.

If you detect any rancidity you need to find another source.

For what it's worth, I too take essentially what you're taking: a private label knock off of the Centrum mature multivitamin (unless you're a menstruating woman you probably don't need iron supplementation and it can be harmful) and a fair amount of Vitamin D3, which I will be adjusting based on blood tests to figure out what's right for me.

</comment><comment><USER41> i take an efa pill (omega 3, flax, omega 6, omega 9, etc.) maybe placebo but i feel it enhances the quality of my dreams.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the Best Method of finding a Co-Founder? - <AUTHOR>

I have just started prototyping out my initial MVP after gathering user stories. While I have what it takes to do some solid coding, my UI/UX experience is lacking. What is the best way to find a local UI/UX person that is looking to jump on board with a startup for sweat equity?
I have attended various events and talked to several people but haven't really found what I am looking for just yet. Are there avenues of recruitment that people have had great success with?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Finding a business partner (co founder) is just like finding a life partner. You have to start out with a business date and see if you can take the relationship to the next level. Running a business is all about conviction and hard work. You will go through lots and lots of ups and downs and for better or worst your business partner will be there to share your burden. You should try to get a co-founder with skill-set that is different from yours. So, if you are a coder, try to bring someone who is great at sales and marketing especially with user acquisition experience. Two hackers are good but diversity in co-founder is even better! Especially, if you can get someone with user acquisition experience upfront, it will make all the difference. Building some thing that every one wants is the hardest thing to do so in a team try having one person focused on building the product and the second person on bringing users to test it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm curious as to what these "hackfests" you refer to are. Are they meetups from meetup.com in your area? I'm in a similar situation, a UI designer looking for a developer co-founder and haven't found any luck either.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep. In most areas, there are Hackfests where developers of a particular language get together and just code.

In Boston, there are tons of hackfests, and various other entrepreneurial events that can help anyone find a co-founder, I just haven't had any luck yet ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How about the people that don't like or dont have time for said hackfests, how else would one meet someone like this?

I feel that hackfests/days are not really all that enjoyable but am just as likely to be prime co-founder material...

<comment><AUTHOR> There should be non hackfest events that you should be going to if you are interested in startups (i.e. networking events, tweetups, etc).

I don't have much free time on my hands either, but I am still actively going to these events because its how you meet people interested in startups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hackdays, best way to find someone you gel with is to build something with them

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats honestly what I figured. I have been going to hackfests (every 1st tuesday) for the past 2 months. No luck yet, but I guess I'll keep at it.

Thanks!

<comment><USER5> Hackdays and Hackfests aren't really the same things.

Hackdays typically are much longer events running over 1.5-2.5 days where you generally build something from scratch.

There are even some focused specifically on people who want to build startups (StartupWeeekend and Launch48 being the main two).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am working on a tool that addresses your problem, quite exactly. Perhaps we can chat? Contact me at wahyu at picocrew dot com

</comment><comment><USER7> www.founderdating.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I applied. I am not getting my hopes up for this, but the design makes it feel promising ;)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can one create a robot that can sort through glass bottles? - <AUTHOR> I ask this as our local landfill facility will reach capacity by 2039.
We used to ship our recyclables to China but they do not accept it anymore.
Below is a link to our landfill facility website.
https://www.crd.bc.ca/service/waste-recycling/hartland-landfill-facility
Thanks for your help!
- Mark <comment><USER2> Somewhat related, perhaps you can borrow some ideas "Sorting Two Metric Tons of Lego" [https://jacquesmattheij.com/sorting-two-metric-tons-of- lego](https://jacquesmattheij.com/sorting-two-metric-tons-of-lego) HN discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14226889](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14226889) (1264 points, by jacquesm, 11 months ago, 213 comments)

Remember to read the part two too.</comment>


I have $5. What is the best way to invest and grow my money? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Investing/I-have-5-What-is-the-best-way-to-invest-and-grow-my-money#ans2385498

<comment><USER2> That was an awesome answer. Sometimes constraints clear our thinking, other times we can focus on them to our detriment.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's a great point that $5 is worth basically nothing in this scenario, but it would be interesting to know at what point $N becomes worth something potentially greater than $N in this fixed amount of time.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice how every solution (except the bike-pump) business, involved abusing someone's trust or creating negative externalities (artificially extending lines, hijacking class time).

It's a good education, but a depressing one.</comment>


I Don't Believe in Blockchain - <AUTHOR> https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2017/05/13/Not-Believing-in-Blockchain <comment><USER2> The blockchain hype is amazing and entertaining, I love going to blockchain events where 95% of the speakers have no idea what the hell they are talking about, I love when banks and fortune 500s send their chief innovation officers to blockchain meetups to find out how they can use the blockchain (hint: they don't need it), I love going to hackathons where all the projects are fun and cute but provide no real world value. The coolest thing is that I live in Toronto, Vitalik Buterin is from toronto, I met him for 5 seconds, a lot of my friends have met him, therefore they can call themselves blockchain experts. The thing I love the most is when entrepreneurs with past exits tell me about their "private blockchain" projects which got a verbal endorsement from Vitalik's dad.

<comment><USER3> Engineers don't like being told by mgmt what to do, that I agree with. To continue generalizing, engineers also hate to re-evaluate the level of their skills when having to learn a new stack.. It took msft 10-15y to get uptake for the .net stack on the back-end side, and the reason they did that was because of infighting in the Java community.

Having studied the BC stack, I would say that the biggest obstacle will be to get engineers to dare try something new. To many SW-engineers on the web-side today, don't really have sufficient skills to understand BC-technology. I don't mean to offend, just state what I see. We saw the same thing with p2p-tech before that.

Solidity as a programming language is an interesting abstraction and perhaps lowers the barrier somewhat, but it will take many years before the skills available match that for what is required to gain momentum on a broad scale.

If you're an engineer and wonder why mgmt keeps bringing it up, its because this will potentially help them build a platform (two-sided) market. If that occurs and you constructed it correctly, your company may well be able to skip on taxes as well, as a side-effect.

<comment><USER4> > Having studied the BC stack, I would say that the biggest obstacle will be > to get engineers to dare try something new. To many SW-engineers on the web- > side today, don't really have sufficient skills to understand BC-technology.

I find those sentences make an interesting pair: they're both huge assertions at odds with the general consensus and you didn't support either of them. The usual complaint of web developers is that they're endlessly drawn to new things, so it seems like some evidence would be in order to claim they're suddenly extremely conservative in this one area. Similarly, since Bitcoin proponents like to talk about about simple and easy to use it is, it seems implausible to blame everything on a lack of skill.

The comparison to P2P is interesting: the technology was rapidly adopted in a few areas where it offered a clear win but, similarly, had various people pitching it as the solution to all problems and claiming that skeptics were ignorant luddites. Since those products all failed, perhaps it would be better to work on answering those questions rather than dismissing them?

> If that occurs and you constructed it correctly, your company may well be > able to skip on taxes as well, as a side-effect.

This kind of argument is not going to change the reputation Bitcoin has for being most of interest to crooks.

<comment><USER3> > The usual complaint of web developers is that they're endlessly drawn to new > things

I'm referring to a new way of constructing software, using a transactional database at the core and defining every event as a transaction between two parties. Today engineers usually think of the platform as a distribution medium for data, aka. client-server. In the BC world refining this so that any party can take on any role, aka. decentralized/distributed is challenging. I'm trying to explain that this go far beyond a new JS framework or (no-)sql database, in the BC environment the engineer must be able to define and code business rules.

> Since those [p2p] products all failed

I don't think p2p failed because of technology, but rather because mgmt/industry wanted to keep control. See e.g Spotify or Skype as examples, there are many other interests at play than pure technological.

> tax evasion (value added tax and in some case corp. tax)

I agree with your view, but if you examine today's platform economies this is exactly what they have done to a large extent. They give away "free" services only to cash in on your personal data from a near tax free country setup. Examples are FB, Google, Apple, Amazon..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In summary: "I don't think the Blockchain will be a winner because there's too much hype, it's not being developed by geeks, and it's not helping people do their existing jobs."

1\. There is a lot of hype, sure, but there was around that whole Internet thing too.

2\. The idea that geeks aren't working on it is patently absurd, and

3\. I'm not sure how OP missed the jobs-to-be-done of financial transactions, proof of identity, proof of ownership, etc. Those are all pretty important jobs in trillion dollar industries.

<comment><USER6> Re 3., tell me one problem that blockchain solves that a regular db and authentication can't?

<comment><USER7> Show me one db with auth that can't be maliciously altered.

Agree that many usecases would be better served by a centralised system, but many don't seem to grasp how useful an immutable database is.

Even with the advent of quantum computing and the havoc that Shor's algorithm will cause, there still won't be enough computing power to undo the Bitcoin blockchain.

<comment><USER8> Publication gives similar durability though.

(there's no need to do proof of work to track and publish a hash tree)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When I got into bitcoin in 2011, it had a market cap of $20 million, and already had several killer apps:

\- Making darknet drug markets possible

\- Allowed permissionless, highly convenient storage of wealth

\- Allowed large, rapid, low friction money transfers anywhere in the world

Now, in 2017, Ethereum has a market cap of 8 billion, yet I can't find a single use case for this technology other than enabling other scammy ponzi- like coin offerings.

<comment><USER7> Transparent voting mechanisms, prediction markets, p2p betting, gaming micropayments, distributed computing rewards, replacing entire national currencies because of irresponsible governments,etc

<comment><USER9> Vague gambling stuff - is this really going to be a 10x improvement over betfair who already offers solid p2p gambling markets with <5% house take?

Distributed computing rewards - maybe for a subgroup off applications (eg. illegal stuff eg. piracy), but in general terms a centralised system is easier, cheaper and quicker to develop

Replacing national currencies - this is already bitcoin's killer app. Ethereum adds almost no utility to this space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I love the concept of a decentralized currency. Blockchains, not so much. They are inefficient, unscalable and resource-hungry. But they're the best we've got to get there now.

Looking forward to Mimblewimble.

</comment><comment><USER11> While perhaps not worded particularly well, I think there's a point to what Tim is saying. In many conferences targeted at non-technical people and investors, block-chain is often touted as some sort of magic wand. Financial transactions, record of provenance, and other problems were solved before block chain with centralized databases, and then digital signatures, etc. When these problems come up in a more traditional domain, centralized approach often works just fine and there's no need to make it more complex.

<comment><USER12> > In many conferences targeted at non-technical people, block-chain is often > touted as some sort of magic wand that will solve problems without > discussing how.

cf. "the web", "ecommerce", "p2p", "social media", et c.

it's a tool, and a damn useful one, that enables some things no tools did before. that's it, and that's all of it.

<comment><USER4> All of those had immediate real world uses. What activity which normal people do has seen a blockchain offer significant improvements over previous practice?

<comment><USER13> Buying illegal drugs. That's literally it.

I'm writing a book on this. (Nearly finished! Probably!) I have read thousands of pages of the worst PDF whitepapers you can imagine. I have looked all over to see if there's a "there" there.

As far as I can tell:

1\. The only thing blockchain does _in practice_ that anything else can't is decentralised cryptocurrencies.

2\. The only thing decentralised cryptocurrencies do _in practice_ that ActualMoney doesn't is markets for illicit goods and services.

note the "in practice" \- it's had eight years of "possibilities", by now I think we can look at what it's done.

also, 3. the decentralisation isn't permanent - Proof of Work benefits from economies of scale, meaning mining recentralises, and this is exactly what happened from the FPGA era on.

The usual business proposition for Blockchain(tm) is supply chain management. Blockchain doesn't solve any of the actual problems (bad data - it turns out that crooks don't put careful documentation of violations into the data, and bribe local inspectors and adjudicators) but _does_ offer a monopoly position to the company defining the blockchain in question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This article is just a spin of "I don't see how music on the computer is easier than in the radio" or "buying a newspaper will always be easier than reading your news on some weird website".

Bitcoin and cryptotech are loaded with geeks, just not the same ones as the author associate with. And cryptotech do a lot of stuff way better than existing tech. You have to be totally blind not to see it, IMO. :D

It was the same with "noone will need a personal computer" laughed by older- school engineers, or "The Internet is a funny toy with its funny packet switching, but real business-critical communication needs a reliable networking like a connection-based phone system".

Cryptotech (not only blockchain-based) is disruptive, groundbreaking and as transformative as personal computers were. But it took like 30 years to get personal computing to the point where it was obvious. And it won't be much faster this time. There will be blockchains, technologies, standards, businesses going up and down, people getting rich and/or broke, with winners shaping a new world.

<comment><USER15> > But it took like 30 years to get personal computing to the point where it > was obvious

Gotta quibble with this one. 30 years after the PET shipped we were solidly in the middle of the Web 2.0 revolution.

Yes, ideas take time to mature. No, the PC in't a good reference. By 1981 it was clear where we were going.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> So if his argument is that geeks in the corporate trenches aren't using it to quietly get their jobs done without involving management, I'd say the reason is that if you're just doing internal work, you're better off using a database.

Blockchains are useful for reducing the overhead due to lack of trust when you're working with other companies. You can't really make that happen without management on both sides getting involved. There's no way a back office geek working on his own can make complicated auditing and settlement procedures go away, and that's the sort of thing where blockchains help.

(And of course not every new technology gets adopted first by corporate geeks; iPhone apps are one example of consumers taking the lead.)

<comment><USER4> > Blockchains are useful for reducing the overhead due to lack of trust when > you're working with other companies

Can you expand on what you're defining this problem as and how Bitcoin reduces costs relative to the traditional approaches with trusted third parties, PKI, etc. I've seen the marketing pitches but they're always conspicuously lacking the kind of specific "we pay X to do Y but could pay Z" pitches which I've seen used to justify bringing new tech inside.

<comment><USER16> Not so much Bitcoin as smart contract platforms like Ethereum, or various private offshoots. Most of what I know about this comes from watching the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance conference, which had people from JP Morgan, Santander, and several other large corporations.

Interbank settlement is one example. Right now it involves auditing process that take days. A blockchain implementation could reduce it to seconds. Insurance and supply chains are a couple other things they mentioned.

Pretty much any time you're either doing a lot of mutual auditing, or paying someone a lot to maintain a trusted transactional database for a group of companies, there's an opportunity to reduce costs and/or speed things up with a blockchain.

For now, that probably doesn't mean a public blockchain, due to privacy and scalability issues. The companies in the EEA are focusing on private versions for now; if you have a known set of nodes and trust that no more than a third of them will commit fraud, you can get away with much faster consensus mechanisms. At the EEA conference they said if Ethereum succeeds in its scaling and privacy efforts, they hope to move at least some applications to the public chain, but that's a couple years off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This article is awful. Why are people upvoting it? I understand scepticism, but this touches on a lot of things and comes across as a rant more than a reasonable discussion.

1\. There are not only brilliant people leading these projects (Vitalik on Ethereum in particular), but blockchain is a huge passionate discussion amongst the SWE communities I find myself in.

> for example the laughably slow transactions-per-second of most real-world > blockchain implementations.

2\. Is he/she just talking about Bitcoin? Apparently one means 'most'. There are plenty of plans around scaling in various tech: Raiden for Ethereum is an interesting example for smaller transactions.

> I could maybe get past the socio-political issues, the misguided notion > that in civilized countries, you can route around the legal system with > "smart contracts" > I still don't think the world needs it.

3\. Doesn't go to support their arguments at all. A simple and obvious use case here is: banks dragged down by capital obligations from Dodd-Frank regulation are looking everywhere for cost savings.

Blockchain is interesting to everyone because there are fairly easy to get involved in financial instruments associated that have been doing very well lately. With that, there are plenty of nerds investing a lot of time into technologies to make these networks truly useful.

<comment><USER18> > Banks dragged down by capital obligations from Dodd-Frank regulation are > looking everywhere for cost savings.

Name a single bank who is using blockchain in an essential component of their operations (not just a proof of concept). Go on, I'll wait.

Sure, blockchain is "interesting" and the people involved are "brilliant" but where is it delivering a 10x improvement over the status quo?

Blockchain is a classic example of a solution looking for a problem.

<comment><USER17> > Name a single bank who is using blockchain in an essential component of > their operations (not just a proof of concept). Go on, I'll wait.

What a ridiculous argument. With blockchain really just becoming interesting over the last 2 years, you think banks, many of which use systems 20-30 years old (bonds are still primarily traded over phone) are going to switch over to it immediately. Give me a break.

> Sure, blockchain is "interesting" and the people involved are "brilliant" > but where is it delivering a 10x improvement over the status quo?

International bank transfers can take days, have large transaction fees, and have a non-trivial amount of book keeping error. Whenever those same transactions could take 30 minutes with no human oversight I'd say the speedup is much higher than 10x. With that, it seems like you're more interested in making claims without being properly educated on what you're talking about.

<comment><USER18> International money transfer is indeed a big problem, and TransferWise has built a billion-dollar company over the past 6 years solving it, just not with blockchain.

<comment><USER19> Heck, even Paypal is a smaller scale solution to this problem. Not to mention much more broken Western Union transfers.

It is not like the problem hasn't been attacked many times from different angles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > And without exception, I observed that they were initially loaded in > the back door by geeks, without asking permission, because they got > shit done and helped people with their jobs.

This is precisely what I see happening with bitcoin. Bitcoin addresses keep popping up more frequently every day (with WannaCrypt being one recent and unfortunate example). Despite the scalability issues and regulatory uncertainty there isn't an easier way to send value around the globe. And this isn't simply because banks face a huge regulatory burden. The settlement systems in place are very complex and archaic and blockchains promise a fresh start for a global settlement layer.

</comment><comment><USER21> I wish people would drop the theatrics when writing these. Here's the same article rewritten without loss of substance:

\---

I looked into blockchain technologies carefully and I've ended up thinking it's an overpromoted niche sideshow.

I've seen wave after wave of landscape-shifting technology sweep through the IT space: Personal computers, Unix, C, the Internet and Web, Java, REST, mobile, public cloud. And without exception, I observed that they were initially loaded in the back door by geeks, without asking permission, because they got shit done and helped people with their jobs.

That's not happening with blockchain. Not in the slightest. Which is why I don't believe in it.

</comment><comment><USER22> What's the Byzantine Generals solution he's talking about? I thought most BC implementations can't recover from worst case BG problems?

That said, I know a lot of people using the tech and they're making money with it, solving real technical problems. I suspect maybe Bray doesn't know about it because it's easier to assume that it isn't than to verify it so.

There are specific industries where block chain limitations don't matter, and its guarantees do.

<comment><USER19> Apparently those "real technical problems" have already been solved in another way that is commonly implemented or are unimportant.

<comment><USER22> I mean, a great example is medical records. I know because the concept if using hash blocks for history predates Bitcoin.

Personally I think both the hype and the anti-hype exist because we finally gave this family of data structures a snappy name.

Also, I found the BG solution he was referring to and it's rather soft.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Perhaps because Blockchain is about automating trust. However trust should go deep. Everyone should be able to see how something works and Blockchains are too complicated for most people to understand. These people are forced to trust someone else, some sales guy or the like.

Bitcoin is growing because there are enough people on the world who are willing to risk it. They don't trust Bitcoin, they are gambling.

</comment><comment><USER24> This article is lazy. It sounds like the author took a cursory look at the tech and wrote it off. This has no place at the top of hackernews.

</comment><comment><USER25> While I agree that there is a lot of hype at the moment, once the dust settles we will be left with the usescases that stuck. The geany is not going back in the bottle. And some of the projects are run by the most geeky people I have ever seen, people that are knowledgeable in multiple fields like cs, cryptography, math and economics.

</comment><comment><USER26> _> (optionally) a Byzantine-generals solution too!_

What is this referring to? In all of the ways that I've seen the Byzantine generals problem phrased, it's presented as impossible to "solve".

<comment><USER27> [https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1wqj8z/will_someon...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1wqj8z/will_someone_explain_how_the_blockchain_solved/)

<comment><USER26> Ah, thanks, I didn't realize that the Byzantine generals problem wasn't just a synonym for the two generals problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Darknet believes.

</comment><comment><USER29> It's easy to just dismiss saying "that's not happening with blockchain", a baby can say that too.

But I have no idea what he's talking about when he says "And without exception, I observed that they were initially loaded in the back door by geeks, without asking permission, because they got shit done and helped people with their jobs."

Is he saying Bitcoin is not being developed by geeks?

Is he saying Bitcoin is not "helping people get shit done and helping people with their jobs"?

There are valid criticisms, and there are really baseless rants like this. Just because you're "old" doesn't mean you know the future from your past experience. Tons of talented old people (and younger people too) with tons of experience never realized the potential of the Internet when it first came out.

Oh, and when Internet first came out, it never was meant to "get shit done and help people with their jobs", for a long time. It was a fringe culture. If he's as experienced as he claims to be, he should know better.

<comment><USER30> Serious question: what is block chain being used for besides trading crypto currency? Like, not building infrastructure that may be useful, for things in the future, not speculative value but stuff that's identifyably useful in and of itself today?

I don't follow coins closely anymore but the main one I saw was namecoin, which hasn't yet seen much use.

<comment><USER31> I rent cars, pay for groceries, and basically do everything else with Bitcoin. I have to use card gateways like Bitwala for that, but it works for me perfectly. My debit card can be usually loaded with Bitcoin within 10-15 minutes (it is especially helpful as I live in 2 countries and travel a lot; bank transfers take much more time).

There are many companies now where you can get your salary paid in Bitcoin. In fact, it is so infinitely more convenient, I think that only the forces of mental inertia hold this approach from immediate universal adoption.

<comment><USER32> My credit card does all of that and they actually reward me for using them, so given the choice when paying for something I will choose a credit card 100% of the time.

<comment><USER7> They reward you by charging the merchant more. You realise that right?

<comment><USER32> Of course, that's what's so great about it. I don't pay a thing!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>