How I became a drug cheat athlete to test the system - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-32983932 <comment><USER2> In case one has ever wondered why the huge preponderance of drug use (particularly EPO) in endurance sports:

Pre: EPO microdosing:

 _I managed about 10-and-a-half minutes and a power output of 350 watts. ... score a 58 on the test, which compares favourably to the average person 's 35 but rather pathetically against an elite athlete's 70+._

Post EPO microdosing:

 _I flew past my previous mark and hung on for more than 12 minutes and 375 watts. This gave me a score of 63, a 7% increase in seven weeks._

How on earth could clean athletes ever expect to compete, particularly given that the chances of getting caught are so slim.

<comment><USER3> In cycling one key is drafting. We have a few guys where I live that do well in big national races. When they show up on the Saturday group ride, weaker riders can keep up thanks to the advantage of drafting. A rider has to be about 30% stronger than me to pull away when I am drafting him.

<comment><USER4> Which is why Grand Tours are really a test of climbing and time trialing ability.

<comment><USER5> And surviving three weeks of racing, often over very difficult terrain.

Your "average" pro cyclist (the domestiques) dope because that's the only way get through a grand tour. It's not about going faster, it's about survival.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really would like to see sports where performance-enhancing drugs (except life-threatening ones) are permitted.

<comment><USER7> Currently the world's most famous athlete, Lionel Messi, is legally permitted to take HGH, one of the most potent steroids ever made, due to an earlier growth deficiency. Johann Cruyff, also considered one of the football greats, went through the same legal HGH treatments.

Their acceleration and injury tolerance is mind blowing. See how Messi blew past 6 players in a cup final last week after playing 50+ games:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOX2QpfMkq4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOX2QpfMkq4)

And also here's Johann Cruyff blowing past players with ease:

[https://youtu.be/YU-k-Ots3iY?t=1m31s](https://youtu.be/YU-k-Ots3iY?t=1m31s)

The popularity of these two players would indicate that athletes legally permitted to use steroids would be very popular among sports fans

<comment><USER8> Lionel Messi is not generally considered a great athlete, with exceptional strength or stamina or anything like that which would be affected by PEDs. His ability is pure skill and intelligence. Cruijff was similar.

<comment><USER9> In Messi's case this is exactly why it's the supreme advantage. He already possess world class skill and intelligence, add HGH to the mix to boost his athleticism and you have a balanced, top tier athlete.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Related, much earlier (2003) article: [http://www.outsideonline.com/1924306/drug- test](http://www.outsideonline.com/1924306/drug-test)

He didn't try to avoid any tests though.

That micro-dosing is effective for passing the biological passport hasn't been news since Tyler Hamilton detailed how it was done in his book[1]. Michele Ferrari (who invented it, and systemised a lot of doping methodology) is bad person.

If you are interested in any endurance sport outside of cycling (which suffered the worst for a long time) then your sport has some challenges.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyler_Hamilton#Autobiography](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyler_Hamilton#Autobiography)

</comment><comment><USER10> Here's the discussion over at Cyclingnews' 'doping' sub-forum: [http://forum.cyclingnews.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=29527](http://forum.cyclingnews.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=29527)

Interesting to read what insiders have to say/think about it.

</comment><comment><USER11> Offtopic-ish, I do not think taking PED's is cheating. I'd really love to see what we're capable of without the shackles of the illegality and false perception that most have of PED's. Allowing for proper research and acceptance.

<comment><USER12> "The All-Drug Olympics"

EDIT: The Reference: [https://screen.yahoo.com/weekend-drug- olympics-000000571.htm...](https://screen.yahoo.com/weekend-drug- olympics-000000571.html)

<comment><USER11> "The Olympics"

But where athletes don't have to risk their health and can safely do what they're going to do anyway. Also they're better.

<comment><USER13> Many PEDs are inherently unsafe. If you're e.g. boosting the hæmoglobin levels in your blood, that's necessarily putting stress on your heart and increasing your risk of problems in later life.

<comment><USER11> You're right, 'safer' not necessarily 'safe'. That being said I believe people should make their own decisions for themselves, elite athletes understand the risks associated, but to them it's worth it.

<comment><USER14> To some of them. To the athletes for whom it isn't worth it, they are now effectively left behind.

When you allow some to dope, the reality is that _all_ face pressure to dope.

<comment><USER11> The reason they are left behind is because the illegality of the substances. If you have two separate organisations, one which you can do what you please, and another where you are restricted/tested. You would not have the disparity.

What we have now is an underground culture with little knowledge and even less perception. Banning does not work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's interesting that we just accept genetic advantage and even prize it, but man made advantage is called cheating.

Athletes should have handicaps like in horse racing ;-)

<comment><USER15> I'm not really sure why this was downvoted, apart from because you didn't enjoy my point of view. I personally think it added to the discussion.

You are, of course, welcome to downvote this comment that definitely doesn't add to the discussion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There was an interesting series of articles on T-Nation relatively recently on how easy it is to beat the Cross Fit (and by extension other organisaion's) drug tests:

[https://www.t-nation.com/steroids/beating-the-crossfit- drug-...](https://www.t-nation.com/steroids/beating-the-crossfit-drug-test)

</comment><comment><USER17> There is a lot of interesting info and history in the movie "Bigger Stronger Faster":

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1151309/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1151309/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1)

</comment><comment><USER18> Wow! I've competed in rowing at fairly high level and reading this is article is shocking. I did not expect such a huge performance boost and THEN to turn up clean is insane.

So far I've always given people the benefit of the doubt but this really makes me wonder...

<comment><USER19> Rowing would be a perfect sport to do this in. I've heard rumors that there are rowers who do it, but I think the reason why it isn't that widespread is because there's no money in the sport. Although testing is lax, so maybe it is widespread at the top levels and we just don't know about it?

<comment><USER18> I rowed just below international level and several of my former team mates have world and olympic medals. Also, I know that my pure power output was better than some of the international rowers and I didn't even take Creatine. My house mate is in a national team squad right now and he gets surprise tested every few months. He actually has to keep a calendar of where he sleeps every single night so they can find you in the morning... I doubt there is much cheating going on in rowing, like you said, it's just not worth it financially.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The whole guilt narrative seems odd to me. Wasn't he testing micro dosing and the passports efficacy? It seems disingenuous to add that whole aspect to me.

<comment><USER2> I think it was pretty clear why he did that - now that people know he can MicroDose to very significantly enhance performance, who is going to believe in his performance being "natural" if he does extraordinarily well? Particularly as he demonstrated that even the more stringent systems didn't catch him.

He was trying to make it super, super clear that he know that it is cheating, that it is wrong, and that if he _EVER_ did this outside of this trial, that he would be guilty as sin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It would be interesting to compare this with the improvement that he would have got if he did altitude training.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm skeptical of the author's claim about V02max that "even half a percentage point can make the difference in elite sport, that is a huge bump."

________

RUNNING PREDICTS RUNNING BETTER THAN PHYSIOLOGY (a duh? moment here)

Noakes, T. D., Myburgh, K. H., & Schall, R. (1990). Peak treadmill running velocity during VO2max test predicts running performance. Journal of Sports Sciences, 8, 35-45.

The best laboratory predictors were: (a) peak treadmill running velocity (r = -.89 to -.94); (b) running velocity at lactate turnpoint (r = -.91 to -.93); and (c) fractional use of VO2max at 16 km/h (r = .86 to .90). The predictive value of the lactate turnpoint measure increased as the distance increased.

The poorest predictors were: VO2max (r = -.55 to -.81) and VO2 at 16 km/h (r = .40 to .45).

<comment><USER23> At lower levels, technique can handily beat raw power, and vice versa. At elite level, those lacking either technique or raw power will be filtered out, or forced to work hard on their weak points (example: Federer had to work on his weight training when the likes of Nadal and Djokovic hit the scene)

In sports where competition is strong (1) that, at best, leaves those with good technique and exceptional power or exceptional technique and good power, but likely, top players are exceptional in both areas. In that group, getting more power or endurance can certainly be a decisive factor.

And as another reply said, cycling (like cross-country skiing, and rowing) is a bit different in the sense that raw power (per kg) is a really good indicator of performance.

(1) in weaker competitions, you can still see strong players with weak technique or vice versa. That happens in smaller countries, for example, and, historically in about every sport.

<comment><USER22> Like I said to the other reply, you are making logical points but the data shows that they are flat out wrong. "Raw power" whatever that means (likely you're using it as a rough proxy for VO2max) is a solid predictor if you're trying to distinguish elites from untrained people but a _terrible_ predictor if you're trying to distinguish among elites.

See this study(1) showing that the best two cyclists out of 11 world class professionals tested had a VO2max that was closer to this amateur reporter (before doping) than to the elite cyclists with the highest VO2max. (1) [https://d3epuodzu3wuis.cloudfront.net/R063.pdf](https://d3epuodzu3wuis.cloudfront.net/R063.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The 7% increase in performance is astonishing but with the gain comes potential pain:

Least harmful side effects: Cold symptoms such as stuffy nose, sneezing, cough, sore throat, joint pain, bone pain, muscle pain, muscle spasm; dizziness, depression, mild headache, weight loss, sleep problems (insomnia), nausea, vomiting, trouble swallowing; or pain or tenderness where you injected the medication.

Most severe side effects include: Seizure, uneven heartbeat, dangerously high blood pressure and more.

[http://www.rxlist.com/epogen-side-effects-drug- center.htm](http://www.rxlist.com/epogen-side-effects-drug-center.htm)

</comment><comment><USER25> It's interesting, but not a scientific experiment. Can we draw any conclusion with "1 datapoint"? The 7% increase may be explained by familiarity with the effort test the second time, 7 weeks additional training, better confidence and morale and so on...

<comment><USER26> I think the biggest failure here is not tracking the 4 months prior. Each week, given he undertook dedicated training under the guidance of a professional, he would have seen an improvement in his results. I'm sure his measurements and ride data would have looked meaningfully different between week 2 and week 12 of his 4 month run up period. Now some of that would taper but he'd still see performance improvements after 4 months with regular dedicated training in place. So it would be key to have that context. Perhaps the increase due to doping is 3-5% vs the 7%. Still substantial either way.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: do entrepreneurs serve as pawns for economic development? - <AUTHOR>

My thesis is that entrepreneurs serve as pawns for economic development.
This might sound a bit far-fetched, so please allow me to explain in the following lines. As a prelude, I claim that:
1) most societies need entrepreneurs to innovate, to grow, and to prosper. When the state is the sole agent of business innovation, mediocrity and inefficiency tend to reign supreme.
2) wherever there are business opportunities, there is competition. Thus, statistically speaking, entrepreneurs are destined to fail.
The point I am trying to make is that societies need entrepreneurs to advance economically, even though most will fail. Hence, my claim that entrepreneurs serve as pawns (or canon fodder, if you prefer) for economic development. A happier metaphor would be to say that entrepreneurs are the shock troops of capitalism (as Schumpeter put it).
For centuries, emperors and warlords recruited their soldiers with promises of land and loot. Are entrepreneurs today's useful idiots to be sacrificed for the advancement of the economy? The promise is no longer land nor loot, but a successful IPO, early retirement, etc.
I know this might sound extreme. What do you guys think about it? <comment><USER3> It's quite extreme and overly simplistic...

The danger, as always, is that there is some truth to what you say, but that truth is stretched and blurred in various direction so as to be mostly meaningless.

Almost every high-reward human endeavour, from drug dealing to movie stardom or stock trading, generates large amounts of competition. That's one of the main reasons a free market is a productive way to allocate resources - <USER2> places high rewards on things of high value, and allows anyone to compete, so that more people will provide these high-value things, thus driving their price back down. In that way, your suggestion is true.

However, there are three implicit assumptions in your thesis that are very, very shaky.

The first and least harmful is the idea that "being a pawn" is somehow implicitly bad. You haven't established that at all. There is no absolute "bad", so you must be implying that it is worse than something else. I'd be curious as to what that thing is, in your mind. Perhaps, if you dig, you might find that actually, being an entrepreneur (pawn or not) is quite a good deal, better than most others.

The second false premise is that there is some kind of specific group of people who are deciding this, manipulating this system for their benefit. There is no such group. Or rather, there is - this group is all of us. We all benefit from a system which encourages innovation and competition and rewards it. There is no conspiracy to exploit entrepreneurs by somehow making them compete against all odds. Nobody sat down and thought "I wonder if I can get all these useful idiots to start lots of innovative businesses so that... what?"

The third misconception is the idea that entrepreneurs are somehow being manipulated by this system beyond their understanding. If anything, I'd say it's the opposite. Entrepreneurs set out to shape the system around them to provide them with rewards.

The fact that some types of businesses have high failure rates (I still don't really believe those 95% business failure rates... I strongly suspect very shoddy statistics that have a very poor definition of "success") doesn't mean that somehow most entrepreneurs are being suckered into starting business.

I think you need to rethink this idea from the ground up, carefully examining your assumptions as you go along, and maybe talking to some entrepreneurs too. You will, I believe, find it has no substance in reality.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for your insightful response.

Having worked for a couple of hi-tech startups, I am a little bit acquainted with the entrepreneurial world. Since both startups failed after a few painful years, I am also acquainted with failure and burn-out. No complaints. I knew how slim the odds were ;-)

I am fully aware that my thesis is quite ludicrous indeed. It may be a metaphor, but it is also an overly far-fetched one. All in all, I entirely agree with everything you wrote. Allow me to explain where this heretic thought of mine comes from:

I come from Europe. My country is literally dominated by interest groups. With the end of European imperialism, my home country declined both in influence and affluence, as many others. Most people still live in the grandiose and glorious past, and haven't realized the world has changed. The country no longer produces much, and there's no longer an empire to supply the home land with resources at an affordable price.

Some "bright politicians" (pun intended) thought of a solution: to create a clone of Silicon Valley in their land. As a result, there are tons of government-funded "innovation agencies" whose goal is to pro-actively promote entrepreneurship. Moreover, successful entrepreneurs show up on TV as rock stars. The old bankers inherited their wealth from their families. These guys are self made men, and since the country hasn't had many of those, they are admired.

There really is an effort to promote entrepreneurship, as it is perceived as the one and only salvation to the impending economic debacle. I would not call it a _conspiracy_ (what an over-charged word!), but everyone in positions of power is promoting the idea that the country needs startups. Politicians, business leaders, distinguished academics. The _meme_ is that starting a business is almost a patriotic duty!! Serve your country!! Found a company! No joke.

Overall, I believe this is good because the country needs to renew itself. However, I think the risks are being left out of the propaganda. These people are luring kids with the promise of fame, a comfortable lifestyle, and a meaningful career. Most of the kids being "brain-washed" will fail, though they haven't yet realized it. Of course, the rich kids are still going into politics, law, management consulting and banking. It's the middle-class kids who are being lured into this. Again, I know this is an over-stretched metaphor, but to me it looks a tiny bit like those war-time recruiting ads for the military where they emphasize the "adventure", but minimize the grim survival statistics.

Once again, thanks for your input. It did put things in perspective :-)

<comment><USER4> Now I see why this problem is on your mind. In my original reply to you (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=646561>), I made the point that people should be free to choose how much risk they want to take. If your government is using propaganda and other methods to encourage people to take a bigger risk than they would otherwise, then it's not surprising that there are bad effects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> 3- I think you're generally along the right lines. I can offer a different explanation. Most of my own thesis comes from reading Eisenstein's "Ascent of Humanity", though I've put a little of my spin on it.

The basis of civilization - the good and the bad - comes down to our concepts of money and property. I'm only going to speak of the bad here.

Money earns interest, hence if you have it you are compelled to hold on to it; as well, because it compounds, a quick cash grab may theoretically exceed the return of any sustainable venture.

Property, on the other hand, makes us seek to control our world so that others can't. It started with land, but it's spread to just about everything, including abstract concepts.

Most competitive forces can be attributed to this volatile combination.

But the entrepreneur's motives may differ from competition; instead of grabbing money and holding on to it, or taking other people's land, resourcefulness and efficiency is another goal, and it is usually the one that produces the most successful businesses.

What civilization has done is to use money and property as proxies for efficiency, which for the entrepreneur encourages all negative externalities, and for society as a whole causes a lot of deep rifts and strife.

But I think that, ultimately, technology - by increasingly giving power to all individuals - is going to make the money and property concepts irrelevant. It's already doing so online, albeit with a lot of friction because we have to use side-channels to translate online "currencies" (popularity, utility, reputation) into money.

<comment><USER5> _The ascent of humanity_

Sorry, but Eisenstein's (the author of that book) ideas are bunk. He is just a guy on the net with opinions, which in itself is inoffensive. But they are terribly researched, economically laughable opinions, which he claims to back up with economic theories - and which therefore duly require debunking.

His main thesis is that "we should make interest negative" - as though the time value of money were some sort of law by fiat! We set interest rates, yes - but that's like putting a dam on a river. Making interest negative is like making laws that water must henceforth flow uphill.

He's also in cahoots with the Law of Attraction people (a slightly creepy new- age religious group), who use all sorts of pseudoscientific garbage to justify their existence. Quotes on Eisenstein's website by Bruce Lipton (among others) seriously call his credibility into question. (Bruce Lipton was a genuine biologist who fell off the rails in the early 90s and started writing a bunch of nonscientific mumbo jumbo about quantum theories of consciousness and evolution - published by Mountain of Love (!) publications).

Eisenstein uses similar techniques - pseudoeconomics instead of pseudoscience. I don't know if you're quoting him, but "money and property as proxies for efficiency" is absolute codswallop. (The phrase "proxy for efficiency" is, so far as I can tell, completely devoid of meaning. )

We use money because it is _more efficient_ than e.g. goats as a unit of economic value. Before money was called money, it was called gold (and the ancient Japanese used rare seashells, and prisoners use cigarettes).

Your final point is also incorrect - the possibility of monetizing the efficiencies gained through improved communication _has driven_ the current wave of technology, not been replaced by it. Finally, technology absolutely does not give power to all individuals - at best, it confers advantages to those (often small) groups who adopt it.

Please help debunk people like Eisenstein. Let's be honest: economics is hairy enough as it is without people spreading that sort of twaddle.

<comment> 3- OK, to be honest I've been looking for someone to actually debate this with.

First of all, "proxy for efficiency" is my own terminology and seems quite sensible to me. We talk about productivity in terms of GDP per capita. Implicit in that is the assumption that money is its own value, which it isn't - money is at best a marker of value. But we reward people with the marker, not the value.

Second, your point of money being more efficient than other goods as a unit of value doesn't go anywhere. It does not get at the point Eisenstein presents, which is that the concept of trade exists because of ownership of scarce resources. If nobody owns anything, trade is nonsense.

Third, the Eisenstein thesis doesn't mention interest. Negative interest is mentioned in the form of demurrage in one of his closing chapters, as another way to define money. But his overall thesis is non-economic: that we have set ourselves up, in a variety of ways, to battle against nature and against each other. "Separation of self" is the term he uses, along with a variety of colorful New-Agey terms. I'm focused on the economic points in part because I hold a B.A. in economics myself, and there are some solid points made about economic systems outside our mainstream viewpoint - particularly with respect to prehistoric gift economies.

Your claim that the current wave of technology - by which you presumably mean online communications - was driven by monetizing efficiencies....that one seems a bit faulty. The Internet started as a military/academic project, not as an attempt to build a consumer market. As well, most open source software isn't built with a monetization in mind, but rather is a way for others to reduce their costs. In general the market doesn't build the technology, the market commercializes the technology after it becomes self-evident. The reason we have zillions of web startups is that the web still has so many new concepts to explore that everyone can be a do-gooder and monetize at the same time. The fact that a lot of people _aren't_ monetizing the things they do online(for example, HN being free and user-driven) is the interesting part. That's a huge reversal of so much of history.

Your statement of technology not giving power to individuals seems incredibly wrong. The Industrial Revolution was organization-driven, but our current revolution, whatever you might call it, is acting to take apart organizations. Blogs vs. newspapers. Social media vs. mass media. Central office vs. virtual office.

<comment><USER5> I agree that money is a proxy for value. That still does not justify the unsupported claim that it "encourages all negative externalities", and causes "deep rifts and strife." I agree that economic activity can have negative consequences - but how is this caused by the mere existence of money?

Being rewarded with the value is _not_ more helpful than being rewarded with the marker - most people appreciate using their paycheck at their choice of restaurants, rather than simply trading code for hogs at the local bazaar.

 _If nobody owns anything, trade is nonsense._

Barring slavery, nearly everyone owns their time. Thus people own something. Until a startup solves death, that remains a scarce resource. The existence of scarce resources with ownership is thus fundamental to the human condition. Much (most?) trade involves the exchange of labor for "markers." Any time you do a favor for anyone, it's trade. Sometimes, they do you a return favor by giving markers. We can rename money to markers and trade to favors, but that's what it is.

As for physical resources - their "ownership" is basically just a way of prioritizing access. So - you might prefer other ways, like waiting in line, or lotteries. When people have tried those ways, they've found that letting the guy with the most markers have the resource works out for the best. Obviously, you know this - so what do you think works better as a means of resource allocation?

 _Third, the Eisenstein thesis doesn't mention interest_

He mentions several times (I'm referring primarily to his videos) an enthusiasm for instituting money that "decays," like bread, so that we are tempted to spend it more quickly rather than attempting to save it. I can't describe this idea as anything other than crazy, so I'm glad that you reject it as well.

 _Monetizing efficiencies....that one seems a bit faulty_

It's true - I expressed myself poorly, and indeed the idea was unclear in my mind at the time. I think neither of us was right in our characterization of this so far. Technology and markets are, to me, each the seed of the other. Yes, technology creates new markets - but markets capitalize new (usable) technologies. You don't have to call them markets - you can call them patrons, such as those that financed da Vinci. Once again, however, markets appear to do a better job than feudal patrons. Increasingly, groups of patrons acting with good information can do a good job as well - but it remains a market, just a better-informed one.

 _Our current revolution_ (/me degrades into general rant:)

... is not a revolution at all. The "Web2.0" line of innovation seems quite trivial - office online instead of offline, social voting - these are simply efficiency improvements on existing organizational memes. It's probably impolite to post such a comment on a YC board, but nonetheless - does anybody _seriously_ think that this stuff is earth-shaking? Culturally, it might be; but technologically, it's just variations on a theme. Go check out the stem cell labs in Singapore; _they're_ innovating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You can think of an "entrepreneur" as someone who has chosen to take higher risk for the potential of a greater reward. People should of course be free to choose a lower risk pursuit, but the potential reward is also lower.

You're saying many entrepreneurs fail and that this sucks. But your post kind of assumes that _who_ is an entrepreneur is predetermined. Instead, as I said, people should be free to choose the amount of risk they're willing to take, and yes, many of the people who choose to take big risks will fail. That's how it's supposed to work.

Also, obviously each person doesn't have to make this choice once for their entire life. They can fail and try something else.

</comment><comment><USER6> By the definition of capitalism, we are all pawns of the invisible hand of the market, as much as we are the benefactors.

</comment><comment><USER7> _What do you guys think about it?_

I think your theory is without merit.

Most entrepreneurs fail because they take on an endeavor they are not cut out for.

Additionally, it is not like the government randomly selects people and tells them they must go try to start a business.

Generally speaking, entrepreneurial types go into the battle knowing that the odds are stacked against them, but for whatever reason, they feel this is a better approach than a more "safe" career working for another organization.

Even in the tech startup world, there really is no "recruitment" of entrepreneurs, VCs typically reject meetings rather than go out and try to drum up business.

<comment><AUTHOR> My detailed reply to yours and other people's responses can be found here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=646616></comment></comment>


Blacks and Hispanics Are More Underrepresented at Top Colleges Than 35 Years Ago - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/24/us/affirmative-action.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0 <comment><USER2> I suspect users are flagging these submissions because of the abysmal comments, and they're not wrong to. If were going to have a discussion it needs to be up to the civility and intellectual standards of the site.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER3> I would suggest otherwise.

<comment><USER4> What would you suggest?

<comment><USER3> As noted: otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Note how systematic and inexorable the graphs are; it's not any individual college or policy or region. I suspect that this is a mechanical effect of top colleges keeping enrollment essentially static even as the population continues expansion; this means that getting in becomes ever harder (see for example average SAT scores at MIT or Harvard), which in turn changes group admission ratios by the usual tail effects - when you have two normal distributions with different means, the further out you go, the more lopsided the fraction becomes. If you have a mean difference of, say, 100 SAT points between two groups, that leads to a relatively small difference in the number from each group passing a low cutoff like 900, but it means that there will be hardly any members of the lower group reaching 1600 compared to several from the higher group. The tails thin out too fast. (The tails effect is likely also related to the Asian overrepresentation.) Presumably the larger effects in elite colleges are why the NYT investigator focused on them rather than national aggregates, which will show smaller shifts as the lower-scoring students can still go to the unselective colleges.

So as long as Harvard et al keep their incoming classes small and the number of prospective college students remains high or keeps increasing, the imbalance will continue. A few elite colleges may be able to poach from each other to improve their numbers (like Harvey Mudd) but obviously they can't all do that.

<comment><USER6> Best comment in this thread. Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article goes astray in the very first paragraph. "Even after decades of affirmative action." The period starts after the Supreme Court's 1978 decision in _Regents v. Bakke_ which put significant limits on how affirmative action programs can be structured. More generally, the entire 35-year period (starting 1982) takes place during a conservative retrenching from the civil rights era.

</comment><comment><USER8> The denominator used is "college-age population". I wonder what the charts would look like if they used "4-year college attendees".

I'm not saying that's the only way to look at things, but if the overall attendance rate for 4-year colleges is lower because a large swath of the population self-excluded from 4-year colleges, it would surprise me if that effect _didn 't_ show up in the data.

Now, you could fairly ask why that large swath selected out of 4-year college, but the answer there probably isn't in the recruitment and admission processes of the specific colleges even though that's where the problem appears.

</comment><comment><USER9> There is something very funky about the numbers used in this article. All their charts are measuring "enrollment gap", defined as (percentage of college-age population) minus (percentage enrollment). But this conflates changes in enrollment with changes in population. This is especially obvious when looking at the graph for Hispanics, where the number of college-age Hispanics has greatly increased from 1980 to 2015; the "gap" has grown from 3% to 9%, but without using a ruler, it's hard to tell whether the actual percentage of Hispanics attending college has gone up or down!

This makes me feel like the author of the article is trying to deceive me, and I'd much rather get numbers from somewhere else.

</comment><comment><USER10> Thread about this same article from 4 hours ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15089419](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15089419)

</comment><comment><USER11> To fix inequality of opportunities one would be well advised to start with the way k-12 schools are funded. It's too late for most disadvantaged students by the time they are old enough to go to college.

<comment><USER7> Some of the best-funded and worst-performing school systems are ones in inner cities with high minority populations. Baltimore, MD public schools spends more per student than the wealthy D.C. suburb of Montgomery County, MD, despite having a lower cost of living.

<comment><USER11> Sure. But many of the worst performing schools are under funded. You can find outliers either way. There's also the fact that the way k-12 schools are funded causes socio-economic segregation. People with means congregate together due to schools (among other reasons). I don't know if this would be true but maybe if there was genuine equality of funding throughout the country then maybe there would be less socio-economic segregation.

<comment><USER7> There is more or less equality of funding (at least, between rich and poor counties in the same state): [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/03/12/in-2...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/03/12/in-23-states- richer-school-districts-get-more-local-funding-than-poorer- districts/?utm_term=.eee2b4649c2a).

> Federal spending — including through Title I, money meant to bolster > programs for poor children — is serving as an equalizer, according to the > federal data. When federal dollars are included, just five states are > spending less in their poorest districts than in their wealthiest. > Nationwide, the average disparity drops from 15 percent to less than 2 > percent.

<comment><USER11> From what I've read school funding for k-12 varies widely throughout the country.

[http://www.asha.org/Advocacy/schoolfundadv/Overview-of- Fundi...](http://www.asha.org/Advocacy/schoolfundadv/Overview-of-Funding-For- Pre-K-12-Education/)

[http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2016/05/18/the-k-12-fundin...](http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2016/05/18/the-k-12-funding- crisis.html)

I'm no expert on the issue but I have seen schools in poor neighborhoods lacking in computers and with dilapidated equipment. In rich districts I've never seen this. I doubt that just looking at numbers as in the Washington Post article is sufficient to get to the bottom of the issue. Of course, I'm not certain I'm right either.

Whatever the reason I think there is no doubt that some schools are run down and have crappy learning environments. They certainly, on the outside, give the impression of being underfunded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Oh great, another race/gender-based discussion to elicit the best that the HN community has to offer.

</comment><comment><USER13> Amazing how quickly the proportion of whites dropped in a mere 35 years, in every single one of those charts. Pretty soon they'll have to get used to being a minority in the US as well.

</comment><comment><USER14> I bet it's all those pesky good for nothing lazy asians that spend their entire time doing useless things like studying and trying to make it in life. They're the reason smart and honest blacks and hispanics are being pushed out of top universities. We really need to do something about this.

<comment><USER2> We've banned this account and the others by the same user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> More like "because of Affirmative Action".

Just treat people as fairly as possible. The other way doesn't work.

<comment><USER7> We're going to play poker. Everyone will start with a randomly determined number of chips. But people whose HN handles start with A-H will get, on average, 40% less to start with. Aside from that tiny nit, it'll be a totally fair game.

<comment><USER16> Is the alternative that we play poker and after every N rounds the chips are redistributed so that everyone has the same amount?

At what point(s) should redistribution happen? At what point(s) should it stop to allow better decision making?

<comment><USER17> At the point when you realize that the original distribution is out of line with your current moral and ethical values.

<comment><USER16> Non-sarcastically, I think this is a completely reasonable subjective way to resolve the issue. It's what our political systems are doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Being "underrepresented" speaks absolutely none as to the cause of such a state. I would be interested in more comprehensive data on college applications, and the acceptance/rejection of said applications.

<comment><USER18> _gets negative karma for attempting to discuss_ thanks fam</comment></comment>


Automate the iOS build/test/deploy cycle with Distiller and Hockey - <AUTHOR> http://blog.distiller.io/2014/05/21/always-be-deploying/

<comment><USER2> I wish this was a link to the actual documentation linked in the blog post rather than this incredibly short post which is nothing but a sales pitch. The idea looks nice, but I couldn't help but laugh at the "Use Safari" warning in the documentation log. Why would I need to use Safari to download a simple file from the Developer Center?

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's the link to the setup document: [http://docs.distiller.io/start/getting_started_ota_deploymen...](http://docs.distiller.io/start/getting_started_ota_deployment_setup/)

The "use Safari" warning is because the Apple Developer Center can randomly go all pear-shaped when using other browsers. Not sure why - it logically makes no sense - but it happens more often than you think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This appears to be in the same space as shenzhen: [https://github.com/nomad/shenzhen](https://github.com/nomad/shenzhen) (which works wonderfully)

Can you differentiate your service/system?

<comment><USER4> Sure. There's definitely some overlap. Shenzhen is a smaller piece of the puzzle, designed to build and deploy from a single system at the point that a user decides to do so.

Distiller provides hosted continuous integration, building your code and running all of your tests every time someone commits to GitHub. It also allows you to push the passing build to an OTA platform (Testflight or Hockey) as a final step.

The difference is most notable in a team environment where everyone can have access to build results, including seeing the test results on a GitHub pull request before deciding to merge a set of changes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I want this, but: The product is not explained. It actually took a bit of clicking to finally find the setup process under documentation.

Minor nit, your blog header doesn't link back to the main site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about the spare home page. That's our fault.

The guides for set up are here: [http://docs.distiller.io/guides/](http://docs.distiller.io/guides/)

We're trying to simplify the configuration through a few different means to make setup as straightforward as possible:

\- autodetecting available workspaces, projects and schemes so you can setup a project in a couple clicks. \- automatically handle submodule / Cocoapod dependencies within the VM \- autoincrementing build numbers to simplify OTA (this is a pita)

And if there's any issue around setup, you can get us at email@example.com or hop into chat at [https://www.hipchat.com/gCQq5vQ18](https://www.hipchat.com/gCQq5vQ18)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was just looking for something like this. I missed my push->circleci->test->deploy workflow when I moved to iOS development. Will be having a serious look at this later.</comment>


Chance the Rapper is the world's first truly independent artist - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/may/19/chance-the-rapper-album-coloring-book-mixtape-billboard-charts-stream-music <comment><AUTHOR> This seems more of a tipping point than Ck Louis - it's more native to the web as a means of watching / measuring.

</comment><comment><USER2> It certainly helps that 'Coloring Book' is a fantastic album.</comment>


On the irony of programmers who don't like abstraction - <AUTHOR> http://eaf4.com/on-the-irony-of-programmers-who-dont-like-abstraction/ <comment><USER2> "ActiveRecord is hardly "the depths". After ActiveRecord, your data will probably go through Ruby's I/O system, TCP stacks, IP stacks, low level kernel I/O, firmware on network cards, a database management system (itself comprising multiple layers of semantics), and will ultimately move some electrons around somewhere."

What are "the depths" according to him then?</comment>


Ask HN: Who still uses voicemail on a website? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Not sure what you mean. The VoIP panel is on a website and the voicemails are stored there and/or emailed to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> I mean, for example, if you want to receive feedback from your website visitors or customers you can put (on the contact page) your email and phone number which go to your voicemail.</comment></comment>


Seth's Blog: Gravity is just a theory - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/12/gravity-is-just.html <comment><USER2> Seth should pick his examples more carefully, he obviously doesn't know anything about science.

\</comment><comment>-----

Seth: _They say he discovered gravity. Nonsense. He just named it._

Fact: He didn't discover gravity, and has never been accredited for doing so. The famous story of Gallileo dropping balls from the tower of Pisa to measure gravity happened in the 17'th century, so obviously the idea of gravity was around for a while before Newton. What he did do, however, was to publish the Principia Mathematica in 1687 that gives an in-depth explanation of gravity, including the famous inverse square law. In the book he theorised his three laws of motion, invented calculus and basically lay the whoole foundation for classical mechanics. This is what we remember him for, not for having named gravity.

\</comment><comment>-----

Seth: _Everyone 'believes' in gravity. And yet, we know virtually nothing about it_

fact: Seth should read up on his physics, starting with Einstein.

\</comment><comment>-----

seth: _There are very few people doing serious gravity research_

Fact: One of the major goals of modern physics is a theory of everything where the four natural forces (weak force, strong force, electromagnetic force and gravity) are combined into one. Gravity has always been the odd one out and hard to explain, thus spawning massive research into gravity. One of the reasone the LHC, the most expensive physical experiment to date, was conceived was to learn more about gravity. Oh, and there's this guy called Einstein that apparently did some work in this area too.

\</comment><comment>-----

Seth: _There are evolution skeptics who would prefer a different story, but no gravity skeptics, even though there's a lot less science there._

Fact: Religion always tries to put down science that reaches contradictory conclusions than scripture, and gravity is no exception since it implies that the earth is not at the center of the universe. Seth doesn't seem to get this though, since the battle was lost by the church long ago. Take Gallileo who was on trial on the suspicion of heresy in 1633 because of his theories of gravity. If found guilty he would have paid with his life. The laws of gravity were much more opposed by the church than evolution is today.

<comment><USER3> _Fact: Religion always tries to put down science that reaches contradictory conclusions than scripture_

Fact: Not "always". For the most part, religious people are oblivious to science, and only highly visible matters like heliocentricity (gravity, less so) become contentious. It's clear that he's making an imperfect metaphor and the details aren't especially important.

That is, are you _marketing_ evolution? Even the smart lads believe in evolution because it's fashionable, like the iphone, and not because they followed through all the relevant citations. Rather, merely quoting the full title of "On the origin of species" is enough to put fair weather Darwinists in a tizzy--and the atheists are right in there with the Pope, depending on how you advertise the inquisition. It's a marketing problem and has a marketing solution.

<comment><USER2> I'm not disagreeing with his central thesis, I'm just saying that it is undermined tremendously by his bad examples.

And since he is in marketing he should know better.

<comment><USER4> A good marketing campaign is rarely deterred by facts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I might be going on a limb here but do we really need to have every single Seth Godin post on Hacker News? Every few days there's a new one that somehow reaches the top, doesn't offer much value and even has significant issues (like this one).. I didn't really think this comment through but I know I have become slightly annoyed with his posts flooding HN as of late.

<comment><USER6> Totally agree. Most of his posts are useless. His total lack of physics knowledge aside, most of his stuff doesn't even tell me how to market better.

<comment><USER7> His posts are, however, often insightful and usually feature a fresh observation.

While these rarely give you step 1 - do this, step 2 - do that type advice, enough insights, when compiled together, can help you come up with ideas and inspire insights of your own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It always irks me a bit when science is pushed out of its comfort zone to make some non-scientific point. Subtlety is lost, misconception introduced. And language like "just a theory" suggests that scientific theory is much less rigorous than it actually is.

<comment><USER9> Exactly. A theory has been vetted by both experimentalists and theorists multiple times until they are all so convinced a hypothesis works that it moves into theory land. In the vernacular, a theory is just an idea, which isn't the way its used in science.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow... apparently Seth Godin is my uncle wearing a clever disguise.

<http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/10/no-one-knows-wh.html>

</comment><comment><USER11> Seth's analogies of gravity and evolution may not be accurate, but his point stands that the theory of gravity is less controversial than the theory of evolution. Its also interesting how he illustrates the power of a story as a marketing device. It is one of the many factors in the the success of evolution vs. gravity.

He goes a step further and provides insights into the kinds of stories that sell (or dont) - long stories and stories that go against the conventional wisdom are harder to communicate.

Obviously, if you have a super-spectacular product like google search or iphone (add in your fav product), you dont need to tell a silly story. But for most folks who are in the business of creating/delivering mundane products/services or who dont have a huge marketing budget, its nice to gain an advantage. I think this is one of the reasons for the success of the Balsalmiq guy - he has a nice product but his story of a totally transparent one-person ISV going it alone is really compelling.

</comment><comment><USER12> Sometimes you have to go against the grain though. After all, evolution is true, and marketing it as 'this is a great way to supplement your creationism' (which Darwin actually did) may not exactly go over well or be the most honest approach.

<comment><USER13> We don't know evolution is true. The most you can say is that evolution is the best explanation we have for the data collected so far.

There have been pretty major revisions to the evolution since Darwin's time, and I think it still needs a lot of work to explain some of its fuzzier points ('chemical evolution', cambrian explosion, etc). It's entirely possible that a new explanation (i.e., not evolution) could better explain those and other data points.

It could be similar to how newtonian mechanics works 99% of the time, but couldn't explain the orbit of mercury. We needed relativity (which arguably disproved gravity) to explain the handful of non-conforming data points.

<comment><USER14> _We don't know evolution is true_

I think scientists are still waiting on the results of the 100m year experiment where a fish pen turns into a group of intelligent humans.

Honestly, I'm sure I'll get flak for this, but I can't believe people accept Evolution as if it's some inherent and proven physical law as gravity. On the macro-evolutionary level, there's so much bullshitting/extrapolation going on (especially in the arena of speciation) that there's so many questions and holes left unanswered.

Despite the fact that we only ever observe variation within a given _type_ , we're supposed to have faith in the scientists that (given enough time) we'll get whole new kingdoms of life. As far as I'm concerned, those experiments prove one thing: variation exists within a given type. Period.

<comment><USER15> So the overwhelming genetic evidence for evolution (viral markers shared between species, shared genome, etc.) simply don't count for anything? The fact that non-trivial organisms like E. coli have seen undergoing radical "in type" changes that culminate the in creation of a new bacterial species doesn't mean anything? We've seen speciation occur in short-lived creatures, even above the single-celled level.

The "macroevolution is unproven" dodge is a very popular song and dance right now, especially as Texas is gearing up for its Big Outdoor Criticism-Of- Evolution Fight. But the reality is there is overwhelming evidence supporting micro and macro evolution. It is difficult to reproduce the precise biological conditions in a lab, but science is full of facts that cannot be reproduced easily in a lab (e.g., stellar chemistry is all about experimental compromises. We don't have the resources to keep a vacuum for 100m years).

I appreciate that you may have certain beliefs (be the religious or simply skeptical) that make it difficult for you to accept evolution, and you have nothing but my sympathy as you tackle this difficult issue. But evolution's problem is _not_ a lack of evidence. If you believe that macro-evolution lacks evidence, this is because you have not familiarized yourself with the evidence.

<comment><USER14> _The "macroevolution is unproven" dodge_

Except it's not a dodge at all. E-coli is still E-coli, whether it powers itself on glucose or citrate. Regarding Lenski's E-coli experiment, an earlier study on E-coli showed uncultured strains of E-coli can metabolize citrate in low-oxygen conditions: <http://jb.asm.org/cgi/content/abstract/180/16/4160>

So that whole generation 31.5k citrate "evolution" in E-coli wasn't something new, it was a forced adaptation to E-coli by lab conditions. Great job, we yet again proved that a species is capable of adapting to extreme environments within the limits of its genetic makeup -- chalk another one up to micro- evolution and species adaptation.

Diane Dodd's fruit flies are still fruit flies, regardless of whether they prefer mates who eat maltose or starch. A fruit fly's preference for a type of mate does not create reproductive isolation (the two types can still reproduce), nor does it even come close to producing an entirely new species. This experiment is barely different than saying humans of a similar race prefer to mate with each other.

So again, from an ID perspective there are many holes in macro-evolution because it is entirely, 100% based on the faith in scientists that micro- evolutionary changes will add up. There is not a single macro-evolutionary study (and there never will be, because there isn't enough time) that conclusively proves the change from one type to another. All we have is that we can push a given type to it's pre-defined genetic limits by forced adaptation in lab conditions (Micro).

So yes, there is an overwhelming volume of evidence for micro-evolution (which I agree with - species adaptation in an environment and all), but here's the way I see it:

Scientists can observe and verify many independent and separate processes (examples: MicroEvolution works and Fossils exist). Each one of these independent, observable items are like small Lego Bricks, all solid pieces that you can build with -- of course, some fit together more properly than others.

Except the only problem is that scientists don't have the instructions, nor can they see the picture on the box, nor do they even have a clue how things really get built in the Lego Universe. So what we effectively have is a bunch of scientists that say "Well, these pieces fit together pretty nicely and we created something that looks pretty decent (to us), but we have absolutely no clue if we even built the right thing. Just have faith that the way we linked these pieces together is how it really looks on the box"

<comment><USER15> _"E. coli is still E. coli, whether it powers itself on glucose or citrate."_

Except that one of the defining factors of E. coli is that it cannot process citrate. But hey, I wouldn't want to ruin a perfectly good dodge.

And you've also neatly stepped aside the massive genetic evidence of evolution. The fact that we have specific genetic patterns that are clearly shared with proposed precursor species is pretty hard to ignore, which is why nearly all anti-evolutionists never address that evidence head on, instead attacking "macro-evolution" or older arguments like gap-arguments.

 _Except the only problem is that scientists don't have the instructions, nor can you see the picture on the box. So what we effectively have is a bunch of scientists that say "Well, these pieces fit together pretty nicely and we created something that looks pretty decent (to us), but we have absolutely no clue if we even built the right thing. Just have faith that the way we linked these pieces together is how it really looks on the box"_

Which can be said of all science. Why do you hold special exception for Biology? Physics has core theories that are not entire validated or not understood, and yet you have no problem using a computer that works using principles said principles.

Simply put, you're applying inconsistent criterion to these to preserve a non- scientific ideology. You don't have a problem interacting with gravity, electricity, or nutrition (a far less understood science). But the fundamental unifying theory of biology? Well that steps on your minority fundamentalist religious convictions! Time to draw a line in the sand.

And the most irritating part about this is you mention ID. The most ironic part of ID is that it's _not inconsistent with evolution_. Evolution is just the _mechanism_. It's well within human capacity to design evolving systems, so why couldn't an omniscient God do the same? And indeed, wouldn't this vastly simplify the process?

In any event, religious folks always try to mix mechanism with meaning. The mechanism is something we can quantify and describe. The meaning is something you are free to imagine in any way you want. Religion has always been first about meaning and only later goes into mechanism when it begins to amass secular power.

<comment><USER14> _...E. coli is that it cannot process citrate._

You must have missed that study I posted where it showed that E-coli already has the capability to process citrate within it's genetic code, it's just typically not utilized. Forcing something to adapt to an extreme environment within its genetic confines is not macro-evolution, thats micro-evolutionary adaptation. Let me repeat it: E-coli that processes glucose already has the ability to process citrate within its DNA. All these experiments have shown is that when you force a species to adapt it will adapt as far as it's genetic boundaries enable it.

 _Which can be said of all science. Why do you hold special exception for Biology?_

I don't. I am particularly skeptical of Macro-Evolution because (1) it is entirely and completely unobservable and (2) is the human product of many independent processes that have all been linked together. This Macro- Evolutionary "process" is a creation of man, not inherent nor observable in the universe like gravity, electricity, and the effects of nutrition. Unlike physics, which is often provable through observation and mathematics, MacroE is man's attempt to build the unobservable from what can be observed, and I have every right to be skeptical when we move beyond the bounds of explaining the observable to explaining the unobservable.

<comment><USER15> Once again, dodging the genetic evidence for evolution. But I understand why you do it, it's even more irritating that recent fossil evidence if you've got an axe to grind.

 _I don't. I am particularly skeptical of Macro-Evolution because (1) it is entirely and completely unobservable_

Save for all that fossil evidence, genetic evidence, corroborating evidence in short-lived creatures. Completely unobservable.

We have a _mechanism_ that we know works on real, living creatures. We have _evidence_ that such process has taken place all over the earth on a large scale. What we don't have is the exact process happening under glass so that all you can do is avert your gaze.

And even if we had that the ID/biblical literalist movement would just move the goalposts again. They always do.

 _(2) is the human product of many independent processes that have all been linked together._

No different from physics. We have no unified theory, and many observations remain unexplained.

 _The Macro-Evolutionary "process" is a creation of man, not something observable and inherent to the universe like gravity, electricity, or the effects of good nutrition._

All "scientific fact" is the creation of man. There is nothing privledged about our physical models. Indeed, it's certain that our current models of electricity, gravity, and nutrition are incomplete and probably deeply flawed models. Science is not about proving absolute truth, it's about removing bias from observation and building models to fit those observations.

Your metric of belief is strongly biased here, and only in the case of biology. From what you've said, it's because your religious beliefs. You're free to hold them, but I'm also free to point out that the scientific consensus is that your religious fundamentalism is completely unsupportable when it comes to how current species came into existence.

Sorry, but it's false. And I'm not afraid to say that, and a growing number of people are standing up to the religious status-quo that has gradually been holding America back from scientific progress.

<comment><USER14> _Save for all that fossil evidence, genetic evidence, corroborating evidence in short-lived creatures._

Yet again, what you're saying here is "Trust me that I put all the independent pieces together properly and that's what is shown on the box."

 _All "scientific fact" is the creation of man. There is nothing privledged about our physical models. Indeed, it's certain that our current models of electricity, gravity, and nutrition are incomplete and probably deeply flawed models._

Of course it is! Except when we observe physical processes, we're not starting with the question "Does this even exist?" but "Ok, we KNOW this exists, but how does this work?". The difference between the two is very distinct, and both are subject to man's interpretation.

Read this carefully: ----

Physics takes existing observable processes and deconstructs them so we can understand them better. Macro-Evolution is the attempt to take processes and make them add up (or construct) into a larger process that we don't even know exists - you would agree that we've never observed Macro-Evolution since there's not enough time. To further my physics example, they just spent several billion on the Large Hadron Collider in an attempt to further _deconstruct_ the nature of our world (notably, finding a Higgs boson).

\----.

<comment><USER15> _Yet again, what you're saying here is "Trust me that I put all the independent pieces together properly and that's what is shown on the box."_

"Like all of the rest of science, where this process is good enough!"

Why isn't it good enough here?

 _Of course it is! Except when we observe physical processes, we're not starting with the question "Does this even exist?" but "Ok, we KNOW this exists, but how the heck does this work?". The difference between the two is very distinct._

There is no difference between observations of these kinds. Our senses are so incredibly flawed and unreliable, as are our minds, that there is basically no difference when it comes to science.

 _The attempt to prove Macro-Evolution is the attempt to prove that it even exists (or Does man's linkage of these independent processes indeed = MacroEvolution?)._

It's funny that you say this. 8-10 years ago, the micro-vs-macro-evolution argument was called "irreducible complexity", and the scale was much smaller than what you're holding to now. "How could complex things like flagellum" evolve? Well science has gone and shown that not only is it possible, it's not hard at all.

So, your camp was forced to _move the goalposts_ and say, "Well that level of complexity is okay, but now this level of complexity up here is totally unproven!" And when we show you macro-evolution you'll just move the goalposts again. Because it keeps happening over and over.

 _When we attempt to understand physics and other inherent universal processes, we already know they exist..._

Except that even a casual understanding of science in history would tell you this statement is grossly false. Heliocentricity comes to mind.

And while we're busy debating all this proof and you're picking tiny holes in a remarkably well-researched theory that has risen to prominence as the "unifying theory of biology", where does ID start offering complex studies? Your life-origin of choice has basically nothing behind it save, "My bible tells me so, it's certainly _possible_ , and I don't really believe your evidence to the contrary." You cannot base a theory on negative statements and the Bible.

Your position is intellectually bankrupt, your arguments presented thus far are literally over 5 years old and well-debunked, the scientific community rejects your hypothesis, and your pathological avoidance of the fundamental inconsistencies you're proposing in being an anti-evolutionist are plain as day to anyone without a religious axe to grind.

<comment><USER14> We're really getting nowhere, but I'm curious to know one last thing. Since you seem to be speaking as an ambassador for the scientific community, which one of these processes would have a more solid foundation in fact and truth?

1\. An empirically observable process that, by its very nature, is known to exist.

2\. An unobservable process, where the very condition of existence is unknown.

There's a huge difference in the science of deconstructing what is known to exist (the empirical) versus trying to construct the unknown. One is based in solid fact and the extremely powerful truth of existence, the other is just a pitiful shot in the dark and based on faith that (1) man has the intelligence and capability to put things together properly (2) it even exists.

<comment><USER15> _We're really getting nowhere.._

You're right.

<comment><USER14> Are you not going to answer my question then? Or do you genuinely not know the answer?

 _Your position is intellectually bankrupt, your arguments presented thus far are literally over 5 years old and well-debunked, the scientific community rejects your hypothesis, and your pathological avoidance of the fundamental inconsistencies you're proposing in being an anti-evolutionist are plain as day to anyone without a religious axe to grind._

If you're going to be summarily and swiftly dismissive under the premises that I'm just another "anti-evolutionist" religious type, then proceed to insult me and try to question the validity of my argument by saying I'm someone with an "axe to grind", then you will at least acknowledge that the very science we are debating certainly deserves its massive dose of skepticism from even science itself, not just religious individuals.

<comment><USER16> I dismiss your "arguments" even more swiftly (you're not making any, you are merely making tired, unsupported assertions).

The answers to your "questions" can all be found here, which 30 seconds of googling would have found for you:

<http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/>

You're welcome.

<comment><USER14> Thanks for the link, it's all so obvious now! How can you ever go wrong when you're the one who gets to define both the end result and then fill in the means of getting there?

Of course the evidence will always point to the end result, because you're the one who made up the damn end result in the first place! Evidence can always be twisted and shaped to fit your view when you're the one who gets to define what the picture looks like.

This isn't about whether the evidence points to the picture, it's about whether or not we even have the right picture in mind. It's pretty clear that since the end result (Macro-Evolution) cannot be empirically observed in action, it is a contrivance of man of which it's existence is still unknown.

<comment><USER15> _The end result (Macro-Evolution) cannot be empirically observed in action._

Neither can God.

I do feel bad for you, kirse. 10 years ago I went through the same dilemma, debate and denial. If you want to be rational, you have to learn the evidence. If you learn the evidence and you apply rational, even-handed criterion to the subject, the conclusion that evolution exists and at least partly explains our modern world is undeniably apparent.

You literally have no rational leg to stand on. Your argument that the conclusion was made up and the data forced to fit it is so obviously false that it's almost laughable (few theories are as rigorously opposed as evolution has been, if there were any significant holes the scientific community would tear it apart).

 _This isn't about whether the evidence points to the end result, it's about whether or not we even have the right end result in mind._

This is exactly 180 degrees from reality. If the evidence points to a specific conclusion and that evidence can be replicated by diverse, neutral, competent observers the conclusion is true regardless of if we like it or not. Science isn't about picking a result then gathering data to support it, although if you hang out with the ID crowd I can see why you might get that impression.

If you want an example we can look again to heliocentricity. It was not a popular viewpoint, but the data forced people to accept that position, despite the fact that it went against all the contemporary common sense and religious belief (and despite the fact that it's difficult to observe contrary evidence without a lot of bookkeeping and some optics).

P.S. I didn't answer your question earlier because I've already answered a very similar question in debates dozens of times. Your crowd really needs a revised playbook, because you can basically google ever question as presented and get a powerful rebuttal to your every potential argument.

<comment><USER14> _The end result (Macro-Evolution) cannot be empirically observed in action.

Neither can God. _

Don't feel bad for me, because I am just as happy putting my faith in the existence of God (an entity that cannot be empirically observed), as you are putting your faith in the existence of Macro-Evolution (another process that cannot be empirically observed).

As soon as Macro-Evolution is empirically observed, then I will accept it as fact.

But for now, it's apparent we agree that it's simply a matter of where we're assigning our faith, I'm more content believing that the correct picture/end result is that these complex systems had a designer.

<comment><USER15> I feel bad for you because you've been programmed to be so radically inconsistent. You act like evolution was made up just to weaken the theistic position, but it wasn't. The model of evolution emerged from a host of speciation models that existed, ranging from "God made it that way 500 years ago" to complex and absurdly complex secular models involving generative forces.

History is full of examples where a model emerged from lots of separate data and turned out to be correct. Another great example is Atoms. For a long time, people thought that an atomic model of matter _wasn't science_ because you couldn't directly observe such tiny things. Turns out that was wrong. Then along comes quantum mechanics, and now we're on even more bizarre and even thinner ice trying to map out effects which _observation actually destroys_.

And yet we're making progress, just like we have in Biology. The ONLY difference that is relevant to our discussion between quantum mechanics and evolutionary theory is that your holy text has something to say about one and not the other.

You're deliberately throwing out the evidence because you don't like the conclusion. You're making a special exception for Evolution that no other scientific theory has to make it through just because your religion tells you to.

 _As soon as Macro-Evolution is empirically observed, then I will accept it as fact._

No you won't. When I was younger I had heated debates that ended with, "As soon as we can see evidence of flagellum evoling I will accept [evolution] as fact." They didn't, and you won't. You will move the goalpost, draw new false dichotomies, and struggle to preserve your world-view.

 _But for now, it's apparent we agree that it's simply a matter of where we're assigning our faith_

Quite the opposite. You have decided to have faith, and I reject that notion. Evolution is a useful model for biology, nothing more. If we can provide a better model with excellent evidence involving invisible winged greyhounds, I think that'd be way more entertaining.

You've admitted your position is based in faith, and that's why all the logic, evidence, and reason that I can muster cannot unseat your position. Logic, evidence and reason can only act on rational people, and your faith is–at its core–inherently irrational.

<comment><USER14> _\-- History is full of examples where a model emerged from lots of separate data and turned out to be correct._

History is also full of even more examples of models that have turned out to be incorrect. Historical examples of validity have no bearing on the independent validity of Macro-Evolution. And you're trying to lecture me on basic logic and rationality?

 _\-- You're deliberately throwing out the evidence because you don't like the conclusion._

Right, and you do the exact same thing when you take evidence that indicates complex functioning systems have a designer and simply throw it out the window in favor of your own model. This argument goes nowhere on both sides.

 _\-- You will move the goalpost_

No, I won't move the goalpost, because the goalpost is clearly defined as the empirical observability of Macro-Evolution, in the same way that heliocentricity was proven by its empirical observability. There is nothing farther you can go than empirically observing a fully new type of life come from one another. Again, stop trying to extrapolate your historical experiences with others into an independent case. I will be firmly convinced once I see a creature (a fish?) evolve into a cat or some other creature.

 _\-- You have decided to have faith, and I reject that notion._

Tell me then, how do you bridge the gap of believing that something exists when in fact it cannot be empirically observed? However you may label it, the belief in anything that cannot be empirically observed is never fully grounded in rationality, but an intuitive feeling that it is the truth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Theory: a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment. e.g. General relativity has a lot of mathematics backing it up.

Law: a scientific generalization based on empirical observations of physical behavior. e.g F = ma. We don't know why it's true, it just is some sort of an axiom.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think Seth Godin got it right. Some of the comments here also prove how much Newton is a brand around which a perfect marketing campaign has been formed. I wrote a post about this:

[http://science1.wordpress.com/2008/12/03/the-greatest- market...](http://science1.wordpress.com/2008/12/03/the-greatest-marketing- genius-of-all-time/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Newton's cheap trick to get famous is not giving a name to something everybody knows. It's standing on the shoulder of giants.

<comment><USER19> Maybe my post is not very clear.

Seth Godin implies that Newton became famous because of something that amounts to a cheap marketing trick, instead of just being a genius who revolutionized math and physics.

I say if you want to find something cheap in what Newton has done, the only thing you can do is look at what modesty made him say about himself:'If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants'.

So now if you vote my post down, I'll know it's not a misunderstanding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> i think gravity 'waves' travel at the speed of light

<comment><USER15> You're right. As far as anyone can tell, gravity propagates at the speed of light.

We're just not really sure what is propagating, or why. LHC will hopefully finally give us some useful observations on the subject.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Poor Seth, just can't get it right.</comment>


A Chat with the Directors of the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/11/14881076/the-legend-of-zelda-breath-of-the-wild-nintendo-interview <comment><USER2> I hope this marks a turn in the trend of ridiculous handholding, drawn out tutorial sections and checklists upon checklists that have become so prevalent in open world games.

BotW is doing an amazing job of just letting me explore and figure out stuff out on my own, without spoon feeding me content like I'm a 6 year old who's using a controller for the first time, or shoving a billion achievements/map markers in my face.

I look forward seeing to what other devs learn from BotW and incorporate in their own games.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. For a period of time I had found that single player games were becoming very easy, repetitive, and became stale after a few hours. They were also getting shorter and started charging for DLC, even when the game could be completed in less than 10 hours when released. I think appealing to casual gamers was a factor, along with profit. I started mostly just playing more competitive multiplayer games.

Now, it seems that games are trending back to being more challenging and rewarding. Dark Souls restored my hope for single player games. It was challenging, deep, and the combat system was very fun and flexible. I rarely replay single player games. Before Dark Souls, the last single player game I played through multiple times was Resident Evil 4. I probably spent 100 hours playing Dark Souls. BOTW isn't Dark Souls, but there are a lot of similarities.

I now have a backlog of newer single player games I need to beat, but unfortunately it's a lot harder to find the time now. I really hope the trend continues.

I wonder if casual gamers moving migrating to mobile platforms had something to do with the trend change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My favorite part of BOTW is the villages. I recognize this isn't really something new to the franchise, but with the recipe system, it adds a new dimension.

I play with my kids, and my daughter loves to wander around and talk to villagers, discover side quests, look at items in the shops and cook new items.

My son mostly skips past them and roams around solving big quests and fighting enemies.

I think the weakest part of the game is the Hyrule Compendium, which doesn't really feel very well integrated into the game, and feels like it was added at a late stage, based on the success of Pokemon Go.

<comment><USER5> The compendium is very helpful when grinding for certain ingredients. Without it, I would have never been able to upgrade some of my armour sets.</comment></comment>


Fexl: The one programming language that's close to being flawless - <AUTHOR> https://fexl.com/flawless <comment><USER2> ...-in the creators opinion, for the tasks that it solves for them

<comment><USER3> I think it's difficult to read "the one programming language that's close to being flawless", without interpreting it as being someone's opinion.

Reading the article though, I'd say a good objective argument is made that Fexl is "flawless", insofar as it being the "thinnest possible functional programming layer on top of C." Whether that's useful or good is another matter.

<comment><USER4> These being equivalent:

      (a (b (c (d (e (f x))))))
      (a; b; c; d; e; f x)

Is not required so isn't the thinnest possible layer.

Whether it's preferable to a homoiconic s-expr is subjective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's hard to take seriously the style opinions of someone who indents curly braces that way.</comment>


The Illustrated BERT: How NLP Cracked Transfer Learning - <AUTHOR> https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-bert/ <comment><USER3> I think that the work that is done on ELMo, BERT and others is great and useful. Unfortunately, there are many grandiose claims circling around these papers, such as the title of this blog post.

For example:

 _If we're using this GloVe representation, then the word "stick" would be represented by this vector no-matter what the context was. "Wait a minute" said a number of NLP researchers (Peters et. al., 2017, McCann et. al., 2017, and yet again Peters et. al., 2018 in the ELMo paper ), "stick"" has multiple meanings depending on where it's used. Why not give it an embedding based on the context it's used in – to both capture the word meaning in that context as well as other contextual information?". And so, contextualized word-embeddings were born._

This is blatantly false. Contextualized word representations have been around for a very long time. For example, the neural probabilistic language model proposed by Bengio et al., 2003 produces contextual word representations. There have been many papers about neural language models thereafter. However, the idea is even older, Schütze's 1993 paper (Word Spaces) produces context- dependent word representations with subword units (n-grams).

Researchers have been well-aware for decades that ideally one would need context-sensitive representations and that representations such as those produced by word2vec or GloVe have this shortcoming. However, one of the reason that word2vec became so popular is that it is damn cheap to train [1] and that the possibility to pretrain on much larger corpora gave these simpler models an edge.

ELMO, BERT, and others (even though they differ quite a bit) spiritual successors of earlier neural language models that rely on newer techniques (BiDi LSTMs, convolutions over characters, transformers, etc.), larger amounts of data, and the availability of _much_ faster hardware than we had one or two decades ago (e.g. BERT was trained on 64 TPU chips, or as Ed Grefenstette called it _blowing through a forest 's worth of GPU-time_).

Disclaimer: I have nothing against this work. I very much enjoyed the ELMo paper. I am just objecting to all the hype/marketing out there.

[1] The skip-gram model with negative sampling is very similar to logistic regression, where one optimizes parameters of two vectors rather than just one weight vector.

<comment><USER4> This blog post certainly is pretty flawed on attribution of ideas - <USER2> attributes word2vec as the first to introduce word vectors (which is.... very wrong).

"Word2Vec showed that we can use a vector (a list of numbers) to properly represent words in a way that captures semantic or meaning-related relationships (e.g. the ability to tell if words are similar, or opposites, or that a pair of words like "Stockholm" and "Sweden" have the same relationship between them as "Cairo" and "Egypt" have between them) as well as syntactic, or grammar-based, relationships (e.g. the relationship between "had" and "has" is the same as that between "was" and "is")."

<comment><USER5> True, we built NLP/NLU vector representations from the ground up to tackle hypothesis generation and hidden relationship detection connected to genes, genomic pathways and therapeutics related to extending human lifespan, DNA repair and LET radiation chromosomal damage repair at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab from 2002 to 2008 [https://www.google.com/patents/US7987191](https://www.google.com/patents/US7987191) followed by Tomas Mikolov's/Google's work and preceded by countless others of course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Has anyone developed commercial applications based on word embeddings?

It's clear that people are putting up better and better numbers on certain tasks that are widely shared, but for all I know these will always be a bridesmaid and never a bride when it comes to being useful for something.

Back in the 1970s it was clear that it wasn't going to be easy to make rule- based parsers that were "good enough" but it seems that now the task has been defined down so that if you can do better than chance that's a miracle. Thus people can kid themselves into thinking they are practicing what Thomas Kuhn called "normal science" since they are in the same shared reality even if it is a delusion.

<comment><USER7> Most modern NLP methods are built on top of word embeddings, things like Neural Machine Translation, text classification and etc all convert input words into word embeddings then stack a neural networks on top of it.

<comment><USER6> People write papers about these things.

"Do they make commercial applications?" is the question.

The paradigm here is "Does method X get better answers than method Y?" as opposed to "Will we embarass ourselves if we put method Z into production?"

<comment><USER7> All of those things are used daily by billions of people around the world. Google sells their translation system through Google cloud, so does AWS and a bunch of other NLP startups.

<comment><USER6> Can you point me to a text analysis API that is not embarrassingly bad?

I have tried products from Amazon, IBM, Google and other companies and the one thing they have in common is they've never passed an acceptance test for me.

Language translation is a particular bad example of something where a "Clever Hans" effect can happen, where the reader's desire and capability for closure will fill in for mistakes the system makes and make it look like it performs better than it really does.

<comment><USER8> I don't use off the shelf APIs, but I'd be surprised if Google's named entity recogniser isn't pretty good in the news or financial domain.

OpenCalais is pretty good in the financial domain. [http://www.opencalais.com/opencalais- demo/](http://www.opencalais.com/opencalais-demo/)

IBM isn't great. Don't know about Amazon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> See also "NLP's ImageNet moment has arrived" ([https://thegradient.pub/nlp- imagenet/](https://thegradient.pub/nlp-imagenet/)) by one of the researchers involved in the papers surveyed in this post.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for sharing this link -- found it quite a good read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's ironic that the study of language leads to the creation of a new one

</comment><comment><USER11> How is this related to fastText ?</comment>


Contact tracing app vetted by Apple found to share data with Foursquare/Google - <AUTHOR> https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/05/22/contact-tracing-app-vetted-by-apple-found-to-share-data-with-foursquare-and-google <comment><USER2> They buried the lede here:

> While Care19 does not rely on the recently released Apple-Google Exposure > Notification API, Apple was involved in the vetting of the app

The way the article was written, it seemed like the app was using the Exposure Notification API but doesn't say it wasn't until half way through, and then says that the app was "vetted" by Apple.

Well, all apps are vetted by Apple, that's how the iOS App Store process works. The article (and the Washington Post article this is based on) really don't give details about how involved Apple was, making me believe that this was likely treated as a normal app and was vetted as a normal app.

In other words, I get the frustration with the app sending data to places it shouldn't like FourSquare, which is pretty irresponsible for an app that's supposed to be just for contact tracing, but I don't really see how Apple is part of the problem.

<comment><USER3> >Well, all apps are vetted by Apple

And as such, Apple is responsible for it existing in their store.

>making me believe that this was likely treated as a normal app and was vetted as a normal app.

You'd think with the privacy issues surrounding contact tracing apps, they would have taken a closer look. Seems negligent not to.

How does Apple get away with both the accolades when it keeps a 'curated walled garden' that's supposed to protect users from themselves, as i've seen quoted many times on hn, yet they get a pass when they end up allowing things users would be upset about and well it's not their fault?

It can't be both ways. If they advertise a safe curated garden, then they do.have responsibility when.something slips through.

<comment><USER2> > You'd think with the privacy issues surrounding contact tracing apps, they > would have taken a closer look. Seems negligent not to.

I don't think if this is a good argument, though. Apple is pushing governments that want a contact tracing app to use their Exposure Notification API, which has strong privacy maintaining limitations - for example, it's decentralized, on the phone. In fact, Apple specifically designates contact tracing apps as ones approved and using the Exposure Notification API[1]. The apps that don't use this API are limited - specifically, they can't keep Bluetooth on in the background (meaning, when the phone is locked).

> How does Apple get away with both the accolades when it keeps a 'curated > walled garden' ... yet they get a pass when they end up allowing things > users would be upset about?

In general, the "accolades" are with respect to how the phone treats apps, as well as in comparison to Google's Play Store. Apple is much more strict in their review process than Google, so blatantly malicious things like malware don't get through.

In this specific case, without more details I do believe that Apple treated the app as a "normal app", as it didn't use the Exposure Notification API, and what is meant by "vetted" here is that it was reviewed using the normal app review process. If that's not the case I would agree Apple has some culpability but without those details and thus assuming that this app was not treated specially, I don't think Apple is at fault here. If this had happened with an app using the API this would have been a much bigger news story as it would have shown that the review process for the contact tracing apps is very poor since contact tracing apps are specifically forbidden from both getting location data, which this article is talking about.

1: [https://developer.apple.com/contact/request/download/Exposur...](https://developer.apple.com/contact/request/download/Exposure_Notification_Addendum.pdf)</comment></comment></comment>


Lessons Learned While Building Reddit to 270 Million Page Views a Month - <AUTHOR> http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/5/17/7-lessons-learned-while-building-reddit-to-270-million-page.html

<comment><USER2> "By far the most surprising feature of their architecture is in Lesson Six, whose essential idea is: The key to speed is to precompute everything and cache It."

That made me LOL. Is this really surprising? A symptom of years of high-level web development or similar... ?

This is /the/ classical optimisation strategy - since the day of pen and paper computations (anyone remember "log" books?).

<comment><USER3> > Steve says a lot of the lessons were really obvious, so you may not find a > lot of completely new ideas in the presentation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It appears they should abandon their relational database if they are not using any of relational features.

<comment><USER5> I think they use Cassandra as there database so they already have.

<comment><USER6> I believe they're using Cassandra a sophisticated caching layer. It's not the "canonical" data store, but replaces Memcachedb.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't know why people keep using reddit as a reference for how to do scaling. Reddit is a slow website with frequent outages. It should be a how not to example if anything.

<comment><USER8> Not sure if you know this, but Alexis Ohanian is a member on this forum.

<comment><USER7> Not sure why that matters.

<comment><USER9> Indeed - especially since I've retired from reddit. Though, I do still feel obligated to respond to complaints/criticism; in this case, though, I can't comment on technical decisions - except to say that reddit's recent scaling problems are likely more to do with their dev count (4 - yes, there are four developers working on reddit. That's 1 dev for every ~2Million uniques a month) than technical decisions.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Recreational marijuana is now legal in California - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/california-legalizes-recreational-marijuana-proposition-64-results-2016-11 <comment><USER2> Cool. I as I was furious checking the polls, I noticed that a lot of referenda were being voted on.

Besides a lot of approved tax exceMptions and administrative stuff, some referenda include

* Asking DC to look into becoming it's own state as New Columbia

* Making Alabama a right to work state and Virginia did not

* Legal weed in California, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada and North Dakota

* Raised minimum wage In Arizona, Colorado and Washington

* Washington wants to limit free speech to individuals and not corporations

* Background checks for purchasing weapons in California and nevada

* No universal health care in Colorado (80% no)

* Florida voted against allowing home owners to use solar to make their own electricity

* Indiana and Kansas voted for the right to fish hunt etc.

* Minnesota removed the power for officials to set their own salary

* Missouri wants voter ID laws

* Nebraska abolishes the death penalty

* Oklahoma makes the death penalty constitutional and let's them use unconstitutional means of execution

* New Jersey disallowed gambling in two more counties

* New Mexico allows the state to deny bail for felons

* Oregon let's universities invest in equities

* South Dakota keeps minimum wage as it is

Seems like weed is legal (to some degree) in lots of states. Also, it seems like change on the national level will only happen if they ripple through.

I got these from the Google election thingy.i don't know if the US has binding referendums, so don't if the things I mentioned may or may not happen.

<comment><USER3> > Nebraska abolishes the death penalty

Nebraska kept the death penalty, or more correctly, reinstated it.

[http://journalstar.com/news/state-and-regional/govt-and- poli...](http://journalstar.com/news/state-and-regional/govt-and- politics/nebraska-keeps-death- penalty/article_1890349e-e7de-586f-a3fa-0b5cec013ef2.html)

The vote was, do you want to repeal the repeal of the death penalty.

<comment><USER2> Seems you're right. I guess that update thing isn't super accurate since I saw "repeal" as the chosen decision.

<comment><USER3> Yes, they repealed the previous repeal. It was abolished in Nebraska, now it's back. Reinstate would have kept the previous abolition.

[https://ballotpedia.org/Nebraska_Death_Penalty_Repeal,_Refer...](https://ballotpedia.org/Nebraska_Death_Penalty_Repeal,_Referendum_426_\(2016\))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Dispensories are not yet licensed to sell to individuals without a card. To do that they require another type of license, and none of those licenses have been issued yet.

There is also a maximum amount you can carry at a given time.

This is mentioned in the article as well.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's going to be needed.

</comment><comment><USER6> State-level marijuana laws may have diminished relevance if Chris Christie and/or Rudy Guliani assume federal law enforcement and policy roles.

</comment><comment><USER7> i'm glad, it seemed people were making this about general acceptance, or tolerance, but this is more importantly an incarceration issue

and i worried negative apathy would play a role.. i'm free of any concerns of my own being arrested for this so why vote it legal or illegal.. but i'm glad criminality of cannabis will cease

</comment><comment><USER8> neat</comment>