PCH International in Talks to Buy Fab for $15M - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/20/pch-international-in-talks-to-buy-fab-for-15-million/ <comment><USER2> At first glance, it may seem like a startup that raised >$300m is selling itself for $15m but that's not the case at all. Earlier this year, Fab effectively pivoted from selling stuff designed and manufactured by other companies to designing, selling and manufacturing - and the other those words are in is significant - their own products (i.e. vertical-integration)[1]. That pivot was given a new brand (Hem.com) and it looks like the old Fab brand and business are being sold off, and the focus is now on Hem which, I presume, has the same shareholders that Fab had.

1: www.digitaltrends.com/home/hem-new-venture-fab-like-ikea-customizable- furniture/

<comment><USER3> Yes, I'm sure the deal was structured so that Andreesen Horowitz and other late stage investors won't have to take an immediate 99% loss on their Fab investment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> At first I was confused on who these guys were.

[http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/29/just-fab-sues-fab-over- trad...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/29/just-fab-sues-fab-over-trademark- infringement-unfair-competition-and-more-fab-says-it-will-aggressively-defend- our-brand/)

Two founders with the same last name

found companies with the same corporate name.

Not to be confused with "JustFab"[1]

_____________________________________________

[1] _Why can a scam company raise $40 Million Series C + $76 Million Series B?_

"[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6455391"](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6455391")

[http://www.matrixpartners.com/entrepreneur- stories/adam_gold...](http://www.matrixpartners.com/entrepreneur- stories/adam_goldenberg/)

(Obligatory reply from VC is below)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6455575](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6455575)

Turns out they are litigating the names

<comment><USER5> Were JustFab ever legally punished for their deceptive "payment" process? I'm guessing not. Their current site now shows regular and membership options (like they did on their German site 1-2 years ago), but they still don't state it's a subscription up-front or in the costs box.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't mean this in a negative way, but how does a CEO retain control through a fall from $1B+ to $15M? Isn't that endemic of significant mismanagement, at least in expectations?

<comment><USER7> IMHO, it can go both ways. It can definitely be mismanagement, but it can also be mismanagement by the VCs who have outbid each other on a "hot" company. To a large extent it is the CEOs role to maximise capital raised while reducing shareholder dilution.

I don't know the specifics of Fab, but from the outside it can be anyones responsibility. Fab was valued at $1bn because investors paid that valuation, so I'd be curious to see how Fab was pitched at the investment committee in each of the VC shops during the C + D rounds: Andreessen Horowitz, Atomico...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A bit bittersweet for me. I had a failed startup a year ago where we were trying to connect consumers with local woodworkers and metalworkers. At the time, we attributed our lack of success to Fab and their ability to convince consumers to focus on discounts. We had a ton of other reasons for failing but ecommerce, especially for higher ticket items is extremely difficult and definitely sucks that they didn't make it work. On an abstract level I feel validated that their model didn't succeed but I also sympathize with the founders and the rest of the team. Hopefully they learned a ton and land on their feet.

<comment><USER9> I'm sure Jason will be just fine.

[http://www.geekwire.com/2012/lessons-learned-jobster- jason-g...](http://www.geekwire.com/2012/lessons-learned-jobster-jason- goldbergs-fabcom-lands-105m/)

<comment><USER8> Not so much worried about him - more the rest of the team but hopefully they learned a ton during the experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm always curious what goes into a decision to sell at all in a situation like this.

$336 million raised, sold for $15 million

Is there actually a good reason to bother to do that?

Whatever the case, this is one that'll be referred to with the market bubble of 2012-2014 (along with perhaps Twitter's former $48 billion market cap, Zynga's $15b valuation, the insanity that surrounded Groupon and its $20b valuation, and so on).

<comment><USER4> No idea about this specific case, but the assumption of liabilities may or may not be involved. There are also some ethical considerations about keeping jobs in a going concern (however minimal), and some PR considerations about liquidation, etc. It wouldn't be out of order for a company with $300MM in funraising to have $15mm in misc. liabilities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I always really enjoyed the products Fab procured, but most of it was way outside my price range, and now they have pivoted to hem, where they sell this table ([http://hem.com/en-gb/product/bento-dinner-table- long-10022](http://hem.com/en-gb/product/bento-dinner-table-long-10022)) for ~1200$ USD

<comment><USER12> Oddly, the table is priced identically in Euros and Dollars ($999 and 999€).

<comment><USER13> That's fairly common. German prices include 19% sales tax.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Fab has seen some drastic changes in its 3 years of operation. It started out as a dating site for the gay community and then relaunched as a flash sale site for home decor. Fab announced just six months after the pivot that it had grown its membership to 2 million, "

Is that stretching the definition of pivot just a bit too far?

</comment><comment><USER15> Fab Inc is selling off what remains of the Fab brand & website(s). This should not be a surprise to anyone given they pivoted to Hem in Sept:

[http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/29/hem-fab-europe- furniture/](http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/29/hem-fab-europe-furniture/)

</comment><comment><USER16> I had the pleasure of visiting the PCH Shenzen office recently. Surprisingly cool company. Through an accelerator they help make some interesting products, including Navdy.

Quite curious to see what they'd do with the Fab brand.

</comment><comment><USER17> oww.. the half-stock/half-cash is the insult to injury.

nastygal, modcloth (well funded ecommerce) also having tough time.

good reminder that 1) ecommerce is hard and 2) vanity metrics on ecommerce is an order magnitude larger than most many entrepreneurs think:

"$10 million in goods sold this year" \--> not at scale

"$1.5 million sold a day" \--> still not at scale!

<comment><USER4> CEO _"It's not that hard to build a $100 million revenue e-commerce business, but how do you scale ... "_

er, yep that's not good.</comment></comment>


Improving access to government services through a shared authentication platform - <AUTHOR> https://pages.18f.gov/identity-intro/ <comment><USER2> What could possibly go wrong.

</comment><comment><USER3> Woohoo!</comment>


Android N is Nougat - <AUTHOR> http://www.androidcentral.com/android-n-nickname <comment><USER2> Dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12009512](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12009512)</comment>


Illumos day 2014: The Dream is Alive Linux containers on an illumos kernel - happy-dude https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrfD3pC0VSs

<comment> happy-dude Slides: [http://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/illumos- lx](http://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/illumos-lx)

For those who don't know, Joyent's SmartOS is a fork of OpenSolaris and arguably the canonical implementation of the kernel today. They've made a ton of improvements the past few years.

Bryan Cantrill is one of the guys who helped make this happen, and while it is a 2 hour video, it is definitely worth the time to watch it. At the bare minimum, check out the slides!</comment>


Ask HN: 2 factor authentication for cars - <AUTHOR>

Can car manufacturers implement a 2 factor authentication for cars so that in addition to only the key you will also need something like a fingerprint scan or a password to start the car.This will dramatically increase security for the cars and prevent car thefts.In 2009 about 800,000 cars were stolen with losses amounting to 5.2 billion dollars just in USA. Maybe some startup can implement such a software based system on top of existing car security systems. <comment><USER2> You can already bypass the first factor through hot-wiring, so how will adding another factor help?</comment>


How to increase your Google rankings overnight (#noclickbait) - <AUTHOR> https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/transparency-report-24/#increase-rankings-overnight <comment><USER2> Saying #noclickbait doesn't make it not clickbait.</comment>


Anti-inflammatory drugs may lower heart attack risk - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/aug/27/anti-inflammatory-drugs-may-lower-heart-attack-risk-study-finds <comment><USER2> "the team reported a 15% reduction in the risk of a cardiovascular event, including fatal and non-fatal heart attacks and strokes... There was no overall difference in death rates between patients on canakinumab and those given placebo injections"

Strangely not reassuring.</comment>


Son Tells 81 Year old Dad That Twitter Is Google Revealing his searches - <AUTHOR> http://www.mobileinc.co.uk/2011/05/oldmansearch-son-tells-81-year-old-dad-that-twitter-is-google-revealing-his-tweets/

<comment><USER2> I'm going to say that this is a little tough to believe. At some point wouldn't this guy realize that typing these things into twitter isn't searching for them on google? After doing something 42 times and not getting the desired result, even an 81 year old would give up, right?

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree but let's say the son had a script running that opened Google after, wouldn't be hard to do. It's a good idea tho</comment></comment>


Got a cease-to-exist from eBay for owning a domain with "bay" in it - <AUTHOR>

I own a domain which ends in "bay", but has no content on it nor does it looks or sounds like "eBay".
I received the message below from "Edith, eBay legal department" via Domains By Proxy. Unfortunately Edith does not have the class to include a family name or contact details.
I guess eBay can hide behind some statist law, but I was wondering how I should react, if at all.
P.S. Other than being a female, common and familiar name, are there other reasons why Joe the Lawyer would want to send an email as "Edith"?
<comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--- We have noted your registration through the Internet registry in your country of theplayersbay.com, a domain name that is confusingly similar to the famous eBay name and trademark.
The coined term "eBay" is one of the most famous brands on the Internet.  eBay owns exclusive trademark rights to the eBay trademark in many countries worldwide, including the United States, Canada, The United Kingdom,  the European Union  and elsewhere internationally, including related common law rights.  Accordingly, eBay enjoys broad trademark rights in its name.
Arbitrary use of the word BAY in a domain is problematic if the connected website is used in association with a business making use of eBay or operating in the same sphere of business as eBay.
Please review the following links for further information regarding eBay trademarks: http://pages.ebay.com/help/community/tm.html http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/trademark.html
We are concerned that use of your domain name may infringe and/or dilute the famous eBay trademark.  Infringement occurs when a third party's use of a company's trademark (or a confusingly similar variation thereof) is likely to confuse consumers as to the affiliation, sponsorship or endorsement of the third party's services.  Trademark dilution occurs when a third party's use of a variation of a company's trademark is likely to lessen the distinctiveness of the company's famous trademark.  In this case, your use of "BAY" in your domain name, especially if used for an e-commerce web site, is likely to lessen the distinctiveness of the famous eBay brand.  "eBay" is an arbitrary and fanciful trademark; neither "eBay" nor "bay" describe online auctions, online trading, or e-commerce in any way.  We cannot permit the use of the suffix "bay" to evoke eBay or as a shorthand reference to e-commerce.
We appreciate that you may have registered theplayersbay.com with the best of intentions and without full knowledge of the law in this area.
eBay respects your right of expression and your desire to conduct business on the Internet,  but must enforce its own rights. To avoid further consumer confusion, eBay must insist that you not use the domain name for any purpose, do not sell, offer to sell or transfer the domain name to a third party, and instead simply let the domain registration expire.  In the meantime, the domain name should remain inactive and should not point to any content.
Please confirm in writing that you will agree to resolve this matter as requested. Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation.
Sincerely,
Edith eBay Legal Department </comment><comment><USER2> This is almost definitely coming from eBay.

It's important to recognize that this is a Cease and Desist and not an actual legal action. It's a threat of a legal action.

You really have two options -- either you give up the domain name or you fight. If you choose to give up the domain name, respond that you're doing so and I'm sure you'll get a brief letter thanking you for your cooperation on the matter.

If you choose to fight, and that includes ignoring, responding with questions or telling them that you think they're wrong, don't expect to get any further response until they actually file to forcibly take the name from you.

If this happens, you will have to pay money to defend yourself (no lawyer except maybe the EFF?) will take this pro bono or on contingency. You could also wait until they file legal proceedings to cooperate, which would enable you to keep the domain name for a while longer and force them to spend some money, but you'll still lose the domain in that case.

For now, I'd personally ignore it. Either they're serious or their not. There's no reason to do anything until they show whether they're committed to getting this domain from you.

</comment><comment><USER3> You should read this entire thread about "TeachBook," which was sued by Facebook: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1633106>

In particular, tptacek's comments about PerfumeBay are relevant to your situation.

Short version: yes, you _should_ be worried. Even if you are in the clear, legally, you may have to deal with the legal system itself. Being legally vindicated can still be expensive.

<comment><USER4> This is different than PerfumeBay vs eBay. PerfumeBay contains the entire eBay mark. However, your domain may not contain the complete word 'eBay'.

If your domain is like SomethingBay.com and your website do not mimic eBay in any way, you should be safe. But, if your domain sounds likeBay.com, than it could be a problem.

Do not give up your domain this bot named 'Edith'. eBay will have to go through Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy.

<http://www.icann.org/en/udrp/udrp.htm> <http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/>

Wait until you hear from WIPO or your domain registrar about it. Respond them that your website does not mimic eBay and is not related to them in any way.

Most likely, WIPO will favor the decision on your side. It won't cost you anything to go through WIPO's resolution process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I received one of these years ago, ignored it and they never followed up. YMMV.

<comment><USER6> And this is one of the great things about this community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would laugh and forget about it. If they are going to really come after you, they will give you plenty of additional chances to comply.

<comment><USER8> I'm going to second this, as a Google search for "Edith" "eBay Legal Department" provides several other situations where people are still standing (including a site named 'www.paypalwarning.com' who published the letter they received 8 years ago).

Edit: Additionally, if you really have no return contact, then it's just an attempt to push you over since you can't respond.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> My guess(1) is that "Edith" is a machine that simply emails this to everyone who registers a domain with 'bay' anywhere in it.

I'd wait for actual contact from a living human.

 _(1) I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice, yadda, yadda._

<comment><AUTHOR> I've registered this domain about a year ago so you're probably right about the automation.

Don't worry about the legal disclaimer - I don't have an "Edith machine" nor do I want one ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Even if your domain "theplayersbay.com" represents an online auction site, I fail to see how it can be seen as intrinsically associated with eBay.

It's like Microsoft trying to prevent all software compnies from using the "soft" suffix or the "Micro" prefix.

I suspect that your domain was flagged by a poorly written pattern analysis bot and nobody at eBay has bothered to do any due diligence before firing off this "cease & desist".

My advice - send them an email stating your objection and requesting evidence that it has been construed to have an association with their brand. That should get a human being to actually look into the matter.

<comment><USER11> As it turns out, you're probably wrong; Microsoft probably could target Microfoot and Megasoft and win a case. Read the comments on this thread:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1633106>

I agree that in this case, "theplayersbay.com" probably doesn't have much to worry about.

<comment><USER12> A company has to defend its trademarks in order for something like that to be upheld. The problem is that there are already hundreds of software companies with "soft" suffixed names. Because Microsoft was likely not the first software company to use the "soft" suffix, nor have they taken action to shut down any of these other companies, they can't suddenly do an about-face and claim trademark dilution against one of them (maybe unless there was more to it than a -soft name, e.g. a logo closely resembling Microsoft's, or other attempts to trade on Microsoft's reputation).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Most domain registrars will show their own parking page full of ads by default when registering a new domain name. Could there by chance have been eBay ads on the Godaddy parking page for your domain?

If the page didn't resolve at all, it could just be eBay going down the list of domains that end in "bay" and sending out scary letters from people who don't have last names.

I always recommend putting up a one page website with something like "Coming Soon" rather than running the risk of stirring up a company because of the registrar's parking page.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is precisely why we should be living in the San Francisco Shoreline Indentation Area.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for all the replies, I've read them all and have decided I will let the domain expire.

I will also do my part to increase the average number of people unhappy customers share their experience with.

I look forward to the day that the semantic web will replace our statist legal system.

<comment><USER15> If you like the domain, don't get bullied into letting it expire. As many have pointed out, the notice itself is just a meaningless action by ebay to frighten you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Are you sure this is actually from eBay? I can send an email with a from address of "firstname.lastname@example.com" but that doesn't mean I actually sent it from an eBay server.

</comment><comment><USER17> Could it be that somebody else unrelated to ebay and who is interested in that name send you that email?

Could they have placed a backorder on that domain name and trying to force you to let it expire?

Even if it is an automated mail, I would find it very hard to believe that such a mail would not have some contact info under the "Edith eBay......"

</comment><comment><USER18> As satisfying as it would feel to tell them in no other words to "Go fuck yourselves," you should simply ignore this until there is actual legal action taken against you.

I am not a lawyer, and I'm very spiteful against people telling me what I can and cannot do, so take that into account when considering my advice.

</comment><comment><USER19> Unlike patents, trademarks have to be actively defended to remain valid. My guess is that companies of this size send out letters like these to maintain that they're indeed defending their trademark.

I wouldn't worry about it but still send a reply letting them know why I don't think their trademark applied.

<comment><USER20> It's a little late to say this, since you (ebaysucks) have posted this in public (bad plan), but DO NOT REPLY under any circumstances. Replying does two things:

1\. It alerts the sender that there may be an interested party on the other side of unknown intentions. This gives them further reason to continue to pursue that they didn't have before.

2\. It confirms to the sender that the message was received by a potential defendant. That, then, becomes a piece of the litigation: "Your Honor, over a year ago we sent Mr. So-and-So an email regarding this matter, and he flatly refused to negotiate in good faith with us. Given that... (insert bastardly thing here)."

In short, don't reply, and never reveal your thought process to them except through counsel. And don't pick painful fights (especially inadvertently) for no reason at all. If you feel an overwhelming urge to take some kind of action, talk to a lawyer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> There is no similarity between those two names. Beware however, that court decisions are completely arbitrary in these matters.

Look here for the tragicomedy of _MobiliX_ vs. _Obelix_ :

<http://tuxmobil.org/mobilix_asterix.html>

</comment><comment><USER22> If anything you're infringing on thepiratebay.org more than ebay. Maybe another route is take a hint from pirate bay, and move your operation offshore.

</comment><comment><USER23> Most likely, eBay will try to dispute the domain name by UDRP.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Domain-Name_Dispute- Res...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Domain-Name_Dispute- Resolution_Policy)

There are many examples of this if you search. The most recent one that interested me was the fight over wargames.com.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is most probably a scam aimed at forcing you to relinquish the ownership of the domain.

</comment><comment><USER25> A similar question was asked on a recent 'This Week in Startups' [http://thisweekin.com/thisweekin-startups/this-week-in- start...](http://thisweekin.com/thisweekin-startups/this-week-in-startups- with-tony-haile-chartbeat/)

The gist of the answer was that if you were clearly making a play on the word eBay or if people might get them confused, then you have to stop. It doesn't sound like your case, so you are probably in the right, but the next question is how to deal if you want to fight it or ignore it.

</comment><comment><USER26> How attached are you to the domain?

Should eBay choose to pursue this and you choose to defend it, you may make a good case. I'm not sure if your site has anything to do with auctions, as I can't reach your site ATM - I'm guessing you've been slashdotted. You may argue that you do not share any similarity to eBay and "bay" is a common word.

Right or not however, changing your domain could be the easiest course of action. Especially if you're not attached to it yet.

</comment><comment><USER27> eBay lawyers have to find _some_ way to justify their billings...

</comment><comment><USER28> Emails aren't a legitimate form of legal correspondence are they? I would just ignore it.

<comment><USER29> On the other hand, C&D letters carry no particular weight. It does indicate the seriousness -- if someone is so cheap that they send an email instead of paying the $5 a registered letter costs, they probably can't afford to sue you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I am skeptical. If they were really going for all websites ending with "bay", I'd think some bigger ones would be on the list... like piratebay.

Unless they think that's a hopeless case.

<comment><USER31> It's a .org, so it's worthless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> essentially, everyone here is right.. all they are doing is making an informal request. if they sue you, consider that their formal request.

for the time being though, might i suggest throwing up some content.. maybe something similar to this post is a good start?

edit: sorry.. i should have been clearer. do not reply.

<comment><USER33> It seems to me that putting this post up on his domain could provoke eBay into taking actual legal action.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> same thing happened to me when I had a *Blaster domain. I backed down, but regretted it since.

</comment><comment><USER35> Haha! I wonder how pirate bay will react to this!

</comment><comment><USER36> The really pathetic thing about this is that trademark law requires ebay to protect their rights, so all they need to do, really, ask you to pay them a license fee for infringing on their trademark. This could be just a dollar, and they would have legally protected their rights. Sending a cease and desist is just being assholes.

If they did not. Provide full contact Info, including a mailing address, then this is likely a scam- any law firm is going to give you a way to contact them. If they dont, then what they demand is impossible and thus the notice is not valid.

Around 8 years go i got a c&d from some company that believed they owned the tm on a generic word and claimed my two word domain infringed. Ignored it, still have the domain, no further action, other than some stupid threatening demands from them.</comment>


Ask PG: What ideas are you tired of seeing - <AUTHOR>

and which ones just don't seem to work in real world based on YC experience <comment><USER2> PG has mentioned before that anything which touches label music is almost certainly doomed.

But it's risky to make a list of things to categorically avoid. Things are too unstable at the moment. We don't have a lot of practice living in a future that hasn't happened yet. We know of a lot of things that have failed repeatedly in the past, but will they continue to fail?</comment>


Common Startup Timing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them - <AUTHOR> https://codingvc.com/common-startup-timing-mistakes-and-how-to-avoid-them/?utm_campaign=Mattermark+Daily&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=33630139&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_8iZGC4mo543yNV-whawSgYp8lkVTZ0g-pZ1ndWcP-FX8C6QSVnCJRNQxevVjn5_2HSRTntDoLt1vpnvk7Sn1rL1Q1zA&_hsmi=33630139 <comment><USER2> > Other mistakes are more subtle, like misaligning seasonal demand with a > fundraising cycle (e.g. raising 2-3 months after a peak season is tough > because most of your key metrics are dropping just as you're starting to > approach investors).

Are investors usually this fickle? If you have a good explanation for the drop in metrics, then why would you need to time anything?

<comment><USER3> (I'm the post's author and an investor.)

1) It's less about fickle and more about investors looking for easy reasons to say no. I see 1000+ decks and pitches annually but make ~10 investments. Quickly filtering 1000 pitches down to 200 that seem worth drilling on is part of what makes the investing process feasible. The first part of that funnel is all about eliminating things because they're not in my focus area, or they're in a geo I don't invest in, or their KPIs don't look great.

2) For seasonal businesses specifically, KPIs can be hard to read when there are drops. A SaaS company might grow a consistent 15%-20%/mo, but it's harder to figure out how to interpret 100% year-over-year numbers during the holiday season and then 30% year-over-year numbers in the following months. Is the 100% the improvement to focus on? The 30%? Something else? It's even worse if there's no year-over-year data: if Nov/Dec are great and then Jan is the same as Oct, does that mean the business isn't really growing? If you raise in Dec or Jan, it's easier to make the claim that not only are you having a holiday spike, but part of the spike is "intrinsic" growth, too.

Also, I'm certainly not saying that investors would immediately pass after a few months of down KPIs. But lower KPIs do make fundraising harder even if you have a good explanation for them.

<comment><USER2> That's very interesting, thanks.

That makes sense, you want to make your startup look as good as possible, and it's up to you to sell yourself to an investor.

At the same time, I wouldn't want to do something that might appear deceptive. During my time with startups and meeting lots of people, I've noticed a certain "spin" culture, which some might be confusing with "hustle". It's not hustle if you're trying to deceive an investor to get them to give you money, with the knowledge that your KPIs are about to drop and they're going to be disappointed in 2 months. I'd rather just be honest and straightforward.

<comment><USER3> I agree with you -- I am very much against deception, too.

In this case, I think it's more like Schrödinger's box. If someone is pitching me in December, they can make a case that their current uptick in revenue is sustainable. Without the option to wait a few months, I have to decide if I believe those claims. The claims might be spin, but usually they're honest beliefs backed by a small amount of data. But once Jan and Feb KPIs come in, the data shows if the uptick will actually be sustainable. It's like opening Schrödinger's box and finding out whether the cat is alive. Now it doesn't matter what the founder believes or hopes because I'll be looking at the data -- and often the data isn't perfect, which hurts the ability to fundraise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> this is fantastic, and leo is supersmart.</comment>


The rise of append-only, immutable data stores - <AUTHOR> http://www.pwc.com/en_US/us/technology-forecast/2015/remapping-database-landscape/features/append-only-immutable-data-stores-rise.jhtml

<comment><USER2> If you describe Clojure as "(a LISP library for Java developers)", I am not going to read your paper.</comment>


A 12-year-old Sikh boy is the latest victim of racist terrorism paranoia - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/2015/12/18/its_the_clock_kid_all_over_again_a_12_year_old_sikh_boy_is_the_latest_victim_of_racist_terrorism_paranoia/ <comment><USER2> i feel uncomfortable clicking a salon article. Salon makes a lot of gossip articles.</comment>


Show HN: Sedge, templating and sharing of SSH config - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/grahame/sedge

<comment><USER2> This looks really cool, but I feel like the docs may be missing a step? I see how to install sedge, and I see what a config looks like, but it doesn't list where I'd put the config or how it's used. Do I run `sedge` instead of `ssh`? Does the config get used directly, or is this like a CSS preprocessor for SSH configs, and it generates a larger config in ~/.ssh/config on command?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, oops. I'll write some better docs. Thanks for this.

It generates ~/.ssh/config from ~/.sedge/config. So like you say, it's a preprocessor.

<comment><USER2> Awesome, thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> 1.1.0 out now, some bug fixes and a lot more docs :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Police admit Christmas ruining drone may not have existed - <AUTHOR> https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1063232/gatwick-drone-chaos-airport-drone-exist-sussex-police-jason-tingley <comment><USER2> I read another article yesterday that said the drone "buzzed" the Air Traffic Control Tower. There's misinformation going on somewhere</comment>


Rare Life Dating Back 3.5 Billion Years Found - <AUTHOR> http://news.discovery.com/earth/oceans/rare-life-dating-back-3-5-billion-years-found-131113.htm

<comment><USER2> Slightly larger image: [http://static.ddmcdn.com/gif/blogs/dnews- files-2013-11-MISS-...](http://static.ddmcdn.com/gif/blogs/dnews- files-2013-11-MISS-jpg.jpg)

Because 195x146 wants for a larger size</comment>


Monitor where you store what personal data for GDPR - <AUTHOR> https://sorpii.com <comment><USER2> Actually looks super useful, nice work!</comment>


The Man Who Invented Intelligent Traffic Control a Century Too Early - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/history/the-man-who-invented-intelligent-traffic-control-a-century-too-early <comment><USER2> Now someone needs to invent a traffic light system that uses data collected by sensors and cameras to dynamically adjust traffic lights to improve traffic flow.

My brother and I envisioned this idea a decade ago. Imagine a system that can use deep learning techniques to automatically manage traffic to optimize travel times.

<comment><USER3> This has been done for quite some time, and it's unclear what value deep learning would add beyond the arithmetic we've used for a while.

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

Major cities have Transit Operations Centers or similar where engineers watch road camera and sensor data (as well as local news and other sources of information) and direct traffic lights, gates, police, etc. to keep things moving. There was actually a controversy in London when this control room manipulated traffic lights so the International Olympic Committee officials evaluating London would always hit green lights, and perceive the traffic as better than it actually was.

This may be less apparent in some areas because it is actually done with the _opposite_ intention: to slow things down. If you seem to be hitting every red light, it is probably because the local government decided to install a Traffic Calming program there in the interest of safety / fewer complaints from the neighbors.

<comment><USER4> > This has been done for quite some time, and it's unclear what value deep > learning would add beyond the arithmetic we've used for a while.

I've seen a lot of these claims, and they're easily debunked by driving through a city. The usual case is a platoon of 5 cars cruising down an arterial. A solitary car pulls up on a side street, and the light turns read for the arterial just in time to stop the platoon for the solitary car. A sensible algorithm would let the platoon pass first.

There are endless scenarios of these, to the point where the light algorithm finds a local optima where it is completely out of phase with the traffic and causes maximum delay and minimum throughput.

A relatively small amount of effort going into cameras and an adaptive system that minimizes a cost function would save billions of dollars in gas, time, and unneeded road widening.

<comment><USER5> > A sensible algorithm would let the platoon pass first.

You're taking an example of a sub-optimal local solution and claiming that is proof that the global solution is sub-optimal. That does not follow.

It could easily be, taking your example, that the platoon of 5 cars _must_ stop at some future light, and the delay for 1 car is the smallest delay available for those cars. Therefore, stopping for the 1 car reduces the platoon's total travel time. As the driver, it's easy to think that was dumb because you'll never see the 15-car wait that was avoided by stopping early for 1 car.

Essentially, you are claiming that a greedy algorithm for traffic would always find the globally optimal solution (which we know is not true).

<comment><USER6> Walter isn't arguing for a greedy algorithm. He's giving an example of a local inefficiency and a mitigation. Lots of local inefficiencies add up to a global inefficiency. Illustrating a global inefficiency in itself isn't feasible in an anecdote. Thus I think your argument by assertion isn't possible to refute: you can bring up "local inefficiencies don't necessarily mean global inefficiencies" to dismiss all arguments that the current system is less than optimal.

Me, I've been stuck at traffic lights for 5 minutes at 2 in the morning, with no traffic whatsoever around. A very local algorithm would be highly preferable at that time of night, assuming usual (i.e. very little) traffic at that hour. It's an extreme example, yes: but there does exist a range of traffic patterns between the small hours of the morning and rush hour, and the same amount of global optimization effort is not applied to all hours, for obvious reasons. Something that could analyse the traffic using cameras and sensors and optimize wouldn't have to be paid extra to work late at night.

<comment><USER5> Several cities take the even simpler approach of having lights that change from timed cycles to blinking red/yellow after a certain hour.

<comment><USER4> Cars stopping and then starting again costs time, money, fuel, wear & tear, pollution, etc. It's far from an efficient solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > "Because of my low grades, my father thought that I might be mentally > retarded," Adler later wrote. His father took Charles to see a psychologist, > who said, "You have a remarkable son [with] a vivid imagination. He should > be encouraged to invent."

What a psychologist!

<comment><USER8> My psychologists said the same, as a child. I suspect it's a stock phrase for many of them.

Psychologists as a profession are _much_ more comfortable with the idea of people whose thought processes are unusual, but still effective. It's what they're for, really.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can the martime industry, i.e shipping, travel, be disrupted? - <AUTHOR> I look at startups like Shone from YC and others, and I see some working on pilot assistance programs and collison for cargo ships. Wouldn't fully autonomous self driving ships be a huge disruption to a very old and inefficient industry? <comment><USER2> AFAIK a container ship has about 30 crew. Most of which are maintenance and engineers. You would need those people anyway. Most shipping companies use cheap labour now.

I imagine the largest cost after the ships themselves is fuel.

<comment><USER3> Afaik, historically they switched from fast ships to bigger, slow ones to minimize fuel use per cargo tonnage. At the beginning of the 'standardized container age' there were fast vessels but they lost out to the fuel saving spiral.

If we're just bullshitting, more autonomous sailing vessels that mainly use streams and are automated could be used (like some autonomous little robot floats using wind for propulsion and the sun to power their electronics and small motors crossing the Pacific/Atlantic). But in contrast to the small robotic boats, they won't be able to correct their vector using solar power.

If there are goods that can arrive whenever but need to be cheap, maybe that's an option - but only if the ship can work without maintenance underway, which it probably can't during its entire lifetime.

Edit: The crew is there to make a ship work even though it needs maintenance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Again? I can't think how. It's already been dockerized.

</comment><comment><USER5> Autonomous ships would all too easily fall prey to pirates with a GPS spoof and a radio jammer.</comment>


Show HN: Feather – A Lightweight Auth API - nick-garfield https://feather.id <comment> nick-garfield Nick here, one of the developers behind Feather.

When we set out to build an auth API, one of the first big challenges was just wrapping our heads around all the various acronyms and protocols. Despite the existence of standards like OAuth, OIDC, JWTs, SAML, etc., authentication is anything but standard. As hobbyist devs, we wanted the interface to be simple. RESTful. Leverage HTTP verbs. We wanted an auth API that we wouldn't have to think about and would save us time.

After a lot of consideration, we settled on creating an abstraction for /credentials. With this, we've been able to abstract away sign-in flows for email+password and passwordless auth. "Just create a credential!" As Josh Bloch once said, "Good names are the API talking back to you". We're super glad with how credentials abstract turned out. In the future, we plan to extend it for supporting protocols like OAuth as well.

Feather has saved us a ton of time while building other projects these past couple months, and we're happy to share it with everyone today :)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's such a great quote. Joshua Bloch's talk "How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters"[1] is one of my favorite ever

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heh4OeB9A-c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heh4OeB9A-c)</comment></comment>


The Vacuity of Postmodernist Methodology (2005) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://philpapers.org/archive/SHATVO-2.pdf <comment><USER2> As I said on this forum before hearing people talk about postmodernism as if it is the current "thing" within continental philosophy circles is really odd. It hasn't been for a decade or more.

The backlash against these methodologies has been pretty severe within continental philosophy itself. For example, Meillassoux's critique of correlationism pretty much says that the whole epistemological manoeuvres, perhaps vulgarised by postmodern turn, by which it is claimed there is nothing "real" without a human correlated to it and that "reality" cannot be truly accessed, only reality as it appears to human beings, distorted by power, ideology etc etc.

There is a good description here though might be pretty high level. [https://euppublishingblog.com/2014/12/12/correlationism- an-e...](https://euppublishingblog.com/2014/12/12/correlationism-an-extract- from-the-meillassoux-dictionary/)

<comment><USER3> I don't get the impression that its relevance is due to any particular currency within actual philosophy circles, but rather because postmodernism is the motte to which the more academic strains intersectional feminism retreat when pressed -- and that very much _is_ a "thing" in contemporary left-wing activism and internet flame wars.

On the street and in less academic varietals of intersectionalism, this just consists of "you should shut the fuck up, because you are male / white / heterosexual / cisgendered / wealthy / neurotypical / had good parents / some other form of privileged that I just thought up".

In more respectable garb, this gets dressed up as "your arguments have no validity, because <insert postmodernist gloss on ad hominem dismissal here>". Which is no less toxic to having any kind of rational and inclusive dialogue, and deserves to be taken down on its own terms.

(Note: this is coming from someone who is firmly left-wing and even has considerable respect for many aspects of intersectional feminism when applied in a philosophical / analytical context; I just _despise_ what it has done to the tone of left-wing activism over the last 10 years.)

<comment><USER4> You may despise the tone of left-wing activism, but arguments based on identity aren't ad-hominem. Some people need to "shut up", as you put it, so that other folks who have relevant experience and expertise can talk and be heard.

Forms of privilege aren't just thought up on the spot, activists have been talking about privilege for the better part of a century.

You complain about internet flame wars, but you have interpreted left-wing activism in such an uncharitable way that almost no reasonable response is possible.

<comment><USER5> >arguments based on identity aren't ad-hominem

Well here's the problem. Arguments that discredit another perspective based on the identity of who is making it are ad hominem. Arguments about the discursive process itself that address representation of various identities aren't. For example, if you tell me that privilege prevents minority voices from contributing to a national dialogue on poverty alleviation, I would agree. But that's not how people use identity in most online or casual arguments. They use identity to directly discredit and silence their opponents. Telling others to shut up isn't a good faith starting point for a productive conversation. That approach is based on an unrealistic, zero sum interpretation of how people interact, where it's only possible for one person to speak on any given subject. Getting more black people involved in a conversation on race doesn't mean silencing all the white people. Yet that's where these conversations often progress to. It's extraordinarily unpleasant to experience and completely useless for fostering dialogue.

<comment><USER4> Of course "shut up" is not a good starting point for a conversation. The point is that people can't talk and listen at the same time. When people are ignorant about a subject because they don't have the relevant personal experience they don't have anything to contribute to the conversation so they should just listen. That's the only way to have the kind of productive dialogue you claim to want. Otherwise discussions on these topics will never go beyond the 101 level.

Your claim that white people are being silenced on race is absurd. In all mediums, whether it's newspapers, blogs, TV, or anywhere else, you see white people pontificating on race. It's people of color whose opinions are being silenced.

Besides, a real discussion on race needs to be uncomfortable for white people. A pleasant conversation about race with white people doesn't result in minds being changed. Coming to terms with the way society oppresses people of color and favors white people is inherently unpleasant.

<comment><USER5> >When people are ignorant about a subject because they don't have the relevant personal experience they don't have anything to contribute to the conversation so they should just listen

Well this is exactly the problem. You're assuming from the get go that white people have nothing to contribute to the conversation.

>Your claim that white people are being silenced on race is absurd

I have never made any such claim. I argued that people frequently use identity as a tool to silence opponents. That used to be a common tactic for suppressing minority views. "Oh, he's just a dumb negro, what does he know," and similar statements used to be socially acceptable ways of dismissing someone's perspective purely on the basis of their racial identity. Nowadays that more often takes the form of what you just did: assuming that white people have nothing relevant to contribute, where the reverse argument has become socially unacceptable. That does not mean white people are universally silenced, nor on the other hand does it mean that we as a society are devoting enough time to listening to minorities. The whole point of this argument is that you cannot discredit any individual person's argument on the basis of what proportion of our national discourse is devoted to people who share that person's identity. The argument and the arguer must be separated where the arguer is acting in good faith. A problem with the mix of views available does not detract from the individual truth or validity of any one person's arguments.

>Besides, a real discussion on race needs to be uncomfortable for white people. A pleasant conversation about race with white people doesn't result in minds being changed.

I don't think that approach convinces anyone. You don't win political arguments by alienating people. That sort of verbal aggression just provokes a backlash. Movements make progress by making people feel good about themselves. White people marched with MLK because he made them feel like they were part of a grand moral crusade. Which they were. The gay rights movement has had similar success by proactively recruiting and including allies. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

Ultimately this is the fundamental flaw in your thinking:

>The point is that people can't talk and listen at the same time.

That's true in a one on one conversation, not a national discourse. The consensus that governs a democratic society is the product of a million simultaneous and contradictory voices clamoring in a thousand separate media. Me writing this post doesn't stop a black person from replying. My speech doesn't detract from theirs. It's not a zero sum game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Jordan Peterson has made a few great videos on postmodernism. If anyone is interested, "Postmodernism: How and why it must be fought" [0] is fairly short and to the point.

I try to apply the scientific method to my internal beliefs. I've changed my mind many times when presented with a sufficiently strong argument and evidence to back it up. I'm wrong about stuff all the time, and one of the main ways to find out and fix it is to talk about it!

This is a large part of why I'm opposed to silencing people, instead of letting them talk and honestly engaging with them. Righteous indignation might make you feel good, but it probably won't convince anyone to change their views. You can change someone's mind by being polite, doing your research, and chatting with em. Daryl Davis shows us a prime example of this: How One Man Convinced 200 Ku Klux Klan Members To Give Up Their Robes [1].

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf2nqmQIfxc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf2nqmQIfxc)

[1] [http://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man- convince...](http://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man- convinced-200-ku-klux-klan-members-to-give-up-their-robes)

<comment> d--b Postmodern thinkers are not preventing anyone from speaking, are they? You don't have to like Derrida today, and it's perfectly fine to disagree with Deleuze, Guattari or Fanon...

What's this about?

This sounds to me that Peterson is pissed because people in humanities tend to oppose capitalism. But I think that's mostly because people in humanities have a role in criticizing the system in which we live, instead of trumpeting to the world that what Western societies have achieved is the best thing humans have ever created...

<comment><USER7> > Postmodern thinkers are not preventing anyone from speaking, are they? You > don't have to like Derrida today, and it's perfectly fine to disagree with > Deleuze, Guattari or Fanon...

Depends on who you include under the definition of "postmodern thinkers". I don't hear a whole lot of noise coming from Academic Philosophers per se, but the intellectual heirs of the postmodernists as expressed in the social sciences and various intersectional "studies" programs certainly seem to make a big deal of deplatforming people these days.

> This sounds to me that Peterson is pissed because people in humanities tend > to oppose capitalism.

No. he tells you why he is mad, why invent reasons?

He is mad because of the lack of gratitude at the improvements in absolute standard of living (even though he admits that relative inequality is a problem). As a clinical counselor for many years he has seen the harms caused by persistent resentment.

He is mad because his colleagues in the humanities and social sciences have, in recent decades, consistently opposed the free exchange of ideas on college campuses. He is far from the only academic to voice such concerns[0].

He is mad because of the dearth of good scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.

[0][https://heterodoxacademy.org/](https://heterodoxacademy.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> These straw man arguments always annoy the hell out of me. Please give me some textual evidence that postmodernists and co are anti-rationalists! How does Deleuze, the postmodernist philosopher par excellence, undermine rationality? He wrote two worshipful books on Leibniz and Spinoza, who were both rationalists. These "takedowns" always read like someone who has never attempted to grasp postmodernism either philosophically or sociologically, and someone who certainly has never attempted to grasp Leibniz!

People seem to talk around the simplest postmodernist theses, usually by knowing nothing about postmodernism. In my mind, there are two:

1) Doubting the truth of all knowledge, and 2) an incredulity towards all metanarratives.

Now, please, please recognize, that disbelieving the truth of knowledge is not the same as disbelieving truth! The Popperian concept of verisimilitude could easily be construed as an extremely rational form of this doubt. Is any scientific theory, strictly speaking, true? Or are they all models that approximate a reality we can never ultimately reach? If you think I'm being too kind towards the postmodernists with this interpretation, then you don't understand postmodernism.

With respect to 2), incredulity towards metanarratives was not an assertion in Lyotard's essay, but an observation about the state of our society. And is this not, obvjectively, what we observe? Don't kill the messenger! Certainly not when the messenger is Lyotard, a man who was extremely politically engaged in the Algerian revolution and whose disillusionment ultimately led him to question all grand ideologies.

tldr; these essays are strongman arguments that show they don't understand postmodernism or even their own terms.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is embarrassing and supercilious.

The alarm-bells began to ring from the point at which I realised that the author thought too much of himself to bother to actually engage with any post- modernist. It's easy to impute a series of highly contrived 'rhetorical manoeuvres' to someone if you don't do the hard work of unpacking their thought.

As for the substantive first-order claims, it's hard to know where to even start.

The author describes the 'troll's truism' as an equivocal statement that rides on a truism to make wild claims that it cannot in fact support. When the wild claim is pushed, the proponent retreats to the truism. The truism here is social constructivism, and the wild claim that illicitly rides on this truism is the denial of a mind-independent world. First of all, I don't know in what possible sense social constructivism is a 'truism'. It only rose to any kind of institutional prominence during the 'linguistic turns' of the 20th century. And it probably remains - in philosophy departments, certainly - a minority position. I suppose that perhaps depends on what one takes to be social constructivism; but the brevity of the author's treatment does not allow for this kind of basic detail. The statement quoted from Fish is not 'trivial' in the least.

Second, the real question is the one that Wittgenstein struggled with between his early and late works: is language a device with a single veracious use for the naming of objects in the world, or is it something that is defined by its use as a protean tool of social communication among humans groups through historical time. I have never since any convincing response to Wittgenstein's defence of the latter in the Philosophical Investigations. And if that follows then, whether one has the ontological view that a mind-independent world exists, one is nevertheless committed to a form of linguistic contextualism, i.e. a given statement only has force relative to the criteria of language-use that prevails in the particular social context in which one is speaking. But the author simply collapses the ontological admission of a mind-independent world into an admission that linguistic contextualism has no epistemological purchase - which is completely _not_ the case.

I can't be bothered to sift through the rest of the paper. The treatment of Foucault is especially vacuous.

P.S. I am not a post-modernist.

<comment><USER10> I so wish I understood what you've written.

I've tried to grok philosophy a few times. The reading makes me anxious. Just like when I try to understand poetry and complicated software. I hate knowing that I'm missing something. On the plus side, I have deep empathy for people who don't grok stuff that seems to come easily to me.

Why I'm writing: I think my core mental defect is impaired short-term memory. Most people can keep 7 things (+/\- 2) in their head at once. Allegedly geniuses can keep 10 (+/\- 2). I suspect that my capacity is 5, or maybe 4, though I'm afraid to check.

In both philosophy and complicated software, the levels of indirection, the nested subclauses, quickly leave me behind. I'm more a Gettysburg Address kinda thinker.

So. If in your travels you find any kind of clue about short-term memory, or IQ in general, and ability to understand philosophy, poetry, code, please show some extra patience for people like me who are struggling to keep up.

\---

I'm totally on board with the abstract of that SHATVO paper. If I wasn't overly, unreasonably optimistic, I wouldn't get out of bed every day. Whatever the paper's logical failings, denial is what keeps me going.

<comment><USER11> philosophers are used word salesmen, you aren't missing much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Found this interesting after recently listening to a lot of Jordan Peterson talks - especially the latest Joe Rogan Experience episode #1006 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6G59zsjM2UI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6G59zsjM2UI)

<comment><USER13> I've found that Peterson has the habit to confuse postmodernism with "neo Marxism" (itself a term reminiscent of the "cultural Marxism" conspiracy theory) while they could not be further from each other, except as being originated from conitental philosophy. I've written about one such instance here[0] and as far as I can tell it applies to this video too.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15077128](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15077128)

<comment><USER14> > has the habit to confuse postmodernism with "neo Marxism" (itself a term > reminiscent of the "cultural Marxism" conspiracy theory)

Because that is the most prominent application of postmodernism: to push forward neo-Marxist ideology.

<comment><USER13> That's actually not true. What is "neo Marxism"? As I understand it, it is the application of Marixist class theory to other non-class power structures. However I have seen nor have been able to find any evidence that this is an actually existing group that has grown out of Marxism. Furthermore, postmodernism denies the very structures in the materialist understanding of history which is essential to Marxism. So how are they compatible? These and other issues are discussed in my post and in the article I linked therein.

There's simply no evidence for it; Peterson's confusion is his own and I hope that others do not follow him on this and instead choose to do their own research into philosophy.

<comment><USER15> They are not compatible - Peterson's argument is not that neomarxism and postmodernism are natural bedfellows, but that people espousing postmodernist positions nearly always reveal a belief structure based in neomarxism when challenged by an intellectual equal.

His evidence is presumably his own conversations with postmodernists, and his theory as to why this is seems based more in a psychological than philosophical framework.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Argggh. Professors!

You could nitpick the absolute shit out of any non-trivial work in the humanities--even the great ones--but most people have enough sense not to.

BTW, Foucault is actually readable. Who knew?!

<comment><USER9> "BTW, Foucault is actually readable. Who knew?!"

This suggests that you have never bothered to read Foucault. He is extremely readable.

<comment><USER17> Come on _Emma_Goldman_. Don't do that. Why possibly alienate a potential reader of Foucault? You don't know what path _jstewartmobile_ took to get them to this point. Though it may not be universally true – and it certainly might be unjustified – the Continentals (Derrida & co.) aren't exactly known for their lucid crystalline prose.

<comment><USER9> What? Well, given their dismissal of the whole of the humanities, and the ridicule with which they spoke about Foucault, I doubt they're going to be reading _The History of Sexuality_ or _The Archaeology of Knowledge_ anytime soon. Or am I being too defensive, and mis-judging the post?

Some 'continental philosophers' are difficult to read. Derrida is a spectacularly bad writer, for instance. Foucault is not one of them however. _Discipline & Punish_ is about as readable as Dickens IMO.

<comment><USER17> > Or am I being too defensive, and mis-judging the post?

I think so? :)

Read it again – You could nitpick the absolute shit out of any _non-trivial work_ in the humanities--even the great ones--but most people have _enough sense not to_.

(Emphasis mine.) They are saying that there are trivial and non-trivial works in the humanities. Some non-trivial works are great works. You could nitpick those non-trivial works--even the great ones-- but you'd be wrong to because while you're busy at that you're missing the wood for the trees. To me it sounds like they've read quite a few texts from the humanities, just not Foucault.

<comment><USER9> Ah okay, I'll go with your more charitable reading!

I'm just very used to people dismissing an entire cultural and philosophical movement based on hearsay. It's not that hard to just pick up and read Foucault, Derrida, etc., and find out for yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As long as analytical tradition keeps reducing philosophy into "logical programming," it'll always fail to appreciate the meaning and value of interesting continental ideas such as postmodernism.

This paper is just a very typical example of that failure. Getting buried under `P and Q, therefore R` statements, nitpicking individual examples, missing the whole, thinking _mechanically_ and all...

For example, the author confuses Foucualt's notion of "truth" with basic "truth conditions" and refers to Tarski's "material adequacy condition" to "debunk" Foucualt's reasoning as "false theory."

The author also mechanically replaces the word "truth" in Foucault's quoted writing with Foucault's so-called "definition" of truth and expects a fairly reasonable reading to come out as if English semantics was as mechanical as _Lisp_.

Sorry, the paper has failed to pass the _facepalm_ test while attempting to "expose" the most cited author in the whole field of Humanities as "false."

This kind of mechanical, logic based reasoning ignores the poetic style, metaphors, and most importantly, the whole _context_ of writing by focusing on the details and missing the whole.

It's like teaching an AI to understand Shakespeare's poems but AI constantly finding "contradictions" that "does not compile."

Foucault's philosophy is mostly "political philosophy" and has nothing to do with truth conditions. He also deliberately does _not_ ground his arguments on definitions after definitions. Rather, it is more like an ongoing, deep, open reflection on power, truth and subjectivity in general.

As to "social construction" of truth, you would be amazed at how beautifully Foucault traces back the emergence of "free market" as a "site of veridiction" for "truth" starting from 18th century and how that interacts with "power," "governance" and "subjectivity," all constructing a "regime of truth," covering multitude of implications that a "syntactic analysis of English grammar" cannot explain.

I think there are more things to be found that would interest a hacker in postmodern thought yet gone missed.

<comment><USER19> >He also deliberately does not ground his arguments on definitions after definitions.

Isn't that intentional? Words that have no fixed meaning can't be refuted by logic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It is a shame this fell off the front page so quickly.

I'll tell you my problem with this paper. It's not that it doesn't seem, to a certain extent, well reasoned. That it does. My problem is that it does not correlate with what meagre bits of Foucault and Rorty I've encountered. (I've, uh, never heard of Bloor and to this day I haven't read Lyotard) I've come away from these encounters enriched. Certainly I get a sense of the respect that they have for the millennia-hulking colossus that is the history of ideas. I want to say to Shackel, yes, you _may_ be correct but so what?

Here is Rorty on Truth, 1m:41s long: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzynRPP9XkY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzynRPP9XkY)

I dare anyone not to be seduced by that. Whatever could he mean? What could he be getting at? There goes five years of your life.

These interrelated issues are not as simple as Shackel make them out to be. The game is not to pick out crappy definitions of Truth or Knowledge from your opponent's texts and to shred them into little pieces, douse them in gasoline, and then set fire to them. That's not the game. That game is _boring_.

Speaking of Truth and Power, and speaking Truth to Power, here is Shackel on Wikileaks: [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2010/dec/29...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2010/dec/29/wikileaks- free-speech-discretion-bearing-witness)

"There is no precedence between them and in this case how they balance is heavily influenced by questions over who is our neighbour and how close they are. Whose side are you on? How much discretion do you owe? How much indiscretion must we tolerate? The answers to these questions matter a lot and are hard to agree on."

I'd say we have a good idea whose side Shackel would be on if push came to shove. Does that make his philosophical arguments about t/Truth invalid? No. But if one doesn't want to rock the boat then the kind of t/Truth you're going to like is a very apolitical asocial truth thank you very much. And that's not the kind of t/Truth a lot of Continentals and Post-modernists are interested in.

</comment><comment> d--b Wow, looking at all the comments here, I am amazed by all the negativity around post modern theories.

It's strange to me to see this on hacker news, especially since we as computer scientists, do understand much better than anyone else the complexity of the human mind.

Post-modernism is first and foremost a realization that modernism was a failure. In modern times, people thought that we could find some universal mechanism that describes nature, and that from there we could find a logical language (or structure) that could explain the way everything works.

Great. But then we realized that things were way more complex than they appeared. We found that combining a large number of simple rules quickly resulted in a mess that was nearly impossible to describe. Take for instance the double-rod pendulum or 3-body problem. Physicist admit they don't fully understand what glass is, let alone playdoh, etc.

Nature is not neat and tidy, and neither is the human brain or human societies. That's mostly what postmodernism is about.

I don't really see what the problem is with that...

<comment><USER20> > Physicist admit they don't fully understand what glass is, let alone > playdoh, etc.

People love to throw around junk like this, and it's maddening to try to argue against such vague statements. Which physicists? Have you interviewed all of them? How many material science PhDs do you know? What properties of glass are not well understood? Is it not possible to engineer structures and objects out of glass? When in fact, physicists know tons about glass. What is made of, how its crystalline structure looks, its tensile strength, shatter resistance, acoustic and thermal properties, molecular weights, melting points, optical properties. I could go on and on and on, and it'd eventually be clear that physicists know a hell of a lot more about glass than /you/ do, and then you could still make that vague statement with a derisive smile.

It's just absurd argumentation to say some group doesn't /really/ understand something.

What is memory, what is an atom /really/? For that matter, what is language? Art? Feeling? Love? Hackernews?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> TBH, I've never been able to form a coherent picture of "postmedernism," I don't really understand what either proponents or oponents mean when refering to it.

That said, I think the place where postmodernism enters normal (non academic) human thought is not disimilar to funkier parts enlightenment era philosophy.

Take Des Cartes famous meditations, remembered mostly for his "stage 1" of rejecting all knowledge of anything but ones existence. He then attempts (IMO fails) to rebuild a foundation of knowledge based on pure reason, without any faulty assumptions.

What impact did des cartes have on normal people's thought? Almost no one is convinced by his proof of god. No one is convinced to reject all knowledge and stop there. People are still better for going through the exercise. Challenging assumptions & knowledge authorities. Aknowledging knowledge dependencies, how do I know this.

Des Carte's solipsism doesn't end anywhere concrete, but it opens the door to less ambituous but much more practical epistimology like Karl Popper's.

Likewise, I don't think that enlightement (and subsequent) ethics goes anywhere concrete. Utilitarianism, deontology or whatnot all lead to their own little absurd conclusions if you go down the rabbit hole. Very few people "adopt" them. But, the process does sometimes result in usable ethical frames for situations that do not involve a fat man in a cart.

So that's essentially (oops, no essences!), a lot of modern philosophy in a nutshell (are nutshells structures?). Reject earlier thoughts. Attempt to rebuild with mixed success. Meanwhile, get a better understanding of the limits of knowledge.

So... postmodernism... Like I said, fuzzy on what postmodern means......

But....I think it's a similar contribution. Reject existing frames. Criticize traditional systems. Try to find alternatives. Hopefully evolve in the process.

I think postmodernism opens up some doors to ideas like Yuval Noah Harari's description of human history. A big part of his ideas start with recognizing "fictions," all the things which aren't really real. Things that were made up by people. Tribes, nations, corporations, named places, kingships.... He then asks what are these for? When were they invented? What role do they play..

Postmodernism probably contributed something towards this way of thinking, or the public interest in it.

As to the methods used by postmodernist academics.... I've got no idea.

</comment><comment><USER22> Why was this posted on HN?

 _Edit:_ this was not meant in a pejorative way, it was a sincere question. I thought it was Off-topic.

<comment><USER23> At first glance without a thorough read it appears to me to be a discourse on _constructed meaning_ , relevant to the zeitgeist concept we might know as "truthiness". An easier read on the topic:

[http://theconversation.com/truthiness-and-alternative- facts-...](http://theconversation.com/truthiness-and-alternative-facts- meaning-is-a-moveable-feast-71900)

Pertinent text from the submitted article:

        "But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knockdown argument,'" Alice objected.

        "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone,

        "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."

<comment><AUTHOR> I felt like the paper's concept of a 'Troll's Truism'[1] would be particularly relevant to here. I also remember seeing a similarly structured paper on Scientism here.

[1]"A Troll's Truism is a mildly ambiguous statement by which an exciting falsehood may trade on a trivial truth."

<comment><USER24> So it's what Daniel Dennett refers to as a 'deepity' then?

Source: [https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Deepity](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Deepity)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you use JavaScript as Unix shell scripting language? - <AUTHOR>

Script languages like Perl and Tcl can be embedded in shell scripts. On WinNT series I have used JScript (WHS) for years.
Do you use JavaScript as your Unix shell scripting language? Can you recommend it? Or do you prefer the sh/bash syntax for glue scripts?
On MDN (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Shells) I found e.g.
ShellJS (https://github.com/arturadib/shelljs). <comment><USER2> Well, I did use node.js a couple of times for stuff that would normally be a shell script. Like simple scripts spawning some processes and killing them on certain events. But I don't think I'd use a JavaScript shell. sh seems more writable for shell usecases. But if there was a powerful js shell comparable to zsh I might! Something like emacs shell where you can use a kind-of-bash syntax and elisp at the same time would be cool.

</comment><comment><USER3> Definitely an interesting concept. Really interested to see if anyone is going to answer yes. For me I stick with 'sh' and never really even considered other options, with the exception of csh (c shell) which I dabbled in but really never stuck. This also may be because I am not a hardcore JS programmer. I also have always really considered bash to be a huge part of Linux.</comment>


Briefing: Cancer is not a disease of the modern world - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19591-briefing-cancer-is-not-a-disease-of-the-modern-world.html <comment><USER2> The article seems slightly different from its title. What the body seems to conclude is: 1) the available evidence of ancient cancers is too sparse to conclude anything, given that even "common" cancers would be fairly uncommon in a population of only a few hundred mummies and few thousand skeletons, most of whom died before age 50; and 2) if there is an increase in cancers, it's probably due to preventable lifestyle things like smoking, rather than pollution or other background causes more generally.

In particular, the second part seems to cut against their original point: they first say cancer isn't a disease of the modern world, and then they say well, maybe it is more common, but if so it's mostly because of lifestyle factors.

Both those points do seem likely to be correct, though.

<comment><USER3> Headlines oversimplify.

A better synopsis would be "Cancer is not a disease of the modern _environment_ ; it's a disease of the modern _lifestyle_ and _lifespan_ ".

<comment><USER4> All headline simplify but this one seemed completely disingenuous.

99% of people would parse "cancer is a disease of the modern" as "cancer is a disease of modern lifestyles" Certainly lifespan is less popularly understood. But every point someone might raise here is merely _refining_ the fairly well understood point that _cancer is a disease of the modern world_.

My summary of the article would "we'll make three or four fine, hair-splitting distinctions to keep an unpleasant truth at bay"

<comment><USER5> Wait, what's the unpleasant truth here?

If it turned out that cancer, that horrible disease that kills nearly half of us, was almost entirely due [ _pollution/eating crabs/wearing shoes/fluoridation of water sapping and impurifying our precious bodily fluids_ ] then that would be an unpleasant truth. That's what the original "research" on mummies seemed to be claiming.

If in fact it turns out that cancer is unavoidable if you live long enough, that's a much less unpleasant truth.

<comment><USER6> _"cancer, that horrible disease that kills nearly half of us"_

According to the WHO, cancer is responsible for about 2:17 of all disease related deaths worldwide.

<http://apps.who.int/ghodata/?vid=720>

In the US, deaths from cancer lag behind those from CVD. Though they are closer. <http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm>

<comment><USER5> Right, the worldwide cancer death rate is a lot lower than it is for those of us in rich countries because poor people are too busy dying of other things like malaria and malnutrition.

My "almost half" was an exaggeration, yes (and a totally unnecessary one, nobody needs to be convinced that cancer is bad) though if you also take into account the fact that heart disease disproportionately kills the overweight, if you're not overweight and in a rich country your chances of dying of cancer might well be approaching 50%.

<comment><USER6> In 2005 cancer deaths were about 23% of all US deaths. [http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data_access/vitalstats/VitalStats_Mo...](http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data_access/vitalstats/VitalStats_Mortality.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As someone currently battling cancer (stage IV nodular melanoma) i've been reading a lot about it all lately, and i've seen multiple sources saying that it was the Egyptians themselves who actually first documented cancer.

Eg: [http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2010/09/03//30018...](http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2010/09/03//3001854.htm)

</comment><comment><USER8> Sorry guys, whatever you are saying: cancer is a product of the cellular replication system and the faint, yet existing possibilities of errors in that system. To our best knowledge, the are mostly associated to DNA mutations and certain other physio-chemical states (e.g., epigenetics) associated to it. However, the longer you live, the more likely you will beceome prone to incur these genetic state changes. This state change is mostly related to the fact that we live longer than before. Obviously, there is hereditary cancer and all its implications and we can trace that, but the increased occurrence of these genetic issues leading to our cells to behave in discord in modern society is undoubtedly linked to the greatly increased lifespans. No scientific study has come up with other evidence - and if it would have, I can assure you it would be on the headlines of Science, Nature, and other scientific journals.

<comment><USER9> How would you explain that there are (or were) cultures completely or almost completely free of cancer - with it becoming more common when they adopted the western lifestyle?

 _In Cancer, Disease of Civilization (1960), Wilhjalmur Stefansson mentions a few cultures besides the Inuit in which large-scale searches never turned up cancer. Dr. Albert Schweitzer examined over 10,000 traditionally-living natives in Gabon (West Africa) in 1913 and did not find cancer. Later, it became common in the same population as they began "living more and more after the manner of the whites."

In Cancer, its Nature, Cause and Cure (1957), Dr. Alexander Berglas describes the search for cancer among natives in Brazil and Ecuador by Dr. Eugene Payne. He examined approximately 60,000 people over 25 years and found no evidence of cancer._

[http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/07/cancer-in- othe...](http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/07/cancer-in-other-non- industrialized.html)

<comment><USER10> Those cultures simply did not have the life expectancy necessary to reach cancers. They died from other diseases before that.

<comment><USER9> Well, in the modern world even school kids may have cancer - my daughter has a classmate who went through it, and that's primary school. I don't know the details though about type of cancer etc.

But those cultures didn't have cancer, din't have obesity, diabetes, heart disease ... I don't even know what diseases they died from.

I do not have the book "Cancer, Disease of Civilisation" and the blog post does not tell about the age. Here's the compilation of two other blog entries from the same blog:

[http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/07/cancer- among-i...](http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/07/cancer-among- inuit.html)

 _One of these physicians was captain George B. Leavitt. He actively searched for cancer among the traditionally-living Inuit from 1885 to 1907. Along with his staff, he performed 50,000 examinations a year for the first 15 years, and 25,000 a year thereafter. He did not find a single case of cancer. At the same time, he was regularly diagnosing cancers among the crews of whaling ships and other Westernized populations. It's important to note two relevant facts about Inuit culture: first, their habit of going shirtless indoors. This would make visual inspection for external cancers very easy. Second, the Inuit generally had great faith in Western doctors and would consult them even for minor problems. Therefore, doctors in the arctic had ample opportunity to inspect them for cancer._

This entry does not mention lifespan, but the other one does:

[http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/07/mortality- and-...](http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/07/mortality-and-lifespan- of-inuit.html)

 _Excluding infant mortality, about 25% of their population lived past 60. Based on these data, the approximate life expectancy (excluding infant mortality) of this Inuit population was 43.5 years. It's possible that life expectancy would have been higher before contact with the Russians, since they introduced a number of nasty diseases to which the Inuit were not resistant._

I do not have data at hand about cancer rates in the western world by age, but my guess would be that it's not so uncommon at the age of 60+.

<comment><USER9> _I do not have data at hand about cancer rates in the western world by age, but my guess would be that it's not so uncommon at the age of 60+._

Just talking to myself here:

[http://www.nia.nih.gov/ResearchInformation/ConferencesAndMee...](http://www.nia.nih.gov/ResearchInformation/ConferencesAndMeetings/WorkshopReport/Figure1.htm)

 _1,301.6 per 100,000 in the 60- to 64-year-old population;_

So, if that George B. Leavitt was indeed performing 50,000 examination per year (looks a bit high, that's over 100 per day), and 25% of inuit population lived past 60, he should have examined about 12,500 inuit aged 60+ per year.

By current western standards, he should have found about 160 cases each year among those 60+ guys. The book claims he has not found any.

<comment><USER5> Well then, I'd consider that to be one of those extraordinary claims that demands extraordinary evidence. Something other than hearsay from a dodgy- sounding source.

I'm trying to find out about this George B. Leavitt guy. I assume it was this guy:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Baker_Leavitt,_Sr>.

but he wasn't a physician as claimed, he was a captain and it doesn't mention him having any medical training. Wikipedia also fails to say anything about him examining people for cancer -- if he were really doing so at the rate of one hundred and thirty six per day on average, in between his many other duties (like, say, captaining a whaling ship which would require quite a lot of time spent at sea) then one would think it would have been quite time- consuming.

Other googling for "George Leavitt Cancer" provides a few repetitions of the same claim (including this thread -- hi there!) but nothing that looks reputable. The original claim seems to come from a book called "Cancer: Disease of Civilization?" written by one Vilhjalmur Stefansson who travelled with Leavitt.

Also, your stats aren't quite right. Even if he were examining that many people, he wouldn't expect to detect cancer at nearly the rates that modern medicine would.

Also, that's the cancer incidence rate, not the rate at which you expect to find living people with detectable cancers, since people who do have cancer tend to die, especially in societies where they can't treat it. By the time a cancer becomes big enough to detect via a cursory examination with 19th century technology, it has probably already killed you.

<comment><USER9> These are all good points to think about. For this particular one, I agree:

 _Even if he were examining that many people, he wouldn't expect to detect cancer at nearly the rates that modern medicine would._

But at the same time, as the book claims:

 _At the same time, he was regularly diagnosing cancers among the crews of whaling ships and other Westernized populations._

So detectability, probably, was not that big of an issue itself.

<comment><USER5> _So detectability, probably, was not that big of an issue itself._

Unless, of course, he got it into his head that Inuit didn't have cancers, and then started making false diagnoses based on that.

Look, I don't know how much of this story is true and how much of it is made up. Certainly the part where he's a trained physician seems to have been made up. The part where he examined fifty thousand Inuit _plus_ a significant of westerners per year in between his actual duties as a ship's captain appears to be completely implausible. If this random anecdote is the best evidence we have that living with a traditional Eskimo diet will signficantly lower your chance of cancer, I think it's safe to say that the evidence for the hypothesis is pretty darn pissweak.

<comment><USER8> Average inuit lifespan is about 45 years - however, that means they had a higher life expectancy than we did before we surpassed them. So the extremely cold environment does seem to help (although you just won't get me there :)

[http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/07/mortality- and-...](http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/07/mortality-and-lifespan- of-inuit.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Full disclosure. I am one of those "crazy people" who think grains and complex carbohydrates are killing us, and that a high fat diet, moderate protein, low carbohydrate is ideal.

I really believe cancer IS a modern world disease, however my definition of modern world goes beyond the Egyptians and back to the first people who ever started eating wheat and grains. I would be surprised if the Egyptians DIDN'T have a host of cancers due to there consumption of wheat and grain grown in the Nile.

Cancer is a product of the small failures in the cellular replication system, however, we are accelerating the amount of replication by putting ourselves into modes of chronic hyper-insulinism through all the carbohydrate rich diets we are eating. Add to the chronic inflammation we have put our bodies into, causing our white bloodcells to attack healthy cells, then forcing again even more cell replication, we are essentially giving cancer a better odd at occurring. (This is a gross over-simplification as I am getting ready to sleep, but I could go on about Insulin Like Growth Factors etc.)

Also, in regards to everyone discussing that we live a lot longer than our ancestors. Again this is true to our ancestors going back to the agricultural revolution, but there are studies shown[1] that our hunter-gatherer brethren had lifespans not unlike hours.

[1] [http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/gurven/papers/GurvenKaplan2...](http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/gurven/papers/GurvenKaplan2007pdr.pdf)

<comment><USER5> Have you actually read that 46-page paper you posted? Because I'm only up to page six, but it appears to directly contradict you:

 _"Among traditional hunter-gatherers, the average life expectancy at birth varies from 21 to 37 years; the proportion surviving to age 45 varies between 26 percent and 43 percent"_

Reading onwards, this should give pause to anyone who wants to go on about the awesomeness of hunter-gatherer diets:

 _Gastrointestinal illnesses account for 5-18 percent of deaths... Diarrhea coupled with malnutrition remains one of the most significant causes of infant and early child deaths among foragers and peasant populations..._

<comment><USER11> The way I understood it was that the average life expectancy was low, due to the high rate of infant mortality. But the mode of the age data is up in the 60's-70's. I.e those who didn't die from infection, or being eaten alive actually lived similar lives to us.

edit: Article quote

Page 29: _The data show that modal adult life span is 68–78 years, and that it was not uncommon for individuals to reach these ages, suggesting that inferences based on paleodemographic reconstruc-tion are unreliable._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I happen to know a guy who's father was a prominent biologist and a cancer researcher. He used to make a point that cancer is a result of a random process that is present in all living things, and if humans managed to cure all other deseases everyone would still get cancer sooner or later.

Point being, not many mummies had cancer probably because they simply lived much shorter lives than modern humans. We have pills and defibrilators, they did not.

<comment><USER13> That's too simplistic. Yes, there are many "random" processes affecting DNA, including transposons and viruses. But there are also tumor suppression mechanisms (genes), too.

What the article talks about is the case when a cancerous outbreak goes unchecked in the human body.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer> (Sorry for the RTFWP)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> There is a delicious irony in _New Scientist_ , of all publications, complaining about sloppy and sensationalized science reporting in the media. Sloppy and sensationalized science reporting seems to be pretty much _New Scientist_ 's reason for existing.

</comment><comment><USER15> It seems to me that without modern medicine, it only makes sense that fewer people died of cancer. It's not that it's become more dangerous. It's that there were simply more things to die of.

<comment><USER16> What's more, without modern medicine (and sanitation and nutrition) people _with_ cancer would tend to die earlier, or perhaps of secondary factors. If you're some occasionally malnourished farm hand (read: the vast majority of all individuals who lived in pre-industrial times) and you get, say, leukemia you are going to die of whatever the fuck disease happens to be going around, and it's going to happen quick. The result is that there may be less evidence of cancer in, say, ancient bones but not due to decreased incidence of cancer per se.

<comment><USER17> There is a line of reasoning (and evidence in mice) that the body seems to be designed to operate in starvation mode (e.g. calorie restriction). One line of thought behind this is that food abundance results in signalling along certain metabolic pathways that have not experienced heavy evolutionary pressure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Smoking is the most significant of these, causing around a quarter of all cancers globally."

Except for that the research shows that smoking doesn't cause cancer, except _maybe_ for tobacco. And even the surgeon general now apparently admits that most cancers that tobacco users suffer from probably aren't from tobacco.[1]

[1] <http://www.erowid.org/plants/cannabis/cannabis_health2.shtml>

<comment><USER15> Bear in mind that I say this in the most respectful manner possible: Do you believe everything you read on the Internet?

<comment><USER18> No, of course not, I only cited the UMASS pamphlet because it's the most well written summary of the information. But every other source from the NY Times to Wikipedia says basically the same thing, e.g. <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/01/opinion/01proctor.html>

<comment><USER19> I read that NYT link and it seems to say the opposite - that smoking does cause cancer.

"What few experts will dispute is the magnitude of the hazard: the World Health Organization estimates that 10 million people will be dying annually from cigarettes by the year 2020 — a third of these in China. Cigarettes, which claimed about 100 million lives in the 20th century, could claim close to a billion in the present century."

<comment><USER18> Only a third of the people who die from smoking die from cancer. And again, it doesn't seem to be the tobacco but rather the radioactive material and the additives. Cigarette smokers in other countries have vastly lower rates of cancer.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Whats your Startup / App Ideas for 2013? - <AUTHOR>

share your startup / app ideas for 2013.... whats the trends? <comment><USER2> An app that motivates you to go to the gym. Challenge friends on gym check- ins, and win their money when they don't go.

We're launching for Android on new year's day! (<http://fitsby.com> if anyone's interested)

<comment><USER3> Seems very interesting. Just checked the business model and if people use it repeatedly (not just one wager) this could make a lot of money. Good luck!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A fashion/clothes recommendation engine. I was going to start it earlier this year but got discouraged when I say another startup was much further ahead with their product. Haven't heard much of them since so I think the market is still there. Maybe that.. maybe not though.

</comment><comment><USER4> I plan to create a bitcoin bank that allows you to use Visa debit cards to make transactions and withdraw cash from regular ATMs.

It will work just like your regular debit card works when you are in a foreign country, the conversion will happen in 'real time'.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A motoapp that improves your lifetime of your vehicle... be it car / bike.

<comment><USER5> That would be a killer app, I'd pay for this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Disrupting the restaurant experience. From discovery, to ordering, to service, to receipts. Pretty much everything to do with it is broken and inefficient, so lots of work to be done.

<comment><USER3> Moving in on the fast food ordering online services like just-eat.com or do you mean something else?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A Photo Track Mobile App, essentially a life history Log.

</comment><comment><USER8> Functional-style replacement for Excel.

<comment><USER9> Like Soulver?

<http://www.acqualia.com/soulver/>

<comment><USER8> Not really. More focus on working with tables and reusable custom named functions which operate with one or several columns. General idea is that a new table is some function of an existing one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Crowd Hosting - pool money together, use interest to fund hosting

SalesForce Themes and Skins

</comment><comment><USER11> An app called "Flyer" to browse through events in your city

</comment><comment><USER12> A real estate marketplace.

<comment><USER13> I really want to disrupt the real estate market. Real estate agents in particular. I think it is a broken system, especially on the rental side.

Never dug into the law (here in Australia) but I want to make available the tool for people the manage their own properties, some standard rental contracts etc.

People already look for property online, then you have to deal with the agents, you should just be able to deal with the one - hopefully trusted - site. You search, find, go to a open inspection, apply online, get notified that you have it. Get sent contracts etc. Organise a meet for keys and signing. You'll then manage communication through that with the owner or a proxy.

You'd need to hire a bunch of resources that are vented to do open inspections and manage some calls etc. but on scale they'd be cheaper than a bunch on real estate agents.

<comment><USER9> Find the "international association of home inspectors" or the equivalent. Talk to them, talk to their members, about how much work you'll be sending them.

You don't need to hire them - just subcontract with them. Kinda like what Home Depot does for installation work - they have a vetted network of contractors around the country that they schedule...

Good luck

<comment><USER14> In the UK the "home inspectors" (we call them Inventory Clerks) are quite often the letting agents as well.

In fact, with smartphones/apps many letting agents are doing these jobs in- house.

Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of <https://www.lettingcheck.com>, so get quite a good overview of what the industry is doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> drive up attendant-less coffee kiosk

<comment><USER16> Trying to dry up the hipster job market, are we?</comment></comment>


Show HN: Coffee Script jQuery plugin boilerplate - <AUTHOR> http://philipthrasher.com/2011/09/26/Coffee-Script-jQuery-Boilerplate-Coffee-Plate.html

<comment><USER2> Just did a search for exactly this, can't believe it's less than a day old! Excellence.</comment>