jebus989

Sure editor numbers are in decline, that doesn't support your point. Ignore All Rules is one of the fundamental principles the site was founded on.

"Murdered" Wikipedia whose fifth pillar is "ignore all rules"?

In fairness the original "reporting" was for some buzzfeed-y 12 reasons to love New York, alongside "Because We Were All Taylor Swift Once" (which seems to be some tautology about being excited about NYC, not really sure). Anyway, over the last few hours Pressler switched her twitter to protected so I don't doubt she's getting sufficiently called out for this error.

But asexual reproduction can also be known as cloning! Just a bad/unfortunate analogy.

Such as a 20x heightened risk of developing Alzheimer's relative to baseline (as determined by your ApoE variant).

That's their terminology I believe (hence quotes). However, for fun you can have a go at imputing a full genome from these SNPs (e.g. http://genomesunzipped.org/2013/03/learning-more-from-your-2...). SNPs aren't necessarily exonic either so exome-seq isn't a superset of SNPs (I am a bioinformatics PhD student so while this isn't precisely my day job I'm not speaking from a position of ignorance).

> It wouldn't take much for companies to start requiring that you disclose the knowledge you're at (high?) risk of something and adjusting their prices accordingly - particularly in long term policies.

That's what insurance is though, right? You pay a premium over time relative to their payout risk. If you have heightened risk of serious disease you're not entitled to the same premium as someone with considerably lower risk.

Regardless, other than a couple of exceptions the genetics of complex diseases wouldn't be of much interest to health insurers. A SNP with a tiny effect size associated with type 2 diabetes gives less risk information than taking a look at a person's waistline.

Of course, they're just calling SNPs and using published GWAS studies to estimate disease risk. You can get your "raw genome" text file from 23andMe and convert to e.g. VCF format for use in a bioinformatics tool like the variant effect predictor.

Besides, really the most interesting health-related alleles are the simplest: ApoE, BRCA1 — no complicated algo is needed to interpret those associations.

> Wikipedia creates an enormous barrier to better information due to its size and scope, and its co-dependent relationship with Google.

Too silly to address.

> Wikipedia's medical information is unreliable and dangerous.

Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia not a DIY medical textbook. If you see dangerous information please feel free to edit it out — Wikipedia emphatically does not give medical advice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Medical_disclaimer).

> The wiki layout is useless for certain content types, such as video.

New-ish media viewer allows video playback fullscreen or inline, it's no youtube but unclear in which way you consider this useless.

> So giving free access to Wikipedia, over other sites is not actually in the public good at all. The answer is more competition.

Firstly Wikipedia Zero does not preclude, and indeed hasn't precluded, Facebook zero etc. Regarding competition, you know Wikipedia is CC-BY-SA right? You and everyone else has a right to fork the entire project, along with the mediawiki software...

Ironically that comic and XKCD in general falls into the category of things that are very widely-known but people still present as new information. (The prime example being cryptography discussions linking to correct horse battery staple.)

Less roughly 38k GBP ~= 61k USD. It's been a good half-decade since it was two dollars to the pound.

The second part of your quote (which comes first) was previous research they were setting out to repeat, instead they conclude with "Results do not support the hypothesis that caffeine differentially affects extraverts and introverts".

Well road testing starts January 2015 in the UK, and in Gothenburg from 2017 [0], presumably many other European countries have similar plans so we'll see!

[0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28551069

I understand the confusion but this isn't Windows XP Home with MS Paint and pinball — it's XP embedded (XPe), a minimal OS tailored to specific hardward and still receives security updates until 2016-19 depending on version purchased.

B is a indeed good idea and it already happens, though not as much as Wikipedia would like. Why make a class write a long essay that'll eventually be filed in a bin somewhere when they could be make real contributions to open knowledge? It also might help with Wikipedia's recruitment problem.

There's some advice to help implement successful Wiki-assignments here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Student_assignments

> Apple takes down another indie dev

More factual title: "Launcher removed from App Store".

Context: this is a site claiming to create landing pages with said conversion rate in a day. Landing page itself was designed in a day.

Additional context:

> My landing pages convert at over 10%. Even as high as 17%.

I'd wager it doesn't have >10% conversion however...

As well they should. This one poll gives the appearance of a trend towards Yes and a dramatic close finish, but Yes have always been behind by a fairly consistent margin [0]. Just so happens the odd poll (~2/50 now) finds a Yes majority by crook or by hook (e.g. SNP commission a poll) and it makes a nice news piece. I did a quick analysis of that polling data should anyone be interested [1].

[0] http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/scottish-independence-referendu...

[1] http://blm.io/blog/scottish-independence-polls/

I'd say you're massively selling current knowledge short. Of course in biology you can always go a level deeper and say "but how exactly... " however there's been a lot of research on mitochondria and there are entire centres that study it. In comparison to complex eukaryotic cells, the mitochondria have been see as relatively low-hanging fruit in terms of systems-level modelling (e.g. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/340/6140/1567) due to their simplicity as a regressed prokaryote with a short circular genome.

adden.: here's a nice overview of the biochemistry of a mitochondrion, which has been known for at least a decade (and is taught at A-level or early degree level biology): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3350335/figure/F...

Most uses of "gene" in this thread should be replaced by allele.

The mitochondria has a genome (mtDNA). Not my area but I think while we initially thought it was a fossil of the mito's prokaryotic history and we'd subsumed all the good stuff, there are genes there that may be of interest for exploring ageing and metabolic disorders. It's also quite interesting genetically, as only passed down the maternal line, so can be traced back to a single "mitochondrial eve" (MRCA). This brings up some neat ideas in selfish gene theory wrt battle of the sexes etc.

I'm not saying IS are the Donetsk separatists, just that they're not hiding in mountain ranges or tunnels and there's never been a question of "where are these guys".

I like this, but probably worth mentioning that this isn't a covert group so it seems somewhat akin to reporting where the Donetsk separatists are.

Absolutely right, Anders Ericsson has called Malcolm Gladwell out for misinterpreting his results for this exact reason. Not sure how widely available this is for playback but "More or Less" did a great podcast on this earlier this year: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01sqly1

The content is vacuous, he vaguely dismisses any and every competing longevity research project in favour of SENS, which he has doggedly promoted throughout HN for some time.

I'm a comp. bio. PhD student so don't think this isn't a topic of interest to me, but the answer to every age related topic just isn't "here's a link to some sens promotional material". SENS has some fringe ideas and was mostly rejected by scientists as silly and founded by a charlatan, now Peter Thiel has shown an interest it's got a kind of misappropriated authenticity among those with no scientific background.

I've enquired about a link between him and SENS in the past and also received a few quick downvotes, possibly HNers don't like the tone (fair enough) but I'd suggest it's possible he is using multiple accounts.

This guy is an Aubrey de Grey fanboy who shows up in every ageing related thread shilling for SENS, wouldn't worry about it.

Sorry to hear your story. IIRC the lean startup differentiates a "start-up" from a small new business by the idea that the former operates under gross uncertainty. Generally HN smoothes over this but stories like yours help keep things in perspective.

> hit me on Twitter (@jm)

You win some you lose some, I guess.