maxander

That's all prescribed doses, though. So, yes, the use of benzodiazepines is going up, which obviously carries with it the associated rise in side effects and drug-related deaths. It's not reasonably comparable to the narcotics epidemic, where illegal use is driving mortality rates.

What is the thesis here? Benzodiazepines are commonly prescribed and have the potential for abuse; these things are both true; I hadn't heard the rate of prescription was rising, but I'd believe it. There doesn't seem to be any evidence presented for a trend or rise in benzodiazepine abuse, or evidence of general harm from the use of the drugs. It highlights parallels between the existence of this prescription drug class and another class that is associated with significant issues, and makes it sound as if there were an issue here... and then leaves it at that, the literary equivalent of a wink and a nudge. Are they arguing that prescription of drugs with abuse potential is inherently a problem? Because that would be a very extreme position, one which would challenge a sizable fraction of the medications available to modern psychiatry.

And this is a "journalist's resource," one associated with the Harvard Kennedy School? No wonder journalism is garbage these days.

If things go far enough downhill that the Svalbard vault is lost and its contents just allowed to rot, I’d be surprised if we retained the technological capacity to do things like synthesizing a complex genome from data. (I’m not sure we could do that with present technology either, for that matter.)

As a guy who does a lot of scientific data analysis and plotting, I'm surprised that no one brought up the obvious explanation; in the general scrum of final manuscript preparation, the data analysis guy mistakenly made a plot with the same data replicated several times, but shifted each time so that the plot looked plausible at first pass. It would require a lot of things to go wrong at once, sure... but with experience, you learn to count on a lot of things going wrong at once, especially just before something like a manuscript submission. :)

But that the authors, who presumably could check the raw data the plot is coming from, didn't immediately come back with this explanation, makes it sound much more likely that this is just fraud. Oh well.

I’d imagine they ruled out an alien source simply because any astronomical phenomenon could be produced by aliens. Thinking about that for anything slightly unusual is just burdensome cognitive overhead.

Similar to how cosmologists aren’t satisfied with “god did it” as an explanation. :)

Architects and mechanical engineers not only know about blueprints and design procedure, they also have a solid understanding of the physics that make their designs work. Programmers, by and large, just know how to code.

There exists a formidable body of study describing the practices and theory required to write knowably-correct software, but the software engineering industry treats these ideas with utter derision. Even lighter-weight methods for knowably preventing broad classes of errors(e.g. Haskell-like type systems) are considered niche and pretentious. These opinions are mirrored by many CS programs, so most engineers wouldn’t have the slightest clue how to apply these methods, or even know that they exist, should they decide they were necessary.

With that kind of culture, what can we expect?

Well, over the many-thousand-year geological record, we've seen exactly one global industrialization, and also exactly one climate shift of this nature, and against all odds they're happening at essentially the exact same time. Even if we only consider that fact, while these two dramatic and extremely rare events could be unrelated, we have awfully good reason to think they're connected.

Do you really think there are 100M people on the planet willing and able to pay for the absurd fuel cost this would require, just to shave off a few hours heading to a holiday or business meeting? There’s a reason that present day jets are so slow, and it’s not technological, it’s economical.

The issue is that, presently, all the engineers, and the industrial base, are on Earth. So, space has to value-add to Earth in order to pay their salaries, if any effort is going to persist long enough to get to the self-sustaining picture you speak of.

Being short-sighted is sometimes correct- you’ve got to cross the foreground to reach the distance.

It’s a nice result; a world full of 130-IQ humans with a 120-year life expectancy sounds stable and achievable next to most techno-utopian visions.

But, I wonder if you asked a 115-year old whether they wanted to die in 5 years what they would say then.

That’s why the experimenters added the “assuming a pill that grants eternal youth” detail to the question. But it’s possible that inattentive test subjects didn’t fully internalize that.

I've seen more sophisticated schemes for teacher evaluation, in which the metric takes into account the ability of the students as they enter that teacher's class. So, for a student who got a B, say, in grades N < 5, there's an expected grade value for them to achieve in 5th grade; that student counts towards the teacher's "score" only insofar as they do better or worse than that expected value.

Theoretically, this puts teachers on even footing, even when one might be teaching a class of Harvard-prep elementary schoolers and another teaching a class of inner-city kids who have been educationally neglected their entire lives. And data from student performance over time in the current educational system should be entirely sufficient to train the model.

It's not clear if the study referenced controlled for student variance this way; if so, it would readily explain the lack of results.

I mean, are you "under constant fear of being fired" wherever you work? No one's advocating being seriously harsh to teachers; the issue is that currently, due to union agreements and so forth, it's nearly impossible to fire them. We would fire a janitor who stops doing his job effectively; it's reasonable to apply the same standards to those we trust with our children.

It’s the stereotype, not the reality. Check out the housing prices near frequently-served bus stops in your local city.

The market for ride-sharing services is over $17B [1], of which Lyft accounts for about a quarter. This is cited as a “multimillion dollar” effort- it’s likely barely a drop in the bucket. (And nice marketing, to boot.)

[1] https://www.statista.com/outlook/368/109/ride-sharing/united...

It’s a valid point, but there are also factors in the other direction- for instance, there are people who would have chosen to buy cars if ride sharing weren’t available, and this would have led to greenhouse gas emission through their manufacture, trips taken lazily by car rather than walking, and etc.

I'd guess that most of HN is in roughly your position- enamored with the idea of a startup but without the savings to start one up, or enthusiastic about Big Name tech companies but without the background or geographic location to get in.

First and foremost, understand that your life is fine; you're a software developer with a job that, albeit boring, is stable and makes good money. You're supporting your family. Most people would give a limb to be in that position. Your problems are psychological.

Consider seeing a therapist; it sounds like you need more perspective on your own life than a bunch of commenters on HN could give you.

But for this commenter's two cents; if you do continue looking for a (even) better job, try to find one that gives you better work-life balance. 20 hours for work+sleeping+commute? A good situation should see that down to 17, tops- 8 for work, 1 for commute, 8 for sleep. Moving closer to work, to reduce commute, has been cited as one of the greatest happiness-enhancing life changes one can make. The 8 hour workday is poo-poo'd by HN because it's full of SV workaholics, but its an available and healthy choice outside that scene. (Notably, either working for a Big Name company or doing a startup would make your life much worse in this regard!) If sleep is eating up the time, consider getting tested for sleep apnea (which can also have complications such as depression... natch!)

With 7 hours of free time per day, rather than 4, you'd be in a much better position to get your feet under yourself, both psychologically and practically. (And perhaps, eventually, to make a better prototype for what you want to do long-term.)

It likely isn't what he's looking for, but if he's feeling that badly because of these difficulties (which are a difficult struggle, to be sure, but not catastrophic by any measure) it's not his life that's the problem. For some biochemical or psychological reason it's hitting him harder than it should; that's called, in many cases, clinical depression.

And importantly, in those cases, it's fixed by psychological means- usually not by life success, even when such success occurs.

The headline is a wonderful example of syntactic ambiguity. :)

Ask yourself, though, how often you’ve seen emails like this from other companies in the news. Probably about never? Whatever you think about his reasons, Musk is going way against standard procedure here- and this in the field of company management, not the kind of engineering problems where his weird approach has paid off.

I don't have time at the moment to read the article in detail, but it sounds like the experiment tested non-meditators on work tasks immediately following a meditation session. I don't believe that this has much bearing on the overall levels of motivation on someone who does or does not meditate in general; it's easy to imagine that right after a relaxing mindfulness session people would be a bit sleepy and less inclined to carry out experimental makework tasks dutifully, but the meaningful benefits of meditation would presumably last much longer than such drowsiness.

As others have noted, the article is based on a study that only looked at a small subject of OSS projects, so it's not very solid. But the results fit with many commenters' perceptions. It's surprising that so little is known about the dynamics of how OSS gets written, given how crucially important it is to the global economy these days.

(Even) more broadly; I wonder if a similar system will wind up dominating in some fields of science. There's been a bunch of cases where prominent research papers in AI or biomedicine have been published by entirely for-profit companies; one supposes they benefit in the same fashion that more traditional software companies benefit from publishing open source work, namely by building a reputation and cultivating a larger ecosystem around their expertise.

Any citations on that? In all the hullabaloo about Theranos I haven't heard that there were serious theoretical difficulties with what they were trying to do.

It would make me feel somewhat better about the whole mess to know this was the case. A successful Theranos would have been the best thing to come out of SV since the Apple II. It was sad to see it fail because of executives' delusions.

No, you are wrong. R is terrible, and especially so for non-professional programmers, and it is an absolute disaster for the applications where it routinely gets used, namely statistics for scientific applications. The reason is its strong tendency to fail silently (and, with RStudio, to frequently keep going even when it does fail.) As a result, people get garbage results without realizing, and if they're unlucky, these results are similar enough to real results that they get put somewhere important. Source: I'm a CS grad working with biologists; I've corrected errors in the R code of PhD'd statisticians, in "serious" contexts.

Scientific applications require things to fail hard and often, to aggressively fail whenever anything is potentially behaving incorrectly. R does the exact opposite of that in several different, pernicious ways. IMHO, Python is more dangerous than a scientific computing language should be, but at least it will stop when it hits an error. R has undoubtedly cost humanity millions of dollars in wasted research costs and caused untold confusion, from otherwise perfectly-performed studies reporting corrupted statistical results. The world would be a noticeably better place without it.

I simply cannot articulate my opinion about R without sounding grossly hyperbolic. I'm sad that HN, a place which is typically enlightened in the ways of the programming arts, is so confused what this article is on about. If we tolerate such blatantly hostile design in something as important as the language of scientific statistics, where do we expect to get?

We could be using this technology to see tumors and other pathologies through patients’ skin. Instead we’re using it to give soldiers and spies x-ray vision.

To be fair, isn’t far behind the state of the art in nutritional research.

Of course they don’t. They just need complacent accomplices, such as Mr. Brady.

It doesn’t have to happen to them, they can grow up as happy as they are now. One good reason to seek help for yourself, and recover from your depression, is to give your children an example of how to respond if/when it happens to them.

You expect a future where brain implants will be tiny computers that make you smarter, but perhaps instead you get a future where brain implants are tiny heating coils that make you wake up earlier.

If Stuxnet being limited to interfering with its intended target is your example of how Western intelligence is over concerned with limits to their operations’ scope, I think you hold our services to a very low standard, both ethically and practically. Would it have been responsible, or in the nation’s best interests, to allow Stuxnet to play with any industrial equipment it found itself on? And further, would such a blatant infection have half a chance of hitting its actual objectives?

You also seem to assume that, however badly the Russians have us over a barrel through infected infrastructure, that we haven’t gotten into their stuff just as badly, or worse. All the regulations that U.S. spooks complain about aren’t a problem once you’re on foreign soil working on foreign targets. Cyberwarfare favors the attacker, just because we’re very vulnerable isn’t a reason to believe we don’t have the upper hand.

(And as noted, the U.S.’s budget for this stuff is way greater than our opponents’. If we’re not decisively on top something is seriously wrong.)