threepipeproblm

It is also interesting to note that the paper cites only 3 "NIH grants", but the lead author works for the "Duke Transdisciplinary Prevention Research Center, Center for Child and Family Policy," which doesn't sound very objective.

Hmm, let's dig further. The home page of the TPRC lists a single funder: the NDIA.

https://childandfamilypolicy.duke.edu/project/transdisciplin...

That would be the National Institute on Drug Abuse, an institution which has a pre-established position on marijuana and other drugs, and stands to gain financially the more problems that are perceived with recreational drug use.

The following government piece on drugabuse.org does not mention the serious criticisms, despite heavily quoting from the journal in which they were published 6 months prior. Since it streches credulity to think they didn't know about the problems raised, the logical conclusion is that the authors felt their piece would be stronger without mentioning them (versus offering any counter-rebuttal).

https://www.drugabuse.gov/news-events/nida-notes/2013/08/ear...

"absent improvements in microarchitecture they [CPUs] won’t be substantially faster, nor substantially more power efficient, and they will have about the same number of cores at the same price point as prior CPUs. Why would anyone buy a new CPU?"

For some reason, most of the those who have promoted this piece have failed to notice that the same journal published a pretty scathing refutation of it, a few months later.

http://www.pnas.org/content/110/11/4251.abstract

It seems the original authors didn't even bother to look for confounding factors, such as socioeconomic status or use of other drugs.

Maybe you're right. This wasn't clear to me since I clicked the screen shots and it appeared to show a distinct product.

I am seeing several things I associate with a project that is thinking about commercializing. If this is the case, it seems like rocky territory either way.

Using a competitor's trademark in your marketing slogan, is that wise?

I hope sci-hub and libgen can stay afloat. sci-hub.ac is also up atm. "to remove all barriers in the way of science" -- be advised it's not necessarily legal.

Ironically, you have to copy, paste and Google the titles of most of these to find downloadable versions.

Maybe an interesting time to point out a site I just ran across which is reddit-like, but (as far as I can figure) uses cryptocurrency to fund itself and pay contributors.

Steemit "Your voice is worth something" https://steemit.com/

Of all the supposed reddit-killers that have been put forward, this is notable because of the funding mechanism, and because everyone there seems so damn excited. However, a lot of the most popular articles seem to be about... Steemit itself.

The CEO Steve Huffman recently admitted to editing his political opponent's posts. Maybe they can't get anything done because they're redditing all day.

Good to know, though... thanks.

By my read, the list of accomplishments for customers is notably short of anything positive that Yahoo did during Mayer's tenure, except for the fantasy sports. Non-rhetorical question: do people really think she did a good job because of how she managed the negatives?

I don't follow Yahoo! that closely, so the below is primarily based on headlines I've seen in the past few years... let me know if I have butchered any of the details. The bulleted points quote Mayers' statement.

* We became 1 of 3 internet companies in the world with more than 1B monthly users * We grew our monthly mobile users to more than 650M (one of the largest in the world) by launching and improving our products for mobile devices

Translation: We rode the wave of massive Internet trends, with negligible profit taking, and are now taking credit for the aforementioned trends, which every global Internet company experienced.

* We dramatically focused our product strategy, dispensing 150+ subscale products and features

Translation: We admitted that a large part of our holdings/investments were non-performing or ill-advised.

* We invested in search, building an offering that drew on strengths from Microsoft, Google and Yahoo, to provide dramatically improved search to our users and attract impactful partnerships, like Mozilla

Translation: We admitted total defeat in the business most consumers still think of as defining us, to the point that we now resell the services of the competitors who won.

* We fundamentally improved Yahoo Mail, completely rewriting much of the infrastructure to provide a far more flexible and reliable system, while creating a robust mobile offering. Mobile Mail recently surpassed desktop Mail in daily users, which shows the power of the product and the platform we reinvented

Translation: After taking for granted one of the few Yahoo products with a lot of users, we finally started adopting the UI patterns that allowed our competitors to outdo us in new user acquisition. But we managed to make headlines for confusing/tricking users who wanted to leave after massive security breaches.

* We invested in our homepage and key verticals – news, sports, finance, and lifestyles – with each remaining as the go-to destinations in their categories. And, they have found new followings on mobile through the Yahoo app, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, and Yahoo Fantasy. It’s hard to believe, but, in 2012, we didn’t have any of these 4 now-cornerstone apps on iOS or Android, we weren’t developing native apps, and we didn’t use these sought-after brands outside of desktop. Today, our users collectively spend an equivalent of 1,400 years on these products EVERY day.

Translation: We avoided losing some key properties that people used think were worth a lot before Google came along. Plus fantasy football!! We found a way to say many millions people use or sites daily, which sounds ever more impressive to people who are bad at math.

* We bolstered our security defenses with cross-company initiatives like SSL, HTML5, Account Key, and HTTPS

Translation: We started improving security, mostly after some of the largest and most publicized security breaches in history.

* We committed to and invested in technical excellence in our architectures, reducing user-impacting incidents by more than half over the past 5 years

Translation: we fixed a lot of bugs in our products.

* We won 2 Apple Design Awards in 2013 and 2014, and put unified product design front and center with Fuji

Translation: A company who beat our pants by almost every measure in the marketplace, said we made 2 good things, which are not worth specifically naming... the important thing is that Apple liked them, even though they apparently killed off the Apple Design Awards after commoditizing "flat design".

For some reason, people used to think a track record of profits was relevant.

What I found helpful was watching videos by Antonio Centano https://www.youtube.com/user/RealMenRealStyle

I'm going to presume you are male... not trying to be sexist, it's just a guess. If you are female I don't think this advice will be helpful (women seem to have it a lot harder when it comes to these choices, esp. with what is suggested by Antonio, which is largely ignoring current fashion).

He teaches the difference between classic style and fashion, and focuses on the former. While many of his community are probably interested in dressing way more formally than you are (and frankly seem to long for time when it was more socially acceptable for men to wear suits everywhere), he teaches principles, which can be applied to many different styles of dress.

The older videos are more fundamental and tend to be better IMO.

>> > The world is a better place with lots of smaller companies. >> [citation needed]

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bigger-corporations-are-m...

'Cripple' is probably an exaggeration, I wasn't there (just got the angry phone call) but I believe it was a combination of two factors. First his machine not having a huge amount of breathing room with HD space. Second, the "magic" automated, slow file transfer made his machine unavailable for manual use. But at some point he started to point the finger at Dropbox, started plugging and unplugging the device (have you tried turning it on and off again?). This was a quite smart person who was not computer savvy. I think he was trying to manually transfer a few photos to his PC. I get it... something he used to be able to do for himself stopped working, and until he figured out what was going on, effectively locked up his machine.

If you take this in the context of what others have said about Dropbox's takeover of CPU, hopefully my use of 'cripple' makes sense...

I have rarely seen cases where "magic behaviors" that users don't understand work really well.

I definitely should have used the subjunctive case there, but I was addressing an HN audience who does get it. A charitable reader might have responded to the gist of the criticism.

Are you suggesting that because many of Dropbox's users don't know about the rooting thing, it's justified by their expansion?

I think the important thing is that, were most users to understand the rooting issue, they would be upset. Most users could easily understand it, if explained clearly. This is likely why Dropbox didn't disclose at all until caught -- and now, presumably, has a techie-sounding disclosure instead of "can we 0wn your machine?", if they are even still doing this on Macs.

This goes along with my original complaint about Dropbox: defaults that are ostensibly in Dropbox's interest, but not users'.

Did you read the part of the statement where they promised to make changes to the application disclosures?

Characterizing typical users as unable to understand rooting sidesteps the point that, when the concept is explained to them, most will not be comfortable with software companies doing this.

I doubt most people are comfortable with deception around root access, in order to have a better user experience.

This is evidenced by the fact that Dropbox felt the need to apologize and alter their behavior. Largely through HN activism BTW https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/09/dropbox-responds-to-accusa...

I recently started moving away from Dropbox after realizing I am not comfortable with how aggressive and anti-user this software is.

Last year the story broke about very questionable tactics of Dropbox Mac to gain root access.

This year I had a client whose machine was crippled because of a fun Dropbox default where, upon inserting any USB device Dropbox will automatically copy. The user inserted a camera with 4GB of hunting pics and it basically downed his machine. Now maybe he clicked on something to technically approve of this. But I surveyed the user base whom I had asked to install Dropbox and more than one had experienced a problem with this "feature". In one case the employee almost got in trouble for personal use of a machine, because she had connected her phone and didn't realize all her personal pictures were copied there. Less savvy users were involved, but I need to feel comfortable recommending a product like this to less savvy users.

For small n: http://www.kevinalbrecht.com/code/joy-mirror/jp-trutab.html

I started working as a programmer the day I turned 16 in the early 90's, at $50/hr. Freelancing is a good idea... I would focus on small organizations, possibly non-profits. Learn about what organizations do and talk to people there about ideas you have and/or your ability to implement their ideas. Basically, you need to learn sales.

A few decades later I still rely on the approach I learned back then. While many of my peers have a mentality that they are at the mercy of the job market, and need people to create & define work for them, I can create customers wherever I meet people. I have a number of small business customers who would likely never have done development if I hadn't sought them out.

While this isn't the top way to earn a lot of money as a software developer, I continue to work heavily with small businesses because I like it, and because it eliminates a lot of the factors that others seem to dislike about a programming career. Regardless it's a great way to get your foot in the door... companies who can't afford $80,000 programmer salaries -- or the contract equivalent -- can't afford to be prejudiced against your youth and inexperience.

Another way to reduce meat and animal product consumption, though counter intuitive, may be bone broth / anything with gelatin or glycine. I understand it has a "protein sparing" effect, meaning you can eat less protein total without muscle wasting. Our ancestors got a higher ratio of this stuff by eating more of the whole animal, rather than eating primarily muscle muscle bellies, as we tend to do today.

I don't want to take from the gravity of the main topic, but it seemed notable that the online group -- and this is the larger one, not the subset that got in trouble -- identify as "bourgeois". Unless Harvard has really changed, then... nope!

I'm sorry, the research I reviewed on animal infertility was a long time ago. The studies that were from the first half of the 20th century in which this result was demonstrated on just about every domestic farmed species. I don't have time at the moment to track those down. But I don't believe this is 'broscience'.

The first place I'd look if you're searching for studies, esp. more modern ones, is actually the Weston A. Price Foundation. While they have an agenda for sure (e.g. they are currently suing the US prison system for malnourishing inmates, just to name one example of activism/ideology) I think they are generally good folks. They have sponsored some top-notch researchers, such as Chris Masterjohn, in the past.

Here is their scary soy page, which starts with a few citations. I think you'd find more in some of the linked articles.

https://www.westonaprice.org/soy-alert/

Price was a fascinating bro, BTW.

Please feel free to post here anything that you may find to be of particular interest.

I should add that most of these results probably don't apply to traditionally fermented soy (like natto or traditionally made soy sauce -- but not the mass produced stuff nowadays); as I understand it there is no traditional culture which ate soy in an unfermented form.)

I don't know if they specifically apply to this study, but Stephan Guyenet has pointed out some of the potential problems with what are typically called "high-fat" diets for mice.*

For example one research diet that is called high-fat, D12492 - is extremely high in fat (60%) - does not contain what are generally considered to be particularly healthy forms of fat - is extremely processed overall - is typically used with genetically obesogenic mice - typically causes obsesity and neuron damage (and often diabetes) at a young age.

I would think there are quite a few studies on Intermittent Fasting (IF) that more easily generalize to humans.

* http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2012/01/high-fat-diets...

ADDENDUM: Here is the diet used in the actual study. http://www.labdiet.com/cs/groups/lolweb/@labdiet/documents/w... Some of the top ingredients are soy products (which in high enough doses will render most animal species infertile).

These are precisely the 3 pizza joints I cannot convince my room mate to order from. I guess he doesn't like the secret billionaire cheese.

EDIT: Not sure why this is being downvoted. Analysis of the mass market pizza industry as a race to the bottom, in terms of ingredient quality, is an old idea. Couldn't the secrecy, fake differentiation of leading megacorps, and low quality cheese be connected? Are we supposed to be impressed at this way of making money?

I came here to say "bwahahahaha" but this is so much better. Thanks.

I think you are right despite the backlash you are getting.

In college I got deep enough into Prolog to write programs where cuts were required. Later, I got excited about miniKanren. Now I've been looking into constraint programming, and what I didn't understand until recently is that it basically generalizes the Prolog techniques to handle any kind of equation solving / relational search approach. You can do amazing stuff with these systems (e.g. look at HAL http://users.monash.edu/~mbanda/hal/), including write custom search algorithms (consider classic Prolog unification just 1 search strategy on a limited domain).

But I don't think there is any getting around the fact that this stuff gets conceptually harder, as it gets more powerful. The idea of solution sets as potentially infinite relations, rather than functionally determined things, is very powerful but there is an abstraction price.

And to the extent people can wrap their heads around it, there is a "letting go" in not writing programs in the style of deterministic algebraic manipulations. Part of this may reflect a bias, but the magic of delegating solution-finding to an algorithm is also dangerous. Are you comfortable not knowing how many answers there might be if you let the program keep running?

Similarly, consider Prolog's negation as failure. You can't express many formulas that you might like to involving "NOT". Negation is interpreted as a program just not returning anything. There are important reasons for this model, but again, it isn't necessarily as easy a model where NOT can be used freely.

BTW not many people seem to know that Japan had a huge, Manhattan-style program in the 80's. They made Prolog their lower tier.. like their assembly language, or close to it (this was back when people were still thinking different computing platforms needed different hardware). Some people ultimately blamed Prolog for what is generally regarded as the failure of this "fifth generation" project to leapfrog Western tech. But I think Prolog suffered unduly as a result. In fact that project was trying to to a bunch of ambitious things and they all hung on one another. For example, they were trying to make speech the UI, with 80's tech...

All this said I would encourage anyone to explore Prolog, miniKanren, Mercury, Shen or anything of that ilk.

Referring to the episode "Fifteen Million Merits". IMO it's one of the greatest dystopian works ever.