tyu100

Wow, yet another internet moral panic piece from Farhad Manjoo and the New York Times. For extra credit replace smartphone and facebook with MTV and television and see if you can tell the difference from something written in 1983.

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What are you talking about? If a store were to keep every size of each shoe for public display they would have space to show about four types of shoe. Every shoe store since the beginning of time keeps almost all stock in the back.

I think absolutely the opposite: this is a hugely positive disruption in North American cities. Car-centric urban design is such a disastrous problem in so many ways: land use, pollution, cost and so on, that we need massive and immediate disruption that's not going to happen from government fast enough.

The amount of land used and traffic problems caused by these scooters is nothing compared to how much public space is dedicated to moving and storing cars for personal use and is a actually a massive improvement. Additionally, if you've seen their actual use patterns in cities like Washington D.C., because of their dock-less nature and ease-of-payment they are being used by lower-income populations that don't use bike share or other similarly centrally planned options.

Scooters are hugely benign civil disobedience that are helping with what is probably the biggest problems in the world: pollution from personal transportation, whether carbon or localized exhaust. I am cheering them on completely and hope to see more similar disruptions that help the world and make investors rich.

Great context. You don't have to go too far back in the archives of this site to find discussion on Andy Grove's similar big project to use in silico to destroy traditional pharma discovery. We haven't heard much from that project since.

The article was about why testing for lead in depression is probably not a good idea or at least not a better idea than a million other things.

In the Canadian prairies we already had an insanely short window between endless winter season and infinite mosquito season and now tick invasion season has ably filled that gap. Argh.

What are you basing this on? Europe just signed up to complete the massive Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia to keep on getting natural gas from the worst state actor in the entire world while cutting out any leverage their most vulnerable EU partner states had over Putin.

In addition, Germany, in particular, repeatedly shielded and promoted disastrous diesel fuel to give their large automakers a boost in the market. Not only was diesel over electric a terrible idea for carbon emissions but a huge environmental disaster for micro-particulate emissions that cause so many health problems in large urban areas.

Finally, we also have, once again, mostly Germany, phasing out carbon-free nuclear in favour of building new coal plants to give cheap energy to their heavy industries.

Europe is great at promoting its green image to its credulous fans but the reality is a lot more mixed.

This was one of the best didn't read the articles I've seen in a while.

In really is incredible how many billions of dollars are spent on marketing alcohol and how pervasive is is.

I forget if its the Verge or some other popular podcast but they are always suggesting Apple just put together a fully open and accredited online university.

The problem is that there are a lot of people getting paid a lot of money all over the world to work in post-secondary education whom control the keys to accreditation and whom have proven very resilient at resisting any optimization efforts.

My thoughts as well, but still an interesting article.

I'm using concurrent.futures in production and its use of the multiprocessing module caused the Python grpc library to break in a really strange and hard-to-debug way:

https://github.com/grpc/grpc/issues/13873

I suspect it's not the only Python library that will see issues if you are running it in the Future context.

Beautiful article. The moral panic around social media is getting ridiculous, and as mentioned in this article and elsewhere, there's very little evidence that any of the C.A. targeting had any measurable effect on anything.

They usually do well for two reasons. First, the debt is on the books of the company they take over, not the private equity firm. Second, once they have control of the company they charge it 'management fees' for the executives and consultants they assign to run the firm.

Yes, another disastrous private equity takeover. Debt servicing and management fees to the private equity funds take so much money out of the company that there is little left for innovation or tactical missteps.

Sometimes you will see that private equity only comes in when the company is in trouble anyway but I don't think Toys 'R Us was in the bad of shape when Bain and KKR showed up.

Well, the debunking of many of Daniel Kahneman's insights was covered here earlier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15228712

I would everything on whatever this list is with a huge grain of salt along with any other social-science heavy book.

There is none. Rat/mice studies are used as very early steps to point directions for actually significant studies in human populations.

Please stop posting these pre-clinical studies on rats and mice! No one should ever be taking anything away from these sorts of studies for human health.

That's a funny comment given how much watch makers spend on marketing and branding.

Did you read the article? It was a very nuanced look at how to provide medical care and the reasons caregivers and people either under-treat or over-treat and the high levels of uncertainty about the efficacy of any given medical procedure. Certainly financial issues are a large part of the equation but certainly not the only one.

Really an excellent read overall.

This isn't really a political issue. Implementation was done by the civil service and was and is managed by non-political deputy ministers. There was a similar disaster with the centralization of web servers in the federal civil service a couple of years ago.

Frankly, cities like New Orleans, Baltimore and New Orleans need systems like Palantir, drones, license plate readers and etc.. They are like something out of Hobbes right now, with no effective state authority and violence levels unseen elsewhere in the developed world.

Once basic rule-of-law is established then programs like those can be scaled back but a lot of other countries would have established a state of emergency if they were confronted with the levels of violence seen in some of these American big cities. There's already a big push for body-worn camers for police, this is just a natural extension.

The new camera technologies are, for me at least, a reason to upgrade to the current generation. I'm going to grab an IPhone X along with some telephoto lenses for my wife so she can stop taking both her phone and DLSR camera on trips.

I agree that, in general, the reasons for upgrading your phone are less and less. I don't know how new that actually is though, I was using my first generation ipad until a couple of years ago; Apple kit tends to last forever and a lot of new features came in software upgrades. Same with the Nexus/Pixel series in Android world.

Yes, this was a really strange omission as was the threat of any stronger regulatory controls on fracking for natural gas. Both could change the landscape heavily again in the next few years.

I was in Spain last year for several weeks and it was so depressing how every town viewed at altitude was covered in a pervasive pea soup of diesel smog.

The link between German industrial policy/protectionism and environmental disasters like diesel has been known for a while now but European cities in particular will be paying the price for a long time.

Right, so since a common problem with anti-depressants are the varied side effects of different classes (insomnia, weight loss/gain, sexual dysfunction, etc.. and etc..) a big part of going on an anti-depressant is you and your doctor finding a drug and a dose that shows both efficacy and a tolerable side effect profile.

This study generalizes this process by discussing both efficacy (how well the drug helps with depression) and the tolerability of the treatment, as measured by how long people tend to stay on the drug (the site is down right now so I forget the actual term used). Once the paper is accessible again have a look at some of the graphs that chart both of these measures. Generally, the drugs in the upper-right quadrants are better, showing both good efficacy and tolerability.

This study, along with long-accepted clinical practice and the generic cheapness of most anti-depressants now, and the effectiveness of CBT/therapy if it's available to you, means you should really avoid self-medicating for major depression.

Why take risks with your health when there are lots of safe, cheap and efficacious treatments that can be monitored by your doctor?

SSRIs are generally indicated for what's called mild/moderate depression, the most common form, not for the serious conditions that you highlighted.

There were some older meta-studies that called into question their general efficacy vs. placebo even for mild/moderate depression but this new meta-study (with the additional previously unpublished data from their initial approval trials) looks like it has finally settled the matter.

Reading this paper I'm amazed at the increased efficacy of some of the newer SSRI's despite not having a novel mechanism of action. This is similar to how effective some of the newer statins are at lowering LDL cholesterol despite the drug class being around for decades.

edit: It looks like I'm a bit out-of-date in my knowledge but the general point still stands. DSM V has a definition of 'major depressive disorder' which seems to have replaced the old mild/moderate categorization and this study looked at all anti-depressants that treat this type of depression, not just SSRIs.

Many/most online clothes retailers now include detailed measurements of their apparel. Buy a soft tailors measuring tape on Amazon for a few dollars and you can get very precise fits, actually much better than buying in person I find.

In addition, there's a huge focus now on material, both in the niche digital-only nerd-friendly companies like Outlier, Mission Workshop and Taylor and Stitch but in more mainstream companies like Banana Republic.