skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How can we really be sure that they're more efficacious than placebos (which can be quite efficacious) when we aren't allowed to see negative data generated during clinical trials? We have absolutely no aperture into the internal studies that weren't submitted as proof of the drug being effective. Sure, administering these drugs will make some patients report fewer negative symptoms-- typically the worst hit patients are helped the most, so it's definitely worth employing clinically despite the hangups. Effectiveness on target isn't a reason to stop asking critical questions and finding better alternatives. We know very well that long term use of antidepressants or other psychiatric medications has permanent consequences on brain structure and plasticity. There's always long term sexual dysfunction as well, sometimes permanently. I guess people can try to dismiss these side effects, but they're nearly always downplayed by the pharmas and up-played by the actual patients who are unhappy with their treatment.

Then there's the academic problem: the monoamine hypothesis (the underlying theory behind the actions and use of SSRIs etc) is at best a crude approximation with precious little in vivo data to support ideas that are known to be inaccurate and incomplete. You can't take measurements of 5-HT concentrations inside of a patient's brain, and similar measurements based off of mouse models are moonshots, even with the fancy math which is meant to allow a parallel to be drawn. Similarly, there's not an objective test for most of these psychiatric disorders unfortunately, making a remission hard to quantify.

The human aspect is also something to remember. The pharmas have a ton of money, and intend to make more money using products they have already developed. There is a huge incentive for them to hire people with credentials to say that their drugs are more effective than placebos, and generally effective. There is a huge incentive to cover up negative data and bad side effects. There is a huge incentive to keep things the way they are.

I'm going to read through the link you posted and maybe respond again more in depth later, it looks interesting and worthy of discussion.
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at IBM? half the company probably is. http://dev.hasenj.org/post/3272592502/ibm-and-its-minions
The moral argument isn't presented in the piece, so it's not really fair to ascribe it to the author. He's saying it doesn't matter. They're making a "poisoned well" argument that there will be no functional divide between "good" and "bad" ads.
But I am not making any demands at all. Publishers are offering their content for free, and I sometimes take them up on their offer and read it. It's an offer that started with the publisher, not a demand that came from me.

Are you saying it is moral for publishers to track my usage behavior, and to force me to watch any ad they want me to?
The toxic side of free. Or: how I lost the love for my side project (part 5)
Nope, it's all going in a black hole, no exceptions.
Ethical adblocking is all of them gone forever.

I want advertising to cease to exist.
The only assumption that was made is that Galera cluster's SNAPSHOT ISOLATION actually implements SNAPSHOT ISOLATION. How is this not an assumption that should be made by default? If the database user has specified a specific isolation level, then they have already selected a specific trade-off in performance vs consistency. Giving them a weaker isolation level in the name of performance is like giving someone a car when they asked for a train ticket.
Bitcoin was definitely used as a hobby internet currency before it started becoming popular around 2011-12. Now it's largely speculation and hoarding.
Interesting, got a source that you had in mind for that torture claim? I'd like to read more.
Sometimes it's called code generation but I don't know if there's one official term for it.
Seriously! Giant pieces of cardboard are included for free with other products, as packing material.

But cool idea.
+1. It's definitely not sustained. Several friends of mine at the MBB consulting firms tell me it's like a dysfunctional relationship: They'll give you a killer project, working 80-100 hours for three months. Then just when you've had enough and are about to quit, they'll put you on a lifestyle case in your local city and you get to leave at 5.

The bigger issue with banking is the unpredictability. Even if you have no work scheduled for a weekend, folks are reluctant to leave town or even go on a day trip to rural areas without cell coverage, just in case they get pulled into a deal or client work.
I went to a SW just as a developer, and the first few teams I talked to already had their MVP and were essentially feigning that they were a new idea. Basically just wanted some free labour for the weekend...

Ended up making a team with nothing but devs and we built a silly hardware prototype. We ended up winning, then stuck with our day jobs. We were all taken our of our comfort zone, would definitely recommend SW despite the few that try to take advantage of it.

As a shy dude who just writes code all day, it basically forced me to become a better communicator.
Depending on the team you can get away with some of these. Have a manager/PHB that actively discourages unit testing? You don't need to commit your unit tests or write them at all! No one fixes an instance of copy/paste coding? Great, now you too can be efficient by copying and pasting everywhere. No one uses a code formatter or uses different formatting styles? Good! Now your style can shine!

These are all good red flags to check for in existing code bases before you join a team. If you see them, chances are their code review process is poor or non-existent and you'll be fighting a battle against crap code every single day.
Most airlines run giant data analysis operations on schedule (date and time) passenger utilization and anything else they can collect to derive an optimal pricing strategy.

Most fares are updated once per day and these days even intraday is possible. Most everyone uses SABRE, Amadeus and one other as their reservation backends which have various limitations (Spirit is an example that doesn't but it's very rare and theirs sucks). There are also a ton of caches everywhere to speed up the process which affects latency and increases stale pricing. It's sometimes very chaotic as to what everyone will see.

Also keep in mind that A->B and B->A and A->C->B, etc all have a different optimal pricing structure which is why you get so many odd prices. None of the reservation systems can consider every possibility either, they often have to short circuit a search or it would take forever so you can get variations depending on when/where/from what you look for these fares. Dallas to Austin is pretty trivial to search but small airport in Texas to small airport in China is ridiculously complex as there are trillions of combos.
This study is more interesting. young people on certain anti-depressants are at higher risk of violence. We don't know which way causality runs. We don't see the effect in older people.

http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jou...

> These findings show an association between SSRIs and violent crime that varies by age group. They cannot, however, prove that taking SSRIs actually causes an increase in violent crime among young people because the analytical approach used does not fully account for time-varying risk factors such as symptom severity or alcohol misuse that might affect an individual’s risk of committing a violent crime (residual confounding). In addition, some people who committed a violent crime might have subsequently taken SSRIs to cope with the anxiety and stress of arrest (reverse causation). The lack of a significant association between SSRIs and violent crime among most people taking SSRIs is reassuring; the association between violent crimes and SSRIs among individuals younger than 25 years is worrying. However, this finding needs confirming in studies with other designs undertaken in other settings. If confirmed, warnings about the increased risk of violent behavior among young people when being treated with SSRIs might be needed. But, note the researchers, it might be inappropriate to restrict the use of SSRIs in this age group because increases in adverse outcomes associated with poorly treated depression, such as suicide, might outweigh the public health benefit accruing from decreases in violence.
Yep. I found this story horribly and very immaturely expressed, but it may still serve well as a cautionary tale.
Not only this, the system would have to maintain multiple levels of world models and simulate them as well. Consider a sentence: "If he goes there, and then she does not reach in time, he will surely be disappointed."

There has to be a hierarchy of world models, and only the bottom-most layer would be the "real" one. Any kind of planning will require simulating hypothetical worlds.
Ideas are not IP.
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This is a perfect case for disruption. Make a company whose ads are so unobtrusive, so free of tracking, so non-creepy, and so fast that I would actually want to unblock them specifically. Gruber's on that, which is great, but 99% of the rest of the ad industry is full of everything wrong with it, and there's no guarantees Gruber's service won't start running malware tomorrow.

If there's a door open to a room that's filled with 9900 assholes and 100 decent people, even though it's not fair to the 100, it's still a good idea to shut the door. Similarly, right now, the best bet is to set your adblockers in the least permissive way possible.

EDIT: Also, with regards to the decentralized "ad industry", look at what happened in the spam/commercial email industry. The bad companies have been chased out, and the good ones are well regulated. That was many disparate groups, but along with improvements in spam blocking, they've proved themselves ready to sit at the adults table. Advertisers now have a chance to do the same, and Adblock will help us keep them honest.
Not entirely related, but I'm guessing you would enjoy reading Atomic Robo[1]. It's a comic (that has all 9 volumes for free online and the 10th is being released a page at a time daily) that follows an atomic powered robot built by Nikola Tesla.

Steven Hawking is a nemesis of Robo, Carl Sagan helped our hero get to Mars with Voyager, and there is a talking Dr. Dinosaur who claims that he time traveled to our time using crystals.

I recommend starting at the beginning.

[1]http://www.atomic-robo.com/atomicrobo/v1ch1-cover
I came from android (and am going back tomorrow) and I can't count the number of things that I couldn't figure out on my iPhone or its apps. I won't get into the apps, as thats an app developer thing mostly, but man, it took me googling after 2 months of frustration to find out to ignore a phone call (make it stop ringing so I can continue listening to spotify in my car) I had to hit the power button. On my Android I just swiped "ignore" or whatever it says.
Also, this guy built a scale model in the Black Rock Desert:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR3Igc3Rhfg

EDIT: This one doesn't include Pluto.
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The moral argument is indeed presented in this piece with the quote and inclusion of John Gruber's tweet.
...that page cites one of my projects as a reference? May all the gods have mercy on our souls...

Yeah, it's obviously been destaffed at Microsoft. There's a blog, last updated years ago. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sfu/

I know it's likely to be impossible, but if anyone at Microsoft's reading this (and chances are they are), whacking all the source code up on codeplex or github would be awesome. It worked so, so much better than Cygwin.
The problem is that the well was poisoned by bad actors, to the detriment of others.

I've worked on some sites that had adverts on them over the years. They were always pretty simple and respectful – generally no third-party tracking, no obnoxious flash popovers or horrible spammy 'one top tip that doctors hate' nonsense. Or sometime's Google's text ads, which has the downside of tracking but are still pretty gentle.

I fought pretty hard for this in most cases – other parties would rather have trackers from dozens of domains, third-party adservers, interstitial advertising and so on. But it's not like the majority of ad-blocking users care about allowing 'good' adverts to thrive – they'll understandably just turn it on and block everything. Before you know it, you've achieved nothing except lower revenue and a vague sense of having done the right thing. It's a race to the bottom.

The thing is, I'm now a dedicated user of ad-blocking software. And I didn't realise how awful using the web has become until I turned it off for a bit – it's really very unpleasant browsing without adblocking, with slow-loading sites, and obnoxious flashing adverts, and overlays and popovers…

I have nothing against advertising on the web, or even things like Google Analytics. But I hit a website a few weeks ago that had no fewer than sixty tracking and advertising scripts. It's out of control.
Absolutely right.

We refer to this as the Scarlett Johanssonn problem. Any system that is smart enough to understand what we mean by the Scarlett Johanssonn problem, and the reference to Artificially Intelligent virtual assistants, would itself need to be a strong AI.

We've already solved the problem of translating human to machine code for graphical user interfaces. It's the desktop with the keyboard and mouse. It's the app and the touchscreen.

You're exactly right that the question now is how can we do the same translation for voice-based systems.

So far the approach has been Virtual assistants, which is really hard, see again the Scarlett Johanssonn problem.

We've been working to find the right design/interaction metaphor, and the app metaphor seems to work really well.

Not only is the search space limited, like you mentioned, but users have a more intuitive since of how to interact with the app. When you open a shopping app, you know that you can likely search for something to buy ("I'm looking for a new pair of shoes"). When you interact with a general virtual assistant, that interaction is less clear.

The app model also works for scaling conversational interaction beyond a single context. Individual apps can support their own language for interaction which best suits their function. This of course necessitates design standards, just like we have for GUIs.

The limitations for fully voice-based applications aren't technical at this point. They are design problems with known solutions. The break out for voice will happen when the right form factor comes about with the right UI design.
The main idea is to curate worthy stories of redesigned products, concepts and unique point of view in designs.
Thing is that i think the reason they picked gold back in the day to make coin out of, was that it was durable. You could bury it for decades, or even drop it at the bottom of the ocean, and it would not lose any noticeable weight etc.

These days, "paper" notes etc do just as well.
Gruber isn't presenting his argument (such as a tweet so simple could be considered an argument) to end consumers - he's attempting to use his influence on (iOS) mobile developers who are creating content blockers - and this is an audience he does have a fair amount of influence on. But again, the genie once escaping the bottle will have chosen to smash it, not to return.
Here's an interesting part I'm going to use to illustrate a larger point:

> whether those services are free through ads or are entirely paid.

It isn't this simple. I pay for a newspaper, I still get ads. The fact the newsstand price is too low for them to give it to me ad-free isn't really up to me; they don't offer an ad-free option, even at a higher price. Magazines are the same way. So are a lot of premium pay TV channels. So's SiriusXM.

My point is, I can't trust them to not run ads. Even if I'm paying them directly, they still have the option to shove ads down my eye-holes. I can't effectively block ads anywhere but online, so that's what I do.

Everywhere else, regardless of what I pay, I still get ads.
My comment on the article has not been accepted yet, so I'll add it here...

So many things wrong here…where to start?

Indeed trends: you’re looking at relative growth but don’t show overall numbers. Here, let me help you with that: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=rails%2C+node.js&l=

Not only is Rails still more popular than node.js, it has a similar bump in recent results. And that brings me to my next point: Indeed trends are practically useless because they’re measuring word frequency rather than actual demand. For example, apparently “garbage” is as frequently (or more frequently) mentioned in job postings as “node.js”: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=rails%2C+node.js&l= . I guess that means node.js is garbage.

Google searches: search numbers generally indicate new interest in a subject rather than overall usage. For example, “Trump” is one of the biggest search terms right now, even though he doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming POTUS.

Performance numbers: I can’t comment on this since you don’t provide any information on what’s being tested or methodology. You might as well be graphing total numbers of watermelon eaters for each language. And this doesn’t even consider JRuby, which is faster at steady-state Rails requests than CRuby on the same isrubyfastyet.com you attempt to use in a comment to claim it’s slower. Huh??

Rails is static: This is absurd on the face of it…Rails has been one of the fastest moving frameworks, and most people in the know often wonder if it moves too fast. You’re completely out of touch here.

And speaking of out of touch, you call JRuby “floundering” and “abandoned” when we’ve had dozens of consistent releases over the past year. Wow. Are there any actual facts in this article?

Bootcamps: Are you saying that people shouldn’t use a language or framework that’s good for new developers to use? Really? If that’s the case, perhaps we should all be writing webapps in C++. We don’t want any new developers to join us, that’s for sure!

Honestly, you need to get your facts straight before writing something like this. It’s like a parody article.
I should be able to choose what I see on my computer, especially when I'm paying for bandwidth. But this has already been said.

What I find laughable is the author's warning at the end that essentially boils down to: If you keep blocking ads, the alternative will be much worse, so you better not block ads...or else!

"What’s more likely is that web ads are going to get way worse, adblocking is going to go way up, and at some point in this arms race, after the death of many a media company, eventually some will indeed have adapted. The big question is whether you’ll like the alternatives. It can be apps. It can be inside Apple’s Newsstand (featuring unblockable ads). It can be inside Facebooks instant articles. It can be subversive native ads. It can be paywalls. Think in-app purchases: 'Pay $1 for this article, or pay by watching a video.'"
Caffeine at night does nothing to me. I can finish my coffee and fall straight asleep. I do it all the time, I sleep like a log.

A sample size of 5 is way too low.

If 15% of the population does not have sleep effected by caffeine at all, there is a good chance that this study missed people like me completely.
The moral argument is presented in the piece, sure, but it's not agreed with, if you manage to read to what he's actually saying.
There are some comments dead and flagged in this thread that probably shouldn't be, based on the text alone.

To add something more useful to this post, I imagine that the balance will stay where it is now. Technical people will always find a way to use adblock, but the vast majority will kept from using it with partnerships (a la AdBlock Plus and Google) or tech.
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I've known Bobby for 20 years now, and while this makes me biased, this also makes me informed.

Bobby is not entitled or arrogant. He works hard and preserves friendships. He has a strong sense of fairness, and it's my perception it was extremely riled by the actions of Billy.

Bobby's assertions about the software development being more important than the good-old-boy networks and the braggadocio are generally celebrated in this forum, I don't see why there's a minority backlash.

I believe it's clear from what I read that this situation had a non-technical "co-founder" try to screw over technical co-founders, and Bobby is calling him out on it and using it as a teaching moment.
What ads blockers and ad companies should do is work to create an opt in whitelist, that is socially decided upon by the blockers' users.

That is, allow an opt in to use a socially decided upon whitelist, along with your personal whitelist. As users allow ads on certain sites, let them also indicate "this ad should be shown to everyone; it's not annoying/it's acceptable enough to allow". If enough users do that, allow it to be shown. If that triggers a large enough backlash amongst users, remove it from the whitelist, and prevent it from being re-added to the whitelist (though individuals can still whitelist it individually).

That way, non-obtrusive, background ads can be slowly turned on for those who opt in to allow it. If someone tries to engineer the whitelisting of an ad that people find objectionable, it will be removed by all the people re-blocking it. If a user finds the ads being allowed, in total, are too irritating, they can remove the social whitelist entirely. And those who simply want no ads need not opt in to the whitelist.
I recently just quit caffeine (went down one drink a day for a week, then quit 7 days ago.) It's been a process getting my energy back.

I have noticed that food affects me MUCH more than it used to. If I don't pay attention to what I eat now (or when I'm not eating, for that matter), I will end up feeling like crap.

It's difficult because food isn't something I've focused on for years, thanks to caffeine masking my low energy.
Just remember what truly matters in a successful business venture: language policing.
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