skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I do not agree with everything in this article, indeed some of its claims are
suspect, I think it raises important points. There is a dynamic interplay
between "science", the act of discovery, and "technology" putting knowledge to
work. In my own work, the desire to accomplish a task drives my scientific work.
All of my current work has a "natural application" in my field but has lead me
to interesting mathematical questions which have potential applications
elsewhere as well. Thus, the dynamic I have personally observed: progress in one
space enables progress in another.

Furthermore, without individuals who are largely interested in knowledge
discovery, I maintain that progress would be slower. Someone had to desire to
understand cells and know about x-ray crystallography in order for it to be
applied. I picked on this example because it was brought up in the article. But,
by the same token, people interested largely in technological improvement are
also needed. It takes a lot to move a discovery from a lab notebook into a
useful state.

I also categorically reject the notion of technology being a thing unto itself
that perpetuates itself. Humanity is the engine of innovation and no amount of
innovation is likely to change that any time soon. All technology and all
machines are ultimately at the service of humans. We are not in the service of
the machine. We are dependent upon our machines but are machines are not free
from us. This is why post-apocalyptic stories of AI destroying humanity remain
popular. We are uncomfortable and fearful of our own dependence.

The fear of both scientists and corporations is we fundamentally do not know
what the world looks like without government involvement. There is no roadmap
for a transition. There is no telling who would win and who would lose. In the
past several decades major research institutions both public and private have
all had shrinking "time-horizons" for their research. The time-horizon is when
the research (if fruitful) could result in technological advancement. In the
short term a transition to industry funded research would only accelerate that
trend.

In conclusion, science funding and science in general is deeply dysfunctional
right now. A lot of time is spent of obtaining and keeping funding. Our funding
system has likely caused a over supply of entry level researchers which has
fueled low wages. But at the same time, we do not know of a better way to fund
research at the moment. If non-governmental funding is better there is no real
way to try it that won't cause massive structural unemployment and pain
throughout our economy. As much as I would love to see the scientists I know
receive good wages for their important work I think it is about as likely as
properly paying pre-school teachers.
Snapchat is one example [0].

[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/snapchat-is-built-on-googles-...
http://historical.northavenue.net/
Why the downvotes? Look them up. L-Theanine is in green tea and taurine is in red bulls. Maybe they don't help, but they noticeably reduce anxiety in me.
They may both be true - this study was limited to the 1500 largest firms from 1993 to 2012. I'd guess the majority of those CEOs weren't founders.

If you wanted to do an interesting followup, repeat this authors analysis but compare results between founder CEOs and non-founder CEOs!
They also put an automatic limit on resources if they explode your billing and alert you if something goes bonkers.
This all sounds very familiar. Thanks for writing this, I think I'll make an appointment.
Large efforts have a momentum that few people can singlehandedly overcome. And at that level, the kinds of effect you can have are of a different order.
Where would you put the accumulated error? Ultimately you end up creating something like the 4th order Runge-Kutta mentioned mentioned above, which in a sense 'correct' the Euler solution by including the effects of higher-order terms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_methods_for_ordinary...
I don't understand why you need to censor the author's title for him - obviously provocative and pompous titles will put the thread on tilt. If the author wants to be taken seriously when they write editorials especially about science presumably there should be some rigor involved in the process - not just headline grabbing euphemisms. If the author's editorial doesn't evoke substantive feedback - maybe that fault lies with their work rather than with the readers?
Eclipse Attacks on Bitcoin's Peer-To-Peer Network
I skimmed this. Does the author actually make any point or come to a conclusion other than offering anecdotes about how dolphins seem pretty friendly to people?

Edit: sorry, I didn't mean to sound too critical.
That would be a cool idea. But I'm not sure the numbers of founder-CEO companies are large enough to make any conclusive determination. If you are limiting it to tech, I'd think the outliers of Apple, Amazon, and Google would destroy the competition.
TechCrunch is not a B2B publication, it's much more consumer oriented. Most of their market intel is pretty far off precisely because they write about so much in generic/layman terms by writers who don't have strong industry niches.

Investors have much better options for investment intel like CBInsights or Mattermark than TC. It's not a bad source of info, but not always reliable or accurate and definitely not a primary source for VCs/execs (outside of perhaps the SV bubble). A good example of B2B publications would be trade journals and sites like the IDG network that offer much more nuanced articles and insights with very focused categories.
they do one thing and only one thing, they're configurable using command-line switches,

The more command line switches the more code paths. The more code paths the less of doing one thing and only one thing.
Given that Snapchat's business proposition is based on deliberately ephemeral data....
New optimization algorithm promises order-of-magnitude speedups on some problems
The question on the subtitle:

> Does scientific research drive innovation?

This is so obvious that it becomes stupid. Of course it does, there's a lot of research that had to occur before most innovations in history, and most of it was not lucrative by itself.

But then, there's something to be said about bottlenecks. Basic research has been far ahead actual production for a long while. As a consequence, one will really not see any correlation between them.
Andy Kaufman and Redd Foxx to Tour, Years After Death, as Holograms
Uber Said to Plan Another $1B in Fund-Raising
The following is something often repeated that doesn't make sense to me:

>Of course we'll find them among us: they have nowhere else to go.

The ocean makes up a majority of this planet and a tiny fraction of it is within 20 miles of any land where most of the human activity is. Other than major shipping routes, they have the rest to go without encountering people. I don't know where the impression comes from that we are crowding them out.
No, just some nice anecdotes with no explanation.
There was a truly distressing scene in the IT miniseries involving showerheads in a locker room. That perhaps?
Microsoft Support for SSH
When NatGeo was still making their Topo software, you could go to REI and printout fairly high-quality quadrangles of a region you were interested in for a few bucks. Not sure if they still do that.
I find the idea of providing mental health to people as a startup somewhere between horrifying and intriguing.

They are essentially offering to provide a doctor-patient relationship with "coaches" to make it so that "in just 12 weeks, you can lead the life you deserve".

I suspect no serious practitioner would be willing to state it quite that boldly.

Their copy reads like homeopathic/vitamins/magic/juju gobblygook filled with cherry-picked facts, figures, and good intentions.

On the plus side, the site has clear pricing information!
To note: I wrote "~80%" because I was too lazy to look up current statistics and accepted the parent comment at face value, while also allowing a slushy figure. The general presupposition of my comment remains the same regardless: it's unwise to assume that the desktop computer market reflects a website's visitor segmentation.
Re headline

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGTKN0DaxzQ

Usually more about the team, culture, motivating employees, marketing, and operations. CEO had little to do with any of this in almost every place I've ever worked.
Humans have been hunting in the ocean for centuries, today we dominate it to a degree that we're affecting world fisheries to an enormous extent. Dolphins are going to be where the fish are, they have to be in order to live, humans are going to be there too.
Yeah, it's a shame the dolphins seem to be so attracted to them.
Neat strategy. It would be interesting to actually browse through the study's data set and isolate Founder-CEO companies. If there's any conceivable link, then maybe that explains the 30%? However, I don't think there would be many founder CEOs within the dataset.
No. No points or conclusions are made. Just a meditation on dolphins and humans.
He said he can understand non-verbal communication. It is just that he has to think about it before he does. I can relate to that.

I can also relate to you when you say you do your best to hide it. I never realized I did until now.
In your HN profile you are hinting expertise in user acquisition.

Your acquisition results are occasionally impressive, but not sticky:

http://www.similarweb.com/website/grasswire.com

Note 400K monthly visits in August, but then only 85K in September.

Why the results are so unstable?
I seem to remember some old films that didn't mind showing animals dropping which went so far as to stage their deaths ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsFVzywPNEc
Mandating a single, simple standard for medical purposes would probably be the best thing that they could do. I just don't have a lot of faith in it ever happening.
Some folks here use downvote when they disagree, not to indicate that something is wrong with the comment. It helps in creating groupthink, because nobody likes being downvoted.
Sure, that correction is correct ;) but it's not mentioned in that section of the mentioned documented. It leads me to believe that the restrictions described do not apply to them.
Though, if it's so often misunderstand perhaps I should be calling it `on paper' vs `in practice'.
I imagine some of it has to do with availability of adequate food, ocean temperatures (and how that affects both of the other points), mating "grounds", and so on?
I second this - would be awesome. Some of the larger threads are taxing/hard to navigate without a collapse/fold function
Yeah, this one is what I have. In my 20s I realized I cared about being social, and once I worked on it, it slowly became much less severe.
The funny thing is that we have ultra specific water ski codes, yet can't find a more specific one for "burn by motorcycle"
The investors dodged a bullet not because this founder lacked the mental fortitude to face challenges but because he did their due diligence for them and was honest enough to pull out of the financing once he discovered his concept was likely not viable.

The market for seed-stage investments is very frothy today. Lots of investors are spraying and praying, and as a result often lack domain expertise in the areas in which they're investing. Founder pedigree and social proof weigh heavily in what seed stage investors consider "due diligence."
At least that's what he said. The Hobbit for example would / could have been told without the languages, and was at first independent of the Middle Earth.
Can you elaborate a bit on the applicability of those methods for general optimization? Are they significantly better than [stochastic] Gradient descent or Saddle free newtons method? For what kinds of landscapes/dimensions it does well?
Yes, Lord Ridley, who inherited a bank and had to be bailed out by the govnemtnet, lecturing everybody on the triumph of the free market. No thanks.
Walgreens Halts Theranos Testing Center Expansion
Just stop breathing.

That roughly how the first part of your advice comes across. You are not the first and won't be the last. I bear you no ill will for saying it, but it's on the level of telling a depressed person to just stop feeling sad.

I don't know if I'm diagnosable as actually having Social Anxiety. Heck, I never even heard those words until some drug commercial came on TV, so I'm a bit suspicious of the label.

I do know that I see social experiences as different than most people. I've always been that way. Just a bit different in the head I guess. I like different things, think differently, and behave differently. It's part of who I am.

I'm very much the old-school nerd. The one that everybody rolls their eyes at when he starts speaking. I care about things they don't. I don't care about things they do. So it's work for me to communicate with others in a way that doesn't make them roll their eyes. Yes, it's a skill. I'm better at it than I used to be. I could probably be even better at it. But it sure won't be because I stopped caring. If I do that that I'd become an oblivious blowhard.
Yeah for the sake of healthcare I hope athena continues to grow. Keep up the good work!
Is that an American thing? I have never seen a trending box on Facebook.
Show HN: Redux-ignore – Avoid perf problems in huge apps by skipping subtrees
The real gem hidden in this article is the way he approached structuring the round.
It's a little like saying it's easy enough to make your own wine and sell it to minors. It is, but that doesn't make it legal.
> (if Middle Earth map is oriented North-top South-bottom, which I'm not sure).

It is. They explicitly mention that the Dwarfish orientation is different (east up) in the Hobbit, I think.
MiniBrew Is Back and Ready to Make You Some Beer
Went hunting for topo maps again recently, and found an interface called TopoView which is so much better than the USGS store and anything else I've seen that it's dumbfounding:

http://ngmdb.usgs.gov/maps/TopoView/viewer/

It has historical & regional maps as well as the topographical maps. It's easy to browse. It has built-in support for pinning maps on Pinterest. Really.

Huge props to whatever unsung team at USGS pulled this together.
Horrible CEOs absolutely can destroy value. Does anyone seriously question that?

Some level of "good" is probably table stakes. There's a lot of randomness then, especially for non-founder CEOs.
This first person account of social anxiety hits closer to home, for me at least:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/opinionator/2013/03/25/a-day...
Nice idea, what if I want to save more than one list at a time ?
Great if talking helps ease symptoms for some, but this seems like an empty finding.

What, in the physical world, causes this disease? The fungus, gene, or environmental factor - this is what we can hopefully one day discover.

Could the resources devoted to this study have been better used to explore what is creating the problem?
Definitely not a fan of Epic but the article could have mentioned this: https://open.epic.com
Thanks! Even just the abstract is a much better overview than the vague article.
I'd be a wee bit careful: Nuance has a virtual assistant that they're calling Nuance. So you've gotta beware of trademark litigation (unless you're Nuance)
> men like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller—who cornered emerging industries and amassed incredible wealth at the expense of the public and their employees.

That implies that it was a zero sum game. This is far from correct. Standard Oil, for example, drove the price of kerosene down 70%, which was of considerable benefit to the public.
Invest in AMZN to pay for your EC2 bill - feedback loop.
Eh, in my case I think the problem is that I'm interested in things other people aren't and other people are interested in things I'm not.

In other words, being myself is generally the ticket to eye-rolling, exasperation, and boredom from others.

My trick has been to keep others talking about what they're interested it in as long as possible. That usually works well because it's fun to hear what people are passionate about.

Then again, last week that got me trapped in a conversation with a person who advised me to buy gold and bury it around my yard because paper money isn't real since we left the gold standard. Nice guy though.
Throughout most of history, the causation was reversed. Technology drove science much more than vice versa.

For example, Watt and friends improved steam engines, and only later formal thermodynamics was invented to explain why and how steam engines work. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution)

You'll see a similar effect with the agricultural revolution. We know now that legumes like clover provide nitrogen for the soil. But that's way after people figured out it was a good idea. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revolutio...)
I felt the same but was wondering if I was being harsh. It seemed to take forever for the piece to say anything of interest.
Can somebody please shed light on this issue
Actually, I posted partly because I thought it was such a dubious argument that I hoped to see rebuttals, as well as possibly a discussion of why people in the finance world often discount science.

I don't mind you changing it but I'm not surprised you're getting some pushback.
What, and have to TALK in FRONT of a group of people. :)

I've not actually been diagnosed, and honestly not sure if I would be. The key for me will likely be just practice in areas that work well for me. It will make the work into habit and probably make me more comfortable.

Now to find the energy/courage to walk out that door to practice...
"As someone who really has social anxiety, this is not it. I have absolutely no issues understanding non-verbal communication. I'm simply scared of certain social situations, for no rational reason."

i can't say i have social anxiety, but i feel very similar in this instance. and, if i can judge based on this statement alone- i don't think it's fair for you to say your fear comes from "no rational reason".

a very rational reason to be afraid of verbal communication as opposed to text, is that text is a much easier medium to control your message.

there are a dozen benefits: you have more time to parse and consider what one says to you, you have more time to formulate your thoughts clearly, you are less open to your words or tone being misinterpreted, etc.

are you anxious right now? this is very much a social setting. if not- and i hope this doesn't sound insensitive- i'm left wondering, whats the difference? and, would identifying the difference help you overcome your anxiety?
Solid. Thanks for the share
Work-Life Balance Poses Challenges Regardless of Wealth
No idea how to monetize or scale the product apparently leads to have a line of investors ready to pump money into your company. Nice!
Coastal dolphins, which are genetically distinct from offshore dolphins, have evolved to live in coastal waters. Their bodies are not adapted to cold waters or deep diving. They really don't have "the rest" of the ocean to live in.
Creating the steel industry? Creating the oil industry? Pffft. How does that make anyone proud of their hair? You tell me! Heck, Rockefeller didn't even have any hair, and Carnegie, precious little.

Seriously, how can anyone get past that first sentence in all its brazen stupidity?
The more irritating detail to me is that very few places want your records. Even if you carried your up to date medical records on you in some kind rugged secure flash drive, you're likely to be told "thanks but no thanks" if you suggest any medical professionals should look at them.

9/10 they don't want to look. I know there's lots of valid reasons why so I understand that part, but there's a bigger problem it speaks to. To me the greatest failure of modern medicine is that we have a word full of doctors (specifically, general practitioners) who have no time to stay current in their medical knowledge or to learn anything beyond the superficial details of a patient before pronouncing their diagnosis and moving on.

I truly miss having a GP that not only dealt with my medical matters for the first 24 years of my life, but 26 years of both my parents, and close to 20 and 15 years for my siblings as well. There's no way to replace this knowledge now he retired.
Let me cut to the quick: I believe it it possible to be dissatisfied with both racism and riots. I also believe it is possible to be dissatisfied with racism without being morally obliged to support or encourage riots. Perhaps you differ.

Oh, and the Puerto Rico thing actually happened.
Terrifying, Eerily Videos Taken of Hurricane Patricia
That's an argument for not changing linkbait titles on HN at all, which would be a disaster for this place.

(Btw, author usually don't write the headlines, so it's good to give them the benefit of the doubt on that.)
Pandora Shares Plummet as Competition Grows
Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana.
I'm sure a couple years ago almost all mobile ran WebKit, but aren't a huge chunk of new android phones running some flavor of chromium these days? I'd be surprised if WebKit was still in the high 90% range.
I don't recall being a user of any .com companies that failed. But I might have been and forgot.

I certainly used Paypal and Amazon though.

Being a user of the product is a useful tool for separating hype from reality.
This isn't exactly related to the article, but I think this post is an amazing example of how to write an interesting blog post yet, at the same time tie it to what you are selling and make people want to know more about your product without directly telling them to.
I don't want to flood you with a ton of studies (I have lots more bookmarked), but here are several:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15148063

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23155696

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23110922

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22673594

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20101008

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19099589

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17447017

As for glucose, it can be created by the liver as needed using a process called gluconeogenesis - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluconeogenesis
> it was such a dubious argument that I hoped to see rebuttals

That's a high-risk proposition. Most often it just produces ragefests and ends up equivalent to trolling.

Fortunately several HN commenters have already posted thoughtful critiques of the article, which is likely enough to make for a high-quality thread. That was by no means guaranteed, though. Threads are sensitive to their initial conditions, i.e. the title and first comments.
This is a very interesting hypothesis. I've noticed my hearing has degraded in recent years and I'm definitely prone to anxiety in social settings - particularly in settings of new and/or recently acquainted people.

But, I've also been listening to deadmau5 for several hours each day since the summer of 2012.
Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Berkshire Hathaway, FedEx, News Corp, Oracle, Microsoft under Gates, Intel under Moore and Grove, ...