skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Currently there are a studies [1] suggesting Alzheimer's is an inflammatory disease where a bunch of different particles like micro-plastics, heavy metals, microfibers, etc accumulate in the brain causing a brain immune response (amyloid beta and tau) that is more dysregulated in people with certain genetic backgrounds.

Honestly I think this hypothesis makes the most sense - especially if you look at Alzheimer's global and local distribution patterns. Locally people near freeways get Alzhiemer's at way higher rates [2] (I've seen interesting maps of this before but can't find any ATM).

Think about all the particulate matter (incomplete combustion products, rust particles, little pieces of tire) you are breathing in near freeways.

Globally industrial countries have the highest rates of dementia, and the lowest rates are in Africa, India, and South Asia [3]. These places have less industry, less traffic, less plastic (I mean, they are catching up fast, but historically if you're looking at patterns), etc.

[3] also mentions a correlation between meat eating and dementia. I don't necessarily think this is due to the "any meat is bad for you" FUD instead it's most likely due to two factors

- plants have greater anti-inflammatory properties

- any type of fat will accumulate loads of particles and plants don't have fat

tl;dr nutrition is complicated and there is a lot of FUD

- [1] https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/alzheimers-disease-consis...

- [2] http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-air-poll...

- [3] https://nutritionfacts.org/2015/11/12/where-are-the-lowest-r...
Who are the fairest of them all? When it comes to inequality, it's Europeans
You may think this is funny, but Burger King is actually burger-washing a very serious issue.

Not only is fast food convenient, it is essential to the most vulnerable in our society. Burger King provides food fast and cheaply. Simply stated, working class people cannot afford not to eat fast food [1].

In many locations, Burger King is the only fast food restaurant in the area [2]. In many of those same locations, public transit is inadequate for the purposes of going to a competing fast food restaurant. Establishing a fast food restaurant that can compete with Burger King requires so much work and capital that doing so is impossible for someone already working two jobs. For all intents and purposes, Burger King has a monopoly on an essential service.

Here's where it gets scary. Burger King preferentially serves proprietary, branded food items, and beverages from Coca-Cola, for which they've made an exclusive, behind-closed-doors deal... for money [3]. Have you ever noticed that it's impossible to get a McDonald's Burger or a Pepsi at a Burger King? With customers being shut out from these discussions, it's not surprising that the products they serve are unhealthy.

The common sense solution to all of this is to classify fast food joints as public utilities, and then demand that they serve food without regard to its origin. Fast food is far more important than high speed internet. And while the repeal of net neutrality regulations lead to the death of the internet... the lack of food neutrality will lead to death.

/s

[1] http://frac.org/obesity-health/low-income-food-insecure-peop...

[2] http://www.fastfoodmaps.com/

[3] http://www.businessinsider.com/restaurants-that-serve-coke-v...
In my experience the worst developers never ask if if they are doing things wrong and what that might be.

Look at the chages you're making to the code - are they of a quality comparable to what was already there, do they integrate cleanly, are you coding with a style that fits in with the surrounding code?

If not, what could you be doing better and why aren't you already doing it?
It may take longer in the short term, but give consideration to your development practices. Eventually you'll find yourself more quickly writing a higher quality of code that's more maintainable with fewer defects.
I would be amazed if most important physical, mental, or social characteristics had zero underlying biological or genetic drivers, or if they were completely driven by underlying biology. Even small underlying differences can be amplified through compounding effects over a lifetime of decisions, through culture, etc.

(The easy ones are male/female; racial differences are far less.)
New York and Montana Have a New Trick to Protect Network Neutrality
Getting rid of algorithms means replacing them with humans. And humans are far worse.

Humans are terribly biased. Racial bias isn't even anywhere near the strongest bias we have. Unattractive people get sentences twice as long as attractive people. Judges give far harsher sentences before lunch, when they are hungriest. Socially awkward people seem to be pretty strongly discriminated against. Studies have found people discriminate by politics even more than race. Job interviews have actually been shown to degrade performance over just judging resumes. Before statistics and credit ratings, getting a good loan required being an old friend of the banker.

It's not just that humans are unfair. We are objectively terrible. Very simple statistical algorithms beat human "experts" in almost every domain they get tried on. As early as the 1920s, a statistician came up with a formula that was better at predicting recidivism than a group of 3 prison psychologists.

Simple linear regression has predicted the success of medical treatments better than doctors, diagnosed psychoticism better than trained psychiatrists, predicted academic success much better than admissions officers, predicted loan risk better than bank officers, etc, etc. To say nothing of modern machine learning methods on modern computers. It's insane we allow humans to continue doing these tasks at all.

But there has been huge resistance to algorithms in every domain. From people who stand to lose their jobs and be put to shame by them of course. But also even outsiders tend to reject algorithms. And overly trust humans. Psychologists have actually studied this. They call it a bias labelled "Algorithm Aversion". http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/risk/library/WPAF201410-Algort... The study showed that humans were willing to forgive the mistakes of humans far more than those of algorithms, even when the algorithm made far fewer of them.

This is why they aren't everywhere already. The last thing we need is fear mongering like this. As shown, humans are far worse. If an algorithm shouldn't do it, then a human certainly should not.

A big part of the case these people make is a reference to a propublica study that found a slight bias against race in an algorithm once. Yet that study wasn't peer reviewed. The findings weren't statistically significant. https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/propublica_is_lying....

Also, A.I. ‘Bias’ Doesn’t Mean What Journalists Say it Means: https://jacobitemag.com/2017/08/29/a-i-bias-doesnt-mean-what...
Hey, you guys are running a business and I'm running a commentary :-) This stuff is hard enough that what-ifs and naysayers are going to crop up. One of these days I should just put my money where my mouth is. I think the scaling issue is definitely a huge problem and even Cygnus said they found it extremely difficult. I'm not sure it's possible to get the ROI you need if you accept VC, so given your current position, it's not really fair for me to criticise.
Recently finished In Harm's Way by Doug Stanton. Extremely interesting read about a navy ship that sank near the end of WWII. The crew were not rescued for over four days.
Supposedly automation is innevitable, in order to maximize efficiency and profits.

However there is a cost, and long term it will be the ability to provide increasingly huge numbers of people with a job that can provide a reasonable standard of living, along with bread on the table and a roof over their heads.

At some point the huge majority "without", will act to regulate out of control change and enterprise which is not to their benefit, or that of their children. Revolution is not just a quaint concept limited to the past.
The other side of that, detection of frauds, also benefits from current work in the ML/AI/etc.

Adversarial algos sound quite interesting. It might mean that we'd have to look at the evidence of fraud in a whole new way though, because the thing that gives away the fake might not be obvious.
Which is why we shouldn't build our lives or policy around simple algorithms that do not take into account the breadth of human values, philosophy, and desire for change beyond the bad present day.
Off topic, I can't access the economist article, could you post a link to the study so I and/or others can read its abstract?
What’s happens to Bitcoin when Ethereum price falls?
Advice for Maintenance and Updating a Loopback Back-End
Relatedly, there's a typo in their HN profile: "We're hiring remove developers". Sometimes it's the little things that leave a good impression, no matter how seemingly insignificant.
it's not turmeric, it's curcumin, which is about 2% of turmeric by mass (so, you'd need to eat ~4.5g turmeric daily to match study doses)

Typical Indian cooking uses turmeric in pretty much everything. I wouldn't be surprised if daily consumption of turmeric is very close to the figures you mentioned.
I used to love, love, love Heroku. I would tell everyone about it, and at one point I was probably running 20+ projects on it.

I can't quite put my finger on why, but I've gradually transitioned everything off it over the past few years. I think it's been a combination of the ease of AWS, along with Heroku's changes to their Dyno pricing, but I never actually sat down and did the math. It just started to feel a little less controllable and a little more than I wanted to pay. To be fair, their database tiers were pretty pricey, so this article is nice news.

I'd be curious to hear if others have had a similar experience?
Why Writing Correct Software Is Hard[video]
She worked on "bus-bunching". That's still an unsolved problem today, if my experiences on public transport are any indication.
In the UK, skytv stated free to air, with adverts, with movies being subscription but no adverts.

Then they introduced subscriptions around 1994 to all channels, but kept adverts.

I don't subscribe to sky, but I used to, until I saw that the revenue from advertising was tiny - by increasing subscription prices by 10% they could get rid of adverts and remain revenue neutral.

If you don't offer an advert free product I won't buy it. When Netflix and amazon inevitably start adverts, I'll go back to DVDs. If they aren't available then torrents it is.

Advertising is a scourge on civilisation, it costs trillions of dollars in lost time each year in the US alone.
So... Will LightTable now get the love it deserves?
If Google's asset was so powerful you'd think their other products would be doing better. (google+, glass, Allo, etc)
> the only way to combat the thawing permafrost problem is to deploy world-scale carbon capturing schemes of some sort

I think this is a big misunderstanding. The world-scale carbon capturing schemes were deployed already. The problem isn't the capture, the problem is how to prevent them to leak the stored carbon back to the atmosphere.
Man Is Lucky to Survive After Filming Himself Being Hit
> You mention that you hear about most things through social channels. What are the chances those channels found out about those products through ads?

I hadn't considered a sort of diffusion process for ad reach, and it's an intriguing point. I can't recall a specific instance of this, although I would actually be surprised if it hasn't happened. My immediate social circle of friends and colleagues is similar to me, but even several degrees of separation out I could see a relevant product percolating through my extended network and reaching me by word of mouth.

> I don't necessarily see ads as a bad thing

I don't view them as inherently bad in theory, but my experience is almost never positive. Mass market ads feel like a drain on my time and attention without benefit. On the other hand, targeted and relevant ads will be paid for with my personal data, which carries risk to my privacy. Neither side of that trade-off is attractive. The time I do appreciate ads is when I'm shopping or getting offers from a merchant I've done business with, which of course excludes a large number of offerings I would and wouldn't be interested in.
They screwed up when the messed with the free tier.
I agree. "How" is a difficult question to answer, and involves basic research. "X does Y" studies need a hypothesis, a bunch of test subjects, and some statistical wrangling. Far easier than basic research. I'm now at a point to take all statistical studies with a pinch of salt. Molecular studies are more interesting and while micro and may miss the macro picture, are more promising.
I get the impression that a lot of companies still see remote work as an opportunity to hire Bay Area caliber talent for Iowa or Philippines local salaries. And then they're surprised to find a shortage of good developers applying.

The reality is (thankfully) finally coming around to the idea that you get what you pay for. A remote dev who can code his way out of a paper bag and effectively communicate that he has done so is a rare and valuable commodity. Offer to pay accordingly, and you won't have trouble attracting them.
you despise tv ads and banners the same way a 80s kid mocked radio ads but was raised by tv ads, and a 90s kid used kazaa to get mp3 and never even saw a radio ad but was raised on banner ads and email spam.

today you ignore banners, probably never saw a tv ad, but is raised on disney movies selling a franchise and consume social feed that tell you about all the products that ended up in your home
I feel as if competition could make ISP's strive to provide reliable and fast connections if they had competition.
But they are, according to virtually all the data that we have. However there's no indication at all that the cause is genetic but rather cultural in the US.
5mm wetsuit (or more likely drysuit given that he's a diver) saved his life far more than anything else. That's some serious insulation, though barely enough over such a long period of time.

The article doesn't go into much detail in terms of the psychological aspects of the ordeal -- your life flashing before your eyes for days, can't imagine.
This is a strange analogy. A better picture of what food neutrality is would be a menu with identical prices for every meal, be it a three-store burger or a 1 oz of ketchup.
Its pretty simple really, Valve just need to get over its god complex and abide by a countries laws. Lets be honest, the Policy in Australia mandates that it must be "fit for purpose" and it pretty fair with its judgement on such things. I know through personal experience that some games state controller support when they dont actually have it, ive got a couple of games which say co-op when its not actually true, I have a VR game which was VR then pulled VR support a month after I got it ( though it was a free to play game so cant complain there). The fact is they have to offer a fair refund policy and in Valves case this would be best to be decided on a case by case basis. All they have to do is state in its current refund policy that it doesn't revoke any users refund rights within their countries laws. Many refund and warranty statements say this and they are perfectly legal. Its not an issue of abuse, its an issue of doing the lawful thing when its the law
Yes they would, and the C# 7 improvements taken from Midori experience make it much better.

I think in general it is a culture problem.

Those of us that embraced managed languages, including for systems programming (Oberon, D, ...), know that we can be productive 99% of the time and just have to care how to do speed boost tricks on that 1% using profiler and low level language tricks.

In C and C++ communities there is a sub-culture of thinking too much ahead of time how much each line of code costs, thus speeding too much time with design decisions that actually have zero value in the context of the application being delivered.

The problem is not taking those decisions, rather taking them without validating if they are right with a profiler, or regard to the goals that have to be met for the application.

Beyond which any low level fine tuning, while fun, is needless engineering.
> Those researchers also designed a simple predictive model using only two factors as inputs: age and number of previous convictions. By comparison, COMPAS uses more than a hundred. To me, it doesn't sound like those extra factors end up contributing much.

That's the nature of these things. If you use zero factors then you're basing decisions on random chance. Use one good factor and you'll do 60% better than random chance. Add another good factor and you'll do another 10% better. Every factor after that is a single digit improvement.

Because once you have something pretty good, making it even better is diminishing returns. But at the same time, "it's only 1% more accurate that way" when you're dealing with country-sized populations will change the outcome for many thousands of people.

And how does using fewer factors help anything? The underlying "problem" is that people of different races have different outcomes in actual fact, and any halfway accurate predictive algorithm will reflect that difference. It's not as if there is no racial disparity in the number of previous convictions.

If anything, using fewer factors could make the problem worse because it stops considering potential mitigating factors. A young black man with two prior convictions gets the shaft even if he has recently gotten married and bought a house in a better neighborhood.
When I think of buying a car, I think of Honda. I bought Oldsmobiles because my dad did, until they stopped making them. Then I test drove a Toyota, because a family friend loved hers, but it was pretty ho-hum. Then I test drove a Honda, because it's the other Japanese car (which to me signaled high-quality, not because of advertising but because of the family friend's experience with her Toyota), and loved the transmission. Loved my first Honda and have had no mechanical failures, hence car = Honda for me.

My most recent car insurance was purchased because the banker at the bank where I met the guy selling me his used (Honda) car asked me, and I went with that one. You could argue it was marketing, but it definitely wasn't advertising--I had no idea the name of the company until I got the letter in the mail. I do think of Geico, but that's because I am a fan of Warren Buffett, and his annual reports constantly laud Geico. But the website requires you to request a quote, which is too much hassle ("if you have to ask, you can't afford it," I figure). After I have thought of Geico I think of the commercials, but that's not the order that advertising is supposed to work.

The first mobile phone plan I think of is AT&T because they were the only carrier with the first iPhone. (However, I did subsequently switch to Verizon because I had evidence from talking to people, especially my brother, that "more bars in more places" was actually true, so you could argue that advertising factored in there, but it was really more that T-Mobile had such terrible reception at my apartment and AT&T was too expensive, and my brother said Verizon was the only option in the middle of nowhere where he was living.)

Now I don't watch TV, don't even own one, so I will have less influence than most. But, still.
That is a very poorly formed study precisely because systems like the Mechanical Turk actually work surprisingly well. This is a common theme in the 'wisdom of the masses.' If you ask a single person how many beans are in a jar, you're going to get an answer that's generally very wrong. Yet ask 100 people and average their answer and you tend to get an answer that's oddly extremely close to the correct answer. As the number of people independently asked approaches infinity, the error approaches 0.

So when you ask 'x' people to independently judge something, let alone something that is multiple choice with a correct answer, you're going to get answers that are far more accurate than a single individual would give you. So looking at the average answer of 'x' people, comparing it to an AI system, and arguing that they're relatively close so individual people are relatively close to the AI is completely fallacious.

---

As a tangential aside, there's another quirk to the wisdom of the masses. When you let the people communicate and try to intelligently organize and use expertise to come to answer, this effect disappears and the final answer again tends to be very wrong. Kind of an interesting perspective on the current zeitgeist of society and work.

===EDIT===

The authors were obviously aware of the wisdom of the masses. Quoting the paper itself:

To determine whether there is “wisdom in the crowd” (7) (in our case, a small crowd of 20 per subset), participant responses were pooled within each subset using a majority rules criterion. This crowd-based approach yields a prediction accuracy of 67.0%. A one-sided t test reveals that COMPAS is not significantly better than the crowd (P = 0.85).

That's a quite silly p-value and on top of that I'm not sure how they claim their system actually controls for the wisdom of the masses.
Collectible one of a kind celebrity smart contracts
The difference between mathematical neural networks and humans is how they're trained and how they function, which is not just a difference in kind. The way that they adjust weights and perform inference is different enough that them being "theoretically isomorphic" is not a viable argument.
The ACCC is great. They just stung MSY - one of the cheaper components suppliers - $750,000 for misleading signs about consumer rights.

If you buy stuff here, you’re protected pretty well. As a consumer, I think that’s terrific.

For example, a friend bought a hard drive from one of MSY’s competitors. Very shortly afterwards, it failed. The law says he’s entitled to a replacement from the shop that sold it to him, but they refused and claimed that it had to be sent back to the manufacturer. From a consumer’s perspective, that’s ridiculous: you just sold me a thing, and it doesn’t work! I don’t want a repair, I want a thing that works.

The shop he got that from - Scorptec - used to have similar signs to MSY. We checked last week. They’re gone.

ACCC notice: https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/msy-technology-ordered...

MSY home page with court-ordered notice, as of 25/01/18: http://www.msy.com.au/home.php
even they being failure, almost everyone heard of them.
Not quite true. I can think of two well funded people in 1995-2000 who either believed (or implied to funders) that scalable quantum computing was plausible within 10 years. But those people were outliers. You're correct that it was an uncommon view, and mainstream consensus in the field was that it was many decades away. The situation today is certainly very different, and people seem much more optimistic.
> Cpython has non-moving GC so this is not an issue.

I believe the GP was referring to PyPy.

From https://morepypy.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/gc-improvements.html

> The hash field is not necessarily there; it is only present in classes whose hash is ever taken in the RPython program (which includes being keys in a dictionary). It is an "identity hash": it works like object.__hash__() in Python, but it cannot just be the address of the object in case of a GC that moves objects around.
I find it near impossible, mostly due to waves that push water into your eyes and mouth!
Can you please point to any resources that talk about heavy optimization options in c#. That 50-fold increase you talk about is very interesting. I would like to learn more.