skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> “smokers tend to die earlier, meaning that they probably save governments money since they draw less from state pensions.”

OK, let's call the above sentence "the claim". Looking at the nine "Main Results" of your first link, the authors do not directly address the claim, they just choose to focus on something different (all emphasis mine):

> We conclude that the direct costs and externalities to society of smoking far outweigh any benefits that might be accruable at least when considered from the perspective of socially desirable outcomes (ie, in terms of a healthy population and a productive workforce)...

> Apart from the income benefits of tobacco smoking, another source of benefit, especially to the government, of smoking is the substantial cost savings in pension payments from premature death of smokers. This is a highly debated issue in the literature, because it is premised on the thinking that a shorter life expectancy implies a reduced expenditure on pensions. Thus, attempts to promote this will be deemed socially undesirable and hence cannot be incorporated into social policy design.

Note that they don't give a figure for the total savings on pensions, which suggests to me that they know it's very large. They only number they give is

> Manning et al. have estimated that every pack of cigarettes smoked reduces the life expectancy by 137 minutes and pension costs by $1.82.

If we go to Manning et al, we find

> Although nonsmokers subsidize smokers' medical care and group life insurance, smokers subsidize nonsmokers' pensions and nursing home payments. On balance, smokers probably pay their way at the current level of excise taxes on cigarettes...In contrast, drinkers do not pay their way...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2918654

Your second link does not address the claim. And your last link doesn't attempt to rebut the industry-funded results they discuss.

I have no idea what the right way to think about this topic is, but you've hardly given a definitive answer.
If .so TLD wasn't so expensive I'd be tempted to do that.
Would love to hear more about why you call that nonsense.

I think that's a great example though. I'm male, and I think a common misconception is that gender equality is only for the benefit of females. But feminist issues effect everyone. Like women being allowed to join the workforce increased productivity which also benefited men from having cheaper products.

Or this example you point out, men are typically the ones being drafted into war or at least the ones serving on the front lines. I think that raises a lot of interesting questions too. Is that fair? Should women more often be included in drafts or mandatory service? Should women be included in the decisions to go to war? Would we have less wars if that were the case?
It is misleading and completely wrong to infer from "low blood sugar levels make exercise hard" that dietary consumption of refined sugars is essential.
Oh great now nature is going to adapt with laser-resistant birds!
Then they'll have to get Hercule Poirot to investigate.

(For those of you who don't read classic mysteries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_on_the_Orient_Express)
This was absolutely not a failure of ‘middle management’ - this was a top-down strategy to increase profits and the efficiency of their breweries. The Uihlein family owned the brewery and made the calls to gradually change the brewing methods and ingredients hoping people wouldn’t notice the incremental changes.

The owners of a company are generally not referred to as ‘middle management’.
You mean engaging in actions that meet the UN-accepted definition of genocide? May as well just call it genocide.
> Middle managers kept cutting costs at the expense of quality

The article describes that cost-cutting as mandated by the company's president, Robert Uihlein.
i wish the little CPUs weren't so impoverished.
> But is Google planning to hand over lists of users who search for banned terms?

Yes? That's so obvious I'm a little stunned you're even asking. If the government orders them to hand over that information, they won't have any choice.
They said "we still don't have a fully functional human body model", as if one was pending or expected to be developed already.
Reminds me of the one interesting job creating 'loophole' that is a weird sort of working exactly as intended. You might notice sign waver/wearer jobs at public intersections depending on your area. The person is allowed to be there with right of way but just leaving the signs behind would not be allowed. While it is technically a loss of labor to have someone waving the signs (even considering the attention getting) having someone carrying the signs actively ensures that it won't lead to any cluttering and imposes the cost of their salary for the public space they are occupying.
Hackers Turned an Amazon Echo into a Spy Bug
Ah, with you now.
In case anyone is interested, Comparative Digestive Physiology: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4458075/
I know that when I try to follow the recommended amount of added salt I get sick in 2 or 3 days. The total sodium one is impossible (one can eat more than it in fresh fruits!), so I never even tried.

You talk about moderation, but there has been a large lack of moderation on the part of health professionals for recommending untested practices.
Can sound help save a dwindling elephant population?
Just hire disabled people and find their lawsuits in exchange for a cut. That’s already a thing in many places.
> An Australian outback community needs three things to sustain and survive: a doctor (GP) a bank and a pub. Well.. in the final analysis, a pub will do.

Last time I drove through it was more like a pub, a service/gas station and a crystal/woo shop.
Aren't you asking Western companies to take a stand, in place of yourself?

Even if your moral position is correct, there should be a law made in the USA to do what you're talking about. Otherwise, less well known companies would be able to scoot under the radar, while more prominent ones would be taken down. So, to be fair, the onus is on you to stand up for what you believe in and campaign and vote for the ideas you want to bring about.

Pointing your finger at others and telling them what to do, while you do nothing yourself, all to support your own agenda, is lazy and shows a false sense of entitlement.
> sometimes there is a cone of silence which is really strong, and quite at odds with what we think of as "the law"

Reminds me of the plot of the movie Hot Fuzz.
I finished a boot camp this past spring, full time, 3 months. I really wished it was full time 6 or 9 months with some CS light stuff.

I'm sure they wouldn't get a lot of customers, but I would have loved it.
How Engineering the Climate Could Mess with Our Food
Do you know what a thought experiment is?
Thanks for saying this. I'll keep this in mind during my future project (both personal and work). :)
There was nothing sincere about OP's question just as there's nothing lackluster about my answer. You can play your two-sideism game with people that buy that bullshit, I don't.
This phenomenon of trust shattered in a tightly knit community reminds me of Truman Capote's description of Holcomb, Kansas, in his book "In Cold Blood".
A bit tangential, but if you do manage to cut on sugar... It completely transforms your palette. After a few weeks (or maybe months?) you can try an American candy-bar or soda and the sweetness is pretty overwhelming. I was addicted to soda growing up, and after quitting (or rather, greatly reducing), it completely blew my mind how many new flavors I was experiencing.

One piece of advice: if you want candy with lower levels of sweetness, I'd suggest giving Japanese candies a try.
As far as I remember, sodium is dumped passively. The one thing kidneys need an effort to make is to keep it at the blood, not to dump it away.
That's an amazing review - thanks for taking the time to write it! I'm going to check it out, and Skins as well, as I had never heard of it before your write up. You should consider starting up a review website - I'd subscribe...
I would be very careful about assuming too much about neanderthal diets recent studies show that they cooked and boiled food even made chamomile tea and based on recent tooth plaque analysis had a diet which was fairly rich in plant based food sources.

http://www.pnas.org/content/108/2/486.full
To be fair - that blog post has perhaps lost some context being posted up to an unintended audience.

Their headline on their website reads:

"Deepening the Science of Security
Since 2012, Trail of Bits has helped secure some of the world’s most targeted organizations and products.
We combine high-end security research with a real-world attacker mentality to reduce risk and fortify code."

One would expect the target to whom they write their blog posts has some assumed understanding of "the science of security", and they are looking for articles which "deepen" understanding rather than explain it all from an ELI5 or completely non-understanding perspective.

(But you're right about a typically bad level of teaching and documentation in tech. I still remember struggling ~25 years ago with Perl docs which explain this using phrases like "This work just the same way as in awk"... Often things are not much better these days.)
I’ve been driving through farmland in central North America recently and have been struck by the lack of insects. 30 years ago, a windshield grew thick with locusts and who knows what... not now. In hundreds of miles of backroads saw couple deer and several mice.

It also shocking how little land was left forested and I utilized for agriculture, in a way wildlife could still use the land, in areas like Nebraska (maybe 2-3% and usually only if it can’t be used for crops or cattle). And where they have left patches of forest, it’s used as a hunting area.
A censored google can still create more competition.

A censored Google isn't more competition. It's just more of what already exists, with different branding.
Sounds like there's a parallel with boycotts of Apartheid South Africa?

Anyways I think the best answer for society to the general question of "if there's no legal way for a company to operate ethically, should it not?" is a resounding yes. However game theory will ensure that in absence of external pressure (via regulation or public sentiment), companies will try to serve the market for profit.
Many birds are already in dramatic decline from threats like forest fragmentation, southern deforestation, windmills, and cellphone towers. I doubt they’ll be able to kill off black birds and seagulls, though.
That doesn't really work in Manhattan. You may use your bit of sidewalk more than almost anyone else, but in terms of the fraction of total use, you are likely less than one percent. Hundreds or thousands of people walk on any given stretch of pavement every day. To say that the owner of the adjoining property should have the right to impose upon their use of public space just doesn't scale.

Your concept would work marginally better in an exurb where almost no one uses the sidewalk, but even there, it's not really workable.
Can 48% accuracy or 70% top10 accuracy be used for attribution? How high the accuracies have to be before this model is useful?
Reversals are completely normal for cyclic tidal currents or sea breeze / land breeze cycles.
> It's really unfortunate that abiding by local laws and regulations is considered unethical

No, it's that speaking up against local "laws" and quit, then come back again that's unethical.
I'm happy I never put in the hours studying algorithms to work at Google. Whatever happened to following their slogan?
There is a reason why the city licenses exist though. In Chicago, if I recall sandwich boards can cost up to $30k per year. I'm not saying this dog house needs that license but perhaps there should be a fee if you want to put something in front of your store that blocks the sidewalk to pay for the additional inspections needed.

NYC also fines for things out of code on the sidewalk. https://www1.nyc.gov/nycbusiness/article/sidewalk-usage-guid...
Nothing wrong with Google looking to expand into China
> You are disconnected from reality.

I can only talk from my experience. Me and my father searched for an apartment about 6 months before the demonetisation. And I'm searching one for me now. There is a clear difference.
A issue with today's programmers is that they require instant gratification from their programming languages. Remember that it takes a large investment to learn a foreign language. The more you learn, the more you can express. Haskell and FP takes times to master because they are powerful tools that allow you to express complex ideas succinctly.

That's not a selling point unless the ROI on that time investment is good. It's a problem with the language and not programmers if there isn't a more gentle learning curve.
Show HN: Find anyone's email address in seconds
If you wanna be a good dad you have to give 100%!

Actually I think the 110% is apropos because, especially early on, you find out you can do so much more than you think is possible.
Reading Gödel, Escher, Bach? Intellectually positive. Reading a Harlequin novel? Intellectually neutral or negative (opportunity costs). The point is, as for intellectual advancement, choice of content is actually what matters, not the medium.

Regarding books vs video : If a book mentions a Wankel engine, I have to look up that definition or gloss over it, hoping it's concept is revealed later.

If I watch a video and it mentions a "Wankel engine" and I see an engine rotating around and immediately get the gist of how it works. E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=josJhz8VS8A
Yeah I decided idyllic English villages aren't for me, after watching Hot Fuzz and Midsomer Murders.
You do a great job at pretending to be dumb, I almost bought it.

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/Healthday/story?id=4507735&pag...

https://www.dw.com/en/report-extreme-weather-could-kill-over...

http://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-chan...

We just discovered the climate change is happening much faster than our models suggested meaning all those predictions are OPTIMISTIC. I live in a US state that's currently covered in smoke because it's all burning, and a bunch of people die every year in increasingly harder to control fires.

You know what's the most enraging part of this? People like you that go around using logical fallacies to argue a completely discredited side of a very black and white matter simply because you believe it doesn't affect you.
Respectfully, I suggest avoiding saying this kind of thing to someone who may still be recovering from depression. There's a tendency to want to make what they are going through relatable, but that risks minimizing the severity of what they may be dealing with.

Imagine having lost a family member and hearing from someone, "well, everyone loses things". There's orders of magnitude difference.

I just know from experience that when I've been depressed, the level of futility I have felt about any dissatisfaction in my life was so much worse than when I've been mentally healthy. I'm really thankful for more than a decade free of that level depression.

As an alternative, I suggest simply sticking to statements that are affirming of how they have described themselves feeling.
Check this out.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC
The Original 1978 Version of Oregon Trail (written in BASIC)
Active learning can occur with both mediums.
I only see orbits and the milky way, and none of the planets and meteoroids. Firefox Linux. Probably missing some webgl feature (other webgl demos work).
The last residential 'school' (which was aimed to do the same for First Nations people) in Canada closed in 1996, with little more then a hummm-hummm.

Our shit stinks almost as much.
>CPAN

Huh. I don't know why, but I never thought I'd see a Perl project anywhere in HackerNews. There might literally be dozens of us.
It is akin to embargo ethics essentially. Technically buying coal from North Korea can help feed the people but by supporting their government you help prolong their power and thus lead to more suffering. It is ethically messy on the right side even.

Similarly by not giving them access to what they know the rest of the world has you breed discontent with the current way of doing things. The culture and thus indirect demand flows regardless of what they do like rock music into the USSR. It also isn't an absolute denial - google would gladly step back into China with no ethical qualms if they abandoned their censorship policies. Their government would find it unthinkable however.
Money. And people are loving it. I doubt anybody will ask who designed this immoral plan on the next investor meeting. If they ask, it will be for praises.
Whenever I hear discussion of whether we should defer to the judgement of scientists, I always want to ask, which field of science do you mean? In some, like physics, chemistry, evolutionary biology, geology, there is still much to be learned but what we have so far is pretty solid. You don't hear about the basics (matter is made of atoms, species emerge from natural selection, plate tectonics) getting overturned.

Then, there are other fields, like economics and nutrition, where the basic fundamentals of the field are a pile of mud. It is much like medicine in the era of balancing the four humours. In the meantime, we need to fund research, but not listen to any of the recommendations of the experts, until they achieve a basic level of understanding of their subject (which clearly hasn't happened yet).
What's new in Linux Lite 4.0
Warner’s Plan to Ruin the Internet
Like a dog on a leash isn't controlled by its owner, it's just submissive to him? Riiiiiight.

If Baidu was really doing anything independent, then it would get reined in, like the overseas Chinese real estate firms are.

As for censorship:

"According to the China Digital Times, Baidu has a long history of being the most active and restrictive online censor in the search arena. Documents leaked in April 2009 from an employee in Baidu's internal monitoring and censorship department show a long list of blocked websites and censored topics on Baidu search."

I don't think Baidu came up with that list all by itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu#Censorship
Many concepts cannot be described visually. You can't visualize how freshly cut grass smells, so there isn't much of a way to utilize that mental process as a manner of connecting you to something in your past to base a feeling off of. And you can't twist and break those feelings either - where you can easily, in words, take something like fresh cut grass and make it a painful experience by associating it with something like past trauma. Say, a description where an accident with a lawnmower led to a character losing an arm. Now that character is traumatized by the smell and in some manner so are you. There is less depth to the internalization a visual presentation of those events creates, as the book is more likely to force you into imagining those events and empathizing with the character. You may even end up traumatized yourself as the reader of such a powerfully connected piece.
What’s New in Linux Mint 19
Given the obesity problems in the US, the low-carb/keto suggestions are effectively the same as the premature optimization/bike shedding issues with coding. If you're eating 1,000 calories too much, it doesn't matter if it's carbs or protein. Get the calories-in-calories-out balance correct, then you can start worrying about the macro nutrition afterwards. If I recall correctly, the sugar toxicity problems occur when you don't burn them.
What's the difference between Google adopting Chinese regulations in China and Google adopting GDPR regulations in Europe?
There was a larger species of buffalo that was driven to extinction long before Europeans reached the western hemisphere.

But, you're right about the smaller bison species that we are all familiar with.
And working out can take many forms. For me it often involves practicing harmonica. It's great aerobic exercise, and I'm learning how to get better at something I enjoy and hopefully other people may enjoy too.

If I find some time in a day to practice, it changes my mood a lot!
Parent's action or inaction regarding this matter makes zero difference to the subject at hand. You've attacked the parent post without actually refuting a single thing it contained.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
I don't hear the constant debate you refer to -- what are your sources for political news and analysis?

The Civil war is a valid example of our historical struggle with the issue of state vs federal policies, but that was a long time ago.
Where can I buy such a laser? My yard is always covered in birds, and at least twice a week birds get caught in my house (very open design). I would love love love to be able to keep them away harm free.
I think this one shows it even better: http://hot-topic.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/GRIPtempBo...

And yes, there's a fast climb, but it's not the only instance in history, look at 800AD, 200AD, and a lot more in the past, it seems to be the way the temp fluctuates, very sharply.

If we get back to the 10,000 years chart, do the last 150 years seems off the chart? If anything, it shows that we're cooler than the last 10,000 years.
This was a Twilight Zone episode.
Well, I think he/she explained rather well the reason why - and the extent to which - such a thing would be useful. That plus knowing the amount of effort expended in the rest of the field of medical research today ... it is indeed surprising that nobody has bothered to even try to produce a human body model. The feat probably wouldn't even require genetic engineering. (Then again, the amount of rote concepts in biology has steered me clear away from studying it beyond a single required high-school class, so what do I know.)

My best guess is that there must be some kind of fear, among that field's practitioners, that some stupid politicians (gah, redundancy!) would take one look at the project and throw a hissy fit or worse.
How does fat block insulin?
Maybe because, according to your link, hundreds of people inside Google knew about this for over a year and said nothing?

It's one thing for a plan like this to be secret among a bunch of C-levels in a boardroom for a week. It's something else when HUNDREDS of people are involved, and a product is ready to deploy. That indicates a cultural problem within the company.

More evidence of that (again from your link):

"Company managers responded by swiftly trying to shut down employees’ access to any documents that contained information about the China censorship project, according to Google insiders who witnessed the backlash."
The problem, though is that there are allowances for many other uses of the public sidewalk (for example, a restaurant having outdoor seating, or a store having coin-operated kids rides). It's just that there's no specific process for this product, and they speculate that it would be impossible to allow doghouses without changing the law.
Bitcoin and Ethereum Fall Substantially in $18B Crypto Market Wipeout
>in small communities, sometimes there is a cone of silence which is really strong, and quite at odds with what we think of as "the law"

Really? I got the opposite impression from the article. Everyone is happy to talk about who they think did it, and everyone has their own theory.
Public shareholders and their destructive unrealistic expectations. They expect to see growth continue regardless of the size of the company when risk/stability and rate of growth are in an inverse relationship equilibrium (low risk-high returns eventually leads to more investment which leads to diminished returns, high risk leads to less investment which means better margins from lack of competition if the risk pays off). They have proven downright allergic to long-term planning in favor of the short term.
The blueberries are only there because the farmer is planting them in the first place. Though I agree with your sentiment.