skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> when you tell your patients you are giving them a placebo,

Patients dont know they are getting a placebo in clinical trials. It's double-blind by design (doctors dont know either which one is placebo or active ingredient).

Since we assume placebo effect is partly psychological, if you tell a patient you are giving them placebo this could possibly lead to worse outcomes.
5 Market Obstacles That Kill Even Compelling Products
> Why would aliens treat humans any differently?

There's no obvious reason why aliens should perceive humans as either a threat or a resource. There may be non-obvious reasons, or they may be irrational about it. But unless interstellar travel is a lot easier than we think it is, it's unlikely that aliens would assume visitation is likely in either direction.
Well said and great argument on both sides but you missed the point that nobody wants to spend time learning another tool. Most experts are very quick at things. Unless you know you're going to beat adobe 100% and with the entire feature set you wont try an innovative way.
Agreed. And one can have those things without religion.

Teaching kids to blindly accept matters that are unfalsifiable, doesn't seem like a positive thing. Acting as an example to kids by being discriminatory toward those who do not blindly accept the unfalsifiable doesn't seem like a positive thing either.

Edit: minor phrasing
Which is really more for them than for you. When you're dead, it won't matter to you that you saw those things, but it might matter to your child for the rest of his/her life.
Sane middleground:

"We did procedure X, but your insurance covered all of it."
Winners of the 2018 Wildlife Photographer of the Year Awards
Thermal scope on a 50 BMG does this already.
I'm factoring in parental and cohort influence: these kids play with each other, and are not in school yet.
Well apparently there are physical measurable effects, as another poster commented below.

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/306437.php
Hands on Machine Learning Project – Test Your Data Preparation and Visualization
copenhagen to some extent https://goo.gl/maps/BbbNpvT2BPo

The first "park ring" is essentially the old city walls and moat
It's such a shame that the two scientific fields that we desperately need to advance, psychology and neuroscience, often need to rely on purely subjective input.
What's the most impressive placebo effect recorded in a study? Is it always limited to mild pain relief?

For stories like this, people always predictably discuss how ethical it is for doctors to knowingly prescribe placebos for stories and how different interventions have different impacts.

If placebo alone can't cure anything and only gives mild pain relief, I'm surprised nobody mentions it's overhyped.
"Raku" is the name I'm going with. Raku programming language. Now when is it going to be installed by default on OSes?
From the AMA it's all client side and apparently he didn't use any popular library (eg: React, Angular, etc).

He claims he uses Paper.js only for computing vector graphics booleans.
I think that the Burlington example that has been cited a lot in this thread shows that non monotonicity is a problem for IRV in not just pathological edge cases.
The placebo is based on belief. You give a sugar pill to someone and they believe it is something more. That's "tricking them."

And yes, I do think most doctors in Western medicine cling to a form of Cartesian dualism. It's somewhat tempered, but the mind body connection is vastly underexplored.
Larger groups don't act the same way as smaller ones.

If your sister dies tomorrow, you'd probably be quite upset.

If I die tomorrow, you wouldn't care even if you found out.

Consider that your roommate, parent, village member, whatever, finds out that you're gay. It's a small group. They have the information to know whether that getting out would be good or bad for you, whether you'd like that information to be disclosed.

On a global scale that discretion just doesn't exist at all. Facebook doesn't _care_. A random worker who sees that information doesn't _care_. The information can make its way to someone who _does_ matter to you (or at any later point suddenly you may matter to them).
From what I saw in the AMA it's 99% vanilla.

He only uses Paper.js for computing vector graphics booleans.
> Of course evolving the pupa seems like it would be a lot more difficult

Once you have evolved one intermediate form others can follow more easily. It’s always important to remember that genes define recipes that create biological structures, not blueprints of what they look like.

It’s a different mechanism but genetic networks are good at repeating things like body segments, fingers, etc. Biology invented the REPEAT UNTIL loop a long time before we did.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc
This is sort of a semantic quibble over what the "free" in "free will" really means. Does it mean freedom from the external environment outside my head? Freedom from my past light cone? Freedom from legal, cultural or other sorts of coercion? Or does it really mean "self-determination"?

It's fairly clear that the author's are using the light-cone sort of definition, but they discuss this ambiguity towards the end on p.230:

> Some readers may object to our use of the
term “free will” to describe the indeterminism of
particle responses. Our provocative ascription of
free will to elementary particles is deliberate, since
our theorem asserts that if experimenters have a
certain freedom, then particles have exactly the
same kind of freedom. Indeed, it is natural to
suppose that this latter freedom is the ultimate
explanation of our own.
UCS-2 was all there was at the time, though. Blame Unicode for thinking 65,536 code points would be enough.
For sure. The thing is, Japan is very industrious and innovative in certain areas, it could have many more international players if it would push more abroad. Much of their services sector for example is almost purely concentrated on domestic market. Same goes for heavy industries, household devices and media industries, with some exceptions in gaming. Toto is a perfect example - they were 20+ years early in washlet innovation but never marketed them much abroad. There's a tendency of giving up after just timid marketing campaigns abroad I think. The most successful examples are mainly where they've built up foreign subsidiaries with a certain amount of autonomy, such as Honda & Toyota in US and Europe.
I love your framing of the question, but am frustrated with the Compatibilist conclusion.

"Moral responsibility" is a heuristic for our monkey brains, tapping into evolved ideas of justice, accounting for imperfect prediction of future events, attempting to control human behavior one way or the other. The reason we don't lecture engines about morality is because it is perfectly clear that they obey only one kingdom of rules, the physical.

Humans also must obey physical rules, but there are so many layers between base physics and human behavior that we speak in very fuzzy heuristic terms about morality. This does not mean free will is anywhere to be found in one of those intermediate layers, just that it's too complicated a machine for us to analyze like an engine, so we resort to using the levers and knobs that evolution gave us. IOW, free will is a "god of the gaps", only existing while we still lack the knowledge to better understand the layers between our gross beliefs/actions and base physical processes.
> The Boston-based company raised $2.2 million earlier this year, helped along by buzzwords such as “biometrics” and “blockchain,” which it claims allows it to secure the voting process. Its app reportedly requires voters to take and upload a picture of their government-issued I.D., along with a selfie-style video of their face, which facial-recognition technology then uses to ensure the person pictured in the I.D. and the person entering a vote are the same. The ballots are anonymized and recorded on the blockchain.

This is horrible on so many levels.
I was in Scouts, too, and I had a similar experience to you. That doesn't change the fact that organization has weighed-in on matters of religion[1] and affirmed themselves as being discriminatory toward atheists.

[1] - https://blog.scoutingmagazine.org/2018/05/31/bsa-reaffirms-d...
How to Use “The Most Persuasive Story Ever Told” to Dominate Your Market
"Scared to death" is not just an expression, as your case perfectly illustrates.

There's a general tendancy to discount the matters of the mind when treating the body, but both are very much connected and usually for a good reason—at least from an evolutionary perspective. In the US, there's often a stigma associated with just admitting weakness. Support exists but it's not always easy to come by.

It helps a lot if you can find a Primary Care Physician who has at least some notions of psychology and can help bridge that gap—and if needed, recommend the help of specialists regarding our thought processes. (In your case, it sounds like you were on your own to figure this out: glad it worked out, though!)
It's important to note that placebo effect does not work at all on stuff like infectious diseases. There are clear categories of diseases where your psychological state will have absolutely close to no influence on the outcome.
The UV part of sunlight breaks it down into CO2 and water. And before you get too worried about the CO2, that's from "current" carbon in the environment (the grass that the cows ate) not fossilized carbon. So it's not a net addition of carbon to the atmosphere.
What about pricing and marketing? Is it ok for a doctor to create a new "placibo treatment" and market it as the real deal on late night tv just because some non zero percentage of people will mark that they had improved symtopms. What is the fair price for a sugar pill that the doctors and compaines are empowered to lie about. Ones mind and mindset play a big role in healing the body and we have far more powerful tools for effecting the mind then future doctor's lies and sugar pills. We have therapy, counseling and the love of family and friends. In my mind its all about hope which doctors can deliver to patients far better with smiles and compassion then sugar pills.
> A physiological problem in the mind can cause a chemical problem in the brain which can cause a ‘physical’ problem in the body. Or heal a problem in the body.

Unless my particular pathways are different and I respond to placebos differently than another population.

You're not wrong that it's well established that there's some effect, but beyond that, it's barely science until we can map these pathways.

So it's still a 'trick'.
It's also interesting to note that it may not be necessary to lie. In a number of studies, placebos have been effective even when the patient is told they're getting a placebo.
The acronym is S.I.L.O.?
A true engineer follows problems to solutions. Gates is up front about this.

What kills the most people? Of those things, which can be realistically improved?
I knew these guys, IIRC, clojure originally came from an acquihired startup. This grew into a relatively small team working on an e-receipts project that was remote but largely based in Portland.

The most interesting thing about that team was that it appeared that not just a beard, but an epic beard was required to on it. I keep in touch with one of them, but he has left the firm. The others... I should probably send a note to- those were good guys.

I guess more generally though, they are "off strategy" and clojure was not making inroads at Labs, at least at the time I had left. There was a lot of gravity towards only using Java on the backend, part of my friction with upper management was pushing node.js as a backend technology. My feeling on the Clojure guy was that they were a good team so they were left alone since they weren't a core feature and they never generated any noise. That's just my take on it though, why after the big upper management change they really bristled against certain teams and technologies but were content with others was not clear to me.

Before I sent this off, I figured I should look at your links- the featured guy in the podcast was the one person whom I had mentioned that I keep in touch with but had left the firm- as have the other two that were on it. I recognize three of the contributors to lacinia.
I'd say this is really impressive: sham surgery on the meniscus.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/surgery-is-one-hell-of-...
Maybe for superficial bugs in small toy programs. But a real bug in any sophisticated program requires a bit more than looking at the code most of the time. User feedback, log/trace data, performance data, system events data, memory dumps, etc.

Of course the bug could be in proprietary software your code is using. How would you fix that by purely looking at your own code?
This just seems so much myth making and gratuitous glorification so people can feel special just getting a job. The famed difficulty of getting hired creates a sense of elitism and exclusiveness and perpetuates a culture of insecurity.

This is very cult like, If people are indoctrinated to think that they are part of an elite group they will be devoted and would look at leaving as a step down. Cults are a great business model as the followers are very devoted.

It suits the agenda of employers to construct this and target individuals who derive all sense of identity and self worth from their jobs and when employed will work their asses off in a constant reaffirmation of 'specialness' just to retain their sense of self worth. Very cult like.
Do you have any evidence of that claim?

Also, even if it’s true, why does the company get to command the researcher’s time?

Finally, as a company, you get to mitigate this by having a serious disclosure policy. It helps if you don’t look like the bad guys.
SETI in the Infrared
> but try actually taking their position seriously first.

That's a mighty big presumption. Upon what grounds do you say I am not?
> Perfectly fixable items are going in the trash

Which results in the refrigerant being released anyway once the item deteriorates enough.
Mercury is like Prolog, but deterministic and strongly typed, hence faster to run and faster to write.
> Most medieval wars were fought over very materialistic concerns.

Indeed. Though, religion can be a very useful ideological pretext for getting you to do something that materially benefits me.
> Delphi/Pascal had the best strings

Delphi/Pascal had fucking terrible string.

> Single byte storage, so it works well with utf-8.

No awareness of encoding, so easy to break your text if you try to do anything other than pipe it through.

> Byte length field, so it knows the length of every string and it can store null bytes.

Single-byte length field, so your strings can't exceed 255 bytes, and you need a pointer indirection just to get the length of your string.

> An additional null byte past the end and pointer shifting, so every Pascal string is also a C pchar string.

Scratch that, 254.

> Reference-counted copy-on-write, so you can copy it in constant time for reading and treat it as if the string was fully copied for writing.

Rc'd cow, so you never know whether your write is going to be free or incur a complete copy.

> Behaves as a value type with the null pointer being the empty string, so you can never get a null pointer exception. Any string operation returns always a valid string.

The null pointer is the empty string, you don't get to know whether you got no input or got an empty input.

> (Optionally) index checked with the length, so you can never get a buffer overflow.

(Optionally) you're completely unable to implement generic string operations because the string type carries a length and the language gives no way to be generic over that.
I'm also interested in using it for a Rails application. Does it work well with the payed version?
People build new houses, extend their current ones, replace broken ones. I'd still bet on the average lifetime of one to be over 20 years...
I'm still reading the submitted article, but with the many relevant useful comments of `tokenadult in mind: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=...

> Placebo effects are strongest for patient self-reported subjective symptoms (classically, pain) and weakest for objective clinical signs measured by experienced observers.
Boy Scout Tripp’s are often (usually?) Sponsored by a local religious organization. They do have other types of sponsors such as civic organizations. My troop in the 1980s was sponsored by the local Lions Club.

The local troops can have very different attitudes about beliefs in god (or the lack of), sexual orientation, the environment, etc
If we think that not enough people are voting, the way to solve this is NOT through get-out-the-vote efforts, voter registration drives, and tools like this to make it easier to cast a vote. These are not the bottleneck.

Voting may be a duty, but it's one that carries a lot of responsibility. Getting ignorant people to cast poorly-informed votes does not help our society. And I think that people realize this. So when they know they haven't invested enough in fully understanding the issues and the candidates, they spare us the chance of their error by not voting.

If you want to get more people actively participating in democracy, the right path is through transparency in government and other efforts to make it easier for people to understand what they're voting on. Today it's a big investment in time to get oneself up to speed, and so making that information more accessible and useful would lower the cost for a citizen to make an informed vote.
For example I have never done well in group situations. I see other people having fun and bonding while I am on the sidelines, don't have fun and don't make connections. I have tried a lot of things but I never got comfortable. This contrasts to other things like public speaking or talking to women. There I took advice and could implement it with a lot of effort and eventual improvement. But there are situations where I simply don't improve despite other people handling them naturally without effort. I also can identify with some typical autistic traits.

I would compare it to a dyslexic ex coworker. I can look at a sheet of paper and read it within seconds, understand it and spot spelling errors. He could stare at it for hours and only see a jumble of letters. I practiced a lot with him but he just didn't improve. On the other hand the same person could go to a bar, look at people, and immediately he knew who to talk to in what way. I go to a bar, see random people, but simply can't read the situation.

Does this make sense? I have improved a lot from a miserable childhood up to my 30s to now being socially reasonable functioning but I have some hard limits I can't overcome no matter how I try. Now I am accepting this and feel liberated from pressure.
And isn't an amiable city to live in. You basically live inside your car, there are very few opportunities to do things within walking distance.
Swift? Modest proposal?
This might be true but is very surprising (since Omega 6 polyunsaturated fatty acids are found poultry, eggs, nuts etc... which I thought to be rather "healthy" in general) I found this [1] abstract which supports your point. Is there more evidence? Also what's the relation between inflammation and obesity?

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29610056
If they're just administering placebos do you still have to pay for real doctors?
In pain related studies the placebo effect seems to disappear when patients are given the endorphin blocking drug Naloxone.

Seems like an actual effect to me.
> are they that popular outside of chat apps ?

Yes.

> how many emojis on this very page ?

HN literally strips out arbitrary codepoints — including emoji — from comments. So zero. Because HN forbids them.
I believe that the placebo effect is significant enough that I have told my wife that if I ever become ill then she should discuss the possibility of giving me a placebo treatment with a doctor without my knowledge. Although it works when people know it is a placebo it seems to work better if people don't know. So for example, if I get ill and they aren't sure what to do, give me a placebo and tell me it is medicine for my illness, whatever it is, and see how that goes. If it works dont ever tell me it was a placebo. Its got to be worth a shot.
For a technical, in-depth overview of IncludeOS and how it was made I find the main authors presentation at Cppcon 2017 is a pretty good introduction:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7D88U-5pKc (one hour, quite entertaining).

There is also the original paper which was presented at the 2015 IEEE 7th International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom).

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7396164
"don't crash" can't be an absolute requirement, because operating systems. I've had programs crash when running out of RAM, I think sometimes there's no way for the OS to recover without killing some programs.

If you absolutely can't crash, you need to build an OS that caters to that - modern OSes explicitly prioritize other goals, like performance
That's kind of stupid...takes the point away from roundabouts. They're designed to keep the traffic flowing in low /medium conditions when a traffic light or stop sign would bring it to a halt otherwise. Saves on fuel etc.
Source{d} Engine in five minutes
You can compile the Linux kernel with only the modules necessary for running it in a virtualized environment (ie, only virtio modules) and simply include your application in the initramfs as init. If you include nothing else, that's about 6MB + your application.
Show HN: Parens – A lisp like scripting layer for Golang
There have been "open-label placebo" trials, where the patient is aware they're getting a placebo... and it may still work.

E.g. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/placebo-can-work-even-kn...
Right, I see how it's being used in the proof, my point is that what the theorem proves, regardless of how the notion of "is determined by" is clarified, is not at all interesting or surprising.
> What is the fair price for a sugar pill that the doctors and compaines are empowered to lie about.

$0.

Health care costs have ruined many, and that's frankly unethical. I don't see a point treating the unethical American health care system as a premise in these ethical debates.
On what? Reasons UNIX isn't so great? There was an entire handbook written about it decades ago, much of which is still relevant. Text isn't a universal interface, files are not a good abstraction for everything (not the way UNIX does it anyway), the permissions system is extremely limited and quite backward for modern problems, the way the file hierarchy is organized hasn't made sense for about 30 years, POSIX has a lot of well known issues, etc.
https://www.marketplace.org/2015/03/03/health-care/how-cost-...
The sad part is everyone would prefer taxing profits, but that just doesn't work with multinational firms. Since, you know, they will restructure their company to on paper generate all profit in a tax haven. For example their algorithms are owned there, even though it was probably developed by you local citizens, is deployed on you local server and the sale to the tax haven happened for a symbolic dollar and for sure not an open market.

It is also almost impossible for new companies to start competing if existing big players can easily avoid paying taxes while you cannot. And no, we cannot simply allow everyone to not pay taxes.
If it works, its treatment, even the right treatment. Would you know when its safe to give a placebo? That takes diagnostic skill.
My favourite as well!
Offer an in app purchase as donation. Low friction flow for iOS users, free money for you!
I find it unusual that many people will dismiss the placebo effect yet will happily accept that stress can cause lots of negative reactions physiologically. They seem like two sides of the same coin to me.