skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My overconfidence is mostly coming from the long tail.

Even if there are millions of distinct plant chemistries out there, a small number (say, 100) will account for 90% of the herbal remedies prescribed and taken. These will have been studied by scientific methods exhaustively. The next most common chunk will have received some cursory attention, and then you enter into the vast fields of the unknown.

But the fields aren't unknown to just science: they're unknown to cultural practitioners as well. I'm willing to believe that, even without double-blind clinical trials, people were able to find effective treatments with enough trial and error. But "enough trial and error" means "not the long tail". So once you start talking the 1000th most common plant used for medicinal properties, the amount of experience pre-scientific practitioners have accumulated is negligible, and handful of anecdotes at best. Not even enough to ascribe correlation, let alone causation.

So on the head of plants of potential value, I'm betting that they've all been studied exhaustively. On the tail, there are countless plants which could have countless benefits, but essentially no evidence to do anything but pick one at random and hope it cures what ails you. The middle, of enough evidence to suspect or know a plant does something, but not how, is going to be fairly small.
Github flaky
I believe this is because of Reddit.

Some chap (maybe an HTC employee?) posted on the /r/Android subreddit that he was giving away a couple of HTC smartphones[1], and all one had to do to enter the giveaway way fill out their Reddit username in the linked Google Spreadsheet.

This post has now been deleted from the front page as well as the subreddit -- I'm not sure why.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1air46/hi_reddit_i_...
> I disagree that alternative medicine being more popular with women means that women as a whole have been given less critical thinking skills

Well, we're failing women here somewhere and my first guess would indeed be the education system in general, and maybe the image of science education in particular. I'm not saying that women generally employ less critical thinking skills (hence my original comment about astrophysics in that context), but at the same time there is very clearly something wrong that makes women more susceptible to this C/AM bullshit. There are clearly antibodies missing here, the question then becomes why are we giving those antibodies to men and denying them to women?

> I think it's just because some things are more popular with women, and some with men.

Sure, though as I said in other comments, by default I tend to attribute these things overwhelmingly to culture, not physiology. Being susceptible to C/AM and other crap is not a cute little boy-girl difference, however. It's a massive problem, because having a mind with this faith-based nonsense in it is clearly a disadvantage that precludes victims from actually understanding the world. Not to mention it's a risk whenever "alternative medicine" is favored over actual treatment in critical situations.

> Alternative medicine appears to me to be something that is more popular with women, and it also happens to be irrational.

My point is, that needs to change. It's not an innocent phenomenon. There is something deeply wrong here. To shift the focus a little, do you know which group is also extremely susceptible to non-scientific bullshit? Medical doctors. It's a huge problem. We're currently addressing this issue both in medical school and in hospital culture, but it's still an uphill battle. We need to do the same for women.
What astounds me is that Google encourages me to type emails when I'm in the metro underground by allowing me to start new e-mail drafts. But Drive? "Error creating document" (yes, they lead you into thinking you can make a document by letting you get 99% of the way there before the app displays an error). You literally cannot type a single character in a document offline in Drive on Android. It's outrageous. If they improve their offline support, and become more resistant to downtime, I'll be very happy using Drive. Otherwise, I'll wait for a startup to fix collaborative Document editing.

Edit: I'm going to update my pending YC application with another secondary idea; fix Google Drive with open source tools, build it into a protocol and not a single proprietary product.
I would still like the search results to show up though. Just prioritized lower than my history.
What is for you 'medicine proper'?

Do you mean it has been tested and found to work, even if it has nothing to do with medicine (some herbal supplement or meditation) or just medical approved/ordered?

I don't buy into much of the alt-med areas (homeopathy, acunpunture, etc, just not my cup of tea) but I do research a lot about natural 'supplements' and many have been proven quite useful for human health. In what category would you put this?

The other part of the problem is the influence medical staff have. One example is the food advice we have been getting the last couple decades.

'No fats, a lot of cereal. That's the way to live.' which still today doctors here advise (my dad is pre-diabetic, his doctor recommended to change to wholegrain bread and stop eating animal fat, and take his medicine, can't forget that along with his statins for the cholesterol!) which we all know now that isn't the way to go, but many doctors are still making their informed decisions by things they learned 40 years ago in medical school.
Beginners guide to Clojure
Legal Errors in Wall Street Journal's Dangerous Manning Article
Hans Rosling: The River of Myths [3 minute vid]
Alex Gives Up
sure it is ... but they are not stuck in the same place they were 20 or 30 years back.
If running the same cryptographic key for all accounts is resistant to failure, you and I have different definitions of precautionary measures.

Dropbox is not the shining example of corporate citizenry, especially when it comes to security (although they're fairly good on uptime).
Because they have a nervous system and the same brain as you as far as registering nerve impulses. If you've ever had a pet, they give all indications that they are suffering when they're in pain. If they give all indications of experiencing pain and suffering, though they cannot communicate this to us, the simplest explanation is that they feel pain and suffering.
> IMHO, your plus sign is "pointlessly terse and cryptic". See what I did there?

No, I don't see what you did there because + has one and only one meaning, and that is add. Every child can identify what + means, the same cannot be said for (a,b) ->, even to developers who have developed their entire lives (unless they have experience with coffeescript). Hence, cryptic.
You can burn out. Make sure you keep learning new things and solve different problems.

Luckily the field is really vast to keep you interested for decades.
> - Allow to use a dark theme on all panels.

I'm working on that. Screenshot: https://bug836233.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=719...
The quality of the English used on that site really inspires confidence in it's accuracy :

"The car which sells for Rs 5.96 lakh in Delhi (ex-showroom)" -> ex-showroom ? What's that ? A swimming pool ?

"It can receive emergency charge with a text message." -> Power over SMS ?

The images are obviously drawings, not even renders, further inspiring confidence. The only references to it are to academic experiments. Not to dish on academici here, very smart people, though not always perfectly accurate with "on the market next year" predictions.

It doesn't seem to be vaporware though : http://www.motorbeam.com/cars/mahindra-e2o/mahindra-reva-e2o...
Key to Happiness: Keeping Busy Without Feeling Rushed
That's the most ridiculous statement I've read in a long time.
Risk I/O Overview Video
Get an overview of Risk I/O, our vulnerability intelligence platform, in just 90 seconds via our new video.
Finally, i hope this makes Lua much more widespread.
But the way the professor is saying makes it look like the countries who move into the developed world 'square' are now, in fact, developed. Ethiopia's capital is far, far from 'developed country' status. I guess you and the parent are right, though.
The Nintendo WiiU is Selling Very Poorly
We do both at the same times: adding tools and improving existing ones.
I hate sites like this that dole out content one quantum at a time in order to expose you to more advertising. Once I see the intent of the design, I bail -- I never read them.

Nothing is more indicative of predatory unprofessionalism than an article that puts one word on a page and requires you to move on to more advertising in order to read the next word. Guess how many professionally designed, successful web sites do this?

Also, almost 50% of the links submitted by user "mediagearbox" (https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=mediagearbox) are links to businessinsider.com. This is not a coincidence -- it's a shill masquerading as a participant.
Thanks for the initial feedback :)
Using vertex colors with linear interpolation over triangles is an interesting way to compress low-frequency images such as backgrounds. I had no idea that they did this in HW2. It also looks surprisingly good.

The page is neigh-unreadable though, with all the moving stuff. Please add a pause button :)
There's a Firefox addon called Instantfox [1] which makes the Awesomebar behave somewhat more like the Omnibar. Possibly too much so, depending on your preferences.

[1]: http://www.instantfox.net/
I honestly wonder how much this is costing them:

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/sla.html

How do they calculate "Monthly Uptime Percentage"?
Is it so wrong that I... don't really mind? I feel bad admitting that, but I actually think it's kind of cool. Marketing is moving beyond "generically spam this to millions of people in this 'demographic'" to actually giving me personalized advertisements that I actually might be interested in.

I treat it the same way as I treat the rest of my online identity: if I'm doing something I want to be anonymous I take steps to make it that way, such as using a throwaway account with cookies disabled. I recognize that when I buy store loyalty cards, I'm giving them access to my purchase patterns.

It's a trade-off I make, and I don't put the responsibility for that decision on anyone but myself.
Maybe someone did ~/Google Drive/Google Drive and created a rift in the space time continuum.
Agreed. I'm not arguing for needless cruelty. Humane slaughter methods exist and companies/individuals who are not using them should be systematically shutdown and charged.
Do you know about : https://heatmap.mozillalabs.com/ ?

The back button is heavily used, even without gestures/mouse.
Shit happens. It was also possible if all your data was on the hard drive. And Google drive has an offline version of the app, so server downtimes limit the usage but don't make it completely useless. And if my hard drive breaks, it's not like a bunch of very well paid engineers are working relentlessly to bring my hard drive back as quickly as possible. But they are in case of a services like dropbox or drive. And not to mention that the whole backup work is being taken care of.
Great advice. This is the true wonder of HN community
To-do
1. sing up to Linkedin (should have done it from the beginning)
2. call every Wev dev company in Melbourne
3. be brave
4. open source
5. call some more
6. Use social media

Thank you! this is the kind of advice I was craving for
How far does $1,000 go for a young (unmarried) just out of college engineer?

Just for reference I will give you what my first paycheck was 1 month out of a mid-level engineering college with a Comp. Sc. major. Rs 2,000/mo as a software engineer. After my boarding (shared) and living expenses I could still save close to Rs 1,000/mo.

Granted this was 20 years ago and in a non-metro area, so adjusted for inflation lets multiply that by 10.

So $1,000 (= Rs 50,000) today, could feed a hungry unmarried entrepreneur on a Dosa (substituting for Ramen here) budget and shared living with friends for several months.

After all this is a startup.

Keep your eyes off those Aeron chairs and you could manage to run a lean startup for several months on that.
Eh, either way, it's the same problem. Imagine you're an agent for BigBank, thinking you're running on Alice's computer. If you authenticate yourself to BigBank, BigBank gives you a session key you can use to communicate securely with them--and then you will take messages from Alice and pass them on to BigBank.

But you could also be running, instead, on an emulator on Harry's computer--and Harry wants Alice's credit card info. So now Harry reaches in and steals the key BigBank gave you, then deploys a copy of you back into the mesh, hardcoded to use that session key. Alice then unwittingly uses Harry's version of you--and Harry MITMs her exchange.

In ordinary Internet transactions, this is avoided because Alice just keeps an encryption key (a pinned cert) for BigBank, and speaks to them directly. If you, as an agent, are passed a request for BigBank, it's one that's already been asymmetrically encrypted for BigBank's eyes only. And that works... if the bank is running outside of the mesh.

But if the bank is itself a distributed service provided by the mesh? Not so much. (I'm not sure how much of a limitation that is in practice, though, other than "sadly, we cannot run the entire internet inside the mesh.")
Everyone is missing the point. They develop for Windows because they will have the most chance of getting someone to play their game. (95% of installed O/S in PCs).
Yes, that is my experience too. But I don't care; google drive is for google docs, and google docs aren't useful at all on my desktop. I'm not sure why I even run the gdrive desktop app.
Is there a version of the video without the music? I can barely hear what he's saying.
Interesting. It appears the contest was held previously and it brought down Drive then.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1air46/hi_reddit_i_...
I am surprised you think this is a point in your favor. Yes, the primary active ingredient in marijuana is not sufficient. But you just said different strains of marijuana have different effects.

Which strain is most effective for glaucoma? Which strain is most effective for pain management during chemotherapy? Which strain doesn't help with either of those things? The same questions can be asked for any plant.

Medicines extracted from plants may not have the exact same effect as those plants, but they are much more predictable. The dose, the benefit, and the side effects can be studied and known. (And there is no reason to think the effect will be worse or weaker: the extra cocktail of chemicals in the plant could either amplify or dampen the primary active ingredients.)
I think wearing your company t-shirt is a good way to get conversations started and would be especially effective if no one has heard of the company.
> "Everything in your Dropbox folder is always on your hard drive and merely synced with our online service, so you have access to your files even if you're offline. If you have multiple linked computers on your local area network, we'll even sync from those computers rather than via the Dropbox service whenever it can."

There was a bug a couple months ago where Dropbox zero'd out some files, and then synced the 0 byte files across all of your connected computers, thereby destroying every linked Dropbox file that was affected.

There was that bug a few months ago where Dropbox left all accounts open, with no passwords, for four hours or something like that.

They are not resistant to failure by design.
I'm not really sure I make appeals to authority, and the fact that I rip into stuff is me treating people as equals, not as fragile china dolls that need to be cosseted and persuaded with allusions to reality to persuade them down from their weird views.

I'm also pretty sure you're right that it puts a lot of people off, and I'm not the right person to talk to them :)

Oh and I absolutely agree that the days of listening to experts and authority figures are over. I'm not one.
You'll find me the last person to say that the medical establishment has everything right, or that we should always listen to doctors because they're just so clever. I just think that most of the thought behind alt-med in its various forms is nonsense too.
How Not to Be Seen - Object Removal from Videos of Crowded Scenes
Wow. Wouldn't it be great for us content providers if there was a service that would tell us when our content appears on HN? (hint. hint)
Interesting piece in there:

"Fun historical fact: If you disabled JavaScript in Netscape 4, css would also stop working — because css was applied to the page using… JavaScript."
Seriously? Google experiences such infrequent outages that it really is a reasonable alternative to most normal home storage solutions.

I'd be interested to see an aggregation of data on down time for a PC, for the average user, due to viruses, malfunctioning hardware, broken HDD, stolen PCs, etc. VS common issues with Google drive and chromebook combination: stolen credentials, ISP outages and downtime.

This is a good time to go check out other services and see if you like them better than Drive, but let's keep put the pitchforks and tar away for right now.

And yes I realize this can severely affect a good subset of users, and disrupt their workflow, but let's really analyze the difference rather than just giving into our gut reactions eh?
The headline statement here is factually untrue. The few sources cited in this blog post do not support the headline as it is phrased. Rather, the correct phrasing would be "United States women no longer enjoy the rapid increases in life expectancy at all ages still found in other countries."

Necessary context for this article can be found in an earlier Hacker News comment

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5196734

by another participant on an earlier article from the same blog:

> > It appears you've made some sort of resolution to publish and promote a blog entry per day in 2013. 40 entries in 41 days this year vs. 46 in all of 2012. You should reconsider - whatever your reasons were, I doubt they included a desire to develop a reputation for presenting topics that were sensationalized and thinly researched [1] produced with a pace that ensures discredited theories dont get reviewed.

[1] http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/02/drug-companies-stop-h...

> Wow, nice spot and they have all been submitted to HN. I have never seen anyone's submission history be so hell bent on self promotion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=techdog

That was followed up by another set of comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5240084

> I'm beginning to flag these posts.

I agree.

Here are links to better demographic information on recent health trends. Girls born since 2000 in the developed world are more likely than not to reach the age of 100, with boys likely to enjoy lifespans almost as long. The article "The Biodemography of Human Ageing" by James Vaupel,

http://www.demographic-challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2...

originally published in the journal Nature in 2010, is a good current reference on the subject. Vaupel is one of the leading scholars on the demography of aging and how to adjust for time trends in life expectancy. His striking finding is "Humans are living longer than ever before. In fact, newborn children in high-income countries can expect to live to more than 100 years. Starting in the mid-1800s, human longevity has increased dramatically and life expectancy is increasing by an average of six hours a day."

http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity....

A comparison of period life expectancy tables and cohort life expectancy tables for men and women in Britain

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lifetables/period-and-cohort-l...

helps make the picture more clear. ("Period life expectancy" is what is usually reported for a whole country. But cohort life expectancy provides a better estimate of future lifespans of young people today,

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1...

and is still steadily on the rise around the world.) Life expectancy at age 40, at age 60, and at even higher ages is still rising throughout the developed countries of the world.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w...
People like their favorite brands and will post and upvote them. Costco for example. People love Costco as the anti-Walmart. That's not to say manipulation doesn't happen, but the author should at least mention this.
>And Google drive has an offline version of the app

How useful is that on a Chromebook that comes with 100GB/1TB of cloud storage and ~9.5GB of available local space?
That's just an issue with the Android app. On my Chromebook I can start documents offline no problem, and on the Android app you can work on offline documents without a connection.
totally agree with you. FF is really good at making people WOW but I'd really like to see usage numbers.
Open all your browsers at once in OSx
Ignore data and go in search of anecdotes? Wha?
Tl;dr? Don't bother.
I agree with your reasoning, but you assume that the outcome of the research on a given plant will very quickly lead to a total understanding of its ingredients and effects and that it will always be feasible to develop a technological process to deliver the same complex of ingredients in the form of a pill, neither of which has to be the case.
What I am stating is limited in scope, and your response is as disingenuous as it is snarky.

Your example likely demonstrates selective pressure within species--specifically urushiol in plants as a protective mechanism against herbivores. But you are arguing against the relevance of selective pressure. So you have beat up a straw man in which all things natural are better, but of course, I never argued that.

Do you believe in selective pressure? Do you think digesting cow milk conferred no evolutionary advantage?
There ARE studies on the prevalence of the genes for digesting dairy milk, and I think they back me up.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/11/science/11evolve.html?_r=0
As I said in another comment, how is that going to help on a Chromebook that comes with 100GB/1TB of free cloud storage and ~9.5GB of available local space?
It seemed pretty clear to me that he was talking about two specific metrics - child mortality and birth rate -, and using them as an example of how having data lets you destroy common myths about how far the developing world is lagging behind.

E.g. we still frequently see the "what do they need the X for, they don't have food and water" lumping all of Africa in one basket whenever someone presents a project to provide something other than pure basics to somewhere in Africa - people are still stuck with the images they got uised to with Live Aid irom 1985.

Meanwhile Arica as a whole is about to pass 80% cellphone penetration.
How could one spreadsheet bring down Drive?
Speed up Primefaces page load with remoteCommand partial update
Python as 4th language to get CUDA compiler
At some point, hopefully soon, engineers as a whole will start to realize they are being taken advantage of and learn how to negotiate better.

Anyone up for a company hack day where we get to work over time without getting paid overtime?
Yeah, I hate pull to refresh and a lot of these other "innovative" gestures. It's much more efficient to just have a refresh button, even if it's not as sexy.
He was out of phone as well as Internet contact. Maybe HN should send homing pigeons when a link gets popular?
Sorry, you missed my point...

Clearly some forms of pain and suffering are easily observed!

But what about the pain and suffering you can't observe? Insects? Plants? Microbes?

My point is, by placing the moral threshold at "observable pain and suffering", you are taking the easy way out.
I've had friends (...) wanted it to be perfect. And since "perfect" was unattainable they spent all their time playing video games instead.

I feel naked in front of that statement. :(