skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But the genetic specialization has weakened the previous genetic diversity of food.

This is indeed true, but all crops we eat have lost diversity. Domestication implies selection on domestication traits, which means that there will be a drop in diversity. This is why we eat corn and not teosinte, large delicious tomatoes rather than tiny tomatoes, etc. We have selected on variability for certain traits to give us better crops.

> Rendering our food supply more brittle, because we've created plants which need a very precise, artificial environment filled with external inputs.

This is just farming. Agriculture by definition is changing landscapes by adding external plants, and tendering them. This has not made our food supply more brittle, but has allowed a degree of specialization that has allowed us to feed more mouths with less inputs.

> Now, we've added GMOs, which have decreased genetic diversity even more. (Massive monoculture plantings all with the same genes, with even more artificial needs.)

GMOs have nothing to do with diversity. You can breed varieties, crossing wild populations with domesticated ones, and then add in a transgene at the end. This doesn't undo the diversity you've added through wide crosses beforehand.

We grow monoculture crops because we need consistency for consumers. Look at apples: sure we could have apples that are all genetically different in an orchid. But traits like flowering time, color, taste, texture would be all different. Consumers would eat less apples because many are just gross, and this would lead to huge wastes in agriculture. There's a reason we do monoculture.

> The reason sexual reproduction succeeded was it creates as diverse of a genome as possible. By reducing that process, and substituting what we think of as "better", and then making it so 80% of our food supply shares the same genome, we're really setting ourselves up for a fall.

See above. But also, all organisms experience such risks. Even diverse ones. This is why extinction happens. Modern molecular breeding techniques greatly alleviates this because we can see which varieties confer resistance to a pathogen or pest, and then breed in those select traits. We maintain consistency in product but add borrow diversity from resistance loci.

Borlaug's success was very simple: no GMO, just simple breeding techniques. He bred for semi-dwarf traits, which allow most of a plant's energy to go towards creating grain rather than vegetative mass. How is this inefficient? Why would it be more optimal for us to dump fertilizer and use agriculture space and have it go towards vegetative mass rather than something that feeds people? I agree agriculture is not great for land, but our best option is to make it as efficient as possible.

I suggest you study breeding and agriculture if you wish to argue on these topics. These incorrect views spread very harmful misinformation around.
That is for the official record. Even Yahoo won't know how many users' data was compromised via NSA backdoors. A regular user should never trust Yahoo and other such services.
Ah, sorry, I was using it in the locality sense (as in, coherent access). Admittedly less common, but not uncommon, in algorithms; downright confusing if you're in an architecture frame of mind.
They do. Both do. No one is immune to data entry in the medical world.
Three points:

1. This is one of those things where you want it to be all-or-nothing. "30% formally proved" is completely useless; it just means that the inevitable bug or security hole is in the other 70%.

2. You're limited to writing constructs that can be formally verified. (My understanding is that this means that it's a bit more difficult than "let's formally verify Ruby and then run all the Ruby programs on our verified Ruby"; some programs will need to be rewritten and others will simply not be verifiable.)

3. We still have to solve the politics problems that already are pervasive in some of these environments (e.g. people who intentionally leave easy bugs in their code and then fix them later so that they look like they made more changes as measured by a KLOC count).
Derek Siver's observation back in 2005 that ideas are a modifier on execution is a slightly better recounting of this point: http://sivers.org/multiply

People can bitch and kvetch about elevator-pitch/vision level descriptions of products, but such analyses are always shallow, and particularly for interesting products almost always miss the point.

Always look to the execution.

(on the flip side, the flaws of poorly executed projects can often be very easy to sum up)
Ask HN: For SEO Does it Matter if the Domain is .net or .org Instead of .com?
That was a very good read. Kind of scary to think about. I waste a lot of time online, so I'm not immune, but I don't play addictive games anymore. I can get addicted to them. If I start playing a game I might end up playing it nonstop for a week. But I don't try new games. It doesn't seem fun. Just like I wouldn't start using addictive drugs.

The same is true of websites. If I just stop going to those websites I'm addicted to for a week, it breaks the addiction and I won't go back. I have like 20 messages on reddit that I never get around to replying to, and bunch of Facebook posts that feel like more work to read than it's worth. My RSS feed overfilled and I haven't checked my email in months.

The point is, unlike drugs, games don't stay fun forever. You get bored and quit. And if you quit you lose the temptation to go back to them.
CBT gets quite a lot of props. It legitimately deserves many of them but probably gets more than it should, especially relative to "black magic" psychotherapies.

The main reason CBT is so popular in the industry is that it was designed from the ground up to be testable. CBT practitioners and CBT-friendly researchers have run a lot of tests, and they have found that CBT is effective.

For a long time, other modalities either weren't tested in this way or were only tested under CBT-friendly conditions. And this is a real black mark against them. But since CBT started eating their lunch from 2001 or so, other schools that could afford to started doing their own tests.

Guess what happened when psychoanalysts started running their own tests? If you guessed that they went home crying and gave everything up for CBT, you would be wrong. Instead, psychoanalytic-friendly researchers have found (empiricially!) that psychoanalytic treatments are effective, except for schizophrenia, just like CBT-friendly researchers found that CBT was effective for everything including schizophrenia (which really should have been a tipoff that something was amiss in the first place TBQFH). In other words, which therapy gets found to be effective depends a lot on which therapy the researcher wants to be found effective.

There are a ton of problems in measuring psychotherapy. Researcher bias is an obvious one. Ensuring that the things you're measuring are actually the things that you're supposed to be measuring (e.g. that the CBT patients are all actually getting by-the-book CBT, psychodynamic are getting psychodynamic, control are getting...what?) is another huge problem.

Across thousands of studies, the biggest variable in effectiveness of psychotherapy seems to be the therapist him- or herself. Some are drastically noticeably effective across a large number of patients and most are not. The effects of treatment modality, assuming you can pin it down at all, are seldom very significant, especially when blinds and control are used.

Other reasons CBT tends to be favored: emphasis on short duration is insurance friendly. Also, the 'cognitive' adjective implies that it has something to do with recent advances in neuroscience, which it doesn't.

(FWIW I've had both CBT and analysis, benefited from both in different ways.)
Where the coding craze is going overboard
Local Library Would Like to Remind Everyone Its Shit Is Free
Enemy Of The State [1], the Tony Scott Joint, is a sort of follow-on, sort of homage to The Conversation, which is in my opinion the best American movie ever made. It's a worthy double bill.

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120660/
Change would happen, but not the same changes as we're causing.

But you're right, there is a large component of self interest in preserving the environment, an environment that works prett well for humans.
Assuming your goal is to have a successful startup company, I've often wondered what the optimal trade-off between time-per-startup idea and number of startup attempts is.

For instance, I could spend a year working on two really big, elaborate ideas that I have, but if they fail (likely), then I've wasted ("learned what not to do" if you're the optimistic type) a year working on only two ideas.

Or... I could invest my time in a bunch of little startup ideas. Make one simple webapp a week, and out of 52 of them, one should stick, right?

But the problem is that in general, the more time and effort you invest into any particular idea, the higher quality the product of your idea will become, and the better a chance it has for success.

So, I'm not sure what the best route is. If you look at which companies have historically been successful (FB, Twitter, Instagram), you see that the founder spent almost all of their time on that one idea. But, this may be an example of selection bias. It could be the case that the biggest successes require a huge time-investment in one project, but the probability of success for any random project is very low. In a sense, they won a lottery of a sort. Perhaps your chance of success -- but not mega-success -- becomes more realistic if you focus on many smaller ideas.
NSA can reportedly tap smartphone users' data
I would generally recommend against getting a legal cofounder, even in the medical world. They're not contributing nearly as much as the other cofounders in the beginning, especially when you're building a tech-focused startup.

Make friends with a lawyer. Read up on everything legal you can. Pay your lawyer friend when you need lawyer advice and lawyer action. But don't give them not only full-time, but founder, level status unless they are truly a full-time founder.

Plenty of others share their early-stage lawyer advice freely so startups don't need to get in this situation. Check out:

* http://startuplawyer.

* http://rockhealth.com/resources/startup-elements/hipaa-compl...

* http://rockhealth.com/resources/startup-handbook/
It's just saying that clicking there you find an actual map.
Intent intent intent. The analogy of grabbing the binder on the back counter fits perfectly, because it shows the intent.

Googlebot is incapable of intent. It is a computer program that simply crawls accessible pages. It cannot distinguish between a website for which access is obviously not intended (i.e., Weev's case of accessing *other people's private information) and a website for which access is intended (i.e., a public Facebook or LinkedIn page).
No. From my experience it does not matter between these three. Previously a lot of people thought that .info domains had been penalized by google as they were abused (cheap domains to buy) but there was no substantial data to backup the claim.
I think that's a matter of tool quality. If they're high quality tools/libraries/documentation, then it could just become another secondary skillset like writing good tests and using version control.

For motivation, talk to the folks worried about costs of substantial failures. This is really analogous to insurance. An unpleasant, but tolerable amount of overhead that gives you a maximal bound on how bad a failure can be.
I get the sense that this post is OP's attempt to accomplish #1.
seriously, why ? are our eyes getting worse ? have centuries of publishers gotten it wrong all this time, and should everything have been 'large print' edition from the start ?

I'm 40+ and I should probably wear glasses for reading, but I really don't 'get' the big font hype.
could you unpack your remarks in a bit more detail?
for a startup, i would not even be worrying about this. i rank them like this-

1. .com
2. .org
3. .net

in the end, if you're launching and MVP don't worry about this too much.
Options are key. I love headphones. I've spent more money on headphones than most[0], but a lot of the time when I'm working on some types of problems, I don't want to listen to anything and I don't want distractions or anything sitting on my head. Not everyone works well with headphones, so it is reasonable that there should be places you can get away to. Lacking a space like that, you oftentimes seek out a third place like a coffeeshop that may not be quiet but at least doesn't have chatter of immediate relevance to you.

I really wonder if we've lost something by not having more spaces in our life like libraries where the cultural norm is to be silent and to enforce silence in the space so it may remain a sanctuary from noise.

[0] ironically, I've also made more as the models I bought appreciated in value significantly, so yay!
Well, sure, but that's so reductive as to be meaningless. There's a strong element of self-interest in preserving an environment that we're well adapted to, and as some of the changes threatening that environment are anthropogenic, changing our behavior is a perfectly rational thing to do.
Fixed - thanks Davedx!

https://github.com/josephwegner/stories.wegnerdesign.com/com...
Are deadlines evil?
No two ideas are ever the same; in the details... Sure Abraham Lincoln filed for a patent on the essence of 'friendster' and other followed suit; but the details make the difference.
Having done a bit of surfing and having been around a long time, I sometimes think of these things in surfing terms. Apple caught a couple of good waves and rode them masterfully, but missed a few others. Same with Microsoft. Microsoft is looking a little tired and might want to stick to safer waters, but Apple has another great ride in them for the next wave, if they can keep others from stealing the wave.
I know a pregnant woman trying to get information about which vaccines to administrate to her future baby. She either get as answer "do them all as there's absolutely no risk' or 'vaccines are bad'. So it's not an organised group publishing position papers as you asked. But she has a very hard time to get explanations of the implications of not administrating a vaccine against usually benign affections.

Also, I just found this article mentioning that the cdc used children as guinea pigs for a new vaccine. Of course i am not sure it is true but it makes me suspicious and distrustful. How could i believe them blindly as some commenters seem to do if they do such covert operations?
It's interesting that both Twitter and Facebook evolved quite a bit from where they started. The newsfeed and chat have both altered how I use Facebook and made it much more like twitter for me. When twitter first came out though I don't really see how anyone could have claimed it was a Facebook clone.
Some of the domains are being auctioned by GoDaddy (TDNAM). They can only be bought through GoDaddy. There are others that can be bought through Sedo, SnapNames, Namejet and Dynadot. Unfortunately, there is nothing I can do about that.
Thanks for the correction. I recalled history correctly since I was young at the time and failed to fact check.
This Party Kind of Sucks
User experience.
Looking for feedback on seats.io - interactive seating charts
>for when one party has dominance too long we get into situations like we are today.

Yeah, and right now it's the Democrat/Republican party.

You aren't going to change anything switching from Democrat>Republican or vice versa.
Wow, been looking for something like this for some time... thank you.
A circuit that calculates the nth Fibonacci number or performs quicksort. I imagine any synthesis would have to generate something that is effectively an iterative solution: instead of producing n identical circuit blocks for n calls of the function, it would only have one circuit used over and over again. But this defeats the ability to exploit the potential parallelism that could be achieved in the execution of the algorithm.
There are strict liability violations, but they tend to be things like traffic ordinances, not felonies. For example driving a motor vehicle in a wilderness is a strict liability offense, though its a misdemeanor punishable potentially by jail time. I think those are very troubling, and I'm against jail time for any non-violent crime, but they're not that pervasive.

But lots of otherwise troubling laws aren't strict liability. E.g. Child pornography possession requires knowledge of both possession and its status as child pornography. Drug laws are generally not strict liability.

Negligence law is civil, not criminal, except to the extent that reckless disregard is a state of mind satisfying intent requirements for a few limited gross negligence crimes (e.g. Locking the doors of a tightly packed nightclub).
But still very much solvable in the specific domains of real world applications.
Snowden in Exile
So maybe we should generate our own curves. I propose something as follows:

1. Locate a public string. A tweet or a quote should suffice.

2. SHA-512 the string to obtain a seed.

3. Use that seed to generate b, and calculate N = #E(Fp) = n * h, and choose a base point P. Of course we need to ensure that these parameters are safe against known attacks.

4. Mandate that the new set of parameters MUST be supported wherever NIST prime curves are supported.

The last step is probably the most difficult. You don't need that if you don't need to interoperate with other implementations though.
Hopefully you've found one of the 52 ideas awesome enough to spend a little longer on. How enthusiastic / passionate you are about it is a big factor in how successful will be.
> I think you are saying that we can't be sure that the author of the article kindly submitted here really knows what he is talking about.

That's true in all intellectual pursuits, and particularly true in science -- there are no truths, only evidence.

> ... but he also hasn't had any influence on the clinical practice of psychiatry in the United States, the main topic of the article.

He published in the same journals as U.S. researchers and therapists, working to the same standards (or lack thereof) and with the same contempt for science that is a hallmark of the field. It certainly does indict the entire field, or do you think Europe is located on a different planet?

Since you seem to think Holland is located on an alien moon, here's a similar recent scandal involving a Harvard professor:

http://chronicle.com/article/Marc-Hauser-Resigns-From/128296...

Quote: "Marc D. Hauser, the Harvard psychologist found responsible for eight counts of scientific misconduct by the university, has resigned ..."

In scientific fields, such misbehavior isn't tolerated, and exposures of this kind end careers (example Jan Hendrik Schön, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal). Hauser, on the other hand, is, in his own words, moving on, exploring "some exciting opportunities in the private sector" and that he had been involved in some "extremely interesting and rewarding work focusing on the educational needs of at-risk teenagers."

So this public fraud, this person who holds science and professional responsibility in contempt, is going to be allowed to treat at-risk teenagers? Only in psychology.
CBT gets props because its empirical results have shown to be more effective than the traditional talk therapy approach. It's been around for a long time, has been studied enough for us to be confident that it makes a real difference, and I consider it as medicine for thoughts. Of course there's no way for us to quantify its precise method of action, so it's not that different than making the observation that the bark of a certain tree seems to reduce pain and inflammation, but if the burden of proof is to show direct causation from our thoughts and CBT to a better outlook on life, we might as well be asking about the nature of human consciousness.

CBT is a framework more than it is a manual, and not nearly as robotic as you've described. All therapy requires a human relationship to be successful. You have to trust your therapist to believe in the things they say, and that belief is a prerequisite for putting in the effort to reshape your thoughts and attitudes, but what's so robotic about a therapist asking you to explore the origin of a preconceived notion? About them asking you to be mindful of those type of thoughts? On coaching you to intercept those negative thought patterns and replace them with improved ones?

I think chalking up the efficacy of therapy to hope and placebo is a bit disingenuous. Yes, belief in change is a precursor to real change -- no therapist can help someone who isn't willing to believe or even want to change -- and in a way, the therapist's role is to guide you in your own endogenous healing process. However, there needs to be some rigor in the way they guide you to break bad patterns and replace them with better ones.

In a way, the therapist's challenge is like inception: how can I plant something in someone else's head but make them feel like they came up with it themselves? I think most of us could look at someone with low self esteem and negative thoughts and tell them what's wrong and what they should say or do or believe instead. However, that process needs rigor, and one of the best tools in the toolbox is to increase someone's mindfulness, and one of the best ways to do that is CBT.

I think overall you're a bit dismissive of it as a shallow, robotic approach when really it's a simple, repeatable, controllable frontline intervention. It's not going to work for deep-seated issues, but I think of it as almost being a prerequisite before those deeper issues can be tackled. I am of course speaking from personal experience, in both myself and what I've observed with others.
According to Phornoix, Chris Wilson of Intel wrote this in a Git commit:

We do not condone or support Canonical in the course of action they have chosen, and will not carry XMir patches upstream.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQ1NjY

Phoronix's link to said commit does not work, so it is hard to infer context. But I would assume that "the course of action they have chosen" refers to working on Mir in the first place rather than contributing to Wayland. If that's the case, can't say I really blame Intel.
As someone who used to be in to audiophilia, debates on sound quality of equipment and the supposed night and day differences are an incredible exercise in futility and purchase justification. Smoke some cannabis and $5 earbuds fed by a no-name MP3 player will deliver more detail than the custom modded Sennheisers fed by an amp and DAC stack imported from a boutique in Belgium would have gotten you otherwise.