skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps the hypothesis would apply more to the approach/situation rather than the goal.

If depressed people despair that they cannot find new friends or lose some weight, maybe the depression might direct them to try something new. That's how I see the idea presented here. (Unfortunately, you're right that many people are quick to give up and deem a goal impossible.)
I have been appropriately corrected (by you and others), thank you.

I think I've spent so many years battling with anti-standards folks that I now take it personally when people advocate leaving out tags and not using a proper Doctypes and the countless other things Google does. In this case, I failed to do any research before making my argument, and have been deftly slain for it ;)
My environment shapes me far more than my genes. I know this because I'm not the same person who woke up this morning. Sure, my genes may predispose me to Alzheimers or Diabetes or cancer. They drive my physical characteristics, and maybe much more. But my essence is not pre-destined by my genes.
Modern medicine is largely built on advances made in non-medical fields like physics, chemistry and engineering, no? (E.g., it would be harder to do medicine without electricity.)

So I would expect advances in those fields to be crucial to future medical progress.
I disagree with this argument. I think another one's more salient. For a pack animal such as primal humans probably were, a certain type of moderate depression is a survival mechanism for dealing with low social status. Your appetite and libido decrease, you become inassertive, you accept mistreatment from others. Subjectively, this process and experience sucks, but lacking desire to mate with the alpha female keeps the omega male alive. Much more importantly (since nature doesn't care much about unsuccessful individuals) it's a survival mechanism for the pack; the depressive response ensures that, in extreme scarcity, the less successful individuals slink away and accept starvation, rather than challenging and potentially causing harm to the more important ones.

In modern society, this reaction is completely useless and utterly maladaptive. It also has a tendency to fire in people at all levels of social status, because modern society (with its dynamic, subtle, and multileveled play of social status) is confusing to the primal mind. So a depressive response can be rightly considered an illness.

Civilization expects everyone to assume the role most closely analogous to high beta/low alpha. People who have omega traits tend to be depressives; people who have too many alpha traits are sociopaths.
Ask HN: Learning about machine vision?
Any recommendations on where to start learning about machine vision?

A well-written (but not gargantuan) printed book would be preferred.
I love how you state that you're not a lawyer then present definitive legal advice.

How is charging different amounts to different people "dangerous legal territory"? Companies do this all the time...think about all the transactions where the price is haggled back and forth, or companies offering a special discount to startups or nonprofits, or offering specials on certain days of the week, etc.

Unless you're segmenting your groups by some protected status, like gender or religion, I don't see how it's a legal matter at all. But mostly I'd like to hear why you know that it is.
The very image and text used in the article implies that the original poster is correct.

Look at the example for 32 - it is given as 8 + 2x12. The hand on the right has two fingers extended. Clearly all fingers can be extended in this image, and then the number would be 8 + 5x12 = 68. If the left hand is used to count to 12, the number is 12 + 5x12, or 12+60=72.

Either the limit is 60, or the images/text in the article are wrong.
Parrots and dogs will tear apart their environments (and sometimes their bodies) under certain circumstances, such as extended loneliness. Seems similar to human depression.
The paper could benefit from a few more pictures
If this pans out, it could be revolutionary. They mention facial reconstruction in passing. I once knew a woman who was in a car crash and had to have one side of her face reconstructed a few years earlier. The surgeon did a wonderful job, but it was still a long and painful process for her.

Another use I can think of is for after heart bypass surgery, or other surgery where they have to crack the sternum. This putty could be used to fuse the sternum back together, which would probably speed healing.
You spelled "immediately" wrong. Instead it says "immediatly".
It's an IRS sting operation.
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You are either fishing for compliments or off base; I think the design looks pretty good.

Some notes:

* While doing the scan an animated graphic showing that something is happening would be nice user feedback.

* The front page claims the scan runs "every minute", but page=nbi says "As often as every 10 minutes". Which is it?

* Flash on homepage, sigh.

It seems well done and is potentially useful. Good luck.
My, it does go on a bit, eh? This sort of thing makes me wish the patent office could charge extra for unreasonable workload.
I don't like the embedded slideshow on the page. Try getting that information on the page in a different manner.
From the opening paragraph: [He] likens the relationship between mild and clinical depression to the one between normal and chronic pain. He sees both pain and low mood as warning mechanisms and thinks that, just as understanding chronic pain means first understanding normal pain, so understanding clinical depression means understanding mild depression.

In other words, yes, people with clinical depression find that it gets in the way of their daily life. His hypothesis is about why normal, healthy people suffer from low mood / mild depression from time-to-time, and what evolutionary advantage that might give us.
Who moved my 'Delete' key? Lenovo did. Here's why.
Thanks for the response. Not looking for compliments, but comparing to most sites around (specially from startups that I see here) I couldn't get to a design that I really liked.

-Good point on the animated graphic. I will see how to add it.

-The scan right now is every 10 minutes (during beta), but we will allow every minute in the future.

-The flash (from scribd) was an attempt to make it more friendlier... will see how to improve it.

Thanks,
Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On, by Tim O'Reilly
Should have called back and told them the bank was getting robbed by a crazy looking homeless person.

Would have had the entire police department there right away
Thanks, just fixed it. I don't know how my auto-corrector let is slip...
You are the second person that says that. You don't like it because it is from scribd or the layout/design itself?

I was between the slide show and a video, but thought the slide would be more accessible.
Sounds reasonable, leading to the prime exception I take with this whole line of inquiry known as "evolutionary psychology": the lack of falsifiability of any plausible hypothesis. You can handwave pretty much any narrative that somewhat fits the data and publish.
> Civilization expects everyone to assume the role most closely analogous to high beta/low alpha. People who have omega traits tend to be depressives; people who have too many alpha traits are sociopaths.

This is, far and away, one of the most intelligent and insightful comments I've read on Hacker News and explains a hell of a lot to me. I might quote you on this one later in an article I've got in the que to write: Is there any particular way you'd care for me to source you? I've got the permanent link and your screenname and can use that, but if you'd like it attributed differently I'd be happy to.

Thanks very much for the insight, and welcome to HN. I hope you stick around, this really got the gears turning in my head.
Doo Dah to the Dipity Doo
Ask HN: Please review SillyApp
I don't really want to deal with someone in Delhi when they can't understand that my no-fee bank account isn't supposed to be charged fees. Hence no-fee. Yet when they finally understand, they tell me 'oh, we can't deal with that, you'll have to go into your local branch'.

I really don't want to call 9-1-1 and be told 'oh, we can't deal with that, you'll have to go into your local branch' when I say my grandma is having a stroke.
Pretty good service, is this going to be a free app?

One suggestion I can give is make this service active. At the moment, the only big advantage I see from using this is the knowledge really quickly that something has gone wrong through email/sms, after which I need to do something about it. My idea is that if you implement some sort of a web-hook or callback mechanism to it, I think the use of this service can really shine.

For example, if a defacement or a DNS change occurs, you can have it alert you AND take a certain actions until you fix it, such as shutting down the servers or taking down the DNS servers (these examples are extreme, but just for example sake). Just a though.
I am in the beta program. It has a certain promise to the interface and the team is very responsive when it comes to bugs. However, there are frequent and sometimes significant bugs that have really made it impossible to do serious development. Everything is essentially in a webview with no low level socket connections and only limited native controls. All this being said, it's a lot better than phonegap and will likely win out in the long run.
In addition to tokenadult's comment, which I would expect is probably correct, I would relate this from my abnormal psych class: A number of conditions given the same label are known to be distinct, in that we can tell there's definitely more than one distinct thing going on, but nobody quite knows where to draw the line. Part of the purpose of the label is to give psychologists simply a word with an agreed meaning so they can discuss it with each other. As they narrow down exactly what the variants are and figure out where to draw the line, psychologists will give the variants new, separate names.

This is closely analogous to the justification given in the Design Patterns book for programmers. And in both the design pattern and the DSM case, there is widespread misunderstanding about the fact that the most important thing for both is simply giving things names, since we can not talk clearly about what we do not have proper names for.

Schizophrenia is the classic example, which started out as all but a synonym for "idiopathic mental disorder" and has gradually been refined into various distinct pieces, but not without controversy [1]. It remains an over-broad distinction, but of course that's because nobody really knows how to cut it down better yet.

Depression definitely would seem to be very similar; just look at all the types listed here [2], which I'd hardly expect to be an exhaustive list. Certainly in the popular press, which rarely takes the time to really nail down what they are talking about, "depression" is a term so broad it has hardly any meaning beyond "I feel sad a lot".

There's a lot of slicing and dicing done by the real professionals, which the popular press is entirely oblivious to. (I only sampled at the beginning, but I can at least say that's a true statement with confidence.) And there's more defining yet to be done. If you're interested in the subject, it's definitely an interesting one for hackers, seeing how the most complicated computing device known to man can go wrong. It can be... scary, though. (I don't have specific book recommendations though. Perhaps others will chime in.)

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia#Controversies_and...

2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_psychological_depressi...
Not really. When I got texted the rumor, google/yahoo/bing produced nothing while twitter had 4034 more results to show me within a few seconds of searching.
Version 0.1 = Start lo-fi
Purpose of Depression: Why you should listen to it rather than let drugs dull it
I'm doing this now, thanks for the suggestion.
Is this an assumption or a fact? Strangely enough, that comment alone seems reason enough not to even bother visiting the site.
And stop-loss orders involve money. Twitter does (should?) not.
If you're wondering why the "Orientation" control doesn't work, it seems it's using WebKit-specific CSS.

I'd always wondered where DaliClock got its fonts from, but apparently it's just got a hard-coded list of character segments.

A few years ago I figured out how DaliClock's might work in a shower-epiphany, and bundled together an experimental implementation in Python with the PyGame graphics library:

http://zork.net/~st/pydalitext.py

...there's a bunch of stuff I could have done to make the morphing even more smooth, or to more intelligently decide how to add and remove segments to a character's scanline during a morph, but I'm satisfied with the effect I got.
Much more importantly (since nature doesn't care much about unsuccessful individuals) it's a survival mechanism for the pack

I am not a biologist, but according to (what I understood of) "The Selfish Gene" and the like, the natural selection takes place on the level of genes. Since the successful reproduction of a gene is usually (barring some exceptional situations mentioned in the book) tightly coupled with the fate of the individual carrying the gene, reasoning about natural selection that operates on individuals typically leads to correct conclusions. Reasoning about natural selection on packs is on the other hand typically incorrect, if it leads to conclusions different from the individuals-based selection.

In your example, if you imagine two genes, one that tells the low status carrier to accept starvation, and the other that tells its carrier to fight for dear life no matter what its social status, the second gene will win and the first one will go extinct, even if from the point of view of the whole pack the first gene could be better.

This is not to say that your hypothesis is invalid, as I'm sure it can be rephrased in terms of genes/individuals without losing the core message.
Group selection has been proven not to work so you'd have to demonstrate a benefit for the depressed individual to justify it evolutionarily.
Flinch pricing:

http://venturehacks.com/articles/pricing
One thing that I don't really understand is why not adopt a new syntax to allow users to specify the version of Python a file should be imported and run under. Just have the interpreter pick 2.X by default, but if there's something like

##python-3.0

as the first line, then load the file with the 3.0 interpreter. This way you can intermix 2.X libraries with an otherwise 3.X project without having to deal with the whole 2to3 thing.
I thought the slideshow was different from what I expected and my eyes immediately went to it when it loaded. But it didn't strike me as bad, just keep in mind that because of the load time, it may be pulling people's eyes there instead of your page.
Not only is this particular hypothesis falsifiable, it has been more or less falsified (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection).

Also, it seems to me that in these kinds of discussions, a lot of these evolutionary-psychology stories are not meant to say "this is exactly why this thing evolved", but to demonstrate that there are reasons that such a thing could evolve. A lot of this kind of thinking is probably derived from arguing with anti-evolutionists who claim that such-and-such could never have evolved because it's apparently mal-adaptive.
Well I mainly made this to get myself comfortable with Cocoa. Maybe once I'm finished I can try learning something like Qt.
seems more likely to me that depression doesn't get in the way of survival and reproduction.
I'm assuming you use a debit card, because I imagine it's very difficult to live on cash only (you need something with a number to buy stuff online, for one thing.) I used to have a debit card only, but it's a bit scary: whoever steals your debit card number (or the card itself) has direct access to all money you have in your checking account. If they steal your credit card number on the other hand, then (a) they can only get up to your limit (which I keep low) and (b) you can challenge the bill and not pay and you are protected by law in some way. As long as you pay the bill in full at the end of each month, you can't lose.
Oh my. What if our entire universe is just a role-playing game created by a crazy patent-seeker in another universe, and we are the NPCs?

At least, I'm not consciously a paying player. Are any of you?
x17online.com were the first to report he was rushed to UCLA but even they acknowledge that it was TMZ who broke the story that he was dead.
The author list alone strikes me as a dead giveaway.
Relatedly, you not selling to HN posters, people on Slashdot, starving college students, or people who are morally opposed to spending money for software.

I don't mean to step on any toes, but I've heard "$20 is sort of pricey for a business -- why not make it $10?" enough to be skeptical of the advice on pricing from other people, unless they are saying Charge More.
"The DSM-IV organizes each psychiatric diagnosis into five levels (axes) relating to different aspects of disorder or disability:

Axis I: clinical disorders, including major mental disorders, as well as developmental and learning disorders

Common Axis I disorders include depression, anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder, ADHD, Autism, phobias, and schizophrenia."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manu...
I would believe it if it were WANGBIZ.edu
Yes, my housemate's dog has separation anxiety which is not good (but he was adopted from a shelter).

We hypothesize he gets all anxious because when we are leaving and locking him in his (reinforced) cage - he doesn't know if we'll ever return. Which is different from humans - as in we know that it is only a matter of time.
Not only is this particular hypothesis falsifiable, it has been more or less falsified (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection).

That wikipedia link has absolutely nothing to do with the falsification of the narrative he proposed.

Also, it seems to me that in these kinds of discussions, a lot of these evolutionary-psychology stories are not meant to say "this is exactly why this thing evolved", but to demonstrate that there are reasons that such a thing could evolve.

I have no problems with narratives and possible explanations but if you scour the literature you will not find, on average, the qualifiers of uncertainty. I _do_ have a problem with people who take a casual glance at said literature and present their arguments with no degree of uncertainty. Just-so stories strike me as the epitome of intellectual laziness.

A lot of this kind of thinking is probably derived from arguing with anti-evolutionists who claim that such-and-such could never have evolved because it's apparently mal-adaptive.

I have no idea how this type of thinking came about and have no problem admitting it.
Wow, that's funny. When I read it, I was thinking, "Can this (or that) really make a significant difference.?". Then I thought, "Well, it must since it's on Google's tips page.". Bzzzzzzzt. Wrong.

I feel sorry for all the people who instantly started hacking (as in machete) up their entire app based on this advice.
Here is another potential one that is in beta. Ansca's development environment is based on the Lua game programming environment and compiles to native iPhone. Have not yet had time to check it out yet but it seems to be very promising.

http://www.anscamobile.com/corona/
The question is not if it's valid or invalid (which is another debate) but rather is it faster or slower.

I'd like to see Google provide facts and figures. When Steve Souders worked at Yahoo! a large part of recommendations were backed up by experimental data collected by Tenni Theurer (my manager's wife, coincidentally).

I'd like to see Google provide the same kind of experimental data for their guidelines. If saving 14 bytes is a network saving, where are the page render tests in browsers, particularly "A-grade" browsers?
Do you think this paper held up to "rigid peer review"?
I've used it occasionally. I had to work with one Windows box (for IE testing), to which I always forgot the password.
wouldn't you think, that as a "celebrity" he'd want people to know it's his site.
Google homepage is fine, they need to spend more time on maps.google.com. I wonder what the true return is on investing in the analysis, the number crunching, etc. just to save a few bits of data.
And lionhearted would have been fined for reporting a false emergency. Meanwhile, crazy homeless guy gets off scot free.
Interesting question. Keep in mind that for most of human history it was challenging to just get enough calories, so the question of figuring out the optimal diet is a fairly recent development.

And, per the line you mention, the established view at the time was that the cure for worldwide malnutrition, etc, was to figure out better ways of producing protein. This was actually what TCC was trying to do initially in his research before he discovered that animal protein causes health problems.

Notice that today everything is marketed as a health food. I was watching TV earlier and saw a commercial for "Sunny D" that essentially sells it (yucky orange flavored sugar water) as a health food :)

One note: The first bit of the book is a bit sensational, but stick with it -- the claims are all nicely substantiated.
I think this is very interesting but also somewhat misleading. Her traditional media connections, e.g. her label, helped her accumulate 30k fans on Twitter which she can then leverage in interesting ways.

Not that this isn't interesting. However the point remains that conventional means remain a good way of starting a following, social networks are a good way of leveraging them.
I know more about the book publishing industry than the music one, but I'd guess that to get million dollar advances you'd have to be a band with a track record, or at least one in a bidding war between labels.
IANAB either, but pack survival could have a role in gene transmission, it would just be more indirect. Suppose pack A is full of extreme non-depressives and B is depressive. Highlander style, only one male in A will survive while B can maintain a back-up stock in case accident befalls the alpha.

That said I don't see why the gene expression couldn't be:

if (alpha) {
act like alpha
} else {
act depressed
}

individually beneficial and pack beneficial simultaneously.
Sure. I also don't live credit-free; we've used installment credit to buy an appliance or two, and of course we've made car payments. But credit cards? What's the huge win?

As for debit card loss liability: I've had cards stolen numerous times, and I've never had trouble getting charges reversed.
Yep. Here's a really good example from EY:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/kw/the_tragedy_of_group_selectionism...

"The mathematical conditions for group selection overcoming individual selection were too extreme to be found in Nature. Why not create them artificially, in the laboratory? Michael J. Wade proceeded to do just that, repeatedly selecting populations of insects for low numbers of adults per subpopulation. And what was the result? Did the insects restrain their breeding and live in quiet peace with enough food for all?

No; the adults adapted to cannibalize eggs and larvae, especially female larvae."

(Here's the actual paper:

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/73/12/4604.pdf

)
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a/b test it if you have decent traffic. You have to make sure you get a statistically significant sample.
It doesn't fit. A lot of that information would be interesting, but it takes extra time to load, and because of the small size is hard to read. If you actually put the information on the page in an appealing way, I'd be much happier to look over it.