skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Full disclosure: a paywall prevents me from actually reading the article. However, to your comment, I would say that this doesn't actually prove that people can treat themselves. If it were proven that people truly are competent to treat themselves, I think more people would have done so. Once you are in a cycle of despair, it isn't always easy to see any way out. Every single option is void of hope of any sort. Broken hope.

Virtual therapy is hope in itself. I remember my parents taking me to a therapist when I was 14-15. I got caught shoplifting and they wanted to make sure I was ok. I really wasn't - I know now that I'd been mildly depressed for years by that point - but the therapy was wasted. Why? A combination of the man being a Christian therapist (still with degrees) and them making me sign a release form - nothing I said to the man was private from my own parents. This was not a safe place and I never trusted the man. No trust and a high likelihood of judgement from multiple parties (and a high chance of disproval or over-attention) made me shut up. Virtual? I'd consider that now, especially if for free. Best of all, it is private. Safe. No one could even see me go into the therapists office. Other people have issues trying to find a therapist that they click with. A computer is allowed to be off, to be a little cold, to be somewhat matter-of-fact: Humans need a bit of caring and empathy to go along with it.

So much of the stuff online seems like a scam. My father, during a depressed phase, spent a thousand or two on a program that basically said 'think yourself happy'. Common advice, which doesn't work. Also basic is 'just have faith in god (generally christian, but not always) and it will pass'. Actual help in any form is in short supply. Good sources stop well before practical help and tell you to talk to someone.

If my words sound a bit crazy, and not like normal people think, good. This is the stuff I have dealt with for the last 25 years or so in varying degrees. I generally haven't had access to a therapist or even be able to afford a doctor, so I'm just stuck. It isn't always bad, but it is always in the background.
Ask HN: Difference between Blue ocean strategy and The innovator's dilemma
Crimea also has been historically part of Russia/USSR until 1954.

(I'm French, just stating)
http://www.reddit.com/r/standalonn/comments/2dsal5
It seems like the proposed cosmological natural selection is fundamentally different from biological natural selection in the sense that there is no actual pruning. That is to say that given a universe all of its children will survive and reproduce based solely on their laws of physics, independent of what all the other universes do. This would mean that all possible universes which could be reached through this mechanism will be reached, wheras in evolution as it happens on Earth, most of the potential organisms never exist because there ancestor got out-competed at some point.
These rule problems can be a distraction from actual role playing. Might be a good time to try the White Box rules.
>Absolutely. I hope that every year of my life, I look back, and laugh at the things I 'knew' 10 years ago. Is it the same for you?

To an extent yes, but that slows down the older you get.

>The oft-repeated idea of an "underdeveloped" teenage brain is a bit old. Scientific American did a piece on it in 2007.

That article itself is outdated. There are numerous studies done since then that support my assertion.

Here's a few articles.

2011 http://www.edinformatics.com/news/teenage_brains.htm

2011 http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/10/teenage-brains/dob...

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1411647...

http://phys.org/news/2010-12-brain-fully-mature-30s-40s.html

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000087239639044371370...

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1241194...
It looks like there was a misunderstanding here. It's ambiguous from your original post whether you oppose unschooling in general or the specific approach of the author of this article. It's clear now that you meant the latter and as someone who generally supports unschooling, I do see your point. If I had kids to unschool, I would try to encourage them towards more intellectual pursuits. And if they were anything like I was as a kid, they would enthusiastically take part without coercion (unless I required them to conform to a rigid educational program, in which case coercion would be required frequently).
Fun game, i like it!

Minor: In the gameover pop-up the social buttons only show the facebook logo, though the links point to fb/twitter/plus
A fictional catalog of possible products
> This is completely orthogonal to whether a virtual therapist is as effective as a real therapist, which is the subject of the story.

No, it's completely relevant. Can a scientist's work be automated? No, not really -- too much originality and depth of thought for modern AI to imitate. Can a hamburger cook's work be automated? Well, yes, indeed it's happening.

If a virtual therapist is as effective as a real one, this calls into question the value of a real therapist, as well as the school of thought to which he/she belongs.

It may be instructive to know that psychiatrists have given up on talk therapy entirely and are now pursuing what they call "biological psychiatry", which is something vaguely resembling neuroscience, but with a lot of drug prescriptions being written.

> If treatment A and treatment B are equally effective, that doesn't tell you anything about treatment C.

True, but it does suggest the Placebo Effect as an explanation for the lack of difference. As it happens, a number of studies that compared therapies have come to that conclusion.

> Aside from all that, I'd love to read up on this research -- happen to have any links or recommended starting points?

Sure -- start here:

http://arachnoid.com/building_science

Then go here:

http://arachnoid.com/trouble_with_psychology

Then here:

http://news.sciencemag.org/2013/05/nimh-wont-follow-psychiat...
> someone who's educational experience is walking around the woods unsupervised?

That would be "whose".

Nobody cares about education before degree level, so I suspect they'll be fine.
> we don't really respect teachers or education in the US

That's probably the most important answer right there. If teachers had the same, or even higher, status in society as doctors and lawyers (had just as many tv-series where they were superstars etc.) we wouldn't be having this discussion at all.

The same issues with measuring performance exists in those other jobs as well, but the perspective on teaching is always from the top. Everone's an expert in a way that's not true for law and medicine (to carry on the metaphor above).
I think it might be wishful thinking to imagine that kids left to their own devices will identify and persue useful skills without adult guidance. Even if every kid who watches cartoons develops an interest in stop motion animation, how many stop motion animators do we need? How would you even understand how to start with quake modding without knowing basic math and reading comprehension?

When I was at school there were kids who would frequently "unschool" themselves by skipping class, the interests they developed were mostly related to vandalism and other petty crime.
No, I think you get the wrong impression here. This is not a city that has grown to 120k over 1000 years and which disappeared in a blink, this is a village that was overgrown because of the coal mine activity in the past 100 years, and just like in all modern countries which made the switch from coal to something else, the economic activity went somewhere else and people with it.

So no, it's actually very similar to cities in northen France, West Germany and South Belgium which lived from coal as well and quickly dropped in population as well. And the same thing is happening in Detroit as the auto industry dissappeared as well. It's all the same thing at work.
>If a virtual therapist is as effective as a real one, this calls into question the value of a real therapist, as well as the school of thought to which he/she belongs.

The point I'm making is that just because therapy is equally effective as a sympathetic friend (as you mentioned), that doesn't mean that the virtual therapist is equally effective as well. The research simply hasn't been done to back that up.

Edit: To be more clear, nothing in this article speaks to the efficacy of the virtual therapist whatsoever. It could be completely useless, for all we know. I think you're making a lot of leaps here.
Hey even during natural disasters in japan there is no looting going around. So why would you expect graffiti and crime to suddenly occur with reduced population and unemployment ? It's just not in the culture in japan. Plus, this kind of behavior usually comes from youngsters, and there are less and less of them in Yubari so it's EVEN less likely to occur in the first place.
Why wait for the state to teach your kid to read? I wouldn't trust an elementary public school teacher to build IKEA furniture let alone teach my kid the most important skill he'll ever learn.

Most importantly, once they learn how to read they won't have to wait for or trust the state to teach them anything ever again; it's all there for free on the internet and in library books.
Buttons – When states are gone
Your model is overly simplistic. Please add more stochastic behavior for fluctuating oil prices as well as economic cyclacilaties.
It looks like you're missing the middle initial, which a lot of businesses use and also easy to permutate through only 26 letters.
The "euthanasia" actually began in September 1939. October was when the law was passed, which was backdated to September 1st.

This isn't just to be pedantic, I'm currently reading The Third Reich trilogy by Richard J. Evans, and this is an instance of the Nazi emphasis on appearing as though they had a legal basis for their actions, even well into the dictatorship. It's one of the most bizarre parts of the story to me.

The euthanasia was attempted to be done in secret, so under what circumstance the backdating (or even the existence) of the law could possibly have been useful is beyond me. Under Nazi victory, those involved were safe from prosecution, and in case of defeat, the law could not have saved them.

It's like something straight out of the movie Brazil, though not being fiction and having resulted in the death and suffering of countless real people makes not possible to enjoy the insanity of the situation.

I highly recommend the books, though I don't exactly have a weak stomach, and many parts were quite difficult for me. It reminded me quite a bit of Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation, which was also extremely long and dense with suffering.
Well you are posting at an extremely tech oriented group.
I believe i speak for like 90% here that we all want to hear about the tech* wooops.

Shed some light in how you made everything. This is what interests us mostly.
In conversation in Facebook, Skype, et al, they usually have a number of smiley faces.

Some people use them all the time. And they don't have to be graphics, they can be done in text too. :]
Or we can maintain the status quo by not using that website.
You mean like Apple refusing Pointer Events first, or Mozilla refusing WebP, NaCL/PNaCl/Pepper, trying to refuse Web Audio, MS refusing WebGL, Canvas, Web Audio, WebRTC.

Every vendor fights their own turf battles. Not-invented-here seems to also be a big issue in standards committees.
I don't agree, some of the people that use emoticons all the time are actually older than 40.
Doing all of this at 16 how do you compare to your peers? Are you atypical or ordinary? If ordinary then maybe things have changed in the 15 years since I was in high school.

And if you're responsible for your own major bills and expenses like housing, food, clothes and transportation then even more kudos to you. I'd be extremely surprised if that was the typical situation of an average 16 yo American.
Have you read The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher? I recommend it to you and would be curious what you think of it. Here's a Cliffs Notes abbreviated version, just listing what the seven lessons are:

http://www.athenstalks.com/node/179729

And here's the whole essay (which is still pretty short):

http://www.worldtrans.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt

Of the "seven lessons", I think the lesson of the bells was the one I found most damaging. When I get interested in a subject, I would want to study that subject deeply, intensely, to the exclusion of everything else. Having to learn a subject like math divided into TINY LITTLE CHUNKS, mere drips and drabs spread out over an entire YEAR, takes something that could have interesting and makes it infuriating. Being expected to turn your interest on and off like a light switch when bells ring at arbitrary intervals...just didn't work for me.

I'm sure it depends on the student. Kids are resilient; I think most manage to learn a fair bit despite their schooling and some learn a bit due to it. For myself, I'm pretty sure school damaged my intrinsic motivation and wasted my time; I feel like I learned much more despite school than due to it.
Code.org K-5 Computer Science Curriculum Beta
The name seems wrong: Pavlov is famous for the development of classical conditioning; that is, you train one stimulus to trigger another. As far as I know, classical conditioning is about involuntary behaviours.

Instead, the startup seems to follow the old law of effect from Thorndike: "Behaviours associated with pleasure and comfort are more likely to be repeated, whereas those associated with displeasure are less likely to be repeated".

Combining extrinsic motivation and punishment doesn't seem a winning strategy.

"Pink warns against contingent or 'if-then' rewards: if you perform, then you get paid, or if you do your homework, then you get cake. He shows how contingent rewards lead to a very short-term motivation, a higher likelyhood of unethical or risky behaviour (cheating), and poorer performance. Therefore, he recommends that extrinsic rewards be given only after the fact as a bonus, not as a carrot." – Dorian Peters, Interface Design

My guess is that the Pavlok would help for short term accomplishments, but it's not going "to create the conditions for people to motivate themselves (Edward Deci)".

I'm not an expert; It would be interesting to read an actual psychologist's take on the Pavlok product.
The answer is obvious -- all you have is time on your hands, and that time is easily filled reading mystery novels at the local lending library while waiting for your welfare check.

> ... when you're basically one step away from homelessness?

American society is so immersed in conventional signs of status that it's possible to shamelessly define people in terms of what they lack. Homeless. Jobless. Degree-less. Car-less. People who live in hotels are homeless, strictly speaking. Many New Yorkers are car-less because there's good public transport. I lived in New York City for about five years in the 1960s and it would never have occurred to me that not having a car made me a second-class person.

In the U.S., the view of rich people as seen by poor people is wildly distorted -- the rich are jetting around, wrecking their exotic cars, throwing wild expensive parties. And the view of poor people as seen by rich people is wildly distorted -- the poor live in cardboard boxes, do drugs, drink cheap wine, and so forth. Both equally inaccurate.

The 2008 financial crisis had a number of causes, but one of them was a federal program to get people into houses they actually couldn't afford. The mortgage meltdown was partly the result of this program that created an artificial scarcity (and price rise) of real estate and a widespread disregard of people's inability to pay their mortgages.

My point? Being homeless isn't the worst thing that could happen to someone.
Card Trick Leads to New Bound on Data Compression (2010)
Academic Ranking of World Universities 2014
How does A virtual shrink may sometimes be better than the real thing make you feel?
I love the weekly-newsletter format, so i very much appreciate Kale Davis' hacker newsletter: http://www.hackernewsletter.com

Other than that i use MiniHack on iOS (https://itunes.apple.com/be/app/minihack-for-hacker-news/id6...)... I rarely use the website
“Prison is a bit like copyright”, says jailed Pirate Bay founder
Samsung Galaxy Note 4 Leaked with Three-sided Display
> I would say that this doesn't actually prove that people can treat themselves.

Yes, true, it proves nothing. It only suggests it.

> If it were proven that people truly are competent to treat themselves, I think more people would have done so.

Not if they think psychologists are doctors. Not if the real point is to have a conversation with a sympathetic listener who isn't a machine. There are plenty of reasons a virtual therapist wouldn't work, apart from the technical content of the therapy.

> ... nothing I said to the man was private from my own parents.

I've read cases like that also, and IMHO it's criminal to create a quid pro quo in which the advantage of a sympathetic listener is undercut by the fact that anything can be revealed to the parents, who are often the real problem.

> Best of all, it is private.

Maybe. If this virtual therapy thing takes off, people are going to have to be very careful about how the transactions are handled. The content of the sessions would be a gold mine, and I'm sure people will try to offer online therapy sessions with a way to preserve the session content for "research", all explained in excruciatingly small print.

> I generally haven't had access to a therapist or even be able to afford a doctor, so I'm just stuck.

This is not to diminish your situation or pretend to understand you, but there was a time when a sympathetic friend would have been the obvious remedy.
Teaching should be a business. Then the best models of teaching will get the best customers. When you have schooling as a government service, there is little incentive to provide good education.

Going to school is probably the most miserable experience of my life. It's up there with having a job that started at 7:30 AM.
Ask HN: How do I find a remote job for my wife?
My wife and I moved to Europe a couple of years ago for my job. Unfortunately, she's having a difficult time finding work here. She was an attorney back in the U.S. which doesn't really translate well. She's also an excellent researcher and writer.

There must be a startup looking for her skill set. I need someone to take a chance on her. Any tips?
> The point I'm making is that just because therapy is equally effective as a sympathetic friend (as you mentioned), that doesn't mean that the virtual therapist is equally effective as well.

I only emphasized that because the linked article suggested that it might be so. Also the history of ELIZA and more recent programs suggest that people derive substantial benefit from them.

> It could be completely useless, for all we know.

The same could be said about conventional talk therapy -- surely you realize that research can't exclude the Placebo Effect as the primary agent of action in therapy (and many studies say just that).

> I think you're making a lot of leaps here.

I've studied this problem very extensively, it's not something I take lightly:

http://arachnoid.com/trouble_with_psychology
With a resolution that high you must be used to small fixed pixel width sites. Pity they can't all just be doubled or quadrupled in size.
NYT used to do similar - workaround is to adblock the specific JS script, or just disable JS altogether when on that site.
There are plenty of for-profit colleges, and by and large they are complete scams. Color me highly skeptical.

In the real world most education is government subsidized, and the counterexamples that do well seem to run on a non-profit model.
One develops reading comprehension by reading, including texts, blogs, and videogame chat - and time spent sitting at a desk being talked at takes away from the time you could be using to do that. Realizing you want to do something that requires basic math gives you a reason to learn basic math, which makes learning that basic math easy. (Me, I learned trigonometry because it was helpful to draw cool patterns on a computer)

I think you're suffering from status-quo bias. Read the link I gave you above.

One of the biggest secret weapons of homeschoolers and unschoolers is age-mixing. Standard schools artificially segregate kids by age and force them to learn in a specific order. This guarantees that no kid in the room knows much more than the other kids. In the real world, on just about any subject at all you can find people who know a little more than you and learn from them or find people who know a bit less and teach them. Kids teach EACH OTHER how to do cool stuff like use a computer or mod a video game.

The hardest and most important thing to figure out in life is "what do I want to learn and how can I learn it?" When schools decide on a specific curriculum and spoon-feed it to kids, they destroy the intrinsic motivation to solve that question for yourself; you can just passively accept what is being force-fed to you by your teachers. But then when school is finished, what do you do THEN? Over a dozen years or more you haven't PRACTICED setting your own goals or figuring out how to fulfill them! Mightn't it be better to do that starting much earlier in life?
I would take it as a hopeful sign that we can cure ourselves with a little virtual assistance. Not unlike a spreadsheet to organize our thoughts about finances.
Then, are the Amish 'abusing' their children? What about the Inuit[1]?

[1] http://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/home/government-pol...
But the only sane way to run a non-profit is to run it as a normal company with the twist that all profits are reinvested at the end of the year.
UPnRIDE: Now Quadriplegics Can ‘Walk’ Too
> From the title, I expected some evidence that the AI was better than an actual human. That's not the case.

We don't know that. It's not that it's false, but that the evidence is not clear one way or the other -- it's just speculation at the moment.

We do know that programs like ELIZA, crude as they were, made many people feel that something worthwhile was taking place. In one case, a test subject asked Weizenbaum (ELIZA's originator) to leave the room so she could have a private conversation with the therapist.
I'm unsure whether we're talking past each other or if my point simply isn't coming across. My issue with your comments has nothing at all to do with your issues with therapy, most of which I agree with you on. The issue I have is that you're making assumptions based on this research that the research doesn't back up. From your original comment:

> It proves that people are competent to treat themselves, the real meaning of virtual therapy.

This is simply not supported. Full stop. It's especially not supported by research that has nothing to do with the efficacy of virtual therapy.
Because there's no way to weed out under performers, the teachers unions block every attempt at doing so. So the system must be highly regulated and inspected to limit the damage that bad teachers can do. The weird thing is, good teachers are happy to be shackled to the same system, collective pay bargaining etc.

If bad teachers could be fired! then the money spent on inspections would easily cover better pay for the good ones. But the unions must be smashed first.
This is a great idea, I hadn't thought of embedding ECC keys in the address itself. That makes them very easy to share, and backwards-compatible. I think this has great potential, especially as a mail client plugin, since it's so easy to use.
USSD is correct! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unstructured_Supplementary_Serv...
You can't compare the schools you went to with the Sudbury system. The skipping class happens exactly because you are trapped, because there is something you rather will.

But why skip class if you can do what you want?