dsrguru

My immediate thoughts were very similar to cperciva's. In the status quo, there's already a disincentive (for those who care about average karma) to comment on any posts that require scrolling down, especially if posts above them are heavily nested or if they themselves are. I can think of a particular discussion I had with a well-known HN user who has professional/financial incentive to care about his karma statistics, and as our two person back-and-forth got slightly too nested but very much unresolved, he merely liked my final comment and never replied.

If pending comments are applied to anything except the top-level, I could see this having disastrous effects on the quality of response in discussions since responses in low-traffic branches will likely not even show up.

In fairness, the three games he's currently working on follow that same mold of being super easy to learn and super hard to beat--not a good recipe for warding off addiction!

I believe nlawalker's point was that if a paid service is identical in functionality to a free "pirate" alternative, there's still an incentive to use the free one. Even if the paid service is better than the free one, many people would opt to stream illegally over, say, purchasing region-free non-drm DVDs.

> Learning is simply better when you have to write things down.

I disagree. Learning is better when you aren't able to diddle on your laptop or phone, and having to write things down strongly encourages you not to do those things, but the actual act of writing things down forces you to focus on quickly copying text, which hugely impairs your ability to internalize what was said.

Some people's learning styles might make that less of a problem (i.e. so-called auditory learners might be able to internalize what's being said nearly at the speed it's spoken), but for those of us who need to translate what we hear into our own mental language, constant note-taking substantially hampers the learning process.

The ideal for me is to preview the notes of a lecture before it's given a la Khan Academy, pay full attention during the lecture, occasionally jot down a keyword to trigger the memory of a thought I had during the lecture, and if I didn't have the opportunity to preview the lecture notes then I'll want to be able to access them afterwards to look up anything I don't remember.

Edit: Corrective upvote because you didn't say anything that harms the discussion.

In fairness, it's somewhat likely that everything went exactly as planned, at least for some of the people behind MtGox.

1950s logic (at least in the US) was not that if one partner is not earning money, they should contribute more to the house. 1950s logic was that the male partner earns the money, and the female partner should be satisfied with housework, regardless of whether or not she prefers it. This logic cyclically resulted from, and resulted in, many parents only putting their male children through college.

> Doing things elegantly in practice unfortunately adds zero flexibility for non-trivial changes in business direction: you simply can't foresee everything. One swift decision at mid-management level and your elegant framework suddenly becomes an unwieldy Titanic impossible to put into a quick turn.

Yes and no. If you're writing very elegant statically typed functional code like in Haskell or ML, you're going to have to be elegant at the design level, and yes, you might have trouble adapting to new requirements. But if you're in a domain where requirements aren't always set in stone, you're probably using a more dynamic environment where you don't have to be what the OP called "elegant" at the design level (e.g. his unrealistic caching layer example), but you can still write elegant code at the micro level (within functions, classes, etc.), which will almost certainly lead to substantially less technical debt and shouldn't cost much if any more time than quick hacks at the micro level.

I don't specifically know about Xi'an, but I remember in 2012 subways in Beijing were a flat 2 rmb (about 0.35 USD) and in Shanghai something like 2 to 4 rmb depending on distance. Nanjing was similar, but I don't remember the specifics. So assuming all Chinese cities that have subways charge the same order of magnitude, this loophole would have indeed been valuable.

Consuming monounsaturated fat is good for you. Consuming polyunsaturated fat, with the exception of omega-3, is not.

My understanding is that the polyunsaturated fat in virtually all vegetable oils are omega-6 fatty acids, which we consume way too much of relative to omega-3 fatty acids (which are also technically polyunsaturated but which are not present in any significant quantity in such cooking oils), and the huge quantities of omega-6 that almost everyone consumes is believed to increase our risk of numerous diseases, including cancer. Monounsaturated fat, the primary beneficial constituent of so-called Mediterranean diets, and especially the specific monounsaturated fat called oleic acid, is protective against cancer, reduces LDL (bad cholesterol), and possibly raises HDL (good cholesterol).

Extra virgin olive oil has a pretty great monounsaturated to polyunsaturated fat ratio and good flavor for salad dressing, eggs, sauces, meat dishes, etc. The only real downsides are low smoke point (some sources say that that means trans fat and other scary stuff can show up at the high temperatures used in stir-frying and deep-frying) and that good flavor != neutral flavor, which is sometimes preferable. Some presses of avocado oil and safflower oil have similarly great mono- to polyunsaturated fat ratios while also having high smoke points. Avocado oil tastes sort of creamy and nutty while safflower is very neutral.

Just google the URL (without the trailing GET parameters) and click on the first result. That always circumvents the NYT paywall.

That's absolutely true. I was not commenting on whether or not they need solitary confinement. I was stating that the claim in your second paragraph--that violent criminals almost always pose more danger to society than non-violent criminals--is not true. It would seem several people strongly disagreed with me...

> I disagree with you in every possible way, and I think you've just decided, off the top of your head, to make that up because you think it sounds good.

That tone was completely uncalled for, and assuming you were the one who downvoted me, downvoting me for disagreeing was equally uncalled for. This isn't reddit.

> You might be able to google some statistics, but I'm not drinking your kool-aid.

If you're going on gut feel rather than providing any statistics to the contrary, don't criticize me for going on gut feel.

> Assault resulting in serious injury is categorically worse than fraud or identity theft

I agree that assault resulting in long-term or permanent injury is generally worse than monetary fraud and perhaps partial identity theft (using one's information to commit an isolated instance of fraud). However, it's certainly not "categorically worse" than all forms of fraud or identity theft. Even breaking someone's legs (one of the worst forms of [non-sexual] assault) generally ruins a person's life less than full identity theft and, by definition, less than stealing so much from someone that they are driven to suicide.

> and far more common

If you mean some class of assault is more common than some class of fraud or identity theft, I don't know if you're right or wrong, but that has no bearing on the rate at which a particular criminal will commit repeat offenses.

If on the other hand you meant that assault in which there's serious injury is the most common kind of assault, we'd have to consult Google but that seems highly improbable.

First of all, let's be clear that risk of fraud to an individual is often as harmful, if not more harmful, than risk of violence to an individual. Fraud that takes out a person's entire life savings, even if the victim doesn't commit suicide, typically does more lasting damage than, say, the average case of assault and battery. And that's not just true with identity theft. Stealing money alone can cause people to commit suicide as in Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme.

So then the question becomes which type of criminal is more likely to commit more crimes if not in solitary confinement. Obviously it depends on the specific kind of criminal but in general, I'd say perpetrators of fraud if they have Internet access and violent criminals if they don't have Internet access.

This is terrifying. If they successfully lobby to legalize commercial drones in low-flying airspace, the peaceful sky will be polluted with flying robots (we've destroyed the terrestrial environment already, seriously don't need to destroy the sky too), businesses would have access to terrifying surveillance, criminals/terrorists could remotely break into drones or fly their own disguised to look like commercial ones (and load them with cameras or weapons), etc. All so Amazon could be slightly faster than Instacart?

FYI I'm not a luddite and I recognize the increased convenience that faster shipping would provide and the potential other gains that would come of commercial drones. But the tradeoff just doesn't seem worth it here at all.

Not at all like the situation in China. In the U.S., if you're in a neighborhood with a large organized crime presence, passers-by will often refuse to testify, but what the parent is talking about in China today and the U.S. in this hypothetical future is different. In China, there is a recent history or at least public perception of victims falsely accusing good samaritan helpers of being the perpetrators in order to sue someone, even if they can't catch the perpetrator. The parent is saying that the U.S. could become the same way, except with would-be good samaritans/crime reporters not being afraid of the victims but of the police.

How do you have access to his profile? Could you be mistaking him for the Neal King of Sofia University or the Neal King who was a marijuana grower who recently disappeared?

Presumably the same reason they chose a Japanese name--that at least one of them speaks Japanese. I'm not really sure where you're going with this, but if you read the analysis in the article I linked to, as well as King's response to the author's email, I think you'll agree that they're a likely candidate.

I'm really eager to see how conclusive the study will be. For now, I'm sold on Satoshi Nakamoto being King, Oksman, and Bry.

http://www.fastcompany.com/1785445/bitcoin-crypto-currency-m...

As with the Arabic and Chinese language families, different varieties of Romance languages are similar enough in syntax and vocabulary that speakers can kind of make themselves understood to each other if they speak slowly and choose their words carefully. Same with lots of closely related languages, e.g. German and Dutch. But they're not nearly mutually intelligible to the degree that American English and most varieties of British English are or that Hindi and Urdu are.

Regarding the Spanish/Italian example, the father of a friend of mine was fluent in Spanish, French, and Portuguese. Using an Italian grammar guide and his knowledge of Romance vocabulary from the other three languages, he learned Italian in a single flight from the US to Italy to the point where he was able to conduct business in Italy immediately upon landing.

I don't know if that's the case with Polish and Ukrainian. That certainly is the case with Arabic where many speakers of Levantine or Gulf Arabic will probably understand Egyptian Arabic since they grow up watching Cairo-based media. Likewise, most Indians who don't speak Hindi will probably understand it perfectly since they grow up with Bollywood. I assume that's especially true for northern Indians whose languages are related to Hindi.

A Yiddish scholar once said that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy."

It's really true. One might think that mutual intelligibility (ability for speakers of one to make themselves fully understood by speakers of the other) would be the standard for differentiating languages from dialects, but the distinction really ends up just being political. The spoken forms of Hindi and Urdu are entirely mutually intelligible but have two separate names.

Many varieties of Arabic and Chinese are mutually unintelligible but are called "dialects" of one Arabic or Chinese language, presumably to promote a unified Arab or Chinese identity. Speakers of Moroccan Arabic and Levantine Arabic or of Mandarin and Cantonese can't understand each other any better than speakers of Spanish and Italian can, but we don't call Spanish and Italian dialects of Modern Latin!

It gets even weirder when you have a dialect continuum, like with Polish-Russian-Ukrainian. Russian is somewhat mutually intelligible with both Polish and Ukrainian, but Polish and Ukrainian are not themselves mutually intelligible! So even if politics didn't play a role in the distinction between language and dialect, it would be hard if not impossible to come up with a universal distinction.

Thanks for the link. I can only access the abstract, but conflicting results "over the extent to which elevated salt consumption has adverse implications for population health" is very different from saying that "there is a widespread and unsupported belief that moderation of sodium intake is a key public health concern, which it is not."

It sounds like the article concludes, contrary to your memory, that as a result of non-objective scientific practices, the public incorrectly believes that high sodium intake is definitely a huge problem for all, when in reality, it's either a huge problem for all, or it's a huge problem for some, or it's a huge problem for some and a small problem for others, or it's a small problem for some.

I apparently missed that! Hopefully my redundancy here will help prevent others from doing the same.

WARNING: Do not read this article if you haven't watched the end of Breaking Bad. (This post is safe though)

I, like the author, am very sensitive to spoilers and completely agree that people for whom spoilers ruin the enjoyment of a work should still be able to reap the benefits of an encyclopedia for the work's "metadata" -- information about the cast, running time, season and episode count, production, etc. However, the article, ironically and much to my horror (Edit: actually the author has a warning at the top of the page, which I missed), spoils the end of Breaking Bad, one of television's most popular shows, a show that is/was still on my to watch list.

> In fact, people do believe weird things about salt; there is a widespread and unsupported belief that moderation of sodium intake is a key public health concern, which it is not.

It's not an unsupported belief. Studies have shown that high sodium intake is a significant contributor to hypertension. Here is one such study: http://eurpub.oxfordjournals.org/content/14/3/235. There is debate about whether consuming several thousand milligrams of sodium a day adversely affects blood pressure in everyone or only in some people, but that it's a major contributor to hypertension (9-17% of cases) is supported.

If you have specific criticisms of the methodology of those kinds of studies or if you have links to sources that dispute the above, I'd be interesting in reading them.

Or are you saying that what's unsupported is the notion that the above makes sodium intake a key public health concern?

This article is both accurate and highly misleading. The author is correct that there is very little reliable evidence that links glutamic acid and/or glutamate to health problems. The backlash against MSG as a result of the "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome" craze, was not rooted in scientific inquiry.

However, MSG is not just a source for glutamate like seaweed and tomatoes are. MSG is the sodium salt of glutamic acid and contains not just glutamate but also sodium ions. Having 2000mg of natural glutamate should be harmless. Having enough MSG to give you 2000mg of glutamate means you're getting a shit ton of sodium. That's not good for you, especially if you're one of the many people for whom excess sodium intake adversely affects your blood pressure. So while MSG is presumably no worse than NaCl (and is perhaps better in that the umami flavor means you don't have to use as much sodium to get an equally rich taste), to say that MSG is totally harmless without even mentioning sodium and hypertension is ridiculous. Even in terms of short term effects, I've had plenty of MSG-free hot and sour soups that made my head itch. Not from MSG but from thousands of mg of sodium found in their gratuitously added soy sauce and table salt.

Given that the YC partners have a ton of applications to read, and given that your second sentence ("It simple.") suggests you didn't proofread your application, it's possible they didn't continue reading it.

Are you saying that releasing a similar system under an open source license will prove claims about the way their code worked in the past or just that we'd know if encryption is happening in the open source system?

I know a lot of this post-PRISM fear of the US government is to be expected and is certainly popular on HN, but comments that single out the US like this really make little sense to me. The governments of Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand all share tech-related intel with the United States and, potentially if not presumably, have similarly intrusive methods of surveillance. China goes so far as to ban social media sites that they don't have control over (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube) and replaces them with sites that they do (renren, weibo, and youku/tudou). That, combined with general censorship of the web, is far scarier than what the NSA does, even assuming the NSA's scope is as wide as television shows make it out to be. And even in most other countries, the scope of domestic Internet surveillance is unknown, which is very different from "known to be minimal".

Edit: Ah if this was about intellectual property takedowns, then currently the US situation is a bit worse than most of the rest of the world. But still, China friggin censors their Internet, and comments like the above still seem to always single out the US.