stenl

Why isn't this exactly like playing "Nearer My God to Thee" on the deck of the Titanic? The ship is sinking and we're going to talk not about the water rushing in through the hole in the hull, but about ...gardening?

By all means let's have a civilized conversation but we're in a political crisis and "we" as "hackers" need to help fix it, not wish it wasn't so.

About controlling people in a democracy, there's a great documentary, "Manufacturing consent" featuring Noam Chomsky.

See [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent:_Noam_...

Seems to be available full-length on YouTube: [http://youtu.be/YHa6NflkW3Y](http://youtu.be/YHa6NflkW3Y)

Here's a press release from the company: http://asteriasbiotherapeutics.com/asterias-biotherapeutics-... They're doing a dosing study, with escalating number of cells injected. Results are promising, but the study includes no controls, so there is no way to know if the cell-based treatment is better than no treatment.

The current study is open-label (i.e. not blinded) single-arm (no controls). Once they establish the right dose, they will need to do a double-blind randomized controlled study to find out if it works.

I agree on the loss of privacy, a big drawback of (current) cards.

As for your other points: Swedes use nearly exclusively debit cards directly linked to an account (so no bills to pay, no interest, no risk of spending more than you have). We all have apps to monitor our account balance.

For P2P payments we use Swish, an app linked to your bank account and your phone number. It lets you pay instantly to anyone with a phone number and it's "free" but of course locks you in to your bank. The UI is decent.

As for "supporting your community by eliminating overhead" I think the overhead is higher for cash, and many businesses seem to prefer cards (many now, like banks, are cash-free). Also, eliminating cash has the advantage of making it harder for businesses to avoid paying taxes.

I also agree that paying with your phone sounds worse than using a card (which takes seconds and never runs out of batteries), but maybe you get your privacy back?

I live in Stockholm and haven't used cash for several years. I have no cash on me ever, no coins, nothing. It's liberating. I get very annoyed when travelling and I rediscover the cash-based society and the need to always predict how much cash to carry.

I have slightly different parsers for each family of journals. I use the DOI to get the metadata where possible. Then I reformat to show title, authors and journal consistently. I also create a direct link to the PDF where possible because I prefer to get at the paper with a single click.

Exactly. The API is written in Go (because I wanted to learn it), and there's a Postgres database behind it, and a background Go process that scans the journals for updates. I recently rewrote the client in React as a learning exercise, but haven't made the switch yet

If I restarted from scratch I would do the server-side in Python because there's just a lot more good libraries available.

I made a simple service for myself (http://paperfeed.io) which is a feed of all the new papers in journals I care about. I can "star" papers for reading later. Works extremely well for my habits.

You're welcome to try it (not sure if the signup workflow still works; let me know). I'll be happy to hear your feedback.

Edit: you can upvote papers, and they'll float to the top just like on HN.

War crimes: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/nov/24/donald-trump...

Invasion: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/11/trump-wants...

Exactly my thought. Stephenson's article is my all-time favourite Wired piece. Here it is, a great longform read: http://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

Yes, sorry that was a terrible reference; I should have been more careful. But take instead the murder rate from Wikipedia (which gets stats from the UN): Sweden is in place 205 out of 218 countries and no other nordic country is lower except Iceland (and the rate in Iceland is not accurately measurable since they had only a single murder).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

This despite the fact we're in the top ten for gun ownership: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_c...

We're in 64th place for crime, just behind UK and Australia and way behind the US (obviously). But Japan is absolutely great if you're looking for low crime rates, and the food is fantastic too.

http://www.numbeo.com/crime/rankings_by_country.jsp

It's Denmark that's the outlier. By far the least welcoming to foreigners (i.e. "racist") of all Western countries. Source: Max Fischer, Washington Post (https://twitter.com/Amazing_Maps/status/691025214952624128)

Oh come on. 16% of the population is foreign-born, of which half are Europeans. Of the top ten immigrant countries, only one is arab (Iraq), and they constitute 1.3% of the population. The many Syrians who came last fall are not in the statistics yet, but will likely also amount to less than 2%.

In Malmö, less than 30% are foreign-born, and the largest group is (unsurprisingly) Danish, along with Iraqi and former Yugoslavia.

http://www.migrationsinfo.se/demografi/fodelseland/

In terms of attitudes, Denmark is the least welcoming to foreigners, of all Western countries: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/03/21...

It's also discouraging that they support their finding by saying "The significant replicated association of Neandertal SNPs with mood disorders, in particular depression, is intriguing because Neandertal alleles are enriched near genes associated with long-term depression (5)".

"Long-term depression" (LTD) has absolutely nothing to do with "depression". LTD is a mechanism of synaptic plasticity, where the strength of the synapse is reduced ("depressed").

I'm a neuroscientist, and I checked ref 5.

Linnarsson lab, Karolinska Institutet | Stockholm, Sweden [ ONSITE

I'm a full professor of molecular neuroscience, leading a group of ten people (PhD students, postdocs). We use single-cell RNA sequencing to discover and understand all the cell types of the mouse brain. We have published very well (Science, Nature, etc) and have just been funded to map every cell type in the mouse nervous system. This is an incredibly exciting project: for the first time, we will be able to say exactly what types of cells exist in every brain region, and which genes are specifically active in those cells. We have great funding for the next five years.

Now, I'm looking for a front-end programmer with some back-end skills to help build a data portal to share our data with the scientific community.

* Work in our team in Stockholm, Sweden

* Work with people from all over the world (English is our working language)

* Help us do groundbreaking science!

* Ok salary, great Swedish employment benefits

We're looking for someone who can build an UI, with tools for visualising and browsing a very large and complex dataset. We think you love making data pretty! Currently, we use

* Python for the back-end and tools

* React and D3 for the front-end

Check out our work at linnarssonlab.org and github.org/linnarsson-lab

Interested? Contact me at sten.linnarsson@ki.se!

Thanks,

Sten

I did. I looked at the paper and my description of it is accurate, including the reported p=0.07.

Because of the underpowered design, we learned nothing. Underpowered studies are worse than nothing: http://www.wiringthebrain.com/2015/12/on-literature-pollutio...

Measure five different things. Use underpowered design. Compare everything to everything using many fancy-sounding statisticsl tests. Fish for p<0.05 (and the occasional "marginally significant" p=0.07).

Remember, most psychology research cannot be reproduced: http://m.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716

Published in a shitty journal (Impact Factor: 1.3) with n = 10 per group. Also relevant: most psychology research published in high-ranking journals cannot be reproduced (http://m.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716).

"whether coherent quantum processes play a nontrivial role in biology" (from the paper) is very controversial. The idea was that coherence would make photosynthesis more efficient. If they're right about this mutation switching between coherence and not-coherence, they should now proceed and test the efficiency of the two photon harvesting modes.

Intriguing findings, but antibodies (used here to detect fungi) are notoriously prone to false positive findings. Direct shotgun sequencing of brain DNA, in a blinded design with sufficient numbers of patients and controls, would have nailed it. Actually, I wonder why they didn't do it already? Maybe lack of money?

You should drop synthetic DNA in it and then sample all nearby lakes and do PCR. Even aftera trillion-fold dilution it should be detectable. Would be cheap, easy and very likely to work. A cool weekend project for your kids!

Seems like there should be some less ridiculously low-bandwidth and high-latency tech for the modern Godfather, no? E.g. why don't they use an electronic dropbox, posting messages in code on a public forum? Is it just that Mr Godfather is technologically challenged, or is there a good reason why burying scraps of paper in soil is inherently better?

Brain science is my expertise, and you're right that the lack of vasculature will limit the viability of this. It will never grow beyond a few mm, and will have a dead core most likely. Plus, at "5 weeks" there will be no astrocytes or oligodendrocytes. You need astrocytes to make proper synapses and oligos to get proper signalling speeds. Others have shown more advanced brain organoids, incl astrocytes, but this tech is still very far from a conscious piece of tissue in a dish.

From that link: "the Swedish authorities have never explained why they refuse to give Assange a guarantee that they will not extradite him on to the US under a secret arrangement agreed between Stockholm and Washington."

Weeeell, maybe because Sweden is a democracy and has no "authorities" that can guarantee the outcome of hypothetical future legal proceedings.

Also, note that Assange was obviously in Sweden when the rape allegedly happened, and only became conveniently afraid of extraditiom to US after those allegations surfaced.

It annoys me when news stories don't link to their sources. Here it is: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2605.2009....

The study is terrible. All the reported effects include 0 well within the 95% confidence interval (e.g. ranges like -2.3 to +3.2), yet mysteriously the P values end up just the right side of "significant". This reeks of confirmation bias, or worse.

Having never heard of Ze Frank, I had to check Wikipedia: "Ze Frank (born Hosea Jan Frank on March 31, 1972) is an American online performance artist, composer, humorist and public speaker based in Los Angeles, California. He was a pioneer of the vlogging format and is considered one of the most influential people in the field, inspiring such shows as the vlogbrothers, Philip DeFranco and Wheezy Waiter. He is currently executive vice president of video at BuzzFeed."

Now I'll have to google "vlogging format"...

It's definitely fantastic, and one of the books that had the greatest influence on my thinking (I read it as a teenager, 20+ years ago).

If you want something less theoretical, more personal, poetic and emotional, his "Le ton beau de Marot" (English, despite the title) is also fabulous. He takes a short poem and translates it a hundred different ways, all the while musing about what "translation" means (literal, conveying the same emotion, using the same metaphors, between cultures...) as well as about thought, language and meaning more generally. And then, while he writes the book, his wife gets a brain tumor and dies, and the book becomes part of his mourning.

Sorry, I should have said "from a predominantly catholic country".