naterator

> Do you understand how widespread this kind of research is? Literally everyone does this.

One of the main objections I'm seeing from people (in my bubble) isn't that Facebook did this, but that Cornell, UCSF, and PNAS participated in this. Facebook can do this, and while it's unethical it's not illegal. Same goes for manipulative people in your everyday life (let me not tell you about the horrific human being of a girlfriend I once had). The point is that science and the people who purport to carry it out should be held to higher and rigorous ethical standards. If those standards are not met, those people should be excluded from science and their findings ignored. They should not be awarded serious consideration in a journal such as PNAS. That is what is happening here as far as I can see, and while a bit dramatic fashion I think it is correct.

Also, if I may toss my personal interpretation of the research into this... ethics aside, the study is extremely weak, and I honestly don't see how it can be published in such a "good" journal. The effect size was < 0.0001. They hand-wavingly try to explain that this is still significant given the sample size. I'm personally not convinced, at all. Sounds like they needed a positive conclusion out of the study and so they came up with a reason for one. If this landed on my desk for review I would have reject on that alone.

Silicon Valley and the tech sector is full of adult babies. Watching the twitter reaction to this news (and others) is pretty fascinating. You're all so doom-and-gloom the first second the government tries to regulate something. Let's not discuss the histrionics that come out on other topics. Further, you act like there could be no possible logical reason why these things should be regulated. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of onerous regulation or regulatory capture, but you guys are just a bunch of babies.

I think there should be rules about drones, because I can easily think of several really fucking bad things that could happen if everyone who wants to tinker can just fly their drones around because they've got the money and know how. What happens if Amazon tries to deliver a package, but the software fucks up and the drone flies over the airport (assuming the engineers even thought of that problem in advance)? What happens when multiple business start flying drones around and they start crashing into one another, falling on people, highways, or whatever? I've seen a video where a guy decapitated himself with his gas powered toy helicopter. Are these drones going to be safe if they crash into me, or should I walk around with a shotgun?

We need rules. We don't need onerous rules, but we need rules.

>They could have just surveyed users back then to find out where they were screwing up, but in typical Google fashion, that would have involved actually engaging with their users, which Google is borderline allergic to.

Yup. Google never grew out of that phase--the Steve Jobs Phase, I like to call it. Obviously when Google started they knew what users didn't even know they wanted. Efficient search. Great webmail. Etc. But then Google (should have) realized it was a business with customers who aren't always idiots. It did not. It still really hasn't.

That's not a clear-cut mistake, and in my opinion totally forgivable. http://www.betterwritingskills.com/tip-w005.html

I think it's a very valid criticism if your best people (not talking about "most" people, who don't start companies and create new stuff) can easily move to another country (or other state inside the US) and earn WAY more for the same job or skill set.

It's not a valid criticism if the gov. footing 80% allows these companies to now offer SV/NY competitive salaries. Which I suspect will happen if they do it right (both the governement and the entrepreneurs).

Yea, the lesson is: If you find yourself in a situation like that, bail out as fast as you can. When we're young we are often not taught—or more importantly we do not have the opportunity—to simply GTFO of the crappy situation we're in (Family, Bullies, etc.). It has tragic consequences both early in life and later on. It's (one of the reasons) why we get school shooters, why people stay at crappy companies when they don't have to, why people stay in destructive relationships.

Modern society often allows us the freedom to avoid people and situations we can't control but don't want to be in. For the love of god, please take advantage of that.

Indeed, here was the link:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/215201435/dart-the-worl...

Isn't this the type of thing a place like Bell Labs would, or Google X should, be on top of? And not fruitlessly rehashing the space elevator idea?

IMO it's definitely Second-system syndrome. Maps worked fine and didn't need much added/changed, but someone decided that they needed to keep iterating and now we're stuck with all the cludge built on top of it now.

What surprised me more was that the Canary Islands was one of the first markets for IKEA (before 1985). I mean, the Canary Islands before Madrid or New York? WTF? I can only assume they were using as a test market, like Kansas City for Google Fiber, but still... wow!

Yea, that's great and all but what happens when China and it's 1.4 billion people get their stuff together?

It's astounding that it seems that few in the US government seem to acknowledge that we may not be on top always, and what goes around comes around. There will be real future costs for our moral corruptness.

> This is the easy way out for them.

As far as I understand they wanted to restructure but they are not being allowed to by the court. The first line[1] in the doc essentially says this. This happens when the court doesn't think there is hope for rehab, which is not surprising in Mt.Gox case.

[1] "At 5 p.m. on April 24, 2014, the Tokyo Distri ct Court issued an order of commencement of the bankruptcy proceedings for MtGox Co., Ltd."

Meta: I love that lately there have been more health and biology related submissions here on HN. Dovetails nicely with YC new shift/interest, and matches one of my great personal interests.

Do other like this as well, or do people wish that HN would stay focused on software, VC, and traditional tech? Just curious. Obviously it's getting upmodded, but still curious to hear if there is another side.

Shouldn't there be some kind of formula for this kind of thing? Some kind of way to gauge how much salary/year you should give up based on how likely you think they will be successful. For example,

[% annual salary haircut] = [likelihood success in 10 years] * [estimated stock price] * [expected salary sans options]

... or something. Obviously it's far from a science, but I think there should be some kind of general way to arrive at reasonability. Currently start-ups essentially rely on how poorly people gauge the probability that a company will actually be successful vs. actual numbers. Or, put another way, how willing the hiree is to gamble/risk.

I only bring this up because, after personally seeing or being on the losing end, I would never accept the salary haricut for options again unless I could somewhat reliably gauge them, probabilistically. Maybe that's something I'll look into for the future. People do this kind of thing in the Insurance industry and on wall street all the time, I suppose.

Sidenote: Paul, thanks for all the really cool stuff you've done over the years.

An interesting theory, but the problem with it is that the pool of potential devs is effectively limitless (well, not really but it might as well be). They would have to pay me multiple $10ks to stop dev and shut up. And offering that to 100 or 1,000 devs starts getting really expensive. I don't know. Certainly the first few groups it would work, but... if the cat ever got out, everyone would be lining up to develop it, and it would be easy for the cat to get out.

It should be noted that a parallel study[1] at the National Institute for Aging (NIA) found that this was not the case. The authors of this study (UW) claim (as far as I understand) that the NIA study was flawed because both Control and Calorie Restricted (CR) monkeys were fed diets that were both restrictive, and not sufficiently different. There also seem to be some debate about the composition of the diets. The controls in the UW study were allowed to eat as they pleased (i.e. become fatties if they wanted). They claim that if both "modest" or "moderate" CR are equivalent, it would be a very important conclusion. The practical consequence, if true, would be that we wouldn't have to starve ourselves too much.

Mouse models had suggested years ago that calorie restriction could lead to ~%50 increase in lifetime. However, the problem with mouse studies is that they are pretty different, and also the mice they use are really inbred and perhaps non-ideal examples. The conclusion from the primate studies is really stacking up to be a common sense "eat in moderation, healthy, and you'll live at least a little longer, maybe a lot". Not really groundbreaking stuff, to be honest. And still not conclusive when you consider the resources that went into these studies. This also teaches us nothing about mechanisms, which would be really useful. Just my cursory assessment so far.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/30/science/low-calorie-diet-d...

There are people fighting for those rights as well. And I don't think they're insane (as you seem to imply). As long as it's clearly agreed upon between consenting adults, it's not so ridiculous. Perhaps the logistics of that are more complicated, but should they be denied that if they really want it?

>They'll literally kill people, for profit and profit alone.

And how many people would they be "killing" if they had decided to not develop the drug at all because there is no chance of making money? Should they have done it out of the kindness of their heart? It may be disgusting to you that that is the truth, and then perhaps you should be petitioning your government to replace the industry with public institutions, but that is the current reality.

> neither my name or Coinbase-only email address was in this list

That doesn't really mean anything, since it clearly says at the top:

"Here is a partial list of Coinbase user emails and their full names. Full list much bigger."

Which could be bullshit and scaremongering. But it certainly could be true that they have a large number of Coinbase user's emails.

I understand why people are upset about Facebook's acquisition of OVR, especially the hardcore gamers. I was surprised and upset when I first heard the news, too. However, from Facebook's perspective and the perspective of anyone who cares about having better long distance social experiences or virtual reality experiences, it's a great move. I am sure VR will be primarily used in games, and the tech will be perfected on games, but it has real value in so many other realms. All these assumptions I keep hearing (and those in the article) about how it is going to turn into Second Life style "Metaverse" or whatever is just cynical. Sure, it could turn into that, and be as pernicious as you can imagine. But alternate possibilities are that I could replace Skype, which is awkward for my mother to use, and I could actually go sit in my living room across the ocean and have a conversation with her. That would be amazing.

If all you can see for VR platforms is games/metaverse, then you aren't thinking far enough ahead. I think it would be a tremendous shame if VR is only ever used for games. And Facebook/Oculus won't be the only one pushing VR. Sony is already doing it, and it wouldn't surprise me if Apple, Google, etc. are also working on it. The future (with virtual reality) is going to be awesome. Any privacy concerns can be handled separately, and should be.

Working link to actual article: http://www.cell.com/retrieve/pii/S0092867413015213

> [1]"Airbnb doesn’t even own a bed, but its backers think it’s more valuable than Hyatt"

Sure, certainly an important thing to consider if you take the pessimistic view. On the very optimistic side, consider the possibility that AirBnB makes hotels almost entirely obsolete (it is definitely putting pressure on them). Hotels are expensive and cookie-cutter. While in some ways predictable is their advantage, expensive is not, and cookie-cutter is boring. AirBnB offers location (location location), comfort (home away from home), privacy (if you want it), and novelty (every trip is different). Major pluses in my book.

> Once they are forced to play on a level playing field,

What happens if they aren't, ever? What happens if cities all over the place actually accommodate them? Unlikely, sure--but it's easy to be a naysayer on the internet. It's more likely what will happen to them is what is happening to Uber et al. Some places accommodate sycophantically (SF), some places go the opposite direction (Seattle). And anywhere that accomodates, AirBnB stands to take a huge chunk out of the existing hotel biz.

There are smart people working on these valuations, on both sides. AirBnB has real, valuable network effects that need to be considered. I don't imagine to be able to gauge this one accurately purely based on "c'mon, thats so much money!!". I'm honestly more a pessimist on AirBnB. But I've been a resolute pessimist before and gotten burned badly (e.g. stock market 2013, anyone?)

Terrorism is also a non-0 probability possibility, which must also be considered.

> Crisprs is supposed to be somewhat noisy

Since you seem knowledgeable: Do you know how they compare to other kinds of methods for cutting/splicing new genes into DNA, such as Zinc fingers or homing endonucleases? Specificity (non-noisy) seems like it would be the most important feature of something like this. Although I guess we don't really know, I could imagine "noise" turning into other horrible diseases, loss of viability, etc.

Edit: And now I notice that they discuss this further down in the article. Nevermind.

These kinds of things are daily discussions in laboratories all over the world. Everyone knows there's no future in academia, and so everyone is looking for an exit plan. I actively discourage people from doing a PhD. Academia is a horrible feudalistic system that doesn't pay well enough to keep the bright minds it attracts. There is no sense in being a post-doc for life. Much better to take that hedge fund job.

The really concerning potential consequence of this is that it could result in a dearth of innovation in cures for diseases, and we won't see the affect of losses until 5 or 10 years down the road. No one will fund a biotech startup that's not backed by MDs or PhDs and academia-approved proof-of-concept results. Good luck getting that when everyone is running for the lifeboats.

You don't even need to look at tax code. Just consider the fact that many people who work for places like Walmart also get Food Stamps and Medicaid. Many US corporations would not be be profitable (or at least structured the same way) were it not for the government footing the bill at some point along the chain.

Not sure if it is/was, but having at least three people review code before merge should be standard practice for security critical stuff like this. Something I plan to implement in the future.

While I'm sure you mean well, and it's not like HN is full of trolls who want to trick you, you shouldn't just be asking for PayPal accounts that you'll willy-nilly send money to. You have no idea if this story is true or if this is just a scam. Let's at least do some due-diligence, then we can get a serious campaign going.

I'm sorry to be so skeptical, but I've seen some truly conscienceless scammers--both on and off the internet--to not trust anything anymore until it checks out from multiple angles.

I came late to the Bitcoin party, so when I started mining other coins mid-last year the first thing I did was download the wallet client and encrypt, and backed it up. And I still didn't fully trust that my coins were safe, and that there wasn't some other bug in the protocol that could result in my coins getting stolen somehow (or at least confusion arising as to who owns them). I don't understand how people put so much trust in these exchanges as to have millions of dollars equivalent of coins there.