Hey, just jumping in, I have a BS in Biology and api's post here is full of non-scientific and pseudoscientific garbage.
I believe he suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect and his completely unsourced post should create a huge red flag in any readers mind.
I'm not going to go point by point as the average HNer should be able to research for themselves, but I will respond to this gem that generated the largest facepalm:
> Nearly all food "innovations" of the last 100 years are unhealthy ... The only beneficial modification to the food system from a nutritional perspective has been fortification with certain key nutrients,
This is such a shockingly misguided statement that it hurts to read it. This is why I believe he suffers from illusory superiority, because I think his utter inexperience with agrology is leading him to think that he actually understands this field and can speak with expertise on it.
For a counter-point that "all innovation has been bad", one should only have to look at Norman Borlaug, known colloquially as "the man who saved a billion lives" and "the father of the green revolution". Norman Borlaug was Nobel laureate and agrologist whose research changed agriculture around the world and is credited with preventing billions from starvation.
The innovations of the past century directly allowed nations to increase wheat and rice yields by 2-10X, saving more than one nation from mass famine. I certainly would not label that "unbeneficial" or "unhealthy".
And this is just the elephant in the room in terms of examples, believe me when I say you could write books on the subject of the benefits of agricultural development of the past century. Entire schools are devoted to this study.
I should also have been more precise. By food "innovations" I meant synthetic alterations in the composition of food itself such as the introduction of chemically altered oils, flavoring additives, preservatives, and similar. Borlaug changed the way food is grown, not its composition.
I personally am not particularly afraid of GMO foods. I was pointing out the sociological and political reasons for opposition to them. Look into the history of health advice and you'll find the same pattern: something is said to be healthy and people are told to do it. Later it is found to be unhealthy, often dramatically so. Cigarettes and margarine / trans-fat are probably the clearest examples, but there are many others and many outside the realm of food.
Every time you say something is good then reverse yourself, you lose credibility. At some point people actually start taking your pronouncements as a contrarian indicator. "Oh, the experts say GMO foods are great... they must be on Monsanto's payroll and they're probably worse for you than cigarettes."
>Look into the history of health advice and you'll find the same pattern: something is said to be healthy and people are told to do it. Later it is found to be unhealthy, often dramatically so. Cigarettes and margarine / trans-fat are probably the clearest examples, but there are many others and many outside the realm of food.
Bad cherry picking used only to promote your own point. What about the enormous amount of good advice that has changed our lifestyles over the past century? Do you even know how people lived 100 years ago, how they ate?
What you should say is "some health experts have a habit of not always promoting scientifically sound advice, and many times promoting ideas that fly contrary to evidence. Fortunately as more evidence is gathered, those 'experts' are discredited and a better understanding of nutrition is the result".
When you don't cherry pick, you can find sources like:
Can you take issue with these health experts providing advice? Anything they recommend that you think is grossly wrong? Because this is scientifically validated nutrition advice from health experts, the very thing you're trying to discredit by screaming "trans fats and cigarettes" as if those complex cases invalidate an entire scientific field of study.
Honestly, you're trying to smear the name of "experts" in general, without separating "health experts" (medical doctors, nutritionists, idiot laypeople who label themselves naturopaths, etc) from scientists. I feel like you're trying to find a way to ignore the entire science of nutrition because you got burned listening to a fad or because big tobacco ran roughshod over science six decades ago.
"Honestly, you're trying to smear the name of "experts" in general, without separating "health experts" (medical doctors, nutritionists, idiot laypeople who label themselves naturopaths, etc) from scientists. I feel like you're trying to find a way to ignore the entire science of nutrition because you got burned listening to a fad or because big tobacco ran roughshod over science six decades ago."
Absolutely. That's exactly what I'm doing. High-profile failures affect the perception of expertise, even across disciplines. The Harvard that credentialed the economists who said there was no housing bubble is the same Harvard that credentials the scientists who say GMO food is safe. The medical science that big tobacco ran roughshod over six decades ago hasn't changed substantially either-- the institutions and how those institutions are financed and run is largely the same.
People are simply not going to nod their heads to experts anymore. It's over, not just because of high-profile failures but because of the Internet. On the net anyone can appear as an expert. Anyone can look like they know what they're talking about.
How is science going to adapt to that? What I'd like to see is a solution to both problems: a more transparent, open, and engaging scientific process that both reduces the likelihood of major errors and frauds and more deeply engages the public.
Yeah, to each their own. You still sound extremely anti-science to me, so it's very clear we're going to have diametrically opposed opinions. Thanks for sharing!
I'm not anti-science. I'm not even anti-GMO, though I doubt they're some kind of panacea either.
You know... I have an apology I'd like to make. I'd like to apologize to all those marketing and sales people I slandered over my years as an engineer.
They were so irrational, said such ridiculous and inane things, made absurd and hyperbolic claims and chastised me for pointing out how unreasonable they were, insisted on framing things through awkward metaphors that bore little resemblance to underlying realities...
What they were trying to do was bang me over the head and get me to understand how actual human beings make decisions. They were trying to get me to pull my head out of technical realities (cough my ass cough) for a second and look instead at how things are perceived by people who are not experts.
Cause that's what I'm doing here. I am intentionally being hyperbolic and playing devils' advocate just a little because I want people to grasp why science and industry are mistrusted by so many in the general public. Most importantly, I want people to grasp that the people reaching these conclusions are not idiots. They're relying on methods of inductive reasoning that function on average very well in limited-knowledge scenarios. Evolution invented these methods of reasoning to keep us alive in situations where we have incomplete knowledge and are required to make important decisions.
I might draw different conclusions, but that's because I have a BS in biology and have created transgenic organisms in the lab before. That puts me in a tiny minority, probably less than a tiny fraction of 1% of the population.
I can either look at the rest 99.99% of humanity and the fact that the majority of them are suspicious of GMO food and say -- as most scientifically-minded skeptics do -- "man, those people are idiots." Now I've insulted them, which makes them even less likely to listen to me. Or I can say "hmm... why would so many otherwise intelligent people be afraid of something that is not likely to really be harmful to them?"
I agree. I love OAuth idea and the single-sign on flow. I love having one source where I can go and see all of the sites that have my info, and I love being able to rescind my account from that central location.
However, I hate that Facebook/Twitter take it a step further with all of their social integration features to the point where many apps assume, by default, that you want to share share share everything you do all over your social network.
As I've found a number of apps/websites that do not allow you to continue without giving them permission to post on your wall, I've been forced to mark every single app/OAuth site on my Facebook as available to "only me". Post all you want, no one will ever see it.
Curating what gets posted under your name shouldn't be this much work. I shouldn't have to strive for a clean digital presence with content that adds something to my readers life.
I'd love an OAuth provider that HAS NO SOCIAL NETWORK!
And Google is out on this too, sorry, but Google Plus is obviously the only web property that Google cares about anymore and trusting them not to socialify everything is a fools game.
I'd rather use one with an exceptionally good security policy (including account recovery), realtime multi-modal notification, customizable settings (i.e. being able to ip/geo restrict, rate limit, etc.), etc. And maybe do groups, too.
Google Apps for Your Domain could be kind of like this, but isn't. Probably the closest, though.
This is basically exactly what I built https://www.persowna.net/ for. It's still in its infancy (as is Mozilla Persona), but that's where I want to take it.
Can I email you to talk about your needs a bit? It sounds like you have some good ideas.
It is. It's unfortunate that more people don't know about it, especially since it's ridiculously easy to implement, well-designed and would save us all a lot of hassle.
If you're running a Django app, please add Persona integration. It takes around five minutes, literally.
> I'd love an OAuth provider that HAS NO SOCIAL NETWORK!
GitHub, BitBucket?
Both are actually good options if you have a service with developer demographic (even if its just in part). I'm using Google & GitHub right now, and will likely add Amazon since it's very little work to do so.
>Hulu, Netflix and Amazon all produce original content and are perfectly positioned to disrupt them as their distribution volume increases.
Uhh, as a Hulu subscriber, I'll just let you know: If I only had "Hulu" content to pick from, I'd cancel my subscription immediately. It's not great stuff, barely worth paying for and CERTAINLY not worth both paying for and sitting through the same 4 advertisements over-and-over-and-over again for.
Basically, I don't care who owns Hulu, but if Hulu isn't getting next-day network television + back catalogs, then I'm not going to subscribe. That's what I want it for, and I imagine I'm not the only one.
No, no, no. That's not what I meant, sorry if it wasn't clear.
The point isn't that they're buying Hulu for its original programming. It's that if they want to become a major player in the original content space, they'll need a huge user base to start with. For that, they need licensed content.
In other words, my thesis is that TV networks can be disrupted by someone else making original content and distributing it over the web, but the disruptor will need a big number of users to make this possible. It's much easier to get that big user base with licensed content.
Whether it makes sense for Yahoo to be in the studio and production business is another question!
But this is only buying an extremely limited license to content. Its a catch 22 the only reason Hulu has had any success is because its had premium content provided by its current owners. If Hulu goes independent the content rights are likely not getting renewed at their current rates.
Note that there were rumors that Google already made an overture to buy Hulu at a price rumored to be 2x the current price but with much longer licensing terms and were turned down.
Unless Yahoo wants to focus more on original programming for Hulu (a strategy I'm behind) then buying it for its current content rights is a fools bet.
sitting through the same 4 advertisements over-and-over-and-over again for
What is it I don't understand about the online video business that causes this to happen? They can't get enough advertisements from their partners to allow them to be less repetitive? Advertisers don't want to provide variety? (Maybe advertisers specifically want the monotony? Surely not, else they'd follow the same scheme on network TV.) The endless repetition sucks to watch and it makes the whole thing seem amateurish.
I think this might be one of the areas that Yahoo could really help. They've got a lot of advertising experience, and would hopefully improve Hulu's ad performance.
Both Hulu and Tumblr have proved that ads can work in their product, but haven't really brought them to any meaningful scale. Maybe that's what attracts Yahoo to them?
this is the absolute worst, along with turned up volume for commercials it's pure evil. if there is a hell, i am sure it will be filled with repetitive commercials breaks.
if i remember watching tv at my parrents, the regular tv networks do the same thing right? my best guess is that they did some psychological studies and such repetition is necessary to program your brain with "WANT ARBY'S SANDWICH"
Huh. OK, then it surprises me that they charge so much. I guess they're selling their ad space, though? (Hence it being sensible for them to charge such a high CPM rate.)
On a tangent, that ad was such a terrible missed opportunity.
Here you have scored this exclusive deal with this impossible international crossover genius comedic rapper, and you sell a pretty delicious product, and all you can think of is a 1950s-style cutesy celebrity endorsement format. Ending with a very pre-Don-Draper, wink-and-a-fake-smile, generic-celebrity-worshipping closer "If Psy does it, we all go nuts."
I really liked Gangnam Style the first 30 times, and I enjoy Wonderful's pistachios, but this was perhaps the most unimaginative intersection of the two possible.
Yeah Hulu-specific content is not that great. The main reason I watch it is for specific TV shows that I want to watch after they air on cable. I canceled my cable two years ago and I haven't looked back since.
It doesn't seem like this would go away though. Each of the big streamers are building a specific base set of streamable content.
Amazon is focused on newer films more so than Netflix and Hulu.
Hulu is focused on new television content, with some original programming from overseas shows mostly.
Netflix is focused on older television and movie content, with stronger original programming.
HBO Go will be new movies and strong original content.
Right now there is certainly room for all of these services... I think in the future its highly likely we'll see other channels make a stronger stream crossover (like Comedy Central, Food Network, ESPN, etc..) and we'll basically have content streaming channels. In that world, Netflix, Amazon and HBO GO are still strong, but Hulu might start loosing content or have stronger competition, and that could be problematic.
Yep, I love Netflix and loved every second of House of Cards! Although I have the opposite issue with Netflix. Lack of constantly added content makes their library feel stale at times, while every time I hit hulu.com it pops up with a list of shows with a "NEW EPISODE!" badge. Keeps you going back!
Two words: back catalog. My Netflix queue doesn't go shorter, no matter how I try (both DVD and streaming). Sometimes I feel like a kind in a candy store, when drilling down their recommendations.
Man the "same 4 advertisements over-and-over-and-over" bothered the hell out of me as well. If you're going to do video ads, I'm fine with it, really, just don't make me listen to the same ones over and over for months.
I mean, you mentioned Google, so yes, expect 200-300+ character links for the most simple of urls, with about fourteen layers of different metrics baked in.
Nothing worse than trying to get a link from Google search results.
I've always chalked it up not as advertising but as branding. Those commercials serve to build a brand around a product and keep current owners involved in the brand, through feelings of superiority or whatever.
It's like CocaCola commercials: they don't need awareness through advertising, they want branding. Everyone knows what Coke is, but they want you to associate happiness with their product, so they keep branding.
So when I see luxury brands bashing each other, I imagine that's part of what rich people pay BMW and Mercedes for. For that feeling of "I'm better than you because I own X", which the brands deliver through marketing like this.
>From my point of view, it's just very difficult to continue supporting the video game industry anymore.
Don't judge an industry by it's rotting old guard. Nintendo has been making blunder after blunder for quite some time and does not represent gaming as a whole.
Reddit has helped built a list[1] of studios and publishers who have given permissions for LPers to make videos, and the list is pretty comprehensive. Tons of developers and companies are 100% okay with and even promote it.
Also, with both next gen consoles supporting game play video natively, it's going to get bigger and bigger in the industry.
Everything was stable, I streamed the entire event from Verge pre-show to the end screen without a single hiccup or drop.
I also had far less criticism than you did for the presentation, I found it similar to what Sony and Nintendo do on stage and definitely par the course for a console release.
I mean, think about it: Sony hasn't even shown off it's hardware yet, and they announced months ago. Now Sony is telling us they'll actually, you know, SHOW US the console in a few more weeks. What gives?
At least Microsoft put the product there, front of stage, and (presumably) ran a few demos on it.
Yeah I can't criticize too much on streaming, other than that it worked fine until half way through and then wouldn't reconnect after that. There's a lot of factors that can affect that. Considering it happened from both my phone over LTE and laptop via wifi at home, 2 data points can triangulate in a certain direction.
Your bar is too low. Expect more from product releases. Was this launch better than the PS4 launch? Absolutely. Was it great, not at all.
I will never introduce a product that doesn't do what its being sold to do until I can stand in front of 100 people and show it working.
I believe he suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect and his completely unsourced post should create a huge red flag in any readers mind.
I'm not going to go point by point as the average HNer should be able to research for themselves, but I will respond to this gem that generated the largest facepalm:
> Nearly all food "innovations" of the last 100 years are unhealthy ... The only beneficial modification to the food system from a nutritional perspective has been fortification with certain key nutrients,
This is such a shockingly misguided statement that it hurts to read it. This is why I believe he suffers from illusory superiority, because I think his utter inexperience with agrology is leading him to think that he actually understands this field and can speak with expertise on it.
For a counter-point that "all innovation has been bad", one should only have to look at Norman Borlaug, known colloquially as "the man who saved a billion lives" and "the father of the green revolution". Norman Borlaug was Nobel laureate and agrologist whose research changed agriculture around the world and is credited with preventing billions from starvation.
The innovations of the past century directly allowed nations to increase wheat and rice yields by 2-10X, saving more than one nation from mass famine. I certainly would not label that "unbeneficial" or "unhealthy".
And this is just the elephant in the room in terms of examples, believe me when I say you could write books on the subject of the benefits of agricultural development of the past century. Entire schools are devoted to this study.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_revolution