DanBC2

I'd love to see an enormous version of this harmonic motion demonstration.

(http://sciencedemonstrations.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyw...)

Here's a not very good example using hair and a car stereo (http://youtu.be/4s_lpBkdoNc)

I apologise if I've been too harsh on Soylent. I have, previously, been strongly against Soylent. I'm against some of the techniques they're using to sell it now.

But I'm trying to be more a "critical friend" rather than just "negative". I realise that I don't yet have the right balance.

Soylent is being sold as a complete food. We've seen a couple of mistakes during the testing process. The ingredients list is not easy to find, and the sources of those ingredients are not available, so we cannot check if it is a complete food or not.

Soylent is being sold as something that you can eat for every meal. You can argue that most people aren't going to do that, but that's how Soylent are selling it.

Soylent claim, unambiguously, that it is safe for everyone. People with Crohn's disease sometimes need to eat a liquid feed. Is Soylent safe for them? Because Soylent claim that it is safe for them, and that it'll provide them with optimum nutrition and bring them to good health.

I get all that. It's great.

It's a shame that they (and many of their prospective customers) appear to be unaware of the existing liquid feed products.

Eventually they claim they'll tailor the product for each individual. That'll be interesting. Maybe combine it with life planning for exercise and healthier eating? People could wean their selves off junk foods (subbing Soylent for those) and tapering in better food.

Yes, it has some grams of fibre. I'm not sure what form the fibre is in, or how much. It's on their website somewhere.

So you don't know? Yet you're happy for them to sell it as safe for everyone, as providing optimal nutrition, as bring people to perfect health, as being tested, when we don't know if any of that is true? (And we know the tested part is a lie).

> Why does everyone seem to think that Soylent is "for every meal, everyday"?

Because they're selling it as that. Perhaps Soylent could consider reading these threads and improving their website information?

>Also, it doesn't have a single ingredient list. It's been stated several times that the measurements would be modified according to each individual that would use Soylent.

This version of the product comes, I think, in just two forms, Male and Female. Ingredients are crucial. (Perhaps a legal requirement? I don't know about the US market.) Certainly a list of ingredients for the base product is possible.

It'll be interesting to see how Soylent do the tailoring to each individual. It'll be interesting to see what information they use to do that modification.

> It's not going to kill you, or mess up your health

How do you know?

To disrupt the industry Soylent need to know what that industry is.

So far I haven't seen any sign that they have any idea about what going on in that domain.

There's a bunch of stuff about "Hey! What if food was a simple easy liquid?" - well, fine, except that's been in existence for many years. There's some stuff about "optimal health" - which is a bit scary when you have a bunch of people with (as far as we can see) zero medical knowledge, zero dietary knowledge, and zero nutritional knowledge. Apart from what they've got from Wikipedia. And then there's the "Soylent will feed the world" - except we've been trying to feed the world with similar products for years and there's still a problem.

For the world hunger stuff: Who are they selling to? Charities and NGOs? The WFP and UNICEF? Will they just sell the raw product, or will they sell distribution too? What makes them better than whoever the WFP / UNICFEC are buying from?

This is why it doesn't feel disruptive. Most disruptive companies see what other people are doing, and target the inefficiencies or target what people want done differently.

Soylent claims to be different, but is the same as existing products (but with much bolder claims and much less quality control).

Everything I've seen with Soylent so far feels very rushed, and not thought-through. MVPs are fine for most things, but I'm pretty cautious about what I live on.

Most YC startups are not going to cause you direct physical harm. Soylent might. And I'd be fine with that if they had stuck to the original self-experimental approach. But they're not. They saying, clearly, unambiguously, that the product is tested and is safe and is safe for everyone.

> assuming it's not missing any major dietary component

It has some fibre, but it's missing solids. Who knows if that's important or not?

They claim it has a long shelf life. I'm not sure what they're doing to maintain shelf life. Vitamin C, for example, has a short shelf life. Soylent aren't saying how long the shelf life is, or which nutrients might degrade sooner.

That's the kind of thing they'll need help with. Sealed containers, maybe with weekly supplies per container, dark light-proof containers will help.

(While I'm strongly anti-Soylent, I'm trying to be more constructive.)

Soylent have some fierce competition.

Liquid feeding is not new. Many companies do it already.

Liquid feeding for developing world also isn't new. There are a number of foods developed especially for that market.

Here are some of the competitor products:

(http://ensure.com/) Ensure

(https://www.nutricia.co.uk/fortisip//) Fortisip

(http://www.complan.com/) Complan

(http://abbottnutrition.com/brands/abbott-brands) Abbott Nutrition Brands

These are big companies. They have dieticians and nutritionists working for them. They have established manufacturing channels sorted out. They supply a known, quality product to a variety of sources. They have existing contracts with big customers. They have expertise in selling to healthcare markets.

Note also the caution they use when describing their products - they don't claim that these are suitable for anyone. They certainly don't suggest that you stay on a liquid diet if you don't need it. They strongly suggest doctor's supervision.

Soylent claim to be interested in the developing world markets. About 20% of the world live on less than $1.25 per day. (http://povertydata.worldbank.org/poverty/home)) And the main ingredient of Soylent is water, supplied by the user. About one billion people don't have access to clean drinking water. (http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/mdg1/en/index.htm...)

The World Food Program and UNICEF have some information. (https://www.wfp.org/nutrition/special-nutritional-products) -- see how cheap they're aiming for?

It's your body, and what you do with it is up to you. But Soylent are being irresponsible by selling this product as "safe", for everyone, as "tested", when it hasn't had any testing, and we don't know that it is safe, and we do know that it is not safe for everyone.

And this is the company selling most of the ingredients for these various nutri-stuffs (http://www.dsm.com/en_US/foodandbeverages/public/home/pages/...)

Good Luck and everything, but I don't think they have any clue what they're doing, or who the established competitors are.

(Using secondary account because I'd set noprocast a bit too long)

The drug has been used to treat the condition for nearly 60 years.

> prescribed medication for this truly bullshit condition concocted by the modern age.

Ritalin is nearly 60 years old.

Well, no. Now we know what we don't know, rather than assuming we do know something. And when we specify one font over another we can say honestly "Because I like it" rather than dishonestly "Because science tells us it's best".

He crashed significant parts of the Internet, causing considerable alarm amongst sysadmins. His father was working for NSA at the time. I seem to remember he went to his father and was persuaded to own up, but maybe I misremember.

Here's Eugene Spafford's write up: (http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1701&...)

Page 26

> However. at a recent meeting, Professor Rick Rashid of Carnegie-Mellon University was heard to claim that Robert T. Morris, the alleged author of the Wann, had revealed the jingerd bug to system administmtivc staff at eMU well over a year ago.

Here's Seely's "Tour of the Worm" (http://www.cs.unc.edu/~jeffay/courses/nidsS05/attacks/seely-...)

> These notes describe how the design of TCP/IP and the 4.2BSD implementation allow users on untrusted and possibly very distant hosts to masquerade as users on trusted hosts. [Robert T. Morris, "A Weakness in the 4.2BSD Unix TCP/IP Software"]

Here's Mark W. Eichin's and Jon A. Rochlis' "With Microscope and Tweezers" (http://www.mit.edu/~eichin/virus/main.html)

> That means that if someone steals your card or your smart-ring, you’d better report it stolen pretty quickly.

Well, yes. But you'd hopefully have a master passphrase to open the "smart-ring" device, making theft less of a problem.

This is briefly mentioned in Clifford Stoll's book "The Cuckoo's Egg" (which is great read).

It's a fascinating story. I also like his father's (or maybe it was his?) idea for a spellchecker - using statistical analysis.

Passwords are lousy. Really lousy. As you point out the problem isn't with the security of them (when properly applied) but because it's all just so klunky and annoying and different websites have different implementations.

I know at least two websites that ask for a username, a password, and they also give a capcha. I have some websites that won't let Chrome save my password.

Really, I want a hardware thing with a long secure passphrase, that has all my other usernames and passwords (12 character alpha numeric with upper and lower case) in it, that confirms my identity to all these different websites. (Can I do this with Yubikey? or anything else?)

Plea bargains are weird when used as a weapon to intimidate someone.

There's something vaguely similar with people (at least in the UK) wrongly convicted and sent to prison. To qualify for early release they have to atone for their crime, which means accepting guilt and feeling remorse. But you cannot feel guilt nor remorse for a crime which you did not commit, and so they don't get early release. "Say you did it; do the time; you'll be out soon enough."

See also Japanese police and courts - suspects are held for much longer than in the UK; they're bullied and intimidated; and once things go to trial there's a > 90% conviction rate.

Here's a 24 minute BBC radio documentary about forced confession in Japan:

(http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/docarchive/...)

Sometimes they have multiple confessors to a single crime.

Have you spent any time in prison? Have you visited anyone in any prison? Which federal prison do you suppose Mr Swartz would have been sent to if he had been convicted?

> It was not at all realistic to think a 35 year sentence would have been handed down for downloading scientific papers, even in America.

It's easier to say this when you're not facing prison and financial ruin.

He wasn't being charged with "downloading papers". He was charged with wire fraud, computer fraud, criminal damage, etc.

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jul/21/aaron-swart...)

> US attorney Carmen Ortiz said: "Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars. It is equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away."

> If convicted Swartz faces maximum jail terms of 35 years and possible fines of up to $1m. Swartz appeared in court on Wednesday and was released on bail of $100,000.

And it'd mind-boggling that we're talking whether 35 years is realistic or not; the fact that prison is considered a suitable punishment for the alleged crime is a disgrace, and something that shames America.

> Not sure why PG has not said anything publicly

I find your comment bizarre.

> this very sensitive issue.

> Not sure why PG has not said anything publicly

Why should PG talk publicly about the death by suicide of someone he knew?

Given the quality of a lot of Facebook comments any of the Loebner Prize bots would have a reasonable chance of passing as human.

(http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html)

A bit of tweaking - some learning and some Markov chains - and you'd have something reasonably solid for that narrow gap.

Obviously there are trivially easy ways to trip up bots, if you suspect they are bots.

The ultimate story is of the Anandtech forums, where someone invented a woman, sockpuppeted her on the forums, romanced her on the forums, got married, had a child (or she already had one?) and then killed them both off in a road traffic accident.

(http://web.archive.org/web/20010624115154/http://forums.anan...)

(http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=275172)

(http://oro.open.ac.uk/647/)

Fakery on the Internet is fascinating and very very common. People fake having cancer; people fake their own situation; people fake their friends. The movie Catfish is a nice exploration of one person's fakery. (It would have been easy to say "OMG SHE'S MENTAL LOL" but it's a surprisingly gentle confrontation and you end up somewhat sympathetic to her.)

Here are some other notable fakes:

SEXTORTION AT EISENHOWER HIGH

(http://www.gq.com/news-politics/big-issues/200907/wisconsin-...)

> Last year, an awkward high school senior in Wisconsin went online, passed himself off as a flirtatious female student, and conned dozens of his male classmates into e-mailing him sexually explicit images of themselves. What he did next will likely send him to jail for a very long time

DAVE ON WHEELS

(http://betabeat.com/2012/10/meet-hunter-dunn-the-young-man-w...)

> Followers of “Dave” on sites like Twitter and The Chive thought they were reading posts from a deaf young man suffering from cerebral palsy who had worked tirelessly to overcome his obstacles, all the while maintaining a positive outlook and relatably wry sense of humor.

KAYCEE NICOLE / DEBBIE SWENSON

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2001/may/28/internetnew...)

> For two years, a young American girl recounted her brave struggle against leukaemia in a daily online diary. This month she died. Thousands of web-users sent condolences. But [...]

(http://web.archive.org/web/20050115092141/http://www.rootnod...)

(http://www.metafilter.com/7878/The-Kaycee-Nicole-Swensen-Faq)

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaycee_Nicole_Swenson)

THE LYING DISEASE - in which a cancer patient is befriended by another cancer patient, who is faking cancer. (Happens three times.)

(http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-lying-disease/Content...)

WARRIOR ELI - a ten year hoax

(http://gawker.com/5914621/the-long-fake-life-of-js-dirr-a-de...)

Awful.

T Mobile insert <script src="http://1.2.3.8/bmi-int-js/bmi.js language="javascript"></script> after the opening <html> on every page. Pretty lousy behaviour.

Gnome overlays the root window, so anything you write to it is not displayed. Thus, they broke existing functionality.

(http://galahad.armoredpenguin.com/rootwindow/)

There's probably a service for people to fake it for each other - you have a site like okcupid but the intent is not dating, but posting "cute" messages for each other on facebook and twitter.

You're getting a pretty hostile response!

People are free to spend their money on whatever they want. I'd prefer them to spend money on meditation than on, for example, telephone psychics or homeopathy.

Motivation is a tricky, unsolved, problem. It's really important too - people need motivation to stop smoking, to eat better, to exercise more. These all have serious public health impacts. So I welcome anyone working on this problem. I hope you're keeping detailed stats.

Good Luck!

Have you seen the Maximite?

(http://geoffg.net/maximite.html)

> The Colour Maximite is a small and versatile single chip computer running a full featured BASIC interpreter with 128K of working memory and eight colours on a VGA monitor.

> It will work with a standard PC keyboard and because the Maximite has its own built in SD memory card and BASIC language you need nothing more to start writing and running BASIC programs.

> The Colour Maximite also has 40 input/output lines including an Arduino compatible connector. These I/Os can be independently configured as analog inputs, digital inputs or digital outputs. You can measure voltage, frequencies, detect switch closure, etc and respond by turning on lights, closing relays, etc - all under control of your BASIC program.