_pius

actually, having gotten a phd and attended many journal clubs, "seen his papers roundly critiqued on the merits at too many journal clubs to count" is as strong a point as anybody can make.

Journal clubs are vicious. Everybody's got their brains and knives out …

actually, having read what you wrote, saying that “journal clubs are vicious … everybody’s got their … knives out” undermines your argument by implying that even good papers will be “roundly critiqued” in that setting, making this about as weak a point as anybody can make.

—

on further reflection, what I do find to be a strong point but in favor of Loeb’s argument is the fact that it triggered the scientists who wrote this comment and its grandparent to underscore the point of the article by more or less heaping scorn on the author, listing their own credentials, and proceeding to make — forgive me — non sequitur arguments from authority instead of substantively refuting the claims.

if this is what happens to a former department chair at Harvard when they question orthodoxy, it indeed does not augur well for less-credentialed researchers, regardless of the merit of their work.

So by that logic Obama should be small capital black since his father was from the wrong side of Africa and not a slave … Oh the racialist hierarchies we build.

Not sure why you’re injecting inflammatory bile into an otherwise civil thread. If you read past the first sentence, you’ll refute your own point. Think before trolling.

This may or may not change your mind on the topic.

https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php

From the article:

To capitalize Black, in her view, is to acknowledge that slavery “deliberately stripped” people forcibly shipped overseas “of all other ethnic/national ties.” She added, “African American is not wrong, and some prefer it, but if we are going to capitalize Asian and South Asian and Indigenous, for example, groups that include myriad ethnic identities united by shared race and geography and, to some degree, culture, then we also have to capitalize Black.”

The people cheering this on will not be protected when the mob comes for you.

The facile sophistry of comments like yours is becoming obnoxious. An actual fascist mob already came for us last week and we were not protected, get it?

There can be interesting intellectual arguments about whether this was the right move but breathlessly calling ToS enforcement by private companies a “mob” while ignoring an actual mob with lead pipes, guns, and bombs ain’t it.

Did you ever actually refactor code with a significant test suite written under heavy mocking?

I have. The assumptions you make in your code are there whether you test them or not. Better to make them explicit. This is why TDD can be useful as a design tool. Bad designs are incredibly annoying to test. :)

For example if you have to mock 3 other things every time you test a unit, it may be a good sign that you should reconsider your design not delete all your tests.

I think you wrote this before I finished elaborating on my comment. :)

Yes, you should delete tests for everything that isn't a required external behavior, or a bugfix IMO.

For the edification of junior programmers who may end up reading this thread, I’m just going to come right out and say it: this is awful advice in general.

For situations where this appears to be good advice, it’s almost certainly indicative of poor testing infrastructure or poorly written tests. For instance, consider the following context from the parent comment:

Otherwise you're implicitly testing the implementation, which makes refactoring impossible.

A big smell here is if the large majority of your tests are mocked. This might mean you're testing at too fine-grained a level.

These two points are in conflict and help clarify why someone might just give up and delete their tests.

The argument for deleting tests appears to be that changing a unit’s implementation will cause you to have to rewrite a bunch of old unrelated tests anyway, making refactoring “impossible.” But indeed that’s (almost) the whole point of mocking! Mocking is one tool used for writing tests that do not vary with unrelated implementations and thus pose no problem when it comes time to refactor.

Now there is a kernel of truth about an inordinate amount of mocking being a code smell, but it’s not about unit tests that are too fine-grained but rather unit tests that aren’t fine-grained enough (trying to test across units) or just a badly designed API. I usually find that if testing my code is annoying, I should revisit how I’ve designed it.

Testing is a surprisingly subtle topic and it takes some time to develop good taste and intuition about how much mocking/stubbing is natural and how much is actually a code smell.

In conclusion, as je42 said below:

Make sure you tests run (very) fast and are stable. Then there is little cost to pay to keep them around.

The key, of course, is learning how to do that. :)

"... can this guy even be considered black? He looks like a regular person ..."

This subtly dehumanizing idea that certain races are normal while others are irregular is the root of many problems.

This headline rewrite does a disservice.

It editorializes away the point of the post, which is that, according to the author, "Apple just killed offline web apps while purporting to protect your privacy [by forcing WebKit to delete all local storage after 7 days]."

Thanks for the interesting post. This isn’t a critique or evaluation of your work and you did mention that the client side JS can read the location hash.

I agree with your comment. I just don’t want anyone to think that a key stored in the location hash is somehow truly protected from ever getting back to the server, which was how the comment to which I responded sounded to me.

I didn’t know the part after # in a URL doesn’t get sent to the server.

While that is technically true, please know that it is not true in a way that is meaningful for many threat models. The JavaScript running on the page can trivially detect, inspect, and log changes to the location hash.

More information here:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WindowEvent...

You're saying that "[you] hate the way the cryptocurrency world has sucked all the air out of the decentralized room" but also that "we already have tons [of decentralized apps] that do not [use cryptocurrency]." That seems contradictory.

As this announcement stands, I ... won't be using what they build.

Considering you literally haven’t been told — let alone allowed to use — what they’ve built, that sounds like a reasonable prior.

Until you have a product, there's nothing to talk about.

Yeah ... if you’re a marketer. People who actually make stuff are allowed to be excited about what they‘ve been working on in their garages and get to tell people more about it on their own schedules. They don’t owe you a feature comparison table every time they talk about their project.

In fact, they don’t owe you anything at all.

”I've read all of the founders' blog posts now and I'm convinced they've packed every anti-pattern they could find into this startup .... they [list their values] ... yet there’s essentially nothing about what the product is.”

Imagine you and your friends excitedly announcing on your personal homepages that you are setting out to build your passion project into a going concern “not driven by power or greed, but by accomplishment and self-fulfillment” [1] and being flooded in a community of supposed hackers with derision that your post wasn’t a good enough press release.

For some people, the actual human excitement of friends earnestly getting together to build something new primarily because they want to see it in the world is so foreign that they can only snark about it.

Hopefully that kind of response vindicates their values more than it demoralizes.

[1] https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/new-golden-age-of-building-wi...

That’s a good question, I don’t know the history well enough to comment on that.

Much more important than CLU itself — groundbreaking as it was — was Liskov’s formalization of substitutability as a rigorous principle one can use to reason about the quality or correctness of an arbitrary abstraction (or model thereof).

And it seems others were thinking the same way: 'After you won the Turing Award, a comment appeared online saying, “Why did she get this award? She didn’t do anything that we didn’t already know.”'

This is not only distasteful but false.

First, modules in Modula were primarily about scope not abstraction.

Liskov pioneered a core aspect of abstraction which, among other things, allows modules to rely on abstract interfaces rather than their implementations (or a type or class rather than its subtypes or subclasses).

Abstraction only works reliably if any provably true property of a type is also provably true about its subtype.

Want to learn more? You’ll find it referenced in the literature as the Liskov Substitution Principle.

https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=197320.197383

... A browser extension that automatically launches on settings pages of SaaS tools. When you make a change on these sites, the extension gives you the opportunity to also provide a commit message, similar to how you would with a code check-in. Now you have a record of some button clicks that impacted your environment. The change has a permanent URL so you can look it up later if you forgot what you did, use it to help you move settings from staging to prod, or have others review the changes that were made. ... Our extension is able to capture payloads while being generally agnostic of the site itself. We’ll capture changes even if we haven’t seen the site before or if something has changed from the previous time we encountered it.

This sounds amazing, would have definitely made my life easier on many projects ... looking forward to checking it out!

Oh, and one thing to add if you haven’t already is the ability to whitelist which domains the extension is active on for privacy purposes.

We know that won't converge, and not being able to try infinite numbers has nothing to do with it. So what you say seems to me to be, on the surface, pretty much complete nonsense. To one who is trained in mathematics, what you're saying feels very similar to people who haven't travelled much saying that the Earth is obviously flat.

With respect, this response seems needlessly harsh and supercilious. That’s the kind of stuff that discourages people from going deeper into a field. The question appears to have been asked in good faith ... why not be more charitable and constructive?

And as you probably know, it was discovered that many sequences that supposedly “won’t converge” indeed do converge under analytic continuation, there are reasonable and terribly subtle philosophical questions to ask about the validity of inductive reasoning, and there are working mathematicians who consider themselves finitists.

What’s sorely missing is guidance (or code) that can help empower more people to create things like this.

http://worrydream.com/Tangle/

"if you ate 0 grams of sugar for more than a couple of weeks you would die"

This is completely false. Indeed, depending on your body composition, you can do a water fast for two weeks and be completely fine. I've done it, I know.

Getting this stuff right can change lives; please think twice about engaging in uninformed pedantry and FUD.

He has famously said he would have sold FB if yahoo kept the $1 billion tag.

If he indeed said that to someone, it was not famously; the prevailing mythology is definitely that he was uninterested in selling at that price. Would love to see your source if that isn't true.

Yahoo did famously miss out on acquiring Google early on because of a lowball offer ... maybe you're thinking of that?

This submission has an editorialized, misleading title.

The actual title of this paper is "Homophily in Entrepreneurial Team Formation" and it presents a number of results, one of which being that: "homophily in ethnicity increases team performance by lifting teams in bottom quantiles to median performance quantiles, but it does not increase the chance of being top performers." Very different implication from that of this editorialized submission title.

Here's the full abstract:

We study the role of homophily in group formation. Using a unique dataset of MBA students, we observe homophily in ethnicity and gender increases the probability of forming teams by 25%. Homophily in education and past working experience increases the probability of forming teams by 17% and 11 % respectively. Homophily in education and working experience is stronger among males than females. Further, we examine the causal impact of homophily on team performance. Homophily in ethnicity increases team performance by lifting teams in bottom quantiles to median performance quantiles, but it does not increase the chance of being top performers. Our findings have implications for understanding the lack of diversity in entrepreneurship and venture capital industry.

"Advertising" isn't a business model; it's a crutch one reaches for when an existing business isn't financially sustainable on its own.

Advertising is absolutely a business model; it funds not only most of what you see on the internet, but much of what you watch on TV.

Now is it the best business model for every company? Obviously not.

It's in the app layer, we dont need a "fifth" layer.

That's raised in the first comment, by Fred Wilson. Naval's response was:

You are correct in that it’s technically another set of application layer protocols – I was just being provocative with the title Although in theory it could be a resource allocation layer on top of SMTP, HTTP, etc. Semantics…

I've seen him give this great talk before, but IMO the delivery this time feels rushed and a bit disjointed. That said, the last few minutes summarize his powerful "Gretzky Game" idea so succinctly that they're worth the price of admission alone.

I would recommend watching the last 18 seconds of this version (starting at https://youtu.be/ZDM33CMJvp8?t=3452), internalizing the Gretzky Game slide on the screen, backing it up and watching the fuller explanation in the preceding ~3 minutes (starting at 54:18, https://youtu.be/ZDM33CMJvp8?t=3258), and then finally watching a different, more expansive version of the talk like this one, given at Qualcomm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdSD07U5uBs.

Oddly specific advice, I know, but hopefully helpful to somebody.

Eagle eyed readers and veteran HN'ers will note that "Tara Ploughman" is an anagram for "Not Paul Graham."

Not wanting to sound too negative, I would prefer to meet the people in person and drink a beer, eat a meal than to lounge around in some virtual room.

Sure. But once you've had the experience of your circle of friends dispersing to different cities, the appeal becomes immediately obvious.

Big difference between knowing the math in theory and actually using it to do something useful with your data.

This is reaching the point of parody.

Imagine saying about your partner that you "can understand why people would be very scared and nervous about [him] ... and then keeping him.