pigbucket

Some practical stuff to consider (not prescriptions), some of which is more relevant in case of advanced disease, and some of which may save you time or headaches in the long run, and some of which will just seem trite and obvious:

1.Second opinion regarding treatment protocol (especially for second line treatment or beyond, where things tend to be a bit less settled) 2. Genetic testing that looks for treatable anomalies. (e.g., FoundationOne) 3. Disabled parking placard (if your country has this) 4. DNR. (Do not resucitate order) 5. Power of Attorney (for matters both medical and financial) Treat anxiety/depression. (Remeron, for example, helps with anxiety, depression, sleep, and appetite) 6. Protect patient from misinformation 7. Prophylactic treatment of pain 8. Prophylactic treatment of nausea 9. Prophylactic treatment of constipation (stool softeners are not always enough) 10. Always request STAT orders from doctors (to reduce time spent waiting around for tests and for test results) 11. Grab rails/ support rails for bathroom/shower + shower chair + walker 12. If relevant: consider upgrading medical insurance during open enrollment period. 13. Will. 14. TV for bedroom. 15. Make sure bed is as comfortable as possible. 16. Write down questions for oncologist prior to appointment. 17. Protect patient as much as possible from idea that she is burden, from natural expressions of impatience or frustration, from arguments etc (since these can have medical implications in terms of willingness to endure necessary treatment) 18. Caretaker needs to be taken care of too. 18. Avoid delays in treatment as much as possible. 19. Vaccinate against flu and covid

As discussed in Bertrand Russell’s If the Title is a Question, Is the Answer No?

Teachers consider the practice you describe (paying someone to spruce up an essay) cheating, but it's not clear that that is the kind of service that OP's site offers. Many teachers also encourage students to get critical feedback on their essays, and so they should. Many professional and academic writers seek out the same kind of feedback. I share your desire for the democratization of online education (that's the point of essayjudge) but there are so many sites that appeal to the baser instincts of struggling or just lazy students (selling pre-written or custom written essays) that I think any site that provides legitimate feedback to students, even if it's for a modest fee, should be welcomed.

Thanks for your kind words about http://www.essayjudge.com While it's true that our service is free, it does come at the cost of the publication of one's essay. I had several (<15) requests last semester for private essay reviews (which I did) for a fee (which I turned down). Since I'm reaching a relatively small number of students (<20k/month), there may still be a viable market for OP's service. Whether OP has the price point right, I don't know. I don't see how cost of advertising/teacher pay/etc. doesn't outstrip profit at $12/essay. Perhaps it could work if OP is an seo magician. In any case, I applaud jjets for not just creating another cheater site. I can share some experience and maybe stats with you (jjets) if you are interested; you can email me at bbquigley using google email.

This is why I love HN. See something that blows my mind. Read comments. Meh. (When I say "love," you know I mean "hate" right?)

This is a rare and wonderful eulogy. We can nitpick over the details of Fry's grasp of the Apple way, but today it is probably better just to appreciate what Fry gets right about the phenomenon of Steve Jobs. I think one thing he gets right, the thing in any case of most importance to me, is the attitude that Jobs brought to the things he did. The phrase "insanely great" has been knocking about in my brain as a kind of touchstone for that attitude since I first heard it used of the Mac in 84. I was a kid, but the phrase stuck with me, like the voice of conscience, becoming a constant challenge to do better. Beyond the macs and the pods and the phones and the pads, what I feel most grateful to Jobs for is the fact that he supplanted the old clarion cry "good is not good enough" with the much more powerful idea: "great is not great enough." There are other powerful ideas, including the antonymous "Just ship it!" Perhaps the challenge of living well and doing good is to somehow respond to the imperatives implied by both ideas. "Just ship it!" is a useful antidote for the procrastinating and hesitating conscience, but the romantic in me appreciates more the restraints placed on whatever forces lead us to accept mediocrity by having the ideal of the insanely great held before us the proper measure of human achievement.

>Honestly, should the consulting thing confuse or worry anyone?

I think the author did a pretty good job of explaining why she is worried, and while your two points are compelling, neither really addresses that explanation. You've got people who wanted to be artists, or public servants, or writers, or filmmakers, or non-profit workers, giving up their dreams for the sake of the security offered seductively by professional recruiters. That's a trade off for them, and perhaps liable to elicit a general shrug, but it's hardly a radical position to view so many making that trade off as potentially a loss for society or, say, humanity. Maybe the Shakespeares of this world always end up being Shakespeares. But maybe every once in a while they end up in finance or consultancy. I think it's fine that they have to freedom to do that. I think it's a shame that so much of the risk is on the side of "I'm going to be the next Shakespeare."

Yes. It was appealed by the Bush admin., and overturned in '09

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Mayfield#Court.27s_ruli...

Good to be aware of this if you plan to falsify your tax returns, according to a '98 NYT article (from which this post takes its neat title)

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/04/science/following-benford-...

I recognize that this is a soundbite version of recent history and tangential to the main point of the article, but just for the sake of contrarianism: Google is the company that pulled out of China in opposition to government-sponsored censorship; Amazon is the company that cut Wikileaks loose in response to government-requested censorship. There's more to judging a company's "interestingness" than its apparent antipathy to elitism.

Your comment was looking a little grey under the collar when I read it, which I think raises the irony to which you allude to another level.

I really like your comment, but I don't think we should judge an odd philosophy on the basis of one of its most banal articulations. The article belongs to a genre with a pretty decent tradition, but its relation to that tradition is derivative in the worst sense (in fact, it's at least a second derivative, so to speak, rehashing an already bastardized rehashing of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire). Every age diagnoses the malaise of the age, but not every age does it equally well. One problem with the modern era is that we don't have a Kierkegaard or Nietzsche to write our critiques of average modes of existence.

I like the concept but I think it's missing something to get the user interested in the first place. HN has content I like from people I don't know. Twitter has random soundbites from people I can choose to follow. It looks like your app drops the interesting content part of the social-networking thing and the interesting tweeter part of the twitter soundbite machine so I end up being asked to be interested in completely random soundbites from completely random people. The example of the leaderboard on your post would be an unfortunately accurate prediction of the kind of content I'd expect. You really should try to get more interesting content on your sample leaderboard.

1. Maybe I'd be more interested if I knew or in some way could identify with the people sharing quotes. So what about names being visible. Or:

2. Maybe I'd be more interested still if there was a way to filter by group. Christians might be interested in random quotes from other self-styled Christians. Atheists might be interested in god-debunking soundbites. Technophiles might be interested in "android v. apple" slugfests. And so on.

3. Maybe I'd also be interested if event-specific or news-specific quote voting were possible. E.g., I'm at a baseball game and I can follow people from all over the park sharing observations about players and hotdogs. Or there's an earthquake, and I can follow stuff about that. In this respect, you'd be doing something that makes Twitter interesting rather than just the thing that makes it boring, and the voting would be a real addition.

Caveat: complete novice here, in awe of people who can so readily conceive and execute an idea like this.

A beautiful typo. You mean "vulnerable" for "venerable" right? Is that because you think they really are doing what the article implies? Is there evidence more substantial than that offered by the Tribune? The article for me is just shoddy journalism. Can it be that hard to really test the hypothesis that businesses that turn down the ad salesperson get screwed by Yelp? I don't want to defend Yelp since I don't like the site, but I think its pretty scummy of the Tribune also to willingly promulgate, at least by rhetorical implication, the idea that Justin G is some kind of shill for non-Brader dog trainers.

(Very much tangential at this point, so I'll put my theory that Justin G, far from being a shill, is actually a superhero in parentheses. Consider: He's very secretive. He reviews businesses without leaving behind a trace of his true identity. He doesn't respond to queries from the Tribune. And look at his profile: He wears a cape. A cape! Also, his reviews are annoyingly sincere. And as for his name, clearly Justin G is justing the world one review at a time. Yes, verbing weirds language, but if you can justly right the world, why not rightly just it too?)

http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=z25c9TyWY1TdVEGxkj34...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_(linguistics)#Humor

Exactly. In fact, the guy didn't discover that trees branch according to the Fibonacci sequence (which was long known) but rather began his investigation by asking, Why the Fibonacci sequence? Then he hypothesized that it optimized the gathering of sunlight for photosynthesis. Then he tested the hypothesis with a new pv array.

Inhabitat credits treehugger.com as its source. Treehugger's article is not breathless about biomimicry, not spread over two pages, and not interrupted by adsense and images. http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/08/13-year-old-makes-so...

Edit: The source of treehugger's article is Aidan's own article, which is better still, and addresses briefly some of the issues raised in comments here (e.g., about fixed vs. tracking pv arrays). http://www.amnh.org/nationalcenter/youngnaturalistawards/201...

Thanks for the feedback. On my immediate to do list. No excuse, but I didn't build the site, and the process of trying to fix its bugs since I took it over while completely changing its focus has been especially onerous for me. Please use my personal email in my comment above.

>I’ve seen a lot of what passes for excellence in high schools, and it’s not good enough.

I’ve encountered many brilliant students in college, with straight A’s through highschool and stellar SATs, who cannot string three or four sentences together into a coherent paragraph. I am now trying to realize a vision of a Khan-inspired service for writers who are not getting the help they need from school. This is probably not the time for a shameless plug, because my site, as a site, still sucks, but if any student here wants free, quality reviews of their writing projects, you can get them at http://www.essayjudge.com

I say “free,” and mean it, but if you want to abuse the service, then I may ask you for a return favor in the form of development advice.

At present, you can submit writing quickly at the site using anon/anon as uid/pwd, but for HNers who don’t want their writing and the attendant review published, you can google-email me (bbquigley). No promises if I’m inundated, except to try my best.

Could the downgrade not have led precisely, if ironically, to the treasury rally by promoting concern about the general economy, with consequent sell-off of high-risk assets and flight to safety (treasury bonds, downgrade notwithstanding, still being seen as the safest bet for a lot of people in case of general economic uncertainty)?

If a company has access to hundreds of millions of profiles, can figure out an effective way of delivering targeted ads, and can effect a fundamental shift in the way most people find content on the web (i.e., a shift from keyword search to social search/sharing), then Google's advertising revenue could fall significantly. The obvious existing threat is Facebook. Facebook ads are not good enough yet, but could be relatively soon. I think the question for Google is whether it can catch up on social before Facebook catches up on search and ad targeting.

dsl put one up when the chrome extension block was released: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2218528

"If you don't like a site that appears in your search results, you can block all the pages within that site. Then you won't see any of those pages when you're signed in and searching on Google. If you change your mind, you can unblock the site later. Sites will be blocked only for you, but Google may use everyone's blocking information to improve the ranking of search results overall. You may block up to 500 sites."

From the US site http://www.spotify.com/int/coming-to-the-us/

>The award-winning music service that’s taken Europe by storm will soon be landing on US shores. Millions of tracks ready to play instantly, on your computer and your phone.

>Any track, any time, anywhere. And it's free!

Maybe there's a bit of a drawn-out bait and switch strategy here, but it looks like Spotify is going to start off in the U.S. with an "all-you-can-eat free tier".

>The ignorance the writer displays in the last paragraph is ridiculous. "Anti-stem cell research campaigns" are against use of embryonic stem cells. But the writer's own article indicates that adult stem cells were used here.

Some opponents have argued that stem-cell research is useless as well as, in the case of embryonic stem-cell research, ethically questionable. I take it the author's point is that now we can prove the general case: stem-cell research can lead to cures, and so disprove one of the (tactical) arguments of opponents. Rush Limbaugh at one point said embryonic stem-cell research in particular is useless, so he won't be bothered by this news.

>I find it hard to believe that in the millennia of recorded observations of animals, that no one observed a single instance of rock-bashing or stick-throwing.

Pliny's Natural History, which every natural philosopher and biologist in the west up until the 18th century likely read, is full of observations of interesting and apparently more than instinctual animal behavior, including the use of stones by ravens to raise water level in a jug (the observation at the root of the well-known fable by Aesop).

Against the long tradition of seeing humans as in some essential way distinct from animals (by virtue of tool use, or speech, or reason, or compassion, and so on) there is a counter-tradition (from Empiricus to Montaigne) of denying the distinction, and that tradition has collected gobs of anecdotes and observations of apparent reason, communication and tool use).

I distrust articles from "the Fool" because they often do stuff like this; publish one article calling for a recovery in X, and one saying that X will tank. Ultimately, someone at fool.com will always have been right. That doesn't mean this article is wrong, but my guess is that it is just the article written in response to someone at the Fool saying, Hey, we need to write a pessimistic piece on real estate to counterbalance our recent upbeat assessment. What actually makes the article not credible, in my view, is that it takes no account of growing population, no account of economic growth, no account of future inflation, no account of the precipitous decline in housing starts in the last few years, and no account of the fact that people are inclined to forget the lessons of the latest bubble as soon as they smell a new one. It also takes no account of the fact that every time someone says "this time is different" they turn out to be wrong, but maybe this time is different.

(I own (so to speak) a house--how's that for disclosure!)

Completely missing from your postmortem (from which I learned a lot and for which I am very grateful) is the fact that the service you offer, to judge from the demo alone, is frankly not very good. Perhaps your analytics show that few visitors bothered to look at the demo, so maybe the point is moot, but I think the demo is awful, and if I wanted to take over this business, I would completely redo it, or remove it altogether (sometimes it’s better not to show the product!).

I’m not talking about the implementation, which is great. I’m talking about the actual advice given in the demo, which you are offering as an example of the kind of thing students should be willing to pay for. The first comment is, essentially, use “and” instead of “&.” The second is, in effect, “make this bit a separate paragraph, and tie it in better.” And so on. The advice is generic or, when concrete (as in the case of “use and”), banal. There is very little of it. And there is very little of value in it. And since it’s a bit of a struggle to read the handwritten text of the sample essay, it’s even harder to tell if the generic advice is relevant--except in the case of the advice given for the conclusion, which is so general as to be universally applicable, which is not to say it is good advice.

I got a sense from your postmortem that you in part want to blame your lack of success on students not being interested enough in their own studies to pay for your service. I’ve taught thousands of students, so I know well how few are willing to write out practice exams, and how few of those are willing to seek out feedback. But a very small percentage of a very large number can surely translate to a modestly profitable business (especially, in this case, if you had plans to expand into the huge American market and into the college essay review business, which is what my crummy site is trying to do). God knows it’s hard to get students engaged, but the ones who visited your site were looking for something, and I don’t think they found something worth paying for.

Saying what works as part of your criticism is also a pragmatic way to make the recipient receptive to your negative criticism. A friend of mine who is a professor uses what he calls the sandwich theory of essay criticism: Say something nice. Say the critical stuff. Say something nice. The tough and bitter meat is in the middle, and the bread makes it palatable. I’ve just taken over a peer-review essay site and added a feature (expert reviews) that has come to dominate what the site does. Although the reviews we have started offering are not scathing, they are detailed and very critical. My hope, of course, is that they are very useful, but some students who submit essays for review will find their writing dissected and examined to an extent they have never experienced before. And it’s in public. I expect that it may for some be an overwhelming or even harrowing experience, and reading this post and the comments makes me appreciative of the courage of those who submit their essays for such criticism.

fellat

It may be too late in the game to reply to this nonplussing nonresponsive response, but what the hell...

>What responsibility am I shirking? If you want the job, then you do the thing.

Was "shirking" too severe? You disclaim, patently and unapologetically, responsibility for the effort that will be put into applying for the position by applicants who will not get the job.

You disclaim that responsibility by saying in effect "it will be fun, and if it ain't fun, don't do it, and if you do it and don't get the job it might be good for your portfolio, or good experience."

Your choice here was between devising an application procedure that actively and consciously tries to minimize the futile endeavors of most applicants or devising one that does not but instead leaves the responsibility for that minimization entirely up to applicants themselves.

You seem to like the second choice, suggesting it really is not at all your responsibility; it's all on the shoulders of the applicant. You're not (the applicant will be distressed to hear) his mom.

Yet elsewhere you seem to want at least a little to acknowledge that there is something to be said, at least publicly, for taking the first choice: You wondered whether you were asking too much. You advised applicants only to do it if it's fun and so on. It seems to me that that's an example of trying not to be callously indifferent to the work of others.

I was merely trying to point out that that's not good enough. It should be obvious, I think, that this, your, strategy for minimizing wasted effort on the part of applicants is not going to work.

The alternative strategy of many employers is to impose the more effortful parts of the application procedure only late in the process and only on applicants they are already interested in. They do this even though it's more time-consuming for them. They take that responsibility. You don't, and shrug.

But let me do you the honor of citing you again: "so be it." I'm certain you have no reason to worry about this. I'm sure Reddit will get its rockstars and continue to rock.

And if you ever want a lesson in supercilious condescension (the "I'm not your mom" stuff is embarrassingly amateurish), look me up. I take payment in advance.

P.s. I didn't use the phrase "spec work" and if I had I wouldn't have used it to mean, in accordance with your bizarre and presumptuously corrective definition, "asking someone to do work and then paying them etc..." Clearly that's nonsense. Spec work is the work, not the asking. I did use "on spec", and used it as a standard modifier to qualify the meaning of "work" as work which is done speculatively in hope or expectation of gain. In this (hardly broad) sense you are asking applicants to do work on spec. Joyfully.