MetaFilter at least has the advantage of being old and respected enough in tech circles to get the attention of Hacker News and Matt Cutts himself when something like this happens. For the vast majority of legitimate websites who see their traffic drop or become non-existent when google pushes an update to their ranking algorithms, there is virtually no recourse. I understand it's a necessary evil and there will always be collateral damage when trying to combat spammy websites, but at the same time it's scary to know that there are people whose sole source of income is web traffic and overnight it can disappear without explanation.
Readit Newsstopcodon commented on On MetaFilter Being Penalized By Google: An Explainer searchengineland.com/meta... · Posted by u/_pius
Interesting post. I'd like to think of myself as 'intelligent' - as most of us do - I'm Mensa, I'm a programmer of 30+ years blah blah. I live and breath 'logic'. So take this for what it's worth.
2 is the big one from my perspective. I think it's extremely naive to immediately trust anything coming from mainstream science / medicine these days. GMOs, as an example, demonstrates the inability of some scientists to understand the concept of 'playing with machines they neither understand holistically, nor practically'.
Even 'slightly large' software projects, where the variables are all contained in a highly controlled and observable environment, go horribly wrong. I can't imagine the arrogance you need to mess with nature confidently.
Nature is a complex machine, don't f* around with it unless you a) can create it from scratch b) are absolutely sure what you're doing is not going to affect the machine's surrounding environment. We are far, far away from those necessary understandings. I would think this was obvious, but apparently it's not.
I get the impression that in America I'd be shouted down for saying this.
This will come off as a strawman, but the same could be said for every drug ever prescribed. There's absolutely no way to quantify the effects an "unnatural" molecule will have on a human body, since everyone will have physiological differences, and there will be a near infinite number of environmental factors. The best we can do is use the sum of human knowledge as a framework to test that drug to the best of our ability, and try to figure out if it's safe by examining the evidence.
I'm an agricultural geneticist (not in industry, I have never worked on GMOs but I do keep up to date on the literature so I can educate others), so I will be biased here, but GMOs have been very carefully examined for decades with no credible evidence to suggest they pose a threat to human health.
Without going in to a lesson on population genetics, most genes, even if they found their way in to a natural population outside of a farm, would not spread in the population because of selection against them. Empirically the frequency of this kind of spread from crop to natural population has been found to be nearly non-existent, which is why it's not a huge concern.
Humans have been causing artificial selection on plants for thousands of years. Breeding for completely unnatural traits, and even crossing entirely different species to create novel organisms for agriculture. GMOs are far more controlled in this sense, where you know exactly what you're doing to the genome. Combining two genomes separated by millions of years of evolution at random through forced sexual reproduction in plants happens every day in crop breeding but nobody cares because it has this arbitrary label of "natural", presumably because it doesn't involve some sinister figure in a labcoat.
Unfortunately the anti-GMO activists do an excellent job of spreading misinformation and distrust of scientists to the public. The large biotech companies can do very little for the PR of GMOs, leaving academics to try and fight against the tide of hatred for what is actually an incredible tool for solving the worlds food shortages. Sadly most scientists are too busy writing grants to bother.
I noticed when I uploaded an image a few days ago, the "direct link to image" field was missing entirely. I figured it was meant to curb direct hotlinking.
stopcodon commented on The Arsenic DNA paper exposes flaws in peer review michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=... · Posted by u/ilamont
There should be an "Open Source" science journal. Where anyone can submit a paper and anyone can peer review or freely read said articles. User accounts could have a vetting process to verify their real world credentials and the articles they review would be weighted accordingly. Funding by donations and for-pay apis to do advanced searches perhaps? How awesome would it be to be able to freely read a repository of this kind of information? And to also be able to accurately say what is or isn't the current "scientific concensus".
I feel like this shouldn't be too difficult to make.
In addition to the PLOS series of journals, there are also other modern open-access journals popping up like PeerJ (peerj.com) and elife (elife.elifesciences.org). Anyone can go on and download the papers, and usually the datasets used in the papers if you want to replicate their results.
stopcodon commented on Diablo 3 to permanently remove its auction houses in March 2014 arstechnica.com/gaming/20... · Posted by u/freeman478
So, I have a bit of a personal episode here I'd like to share.
I played a lot of Diablo 2, more than I care to admit, and so the launch of Diablo 3 was a really big deal to me. I pre-ordered it on day 1, I pre-installed the game weeks before launch and I read every piece of information about the game. When the game came out, I initially loved it; just an absolute pleasure to play. It was great, until I found the auction house.
Within a few days, I had enough gear to handle most everything in the game and after a week or two I had a max-leveled character of each class. What was left to do? I hit the level cap, and even though they eventually came out with a second cap, the idea of grinding made no sense when the auction house existed. The most practical thing to do was trade and that got so boring so quick :/.
The design choices that Blizzard made as a direct result of the auction house are both terrifying and a fantastic lesson for anyone in the startup world.
As a direct result of making money off of the activities of people in the game, Blizzard made the following game inhibiting decisions:
* Penalizing players for dying for longer and longer periods of time
* Limiting in-game communication systems severely
* Penalizing players for playing in groups
I could go on, but the bottom line was this: Activision put profit over gameplay and burned one of the best franchises in the history of gaming for little profit. The game was absolutely atrocious as a direct result of the goddamn auction house. It took my favorite game and turned it into a stock simulator.
What made Diablo great was the camaraderie, the lack of a driving arching focus on optimization/monetization, and an amazing community of folks. Diablo 3 tried to turn all of that into money and it sucked.
Thank god and good riddance to that rubbish auction house.
I played Diablo 1 and 2 for many years, and pre-ordered Diablo 3 like you. I ended up playing for a few weeks and haven't touched it since for the following reasons:
The auction systems - didn't like them for the exact reason the linked article states. There was no "fun" in trying to get gear in the actual game anymore. I used to enjoy "Magic Finding" to gear new characters.
Only 4 people per game (versus 8 in Diablo 2) - At launch, myself and the 5-6 people I played D2 with all wanted to play together and simply couldn't. I suspect this to be related to the fact they planned to release it on consoles from the start. Unrelated to this complaint, but I also found the interface to be suspiciously optimized for console controls instead of keyboard and mouse.
"Matchmaking" - Part of the fun of D1 and D2 (in my opinion) was joining player created games (with names specified by the players). PvP games, trade games, chat games, hide and seek, specific quests, magic finding, levelling, boss runs etc. In Diablo 3 this was taken away. You were just thrown into a game with people on the same quest as you. To me this destroyed a significant part of the community that kept people playing D2 as long as they did. In the time I played after launch it was difficult to get in a game with anyone willing to communicate, or who actually spoke the same language.
Fewer skills/choices in placing attributes - Self-explanatory. D3 dumbed down the process of "building" your character to the point where no matter what you do you'll have a viable build. No more creating a character around a specific skill or item you like just to see if you could optimize it despite the disadvantage of it not being a mainstream build.
No PvP at launch - Again, self-explanatory. No idea if this was patched in at some point.
stopcodon commented on Google+ spamming people every 2 weeks to put up a profile photo levels.io/google-plus-spa... · Posted by u/pieterhg
> fix the Gmail UI.
They just tried recently.
I'd like to stop using GMail, but there aren't worthy competitors (free, large, mostly reliable). My ISP (which is a major one) sucks at mail compared to Google.
>tried
I waited 2 hours for an email yesterday only to find it hidden in a new "Promotions" tab instead of my inbox, which meant it didn't get pushed to my phone for some reason.
stopcodon commented on Google+ spamming people every 2 weeks to put up a profile photo levels.io/google-plus-spa... · Posted by u/pieterhg
Do you want to use your real name for YouTube:
- Yes
- Remind me in a week
How about: don't bug me ever?
This is probably one of my largest complaints about a google product at the moment. It feels like they're trying to trick me in to doing it with that invasive pop-up I get every week.
I don't even use YouTube for uploading or commenting, but I also don't want my real name and a photo of me on that site in any form. There's always the small chance they'll do something stupid like roll an update that makes my "previously viewed videos" available to my "social connections" by default without notifying me.
stopcodon commented on Snapchat, You've Made a Huge Mistake blog.etanzapinsky.com/201... · Posted by u/etanz
I'm glad someone pointed this out. This feature has always existed. You didn't even have to do it through your web browser, Snapchat has always had a link within the app to view the profiles of your friends (including their "best friends").
Exactly, I'm not sure why this suddenly became news. Did nobody bother to tap a name in their friends list in the last 6 months?
stopcodon commented on Researchers find a completely new DNA binding protein arstechnica.com/science/2... · Posted by u/darxius
There's a very interesting rule of thumb that is used in the protein folding field. If 30% of the amino acids in two different proteins are identical, then you can be very certain that they will have identical (or nearly identical) 3D shapes. However, it is entirely possible that two proteins have no sequence in common, yet still fold to the same shape. A friend actually stumbled upon just such a case when I was still doing protein folding work, and it was amazing to look at the sequence of these two different proteins and see nothing in common, then flip to the 3D structure and see that they line up almost perfectly.
Proteins are immensely cool.
That's why ab initio protein structure prediction is such a sought-after tool in bioinformatics. You can have an incredibly high degree of nucleotide/amino acid substitution between two proteins with the same structure, function and evolutionary history, but current methods of detecting these relationships still largely rely on sequence comparison alone.
Read it here: http://www.redditblog.com/2014/09/every-man-is-responsible-f...
Here's the comments from their blog post: http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2foivo/every_man_is_re...
The admins are getting called out in nearly every top-level comment for folding to media attention and celebrity lawyers, when other objectively worse subreddits are actually granted the "hands-off" approach the site claims to use. Presumably because the victims can't afford legal teams or make headlines like celebrities can when their privacy is violated.
The leaks were despicable and I understand any business taking steps to avoid involvement in their distribution, but you can't expect a user-base like reddits to tolerate the administration saying one thing and doing the exact opposite in certain cases where there's bad press involved.
Edit: Here's a follow-up post from the sysadmin alienth in response to the backlash from their decision: http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/2fpdax/time_t...