naterator

> Do you understand how widespread this kind of research is? Literally everyone does this.

One of the main objections I'm seeing from people (in my bubble) isn't that Facebook did this, but that Cornell, UCSF, and PNAS participated in this. Facebook can do this, and while it's unethical it's not illegal. Same goes for manipulative people in your everyday life (let me not tell you about the horrific human being of a girlfriend I once had). The point is that science and the people who purport to carry it out should be held to higher and rigorous ethical standards. If those standards are not met, those people should be excluded from science and their findings ignored. They should not be awarded serious consideration in a journal such as PNAS. That is what is happening here as far as I can see, and while a bit dramatic fashion I think it is correct.

Also, if I may toss my personal interpretation of the research into this... ethics aside, the study is extremely weak, and I honestly don't see how it can be published in such a "good" journal. The effect size was < 0.0001. They hand-wavingly try to explain that this is still significant given the sample size. I'm personally not convinced, at all. Sounds like they needed a positive conclusion out of the study and so they came up with a reason for one. If this landed on my desk for review I would have reject on that alone.

Silicon Valley and the tech sector is full of adult babies. Watching the twitter reaction to this news (and others) is pretty fascinating. You're all so doom-and-gloom the first second the government tries to regulate something. Let's not discuss the histrionics that come out on other topics. Further, you act like there could be no possible logical reason why these things should be regulated. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of onerous regulation or regulatory capture, but you guys are just a bunch of babies.

I think there should be rules about drones, because I can easily think of several really fucking bad things that could happen if everyone who wants to tinker can just fly their drones around because they've got the money and know how. What happens if Amazon tries to deliver a package, but the software fucks up and the drone flies over the airport (assuming the engineers even thought of that problem in advance)? What happens when multiple business start flying drones around and they start crashing into one another, falling on people, highways, or whatever? I've seen a video where a guy decapitated himself with his gas powered toy helicopter. Are these drones going to be safe if they crash into me, or should I walk around with a shotgun?

We need rules. We don't need onerous rules, but we need rules.

>They could have just surveyed users back then to find out where they were screwing up, but in typical Google fashion, that would have involved actually engaging with their users, which Google is borderline allergic to.

Yup. Google never grew out of that phase--the Steve Jobs Phase, I like to call it. Obviously when Google started they knew what users didn't even know they wanted. Efficient search. Great webmail. Etc. But then Google (should have) realized it was a business with customers who aren't always idiots. It did not. It still really hasn't.

I think it's a very valid criticism if your best people (not talking about "most" people, who don't start companies and create new stuff) can easily move to another country (or other state inside the US) and earn WAY more for the same job or skill set.

It's not a valid criticism if the gov. footing 80% allows these companies to now offer SV/NY competitive salaries. Which I suspect will happen if they do it right (both the governement and the entrepreneurs).

Yea, the lesson is: If you find yourself in a situation like that, bail out as fast as you can. When we're young we are often not taught—or more importantly we do not have the opportunity—to simply GTFO of the crappy situation we're in (Family, Bullies, etc.). It has tragic consequences both early in life and later on. It's (one of the reasons) why we get school shooters, why people stay at crappy companies when they don't have to, why people stay in destructive relationships.

Modern society often allows us the freedom to avoid people and situations we can't control but don't want to be in. For the love of god, please take advantage of that.

Isn't this the type of thing a place like Bell Labs would, or Google X should, be on top of? And not fruitlessly rehashing the space elevator idea?

IMO it's definitely Second-system syndrome. Maps worked fine and didn't need much added/changed, but someone decided that they needed to keep iterating and now we're stuck with all the cludge built on top of it now.

What surprised me more was that the Canary Islands was one of the first markets for IKEA (before 1985). I mean, the Canary Islands before Madrid or New York? WTF? I can only assume they were using as a test market, like Kansas City for Google Fiber, but still... wow!

Yea, that's great and all but what happens when China and it's 1.4 billion people get their stuff together?

It's astounding that it seems that few in the US government seem to acknowledge that we may not be on top always, and what goes around comes around. There will be real future costs for our moral corruptness.

> This is the easy way out for them.

As far as I understand they wanted to restructure but they are not being allowed to by the court. The first line[1] in the doc essentially says this. This happens when the court doesn't think there is hope for rehab, which is not surprising in Mt.Gox case.

[1] "At 5 p.m. on April 24, 2014, the Tokyo Distri ct Court issued an order of commencement of the bankruptcy proceedings for MtGox Co., Ltd."

Meta: I love that lately there have been more health and biology related submissions here on HN. Dovetails nicely with YC new shift/interest, and matches one of my great personal interests.

Do other like this as well, or do people wish that HN would stay focused on software, VC, and traditional tech? Just curious. Obviously it's getting upmodded, but still curious to hear if there is another side.

Shouldn't there be some kind of formula for this kind of thing? Some kind of way to gauge how much salary/year you should give up based on how likely you think they will be successful. For example,

[% annual salary haircut] = [likelihood success in 10 years] * [estimated stock price] * [expected salary sans options]

... or something. Obviously it's far from a science, but I think there should be some kind of general way to arrive at reasonability. Currently start-ups essentially rely on how poorly people gauge the probability that a company will actually be successful vs. actual numbers. Or, put another way, how willing the hiree is to gamble/risk.

I only bring this up because, after personally seeing or being on the losing end, I would never accept the salary haricut for options again unless I could somewhat reliably gauge them, probabilistically. Maybe that's something I'll look into for the future. People do this kind of thing in the Insurance industry and on wall street all the time, I suppose.

Sidenote: Paul, thanks for all the really cool stuff you've done over the years.

An interesting theory, but the problem with it is that the pool of potential devs is effectively limitless (well, not really but it might as well be). They would have to pay me multiple $10ks to stop dev and shut up. And offering that to 100 or 1,000 devs starts getting really expensive. I don't know. Certainly the first few groups it would work, but... if the cat ever got out, everyone would be lining up to develop it, and it would be easy for the cat to get out.