Maybe so, but the ads were so annoying I couldn't keep reading. It was almost comical how they kept popping up every few seconds, like some kind of parody.
Curiously this article presents a different hypothesis about why he is able to read 0 and 1:
> It's also "surprising" that his brain doesn't have problems with "0" and "1," McCloskey added. It's not clear why, but those two numbers might look similar to letters like "O" or "lowercase l," he said. Or those two numbers might be processed differently than other numbers in the brain, as "zero wasn't invented for quite a long time after the other digits were," he said.
> Or those two numbers might be processed differently than other numbers in the brain, as "zero wasn't invented for quite a long time after the other digits were," he said.
Come on, that's just silly. What are they even suggesting here? Zero is encoded in a different area of RMS's brain because he learned it as an adult, after its invention under the Nixon administration?
Also from that page: "The group of researchers created new digits for RFS which they called "surrogate digits" so that he could use them in daily life."
That's just not some sort of new jargon, it's what the word surrogate means! How does someone end up writing for a living without learning how to use a dictionary?
Even with targeted ads how often is it that someone actually (1) wants the thing and (2) buying the thing is net good for them and for society?
I'm sympathetic to the argument that ads could reduce information asymmetry, make the market more efficient, and thus count as a social good. The problem is that advertisers' incentives aren't the same as society or the consumer's.
Look at it this way: Google exists. If you know you want something, it's not hard to find online. Ergo, if you often find yourself buying something because you saw it in an ad, what does that say about your rationality as a consumer?
In practice, corporations buy ads to manufacture demand because their products are neither things consumers or society actually wants, nor things consumers rationally choose to seek out.
And we can have it both ways. If consumers really wanted targeted ads, we could build a website for that: users enter their personal information and the website responds with personalized ads. Like Google-search but with only sponsored results.
It's partly biological but there are still many existing cultural attitudes that discourage husbands from performining traditionally "feminine" roles/tasks when caring for their kids.
The author's point about being over-critical of sexism is well-taken, but by reducing the sexist attitudes towards, for example, stay-at-home dads, it may be possible to help more women in STEM have fully productive careers.
Related: How To Change Your Mind is worth reading. It covers the history of psilocybin & LSD research including the early parts of this recent resurgence in interest.
On the positive side, I do think that if we repeat this truth enough times we can decrease the "cover my ass" value of consulting and help more orgs make change autonomously.
Thanks for pulling out the data! One problem is that "somewhat", "very", "completely" don't give a good picture of how dissatisfied these 2.7% of patients are. It's possible some of them developed serious dry eye which can be totally debilitating.
This doesn't mean the procedure shouldn't have been approved, it most likely means that folks need to do better patient education and qualification. Not everyone needs to be a good candidate.
It's also possible that these results vary a lot between LASIK docs. I'd expect that some qualify patients more thoroughly than others. Risk for developing side effects can be assessed beforehand, to some extent.
Eye drops do not treat the underlying cause of dry eye (unhealthy/insufficient tears, inflammation (e.g. blepharitis), or in rare cases neuropathic pain). They are just symptom relief.
For anyone reading this who manages their dry eye with eye drops, please do some reading or see a specialist. If all you do is use eye drops, your dry eye will likely get worse.
Eye drops bolster your tear film and help prevent desiccating stress to the eye surface, but they lack growth factors and other important compounds found in biological tears, and can even contribute to washing those away.
Last, whatever you do, don't use eye drops with preservatives (e.g. benzalkonium chloride).
How many quality opinions did your friend get? I also know people with DED and from my experience not all docs understand the disease well. Obviously you know more than I do, but I'm very skeptical that there isn't more to the story than "a lifetime of drops". Also, I hope your friend has tried autologous serum drops.
That is a great suggestion IMHO. ASTs are pretty amazing but they're not a cure for everyone.
In the case above, I'm referring to my spouse. Her entire family has this problem - dry eye, frequent / continuous corneal erosions - setting in by their mid-late thirties. These are the people who end up wearing sleeping goggles, ointment, taping their lids shut, etc. It's not a lack of tear production, it's poor corneal basement layer adhesion for some undiagnosed reason and, probably, eyelids drifting open during sleep.
I mean, it's worth asking, but anyone with a good niche would be smart to not post it publicly unless the benefits of publicity outweigh the risk of competition.
Sure. But most good passive income ideas are good because of how easy they are, and because they're the perfect size for a small market. Usually even one more competitor entering the market is enough to significantly disrupt them. If you are sitting on one of those, why would you post about it in an HN thread that will be archived and trawled by capable competitors specifically looking for ideas? If it only takes one competitor to disrupt your golden goose, why would you post about it here?
While there are many interesting ideas in this thread, I expect there are a fair amount of people lurking with much more profitable and higher leverage products. So maybe just take the thread with a grain of salt and don't think of it representative of a ceiling on what's possible to build in 2019.
I agree there's niche websites that generate tonnes of money and have been around for years but nobody really knows about them... And the webmaster likes it that way
If you have a good idea you already have a lot of competition. Bad ideas have no competition because they are bad ideas that return every few years to fail again.
All good points. Haven't read the code so I don't know how deep the similarity goes but the new React Concurrent UI Patterns is at a surface level conceptually similar to Ember's interruptible route transitions, though more fine-grained.
Also really like the new <Suspense> Component! I created a {{render-on-resolve promise=foo}} Component for the app I worked on in Ember back in 2016, and we got a ton of use out of it. If you set up your data layer right, and use it well, it completely removes the need to ever manually manage a loading spinner again.
