NH_2's comments

I get that lab meat is largely considered a transcendent technological solution to the ethical dilemma of slaughtering livestock, but at the same time I can't help but think that this dooms chickens and cows to obsoletion and eventual extinction.

Sort of. I taught middle-school students programming using Scratch (and a whiteboard) for three summers, and found that its interface of dragging and dropping blocks of code worked well for teaching programming fundamentals (conditionals, loops, functions, events, etc) without the hassle of a command-line.

I'm curious about this too.

Also, what's the retrieval rate of the data? How much of it can you query at once? Is it different/faster on Ethereum?

Agreed -- would also love to see an incentive structure around publishing negative results. One of the areas of research I think is the most exciting is artificial photosynthesis, and it's currently at the phase where the researchers are trying to discover efficiency gains by just trying out a bunch of different materials.

Take this recent publication [1]:

> For water oxidation, the photoanode surface was protected from corrosion by a 62.5 nm layer of amorphous, hole-conducting TiO2 that was grown by atomic-layer deposition (ALD).

> The TiO2 layer significantly improves the stability of III-V photoanodes in a tandem structure for water oxidation while the tandem structure produces sufficient photovoltage to sustain the efficient, unassisted production of hydrogen by water splitting in aqueous alkaline electrolytes.

They discovered that coating the photoanode with 62.5nm of TiO2 helps stabilize the reaction. But who knows how many materials they went through to get that one? And how many different coating thicknesses they tried before settling of 62.5nm? This tech could be next-gen solar, would be great to see the global rate of discovery increase. Perhaps YC Research can start this trend?

[1] Joint Center for Artitificial Photosynthesis - http://authors.library.caltech.edu/59897/1/c5ee01786f.pdf

Agreed. I'm actually starting a link aggregator (http://www.filter.news) and would love to implement this in the future. Besides supporting quality journalism, I think the signaling could be important as well.

> It's not that your article isn't worth a nickel, it's that it's not worth my mental energy to debate whether to spend a nickel.

I agree with the above, but disagree that this makes micropayments for online content a futile venture. There are a couple ways that come to mind to solve the mental fatigue issue:

1. Automate all the payments

2. Automate all the payments w/ a cap

3. Automate payments from whitelisted domains

4. Don't automate payments, but ask to whitelist new domains (similar to: "remember me").

These could all just be user preferences, just as described in the post.

> Of course not everything on the web needs to cost something, and I’m not arguing that every site charge for its content, and go behind paywalls.

I can't help but think that if the implementation becomes easier then more sites will start to demand small sums for their content. I'm curious about how these charges might work with the existing distribution platforms. Would a user who reads a 402 article through Facebook's Instant Articles or Apple News still have to pay? Apple News at least was offering pubs 100% of the ad revenue they generated off the ads they list themselves, would they give 100% of the 402 payment?

I think this will be good for Twitter. Jack will be able to make big identity and design decisions over the next few years with less pushback from the employees and users than any non-founder CEO. He's already begun by declaring that tweets will extend beyond 140 chars, and the response has been apprehension instead of outright rejection. And for Twitter to remain competitive with Facebook, even as Facebook builds Notes and live-streaming video to cater journalists, Twitter is going to need to make many of these decisions.

It works by finding commonly shared article links, which can be tweets or retweets.

We're working on adding email registration as well as making our topics available to users who don't want to register. Right now, we're using twitter login because it's an easy way to facilitate account creation.

I don’t agree that the YouTube personalities, despite being given access, didn’t ask the President tough questions. During the interview with Obama, Hank Green (the author) asked the President about several things:

  - the feasibility of the ideas he put forth in the SOTU
  - the revolving door between industry and government
  - his use and alleged overuse of drone strikes
  - the long-term foreign policy strategy on North Korea
  - the confusing marijuana policy in the US

I think these are all legitimate questions that the President should have to answer for. I think that there could have been follow-up questions asked, but the session didn’t seem like it was intended to be a back and forth. Obama also took a long time in answering each question, which may have been because the complexity of the issues discussed demanded long answers, or just because he wanted to run the clock.

[Edit] First post, formatted bullets.

Helpful for readability:

var style = document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0].style; style.width = '800px'; style.margin = '0 auto'; style['font-size'] = '19px';

Someone just rocked me with a step function. I'm intrigued.

I'm working like something along these lines for news. Email me (it's in my profile) if you're interested in finding out more and potentially working together.