Facebook Overestimated Key Video Metric for Two Years - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-overestimated-key-video-metric-for-two-years-1474586951 <comment><USER2> > _the tech giant vastly overestimated average viewing time for video ads on > its platform for two years, according to people familiar with the situation_

They didn't "overestimate". They plainly gave false numbers to drive ad sales.

Coldtea's law: Never attribute to incompetence what can be explained by profit.

<comment><USER3> "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

-Upton Sinclair

<comment><USER4> That is basically how Wall Street works. If a trader or salesperson is printing money, management doesn't want to know how it's done. Plausible deniability will at worst get you a failure to supervise penalty, whereas if you understand how these folks are making money you could become complicit in any illicit acts and thus exposure yourself to a much larger penalty and/or jail time.

Of course, the government has proven themselves time and time again unwilling to punish management so management might as well figure out how the illicit gains are being made so they can replicate such processes when the big producing trader or salesperson is invariably poached by a competing shop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "How Facebook is Stealing Billions of Views" \- Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell exposed this with detailed analysis and evidence. Watch it here => [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q)

This is neither a bug nor a "mistake". It's straight up fraud. Fraud because Facebook uses these false #s to prove to their advertizing clients that they are getting a HUGE ROI, when they really aren't. Also the investors and analysts bump up their ratings and the stock goes higher and higher on false ad view #s.

By counting a view as a legitmate view after the video plays only for 3 seconds, their "algorithm" counted billions of views even when the user has not even seen it, because Auto-play is enabled by default and you have to opt- out / disable it and no-one does it. It takes a person roughly 4 seconds to scroll off their feed as they quickly "scan" their friends posts.

<comment><USER6> Do you have a citation for the "4 seconds" figure? If it is 4 seconds, and it logs a view after 3 seconds, that's pretty damning.

<comment><USER5> It's not publicly discussed for obvious reasons, but I worked closely with Mudd for a couple of months last year. Here's a related interview where he touches upon it.

[http://digiday.com/platforms/advertisingweek2015-facebook- fi...](http://digiday.com/platforms/advertisingweek2015-facebook-finds-that- fast-scrolling-millennials-consume-ads-2-5-times-faster/)

Facebook spend an awful lot of resources tracking all sorts of user behaviour inside it's "walled garden".

I got really sick of it after a while and decided to stop working for them (even as a contractor)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> On my programmer hand, I can see myself making a similar technical choice. We have auto-playing videos, we shouldn't count the views less than 3 seconds because that wasn't really an intentional view. But that means we should also exclude them from the overall view count. I don't know if FB did that as well.

On my shareholder hand, this seems slightly like fraud.

On my advertiser foot, this seems slightly like fraud.

<comment><USER8> That is an important question that wasn't clear in the article. If they counted those sub 3 sec views in the count but not in the duration then it would definitely be fraudulent. If they didn't include sub 3 sec in the count or in the average then it is a valid technical decision. I am guessing they were included in the count but not in the duration.

They should have a histogram of durations.

<comment><USER9> It looks like they didn't count it in either metric. Peoples' complaint is that they excluded it from _all_ averages and all reports, which inflates their average duration of video watched because videos less than 3 seconds aren't included at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This seems slightly overblown. I suspect this was a metric useful for engineering that found its way to external usage. That's because in many recommendation systems in practice you want to filter out the spurious views, and a simple way to do that is with dwell time.

It's not uncommon to require at least 50% of pixels in view for 1 second before you have an impression for static images [0, 1]. AOL defines an impression requiring 2 seconds for images [1]. Facebook likely did some analyses to find that 3 seconds was a good cutoff for their site.

There are more sophisticated ways to estimate dwell time but they seem uncommon in practice; perhaps due to their difficulty communicating to advertisers what the impression metric actually means.

For sites with many bots or inbound marketing you often find users bounce quickly which drives some of this timing. I'm a bit surprised it needs to be that high for Facebook without many bots or users bouncing quickly. Perhaps this is for mobile users scrolling quickly.

[0] [http://advertising.aol.com/specs/terms/aol-viewability- terms](http://advertising.aol.com/specs/terms/aol-viewability-terms) [1] [http://mediaratingcouncil.org/063014%20Viewable%20Ad%20Impre...](http://mediaratingcouncil.org/063014%20Viewable%20Ad%20Impression%20Guideline_Final.pdf)

<comment><USER11> It's not overblown if you're lying to advertisers about the quality of impressions their ads received, and lying to investors about it too...especially when your stock has rocketed to making Facebook easily in the top 10 largest corporations in the world.

Not only that but Facebook actively brags about video impressions in their conference calls. This is fraud. I think this is something that should be investigated by the SEC to be perfectly honest. Doesn't mean they should be charged, just investigated; because if they are misreporting this, what other metrics are they misreporting to shareholders?

<comment><USER12> > quality of impressions their ads received

I don't disagree, but FWIW the ads still had better ROI than Facebook's competitors, so the oversight (while embarrassing) may not have actually changed the willingness of ad buyers to pay for ads.

<comment><USER13> Better ROI than competitors. Did facebook tell you that?

<comment><USER14> Any modern advertiser knows their ROI from different channels. As a big FB spender, this doesn't effect us at all.

<comment><USER15> FB has more information about other channels than you do, I.e. for all you know they have algorithms favoring users to see FB ads that are on path that usually leads to your site based on FB pixel tracking. Then all the multi- attribution ROI of FB is nonsenses but you have no idea.

I'm not saying they are doing that, I am saying be especially careful with anyone in advertising who is misleading and who doesn't try to protect their reputation by being exact in what they say.

<comment><USER16> Regardless, dollar for dollar, if people are seeing bigger conversions or returns it doesn't matter whether they came from display advertising or 'organic content'.

If they buy something, who cares?

<comment><USER15> If someone is intentionally adding correlations using predictive information then they are stealing money you did not have to spend on traffic that was inevitable. It is like standing inside your waiting room to hand out your buisiness cards then claiming the sales commission.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "likely overestimated average time spent watching videos by between 60% and 80%"

Soooooooo... fraud? They say it didn't impact billings/revenue, but I have to imagine they will now be in a position to give discounts, if not refunds.

<comment><USER5> Yes. straight up fraud. "How Facebook is Stealing Billions of Views" \- Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell exposed this with detailed analysis and evidence. Watch it here => [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7tA3NNKF0Q)

<comment><USER18> That video is discussing a slightly different problem than the recently discovered issue the article's talking about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't think this is overblown at all.

I expect to see a class action lawsuit because of this. If you are a big advertiser and you can somehow show damages because of this error there may be a case.

There are some adtech companies recently who focus purely on reporting the metrics of your ad purchases. Kind of like acting as a third party. I forgot exactly what they are called.

<comment><USER20> This assumes most advertisers can prove the value of a video view of a certain length. I assure you as someone who deals with attribution on a daily basis that most cannot and the ones that claim to would have a hard time proving it in court. Attribution is hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't believe for a second that this was unintentional. The amount of press and mind share that Facebook has received for their "rocketing video efforts that rival YouTube" was totally worth pissing off some ad exec. Very few people will see this news compared to "Facebook dominates video" headlines that have been everywhere. This was a smart play on their part.

<comment><USER22> "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

I can see exactly how things like this could happen in large corps. You'd be surprised.

<comment><USER23> This might not be totally faor towards Facebook, but:

When it comes to _Facebook_ I guess there are slightly different rules:

A good rule of thumb for Facebook might be: expect malice.

We have seen it with the way the made everything public.

We have seen how they decided to sell out its own user a year after proclaiming their love and how this wouldn't happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> My data-weenie hat tells me that this is a silly metric anyway. As an advertiser, you really care about the _distribution_ of viewing times, and in particular what fraction of viewers watch the video all or most of the way through. Arithmetic mean is virtually useless when the data has a power-law or other non-linear distribution, and it's highly likely video viewing times exhibits this.

<comment><USER25> As someone who helps make decisions around ad spend... not really. I would take a distribution if I was given it but it wouldn't substantially drive my advertising strategy. Views (over 3 sec views is fine), clicks, viewthrough conversion, clickthrough rate, and conversion rate are orders of magnitude higher signal measures than the specifics of how far they got through the video.

I'd imagine that view time distributions are way more important to new media companies that rely heavily on video media like Buzzfeed or anyone putting out content on Youtube.

<comment><USER26> What's the clickthru rate on a movie trailer? What is that going to tell you? Do I click on ads on TV or in the newspaper?

Most video ads I see are more informational than a call to action. Who really wants to click on an ad while in facebook on a phone?

<comment><USER25> The advertising arm of movie companies are definitely looking at the interaction rates of their trailer ads to help make decisions. The reason they do so is because it is a valuable signal.

> "Who really wants to click on an ad while in facebook on a phone?"

Advertising for apps (read: games) is a massive, massive market.

<comment> ctrl-j > > "Who really wants to click on an ad while in facebook on a phone?"

99% of the time I click on an ad, it's on accident.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Then again, if a "video view" is defined as "watched over 3 seconds (50% of the video visible in the screen, IIRC)", then it sort of makes sense that "Average Duration of Video Viewed" doesn't include non-views.

For sure Facebook should attempt to name their metrics as descriptively as possible, but also advertisers should make sure they understand how different conversions are measured, what's included and what's not. Another example would be "Clicks" metric, which included all engagement (i.e. likes, shares etc), instead of just "Link clicks".

<comment><USER28> It doesn't seem all that unreasonable, yeah. If a user scrolls right past a video, should that really count towards the average?

<comment><USER29> A user below summarized the issue the way I understand it:

> _what happens is that views under 3 seconds aren 't counted towards the > average. So if you have 999 999 views of <1 second each and 1 view of 3 > seconds, the reported average is 3 seconds / 1 view = average view time of 3 > seconds, while the true average is something like 500 000 seconds / 1 000 > 000 views._

This is massive fraud, especially if you're shouting from the rooftops "Look at how much more attention people are paying to your videos in our platform!".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I didn't fully understand what the bug was, but I found on a German news page[1] with a slightly more detailed description:

 _Aufgezeichnet wurde zwar die Gesamtsehdauer aller User, geteilt wurde dieser Wert allerdings nur durch diejenigen User, die das Video länger als drei Sekunden ansahen_

So the average was not calculated correctly: They accumulated the duration of all video views (including of those shorter than 3 seconds), but divided it by the number of 'legitmate' views - i.e. only those longer than 3 seconds. So you get a pretty big offset if you have many views under 3 seconds (which they probably do, thanks to autoplay).

[1] [https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Facebook-Unklare- Vid...](https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Facebook-Unklare-Video-Metrik- fuehrt-Werbekunden-aufs-Glatteis-3330188.html)

</comment><comment><USER31> We are using Facebook Audience Network in random order with other ad network for mobile ads. FB ads earnings are about 3-5% of other networks, with exactly the same traffic. Other networks disclose the percentage the revenue split between them and the publishers, but FB does not. What do they overestimate in this case, I wonder?

</comment><comment><USER32> I don't think average watch time is a particularly useful metric, because no matter how they count views, there's some kind of arbitrary cutoff. If they count a view as soon as the player finishes loading, they'll include a whole bunch of people who didn't intend to watch the video, and in fact only "watched" a few milliseconds of it before bouncing. So that will drag the metric down artificially. I bet if they count views as soon as the video starts playing, they could drag down average watch time by improving player load time, because they'd count more unintentional "views" of very short duration.

I hope/assume this is part of a suite of metrics that they provide to advertisers, so you can understand it in the context of other things like video completion rate or counts of views that reach X% through the video.

</comment><comment><USER33> It's like watching a wasp land on a nettle. You know somebody's going to get stung, but you just don't care who.

</comment><comment><USER34> I don't get it, it makes sense?

Less than 3 seconds is not a view any more than seeing the picture of the video is a view. It doesn't count I'd say?

Or do advertisers have to still pay for a 2 second view?

</comment><comment><USER20> While this is concerning, smart advertisers were looking at the distribution of view length percentages anyway as you can easily pull those columns in and their derived metrics.

Likewise, smart advertisers look at lift in conversion metrics when possible, in which case this stat is irrelevant.

That said, FB has not exactly helped things by making metric definitions a little obfuscated in general.

Personally, I see a bigger concern is them giving 100% view through conversion credit with a 1 day window by default as part of any website conversion action tracking. There are very few cases (like some retargeting situations) where you'd ever want to give full weighting for a VT, and while there is likely value in VT's, I probably wouldn't give 100% credit to them by default given the rate at which people scroll on mobile. But advertisers like to see big numbers, agencies like to show big numbers, and so you have platforms like FB aggressively try to push metrics like this and some of their rather loose definitions of "engagement" without great explanation of the nuances or pros and cons. These are largely left up to the advertiser to determine since, to be fair, they are very subjective.

Savvy buyers know this and configure their reporting and tracking settings accordingly because FB and PMDs give you those options. They are sometimes just buried.

Ultimately, IMHO FB and Google's greatest defense towards any of these sorts of claims is better and (more importantly) transparent attribution data and tools. If they can prove their value on the bottom line, other things often don't matter to many advertisers. Attribution is a tough nut to crack, but for advertisers spending large sums, it is critical to be successful in these channels.

</comment><comment><USER35> It is unreasonable, even for a developer, to count 3 seconds as a play. Anyone working on a video product would know they were inflating the numbers.

<comment><USER36> The top-voted comment on this thread, by emcq, has a link to AOL's viewability guidelines which states

"For purposes of Video inventory, an impression is considered "In-View" to a user when at least fifty percent (50%) of the pixels in the ad are in the viewable browser window for a minimum of two (2) consecutive seconds."

Google here [https://support.google.com/dfp_premium/answer/4574077?hl=en](https://support.google.com/dfp_premium/answer/4574077?hl=en) says "For in-stream video ads, 50% of the ad's pixels must be visible in the browser window for a continuous 2 seconds."

<comment><USER37> That's the IAB's standard viewable impression metric: [https://www.iab.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/06/MRC-Viewable-...](https://www.iab.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/06/MRC-Viewable-Ad-Impression-Measurement-Guideline.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Ok, what am I not understanding here?

If they are only counting a view as over 3 seconds. And then only averaging the those views what is the problem? They tell me 1000 people viewed it (over 3 seconds), and then say the average view time was 10 seconds for those 1000 users. How is this an issue? Why do I care that 9,000 people scrolled past it and weren't counted in the viewer numbers? Now if they were reporting this as 10,000 viewers and saying 10 second average, I see the problem. Is that what was happening? Or what am I missing?

<comment><USER39> My suspicion (based on nothing) is that they averaged viewing over viewings with length >3 seconds, but _counted_ all views.

I.e. suppose your ad was displayed 5 times for 0.1 seconds and 5 times for 5 seconds. They would report this as "10 views, with average viewing time of 5 seconds".

<comment><USER40> I wish your comment was at the highest level. Everyone seems to be attempting to make the same point in the other subthreads. The example here makes it crystal clear.

<comment><USER39> My guess was almost correct. The issue was indeed that they use "views with >3 secs" in some metrics and use "all views" in other metrics. Do one of the other, don't mix them up.

[http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/facebook-gave-ad- agenc...](http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/facebook-gave-ad-agencies- inflated-video-viewing-metric-2-years-173676)

> UPDATE: Facebook authored a blog post today to futher explain the metric- > based miscue. David Fischer, vp of advertising and global operations, wrote: > "About a month ago, we found an error in the way we calculate one of the > video metrics on our dashboard – average duration of video viewed. The > metric should have reflected the total time spent watching a video divided > by the total number of people who played the video. But it didn't – it > reflected the total time spent watching a video divided by only the number > of 'views' of a video (that is, when the video was watched for three or more > seconds). And so the miscalculation overstated this metric. While this is > only one of the many metrics marketers look at, we take any mistake > seriously."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> In 2012 there were reports that 80% of traffic from Facebook Ads were automatic bots. So this is not the first time Facebook use tricks to get more money from clients.

<comment><USER42> From what I read [1] it's only one startup that claimed this, and I failed to see any confirmation from any other company. For me, no replication from companies that spend thousands every month on advertising = the startup messed up with its stat tools or wanted to create a buzz around its name.

[1]: [https://techcrunch.com/2012/07/30/startup-claims-80-of- its-f...](https://techcrunch.com/2012/07/30/startup-claims-80-of-its-facebook- ad-clicks-are-coming-from-bots/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> This looks like a flat out lie. Startups have to sometimes do that to woo potential investors. Although I like Facebook overall, I do not agree with many of their business practices.

</comment><comment><USER44> What was the actual bug? Does this mean that no video had an average view time less than 3 seconds?

<comment><USER45> They dont count views for less than 3 seconds in their view count.

They didnt include views of less than 3 seconds in their "average view time" metric, which is very misleading. Their metric was "average view time of video's in our view count".

Which is not the same thing and the latter vastly inflates the effectiveness of facebook video

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> This isn't anything new. Several YouTubers have "exposed" how Facebook tracks views. It's not accurate, but it's the system that has been in place for a while and they've defended it as such.

</comment><comment><USER47> I am disappointed by FB. Next we'll learn that they do tax evasion.

</comment><comment><USER48> If face book only count a view as over 3 seconds, and they measure the average view as only those videos over 3 seconds, what is the problem? Surely now its less representative?

</comment><comment><USER49> When will Facebook 'content creators'(users) get compensated for the value they create?

</comment><comment><USER50> Will there be a class action on this matter?

</comment><comment><USER51> It might be inaccurate but does not matter much in advertiser perspective. Given the conversions etc. eCPMs conversion to the real expected value.

</comment><comment><USER52> how much of their video income will they be refunding to advertisers?</comment>


The last days of the polymath - <AUTHOR> http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/edward-carr/last-days-polymath Who all do we have as living polymaths on our planet? Any ideas? <comment><USER2> Another old friend:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1038795>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=861836> <\- Has comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=850301>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=844229> <\- Has comments

<comment><USER3> I'd just like to say "Thanks" for keeping track of all these HN submissions. It seems like almost every time there's a duplicate post, you're there to provide links to the other instances and comments. It's especially nice when there's more discussion on the articles. Just figured I'd let you know I appreciate what you do.

<comment><USER2> Cheers!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Specialization doesn't mean you can't have polymaths. They just have to be sparser matrices.

<comment><USER5> Noam Chomsky, with his two-ish fields, springs to mind. Asimov and Bertrand Russel might qualify.

It seems, though, that those sparse matrices are largely populated by creative efforts; we see many professors of hard science who are also philosophers, historians or writers, but we seem to have lost the biologist, engineer and composer of da Vinci's ilk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very interesting article! Worthy of my upvote. But at the same time I don't at all buy into its premise.

Literally every field I have even a passing interest in has got people at the top of it who express interest in multiple fields at once. In the web-related world there's Shaun Inman, who goes back and forth between music, web design, and creating video games. Or there's Ze Frank, who goes back and forth between writing and designing tools and music and video comedy and I don't know what else. In music there are a _lot_ of people who specialize in many, many different things at once — either different types of music (multiple instruments, or multiple performance styles, or music production) — or actively in different fields at once. Peter Brotzmann, one of the best free jazz saxophonists, is also a graphic designer who's designed all of his albums to date. Tom Waits is a musician who acts and writes on the side. Auteur directors tend to be involved in five or six different fields at once: James Cameron is a masterful set/costume designer; David Lynch handles the audio production for his movies; and writes some of the music for it. Stand-up comic Louis CK writes, stars in, directs, _and_ edits his show Louie, which is to some degree _insane_.

The problem with looking at the Internet for polymaths of the same caliber of Carl Djerassi is that the Internet generation is too young right now. Ze Frank, who is in some ways the grandfather of the modern Internet creative movement, is only thirty-eight years old. The _real_ Internet generation, of the people who literally never existed in a world where the World Wide Web didn't, was born in 1990. They're twenty years old. They're me.

I can assure you as somebody who's closer to that generation than most of the users on that site: We're going to see an explosion of creativity the likes of which we haven't seen in decades, if ever. The kids I know in high school are busy writing, drawing, making music, arguing philosophy, arguing economics, doing pretty much everything and doing it all at once. Give it thirty years and I think you'll be flabbergasted at what we produce.

When I was eighteen I'd already published a novel, directed a play, written and co-performed a song, co-created said song's music video, performed and co- wrote a Harry Potter dub, wrote multiple essays, and designed a number of web sites. A friend of mine who's a year younger was keeping a political/economic blog and engaging in discussions pretty much everywhere. Yet another friend is a hypnotist, writer, and web designer who I might be making a documentary about this coming summer. The guy I live with, twenty-one, is a talented actor who's also written for the Colbert Report, interviewed celebrities, and in his free time sells tickets. Is that polymath enough for you?

<comment><USER7> No. It's not polymath enough because you haven't acquired the subtle art of impressing other people without coming off like someone who needs to brag about themselves or making already insecure people feel more insecure about themselves.

Without proper social-skills you are just a douche in lab coat/pocket- protector/drama club/hipster enclave. The true modern polymath, IMO are Frank Abagnale, Larry Ellison and Craig Ventor.

<comment><USER6> I wasn't aware that listing a set of things I've done counts as impressing people. It's not like I go around just announcing accomplishments to crowds hoping they'll cheer me or toast me or blow me.

We're discussing an article that opens up by mentioning one man's prowess in multiple areas. The article uses this man as a springboard to ask if there are similarly talented people today. My response was that I think there _are_ , and that while the current generation of Internet People is still young, there's a hell of a lot of promise there, pretty much wherever you look.

I'm sorry if you're insecure about yourself; I didn't mean to shove a list in your face in an attempt to make you feel unhappy. I know firsthand the shallow satisfaction that comes from doing things just to fill out a resume; happiness comes from friendship and personal curiosities. When I was 17 I thought writing a novel would make me happy; it didn't.

I don't know much about Ellison and Ventor. Would you really call Abagnale a polymath? He's a fascinating man, but I don't know him well enough to say that his activities are diverse enough to be called polymath. He was a con man; now he works in security. What else has he done?

<comment><USER7> Don't feel defensive. I think it's great that you are putting yourself in public and getting feedback. The truth is most people think that they are the shit but yet they are so insecure to express so in public. So they feel like Unibomber on the inside but are too chicken-shit to do actually like the Unibomber.

But it's important to take criticism well. Like playing music, it's jarring to hear your own voice or playing on records but it's the only way to get feedback and improve. What you are doing is to turn my criticism of you against me and it doesn't reflect poorly on me but shows off your bruised ego. You are free to think for yourself and then dismiss my criticism but don't turn it into the "idealistic you" vs. the materialistic world; that's descending into the Unibomber rabbit-hole.

And by the way, this is coming from someone who went through a phase of attempting to write the Great American Novel, exploring the liberal arts/music/philosophy/bohemian living, whatever you want to call it. Yeah, it was a very educational experience.

<comment><USER6> Oops! No! I'm sorry if it sounded like I was suggesting you were insecure. I think I misinterpreted when you said "making already insecure people feel more insecure about themselves". I worried you were referring to yourself.

If I could go back and edit my original post, I would, but the edit window closed. I legitimately didn't mean that to be dickwaving. And I tried to say that I _don't_ think I'm a polymath. I'm too young and too stupid. Maybe one day. Anyway, I didn't write it that well and it came off as me trying to look like an Internet Superhero. My apologies.

I go to an art school right now and boy oh boy does the cockiness and one-man- against-the-universe-ing get old. I agree; the only way to really do interesting things is to constantly self-doubt and push to expand. My favorite artists/people in general are the ones who to this day insist on trying to be better than they are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The last days? By whose definition? Not to discount Thomas Young at all, but I have no doubt that in the age of wikipedia you could find tens of thousands of people who could deliver that same address he did - myself included. I would argue heavily against the title of this article. These aren't the last days of the polymath, rather these are the days where we're so saturated with them that few stand out.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if the definition of the polymath is changing as our accessable memory is moving outside of the brain. So, now it's not the person who knows a lot about a lot, but the person who can efficiently query the search engine in real time and has the ability to work with the information coming back from it.

After all, rote memorization was not the polymath's main strength anyway. Now we're just unburdening them to an even higher degree.

</comment><comment><USER10> I would speculate that the reason that the polymath seems less common is that:

1\. Counter-intuitively, polymaths are now ubiquitous. The WWW as well as better information access in general has made it much easier to BECOME a polymath. Because of this, polymaths have to be so much more impressive. My local hackerspace contains several individuals who know/achieve SO MUCH in a variety of disciplines. We have baker, artist, roboticist, biohacker, hardware engineers and Dancer, juggler perl hacking political scientists. All of whom are making important contributions to their fields. However, they are lost in the noise because:

2\. The pace of scientific discovery is growing at an exponential rate. This means that it is difficult to keep track of, or notice any particular discovery, regardless of who makes it.

3\. And I admit, unlike the previous two, this is subjective. I think that we make more of a discovery at the edges of our knowledge than we do of a hybrid. We are all interested by a new type of particle being discovered, but when that happens, we pay more attention to the discoverers' titles as specialists, ignoring the likelihood that the particle physicist working at CERN could also be considered a solid materials/superconductors/computer engineer, as they would need to be in order to understand and utilize their test equipment.

<comment><USER11> 1) I would disagree. The definition of polymath is someone who is an expert at orthogonal subjects. Your definition of expert seems to be slightly lower than mine. My definition would be someone who could give a lecture to other experts in the field with a days notice and be able to answer questions to the satisfaction of the audience.

2) If this were true it would be a short time until science itself crumbled. How then are people able to keep on top of their fields with finite time? The number of scientists isn't exponentially increasing, nor are the number of publications. It's growth, but it's not exponential as far as I can tell.

3) A polymath is someone who has knowledge in orthogonal knowledge spaces. If your field requires knowledge in other very related areas then I wouldn't consider that polymath-like activity.

<comment><USER10> 1) That may be your definition, but it is not the dictionary one. Not that I don't wish that there were more people with leading edge expertise in independent fields, but the definition of polymath is merely great learning in diverse fields.

2) The population as a whole is increasing exponentially, as is the rate of discovery in a great many fields. While I doubt the situation is sustainable, the condition does exist at least in the short term. There is a degree of subjectivity here, but I stand by my statement.

3) Same as #1, worded differently a bit. I actually spent some time looking up different variations of the definition of polymath, and it turns out orthogonality (or independence, since orthogonality seems to be imply different things in compsci than for other disciplines) is not a requirement, just divergence seems sufficient.

As an aside, I am not trying to redefine polymath for my own benefit, being a broad generalist in a lot of fields, but still too focused on some compsci stuff to be a true expert in any of the other ones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The internal subjective experience or psychology of such people is something I find of a certain interest. Somewhat to my surprise, this article actually touches on that:

 _Djerassi has also suffered in his own work because of monomaths' hostility, especially as a playwright. "They always keep crying out 'the co-inventor, father, the mother of the Pill'," he growls. "Without having any knowledge about the play, they start with it. As if it's got anything to do with it." Djerassi thinks that this means he has to work harder to promote his work. "No agent has ever been interested in me. They want 29-year-old Irish playwrights, not 86-year-old expatriates." A trace of bitterness creeps into his voice, but he concedes: "If I were an agent I'd feel the same way."

Overwhelmed by specialists and attacked by experts as dilettantes, it is amazing that there are any polymaths at all. How do they manage?_

</comment><comment><USER13> It made for an interesting read, but I think there are too many generalizations in that type of writing. The truth is, we have just experienced and extraordinary explosion in the amount of valuable data and information that it available to almost everybody. I think that we have not yet come to grips with this and that it has caused some disciplinary boundaries to be rewritten. There will still be heroes after the revolution!

</comment><comment><USER14> I hope to become a polymath, but the (graduate school) system really isn't set up to produce them as such.</comment>


Recursive Make Considered Harmful (1997) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://aegis.sourceforge.net/auug97.pdf <comment><USER2> Yup. But imake is here now and we can all rest easy.

OK, maybe not. But this here autotools cleanly handles all those crazy portability edge cases and gives you a nice structure to boot. It's the Right Thing.

Sorry about that. But check out scons. That's clearly the way things should have been done in the first place.

Late breaking news: supporters of "Ant" in the Java world were just deposed by something called "Gradle"! We'll have experts on shortly to explain why either of these were needed in the first place given that javac handled dependencies automatically in its very first version.

But yeah, maybe python wasn't as clean as we hoped. Check out cmake! Here's the new hotness for sure. Pay no attention to the really awful programming language it embeds, it does windows!

\----

I mean, yeah, recursive make, specifically, isn't a great idea. And for large projects, make implementations have performance issues.

But make is a tool that does two things and does them simple and well: it tracks dependencies between files, and it lets you write simple command sequences in an obvious language to fulfill those dependencies.

And until the authors of all these other tools get their heads out of the clouds and stop trying to fix the OTHER problems with make while refusing to preserve these attributes, make isn't going anywhere.

<comment><USER3> > But make is a tool that does two things and does them simple and well: it > tracks dependencies between files, and [...]

Last I checked, make only handled dependencies with multiple inputs and a single output.

If your build step's command produced more than one output and you wanted to model that in your DAG you had to resort to some questionable incantations that never really worked perfectly (or rely on non portable constructs).

<comment><USER4> firstly, the upcoming version of GNU Make will indeed support multiple outputs in non-pattern rules (pattern rules always supported this, but pattern rules, uhh, have their own problems), using &: instead of :, resolving a bug from 2004. don't you just love the solid pace of those old GNU projects.

secondly, working around this was never very hard, albeit ugly: pretend your rule builds just one of the targets and have the other products depend on that one and simply touch themselves up to its timestamp.

<comment><USER3> I disagree with the characterization that this is "not very hard" (and my initial assessment was "questionable incantations" which I think is also accurate):

[https://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/html_node/Multi...](https://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/html_node/Multiple- Outputs.html)

Definitely not handled "simple and well" as posited by the OP.

<comment><USER4> the horrible contortions listed on the linked page are required for the pathological "some of the targets that are built together got deleted, but the primary one did not" case, which in my experience Does Not Happen (or when it does, it is a symptom of deeply suspect practices -- like shitting where you ea^W^W^W^Wkeeping build artifacts and sources in the same directory, or relying on manually deleting artifacts to force a rebuild instead of getting the bloody dependencies right in the first place, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Relevant: [https://apenwarr.ca/log/20101214](https://apenwarr.ca/log/20101214). Code: [https://github.com/apenwarr/redo](https://github.com/apenwarr/redo). It's excellent!

<comment><USER6> And, sadly, it also doesn't handle correctly / easily the case of a rule building two or more outputs (think yacc producing a .h and a .c file): more contortions are required.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Many people miss the key point of this article:

Break your make build up by recursively including make files instead of recursively invoking them.

<comment><USER8> I tried this once with multiple components (each being built into a static library), components "exporting" public includes (with correct dependencies across component boundaries) and tests for every component (as well as integration tests) and my conclusion: cmake it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> One problem with non-recursive make for very large projects is that make can take a long time to parse and interpret the uber-Makefile. Even though this paper provides some advice for reducing the parse time, it isn't enough for really large projects.

Android suffered from this a lot in the early days. I always wondered whether the initial Android team had read this paper and got carried away...

<comment><USER4> it's not the parsing per se that takes time on modern computers, it's opening and reading in all the scattered included makefiles. also what specifically Android build system is doing behind the scenes is, it runs a python script, which in turn runs find (or maybe several, I don't remember), to gather all the makefiles to include.

but parsing, once all the text is in memory? peanuts.

<comment><USER10> Android's build system now generates Ninja files, which are semantically very close to non-recursive Makefiles, so it's a real-world example you can examine and measure.

Android's build files currently add up to 1.5gb of text(!!!), which even with a fast parser take some time to load (~10-20s).

It's discussed further in this thread (in which among other things I suggest that maybe something is going wrong when you have 1.5gb of text):

[https://groups.google.com/d/topic/ninja- build/htlu9akobq0/di...](https://groups.google.com/d/topic/ninja- build/htlu9akobq0/discussion)

[disclaimer: I am the author of Ninja]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> People who defend make (or its evil companion autotools) are suffering from the Blub Paradox. [http://wiki.c2.com/?BlubParadox](http://wiki.c2.com/?BlubParadox) They likely have never used any better build/configuration system so they think make is the best there is. Discussing build systems is like discussing programming languages. If one party has only ever used Java, then they will never get it.

Personally, I switched to WAF a loong while ago and have never looked back. Perhaps it is not the best build system there is, but it is leagues ahead of autotools/make.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think these "<whatever I don't agree with> considered harmful" articles get a bit tideous after a while. For any of them you can just as easily write a counterpoint "<whatever you prefer instead> considered harmful" with just as much passion and merit. Mentally I tend to rewrite these as "<bob or jane> are mad at <goto, recursion, forth, puppies, kittens, etc>" and that is probably closer to the truth. They are opinion pieces that allow people to vent to a crowd.

If this comment had a title it could be "Considered Harmful articles considered harmful" or "Bob is mad at considered harmful articles". Someone else could come along and write "Lack of considered harmful articles considered harmful" with equal merit I'm sure. ;)

I've made a point the last few years to put at least one goto in all my code just to mess with the junior devs, though in practice the junior devs aren't familiar with the original material so its more the mid level devs that will explode into green flame or curl into a ball when they find my goto. Senior devs couldn't care less if they find a goto.

<comment><USER13> For those who don't get your reference, here is the canonical "Considered Harmful" Essays Considered Harmful:

[https://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html](https://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html)

<comment><USER12> That is a really great link, thanks for posting it! Something I had not considered were these occurring outside comp-sci circles. Makes me cringe. "Sit down sir! Your theory of of spatial relativity is so wrong it's considered harmful! Hurmph! Hurmph!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One thing I love about go is that it builds all the things quickly and in one go.

For other languages, once I found rake, I never looked back. It's so powerful, and unlike make, you don't have to drop down to other languages to do things.

<comment><USER15> In fact, slow builds were the #1 pain point Go was designed to address: [https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article#TOC_4](https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article#TOC_4)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> 30 years on and I've used make, imake, autotools, cmake, ant, gradle, boost.jam (because every C++ library really should have its own individual custom build tool-chain), scons, ninja, and maybe the least bad was a very nice system internal to ILM (though it was purpose written for building C++ & python targets). These days I'm using bazel the most, and while it can be forced into working, it's pretty miserable (and requires support of about 5 people on a dedicated build team). It does not bring software developers joy.

A group/language/team decides "that's it, I hate build tool X, we're going to solve this problem", and they go build their thing, but they care about different details and make some things easy, handle some things automatically, and leave other things as "just don't care" with the resulting tool ends being just like all the previous ones.

I'd be willing to wager lots of money that in future years there will be many more build systems, and they too will perfectly match their predecessors.

[https://www.xkcd.com/927/](https://www.xkcd.com/927/)

<comment><USER17> Boost seems to be switching to CMake for what it's worth.

<comment><USER16> Interesting.. I did not know that. My googling shows that there has been an announcement with an intention to adopt cmake (~ 2 years ago)

[http://boost.2283326.n4.nabble.com/CMake-Announcement- from-B...](http://boost.2283326.n4.nabble.com/CMake-Announcement-from-Boost- Steering-Committee-tt4696935.html)

It appears further discussions are underway, but I don't know what that means in terms of how quickly they will switch. [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/boost- steering/5ifzu...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/boost- steering/5ifzupxKINI)

In terms of bjam vs. cmake... I get why the boost library has needed a custom build tool chain (if you're curious just look at the complexity in headers in trying to work around various template bugs in different compiler versions, or the many many many ways to request naming of the generated libraries). I should have been less snarky in my first post. If boost does migrate to cmake I predict it will be quite a gnarly set of cmake logic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Developers of yarn must have read this.

</comment><comment><USER19> It still is.

<comment><USER20> offhand, graph traversal is a lot more common now than twenty years ago</comment></comment>


Smartphone vs. virus, is privacy always going to be the loser? - <AUTHOR> https://techxplore.com/news/2020-04-smartphone-virus-privacy-loser.html <comment><USER2> > any additional digital surveillance powers should be necessary, > proportionate and temporary

generally not as temporary as you would hope ...</comment>


AngelPad Spring 2012 - Applications Due by Dec 11 - <AUTHOR> http://angelpad.org/more/

<comment><AUTHOR> I graduated from the previous AngelPad class and I highly recommend the program. The experience was challenging, tough, fun, amazing, and totally transformative - my startup, and my entrepreneurial skills, were helped tremendously by our time at AngelPad.</comment>


New "Drastically Simplified" Facebook Privacy Controls Coming Tomorrow - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/25/facebook-privacy-controls-2/ <comment><USER2>
      Do you want your info to be public?
      (*) y
      ( ) n

<comment><USER3> Given how much they keep changing their terrible UI, it's going to be more like:

      Do you want your info to be public?
      (*) y
      ( ) I'm Feeling Lucky</comment></comment>


The Future of the Humanities: Reading - <AUTHOR> http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/the-future-of-the-humanities-reading <comment><USER2> My observations, having begun actively using a kindle about 3 years ago:

\- Digital publishing has a lower barrier of entry.

\- The lengths of digital books I read has a much larger variation than that of physical books. It doesn't make sense to physically publish a lone short story in paper, and really long stories previously had to either be culled to fit in one binding, or split into a multi-part series. Digital works are _less_ susceptible to this.

\- It's easier to keep up-to-date on my favorite authors when they publish digitally. In some circumstances (writing boards), I get to read each chapter as the writer completes them, rather than waiting until the entire book is complete.

In stark contrast to my reading habits from 5 years ago, I now almost exclusively read self-published works. #1 and #2 have led to me reading some stories that were completely different from anything I've ever seen in print form, like some really snarky story told from the point of view of a rock, only he had no opinions or thoughts, because he was a rock. In general, there's _no_ cost for experimentation (besides time).

Relatedly, I know at least one person who has actually just published their first book in physical form. He only did this _after_ amassing a decent base of fans via his digital publications.

These are just my observations. I'm not necessarily putting one form above the other - I think they actually work pretty well together _currently_. I see quite a similarity between physical vs digital books and CDs vs digital music downloads. However, the book is intrinsically usable, whereas the CD requires an additional piece of technology to be used.</comment>


Gmail Videochat - <AUTHOR> http://mail.google.com/videochat <comment><USER2> Dupe.

4th in main page.

Official Google Blog: Talk face-to-face right from within Gmail (googleblog.blogspot.com) 51 points by Anon84 15 hours ago | 50 comments</comment>