We Can Do Better - <AUTHOR> http://blog.unroll.me/we-can-do-better/ <comment><USER3> Give me a break!

>"So it was heartbreaking to see that some of our users were upset to learn about how we monetize our free service."

This reminds me of the United CEO "apology" that wasn't. Really, your gentle little heart was just _shattered_ to learn people were upset that you _send their bloody Lyft receipts from their email inbox to Uber!!_ You pour soul!

You know, America, you could do with less bullshit. I would respect this guy more if he said simply, "We offer a service at no charge, and in order to make money, which is what we need to live and so do our employees, we mine data from inboxes and sell it. This is all in our privacy policy which I advise everyone read before they hand anyone access to their email."

<comment><USER4> >"We offer a service at no charge, and in order to make money, which is what we need to live and so do our employees, we mine data from inboxes and sell it. This is all in our privacy policy which I advise everyone read before they hand anyone access to their email."

You can deal with that. I can deal with that. Most people here can deal with that. A lot of people can deal with that. The news can put some spin on that, use it to enrage a bunch people who don't know any better causing a problem that makes shareholders unwilling to deal with that.

Welcome to the modern world. Being frank about things isn't a risk worth taking.

<comment><USER5> Are you seriously suggesting they lying-by-small-print is somehow the more moral course for them to have taken?

<comment><USER6> I think they might just be saying that we tend to reward lying and punish honesty, so we shouldn't be too surprised when this sort of thing happens.

It frustrates the shit out of me, but I think it's true in many cases. This company would have died instantly if they had been up-front about what they were doing. By lying, they've managed to have some success. I don't condone lying and I wish they wouldn't do it, but given the incentives, I'm not surprised that they did.

<comment><USER5> I take your point, but we didn't reward lying here--they profited as long as we were unaware they lied. Once revealed, the ship is going down fast. This is just to say that crime pays... until it doesn't.

What would be scandalous (and still might be) would be for this to be revealed, and no one to care about it. I'm cautiously optimistic this might be the case--even Uber's bad behaviour is catching up to it.

<comment><USER6> I think we did reward lying. We didn't _intentionally_ reward lying, but that's not what I meant. We don't intend for this to happen, but that's how it works out the way things are set up.

The ship is going down fast, but how much money did they make in the meantime? Will the CEO's salary and bonuses be clawed back? I doubt it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> They don't get it. Their cardinal sin was not failing to disclose how they use your data, although that certainly is a grave sin too. Their cardinal sin was _selling their users ' e-mails_.

Yeah, _if_ they were going to sell your Lyft receipts to Uber, they should have been very clear that this was what they were doing. But that's secondary to the fact that they never should have been doing that in the first place.

I think this bit sums it up perfectly:

"I can't stress enough the importance of your privacy. We never, ever release personal data about you. All data is completely anonymous and related to purchases only."

They care _so_ much about your privacy that they only sell info about the stuff you buy, which is _definitely_ not personal in _any_ way, somehow.

We'll tell Uber about that time you went to visit your girlfriend, and we'll sell info about that weird t-shirt you bought, but your privacy is _totally_ important. Yup.

Edit: I should probably clarify, I'm sure they _do_ get it, but they don't care and want to keep selling your data, so they'll pretend like the failure to disclose was the big problem.

<comment><USER7> Did they sell it that way?

Or did they simply sell something like "of our 100000 users, 30% bought Lyft rides."?

I mean, I still think it's wrong, but selling who bought what is a bit different than selling how much of a group bought how much of an item.

<comment><USER6> If all they sold was a count and a percentage, that would be pretty benign. But what are the odds?

Their privacy policy lets them sell individual messages as long as they're scrubbed of "personal information." Where their bar is for that is anyone's guess.

If all they wanted to do was collect and sell aggregate data, you'd think they would say so, and would have reiterated it in their "apology." If they actually gave a shit about their users' personal data, they'd make sure their privacy policy was as restrictive (for the company) as possible while still permitting them to operate.

<comment><USER8> Slice sells aggregated order data for categories of goods by brand, calculated by looking at email receipts. Things that are useful for calculating overall demand, seasonality, market share, etc. I don't know about selling the actual email content; would be surprised if they did. (Not affiliated with Slice, but am an occasional data buyer, which is how I know of them.)

<comment><USER6> From their privacy policy:

"We collect such commercial transactional messages so that we can better understand the behavior of the senders of such messages, and better understand our customer behavior and improve our products, services, and advertising. We may disclose, distribute, transfer, _and sell_ such messages...." [emphasis mine]

Of course they might not sell your messages, but it's pretty weird that they'd put up a "we totally can sell your vaguely anonymized messages" and then not take advantage of it. What they sell to Uber may not be what they make available to you.

Even if they don't currently, they could start doing so at any time. And even if you somehow trusted them not to, they could get bought out by someone not so trustworthy.

<comment><USER8> They could be, no disagreement there.

Now I'm curious: what is the commercial value in the aggregated email content that would make someone want to pay for it, besides the purchase and receipt data that Slice is already providing (plus subscription and open rates)?

<comment><USER6> Lyft receipts provide origin and destination addresses as well as the exact date and time. That would be tremendously valuable for Uber. That info could be aggregated and then sold to Uber, or their privacy policy would also allow them to just scrub these e-mails (and the manner of scrubbing is not specified, so who knows if they consider the exact origin and destination locations to be personal information or not) and sell them to Uber directly.

<comment><USER8> Makes sense. The clickstream data that ISPs are now free to sell would be a goldmine then.

<comment><USER6> Totally! It'll be a golden age for targeted advertising. Maybe less so for the targets of advertising.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you're jumping off Unroll.me, first log into unroll.me via your Google Login. Go to settings, turn off everything (like the ad tracking) and then delete your account. It's at the bottom of the page in light grey. They'll ask why you're deleting. I'd suggest choosing "privacy".

After, that head into Google > Account > "Connected Apps & Sites" > Manage Apps -- and then explicitly remove Unroll.me there too.

Don't do the reverse as the Google Access is needed to log in and delete the Unroll-side data*

* Assuming they delete anything, but still worth doing.

<comment><USER10> If they don't delete it and they have European customers they are breaking the law.

<comment><USER11> How does that work? If I have a server in my US living room, and someone from an overprotective country visits my server, and my pokemon trading site sets an is_deleted flag to keep foreign keys valid, can you really say I'm breaking the law?

It doesn't seem like laws specific to some European country should apply anywhere outside of that country. I can maybe see the EU(since they like to apply laws everywhere).

You did call them 'customers', which means there's an exchange of money. Is there a restriction on European banks to prohibit them from dealing with sites that don't comply with the country's law?

<comment><USER10> Don't do business in the EU if you don't intend to respect the laws. I find the word 'overprotective' out of place in your comment, it says that you feel that once someone gives you their data it is yours to do with as you please.

As for laws specific to a country applying outside it: you can do whatever you want but the moment you hold assets abroad or intend to travel you are exposing yourself to potential legal action, something always good to keep in mind. The United States has a long history of enforcing its laws outside its borders.

Also, you are wrong about how you'd go about implementing such deletion. You don't need an 'is_deleted' flag at all to keep your foreign keys valid, all you would have to do is to overwrite the record with random data or blank the personally identifiable fields and delete anything that that user has given you. That's not that hard and purposefully mis-implementing that would not look very good if it ever came to a lawsuit. Pro-tip: consult with a lawyer versed in the matter if you want to do this stuff at all it is better to do it by the book.

"Keeping foreign keys valid" is not an excuse to break the law.

<comment><USER12> Prefacing that I think we all have a right to privacy/right to be forgotten, or whatever phrasing is used for this in the EU, as a thought exercise, I'm wondering if you didn't want to abide by this, could you effectively do it? If I run an app and didn't want to handle the whole process of deleting user data or wanted to keep it for later, for whatever reason, would it be possible to forbid/block EU users/customers from using the website?

<comment><USER13> Make that part of your terms. We don't fully delete the data. We don't allow for this reason EU residents since we can't comply with law XXXX.

If they use it, they're the ones breaking the agreement.

Not sure what would happen though. If they sue you, you can probably sue them back. But not sure what you would end up needing to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> nommm-nommm A very important part of a good apology is, in no unclear terms, _acknowledging what you did wrong_ \- they do not do that, it's extremely vague and only hints at "we weren't explicit enough." Explicit about what? Why were people upset? It also gives a mild air of "sorry you were upset" non- apology. Not quite, but definitely has gives off that vibe.

Basically, bad apology

So, I'm totally unfamiliar with this and the CEO doesn't elaborate on what happened at all so can someone give some context? Reading this thread I can see it is something to do with GMail...

What is/was unroll.me? What service did they claim to provide? What did they get caught doing? How did they get caught? What did their private policy not say?

BTW, if you are interested in the art of the apology and apology analysis check out [http://www.sorrywatch.com](http://www.sorrywatch.com) particularly [http://www.sorrywatch.com/2012/12/11/the-parts-of-a-good- apo...](http://www.sorrywatch.com/2012/12/11/the-parts-of-a-good-apology/) and [http://www.sorrywatch.com/2012/12/12/parts-of-a-bad- apology/](http://www.sorrywatch.com/2012/12/12/parts-of-a-bad-apology/)

<comment><USER14> I was a user of unroll.me (one off cleanups of spam here and there). It automatically unsubscribes emails for you based on your preferences, etc. To do this, you give them access to your GMail account. Apparently they were scraping your GMail account for information and selling it to third parties.

<comment><USER15> I don't think they actually unsubscribe you. They basically sit in front of your incoming email and don't pass on emails that match specific patterns. (And apparently sell that sweet, sweet anonymized data)

<comment><USER14> I am not sure if they do or do not, but their tag line is

>Instantly see a list of all your subscription emails. Unsubscribe easily from whatever you don't want.

So, probably makes sense for them not to unsubscribe so they can still get any info on you but to the layman, it would seem they unsubscribe you from emails.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As someone with a startup that heavily leverages Gmail OAuth, this kind of thing is upsetting because it causes folks to lose trust in the technology. Google is partly at fault here though. There should be an audit trail visible to users so that they can see every time a third-party service downloads a message or an attachment. There should also be more granular scopes so that folks can, for example, authorize access to only email threads with certain labels, including the built-in labels. (E.g. only personal email or only commercial email.)

It would also be nice if there were a way for folks with the gmail ID of a thread to download the parsed thread/attachments from Google, with a special scope designed for this. (So that services can get the entire DKIM-validated thread by just letting users copy an address, forward the last message, or via a plugin.)

I spent over a week writing our TOS, privacy policy, and security page, but privacy laws and the underlying technology should be sane enough by default that people shouldn't need to feel like they need to closely parse every word before signing up.

<comment><USER17> The ability to restrict access to specific domains would be really helpful for a lot of use cases.

For example, there are several travel apps that watch for flight and hotel emails, and then track them / notify you about them. If I could give the app permission to access emails from delta.com, united.com, southwest.com, and aa.com, I would be a lot more comfortable granting access. As it is now, I have to give the app read AND write access to ALL email.

<comment><USER18> There is a workaround for that. You can create a second account and create a forwarding rule on the first to forward only mails from delta.com, aa.com

<comment><USER16> That only works for individual email messages though, not for threads. So in this case it would work, but it's not a great generalized solution, even by hacky workaround standards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I prodded unroll.me a couple of years ago about their data retention policy. Their answer was sketchy so I ended up not using the service. I'm surprised it took this long for someone with reach to look into them.

Original thread: [https://twitter.com/elahd/status/575692415132135425](https://twitter.com/elahd/status/575692415132135425)

DMs: [http://imgur.com/H0UABYa](http://imgur.com/H0UABYa)

<comment><USER20> I interviewed with them a number of years ago, and particularly remembered after the initial wave of interviews asking what they felt about their moral obligation to protect users data because they had full read/write access to emails. The response was overly vague and generic, so I wrote them off and immediately removed myself from their service. I wasn't expecting them to be a company a number of years later, and I didn't expect them to have been tied into this. It's mind boggling to think that had I not asked that question, I likely would have continued for my onsite interview and could very well have been an employee with them at this time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wouldn't it just be better for them to come out and say:

"We were mining your emails for profit and tried to hide that in our marketing and brand. We will continue to mine your emails if you want to use our free service, but we'll be more upfront about it in the future."

Why bother trying to act sincerely apologetic? I'd be more sympathetic to them if they would just bluntly state what they want to do.

<comment><USER4> Emotions, feelings and naive people who think the world is black and white. That's why.

<comment><USER21> I don't think their chosen approach has resonated well with their users at all (emotionally or intellectually). People find it hilariously insincere and insulting.

It seems it would be better received if they were up-front in this instance.

They might as well tell their users, "This is how it is. Take it or leave it." Instead of trying to wrap that same message in a layer of false sincerity and lies.

<comment><USER22> Part of what we can't see is what percentage of their user base is even going to hear of this. HN may be up in arms, but if that's all that happens it may not amount to much. Then again, huge swathes of their user base may in fact be HN or people influenced enough by people reading this article to delete it. It's hard for us to know from here.

Speaking for myself, I'd never even heard of this company, so I doubt it's an HN darling particularly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> john gruber's take: [https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/04/23/heartbreaking](https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/04/23/heartbreaking)

</comment><comment><USER24> > At the time, which was over three years ago, they had kept a copy of every > single email of yours that you sent or received while a part of their > service. Those emails were kept in a series of poorly secured S3 buckets.

From [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14180463](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14180463)

However, their Privacy Notice claims to not store emails that are not personal emails but certain types of "commercial" emails as defined by the CAN-SPAM act.

Are they really hoovering up everything?

From [https://unroll.me/legal/privacy/](https://unroll.me/legal/privacy/)

> We also collect non-personal information − data in a form that does not > permit direct association with any specific individual. We may collect, use, > transfer, sell, and disclose non-personal information for any purpose. For > example, when you use our services, we may collect data from and about the > "commercial electronic mail messages" and "transactional or relationship > messages" (as such terms are defined in the CAN-SPAM Act (15 U.S.C. 7702 et. > seq.) that are sent to your email accounts. We collect such commercial > transactional messages so that we can better understand the behavior of the > senders of such messages, and better understand our customer behavior and > improve our products, services, and advertising. We may disclose, > distribute, transfer, and sell such messages and the data that we collect > from or in connection with such messages; provided, however, if we do > disclose such messages or data, all personal information contained in such > messages will be removed prior to any such disclosure.

We may collect and use your commercial transactional messages and associated data to build anonymous market research products and services with trusted business partners. If we combine non-personal information with personal information, the combined information will be treated as personal information for as long as it remains combined.

Aggregated data is considered non-personal information for the purposes of this Privacy Notice.

<comment><USER25> > However, their Privacy Notice claims to not store emails that are not > personal emails but certain types of "commercial" emails as defined by the > CAN-SPAM act.

> Are they really hoovering up everything?

I worked on a competing product a long long time ago. (Well, a competitor in the "all your emails are belong to us" space.)

The way ours worked was that we hovered everything, but before we provided any analytics staff access to it, we grabbed only emails of interest, tokenized the data in them, and then copied them to the analytics data store.

But we were constantly refining what "of interest" meant, which means that we had to go back and re scan the archives periodically, which would always turn up new stuff for the analytics team. The need to re scan historical data as the models improved meant that we had to keep all of the source material, even if it wasn't accessible to the people who were most interested in looking at it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Disgusting company, disgusting "apology".

Add the specific names involved (e.g. Jojo Hedaya) to a list in your head, they'll inevitably be involved in more shadiness throughout the years and it's fun to reminisce.

<comment><USER27> I agree that this is completely appalling and their apology is basically "Sorry you didn't know." But let's not characterize Jojo Hedaya as a bad guy just yet, I did a basic searched and didn't find anything else shady from him. I guess what I'm saying is let's give him a chance and hope for the best, one big thing like this shouldn't mean he is beyond redemption. At least that is what I hope and believe about humanity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> As mentioned in the comments, you'll want to go here and revoke access:

[https://myaccount.google.com/permissions](https://myaccount.google.com/permissions)

Even after deleting your unroll account, they'll have access until you revoke it.

<comment><USER29> I had deleted my unroll.me account several months back - yet I still receive emails from time to time about the new subscriptions I have. They've not had permissions in my Google account since I deleted my account, so it's odd that I keep getting emails from them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What I always wonder about when I see business like these: What comes first? Do they first think about what they could sell and then go about setting up a service that gets users to provide them with that data or do they first create a nice service and then realize they have to keep the lights on somehow?

<comment><USER24> Example of the former.

[http://shoparoo.com](http://shoparoo.com)

<comment><USER30> In what way? Genuinely curious.

<comment><USER24> > Shoparoo is trying to take grocery product collection programs, like General > Mills Box Tops for Education, into the smartphone age. Our primary business > is market research, specifically collecting item-level purchase data from > households, said CEO Jared Schrieber in an interview. We developed an > amazing technology that allows this data to be captured in just seconds via > people simply snapping pictures of their receipts with their smartphones. > However, this begged the question, how could we encourage a large number of > people to spend a few seconds after each shopping trip taking pictures of > their receipts? Our answer, Shoparoo, was inspired by the Box Tops for > Education school fundraising program where parents spend a few moments of > their time cutting out product labels from grocery products.

[http://betakit.com/shoparoo-partners-with-unilever-to- turn-r...](http://betakit.com/shoparoo-partners-with-unilever-to-turn- receipts-into-funding-for-schools/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I feel so frustrated. This Jojo CEO is just gonna get away with it, and in a few days people will forget. He will continue his status as a "successful entrepreneur", getting investments and still selling customer private information to whomever or whatever.

And nothing's gonna happen to protect user's privacy. All I (or any one) can do is to use fake accounts to sign-up for free services.

</comment><comment><USER32> > We never, ever release personal data about you. All data is completely > anonymous and related to purchases only.

Can someone explain how this works. I've heard they sold customer's Lyft receipts to a competitor. How do they sell receipts by making it completely anonymous. Do they have someone there by hand monitoring what it is user's private data and what isn't?

<comment><USER33> I would assume that since a Lyft receipt has a predefined format, it isn't too difficult to script the scrubbing of particular lines of data, assuming Lyft doesn't change their format.

Of course, if they do change their email format, your script is probably letting data leak until you notice and fix it, but obviously privacy wasn't the top priority on Unroll.me's minds in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is truly despicable. Honestly, they signed up users for a _completely_ different service and monetize by mining gmail data. TBH, I feel the same rage against all Google services which are about taking notes, mail, contacts, location and what not whereas in reality they are just mining away. For the startups out there - the Big G is an exception because their service is so wide spread and hard to ignore that people accept their mining as a necessary evil but for others this is totally not a good business model.

<comment><USER35> You are selling google short. Google doesn't sell their consumer data to anyone directly. They use it to help inform advertisers how to sell stuff to you. Uproll is directly selling data about their customers to third parties for whoever will pay.

<comment><USER34> This is not true of unroll. From the blog, "I can't stress enough the importance of your privacy. We never, ever release personal data about you. All data is completely anonymous and related to purchases only. To get a sense of what this data looks like and how it is used, check out the Slice Intelligence blog.". So they are the same as Google.

At the end of the day, nobody outside the company truly knows if either of them sell identifiable information.

<comment><USER36> YMMV on how anonymous anonymized data actually is considering that most people are uniquely identified by the combination of date of birth, zip code and gender[1].

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2942967](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2942967)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> They can do better.. yet they still haven't updated their FAQ. You'd think that at the very least, before trying publicly trying to cover their asses, they'd at least do the bare minimum and write SOMETHING about it on the FAQ. Why even link to the FAQ from the blog post if you haven't touched it yet?

Don't say you're going to do something going forward, DO IT.

</comment><comment><USER38> Kinda unrelated.

As of now, it is _impossible_ to run a pure B2C SaaS which depends on users paying for it.

Is this going to finally change the market so that B2C SaaS companies can charge for their service? I doubt.

The question here is: is our privacy dead? Maybe only we need a law to enforce it?

If make a law enforcing the privacy, then many of these free service will stop being free - causing even bigger digital divide.

What is the solution here?

<comment><USER39> I think that yes, privacy is dead, to those that do not value it. Would you trade your gmail history for a doughnut? If yes, then it is 'dead' and not worth much, if no, you still have it, mostly.

The thing to look at it the economics of your privacy. Why has it died? I think it is because your privacy has some intrinsic value to it. Averaged over enough people and a long enough time, it has some average dollar value, like a lotto ticket. However, it then becomes a commodity like all others, and subject to markets and their rules. If everyone is collecting your privacy and data and then trying to sell it, who is the buyer and what is the price? Who is buying the data from Bose and their scummy headphones and how much are they paying per 1k people?

To me, it seems that the market for 'data' is not at all transparent and that is why there is a grab for the data. If these kinds of companies can convince a potential buyer that their scummy headphones data is worth the price, then maybe the buyer can take it and make more cash off of it. But I think that since the markets are so inundated with people's 'data' that the price is not worth much at all. I mean, when I look at 'targeted' ads or whatever, then all I see is nonsense. I think that currently, the data is worth far too much due to the lack of transparency in the market. Once everyone realizes that humans are too random to target marketing towards, then the prices will drop and the bottom will fall out of the market. The real money, as Apple and the Goog have seen, is in walled gardens that force you to buy their products above all others. Currently, we are in the 3rd round of this match, there is a lot more fighting left.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm a longtime Unroll.me user. I've found the service very useful.

I'm not sure how I feel about all this. But after reading the threads - <USER2> think these things are true:

1) Unroll me does disclose that it sells your data in a way it considers anonymized.

2) The CEO is here apologizing for not making this more clear, not for the practice.

3) There is no evidence they violated their own terms.

What are people upset about most here? Is it the practice or weak disclosure?

If disclosure, what would constitute appropriate disclosure? I pretty much assumed they were doing something like this. How else would they support the service?

As a user, if they are selling my data in a way that is not linked to my name, but used in aggregate statistics, why should I care? I don't think I do. In fact, I can image such data would make the overall economy more efficient.

On the other hand, if such data is being used to ID me specifically, I am more anxious. But there is no evidence of this, correct?

I am genuinely asking. I might cancel my account, but more over general security anxiety, vs. what appears to have happened.

</comment><comment><USER41> > from this point forward, with clearer messaging on our website, in our app, > and in our FAQs.

Yet when you try to subscribe, are freaked out by the permissions required and don't give access to your entire email you're greeted with the following message: "Unroll.Me takes your privacy & security seriously"

</comment><comment><USER42> I remember hearing about unroll.me, last year or so. It made no sense to me, at first. But then I got that they needed full access to my email accounts. I was gobsmacked.

I really don't get why people would be OK with that. Somehow the possibility of a cleaner inbox doesn't seem worth the risk of identity theft.

</comment><comment><USER43> Unfortunately there are many other services out there that sell user email data to companies will to pay for it. See www.boxbe.com which sells data through www.edatasource.com, and getunsubscriber.com (which is similar to unroll.me) and several other applications from www.otherinbox.com which sell data through Return Path ([https://returnpath.com](https://returnpath.com))

Edit: to see how you can buy this type of information, see: [https://returnpath.com/solutions/consumer-data- insight/](https://returnpath.com/solutions/consumer-data-insight/)

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm genuinely curious why people are insisting on assassinating this company/CEO's reputation.

Selling anonymized user data is legal. In certain markets (like this one), any company that does NOT sell your data (and therefore charges their users), will be out-competed by companies that do.

Assuming there is a price to your online privacy (which most ppl clearly believe since they use Google) and the value this product brings to market exceeds that price threshhold, we're better off for it.

It seems to me the way to enact change is through legislation/regulation. And, anger towards any specific actor in this under-regulated field is misdirected.

<comment><USER45> I don't get it either. Google reads your email to serve better ads. You grant unroll.me access to filter marketing campaigns. Now they read your email too. Selling anonymous purchase info is pretty benign given the amount of access.

<comment><USER46> The difference is Google doesn't sell the data to other people. You agreed to Google reading your email when you signed up for the service, with Google.

Its like saying, my travel agent knows my travel plans.

unrollme on the other hand was asked to do a specific task. And while they were probably really good at it, they took it upon themselves to be curious and find more information, black out some and sell that info to others.

Its like saying, you travel agent sells the data on what car you came in, what you were wearing and what you were feeling when you came to discuss your travel plans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Something huge is missing here. This blog post states they're going to be more clear about how they sell users' data, but I just read every word on the Features and FAQs pages, and there's not a single mention of it.

[https://unroll.me/features/](https://unroll.me/features/)

[https://unroll.me/faq/](https://unroll.me/faq/)

</comment><comment><USER48> I'm reminded by the (now old) adage: _' If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.'_

Before you decide to use one of these 'free' services, stop and think what that will really cost you and whether you're OK with the price you will pay. That way you will be less surprised (and outraged) when things like this are revealed.

<comment><USER33> Indeed. I'd like to flay Unroll.me for this, but really, I have a hard time sympathizing with it's users. People should realize by now that all "free services" make money. And if you aren't paying them, someone else is. You should probably understand a company's business model before you sign up with them, and especially before you grant them access to your email account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> If Google were to release a rideshare service, would they be allowed to data mine Gmail for the competitive data? Is that in their ToS?

<comment><USER10> They shouldn't but Google does not have much in terms of Chinese Walls internally. The contents of your gmail account or youtube history could easily affect your search results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> A lot of people want this company/CEO to be punished, but I don't think the level of outrage is deserving.

1) There isn't anything inherently wrong with selling user data as long as it's properly disclosed.

I understand that to some people, online privacy is of immense value -- almost an inalienable right alongside life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. But, we also need to recognize that to others, online privacy has little to no value.

Since there is such a range of value judgements, I think services like this should be freely available for people who don't value online privacy.

It doesn't seem right to project one's value system/judgments onto others when both value systems can peacefully co-exist.

2) The company's practice of selling data was properly disclosed in their ToS

I understand this is arguable, but imo, the ToS is a reasonable place for proper disclosure. Your average consumer knows this sort of practice is possible and also knows that the place to look for disclosure of said practice is in the company's ToS.

</comment><comment><USER50> Why not just charge a fair price for their service? And why is this such a novel concept?

It's offensive for a company to a) be involved in shady data practices like this and b) for them to believe their customers are naive enough to fall for it.

</comment><comment><USER51> I revoked access two years ago, but I don't recall going through the steps for deleting my data. Does anyone have any advice? Should I sign up again and ensure that everything was deleted, then revoke access again?

</comment><comment><USER52> Light gray on white? I guess someone downvoted the hell out of that blog. That can't be a deliberate design choice, right?

</comment><comment><USER53> Did people really sign up for this service without knowing it was being used to data mine? If so, maybe you should sit back and think about how you use the web.

Companies have to make money, and it's free, so it should be assumed they are mining it.

Also, stop being idiots and saying that they are sending your receipts. As far as we know they aren't. They are sending aggregate numbers. Just like the dozen other free services you're probably using right now.

</comment><comment><USER54> Seems nowadays we need a kind of "remove.me" service to quickly remove your account from certain services.

<comment> nommm-nommm Best we have is [http://backgroundchecks.org/justdeleteme/](http://backgroundchecks.org/justdeleteme/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Is there a way to completely cancel my account with Unroll.me ? And remove all traces of my data with them?

</comment><comment><USER56> I wonder how many users they lost to release this same day.

<comment><USER10> Too few. If they're still in business next week I'd consider that a failure on Google's part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> This is disingenuous. Cleary, he knew what he was doing.

</comment><comment><USER58> I don't understand the outrage against unroll.me. From their privacy policy:

>> We may collect, use, transfer, sell, and disclose non-personal information for any purpose.

They told me they gonna sell my data and now they sold my data. Bloody bustards!

<comment><USER59> What's non-personal data? My emails are personal data!

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Garbage.

</comment><comment><USER61> account deleted

</comment><comment><USER62> I unsubscribed and removed access to my Gmail right after. Companies that hides behind small prints to tell you they read and sell your mails should not access my private mailbox.

</comment><comment><USER63> Ugh. This wasn't a mistake, it was their business model.

<comment><USER64> > Unroll.Me is a free service

"If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold". The free services should worry you

<comment><USER63> Yeah yeah yeah

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> This is a reminder that if you're not the client, you're the product.

<comment><USER66> This is so trite, it is borderline meaningless.

Much of the time, you are both the client and the product. See, for example: Cable television.

<comment><USER67> It is. There is nobody here who hasn't heard it a dozen times, and the general public audience it should be aimed at doesn't understand it.

Further, it is cited as a rule but it is far from one. Paying for a product doesn't guarantee your privacy and using a free product doesn't mean your privacy is being violated.

For ex. you can pay for Google Apps over Gmail but the privacy policy and terms of use is still the same (I actually can't think of a single service with a pro paid level where you _gain_ privacy - Flickr, Dropbox, Freshbooks, Mailchimp, LinkedIn, Salesforce, Office online - you name it). Likewise there are countless examples of free and open source software that do respect your privacy.

I don't think there is a shortcut to teaching the general public about privacy - especially not one that can be wrapped in a one line cliche.

<comment><USER68> > Paying for a product doesn't guarantee your privacy and using a free product > doesn't mean your privacy is being violated.

While what you say is logical, it gets scary pretty quickly. What about uber? What about airbnb? Or worse, what about paypal, intuit, wells fargo?

I propose a simple thought experiment as a band-aid. If we can't beat them, we must join them. Every company that collects information about me, must disclose the said information to me. Failure to disclose in a reasonable time frame should result in an automatic fine worth 100x minimum wage per hour every hour after the end of the reasonable time frame. Of course, we'd need very strong whistle blower protection. This would be a terrible idea because if it works (and I doubt it), it will have a huge chilling effect on small businesses. Responding to all the requests would put them out of business.

I don't know what the solution could be... but I know educating people is difficult especially when the people don't want to be educated.

<comment><USER69> It's getting a bit repetitive in this thread, but I can't help but to mention that what you're proposing is the legal status quo in the EU.

At some point so many people started annoying Facebook with these requests that they added a self-service option to download all the data they have on you somewhere in setting. (Google has something similar, "Google takeout")

<comment><USER68> I don't mind the repetition because I had no idea. Sorry, I am not very familiar about laws even here and even more ignorant about EU matters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Let's be honest, pretty clear that Google is already selling your anonymized data (actually, I think it's their data according to the TOS you agreed to). And giving your un-anonymized data to the government. Eww.

There's no reason to get up in arms here... there's no such thing as privacy -- whenever you use a free service, you are the product being sold.</comment>


Do we create the world by looking at it? - <AUTHOR> http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2008/06/the_reality_tests_1.php

<comment><USER2> Every few weeks some extremely old philosophy comes trotting out wearing new clothes. Just read a brief overview of western philosophy and you won't be wowed by this sort of stuff so much.

This particular example is the subject-object problem, popularized by Immanuel Kant. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject-object_problem>

</comment><comment><USER3> Quantum mechanics makes me think we live in a computer simulation and at the lowest level (where the most calculations are needed), the world is implemented using a lazy-evaluation scheme to minimize processor usage.

<comment><USER2> quantum mechanics makes me think that the real reality behind everything is actually a smudge of statistical probabilities. our monkey brains have trouble with the implications this because there aren't any analogies we can use to make sense of it.

Think about it, we have extreme trouble with any math that describes a reality that can't at least be approximated to the scale and zeitgeist of our own. An alternate life form that lived at a different scale or with different priors (perception of time, causality) would come up with completely different explanations for why the math should be the way it is.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> One of my favorite stories was about a women who frantically wrote to Bertrand Russel (of Principia Mathematica fame) claiming: "I'm a solipsist and, I have to say, I'm surprised there aren't more of us."

</comment><comment><USER4> > at least one of two long-held physical principles is untenable: Distant > events do not affect one other, and properties we wish to observe exist > before our measurements. One of these, locality or realism, must be > fundamentally incorrect.

I'm pretty sure it's the second one. If, say, 2 spinwise-anticorrelated particles had x-spin values prior to measuring their respective x-spins, you wouldn't get Bell's inequalities. Isn't that why they were a big deal?

</comment><comment><USER5> Look up the word "world" in a dictionary. Then look up the definitions of each of the words in the definition of "world". Then look up the words in those definitions. Continue on like this until you'd rather not.

</comment><comment><USER6> Could they not condense the article into one paragraph. I could not find the point among all the useless information, like that one:

"On my final morning in vienna, snow was tumbling like dryer sheets as I stared out the window of the IQOQI waiting to speak again with Zeilinger. Suddenly, there was a great flash of lightning and a long roll of thunder as snow continued to fall. I turned around to no one and Zeilinger's assistant appeared. He now had time to talk."

Whatever...

</comment><comment><USER7> some philosopher thought that the world would pop in and out of existence when it was not being observed. He said that because it did not become inconsistent (blue couch turning red when you looked back at it) was because there was a grand observer god that kept everything under observation and therefore nothing popped in and out.

<comment><USER8> You are thinking of George Berkeley.

<comment><USER7> Thank you, you are correct

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like this interpretation: <http://www.ipod.org.uk/reality/reality_decoherence.asp>

Here's the wikipedia article: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence>

</comment><comment><USER10> descartes was right all along

<comment><USER5> It's all about the candles! Here I thought it was about Différance.</comment></comment>


Maya ritual cave 'untouched' for 1k years stuns archaeologists - <AUTHOR> https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/2019/03/maya-ritual-balamku-cave-stuns-archaeologists/ <comment><USER2> "Explorers needed to crawl for hours just to reach first of seven offering chambers"... followed by a shot of one of them, flat of his stomach, clawing at the surface and just barely _squeezing_ through, head turned sideways.

I am not a claustrofobic person, but this is... damn... this feels suicidal. Makes you realize that some people are wired way differently than others.

Edit - [https://imgur.com/EHrwHs3.jpg](https://imgur.com/EHrwHs3.jpg)

<comment><USER3> I once got so claustrophobic just by reading a book about caving that I had to put it away: Blind Descent by James Talbot. It describes the quest of a couple of maniacs to explore the deepest caves on earth under hellish circumstances. No light for weeks, no communication with the surface, camping against vertical walls in the dark, hurricane level winds, tight sumps full of dark water, disease, panic attacks... Man, who in his sane mind does things like that?

<comment><USER4> Honestly it's this kind of thing that really makes me marvel at the human brain. Most people see 'the grass is greener' as meaning that you will always want what you don't have.

I see it as meaning that you can honestly get used to anything, given enough time. It's inspiring really, when I'm at my worst and darkest times, to think - hey, if someone can deal with being tortured for years and get through it, I can make it through this.

<comment><USER5> > if someone can deal with being tortured for years and get through it, I can > make it through this.

I understand what you're saying, but being tortured for years leaves physiological and psychological scars that never go away.

William Sampson, A Canadian who was tortured for 31 months in Saudi Arabia, died at 52 after suffering four heart attacks in six months.[1]

Three of these were after the torture ended.

[1] [https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2012/04/01/william_samp...](https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2012/04/01/william_sampson_dies_nine_years_after_release_from_saudi_prison.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was born and lived for some time in the nearby state of Chiapas. Currently a coder working in a big city, fighting traffic and pollution every day, away from wife and kids, worrying about production issues, health, etc. When I see articles about discoveries like this it always brings me back to my childhood days driving around the Palenque ruins, seeing the miles and miles of hills which were obviously ruins that had become overgrown but that the government had yet to uncover. There are countless more discoveries like this just waiting in plain sight. Knowing that always gives me some kind of peace inside - what we know about ourselves and how we have evolved is very little.

<comment><USER7> "... We need wilderness preserved--as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds--because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it. It is good for us when we are young, because of the incomparable sanity it can bring briefly, as vacation and rest, into our insane lives. It is important to us when we are old simply because it is there--important, that is, simply as an idea." \- Wallace Stegner

Your comment reminded me of this excerpt of a letter to the American Congress about environmental preservation.

<comment><USER8> "Also, without it, all the insects die and the food chain collapses."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Segovia identified 155 artifacts, some with faces of Toltec rain god Tláloc, > and others with markings of the sacred ceiba tree

It would be significant, because the Mayan version of this god is Chaac [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaac](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaac), and there's some speculation over who inherited the god from whom:

> Although the name Tlaloc is specifically Aztec, worship of a storm god like > Tlaloc, associated with mountaintop shrines and with life-giving rain, is as > at least as old as Teotihuacan and likely was adopted from the Maya god > Chaac or vice versa, or perhaps he was ultimately derived from an earlier > Olmec precursor. An underground Tlaloc shrine has been found at > Teotihuacan.[4]

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C4%81loc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C4%81loc)

But my suspicion is that the archaeologist might have said something like "we found faces of Chaac, who is equivalent to Tláloc" (because Mexicans are much more familiar with Tláloc) and then it was mangled by the reporter.

<comment><USER10> I wish people would stop using the term Aztec because there are no Aztecs known to us. Aztec was the slave name of the mythical civilization that took part on the exodus. They are mexicas not Aztecs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I found this paragraph really stunning -- _But until the concept of cave archaeology began to take shape in the 1980s, archaeologists were more interested in monumental architecture and intact artifacts than they were in analyzing the residues and materials found in and around objects. When Balankanché was excavated in 1959, caves were still mapped by hand in the dark and artifacts were routinely removed from their sites, cleaned, and later put back. Of all the incense burners found in Balankanché that were filled with material that could have provided definitive evidence related to the chronology of the site, for instance, only one was ever analyzed._

Archaeologists essentially destroying archaeological information based on the inability to see/measure it. I have never met a scientist that came across a discovery and said, "Wow, this is a huge discovery and we're not even close to being equipped enough to process it correctly, lets just seal it up again and wait." But that was what happened here. It is so amazing to get the chance to look deeply into these things with more capable technology.

<comment><USER12> _I have never met a scientist that came across a discovery and said, "Wow, this is a huge discovery and we're not even close to being equipped enough to process it correctly, lets just seal it up again and wait." But that was what happened here. It is so amazing to get the chance to look deeply into these things with more capable technology._

Yet, I read a lot of archeology books in my former days and almost all of them said modern archeology is founded on digging test pits and strips, to _avoid_ complete site exposure unless circumstances demand it, since future science will be able to exploit the un-disturbed state of the site to do better science.

Archeologists do the LEAST digging possible nowadays. Its the norm to leave it the hell alone, not the exception.

<comment><USER13> > Archeologists do the LEAST digging possible nowadays

Surely "LEAST" would be doing only non-invasive sensing, and rescue digs? Many digs still aren't.

> digging test pits and strips, to avoid complete site exposure

And oh, the care taken when digging and refilling pits, to minimize, for instance, the impact on the site microbiome... err, the site microwhatsit? Picture the careful brain surgeon, picking out his dropped bits of pepperoni and cheese, licking them off his greasy fingers, patting the cranial flap down, and beaming proudly.

Archeologists celebrating their standard of care... while being largely unfamiliar with even the current states of research in genomics, remote sensing, computer analysis, robotics, and much else, let alone their forseeable futures... Yes, jewler's pics are better than miner's pickaxes, careful troweling than careful dynamiting, and hand-held DLSR visual-light photos better than hand-held sketchbooks... but by how much? Compared to what's coming over the _next_ hundred years?

<comment><USER14> > Surely "LEAST" would be doing only non-invasive sensing, and rescue digs? > Many digs still aren't.

You're nitpicking and you know it.

>> digging test pits and strips, to avoid complete site exposure

> And oh, the care taken when digging and refilling pits, to minimize, for > instance, the impact on the site microbiome... err, the site microwhatsit? > Picture the careful brain surgeon, picking out his dropped bits of pepperoni > and cheese, licking them off his greasy fingers, patting the cranial flap > down, and beaming proudly.

This is a shit comparison, and you know it.

> Archeologists celebrating their standard of care... while being largely > unfamiliar with even the current states of research in genomics, remote > sensing, computer analysis, robotics, and much else, let alone their > forseeable futures... Yes, jewler's pics are better than miner's pickaxes, > careful troweling than careful dynamiting, and hand-held DLSR visual-light > photos better than hand-held sketchbooks... but by how much? Compared to > what's coming over the next hundred years?

This part is kinda incomprehensible but it seems like you're being critical of how archaeologists apply innovative tools and methods in their work. You don't know, however, that archaeologists are arguably the most interdisciplinary researchers you can imagine, and use methods from all sorts of other fields to address questions of archaeological concern. There is (in my experience, anyway) lots of care to apply these methods in ways that are ethical, in ways that are respectful towards local communities, and in ways that meet the practical constraints that archaeology faces (rugged terrain, slow pace, low funding, limited timeframe, non-reproducible data collection, coordination of methodologically-diverse projects, etc). No tool is recognized to be useful in its own right, it has to be adapted to suit the circumstances and goals of archaeological projects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Most of all, I hope they'll find some books in there. Only four books have survived [1], beyond some highly damaged works which need serious improvement in CT technology (or other tools) so that we can read them, if they can be read at all.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices)

<comment><USER16> This is so painful to read.

From the Bishop who oversaw the destruction:

"We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction."

I can barely imagine the anguish those people must have felt. Imagine witnessing the destruction of your entire recorded history. Virtually all of the knowledge and art produced by the civilization wiped out in a single act.

<comment><USER17> It's like that one time we decided to do a rewrite... without tests.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sealed up for 50 years after it was discovered is one of the greatest gifts to modern archeology ever. I can't fathom the loss of truly insightful historical knowledge that would have been lost if it was tampered with 50 years ago. What a hero to the future of humanity in understanding our past.

<comment><USER19> Wouldn't sealing it up another 50 years even better? We don't know which much better technologies we have in 50 years

<comment><USER20> Speaking as an outsider, I grew up near Hispanic cultures in the Southwest. I think there's a need for better information about the Maya. For one, there's a basic lack of understanding of time "before America" across the US. Most I've met seem to operate as though human history in the Americas only started with independence. The colonists wiped out a huge amount of history and culture. We might not have the best technology that could ever exist, but we do have a great need to appreciate a shared past. Fifty years from now people will be further from the past and more likely to take it even less seriously.

<comment><USER21> @ianai you should give the book 1491 a read, it is likely exactly what you're looking for and a well written book:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_A...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Something is weird.

 _> After its initial discovery by farmers in 1966, Balamku was visited by archaeologist Víctor Segovia Pinto_

Segovia Pinto reportedly died in 1955, according to this source: [https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=es&tl=en&u=htt...](https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=es&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fprohispen.com%2Fvictor- segovia-pinto%2F)

1955 was 11 years before the reported discovery. Either there is a typo somewhere, or Pinto was not the original discoverer. Pinto was a bit of a celeb at the time, so it's entirely possible that someone erroneously attributed to him what happened in 1966, or that the discovery happened before but was only recorded in 1966.

<comment><USER23> Probably a bad source or typo. This one, from a university, says he died in '95 on a specific day and place. [https://revistas- filologicas.unam.mx/estudios-cultura-maya/i...](https://revistas- filologicas.unam.mx/estudios-cultura-maya/index.php/ecm/article/view/466)

</comment></comment><comment> your-nanny I don't know anything about this team, but the ideal procedure would be minimal disturbance of this site, with minimal removal of artifacts from the site. Organic material for carbon dating, great.

There are several principles that one mist follow. Archeology is a destructive science: you can't dig the same pit twice, you can't remove artifacts a second time. So the first principle is: document everything, and destroy as little as you can. The second principle is that you must proceed with respect for the living Maya, who may well regard this adventure as a violation of a holy site of their ancestors.

<comment><USER24> In the slideshow in the article, it says this:

> The local Maya still revere the caves, and shamans make special offerings to > the spirit guardians of Balamku and ask for the protection of the scientists > who are exploring it.

Seems they're respecting and coordinating with the local living Maya.

<comment> your-nanny thank you for pointing that out to me. I did not look through slides.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm curious about how they decide this is a religious site. The artifacts have images on them, but that can't be the only indicator of why they were there can it? Why build pyramids and other things above ground but then make people crawl deep into a hole to have a small religious site? Isn't it more likely people of lower status were forced to live underground and this is their stash of valuables? - to give just one possible alternate interpretation. How do they decide what a site is?

I'm sure they take into account all the other knowledge that has been gathered over the years and put this find in context. That's largely missing from the article.

<comment><USER26> Valuable objects; difficult to reach; no resources for living (dark, cold; no food or water). All point to having a very good, very impractical reason for going there. Religion fills the bill very nicely?

<comment><USER25> Sounds like a stash of stolen goods to me. And that's actually a practical reason for going there. OTOH religion wants to be accessible to the people. They build temples and such to draw people in, not make them crawl into a deep scary hole where they have a pile of random stuff.

<comment><USER27> Some religions are about secrets, not persuasion.

Mithraism was a popular underground (literally) religion among the Roman army. And the Hebrews weren't about letting people traipse through the holy of holies.

I agree that religion is probably overused in these explanations, but it's plausible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> So some of those objects appear much too large to fit thru the narrow places to get into the cave. How did they get there? Were they made in place?

</comment><comment><USER28> > some researchers have suggested that excessive deforestation in the Maya > lowlands, which was once home to some 10-15 million people

I just can't quite get over this stat they dropped in here. 15 million people in ~250 AD puts it in the same neighborhood as ancient Greece at their peak a few hundred years earlier.

</comment><comment><USER29> I hope they preserve at least some of it instead of escavating it

</comment><comment><USER30> Doctor June Moone's cave

</comment><comment><USER31> thx. learned.

</comment><comment><USER32> Maya mia!</comment>


Startup skills vs startup ideas - <AUTHOR> http://swombat.com/2012/1/9/startup-skills-ideas <comment><USER2> It seems like Daniel is critiquing the tendency to advise entrepreneurial novices to "dive in" and start something. He seems to me to be saying that the just-do-it advice ignores the fact that entrepreneurship is a skill -- you wouldn't advise somebody who wants to learn to program to start with a complex web app, so why do we advise novices to just start a company, when entrepreneurship is equally as complex?

I find the analogy unconvincing though. Both programming and entrepreneurship are trades-like skills that are improved primarily through practice, true. But programming practice is amenable to small, toy projects done in private, gradually moving to larger, collaborative projects as one's skills improved.

The only way to practice entrepreneurship, on the other hand, is to start a company. You could certainly get some practice at the component skills (OP gives an excellent breakdown of those) - maybe do some recreational haggling at car dealerships? Join Toastmasters? But that's akin to doing scales on the piano - to really develop you have to open the music and give it a go.

<comment><USER3> I agree. And the skills he listed? Well, they're great and all, but they are implementation skills. Implementation skills alone in a vacuum is useless. You first need to know how to think critically and apply a high level solution to a problem.

Things like domain expertise, and exposure to hard problems are what we need first: not the ability to code, design, sell, and definitely not the ability to manage and hire (that's so trivial compared to other things). Learning all those skills will make you great at designing cool things, but not at designing cool things that solve problems people will pay for.

<comment><USER4> My point is, jumping in with vision and method but zero skills results in pretty much guaranteed failure.

On the other hand, if you can acquire the skills while, say, at university, or working for someone else, and then jump in with the method/vision, you'll have a much better chance.

The manner in which you decide to implement your vision will necessarily depend on the skills you have. If you're a programmer, you will tend to dive into implementation first. If you're a salesperson, you'll tend to dive into sales first... etc.

To maximise your chance, you need a reasonable level of skill in each of those core areas, so that you don't avoid obvious shortcuts just because you don't know anything. Some obvious shortcuts that are often missed by people with limited skills:

\- building a product for 6 months instead of making a few phone calls and preliminary paper-based demos to validate the demand;

\- hiring an outsourcing firm to "build your prototype" instead of rolling up your sleeves and doing it yourself;

\- building an unusable or ugly product instead of using a baseline competence in design to create something reasonably ok...

Etc.

Reductio ad absurdum: by itself, with no skills, the lean startup method cannot achieve anything. It assumes some skills. The more skills you have that fit into whatever method you've picked, the higher your chances of success.

If you don't mind needlessly failing over and over again for years, though, feel free to jump right in with no clue what you're doing.

<comment><USER5> The core entrepreneurial skills mentioned in Daniel's article do need to be present in some combination on the founding team. This team could include various blends of founders, advisors, employees, contractors, and directors.

Some core skills are orders of magnitude more valuable than others. For instance, raising $100,000 of capital in 1,000 hours is worth exactly $100/hour. Doing entry level marketing coordinator work is worth approximately $18/hour. The higher-impact activity in this context is obvious, especially if getting deals done is the driving force in a founder or co-founder's DNA.

Daniel's article is on the money when it comes to creating a list of the core entrepreneurial skills that CAN and should be learned in order to increase the odds of startup success, so let's continue this discussion over the coming weeks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the "idea vs execution" debate is an interesting one, but I think it often overlooks the often sizable overlap between idea and execution. It's not that ideas without execution are worthless, it's that ideas without execution aren't really ideas.

Suppose I have an "idea" for a novel. It's about a boy whose parents were killed by an evil wizard school, and who is living with unfriendly relatives who don't like or trust magic, and who goes to a wizard school to slowly reach his potential and experience a show down with the aforementioned evil wizard.

Ok, an idea, right. But have I _really_ give you the idea behind Harry Potter? If you give this idea to two different writers and tell them to run with it, I don't think you'll get two different _executions_. I think you'll end up with two different _ideas_. The execution and the idea are so intertwined that you really can't distinguish the two. Software is often like this.

I suppose sometimes there really isn't much of an idea - like when a programmer is handed a series of wireframes and told to "make it live" (or when a writer is asked to "novelize" a screen play, with absolutely no deviation from the script). Programmers do often end up in this category for hire, so I'm not dismissing the "idea vs execution" thing completely. But I do think it often misses a big part of the picture.

</comment><comment><USER7> being non-native english speaker i can't distinguish skills and experience in this article, but i do know the difference between experience and knowledge. the scientist will not try to build the perpetuum mobile because he _knows_ the law of conservation of energy, not because he tried to build the perpetuum mobile for 5 years in academics, failed, thus gained this experience and can move on.

but the skills do really come with experience, many of them, like communication and management.

i missed how lean startup method falls into the same category of methods as scientific method. if we really want to compare them, they really have more in common then contradict: you make theory/MVP, then check it with experiment, then amend the theory | pivot etc...

<comment><USER2> _i missed how lean startup method falls into the same category of methods as scientific method_

OP's comparison, which I agree with, was that both the scientific method and the lean startup method provide a mechanism for the efficient application of skills and expertise. Neither are a substitute for skills and expertise, nor are they useful without that expertise.

Contrast that to a recipe for cookies, which will just work if you follow it to the letter.

<comment><USER7> programming skills - yes, i still can't compare, namely, communication skills with the scientist's knowledge. i believe first come with practice, the latter come with learning and understanding.

> Contrast that to a recipe for cookies, which will just work if you follow it > to the letter.

oh, not in my case! :)

actually i got what you're saying

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My philosophy is this: Be really great at a few things and don't suck at anything. That's a good list of competencies for an entrepreneur. Eighteen months ago I wanted to build a web application that I thought would help a lot of people in my industry. I knew next to nothing about programming and quickly realized outsourcing the core product wasn't going to cut it. So, I quit my banking job and took courses in discrete math, algorithms & data structures, and computer architecture. Along the way I taught myself python/django, HTML/CSS, and JQuery. Last week I launched a private beta and have received great feedback. I'm really great at financial analysis and product development. And now I don't suck at programming, among other things.

</comment><comment><USER9> > "If you handed down the Scientific Method to someone who is not a trained > scientist, in theory they should be use it to derive new laws of nature. In > practice, though, what would most likely happen is that they would mis-apply > this method and come up with all sorts of crackpot theories about perpetual > motion machines and life-altering magnetic bracelets"

What!? I pretty clearly remember being able to apply the scientific method properly in grammar school. The conclusions we reached may not have been earth shattering, but they were valid, because we followed the steps.

</comment><comment><USER10> The problem with this advice is that if you have all these skills, you'll be already paid so much that you'll never become an entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurship as a whole is done on the margins and by definition that implies having a lot of time, not too many skill but also having the mentality that your willing to do whatever it takes.

In the job market its impossible to find a job that lets you cultivate all those skills he listed. Better is to start something on the side and learn all these skills part time.

</comment><comment><USER11> uhm... the most important skill is missing from his 8 core skills: Marketing

without good marketing, all the other skills are worthless. (yeah, yeah, I know there are exceptions, but seriously, marketing is the skill with the most leverage)

</comment><comment><USER12> This is the same as adopting Agile. Just because you use some sort of Agile process doesn't mean your project will all of the sudden be fixed. Agile is generally well suited towards a group of skilled individuals.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Speaking of Lean Startups - did you actually glean anything useful from it? Like something you could start doing tomorrow?

<comment><USER4> Many things from the blog. So far, the best bits of the book are repetitions of the blog (reasonably enough...). Concepts like:

\- If you can't fail, you can't learn

\- Growth hypothesis & Value hypothesis as the two first root hypotheses to check

\- "Innovation accounting" - keeping track of things so you can validate your learning as much as possible

I think Lean is a great framework to apply entrepreneurial skills, so long as it's not followed dogmatically, of course...

<comment><AUTHOR> And does he give you specific advice on _how to do those_? I mean, everyone wants to know if they can grow, but for certain kinds of startups, there's a hockey stick curve, meaning that before it grows... it doesn't.

<comment><USER4> He gives examples in various contexts, rather than advice, but it looks to me like there's a whole series of "Lean Startup" books coming up (e.g. this one: [http://www.ashmaurya.com/2012/01/the-new-and-updated- running...](http://www.ashmaurya.com/2012/01/the-new-and-updated-running-lean- book/) ), and some of them will inevitably focus more on practice. I think the point of Ries' book (which I think is reasonable) is to lay out the theoretical basis and start a movement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Entrepreneurship often involves having sheer audacity. To start something, qualified, prepared or not.

An example? Look at all the entrepreneurs succeeding with a business despite x, y and z, and have "no business being where they are".

Knowledge is not so much power as much as knowledge filled action.

Entrepreneurs who act can beat people with knowledge who don't act. They'll probably be messier, but there's always the chance they'll learn and improve like anyone.</comment>


Android First: New Trend In Mobile Development - <AUTHOR> http://blog.eladgil.com/2011/05/android-first-new-trend-in-mobile.html

<comment><USER2> There are also new consumer use cases that cannot be achieved on iOS.

An app like Texty (<http://goo.gl/P5c0q>) is just not technically feasible on the iPhone. An iPhone version is our #2 requested "feature" -- but we just tell people "Go talk to Steve please :)"

<comment><USER3> I had the same problem with all of my development. My ideas blended local & the web so much and the iOS APIs delineate this so much, it just seemed counter-productive to go through so many hoops. Android has no such BS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I agree with most of this article, however this line is a bit questionable to me:

> Every time my girlfriend pulls out her Android phone, I ask her about apps I > love for the iPhone and she has none of them.

I'd like to know what apps on iPhone do not already have ports or at least a worthy analog on Android (really, tell me so I can start coding a clone). At least in the phone space (maybe not tablet), Android seems every bit as crowded as iPhone.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the list of apps on iPhone only is actually pretty extensive. A lot of the apps will show up much later, or will eventually end up with an analogous app but not necessarily the original.

Some examples: -MindBody Yoga. A directory app for yoga classes -Angry Birds. Took 6 months or longer to end up on Android -Qrank. I don't think they have an Android app -Pictureka. At least when I was playing it, they didn't have a version on Android. -AirBnB. I think they only have an iPhone app etc... I can go on for a while... :)</comment></comment>


Secretary Problem - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem <comment><USER2> I was asked a version of this as an interview question a few months ago. Despite recognizing the form of it immediately and giving some intuition for why it converges to 1/e, the interviewer had nothing else prepared and had expected it to be new to me, so he took me through a brutal one hour of his personal "guided proof" of the answer, including drawing a massive grid on a whiteboard and stepping through iterations. At one point I may have hinted that his method was overcomplicating things and tried to steer the conversation towards other aspects of the problem (ex: the time based formulation), no, let's get back on track with this grid. I didn't get the job, and I was specifically called out for doing poorly on that portion of the interview. I used to think this problem was really cool, now it just pisses me off remembering that situation.

<comment><USER3> Maybe you were the first person he interviewed.

<comment><USER2> It was one of the team members, not a manager or lead, so I would have been inclined to overlook it had it not been alongside 3 other "case interviews" that were tricky whiteboard coding/math problems in disguise. I think I spent a grand total of 20 minutes of my 8 hour day discussing my history and relevant experience.

<comment><USER4> I think dolson was making a joke that the interviewer was actually following this strategy in the hiring process.

<comment><USER2> I think I replied to the wrong person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've always liked this problem mathematically but I'd never used it for _actual_ hiring (though I have happily used it for certain statistical sampling).

When actually hiring, I care about the time value of opportunity cost. That is, we interview and get hire the first candidate that we feel can do the job well and we all otherwise like, then the benefit of having her on the job ASAP exceeds any possibly value from another candidate that might show up some uncertain time later.

<comment><USER6> When actually hiring, you also have benchmarks that aren't purely relative, and past experience to fall back on.

<comment><USER5> > When actually hiring, you also have benchmarks that aren't purely relative, > and past experience to fall back on.

(This problem is framed as hiring the _best_ which I assume means closest to optimal weights on those non-relative benchmarks -- whatever "optimal" means.)

But your comment is interesting, as this problem was originally as "the wife problem": how do "you" \-- presuming incorrectly even at the time all mathematicians to be male -- find the optimal wife.

The thing that made your comment funny to me is that in majority of marriage cases (by anyone to anyone) neither party has much, or any past experience to fall back on!

<comment><USER7> In those cases, even if you select poorly, you can change your weight and preferences afterward.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I ran into this problem many years ago when writing a memory allocator. Say you keep a list of free blocks. You don't keep them sorted, but you do keep track of how long the list is. You now need to find a block of at least size n but not much larger, and the free list is so long you'd rather not look through the whole thing for each allocation.

There are a bunch of ways to write memory allocators, but with the above constraints, it's the same problem.

<comment><USER9> You can use this idea in the clock algorithm to approximate LRU.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I dated a guy once who, after a couple of weeks, asked me to marry him--citing this problem as his reasoning.

I said no.

Butt he's all I ever think about whenever I hear it mentioned, so.

<comment><USER11> Did you ask his value for "n", and how he chose that value?

<comment><USER10> It was 2, and I honestly have no idea why

<comment><USER12> What? That makes it even weirder. That means you weren't even being chosen because you were considered to outperform anyone else. Either you were the first candidate, and no comparison could be made, or your were the last candidate, and had to be chosen anyway!

<comment><USER10> I was his second girlfriend, and he'd just gotten out of a multi-year relationship. We met while interning in SV. We broke up soon after I went back to school, and I think he just ended up getting back with his ex, so...

<comment><USER13> Ah, so once again, we have a situation where the documentation describes the use of an elegant algorithm, but the actual implementation is a random pile of hacks and heuristics slapped together by someone who seems not to have really understood what they were doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I like this explanation of the Secretary problem (aka optimal stopping problem) by @lpolovets [1]

> The basic problem is this: there are N applicants for a secretarial > position. The applicants are interviewed in random order, and you must > accept or reject a candidate immediately after interviewing them. After you > reject someone, there's no way to bring them back. There is only one > position available, so as soon as you accept a candidate you are done. What > strategy should you pursue in order to maximize the likelihood of hiring the > best candidate out of the N applicants?

> It turns out that the best strategy is to look at the first N/e applicants > (i.e. the first ~37%), reject all of them, then accept the first applicant > that is better than all of the initial rejects. It turns out this strategy > has a ~37% (1/e) chance of picking the best candidate, regardless of how > large N is. This is counterintuitive. It means that even if you have one > billion applicants in some random order, you will find the very best one > ~37% of the time with this strategy, even though you will (on average) make > your choice without meeting the last few hundred million candidates.

> I think this has some interesting practical implications. For example, as a > VC, one possible strategy that I can pursue is to look for interesting > sectors (3D printing, drones, bitcoin, etc.) and try to invest in the very > best startup in each of those sectors. The Secretary Problem is a decent > approximation of this. I can go on AngelList and see that there are thirty > 3D printing startups in LA/NYC/SF, which are the markets I'm interested in. > One way to pick the best one of these 30 would be to meet 11 of these > startups, pass on all of them, then invest in the next 3D printing startup I > meet that's better than all of those. Of course, this would be a jerk move. > I'd be wasting the time of a lot of founders if I knew I was planning to > pass on their startups no matter what. However, if I happened to pass on a > dozen 3D printing startups by chance, and I knew that there were ~30 in > total, then if the 14th one was better than the first dozen, I would know > there was a pretty good chance it was the best one out of all 30 even though > I had yet to see the last 16.

[1] [https://www.quora.com/Mathematics/What-are-the-most- interest...](https://www.quora.com/Mathematics/What-are-the-most-interesting- or-popular-probability-puzzles-in-which-the-intuition-is-contrary-to-the- solution/answer/Leo-Polovets?share=1)

<comment><USER15> The secretary problem and investing have one important difference that throws this all out the window - you can meet with multiple startups without rejecting them, and make a decision when you've met them all (or all the ones you want to meet). There's no requirement in the real world to accept/reject immediately post-interview without any possibility of recall.

> Of course, this would be a jerk move. I'd be wasting the time of a lot of > founders if I knew I was planning to pass on their startups no matter what.

On a macro-level, this isn't a jerk move at all - the other way would have you 'waste' the time of 29 founders instead of 11.

<comment><USER16> No, the biggest problem is that nobody is perfect at ranking startups, period. And as proven by that "antiportfolio" page of a day or two ago, even generally successful VCs can't do that reliably.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I started listening to the audio book version of "Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions"[1] by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. It starts by talking about the Secretary Problem and the 37% rule and it is very entertaining how much of our daily problems are some variation of a small set of well known problems that have interesting (and often counter-intuitive) mathematically proofed solutions.

Before I get downvoted to hell, let me say THIS IS NOT AN AFFILIATE LINK, I will earn nothing if you click it (I hate spam as much as the next guy but people here tend to be a little trigger happy).

[1] [https://www.audible.com/pd/Business/Algorithms-to-Live-By- Au...](https://www.audible.com/pd/Business/Algorithms-to-Live-By- Audiobook/B01D24NLWO/)

</comment><comment><USER18> A previous thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7337759](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7337759).

</comment><comment><USER19> If the chance you'll pick the best option is 37%, what is the chance you'll pick someone in the top 2, or the top 5?

Another way of asking is, does it raise the odds you'll get someone really good, even if they aren't the best?

<comment><USER12> I haven't calculated it exactly, but we were playing around with simulation code elsewhere among the comments, and my version [0] calculates the hiring frequency for each candidate, not just the best one, so you could look at the tail of the list called "hires".

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15573921](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15573921)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Did not know about this, but I read a simplified version of it a long time ago, which said "carefully examine the first choice, reject it, then go for the first choice that is better." Apparently, this would give me an above average option in most cases (did not do the math).

I quite like that and sometimes use it, e.g. to decide which restaurant to have a meal in.

<comment><USER21> The Power of Two Random Choices: it's a surprisingly decent heuristic

[https://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm/postscripts/handbook2...](https://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm/postscripts/handbook2001.pdf)

<comment><USER20> Oh interesting, thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I did some analysis of this problem in Python here: [https://imrankhan17.github.io/pages/Solving%20the%20secretar...](https://imrankhan17.github.io/pages/Solving%20the%20secretary%20problem%20with%20Python.html)

</comment><comment><USER23> I'd really like a real-life example of this.

I can't help but think this is a solution in search of a problem.

<comment><USER24> Case: You are wondering around a new city with few friends. Everybody is hungry and getting annoyed. No mobile devices are available or you do not trust the online recommendations. How do you find a good place to eat?

First you estimate based on the level of hunger, quality of shoes and the restaurant density of the area how many places you can check before you starve to death. This rule tells that you should first walk pass n/2.718 restaurants and then pick the best one you have seen so far.

<comment><USER25> Almost correct but the secretary problem only allows you to accept or _permanently_ reject an option. What you describe allows going back to previously rejected options.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is the awe inspiring bit:

> One reason why the secretary problem has received so much attention is that > the optimal policy for the problem (the stopping rule) is simple and selects > the single best candidate about 37% of the time, irrespective of whether > there are 100 or 100 million applicants.

Another example of how our intuitions are poor at probabilities.

100M! Might give that a Monty Carlo sim. Or even try it on a big DB table at work.

</comment><comment><USER27> There's probably no lack of toy code, but since I am a skeptic / sceptic, quick nonsense code for pythonistas : [https://gist.github.com/anonymous/ef975cdcb26044de9ba93e4e74...](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/ef975cdcb26044de9ba93e4e74de29b1)

Guess what? Skepticism allayed!

<comment><USER28> Nerd sniped. I couldn't help it. What do you think> :-)

        from math import e, floor
        from random import randint

        def secretary_search(candidates):
          """Rejects first n / e candidates and then selects the first better."""
          n_reject = int(floor(len(candidates) / e))
          best = max(candidates[:n_reject])
          for candidate in candidates[n_reject:]:
            if candidate > best:
              return candidate
          return candidates[-1]

        success = 0.0
        size = 100
        trials = 10000
        for _ in range(trials):
          candidates = [randint(1, 1000) for _ in range(size)]
          success += max(candidates) == secretary_search(candidates)

        print success / trials

<comment><USER12> My version! [0]

\- More functional, with iterators and stuff. (It's half-baked, though, so please take it further!)

\- Handles small numbers of candidates correctly.

\- Agrees with the table on Wikipedia [1], and with the 1/e limit.

\- Calculates hiring frequency for all candidates, not just the best one.

\- Faster!

[0] [https://gist.github.com/anonymous/9d735c5c77bd2e0939c69f5dd4...](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/9d735c5c77bd2e0939c69f5dd4140cd4)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem#Deriving_the...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem#Deriving_the_optimal_policy)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This would feel much more interesting if there was a cost attached to being forced to hire a terrible candidate.

<comment><USER12> Isn't the cost that you get a terrible candidate?

<comment><USER29> Yes. That isn't factored into the algorithms though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Interestingly, it seems this has been discussed here before: [http://www.thelowlyprogrammer.com/2010/04/introducing- marria...](http://www.thelowlyprogrammer.com/2010/04/introducing-marriage- sort.html)</comment>


Fannie, Freddie and You: What It Means to the Public - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/08/business/08consumer.html?_r=1&ref=business&oref=slogin

<comment><USER2> _It is now clearer than ever that there is no such thing as a truly safe single investment — not a big savings account at IndyMac, not the auction-rate securities that have caused so many problems for scores of investors and not supposed blue-chip stocks like Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac that you might buy on your own, outside of a mutual fund._

So, who is more likely to have owned some FNM and FRE: someone with 100 different investments, who must thus spend less than 1% of their time investigating any given holding (perhaps far less, if their research ever causes them to reject a potential investment); or someone with five or six investments, who thus spends a _lot_ of time thinking about each one, and about what sorts of minor problems or unusual events could make those companies worth a lot less?

<comment><USER3> Is that a rhetorical question?

Of course the one with 100 different investments is more likely to have own FNM and/or FRE. But, he only had 1% of his investments on that. On the other hand, if you only had 5 investments then you may have had 20% of your investments in FME or FRE.

<comment><USER2> The point is that the expected value for making a few investments is higher, if you put any effort at all into picking them. I just mean that if you have twenty people with five stocks each, versus one person with 100, I am betting that the latter will have more disasters, and fewer great picks. Although from one day to the next, 100 will show lower volatility.

Sort of like how if you decided to pursue your MD, JD, MBA, and PhD, this diversification would insulate you from the risk that you're not cut out for legal work. But would still be a terrible idea.

<comment><USER4> There are two assumptions you're making that may be invalid:

1) That the 100 stocks are picked at random

2) That studied (non-random) investments beat out index (random) investments

Even mutual funds are managed and carefully studied by financial institutions. And Warren Buffet, at least, seems to think that the S&P will outpeform the majority of hedge funds over a long period.

<comment><USER2> Your first assumption is incorrect. I never said they were chosen randomly, and specifically mentioned researching those 100 stocks. Since I did not say that the stocks were random, and also said that they were not random, I am not sure where you got that idea.

It seems fairly unlikely to me that there is no value to research. The average person's research may have low marginal value, but I cannot help but notice that some folks are able to research a company, articulate why it's a good company to invest in, and be right. It would be kind of funny if stocks were the only financial transaction in which doing less research was an advantage. Of course, for pecuniary reasons I won't discourage you from investing on that assumption.

The average hedge fund is not necessarily trying to outperform the market. Many of them are looking for higher risk-adjusted returns (i.e. being up when the market is up, and up less when the market is down). And to some extent the low future returns of hedge funds can be blamed on outside investors: a fund with a good record can scale up tenfold within a year once investors start chasing them -- that hurts returns, but their fees can convince managers to take on the extra money anyway.

Finally, the hedge fund comparison is silly because you (probably) don't pay a 2 and 20 on your own personally selected investments. If you do, I would suggest switching brokers. Since Buffett's bet is at least partially a bet that the high returns don't justify such high fees, you might pay attention to the gross returns rather than the net returns.

<comment><USER5> > The average hedge fund is not necessarily trying to outperform the market. > Many of them are looking for higher risk-adjusted returns (i.e. being up > when the market is up, and up less when the market is down).

What do you think that "outperform the market" means if not "higher risk- adjusted returns"?

<comment><USER2> "Higher returns."</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: Out-sourcing little boring jobs - <AUTHOR>

I've got some flow-charts that are currently image files, which I need to redo as Oo Draw files.  I hate that kind of mindless work.  Are there any websites out there where you can pay people to do little one-day jobs like this? <comment><USER2> will <http://vectormagic.com/> help? unfortunately, no longer free.

<comment><AUTHOR> Probably not--there's a lot of text in the charts. And I want to be able to edit them easily in the future.

Thanks, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Mechanical turk?

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks perfect. Thank you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Or maybe not. That doesn't seem to be set up for one-person jobs. More like hiring a swarm to sift through data.

I may give www.peopleperhour.com a try. (The Mechanical Turk suggestion did manage to break my brain-lock, though, so it was useful.)</comment></comment></comment>


OS X 10.11 Ruby / Rails users can install therubyracer again - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cowboyd/libv8/blob/210feb9177ef2f12685629e4fb5a39acc1d3951a/CHANGELOG.md <comment><AUTHOR> This new version fixes issues that many customers have had with rubies built with darwin15 (OSX 10.11).

For this version, no V8 pre-compiled binaries were available. So the install fallbacks on the source, and people with XCode 7.3 installed were unable to compile V8 as is - because Clang 7.3 now enables the -Wshift-negative-value warning - itself turned into error by a global -Werror defined in libv8.

This resolves many issues raised by therubyracer users:

[https://github.com/cowboyd/libv8/issues#205](https://github.com/cowboyd/libv8/issues#205)

[https://github.com/cowboyd/therubyracer#405](https://github.com/cowboyd/therubyracer#405)

[https://github.com/cowboyd/therubyracer#403](https://github.com/cowboyd/therubyracer#403)

Despite what the changelog states, this is indeed released, thanks to @ignisf.

For the record, the error was looking like that:

        In file included from ../src/elements.h:32:
        ../src/objects.h:5252:44: error: shifting a negative signed value is undefined
        [-Werror,-Wshift-negative-value]
          static const int kElementsKindMask = (-1 << kElementsKindShift) &
                                                ~~ ^
        ../src/objects.h:7386:36: error: shifting a negative signed value is undefined
        [-Werror,-Wshift-negative-value]
              (~kMaxCachedArrayIndexLength << kArrayIndexHashLengthShift) |
               <comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment> ^
        2 errors generated.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Postgres.app - <AUTHOR> http://postgresapp.com/

<comment><USER2> I used to build from source, or use homebrew, but in the last year or so I have used this project. A large thanks to the developers. I now use a similar Mac app for Haskell also - simply more convenient.

</comment><comment><USER3> Upgrading is painful. You'll have to jump on the command line, dump, install new version, import. At which point, you might as well use `homebrew`.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the likelihood of the election hack? - <AUTHOR> How difficult is it to hack the electronic voting system the US uses for elections?<p>What hacking do you think took place during the election? Thank you. <comment><USER2> > How difficult is it to hack the electronic voting system the US uses for > elections?

"The electronic voting system" doesn't exist. There are _multiple_ types of machines, software, etc. throughout the US. Some of these have proven to have significant vulnerabilities. In addition, the local boards of elections likely have rollup systems which could be compromised as well. "Insider threats" are another possibility-- for example, throw out some portion of the ballots in a precinct that's strongly on one side or another. Voter- and registration fraud are some of the easiest hacks to perform.

> What hacking do you think took place during the election?

It's quite possible that some of each of these occurred somewhere during the election. They've detected _some_ non-citizens who voted, for example.

The net effect of "hacking", and of innocent errors is likely insignificant, given the hard-working and careful volunteers who man the precincts at election time.

<comment><USER2> Here's some harder news:

Michigan officials say they can not reconcile vote counts in 610 of 1,680 precincts, or 59% of the precincts, in Michigan's largest county , Wayne County, which Hillary won by a margin of 2 to 1 over Donald Trump because the original vote counts in the poll books do not match the number of votes in the machine printout reports.

Specifically, the number of votes recorded by the voting machines were higher than the number of voters that were logged into to vote in these precincts.

[http://alexanderhiggins.com/vote-fraud-12-michigan- hillary-v...](http://alexanderhiggins.com/vote-fraud-12-michigan-hillary-vote- disqualified-recount/)</comment></comment>