Pitch Your Thing To Journalists – PR 101 - <AUTHOR> https://www.dotdotdot.me/Luke-Meyer/Pitch-Your-Thing-To-Journalists---PR-101

<comment><USER2> My girlfriend works for one of the bigger tech blogs. I can't count the number of times I've heard her rant about startups sending her 500+ word pitches where she still has no idea what they do or what they are trying to announce by the end of the email.

First rule of thumb: Say what you do and why you are pitching between the subject line and first (short) paragraph, in the most simple way possible. If you are worried you won't get a reply after that first paragraph you should likely rethink pitching at all.

Nail the first paragraph by keeping it simple (journalists REALLY appreciate this, meaning your entire email is more likely to be read), then provide any supplemental content in the following paragraphs.

Also, don't worry about getting every detail in the initial pitch. If the journalist is interested there will be plenty of time in the follow-up.

</comment><comment><USER3> Surprised not to see "Manufacturing Consent" by Chomksy and Herman. There's a huge amount of insight into the psychology of journalism packed into that book.

<comment><USER4> True, and the documentary is great too: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci_1Ghk0CIc>

Kind of depressing, but it's Chomsky; he has that effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a PR practitioner, I feel like I can dispense some advice here. Here are some thoughts after reading these:

-Your thing likely does not require a press release so skip the articles that try to teach you the 'perfect' press release. Reporters, in my experience, don't give much of a rat's bum about them.

It's business execs who think a press release is the end-all, be-all for media relations and that miraculously, reporters will see your press release somewhere and your phones will be ringing off the hook. In my relatively short (5+ years) PR career, the number of times that has happened is exactly 0.

Instead, focus on crafting a perfect 2-3 paragraph pitch and fine-tuning a list of reporters who cover your thing. The most important thing when crafting this perfect pitch is editing, in case you couldn't tell that that was a recurring theme in the better articles.

-Some of these posts are really good and some are totally bogus. Don't take any advice from the ones that are from people whose method has a name. Your product is unique and so should your approach to announcing it to the press; don't apply some cookie-cutter formula.

Also, eschew the ones that recommend you subscribe to an expensive media contacts database like Burrells or Cision. Those things cost upward of $1,000/year and contain information that, with some reasonable Googling skills, you can find online gratis. Yes, they'll make your life easier but if you're a startup you're likely better off dropping the cash elsewhere.

-One thing none of these seem to address is: you got Johnny Cakes from ZOMGTechBlog to agree to speak to you or your spokesperson about your widget. Now what? How do you make sure you don't stick your foot in your mouth?

-IMHO these are the better ones: Cheat Sheet, DailyNewArticle.com, Top Story PR, PRtini (for as much as I hate the name), Jason Baptiste's, VentureBeat and PRDaily.

Hope that helps!

</comment><comment><USER4> _"Texts you should read before you ever contact an journalist."_

Grammar errors really stand out at font-size: 20px :)

EDIT: It's fixed now.

</comment><comment><USER6> Don't forget the little things. The other day I got a PR release with a) an obvious grammatical error in the subject line and b) 500+ other addresses in the CC field.

</comment><comment><USER7> The main rule to remember is that a journalist, even if they behave in a friendly manner, _is not your friend_.

Everything you say to a journalist is, by default, publishable. Stuff that is in a normal context clearly meant to be kept private is not private. The journalist will publish it if there's a good story.

So don't make lame jokes, they will be published. Don't waffle, it will be published. Before you talk to a journalist, know what you intend to say and say it. There's no obligation on you to do any more than that.

</comment><comment><USER8> Anyone saw this dotdotdot app before? Anyone tested?

</comment><comment><USER9> The contact list link... priceless.</comment>


China unveils 600km/h maglev train prototype - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/china-highspeed-maglev-prototype/index.html <comment><USER2> Discussion a day ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20000034](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20000034)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a suspended style, unlike the Japanese maglev- it's much more like the old transrapid[1] which used a set of coils underneath the track to pull up the train. There are pros and cons to both.

The Japanese maglev uses large unpowered copper coils in the sidewalls[img:2]. They're arranged and interconnected in such a way that they keep the train up and centered. They're quite expensive to build, but more energy efficient.

The suspension style can use smaller coils but they need their own power, which is lossy and can limit the length of the track. In both cases the train typically needs its own generator to create all the power.

The article says that the plan is to make the cars very light, which is plausible- train cars are way heavier than needed; they weigh several times more (~1000 lbs/person) than the people and luggage they can fit. The strength is important though, as the car needs to pull the rest of the train as well. It may limit the number of passengers per train.

They'd have to build entirely new rail for the entire line from Beijing to Shanghai. That would be a very large investment, many times more expensive than just rail. China is preparing for a never-before-seen level of infrastructure and doing anything they can to avoid cars, which would be an ecological and logistical disaster for them.

Maglevs are kind of questionable. The use case comes from moving between large cities- plausible in America, but China already has some of the largest airports in the world and less of a middle class to use them.

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

2: [https://www.jrailpass.com/blog/wp- content/uploads/2017/02/ma...](https://www.jrailpass.com/blog/wp- content/uploads/2017/02/maglev-train-test-track-e1487940220972-1200x767.jpg)

<comment><USER4> A side note, but the poor usage of airports is mostly due to poor reliability caused by the military restrictions on Chinese airspace. [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/24/world/asia/china- beijing-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/24/world/asia/china-beijing- daxing-airport.html)

> With roughly 70 percent of airspace controlled by the military (versus 20 > percent in the United States), commercial aircraft flying in China are > limited to narrow tunnels in the sky. This restricts options for departure > and arrival routing, cutting the number of takeoffs and landings that > airports can handle. Beijing Capital, for example, was the world's second- > busiest airport based on passenger volume in 2017, but it ranked fifth based > on takeoffs and landings, nearly a third fewer than the world leader, > Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

> The lack of airspace is also a key reason delays are so common in China. > Last year, flight delays increased 50 percent, with only 71 percent of > flights taking off on time, according to government statistics... When a > corridor is blocked by a thunderstorm, for example, Chinese flight > controllers often cannot reroute an airplane, because it would have to enter > military airspace. That causes planes to sit on the ground or fly holding > patterns when in other countries they could land or take off.

> The new airport will help by initially opening four, then up to eight, new > runways in the suburb of Daxing, 41 miles southwest of Beijing Capital. The > number of air corridors available for civilian use stays the same, but the > new runways will provide airlines with more ways to gain access to this > limited airspace, allowing the Beijing area to facilitate more flights.

<comment><USER5> Also China knows how to make trains, but much less about making airplanes. So they are not as motivated to develop domestic flights. Even outside of a protectionist angle, when they need economic stimulus, they routinely go for massive HSR construction. It would have been much less effective with airports/planes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Haven't we basically given up on maglev? It's too expensive, and advances in regular trains have shown it's quite possible to go 300 mph on (upgraded) old fashioned steel tracks.

Every time I see one of these projects in any country it seems like a big publicity stunt. Maglevs are cool, and if you have a few your country is cooler. At least that appears to be the prevailing wisdom.

You can see the political underpinnings in the plans, which invariably link the capitol or largest city with somewhere that has a nice airport

<comment><USER7> Japan is developing a maglev from Tokyo to Osaka (but first to nogoya) atm. See [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chūō_Shinkansen](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chūō_Shinkansen)

<comment><USER4> Japan is only developing it because of a few coincidental factors:

\- The existing Tokaido Shinkansen is full. Not many high speed rail lines run as intensively as the Tokaido, if any do.

\- Japan is heavily land-constrained, so even if they built a lower-spec standard Chuo Shinkansen they probably wouldn't save much money either way.

\- Japan's government _loves_ infrastructure stimulus and promoting homegrown technology, and the Chuo Shinkansen achieves both.

Other countries have abandoned maglev because of the relatively low benefit for the increased cost, like Germany and China's initial decision to go with HSR instead of Transrapid.

<comment><USER7> China was going to extend the pudong maglev into shanghai city center and all the way to Hangzhou, but Shanghai residents were too afraid of the magnets so the government backed off.

<comment><USER4> That was part of it.

Part of it was also compatibility with existing technology. High speed rail trains in China can switch off of high speed rail lines onto classic rail trackage and provide one seat rides to cities not on a high-speed rail line. Maglevs can only run on maglev, necessitating a transfer, and travelers _hate_ transfers. In Japan this compatibility is less important because the classic rail network is narrow-gauged unlike the standard-gauged Shinkansen, so they never really needed to care about this benefit.

It was also partially a marketing problem. High speed rail technology is very attractive to other countries because it it can benefit from a larger classic railway network, making it more exportable than maglev. There are also many HSR companies; China was able to use technology from Siemens, Bombardier, and Alstom. In contrast, only Siemens knows how the tech behind the Shanghai maglev works, and they've basically dropped the product due to lack of interest.

<comment><USER7> China's HSR lines are hardly point to point, neither are japan's. I can't remember ever taking a Shinkansen without a transfer at the start, end, or both.

The pudong maglev would be much more useful if it came into shanghai core. Now you have to transfer to it via subway, and so it isn't faster than a taxi while being similar in cost. The Changsha slow maglev is much better, as it actually goes between two places you might want to transfer between (between the airport and the HSR station). Having had to make that transfer by hired car several times before, I'm looking forward to a much smoother next time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Planes travel 50% faster, have comparatively minimal infrastructure cost, and are more flexible than trains. Build better planes.

<comment><USER9> It says it's faster than a plane for Beijing to Shanghai. Planes have boarding times, extra security checks, and produce a lot more greenhouse gases.

<comment><USER10> Anyone who's actually ever compared flying and taking high-speed trains in China will take the train any day over flying between Beijing and Shanghai. The train is faster, cheaper and more comfortable.

<comment><USER11> Just took the Shanghai Beijing train a few days ago and it was fantastic. Comfortable seats, lots of space, good bathrooms, lots of food and drinks to buy and delivered to your seat if you order with WeChat by scanning a QR code on your seat. Way better than going through an airport - and I love flying.

<comment><USER10> Did the bathrooms have soap and toilet paper? It always amazes me how Chinese facilities can be so great, but then lack these two essentials. Chinese trains are usually BYOS/TP.

<comment><USER11> They did. Sometimes they don't have it on train stations but there's either a dispenser outside of the stalls or a store selling tissues right next to the counter.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


There's No Protection In High Ports Anymore, Son. If Indeed There Ever Was. - <AUTHOR> http://bsdly.blogspot.no/2013/02/theres-no-protection-in-high-ports.html

<comment><USER2> I'm tempted to hide sshd behind websockets, partly for this reason. It seems too much hassle to be worth it though.

(To be clear: my concern is about reducing my exposure the next time there is a sshd 0day exploit.)</comment>


Why San Francisco is in trouble – highly compensated city employees - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/09/01/why-san-francisco-is-in-trouble--19000-highly-compensated-city-employees-earned-150000-in-pay--perks/ <comment><USER2> Similar situation to Calgary, Alberta. When the oil sector was booming the private sector was being paid the highest salaries in North America and public employees complained massively and received the highest public sector salaries in the country. Now, oil and gas has cratered and the salaries in the private sector have collapsed (and thousands of job losses) the public sector is refusing to have any salary reduction even though the province of Alberta is completely broke and heading towards fiscal collapse.

<comment><USER3> Saying the province is broke misses the point. Alberta has the lowest provincial tax rate in North America, has the lowest personal tax rate in Canada, and has no provincial sales tax. All of these because of a reliance on Oil and Gas royalties.

Calgary has a similar dynamic with over reliance on commercial real estate for major oil and gas companies.

Alberta is an outlier in how it finances public services. These are structural problems which won't be solved by public sector taking 5, 10, or even 20% reduction.

<comment><USER2> Please take a look at the latest Alberta government 2020-2021 budget update [1], the resource revenue has collapsed to a mere $1.5 billion which is 2% of government expenditures. Also, the government is running a pre-Covid deficit of $8 Billion which has ballooned to $24 Billion due to Covid. The government must raise taxes or reduce expenditures or face more indebtedness than Quebec per capita.

[1] [https://open.alberta.ca/dataset/9c81a5a7-cdf1-49ad-a923-d1ec...](https://open.alberta.ca/dataset/9c81a5a7-cdf1-49ad-a923-d1ecb42944e4/resource/df5d0611-2278-4fdb- aa7b-0c71932479cb/download/2020-21-first-quarter-fiscal-update-and-economic- statement.pdf)

<comment><USER4> So in Canada, unlike most or all us states, Alberta can run a budget deficit, they can just get loans? What if they declare bankruptcy or can't pay some bills?

<comment><USER2> Yes, in Canada the provinces can run deficits and all of them have quite large debt loads but eventually the debt loads become too large as the interest payments grow. In the 90s Canada had to cut government services due to an extremely high debt load [1].

[1] [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-crisis- timeline/timeline-...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-crisis- timeline/timeline-how-canada-tamed-its-budget-crisis-idUSTRE7AK0FF20111121)

<comment><USER3> Canadian Provinces also do the bulk of the spending compared federally with US States.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Having worked on stories like these, I'd caution anyone to examine some of the overtime outliers before responding to them.

Often enough the highest visible overtimes on a city budget are social functions, like a sheriff who provides honorary protective detail to stadiums where they are later bizarrely reimbused through that mechanism.

Below that and down-to the median overtimes usually speak for themselves and draw a fair amount of criticism, but otherwise, the vast combined aggregate under the median points out that we don't pay people enough for the jobs they do, and we can't hire enough of them at that price.

<comment><USER6> It would be just some one-time outliers, except there are real problems where overtime is counted towards retirement, and workers actively inflate their last years just to bump up their pensions and retirement pay. And none of that kind of thing is protected against in the contracts. So the city and taxpayers are being screwed.

<comment><USER5> The last-three-years retirement bowling lanes you're describing need a US-wide overhaul, but it's definitely not an uncommon occurrence in public service admin anywhere in the states, on a City, State and Federal level.

But the overtime budget breakdown for SF (City and County) was roughly 65% transit, 28% maintenance, 5% enforcement. So admin is < 2% of it.

Those numbers in context are interesting. In FY2011/12 the departmental breakdown of employees exceeding set overtime limits were:

\- Transportation: 634 employees

\- Fire Department: 378 employees

\- Public Health: 115 employees

\- Sheriff: 85 employees.

Everyone else in the city - combined - came to just 63 employees. In other words, these are critical positions drawing nearly all of the overtime.

<comment><USER7> >The last-three-years retirement bowling lanes

Also, the double and triple dipping where someone retires from one government job and then takes another one with a different agency. They collect a pension check and a pay check at the same time while also establishing a second pension account in a different system.

<comment><USER8> This is ... normal? You get a pension for working a duration at a job. If you want to 'supplement' your income after that point its a free country, isn't it?

<comment><USER7> In the private sector, with multiple employers, perhaps (though very few offer pensions any more). In the public sector, you would essentially be getting paid twice and multiple pensions by the same employer (the taxpayer).

<comment><USER8> Yes. Go on. And the problem is ....

<comment><USER9> The problem is CalPERS. If you are not retired, you should not be drawing from a pension. When a person goes to another government job and starts paying into CalPERS again, the pension needs to stop.

<comment><USER8> ??? The pension is somehow not a contractual obligation? They didn't work the required years? They didn't meet the pension terms?

I think the issue is the 'you should not ...' part. I don't see it as a moral issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This reads like a clickbait article with an agenda.

Also, who cares? SF is one of the most expensive cities in the world - it's probably fair to expect city employees to make a liveable wage in the city they serve.

<comment><USER11> That's the thing - the livable wage is changing in San Francisco.

SF is seeing a steep reduction in cost-of-living, yet these extremely high salaries won't decrease accordingly.

Also, the herds of people moving out and companies shifting remote will mean lower revenue for the city, meaning these high salaries won't be fiscally sustainable.

<comment><USER9> The city will take on debt load like Vallejo and Orange County. They will try to win concessions, but most likely the unions won't budge. Worst case, SF files for Chapter 9 bankruptcy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This article fails to make the point as to why this is a problem. You might as well make an article "Why Google is in trouble - 60,000 employees earned $150k+".

<comment><USER13> Not really. Google isn't saddled with retirement entitlements. Also Googles employees generate some of the highest revenues per staff in the industry.

SF gets its revenues from its citizens via taxes. The employees don't produce revenues themselves. They are cost centers. Cities by their nature, use regulatory capture to extract revenues.

If googles revenues go down they cut staff. Cities rarely cut staff in line with budget decreases.

<comment><USER14> "Retirement entitlements"? You mean the pensions people have earned, with their labor?

It's not a surprise, to anyone who thinks about it for more than 20 seconds that RN or firefighter is not, in fact, a revenue generating position for the city. But they're generally agreed to be necessary, so why should they not be paid a living wage?

<comment><USER15> If public sector employees want private sector wages, they shouldn't also get pensions. They can save for retirement in a 401(k) or equivalent.

<comment><USER14> If private sector employees want public sector benefits and job protections, they can agitate for them. Talk to your coworkers about organizing and unionizing.

You don't need to drag down others to pull yourself up.

<comment><USER16> No. There are three problems with defined-benefit systems, especially as a form of civil servant benefit:

1) There is far too much risk involved. No one really knows how long a person will live beyond retirement 40 years from now;

2) The systems, as they are in place today, result in retirement income that far exceeds expected returns from investment or growth in GDP over the preceeding 30-40 years of work, and are unsustainable by taxpayers _by definition;

3) The taxpayer - who should be the adversary when negotiating pensions and salaries for public servants - gets no place at the table during negotiations. It is in the best interests of both the leadership of civil institutions and the employed civil servants to increase both salary, pensions, and benefits far beyond any rational economic analysis.

Eventually these policies result in places like Flint or Detroit. My expectation is that Illinois is likely to join them in about 10 years they are so far in the hole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's wonderful that city employees make competitive salaries. I wish they were held accountable when they failed to do their job.

<comment><USER18> I have no problem with most of the base salaries, but the amount of overtime screams either inefficiency or corruption.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Do we want city employees to live in the city ? Because unless your family bought a house in the 60s, you probably want to earn $150k to live in the city.

<comment><USER20> >Because unless your family bought a house in the 60s, you probably want to earn $150k to live in the city.

That's renting a 1 bedroom apartment money. To even dream of ever buying something and supporting a family you're talking $200k+.

<comment><USER21> 200k? I know people on 600k total comp who have been stuck in a one bedroom flat for 4 years because of how many strings the money comes attached with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Putting those numbers into context, from the article there's about 40k employees earning on average 131k. That would be somewhat higher than the median wage in SF (~100k), and for all the employees be about ~5 billion in cost, which is slightly more than a third of the budget of 13.7 billion for the fiscal year 2020.

I haven't looked at what percentage of cost for other cities salaried employees are, but it does not seem exceedingly high. I guess you could justify shaving off 10-15% or so, but I wouldn't characterise this as being a major source of trouble.

</comment><comment><USER23> The issue I perceive with this is that all of these wages seem to be extremely inflated compared to the job market for similar roles. Are private hospitals in SF paying RNs almost 300k a year? Are the FB shuttle shuttle drivers or delivery drivers in industry making 108k a year? I doubt it.

<comment><USER24> It's a common problem actually. Private shuttle companies complain they are unable to compete with all the benefits etc. Government monopolies are the absolute worst for this reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Here are the SF city workers who earn big overtime checks

[https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2020/san-francisco- over...](https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2020/san-francisco-overtime/)

How does someone work 3000 overtime hours?

</comment><comment><USER26> Until California overhauls their ridiculous Prop 13 artificially keeping property taxes low, these arguments blaming budget shortfalls on salaries will continue to be a moot point.

Yes, there can be rampant overtime abuse by government workers to get these inflated salaries, that's a large problem in NYC transit agencies.

However, the overt limiting of city revenue due to Prop 13 is a major cause of budget shortfalls that's looking them right in the face.

If someone is in serious debt while at the same time _going out of their way_ to voluntarily take a lower salary, does it make sense to blame it on their expensive internet bill, or tackle the salary first?

<comment><USER27> That's true if it wasn't for Prop 13, the sherif would of definitely not made 350k in overtime this year.

Very good point

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> To add another dimension, the article makes no statements of productivity. Highly productive workers can demand higher salaries.

Now, I am not claiming they're highly productive (and suspect the opposite), but until the data is there we're missing an important factor in judging.

</comment><comment><USER21> A family of 4 is low income on $110k. SF and but-fuck-nowhere West Virginia are not places to compare on cost of living.

</comment><comment><USER29> Forbes has become nothing more than a tabloid. Article immediately after this one: "The Best Shampoo For Dandruff, According To Dermatologists".

<comment><USER30> It should at least be "According to Venture Capitalists."</comment></comment>


The Death of the Sidewalk - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-death-of-the-sidewalk/2019/06/28/b89c9bb2-9900-11e9-8d0a-5edd7e2025b1_story.html <comment><USER2> The article links to an original NYT publication from the 1890s. What struck me first about it was that it was a reckless police shooting of an unarmed man. And the policeman was arrested and charged and people were upset about it. History repeats itself.</comment>


Show HN: Uncluttered – Simple shared status bar messages for OS X - <AUTHOR>

Over the past couple weekends I created a fun little desktop app + server called Uncluttered.  Its only job is share simple (and short) messages to people's status bar in OSX.  I've been using it to leave myself reminders ("Pay bills"), but can easily see this being used for teams that want to share small pieces of data ("799 sign ups!").<p>Check it out here: http://uncluttered.re-cycledair.com/ <comment><USER2> clickable link: [http://www.uncluttered.re- cycledair.com](http://www.uncluttered.re-cycledair.com)

<comment><USER3> [http://uncluttered.re-cycledair.com/](http://uncluttered.re-cycledair.com/) \- no www

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Do I create the key? Where is it generated?</comment>


Glimmer rendering engine is landing in Ember Canary today - <AUTHOR> http://emberjs.com/blog/2015/05/05/glimmer-merging.html

<comment><USER2> I am just amazed by all the improvements that Ember has had since I started using it. Definitely shows that relying on a _good_ framework is the way to go.

Also, I feel like the Ember core team is not only innovating in the product itself but in its way of managing all aspects of running an open source project and most importantly in how to grow, respect and help an ever growing community.

A huge thanks to all contributors and every members of the Ember community.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> HN Admin: your rewrite of the title is incorrect, my original title was more accurate. The engine has already been merged.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great write-up. It clearly identifies the stage the new technology is in, it calls for the community to get involved, lays out the actions taken and the benefits people can expect. I'm not even an Ember user but this looks very polished and professional. Kudos.

</comment><comment><USER4> So many new features with so few consequences on old codebase... <3 Ember.js</comment>


A Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Visits Onlab, A Young Japanese Incubator - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/25/startup-japan-a-silicon-valley-entrepreneur-visits-onlab-a-young-japanese-incubator/

<comment><USER2> "dressful" makes you more fashionable;) <http://dressful.me/>

</comment><comment><USER3> PIRKA was introduced! <http://www.e-pirka.com>

</comment><comment><USER4> Mieple is on! <http://mieple.com/></comment>


Dormitory converted into gigantic Tetris display (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2007/12/05/mikontalo-dormitory-converted-into-gigantic-tetris-display/

<comment><USER2> Germany's Project Blinkenlights is far more impressive. <http://www.blinkenlights.net/project/videos>

</comment><comment><USER3> you gotta wonder how difficult it was to convince each and every person in the dorm to agree to this...</comment>


Show HN: Census – Export for data warehouses - <AUTHOR> Hello Hacker News! We're a team of YC founders (Meldium W13, Draft S11, TapEngage S11) launching something new (https://www.getcensus.com). How many times has your business team asked you to generate yet another CSV file, write a "quick report" in SQL, or send some custom data to a terrible API (looking at you Marketo)?
We've built a product that connects directly to your data warehouse and syncs into apps like Salesforce, Customer.io and even Google Sheets. In fact, your business teams won't even need to rely on engineering to manage all these pipelines.
The tech stack for analyzing customer data in 2020 looks pretty great. You can load almost any data into an auto-scaling data warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery) with easy point & click tools like Fivetran. You can build SQL models with dbt and create visual reports in Metabase. But you can't easily push insights back into the marketing/sales/support apps.
You can't solve this with direct app integrations or "event routers" like Zapier and you definitely shouldn't over-engineer a solution with Spark/Kafka/Airflow. We designed Census to make your data warehouse a single source of truth for modeling and transformation before publishing data back into your SaaS tools quickly and reliably.
We're proud of what we've built so far and there's a lot more work to deliver on our dream of saving us all from generating & uploading yet another CSV file so we can spend more time actually building our products (or reading HN). You can check it out at https://www.getcensus.com.
Since this is HN, we'd love to hear everyone's war stories on building internal ETL solutions! <comment><USER2> Brad from Census ([https://www.getcensus.com](https://www.getcensus.com)) here - I wanted to add some technical detail for the HN crowd.

On its face, a Census workflow is a simple "program" that our users author in a point-and-click manner – read some data from System A and broadcast it to Systems B, C, and D. But to "compile" that program, Census has to determine:

      - Which APIs to use (bulk, streaming, etc)

      - The schema of each destination (which can change out from underneath us at run time!)

      - The semantics of reads and writes from each system (atomicity, isolation, how roll back if a write fails)

      - How to map data with high-fidelity across strongly-, weakly-, and dynamically-typed data stores

That's just compilation – then we need to execute that compiled plan and move massive amounts of data with low latency and high throughput, all while handling byzantine failures in source and destination systems and automatically rolling back, recovering, or helping users "debug" their workflows when things go wrong.

There's a lot of depth to this (and we haven't "solved" it by any means) - happy to answer questions here or at email@example.com if you have them!

</comment><comment><USER3> Excited to follow your progress! I view this problem as the one of the biggest gaps in today's "Cloud Data Ecosystem". Tools like Stitch and Fivetran make it super easy to extract data from source systems; next-gen cloud data platforms like Snowflake make storing, transforming, and querying that data a breeze (especially with the help of tools like dbt and dataform); and there are a ton of powerful and easy to use BI tools for visualizing and digesting that data. But the minute you need to send that data to other systems, it's back to painful, failure-prone, and mind-numbing scripts.

<comment><AUTHOR> So nice to hear! That's precisely how we felt :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice, congrats on launching! I'm excited to try it out.

Curious - what if there's a transformation that happens with data from the data warehouse but can't be performed with SQL (such as a Python script)? Is there a way to send that data back into the integrations that you support? Or would be it best to push back into the data warehouse and use Census from there?

Aka, can you only transform with Census using SQL? Or other languages as well?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We've been talking about that on the team. I kind of want to expose any table automatically as a pandas dataframe so that you could transform it with python on the fly and we'd take care of the execution (and then sync the result back to the apps). Do you have something specific in mind?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> When can we create an account with email/password instead of Google?

<comment><AUTHOR> Very soon! Send me an email at firstname.lastname@example.com and I'll get you going asap!</comment></comment>


Ask: HN I keep adding items to my 'todo' list and it keeps getting larger - <AUTHOR> Looking for suggestions and/or recommendations from others who have created a long todo list and how they dealt with it without ignoring it. <comment><USER2> The first todo system that worked for me was bullet journal. It is essentially just a notebook where you write down every todo.

I partition it in days and put new things there. Not actionable notes, todos and events get different symbols in front.

Not actionable notes: "-"

todos: "·"

events. "◯"

Once I have done a todo the "·" becomes a "x".

Events that are done will get a "x" drawn over the "◯".

When I have to start a new double-page I also migrate all the old todos and events that are not "x"-ed so far to the new page.

THIS is the crux. You have to migrate them by hand. Your todo list won't grow to infinity because you are lazy. Instead you re-evaluate if the todo is really necessary still.

Yes? Migrate.

No? Cross it out.

<comment><USER2> I also have topic-related or project-specific pages where I track their todos. Eventually the current double-page will be full and I also have to migrate there. In my daily list I then just have a todo like "do the next thing for project XYZ, see page 42", where page 42 would be the current project XYZ page containing the todo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Begin actually doing them or just see how big you can make it, also removing duplicates helps</comment>


Brexit '2nd Referendum Petition' a 4 Chan Prank - <AUTHOR> http://heatst.com/uk/exclusive-brexit-2nd-referendum-petition-a-4-chan-prank-bbc-report-it-as-real/ <comment><USER2> This is a fake story. The Petitions Comission know what they're doing and remove fraudulent signatures.

[https://twitter.com/hocpetitions/status/747063424132255745](https://twitter.com/hocpetitions/status/747063424132255745)

<comment><USER3> No, they don't. There's clearly more than 70000 fraudulent signatures if there are 30000 from Vatican alone.

<comment><USER4> Dunno about then, but there don't appear to be anymore: {"name":"Vatican City","code":"VA","signature_count":58} See for yourself: [https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/131215.json](https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/131215.json)

It's entirely plausible that whoever wrote the script intentionally designed it to submit a large chunk of votes from "Vatican City" to try and discredit the petition, especially given /pol/'s political leanings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Gamergate hero Sargon of Akkad", seriously?

</comment><comment><USER6> Was it though? The people who develop the app surely account for basic voting fraud..

<comment><USER7> Never overestimate computer security, it's almost always worse than "surely it can't be that bad"

<comment><USER6> Well I've met people who've worked on the app, and I doubt that both these folks and a GDS team would miss the major hostile use case of the app.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: A holiday favor, please? - <AUTHOR> Sometimes, I feel very fortunate that my life is what it is. Sometimes, I take for granted what I have.
I read this story about a girl who lost her family and wants Christmas cards from all over the world.
HN is diverse, could we help her? Can anyone take a few moments and send her a card from where you are located?
http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/09/us/girl-arson-christmas-cards-feat/index.html?eref=rss_latest <comment><USER2> How about something more practical and lasting? Maybe a gofundme for her future education or something instead?

<comment><AUTHOR> They have something: "a crowdfunding page set up for Sa'fyre and the Dolder family had raised more than $102,000 as of Wednesday morning."

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is the glitter bomb still thing still around?

<comment><USER4> Yes, along with the copycats of other various items.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Lets do this guys :D going to send one tomorrow :D

<comment><AUTHOR> I have mine ready for mail tomorrow too. Thank you for doing this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was thinking about sending one too

</comment><comment><USER7> In the post as of today!</comment>


Gowalla Launches Engineering Site - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.gowalla.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Always happy to see companies support developers and open source (even happier when I work for those companies) ^_^</comment>


Wolfram Alpha tips for webmasters and sysadmins - <AUTHOR> http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/05/25/useful-wolfram-alpha-tips-for-webmasters-and-sysadmins/

<comment><USER2> AFAIK Google has done all of these things for some years. I regularly use it for the sorts of calculations mentioned in this article, such as:

<http://www.google.com/search?q=2TB+%2F+1.25+MB%2Fs></comment>


[Ask HN] How do you stay focussed and organised to make sure you're productive? - <AUTHOR> As founders, programmers, marketers or as a sales person, we constantly need to make sure that we get things done quickly and efficiently.
This can be extremely hard unless we're pretty organised. I thought it would be awesome to capture the techniques, methodologies and tools we use to plan and work on a survey.
It would be great if you guys could shoot out your thoughts and answers by following this link ( https://paperio.typeform.com/to/SkJrVN ).
I'll share the results once I have enough answers so we can all learn from each other. <comment><AUTHOR> With over 50 responses so far, we've made an infographic to share it with you guys ([http://i.imgur.com/RvoiVuj.png](http://i.imgur.com/RvoiVuj.png)). I'd love to dig deeper and produce a more detailed infographic as we get more responses to our survey.

If you'd like to help, here's the link to the survey - [https://paperio.typeform.com/to/SkJrVN](https://paperio.typeform.com/to/SkJrVN)</comment>


A rising sentiment that IBM's Watson can't deliver on its promises - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/why-everyone-is-hating-on-watson-including-the-people-w-1797510888 <comment><USER2> I'm quite late to this thread, but I worked on Watson very briefly (not on the core development, but overall system performance improvements).

I think there's a major misunderstanding of Watson which isn't helped by IBM's Marketing efforts. IBM Marketing has been slapping the "Cognitive" label on everything and is creating unrealistic expectations.

The Jeopardy playing Watson (DeepQA pipeline) was a landmark success at Information Retrieval, its architecture is built largely on Apache UIMA and Lucene with proprietary code for scaling out (performance) and filtering & ranking. I'm not an expert on IR so I won't comment further. This is very different from Neural Nets that are all the rage in ML today.

I'd like to point the following links from David Ferrucci [1] the original architect of Watson and this technical publication at aaai.org [2].

The DeepQA pipeline wasn't fluff, the intention was to take this question- answer pipeline and apply it to other verticals such as Law and Medicine, essentially replace the Jeopardy playing Watson's corpus of Wikipedia, Britannica etc... with Legal and Medical equivalents.

Given its runaway PR success, the Watson brand was applied to many other areas which haven't been successful but I'd like to point out what the original product was here.

[1] [https://www.singularityweblog.com/david-ferrucci-on- singular...](https://www.singularityweblog.com/david-ferrucci-on- singularity-1-on-1-pursue-the-big-challenges/) [2] [https://www.aaai.org/Magazine/Watson/watson.php](https://www.aaai.org/Magazine/Watson/watson.php)

<comment><USER3> > The Jeopardy playing Watson (DeepQA pipeline) was a landmark success at > Information Retrieval, its architecture is built largely on Apache UIMA and > Lucene with proprietary code for scaling out (performance) and filtering & > ranking. I'm not an expert on IR so I won't comment further. This is very > different from Neural Nets that are all the rage in ML today.

The question I would like to ask is that if the architecture is built on UIMA and Lucence, what exactly did "Watson" do?

<comment><USER2> Apache UIMA came out of the efforts from Ferrucci and others from TJ Watson Research Lab.

"Watson's" secret sauce was the filtering and ranking, you get multiple results from the models, which ones do you pick?

There was significant engineering effort put into reducing the latency of getting answers out of the pipeline as well, you had to optimize given the constraints of latency, accuracy and confidence from the pipeline.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> When I worked at IBM I expressed concern that the television commercials depicting a HAL9000 level interactive dialog system were dangerously overselling what Watson could do.

The challenge, as I saw it, was that no matter how good the tools and products that were used to help companies with data analysis to improve their operations were, when they realize they can't talk to a cube and joke with it about misusing colloquial phrases their disappointment overshadows all the 'good' stuff it was doing for them.

No relationship works well if it starts with a lie and as this article shows, people do take those ads at face value and assume there really is a talking AI inside of IBM. Then they are hugely disappointed when they find out it doesn't exist.

<comment><USER5> Over-promising has killed AI progress before (expert systems). So history's just repeating itself.

People want to believe. They'll pay for their belief. Then when projects start to fail (~5 years after commercialization) they form the opinion that it was never going to work and they'll never do it again.

... then we wait another decade, repeat.

<comment><USER6> There's this trend of Expert Systems being commented on as a failure and starting some sort of AI winter, yet to my knowledge they were among the first commercially viable digital animation tools, the first high speed trading platforms, and are still being used successfully in military planning. Where's the evidence that they were a failure or that they were oversold?

<comment><USER7> Well, there was this place called "The Turing Institute" which was in Glasgow. It was run by a very nice man called Don Michie. I met Don a handful of times, and he was extremely kind and generous to me. He worked at Bletchley Park and died aged 91 having hit a bridge at 120mph going the wrong way up the M11 at 2am sitting next to his wife who had defected to Russia thirty years before. Don was driving, at the time he had been blind for six months.

Anyway, The Turing Institute existed because of Don's drive to commercialise Expert Systems. Don was a driver in the Alvey project which was a grand project to solve issues around Expert Systems in response to the Japanese Fifth Generation project. A man called Lighthill then rumbled the Expert System movement. If you want to watch a demolition of it see the following video :

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yReDbeY7ZMU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yReDbeY7ZMU)

and the other 5 of them (you will find them in the sidebar!)

Fun fact. In video 6 you can watch Christopher Strachey have a pop at AI. Christopher didn't work at Bletchley, he was too young, but he did work at Manchester with Alan Turing and they created computer music and love poetry in collaboration before Turing killed himself. Strachey went on to be the first Professor of Computer Science at Oxford, he was a scion of a great family of artists and poets.

But enough of this. The Turing Institute was an attempt to say "we are right, look", but in fact it failed. Don was clear why, when you hit 40k rules knowledge bases became completely intractable. It was impossible to make improvements or changes. This was christened the Knowledge Acquisition bottleneck, and Don and others turned to Machine Learning (he liked to call it Behavioral Cloning) to solve it.

So :

1\. It was done to death by peer review.

2\. It died commercially.

3\. It's main protagonists decided to do something diffferent.

<comment><USER8> > I met Don a handful of times, and he was extremely kind and generous to me. > He worked at Bletchley Park and died aged 91 having hit a bridge at 120mph > going the wrong way up the M11 at 2am sitting next to his wife who had > defected to Russia thirty years before. Don was driving, at the time he had > been blind for six months.

Wow, what a rollercoaster of a paragraph! Thanks for the story. :)

<comment><USER9> Clearly that's his way of saying something dodgy happened. Note the mention of Russia.

<comment><USER10> No, I think the poster is mis-remembering things which were based on facts.

Donald Michie did work (with Turing!) at Bletchley Park, and he did die in a motor vehicle accident. He was 83 when he died (not 91)[1]. His _ex_ -wife[2] (they had remained friends) was in the car with him and also died. She had never defected to Russia, but she was (or had been) a member of the communist party[2].

[1] [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1556846/Professor...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1556846/Professor- Donald-Michie.html)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_McLaren](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_McLaren)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Crédit Mutuel (a french bank) has adopted Watson [0] and it's not encouraging : it was supposed to help answering emails, : they had to describe manually the concepts in emails and create topics in which looks a lot like decision- trees (and reminds me of this 1985 ad for Texas Instrument's Lisp AI [https://www.scientificamerican.com/media/inline/blog/File/De...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/media/inline/blog/File/Dewdney_Mandelbrot.pdf) scroll to see the ad)

Indeed the whole thing looks like a database with basic AI as a sales argument...

[0 - in french] [http://www.silicon.fr/credit-mutuel-non-ia-watson- magique-17...](http://www.silicon.fr/credit-mutuel-non-ia-watson- magique-173889.html)

<comment><USER12> Totally. I observed a support chatbot project that didn't quite meet up with the vision.

Even based on the technical marketing claims the consultants were coming in with, it was a product less capable than the IBM Prolog-based expert systems that I built out 15-20 years ago to triage and correlate network events in a large WAN infrastructure.... and that was a product with a whole slew of major implementation and operational problems!

<comment><USER13> Chatbots are glorified command line interfaces. With no man pages.

<comment><USER14> Sure, if you ignore the advancements of NLP in the past few years. Sometimes I wish I had NLP in my terminal to autocorrect my typos.

<comment><USER12> NLP is amazing. But getting facts and information into a chat bot is not easy or cheap.

Typically people are deploying chatbots as a cost cutting measure to reduce labor. Sometimes that means using the chatbot as a fancy IVR, getting customers to abandon the transaction or any of several other paths. Actually answering the questions doesn't always matter!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> IBM is a dying giant, I've seen it languishing for years. Their massive screw up was a decade ago when they decided shareholder value was more important than having good engineers. They've since gutted their R&D departments and all that's left are duds and underpaid undereducated consultants rented from places like Accenture.

The only good thing to come out of IBM in years is their Hyperscan regex library and unsurprisingly they don't market it at all or build practical applications with it

<comment><USER16> In the 80's IBM was an unstoppable juggernaut. In the 90's it was Microsoft. Then Apple. Now Google/Amazon.

Conventional wisdom is that, in a free market, a single corporation will grow to rule everything. But that never seems to pan out.

Part of the reason is that the larger an organization gets, the more inefficient and bureaucratic it gets, the less it is able to adapt. See "The Innovator's Dilemma", a book everyone interested in business should read.

<comment><USER17> Oddly enough Microsoft is the only company I can see bucking this trend right now. The other big guys youve mentioned have essentially slumped down into their respective markets and drawn up battle lines, whereas MS really seems to be pushing into new territory. I wouldnt be surprised to see them come back into mobile with a Surface phone that gives Apple a run for their money.

<comment><USER18> _Oddly enough Microsoft is the only company I can see bucking this trend right now._

I'll second that - both Azure and Surface are best-in-class.

<comment><USER19> Eh, Azure is not that great. It's okay.

<comment><USER20> Azure is an absolute joy to use and administer compared to IBM Bluemix.

<comment><USER21> >> Eh, Azure is not that great. It's okay.

> Azure is an absolute joy to use and administer compared to IBM Bluemix.

Note to other readers: although slightly tangential, these two comments do not actually disagree or contradict each other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I had problems with Watson to the effect that not even the documentation matches reality. There are some fairly basic things missing from their NERC offering. I can tell you that the functionality that is missing is so basic (e.g. negation) that without a doubt, no one in IBM has ever used this offering in practise beyond a toy example.

The idea that IBM Watson is some uniform AI in a box with a bunch of REST API's to "expose" its intelligence seems to be the sales pitch. It's not. It's just a bunch of acquired products (you can see this when e.g. Watson Knowledge Studio breaks and you see the Python scripts that glues everything together in the backend) that are poorly integrated, probably because the left hand has no idea what the right hand is doing.

Caveat emptor!

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44796501/ibm-watson- know...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44796501/ibm-watson-knowledge- studio-entities-with-role-attribute-and-extracting-it-fro) [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44800879/ibm-watson- know...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44800879/ibm-watson-knowledge- studio-annotating-negative-negated-mentions)

</comment><comment><USER23> A couple of years ago I was given a project that was essentially "Evaluate Watson APIs to see if there's anything there we could make use of", and came away with the distinct impression that it was largely smoke and mirrors, and there was very little that was either effective or interesting there.

<comment><USER24> Our IT department has been talking about Watson for a while but I never could get anything out of them what it's really supposed to do. From what I can tell it's a very slick marketing term with some mediocre tech behind it.

<comment><USER25> As far as I understand (and I have only passing knowledge on this, as we've been evaluating machine learning technologies for our startup) IBM Watson is just a set of APIs you can use to build your own solution, and the APIs themselves are not top-of-the-line (Google's are.)

The other day I saw a TV ad for Watson for the first time: the ad showed a bunch of aeronautical engineers who instead of having to take all kinds of measurements of airflow around a hull or who knows what else (the TV was muted) now sat behind a single computer that would do the whole thing for them. It was such bullshit, I couldn't believe my eyes.

Imagine Amazon promoting SES as this amazing tool that'd automatically send marketing emails and create a marketing funnel and drive user acquisition cost down by a factor of 100X, without you having to do anything. That's the level of vaporware they are selling.

<comment><USER26> Very few out of the box machine learning services work other than speech-to- text by the worlds greatest company in that field (google). It's not a case of roll your own but find companies that can help you deliver s solution to your specific problem. (That is my business) This is the absolute bullshit of Watson. What it could be is a series of very good datasets and then being able to build models (based on recipes) and deploy them. It's so unbelievably clunky though. And Bluemix? Urgh

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The dirty secret is that IBM Watson is just a brand for their army of data consultants, and their consultants aren't very good. In my experience working for a competitor in this space, IBM Watson was widely agreed to be smoke and mirrors without much going on

<comment><USER28> Former IBM Watson data scientist here.

At first I was annoyed by your comment, but then I realized how true it is and sulked instead.

The good consultants are leaving as soon as they hit the end of their first promotion cycle. The duds stick around and assume the upper-level manager roles. The group is in bad shape now and poised to get worse in the coming years.

<comment><USER5> As someone who's worked in that space, I'll repost the short version of a comment I made before: it's an economics problem.

Services Profit = Bid - Employee Cost + Upsales

Bids are only so flexible. Employee cost is much easier to minimize. So inevitably, all consultancies trend towards providing the cheapest employees that will satisfy the customer. And if the customer isn't constantly vigilant, the quality can get pretty dire indeed (BAs who just learned to "code" yesterday).

<comment><USER29> Holy shit man. This was literally my experience with Accenture. I worked side- by-side with them on a massive IT project. Their team was like 60 liberal arts grads willing to work 80 hours a week configuring some COTS software and 4 managers making sure they don't go home. I think they just use India now instead.

<comment><USER30> One thing I love about HN is the willingness of people to name names in stories. I don't always do it because of fears of repercussion, but I appreciate people like you who do. Thanks for saying the word "Accenture".

<comment><USER31> In this case, the names are completely interchangeable. I had precisely the same experience years ago on a large ERP project on which Deloitte was the lead consultant. After the beachhead team (which was good) rolled off the project, the backfill consisted of an army of fresh-outs straight from Deloitte's consultant boot camp, billed out at a rate a developer with 6-7 years of experience should have cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> IBM has almost zero credibility in deep learning and AI. They haven't hired anyone of note. They haven't produced any novel or influential research in the field in years. And yet they air these cheesy Dylan ads and the rubes fall for it. Watson is a Theranos-scale fraud, and it's finally coming out.

<comment><USER33> Was the Jeopardy think just a ruse? Was it something easy (something any ML/DL team could have thrown together in a year?)

<comment><USER34> No it was a hard engineering challenge. But it solved a very specific problem that has no relevance to most business use-cases.

<comment><USER5> Also, at effectively unlimited cost. Are there any numbers how much they spent on making it work?

<comment><USER7> 30 people (ish) for 3 years + 10 million on hardware?

The brilliance of the team... priceless.

The cost of everything, the value of nothing : this is what will be written on the tombstone of capitalism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I know someone who is intimately involved with IBM Watson, they are highly educated and _constantly_ diss the system. Calling it, 'Just a large database'. If Watson was a true breakthrough, it should be gaining marketshare throughout it's specialities but it's not. Google is leading the industry with DeepMind; Facebook and Microsoft aren't far behind. I'd encourage others to be very skeptical of the PR that IBM is pushing about their Watson problem.

disclosure: I haven't read the article but wanted to share a related story.

</comment><comment><USER36> What? A brand name which is just a word meaning "IBM Enterprise Products and Services" doesn't really live up to the marketing hype? I can't imagine such a thing.

</comment><comment><USER37> Many years ago when I worked for a company that decided our existing ecommerce app was too terrible to fix and would be too much effort to rebuild, we talked to a number of vendors, including IBM. The marketing materials and salespeople made a compelling case, but deeper dives into the app itself and the support engineers behind it convinced even the most enthusiastic internal cheerleaders to look elsewhere.

In recent years as news articles heralding the future of Watson for various industries (including healthcare and supply chain), I predicted a similar path. An amazing product in a very narrow environment designed specifically for marketing and selling purposes, and not very adaptable.

FTA: "And everybody's very happy to claim to work with Watson," Perlich said. "So I think right now Watson is monetizing primarily on the brand perception."

This is painfully obvious, as this has been IBM for a very long time.

</comment><comment><USER38> Yeah, well, "duh." What boggles my mind is people will read this, nod sadly, and continue not to notice that a whole bunch of what they think they know about machine learning, autonomous vehicles and so on is also marketing department hype.

<comment><USER39> I don't know if that's fair. To take self driving cars as an example, I've seen cars driving themselves around mountain View and Waymo isn't promising much more than that. Watson had ads with an intelligent voice but they were selling a bunch of programmers to make expert systems like it was the 80's but in java this time. I think by comparison those other fields are promising less and delivering more. Even if there is still a gap between what people think will happen in the next 10 years and what we can likely deliver in the next 10, it's nowhere like what is described in the article.

<comment><USER38> C'mon man! Google allows one to check on their promises and their progress. For example, from 2012:

[http://www.computerworld.com/article/2491635/vertical- it/sel...](http://www.computerworld.com/article/2491635/vertical-it/self- driving-cars-a-reality-for--ordinary-people--within-5-years--says-google-s- sergey-b.html)

"Such "autonomous vehicles" will be a reality for "ordinary people" in less than five years, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said Tuesday."

How's that working out for you Sergey?

Self driving tech hasn't moved appreciably since the 90s. Computers are better. More people are trying it. Reality is, it's just collision avoidance with GPS. They rely on maps; what happens when the maps change? What happens when a kid runs out in front of one of these things?

<comment><USER39> Sergey isn't taking people's money based on that promise. As an engineer I don't beat people up about realizing how hard problems are and not releasing crappy products. Missing estimates happens. It's another thing entirely to try and pass off a product as something it isn't to a buyer.

<comment><USER38> I dunno it kind of looks like they're going to eventually take someone's money based on similar promises.

[http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/24/investing/google-waymo- self-...](http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/24/investing/google-waymo-self-driving- car-valuation-alphabet/index.html)

I mean, the fact that they've been using funds from advertising to research this problem is admirable in some sense, but they are actually taking someone's money to do this.

Hype from marketing departments on technical matters is not to be trusted.

<comment><USER18> That someone being the shareholders who could have gotten that money as dividends.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm late but have something to add.

Until last week I was on a 6 month contract as a senior DevOps engineer for IBM/Watson. I was responsible for one of the huge real-time data ingestion pipelines that Watson receives. I left to work elsewhere in spite of being offered an excellent position. (If you guys are reading this, hi.)

I went to IBM not expecting much more than working as a cog in a lumbering giant.

Watson is the fastest growing part of IBM. If IBM has all of those eggs in one basket, it is the Watson basket. There were lots of jokes about cognitive in the office pool.

That said, it was by far one of the best managed companies I've seen. They have some fantastic data engineers and scientists. They are backing most of the open source projects related to AI and next generation tech. Spark, VoltDB...

The ads might seem sensational, but the concept of a black box that orders preemptive maintenance for an elevator isn't far fetched...

More over, Watson had so many current customers because it is valuable. The technical advisors that but products don't put faith in ads any more than we do.

</comment><comment><USER41> I like how IBM does very elaborate marketing ploys to hype their wares: like Deep Blue competing against Kasparov and Watson competing against Jennings to showcase IBM's engineering prowess. But it does sell the idea pretty well I think, but perhaps the idea is too grand/far ahead of the present.

<comment> forgot-my-pw Deep blue was just a brute force machine. Perhaps Watson isn't much different, just slightly smarter.

<comment><USER42> Saying something like this does a big disservice to IBM's real accomplishment. Code a brute force chess engine, add some alpha-beta pruning, transposition table, or even some of your heuristics and let us know how it does. Just because it's not an adversarial RNN or whatever, it doesn't mean it's brute force.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> This just goes to show just how tragically far away we are from even beginning to build the rudiments of a strong general purpose AI. For all the fantastic achievements of systems like Watson and Alphago, and they are amazing achievements, they are radically optimised special purpose systems fine tuned to solving one extremely specific and narrow problem, and that problem only.

Watson is a case study in this, but I know Google has big plans for applying the tech behind Alphago in medicine. I wish them every success, but I'm concerned they will hit similar specialisation issues.

<comment><USER7> Medicine - the biggest prize, the biggest trap. Every complication, huge, mind blowing rewards. Maybe, if Google were to go 100% they could break the beast... but it's a 100bn bet.

<comment><USER43> Untill you actually have a viable, testable plan to implement it almost allege money you throw at it is pretty much certain to be wasted.

The Manhattan project is often given as an example, but that project was based on solid theoretical models and repeatable experiments. They knew exactly what they were doing and how they were going to do it.

The problem in AI at the moment is mainly developing talent and expertise, not capital funding. I'm all for advanced research into technologies. However we need to advance that research on as many different fronts as possible in a flexible way simply because we don't know how we are going to solve the problem of general AI. Guessing on an approach and spending billions on it would be a complete waste. We're simply not at a point where that would do any good.

<comment><USER7> Agree, they should have focused on much more tractable domains before Medicine.

I think that there's an business case issue here; MBA's see this as the mega win, the research staff can't say "it won't work" (because you are immediately flagged as an obstacle to progress and the execs either cease to listen because they don't want to hear, or you get bullied with an avalanche of attacks on your team or sacked).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Problem is deeper (and simpler). IBM does not look for clients, but rather victims. We clients end up being caught in an internal upsales fight. Nobody cares which is the best solution IBM as a whole can offer to you (their own people do not even know all their available tools!), but rather how much suboptimal stuff each salesman can load onto you. I'm on my way out of IBM...

</comment><comment><USER45> I actually love the idea of Watson being used for healthcare...

Sadly I think it is being used wrong...

IBM is focusing on using Watson to cure very specific diseases, like certain types of cancer.

I think a far better use for Watson would be to do initial diagnosis, for example my life got massively delayed because I got hypothyroidism as teenager, but only using internet data I could self-diagnose and self-treat (because doctors are still unwilling to help, not trusting data, and before someone come berate me for self-treatment, it is working...) as adult I could finally get my life 'started' (hypothyroidism affect physical and mental development, and slows down metabolism and the brain)

During my quest I met many, many, many people on internet, that had self- diagnosed with something using the internet as a tool. All of us would have been diagnosed properly if Watson was being used on the doctors office, using its data crunching capabilities and symptoms as input to find out what problem we had. (in my case: I have Hashimoto's disease)

<comment><USER46> Why would professionals support tech that makes their labor less scarce? Unfortunately this change won't come from doctors

<comment><USER47> Doctors might fear it, but healthcare administrators would certainly love for a tool to help make diagnosis faster, more accurate and less expensive.

<comment><USER7> If it worked in that way, which it currently doesn't (see comments about question answering systems and Jeopardy) in terms of the state of the art, we're... maybe 30 years off that, like as in we're 30 years off fusion.

Think about the human condition, think about human biology. Be clear- these are systems beyond current science... and doctors deal with them every day!

<comment><USER48> The current push seems to be in radiology. An AI that never sleeps and can read images and give you a good estimate of whether something is a tumor? It probably wouldn't replace humans entirely but it could be the first place that AI really gets into the process of diagnosis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> IBM has a toxic culture. They are the vendor lock-in Gods. Every company I've ever worked for has cringed at the mention of IBM, never suggested them as a new solution, and always regretted whatever if anything they locked themselves into.

They are the only company that charges you to sample their API's. They are the absolute worst, an infection that needs to be cured.

<comment><USER50> Sometimes I wish I was wealthy enough to buy out horrible companies, just so I could have the power to dismantle them and end the suffering.

<comment> Method-X You wouldn't be wealthy for very long ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> They had so much time to contribute but instead chose marketing and pushed into areas where they didn't really have a handle on yet. As in management didn't understand.

I mean all the datasets, dozens of libraries, stunning NN demos and training sets, TPUs (multiple versions at that!) all could've come out of the company.

Think if keras and tensor flow were from IBM. Or all those cars now running Nvidia Jetson, or mega datacenters running NV100s or Google TPUs.

Shoot they even had a chance to enhance PowerPC ICs for NNs.

Alas but nope.

</comment><comment><USER52> Obvious fix is for IBM to put Watson on a blockchain /s

<comment><USER53> You jest, but they're not above "throw a blockchain on it" levels of buzzword- chasing: [https://www.ibm.com/us-en/marketplace/z14](https://www.ibm.com/us- en/marketplace/z14)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I overheard a good-'ol-boy businessman at a hotel bar a few months back. He bore an eerie likeness to Bosworth from Halt and Catch Fire, and was telling a younger gentleman about a project he worked on. "...so Watson comes in and they Algorithm the whole thing..."

I'm pretty sure he thought Watson was a person.

</comment><comment><USER55> Replace IBM's Watson with anything branded with "AI" right now and themes in the article still hold up.

<comment><USER56> It is likely that AI has not matured to the level its being marketed at currently?

And that the over hyping of it today will negatively impact its adoption when ready for general use?

<comment><USER38> It happened in the 80s. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter)

It will happen again. The use of the phrase "artificial intelligence" itself ought to be forbidden until such a thing actually exists in the corporeal world.

<comment><USER57> >It will happen again

maybe an 'AI recession' is plausible but a large scale loss of interest is unlikely given that AI / ML / deep learning (pick your favourite word) is already too embedded in commercial application.

Like always the hype in the field is strong, but this time we actually have the data growth we need to produce palpable results (and already have).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> You can try by yourself. [https://alchemy-language- demo.mybluemix.net/](https://alchemy-language-demo.mybluemix.net/)

Imagine analyzing product reviews to determine if it was positive or negative. Type "I like it", and see the inaccurate targeted sentiment (neutral sentiment instead of positive).

<comment><USER59> I tried this, and while 'targeted sentiment' may be neutral, 'document emotion' has Joy at 0.880435 vs the rest at 0.

If you change your example from 'I like it' to 'I like puppies', the 'targeted sentiment' changes from neutral to 'puppies positive 0.550431'.

While the first example you found does seem odd, the rest seems to work quite well. Maybe it just has problems attaching 'it' to a 'target'.

<comment><USER60> It has trouble with negation outside the relevant clause. So it is not fooled by e.g. "I don't hate it" vs. "I don't like it", but the first of the following two sentences is rated more negative than the second:

I don't seem to hate it.

I don't seem to like it.

 _Edit_ : In fact it can even be fooled just by increasing the linear distance between a positive term and negation. The following is rated +0.6!

I don't in any way shape or form like it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Watson's Natural Language Classifier, in particular its categorization API, is actually pretty impressive...

</comment><comment><USER62> It's tempting to start whispering winter is coming, but I think one may reasonably hope that the current fashions at large have enough nuance to differentiate between this particular marketing gimmick and the broader developments in ML.

Personally I'd be happy to see the paragraphs/minutes at the beginning of far too many interviews about "intelligent" machines exchanged, from straightening out the misconception that Watson is an example of this new hot "Deep Learning" thing and one of the pinnacles of achievement in the field, for some type of more valuable type of commentary from leading researchers.

</comment><comment><USER63> Bundle up for the second AI Winter...

<comment><USER64> Third actually. But it's just Watson; Deep Learning and its derivations are here to stay as they are already state-of-art and close to humans.

<comment><USER65> They are not close to humans at all. They are good for very specific tasks only.

Edit: Spelling

<comment><USER64> You are right - for specific tasks. E.g. in computer vision they are able to surpass humans for static image recognition. For image segmentation they are getting close already. For generating art they IMO have surpassed some "artists" already ;-)

If you think about it, even with 90% accuracy they are worth it as they could almost automate some cognitively-difficult tasks and for those instances that they can't do it properly, a human can intervene. So instead of 10 humans watching over something you end up with a single one. It would take some time until all we have in the research is in production and that will change a lot of things. After that there might be another AI winter (who knows if we can do general intelligence?), but with current pipeline it might take a while to reach plateau.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> You don't say! This is IBM consulting ware? Who would have guessed!

</comment><comment><USER67> This was my opinion when they started running these ads. My opinion has actually softened a little.

Some of the cognitive services they are offering today are not half bad; also I can say their salespeople are doing a gangbusters job in places.

</comment><comment><USER68> Does IBM itself even "use" Watson?

<comment><USER69> Of course not. Watson is just a marketing trick to charge for consultants. I worked there.

<comment><USER68> This has always been my assumption. If Watson did anything close to how it's advertised, IBM would have a big competitive advantage by actually using it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> I saw a very humorous twitter exchange between a bioinformatician and IBM Watson's twitter account. The scientist asked them to provide any peer- reviewed ML publications and the best they could do was an __abstract __at a regional conference no-one has heard of. And it was a terrible abstract.

It's completely marketing. IBM still has a good name among people who don't know much about technology. They're trading on this and the current saturation of 'machine learning' in the popular press.

<comment><USER7> That's mad as IBM have loads of peer reviewed ML publications.

3 minutes of searching :

[http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group_pubs....](http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group_pubs.php?grp=5443)

[http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group_pubs....](http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group_pubs.php?grp=4384)

c'mon

<comment><USER70> I should have added: healthcare. No shit IBM _research_ has publications, they have their own journal. Also, 15 publications in 3 years is pathetic. c'mon

<comment><USER7> Well, the operational people will struggle to publish because it won't be on their scorecard, so effectively they won't be paid for it. Additionally many of them won't have any skills relevant to creating an academic publication and no nice professor to help them do it. So if IBM are going to publish it will be their lab.

In terms of publication rates, in universities it's a mill. All academics are measured on publication impact and because of the arbitrary and self reinforcing nature of impact the way to win is to sprinkle as many papers around as you can get your graduate student factory as you possibly can. The question is what is the actual utility of minting out the same paper with nine different authors?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> it's just a brand name at this point, which they attach to any machine learning they develop or acquire, and they should stop trying to sell it as a distinct technology.

</comment><comment><USER72> > "In the data-science community the sense is that whatever Watson can do, you > can probably get as freeware somewhere, or possibly build yourself with your > own knowledge"

Any suggestions about the freeware?

<comment><USER7> MLlib

Tensorflow

Lime

There you go.

<comment><USER10> _MLib_

The Watson of machine learning libraries.

As someone who has used MLib and raised a number of bugs and feature requests: Use Spark for feature engineering and then Scikit for ML.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> The IBM Watson win on jeopardy was completely made up. IBM does not have an AI that can answer natural language questions now and they also did not have that 7 years ago. IBM'ers are delusional.

</comment><comment><USER74> Completely off topic, but didn't IBM have a system called Watson in the 1990s that was used by the police? Try as I might I can't find a reference for it anywhere.

<comment><USER75> Maybe you are thinking of the product from Harlequin [1].

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

<comment><USER74> I think you're right... thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> d--b watson's mistake is to have gone the chat bot route. promising a natural language input for all underlying problems simply discredits everything else...

</comment><comment><USER76> Any first firings for choosing IBM?..

</comment><comment><USER77> The real crime is in using cancer kids to sell your product. I mean, who even does that? Even if you could cure cancer for kids, I find it incredibly tacky to go around making commercials about how you can cure cancer for kids, which aren't targeted at those who actually are in the position to use the technology, and its used to market to other tangential industries where the real money is. It's just despicable and you can tell right there its smoke and mirrors.

There's a special place in hell for anyone working at IBM or involved in the Watson project who is supporting this thing. It's damaging legitimate deep learning/machine learning industry and generally making a fool out of IBM, AND giving children with cancer false hope....just so IBM can try and stay _relevant_ and _make money_?

<comment><USER78> > The real crime is in using cancer kids to sell your product. I mean, who > even does that??

Charities?

<comment><USER79> Can confirm

Source: former president of children's cancer research foundation

In my defense we were actually trying to make a difference in the world not sell software.

<comment><USER80> > we were actually trying to make a difference in the world not sell software.

I mean, to be fair, I don't think selling software and trying to make a difference in the world are at odds with each other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> Everything to do with IBM is too expensive for the average user.

</comment><comment><USER82> Did they really need to stick an insult at Trump in there?

<comment><USER83> As much as I hate bringing politics into places it wasn't, this wasn't from the author; It was from a quote

> "IBM Watson is the Donald Trump of the AI industry—outlandish claims

> that aren't backed by credible data," said Oren Etzioni, CEO of the

> Allen Institute for AI and former computer science professor.

> "Everyone—journalists included—know[s] that the emperor has no clothes,

> but most are reluctant to say so."

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> the articles content is more just background about watson than having to do with the the title.

as a side note: it just sounds wrong to have the words "hating on" in an article title.</comment>


Don't stifle that yawn -- it will help rev up your brain - <AUTHOR> http://euraeka.com/articles/6026657-Don-t-stifle-that-yawn-it-will-help-rev-up-your-brain

<comment><USER2> <http://www.upenn.edu/gazette/1109/expert.html> by Andrew Newburg was on here sometimes ago.

</comment><comment><USER3> In before "I yawned during the article!"

That aside, I now have an excellent rejoinder to anyone who might accuse me of rudeness due to me yawning while they are talking. "On the contrary," Zachary countered. "What you said is so interesting that I am recruiting extra resources to process it, and the yawning introduces a cooling effect, contributing to optimal efficiency."</comment>


Experiment HN: Idea Day Results - <AUTHOR>

Alright folks. Idea day deadline has finally been reached, so let's hear the three (or more) problems/frustrations/annoyances you experienced/overheard/observed today with possible solutions!<p>This is in reference to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=937032 for those who are confused. <comment><USER2> * No decentralized, redundant, internet archive. Solution? I dunno. I've been banging away at it for years.

* No easy way to search my personal web/reading history. The problem is not just collection, it's relevance. I want to go back and find a book recommendation on design I saw in a blog post sometime in the last week. I dunno where it is or if I bookmarked it. Solution? Google Desktop / WebMynd plus some radically different ideas about search.

* I can't use Amazon EC2 with Mosso CloudFiles quickly, cheaply, and at scale. Solution? Cloud peering.

<comment><USER3> I've thought about number two as well. How about a combination of caching all pages you read and how long you are spending on each page (and maybe if you scrolled as well)?

The idea is to save enough data that you can have an algorithm that will automatically differentiate between stuff you closed within a couple of seconds and didn't really read and stuff that interested you and you actually read through. And the reason for doing this automatically is it seems very difficult to have the discipline take an action every time you see a page that you may want to save so that you can search through again (such as clicking a box for every such page).

Whatever mechanism it is, it needs to account for stuff read through readers and over multiple computers/devices too. I don't want to miss a search result just because I was reading it on an iPhone or in my Google Reader.

Or instead of caching locally, a search interface that would accept a long list of urls to look through.

<comment><USER4> I have thought about it as well. The signals that could determine relevancy in your browser history are likely different form the ones that determine it for web search, and measuring engagement with a page is a good example (it would help web search as well, but it would be harder to measure).

Other things you'd take into account are:

* continuity in time - reading several pages on similar topics one after the other.

* analysis of the subgraph of the web graph that you visited

* you'd be more aggressive with query expansion because you work with much smaller corpus, e.g. you'd want to take hypernyms and hyponyms into account

<comment><USER3> Ah yes, engagement is the word. Interesting. I'd imagine the query expansion should also work across the author dimension--include and rank matches from the same blog higher, even if according to my history, I haven't read that post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> * Carpool coordination. This problem turned into our next homework assignment for my collaborative work class. I'm thinking of something that lets each team member mark down their home, adjust it on a per-day basis if they'll be somewhere else, mark down which days they can drive, and plot optimal routes. Extra points for a mobile app that can read my GPS coordinates and tell me where to go. More points if it balances driving responsibilities well enough that nobody feels taken advantage of.

* Too many notifications. I have to login to a half dozen different systems to keep up on what's happening. That's too much. There are notifications I just want to see, some I want to add to my todo list, some to my calendar, some I don't want to see again. A single-app solution for all of this would be brilliant. Email is too heavy: I want notifications, not correspondence. Bonus points if it's on my mobile.

* Some way to extract the most valuable points out of a meeting. A possible solution might be a 'real time digg' that lets people vote speakers up and down when they agree or disagree with their point. Correlate that with a copy of the transcript and emphasize sections with higher scores. Possibly two-dimensional voting for 'We need to remember this' and 'I agree with this'.

<comment><USER6> >> Too many notifications

What sort of notifications? Please share some examples.

<comment><USER5> In addition to the ones that were already mentioned, I also care about:

Class announcements (currently emailed to me)

Reminders from my calendar (currently email or rss'd)

New posts from blogs I follow (currently RSS)

Notification of shared document changes (currently login to each service to check)

Private messages on forums (currently emailed)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 1\. Startup marketing: should be easier to get a list of all blogs that you can contact. Also I found that the contact forms are next to impossible to find on a lot of sites

Solution: site that lets you generate a list of sites to contact. With direct links to that site's contact us page.

2\. New Season TV updates for basic cable, you know what I'm talking about you watch a TV channel and they keep repeating the same shows 20 times over.

Solution: site that let's you "follow" a show + channel, and get notifications when that channels starts airing a new season.

3\. Where are they now? Where are all of those celebrities, politicians, musicians that have retired from the public eye? What are they doing now?

Solution: IMDB like site for retired personalities. Would show things like,

       Name: John Doe
       Famous For: Congressman from XX from 19xx-19xx
       Latest TV appearance: Youtube link
       Current Occupation: Lobbyist for ______

or

       Name: James Doe
       Famous For: Actor(Movie #1(amazon link) - Movie #2(amazon link)
       Latest TV appearance: Youtube link
       Current Occupation: retired in Florida, spends his spare time working on his bikes.

<comment><USER8> Point 2: You can use Femtoo.com (<http://www.femtoo.com>) to track a webpage (wikipedia for example) to be notified of new seasons/episodes...

You can be notified by email and Instant Messager (if you register using a gmail account).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A toaster combined with a smoke alarm 'SHOULD' result in a machine that does not burn toast.

<comment><USER9> wow that's really clever! I wonder if it's been done. I might try it. Maybe CO2 detector though? I wouldn't want Americium near my toast ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Understanding written text is a universal problem and even minor improvements would matter.

Syntax highlighting for natural language is a possible improvement. I have tried variations of this with no success so far: parts-of-speech tagging in color doesn't seem to help, for example. Automatic extraction and highlighting of named entities is probably most promising.

More generally, it's about ways to help humans understand electronic text better by providing them hints and interactions that were not possible (or were difficult) with paper.

An established example of this is searching within a page. There are different implementation of this, some better than others: search-as-you-type is good, and so is highlighting all results. I haven't yet seen implementations of query expansion like search engines do: correcting spelling mistakes, finding all word forms, finding synonyms. Finding several terms close to one another would also be helpful.

</comment><comment><USER10> 1\. Plastic bags are all around.

       Solution: Make paper bags and sell those. Use less plastic. Spread awareness.

2\. Web hosting/downloads (read the solution).

       Solution: Make all the servers a network of bittorent peers.
       This way load balancing, and bandwidth problems can be solved.
       Downloads can be stopped and resumed.
       After some time the server need not host the file at all.
       There will be virtually no down time.
       If web sites can be served using the bitorrent technology, awesome!

3\. I have a lot of old books.

       Solution: Some web service to exchange old books free of cost.

<comment><USER11> The plastic bags problem was solved years ago in many places.

In the Uk and europe (western europe anyway) supermarkets now either (a) don't let you have them at all, (b) make you pay for them, or (c) let you have them but make you ask the checkout operator instead of having a bunch that you can help yourself to.

Most supermarkets are also selling larger more sturdy plastic shopping bags. These are marketed as a 'green' iniative as using less of the other bags is supposedly good for the environment.

<comment><USER12> Here's the UK situation with bags:

The Waitrose near me has makes a half-assed effort, whereby no matter how much stuff you have (literally, a heaped shopping cart), the lady will look at you and ask "Do you need a bag?" The idea is that if they ask, sometimes you'll say no, and use fewer bags. Usually I respond with something like "Nah, I'll just take the cart, thanks" or "It's fine, I'm a great juggler" or some other stupid quip.

Marks & Spencer also ask you if you want a bag. If you say yes, they charge you 10 pence PER bag. So if you do a lot of shopping at M&S, you really need to bring your own suitcase or something.

Tesco doesn't give a crap. They find baby seals and tie plastic Tesco bags on their heads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> * DVD/CD burning: the fact that people still produce coasters in 2009 is a travesty.

* Video authoring: with the complexity of containers, codecs, DVD formats etc. it's still far from what the MP3 was even 6 or 7 years ago, despite iMovie's best efforts.

* Because of the way the Western 12-note musical system is devised, guitars have intonation problems that can never be fully overcome. I found the solution to this about 5 minutes ago: <http://www.truetemperament.com/site/index.php> Quite whacky.

</comment><comment><USER8> The wireless 'Copy and Paste' mouse - click a file or highlighted text, click a 'copy' button on your mouse and the data is transferred to an SD card in the mouse... point the mouse at another computer and click the 'paste' button on the mouse to transfer the data to another PC ... imagine how much time would be saved instead of uploading/sending files/data using MSN or Skype to send something to the guy sat next to you... GENIOUS, I should probably patent this...

</comment><comment><USER14> 1) Home-delivery, inner city parcel service and taxi service having a centralized system. It will be a B2B and B2C combined together to make things more efficient

2) Higher cab fares during night time so that drivers have incentives to operate during night, especially, on friday and saturday nights.

3) Lower medical/insurance costs

<comment><USER15> I have to strongly disagree with #2 as it will discourage drunk people further from calling a cab instead of driving home.

There's an idea - Bar Van, free rides home from the bar, completely funded by advertising from area businesses that want to support "don't drink and drive" initiatives.

<comment><USER16> Or for a pizza place: buy a pizza, free ride home.

<comment> matthew-wegner I've never understood why pizza places don't rent movies.

"Oh crap, I have a late movie sitting here collecting fines. I'll just order another pizza so they'll pick it up..."

<comment><USER17> I saw a local pizzeria do this in the mid 90s. I thought it was a great idea, but I guess others did not agree with me. The place went out of business and is now a Dunkin' Donuts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I occasionally like to give talks at conferences that will have me (thus proving they're not really very important venues?;-), but you need to be aware of the conference months ahead of time to submit a talk, and I'm interested in stuff in different fields. I need a way to learn about conferences and their submission deadlines.

<comment><USER8> You can use <http://www.femtoo.com> for exactly this!

With Femtoo.com you can track events - you can specify what type of event you are interested in (conferences for example), enter some keywords (Java, Pottery etc) and when the event is schedules (3 months in advance), you will be notified.

You can be notified by email, Instant Message, or a URL callback.

When you've logged in, choose to create an 'Event Tracker'...enjoy!

(I sympathize, I built Femtoo to avoid missing concerts of my favourite bands!)

<comment><USER19> Please stop spamming your site all over this thread!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> See <http://idea-ne.ws> for a slightly lighter take on new ideas.

<comment><USER21> All I get is: "502 Bad Gateway"

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Remembering seeing something on the internet years ago and not being able to find it now. Why can't my computer record every page I visit, everything that comes across my screen, everything I type, etc? We have the memory.

</comment><comment><USER9> New TV series go so wrong. They open up all these story lines and then the show gets canceled and you're left frustrated and confused. Sarah Conner chronicles and Kyle XY are two examples.

My solution, a voluntary agency to preapprove tv series to make sure they have adequate funding and buy in from the network to stay alive until the story reaches a conclusion, and that the story is coherent and makes sense. Viewers like me would only watch shows that get this approval.

</comment><comment><USER22> The random quality of haircuts. Solution: shave it all off the next day.

</comment><comment><USER23> I kind of put them in the other thread ( <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=937184> )

</comment><comment><USER24> lasers to shoot down mosquitoes and eradicate maleria

better...belief persuasion. existence would be so much less traumatic if belief in some kind of afterlife or reincarnation could be instilled after childhood.

for serious this time: ...

nah, who am i kidding. i'm educated, certified, white, and working on my own startup. i live the most charmed existence imaginable (other than the no afterlife thing). i think it's better to scratch more worthwhile wounds.

<comment><USER25> "Rocket Scientists Shoot Down Mosquitoes With Lasers"

<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123680870885500701.html></comment></comment>


W3GiftCards launches free merchant service - <AUTHOR> http://www.w3giftcards.com/ Easily provide online gift card services (via IFrame and Facebook app) to any merchant trying to offer gift cards through their website with no setup fees. Launched with W3Gifts.com to promote our merchants gift cards. <comment><USER2> W3giftcards is an excellent online gift card service! The set-up is simple and currently free of charge to the merchant. This service provides consumers with the convenience of purchasing gift cards instantly online. What better way to boost your gift card sales without having to mail or ship cards to consumers. It doesn't make sense not to offer this service to your customers.

</comment><comment><USER3> W3 Giftcards is a no brainer for small to midsize businesses that would like to reach a wider audience on the internet to help grow their business. W3giftscards is connected on facebook as well and reaches new customers on all the social media channels. It's easy to use and free to sign up and get going.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Easily provide online gift card services to any business trying to offer gift cards through their website and facebook. Simple setup and no sign-up fee.</comment>


In America, rescuing a piglet makes you a terrorist but shooting concert doesn't - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/america-rescuing-piglet-makes-you-terrorist-shooting-concert-doesnt-680727?68072 <comment><USER2> I think the issue is that we started to consider terrorism as the worst imaginable act of a human. This must be the drive for people to actually want the concert shooting to be labeled in this manner. I don't see why we need to redefine the word to allow non-politically motivated acts fall under this umbrella. I certainly would be on board with changing our legal definitions to only include violent (or the threat of) acts.</comment>


TR-069 remote timing attack and memory corruption in Technicolor residential gear - <AUTHOR> https://weaponizedautism.wordpress.com/2017/07/14/vulnerabilities-in-technicolor-adsl-residential-gateways/ <comment><AUTHOR> And a lot of network gear possibly vulnerable to "finicky remotely exploitable fd_set issues"........... whatever the hell that means.</comment>


William Eubank used ingenuity to get sci-fi film 'The Signal' made - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-signal-filmmaker-william-eubank-20140615-story.html

<comment><USER2> I'm glad this movie got made. It was one of those films that snuck up on me in that it quietly blows up on you.

Talking toward getting Laurence Fishburne hooked with the script was quite interesting; part of me was wondering how getting him in the film was swung.</comment>