Cuba's Netflix, Hulu, and Spotify, all without the internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2015/9/21/9352095/netflix-cuba-paquete-internet <comment><USER2> "Most people I spoke to in Cuba work for the state and have zero incentive to deliver anything above the bare minimum. They get paid the same either way. Even the private restaurants lack the fervor of a competitive business, since the economic environment they work in is still completely controlled even if they themselves are private."

Interesting article, but this statement is completely opposed to my own experience. I went to Cuba 4 years ago and nearly everyone I met had something running on the side. One guy said that "everyone has two jobs, they job you're given and the job you love" (he was a tour guide who did photography on the side).

I a country where many (admittedly not all) basic needs are taken care of by the state, the people are able to pursue their own aspirations, as the guy featured in the article has done.

"zero incentive" = neo-liberal bollocks.

<comment><USER3> >One guy said that "everyone has two jobs, they job you're given and the job you love" (he was a tour guide who did photography on the side).

That is because that's the only way to survive. The top positions in Cuba are those which face foreigners, as there is always a non-trivial chance of receiving dollar-based tips, which are far, far more valuable than the official Cuban currency. When I went to a Cuban resort town, my barman had been trained in Physics in Moscow, and considered himself very fortunate to be in the job he was in.

Cubans are, undoubtedly, some of the most resourceful and entrepreneurial people I've met -- but by necessity. The statement that they have "zero incentive to deliver anything above the bare minimum" is absolutely right, because everyone knows that their well-being will depend on what else they can come up with on the side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway._

—Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (1989). _Computer Networks._

<comment><USER5> A blast from the past. I mailed DVD-R's and flash storage because the price per GB was pretty good. No hackers, either. I later found that this wasn't a unique idea: supercomputing and big corporate players often mailed whole HD's of data to cut cost of WAN links. A trick that it pays to never forget in case one of the benefits appear.

<comment><USER6> First off, i recall reading a blog entry or article about someone who owned an Amiga 500 in the UK in the 90s.

Back then you had various glossy magazines around, complete with a classifieds section in the back.

Apparently one use of those was to offer a like for like copying service. Meaning that you put up an ad and people would mail you floppies of various games and software, along with a list of same they hoped to get in return.

Apparently it eventually snowballed to the point where he had invested in a second floppy drive just to speed up the copying process, and ended up spending whole weekends switching floppies and stuffing envelopes.

Eventually he got so fed up he started returning envelopes unopened.

Secondly, i think Amazon accept Fedex-ed HDDs for their cloud services. In case the amount of data to be uploaded would take unreasonably long otherwise.

<comment><USER7> It's very common for a dco to accept physically shipped storage. There are a lot cases, where it is either cheaper, or securer to hand deliver data when it is not possible due to peering issues to establish a non MitM-able connection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just for fun!

My thought was how about a HFT microwave style network: [https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2014/09/22/hft-in-my- ba...](https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2014/09/22/hft-in-my-backyard- part-i/)

So I checked the distance from the Keys to Havanna: [https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome- instant&ion=1&e...](https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome- instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=havanna+to+florida+keys+distance)

Which turned out to be 2500 meters via this: [http://www.hamuniverse.com/lineofsightcalculator.html](http://www.hamuniverse.com/lineofsightcalculator.html)

It's four times larger than the largest non-skyscraper (a TV tower in North Dakota): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_and_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_and_structures_in_the_world)

So sadly we cannot beam Netflix or anything else to our entrepreneurial hacker Mr. Weekly Packet. Added incentive to fund space elevator research?

<comment><AUTHOR> Repeater boat in international waters?

<comment><USER9> High bandwidth satellite spot beam down links would work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I imagine this has implications for the debate where certain people think backdoors and censorship will stop covert communication among criminals or terrorists. Now, we can add to our list of replies, "Hows that working out for Cuba?"

<comment> guard-of-terra Then "certain people" are happy - at least they'll make you live in totalitarian dictatorship, it's a good achivement already.

I came to conclusion that those "certain people" just hate everybody and want to harm us, and then hope to escape proposed punishment themself.

Limiting your rights is not a "price to pay" for them, it's their target. Fighting crime and terrorism is just a front-end to get to their real target, namely to humiliate citizens.

<comment><USER5> I mostly agree. Except, I think their target is stability and control. Fits well into one of the better Theories of Everything I've seen:

[http://www.projectcensored.org/the-global-1-exposing-the- tra...](http://www.projectcensored.org/the-global-1-exposing-the- transnational-ruling-class/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I didn't see the article point it out, but earlier this year Netflix started streaming for Cuban customers: [https://pr.netflix.com/WebClient/getNewsSummary.do?newsId=18...](https://pr.netflix.com/WebClient/getNewsSummary.do?newsId=1896)

</comment><comment><USER11> I'd say there is an internet going on here, it just happens to have really, really crappy latency.

<comment><USER12> Latency or bandwidth, or both? If it's just latency you could still stream things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's funny he said 'Suits'. Just before that I was thinking Junior looked like the Harvey character on the show.

</comment><comment><USER14> What media are they using? DVD, tape?

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra I wonder why we're still having fans of communism, socialism and otherwise far left people if that's what the best communist states have to offer its population?

I mean, it's pathetic to live like this.

Also invalidates most of French thinkers of XX century.

<comment><USER6> At the same time the place as better general health care than USA...

<comment> guard-of-terra I would take internets over health care 99 times of 100.

<comment><USER15> BS. If you meant 'quality' health care, I doubt you' take internet over terrible, third world health care.

<comment> guard-of-terra Why not? I needed health care about 0.5 times to this moment.

Without internet, I'll go and kill myself anyway, why would me need me?

<comment><USER15> Let me know if you ever get some serious, treatable disease, and you refuse to go to the hospital because they have crappy wi-fi.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pitching the VC partnership - <AUTHOR> http://www.cdixon.org/?p=452 <comment><USER2> The referred-to slide, [http://bryc3.com/post/172703130/i-ganked-this-slide- from-joe...](http://bryc3.com/post/172703130/i-ganked-this-slide-from-joe- beninatos) is totally on the money.

I've heard every one of these, and then some.</comment>


Build Business Logic in Minutes, Not Weeks - <AUTHOR> http://www.copperthoughts.com/p/business-logic-in-minutes-not-weeks/ <comment><USER2> I get it, in principle, but in every project I've been in, actually nailing down the business logic itself is the tricky part, more than coding it up. It usually goes like this.

"I want it to work like A." _code it up, find twenty edge case potentials_ "Well, 3, 5, 6, and 7 can be solved like this, let's guard to make sure 1, 3, 8, 9 never happen, 10-13 can never happen, and let me get back to you on the rest." _code it up, notice a few more edge cases._ Lather, rinse, repeat.

Along the way, one of the edge cases will show me that what they really want is B, and time and budget let me know if we start down that path.

<comment><USER3> In general, nailing down requirements is a very tricky part of engineering.

Having a system/body of knowledge to map requirements to implementation is really important.

Specific to software engineering, this process is best supported with BDD and TDD (in my opinion). BDD gets you 100% coverage of behavior: what the "customer" wants. TDD helps you cover edge cases which improves on robustness (which is the process you are describing above).

Coding before you have behavior (what customer wants) is, in my opinion, a bad idea (product market fit first).

Any type of development approach, ill-relevant of it being coding or visually oriented, is going to be iffy without using best known practices.

Now, if you are doing R&D then I would ignore the above process of BDD/TDD with the understanding that any code/program written would be "thrown out" (not put into production).

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This has been my project for the past few months, in one form or another. I'm planning on making a video to show just how easy and extensible this system is, as well as launching to a few small companies in the coming weeks. I'd love to answer any questions/take any criticism. Crocker's Rules (but that's a given around here :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Is this a JSON oriented workflow engine?

My experience with workflow engines (as a developer) has been ... not great. They are hard to debug, and difficult to code once the logic gets complicated.

<comment><AUTHOR> First I'll say that I am nowhere near an expert on working with workflow engines. If you wouldn't mind, I'd love to chat with you about your experiences with them.

The main difference is it's an extended state machine, not just a workflow engine.

It's similar in functionality in a few ways, but quite different from a WE in many more ways. A workflow engine has a subset of a state machine's functionality, hid behind a layer of abstraction that complicates things.

These networked extended state machines can be composed and nested, and as such, I think they avoid a lot of the complexities of a WE. I'll be going into more details on all of this in subsequent posts + a video, hopefully soon.

<comment><USER5> I'm curious why you didn't try UML or SysML instead?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> No, building business logic takes years, and even then it is not done because the business needs demand that it be changed yet again. Business logic is never correct. At best it is just good enough for now. This is why established businesses place so much emphasis on change management. They know that change is constant and that they need changes to be carefully managed in order to adapt fast enough, yet not break anything.

<comment><AUTHOR> I debated using the word "build" in lieu of "implement". Designing building logic is an ongoing process; implementing it is what we're seeking to make easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As an extended state machine, it's certainly an interesting concept. I also love that you describe the components of your workflow in JSON, but the logical pieces are I think where this approach struggles.

I mean I get what's going on here, but the syntax clutter drives me nuts.

[["if", "eq", "decline"], "Pending Response"]

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree completely. DEFINITELY something I'm working on; the syntax is not ideal. That's not even quite how it looks anymore (and even that isn't where I want it to be yet), though I didn't have time to switch it out for the post. Additionally, a lot of that will be abstracted away by the GUI (which should actually be a nice way to build these things; stay tuned).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd love to chat with you more about this. I don't know if we could benefit since we're not building a business app even though it has a fair amount of business logic planned in the spec.

I've signed up to your mailing list anyhow. (Khuram Malik)

Look forward to chatting to you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great! I will be in touch very soon, looking forward to chatting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Also, NoFlo: [http://noflojs.org/](http://noflojs.org/).

<comment><USER10> Reminds me of Quartz Composer

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Amazon has a killer offering for this problem in the form of SWF. It's fairly under the radar as they have done a terrible job marketing it, but it's great.

<comment><AUTHOR> They are going after a similar market, but the key difference (and it's very important in terms of expressiveness) is that they have a workflow engine, but this is a state machine at its core.

<comment><USER11> I don't understand. Can you explain? Writing jobs in SWF Flow Framework is an executable state machine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> thingamy.com have been building and offering a web-based system for supporting what they chose to call "Barely Repeatable (business) Processes" for years, and put a lot of tought into it. Written in Lisp btw.

See [http://www.thingamy.com](http://www.thingamy.com) -> "process engine"

(not associated in any way, just used to read and like their blog for some time)

</comment><comment><USER13> Or do it on your own server with a DSL instead of JSON.

      gem install state_machine

</comment><comment><USER3> What external APIs are working in Copper? Stripe? Twilio? etc.?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now I have Twilio, Urban Airship, Mailgun, and also arbitrary webhooks. More to come soon. It's actually a technology of Marion Tech, copperthoughts is just the silly name of my blog :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "in Minutes"... no.</comment>


As old as good: One Time Passwords - <AUTHOR> http://www.nardol.org/2008/9/12/as-old-as-good-one-time-passwords

<comment><USER2> Another (shorter length) OTP implementation:

Perfect Paper Passwords: <https://www.grc.com/ppp>

I've created a v3 compatible Ruby implementation of this for use in webapps etc: <http://gist.github.com/74551>

</comment><comment><USER3> Perhaps I'm missing something but I don't see too much benefit from OTPs. If the machine in front of me is compromised (e.g. Firefox bug, Flash bug, Adobe Reader bug, Linux kernel bug, Windows bug, etc etc), a OTP doesn't stop a man- in-the-middle attack. Once the attacker is on the remote system they can open a backdoor. Game over.

Sand boxing seems to be a good idea (e.g .[http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2008/09/three- approac...](http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2008/09/three-approaches- to-computer-security.html)). KVM and Xen seem pretty heavyweight. I was looking into using Smack to do lighter weight sandboxing but didn't get too far yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> _"a OTP doesn't stop a man-in-the-middle attack"_

This is true.

 _" Once the attacker is on the remote system they can open a backdoor."_

If you're using OTP's, then there's really only one way an attacker could do that: hijack your session after you use the OTP to log-in, but before you have logged out.

OTP's won't protect you from such a session hijack. However, they will protect you from a simple keylogger on the untrusted machine you're logging-in from, since recording the password you used to log-in will be useless for the attacker (as far as future logins are concerned).

This is why OTP's are very, very important and useful for access from untrusted systems... particularly for uses such as reading your email through webmail interfaces while away at on a business trip or on vacation, where your only access to your email might be through an untrusted computer at an internet cafe or somesuch.

 _"Sand boxing seems to be a good idea"_

I'm all for it. But that is a solution to a completely different problem: how to keep the rest of your system from being compromised further once someone has already hacked in to a part of your system. OTP's are a way to (hopefully) prevent that from even happening (by neutralizing the usefulness of a password that has been compromised on an untrusted machine).

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also see OTPW:

<http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/otpw.html>

According to its author:

 _"OTPW is not compatible with and is not derived from either S/KEY or OPIE. It is a completely independent and different design, which I believe fulfils my functional and security requirements better."_

<comment><AUTHOR> And also see these credit-card-sized hardware OTP solutions:

[http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/12/credit_card_wi...](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/12/credit_card_wit.html)

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1085642/The-n...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1085642/The- new-credit-card-keypad-promises-fight-online-fraud.html?ITO=1490)

<http://www.emue.com/site/home.htm>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Clever, and more practical than two-factor for a lot of situations without sacrificing security. Doesn't necessarily preclude using SSH key exchange on your trusted (encrypted hard disk) personal computer, either. If you're REALLY paranoid, you could use OTPs there as well -- you can't keylog a piece of paper in your wallet...

<comment><AUTHOR> I've always wanted to encrypt my whole disk, but have been too worried about disk errors making the whole thing un-decryptable, and thus losing all my data due to some stupid (and probably inevitable) disk error.

<comment><USER5> CBC mode and its relatives, one of which is likely the mode you have in your head, is great for an ephemeral stream, but not well suited to permanent storage: it's inappropriate for hard drives because it forbids random access, and it's inappropriate for tape drives because it makes the tape too lossy.

Real disks use either CTR mode or CFB mode, neither of which has those two problems.

CFB mode depends only on the previous cyphertext block to decode the current block, which allows random access but amplifies a one-bit error to a one-block error. CTR mode uses the current logical block number as IV salt, so it's both random access and minimally-corrupting in the case of errors. AFAIK most real- world hard drive encryption uses CTR mode, precisely to avoid the problem that concerns you.

<comment><USER6> This is an interesting comment, but it drastically oversimplifies the state of the art. An actually-good Wikipedia article:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_encryption_theory>

The short answer is, "use a well-known full disk encryption product, and don't worry about cipher modes".

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, but unfortunately that article does not address the issue of errors on the disk possibly making all the encrypted data un-decryptable.

<comment><USER6> What's the block cipher mode in which a small series of disk errors makes _everything_ unencryptable? That doesn't even happen in CBC.

<comment><USER7> One could increase the redundancy by further reducing the data density. If all your data is encrypted twice on two different blocks, the odds a couple failed blocks renders all the data unreadable should be reduced.

How would this impact the secrecy of the data?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the more practical use of this would be to still allow your normal password and only use your one time passwords when you're on a public computer you don't trust to not have a keylogger.</comment>


Y Combinator Challenge #18 - The WebOS - <AUTHOR> http://astartupaday.wordpress.com/2008/08/13/y-combinator-challenge-18-the-webos/

<comment><AUTHOR> The WebOS seems like an overhyped term like "cloud computing" or "web 2.0" to me. It seems more likely to me that the change will happen more gradually than most of us would like to think.

<comment><USER2> I'm actually with you on this one. Here's a quick analogy: It's like if you were raised from birth until 5 years old completely locked in a cell with no contact with the outside world, and someone told you to draw a pink elephant eating a chocolate ice-cream cone. You're so far removed from knowing what the basic concepts are that there's no way to even begin to start working on the details.

That being said - the term "cloud computing" may be overhyped, but the reality is that there are lots of businesses making lots of money on it right now, and it's only going to get bigger.</comment></comment>


macOS Mojave Drains Battery Like Never Before - <AUTHOR> https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8553128 <comment><USER2> You're not supposed to editorialize story titles like this. Stories are community property; the person who submits a story doesn't have a special right to add commentary to it.

An appropriate title: "macOS Mojave battery drain".

</comment><comment><USER3> I have exactly the opposite experience. Mojave is substantially easier on the battery of my 15" 2018 MBP than High Sierra was.

One reason (probably not the only reason) is that Mojave is much better at GPU switching, and manages to quickly and fully shut down the discrete GPU once it is no longer being used. In HS, this did not happen. The Radeon would still be drawing power even when, supposedly, only the integrated GPU was supposed to be active.

I'm typing this on battery, and currently drawing between 6-14W while running Firefox. In HS this would be between 20 and 30W.

<comment><USER4> How do you measure power consumption on a Mac? I'm using a 15" 2015 MBP with ~4h battery life, even when the battery was new. I'd like to see how the upgrade affects this.

<comment><USER5> I don't about precise power measuring tools, but I use CoconutBattery which displays what my current drain charge is. I already know what the values are when "idle", so I can compare the new values on Mojave with the ones I remember.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> After the update, macOS will start reindexing everything. It's normal to use more power due to this.

They should check if that behavior continues after a few days, not hours after the update.

<comment><USER7> Or not perform mundane background tasks unless connected to shore power and the system is idle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Every support ticket on Apple's forum is breaking news now.[0]

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_lRJuQtBmc&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_lRJuQtBmc&feature=youtu.be)

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting... I did a clean install from USB and haven't had any battery issues that I've noticed.

I have had a different issue that is mildly irritating. Every time I wake my computer the brightness levels on both my laptop and external monitor are cranked up to 100%. I have the auto-adjust setting turned off, but this issue persists. Other than that, I've been pleased with Mojave, especially Night Shift.

</comment><comment><USER10> Mojave is working like a charm. No more burned fingers while typing, and the battery is lasting even longer in my MacBook Pro 13" 2017.

I was very sad with Sierra but now I can work with multiple VM and IntelliJ without pain in my fingers.

</comment><comment><USER11> Format C: heh. No seriously the old Windows meme of "do a reinstall" has slowly but surely been creeping into macOS. If you're running a system that's gone through 2+ major macOS updates and have problems, you should probably consider a clean install from USB. On a side note same thing applies to iOS. Welcome to software in 2018.

</comment><comment><USER12> For me at least, doing an SMC and PRAM reset appeared to resolve the issue of the battery draining heavily during sleep.

</comment><comment><USER13> Surely just a bug that will get fixed promptly.

<comment><USER14> Surely.</comment></comment>


We all wear tinfoil hats now - <AUTHOR> https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/we-all-wear-tinfoil-hats-now <comment><USER2> Cultural authority got decentralized over centuries, from church to bible to traditional media to new media, where everybody can be an author and become an authority, gain a fellowship.

Peoples obedience to authority didn't change much in general, it's an instinct for survival, it makes the surrounding society and feedback from a society more predictable.

Online bubbles are often subcultures that predate the web, what changed is that many of them became more attractive or commercially viable through independence of location, new viable markets linked to a return of investment, which of course motivates virtual landgrabs and people defending their territory.

It's not a suprise that most online communities have their own authors and authorities, stores, books and conferences, their own terminology or language, their own culture/church basically. It's even obvious within niches like programming. Coming up in such a community is linked to wealth. If you're seen in church and competitors not, churchgoers will likely buy from you.

Abolishing cultural independence would lead to a China 2.0, cultural authority in hands of the state. Likely less innovation caused by a lack of cultural diversity, less motivation to invest into land that's already been grabbed by others.

How can the problems that are likely caused by cultural independence be solved without fully centralizing cultural authority? Can something like a driver license for the web even be possible or be fair?

<comment><USER3> this reminds me of an interview i saw on the news with an elderly british voter who was adamant that she will vote Tory as they are bound to win. it's almost like she saw her vote as a bet and she wanted to get it right.

this interview moved me significantly towards being sceptical of current democracies

<comment><USER4> Most people don't care about politics that much, they vote more or less for a continuation of what's currently going on with an occasional minor course correction one way or another.

I imagine that was the case with that lady, didn't care about politics, wanted things to be more or less the same, votes Conservative and when put on the spot doesn't really have a good explanation as to why.

The most useful thing about democracy is the ability to kick people out, not necessarily choose the best person for the job.

<comment><USER5> We could do a bunch of rounds of elections where we all vote against someone (or some party) Big spending attention whores would be eliminated in the first round.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'll put my "hat" on for a moment and ask: Why doesn't the FEC enforce its policy on the identification of political advertisements and who paid for them when it comes to social media activity? Why is it that a 30 second radio ad needs to have "Paid for by the Candidate X campaign", but millions of dollars worth of paid online trolls needn't disclose a thing? According to their own published rules, this sort of activity should require a financial disclosure. [1]

Question 2: Michael Hastings detailed the legalization of the domestic use of propaganda on US citizens with US taxpayer dollars. [2] How much money has been spent on those activities since they were made legal in 2012?

[1][https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/making- di...](https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/making- disbursements/advertising/)

[2][https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mhastings/congressmen-s...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mhastings/congressmen- seek-to-lift-propaganda-ban)

<comment><USER7> There is a simple answer to this question (excellent question, BTW !)

The FEC can only do this if "political advertisement" is first defined.

And that's where you will most likely hit a wall. Let's run through a scenario to see if we can get people on HN to agree what is or is not a political "ad":

\- Person tweeting on April 15th, "God, I hate paying taxes."

\- Person tweeting on April 15th, "God, I hate paying high taxes."

\- Person tweeting on April 15th, "Why are we paying such high taxes?"

\- Person tweeting on April 15th, "Why does anyone vote for these high taxes?"

\- Person tweeting on April 15th, "Who votes for these high taxes?"

\- Person tweeting on April 15th, "We shouldn't have to pay such high taxes!"

\- Person tweeting on April 15th, "Why wont anyone reduce our taxes?"

\- Person tweeting on April 15th, "Why wont (insert politician) reduce our taxes?"

\- Person tweeting on April 15th, "They should vote to reduce these high taxes!"

\- Person tweeting on April 15th, "(insert politician) should vote to reduce these high taxes!"

\- Person tweeting on April 15th, "Anyone who thinks these taxes are reasonable shouldn't be in office"

\- Person tweeting on April 15th, "Anyone who thinks these taxes are reasonable shouldn't be voted out of office"

\- Person tweeting on April 15th, "That's it - I'm voting these tax-mongers out of office"

\- Person tweeting on April 15th, "That's it - I'm voting (insert politician) out of office"

\- Person tweeting on April 15th, "That's it - I'm voting these tax-mongers out of office, and you should too"

\- Person tweeting on April 15th, "That's it - I'm voting (insert politician) out of office, and you should too"

\- Person tweeting on April 15th, "Vote these tax-mongers out of office"

\- Person tweeting on April 15th, "Vote (insert politician) out of office"

\- Person tweeting on April 15th, "Stop our excessive taxes!"

\- Person tweeting on April 15th, "Stop our excessive taxes, (insert politician) !"

\- Person tweeting on April 15th, "Stop our excessive taxes NOW!"

\- Person tweeting on April 15th, "I'd vote for anyone who will reduce our taxes!"

\- Person tweeting on April 15th, "Vote for anyone who will reduce our taxes!"

\- Person tweeting on April 15th, "Vote to reduce our taxes!"

\- Person tweeting on April 15th, "I'll vote for anyone who can beat (insert politician) and lower our taxes!"

<comment><USER8> Perhaps, the "what" is less important than the "who" or the "how". Maybe any statement made by a member of a political campaign or anyone paid by a political campaign should be considered political advertisement.

<comment><USER7> Great idea...until you realize you've just run headlong into the Citizens United decision.

In reality, if enacted as you say, campaigns would probably just reorganize themselves into a loose federation of organizations, and only one would formally have a candidate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is an extremely one-sided and biased article. Basically, it presumes that manipulating public opinion begins with Cambridge Analytica, being completely oblivious to the excesive lies, public shaming, character assasinations, alarmism that the agents of the "solid establishment consensus" (The Guardian, NYT, BBC, Deutsche Welle, etc) routinely perform.

<comment><USER10> Comparing a newspaper with Cambridge Analytica is simply absurd.

Newspaper will always have some sort of bias because they are written by human beings and the bias is harmless as long as it's understood and recognized by the readership.

Facebook manipulation, OTOH, is completely stealth because each reader gets a completely custom newsfeed.

<comment><USER11> > Newspaper will always have some sort of bias because they are written by > human beings and the bias is harmless as long as it's understood and > recognised by the readership.

I would agree if there wasn't coordinated hit pieces between newspapers or if newspapers didn't appear to collectively ignore certain pertinent events.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Good article but strategic influencing on social can help change outcomes.

The Russians apparently have put up a lot of FB pages, invented 'movements' with FB pages out of nothing, have agitators posting contentious content all in the hopes that it gets picked up by secondary or mainstream outlets.

They've met with at least some success, though it's doubtful they've changed electoral outcomes.

The issue is that sometimes elections are narrow, and more often, there's a single 'event' or bit of publicity that can overturn momentum of a political group.

In Canada, Trudeau has all but completely disappeared during and time when dozens of aboriginal protesters put up blockades. Same for the Premiere of Ontario. Same for the Ontario and Federal (ie RCMP police) police leaders. Nobody wants to deal with the issue due to the risk of someone blaming them for any violence that happens, or images of RCMP in riot gear with smoke etc. having to physically disarm/dismantled protests.

Cynically, the politicians are right to run for cover because if the public gets angry and blames them, the shift in support would have very material consequences.

So this is one example of an issue, that if perceived the wrong way, could have significant outcomes. Agitators who effectively try to run the narrative might have the ability to swing the outcome.

</comment><comment><USER13> This article simultaneously claims that advertising is not effective enough to subtly manipulate how millions of people think about a candidate but that an advertising company _is_ effective enough to manipulate how people think about it. Dubious claims at best.

</comment><comment><USER14> Propaganda is so old news. Brexit and MAGA today are touching the same strings inside people's souls that fascism and nazism did a hundred years ago. Evolution of media from newspapers and radio to TV and Internet just made propaganda more taylored.

</comment><comment><USER15> The op doesn't seem to know the first thing about advertising and is in denial of how it works.

Op asks head of facebook advertising if advertising influences people, their response "No companies spend millions on advertising with us because it doesn't work!".

> The gullibility of the latter two may have stemmed from wishful thinking: If > Brexit and Trump could be traced to the malign influence of a single company

The media picked Cambridge Analytica as their keyword for the story but both Brext and Trump campaigns used more than one ad agency.

> most ad insiders express skepticism about Cambridge Analytica's claims of > having influenced the election

Citation needed. As an ad insider I know first hand that the tactics used by Cambridge Analytica and other agencies work, thats why people pay me to do it.

> and stress the real-world difficulty of changing anyone's mind about > anything with mere Facebook ads

Well no of course not, advertising cant change anyone's mine, thats not how advertising works.

You target people who already have the mindset and encourage them to act on it. Thats what ad men like me do and we keep making good money doing it because it works.

The whole tinfoil hat thing is a bit dramatic for my liking the reality is that if advertising didn't work people wouldn't pay for it.

Every election has millions spent on advertising to influence the result, thats the truth not some tin foil hat conspiracy.

<comment><USER16> >As an ad insider I know first hand that the tactics used by Cambridge Analytica and other agencies work, thats why people pay me to do it.

As another ad insider I know first hand that people are willing to pay me to do a ton of things that don't actually work. (They often continue trying to do so after I tell them it doesn't work and it's a bad idea) People and companies pay millions for things that don't work all the time, especially in advertising.

The saying that 'if it didn't work, people wouldn't pay for it' is false, provably false.

After privately doing research and testing for my own clients for years and reading the research of others, I'm not convinced these tactics work at all.

<comment><USER15> > I know first hand that people are willing to pay me to do a ton of things > that don't actually work. (They often continue trying to do so after I tell > them it doesn't work and it's a bad idea)

Hehehe very true. I tell people what works then they ask me to do random shit. I can't deny you are right at the end of the day I do what they will pay for whether it works or not.

<comment><USER17> Evaluating what works by what the dumbest people do is not science. Marketing results are measurable. That people will measure improperly, not at all, or ignore proper measurement approaches is not about what is measured, it's about the people.

Yes, there are things that can't be measured well. Smart operators tend to not do those things, no matter how common or popular they are.

The very old joke "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half" (John Wanamaker, 1838-1922) was always more about advertising companies pushing advertising than about whether results could be measured.

In politics, look at real people on social media sharing false information and commenting about how they agree with it. Politics is the easiest place for advertising to succeed, because you can use mind control techniques more readily (where you need an "other group" to dislike to cement the self- perception being sold).

<comment><USER18> That joke was made precisely because it's difficult to measure results from advertising. Sure, online banner ads can be precisely measured for click rates, but having spent money on things like billboards, magazine ads, etc. It's difficult to consistently capture the particular ad or place that someone heard about a business. It's difficult to know how many exposures it takes to make an ad effective without going overboard (you can oversaturate, as Bloomberg has proven).

Also, IQ is no defense for persuasion techniques. If you're not keen on the biases influencing your decisions and filters on the world, no amount of intelligence will save you. I think that requires practicing skepticism, both of yourself and of others.

<comment><USER19> In fact, people with higher IQs are more prone to their own biases. The suspected cause is smarter people come up with more arguments that appear sound to the self, making smart people believe their own b.s. more than an average IQ.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> tom-thistime So to pick one example, we're under surveillance. It's a fact of life now. It pretty much wasn't a fact of life in the 19th century.

Fine. But the author keeps changing the subject to insane conspiracy theories. The author seems a little reluctant to distinguish between surveillance and insanity. I think those are two separate topics.

<comment><USER20> >seems a little reluctant to distinguish between surveillance and insanity. I think those are two separate topics.

Paranoid schizophrenia is often defined as having symptoms such as "the government is spying on you"

[https://www.webmd.com/schizophrenia/schizophrenia- paranoia](https://www.webmd.com/schizophrenia/schizophrenia-paranoia)

<comment><USER21> Isn't that convenient? The government is not spying on you and if you think otherwise then you are a paranoid schizophrenic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If you look at examples of mental illness in non technological cultures, delusions manifest as djinns, demons, succubus and so forth.

I once had the opportunity to discuss this with a journalist who spent some time researching and reporting on mental hospitals in Afghanistan. Some of the people at the facilities they visited were deeply disturbed, so the extent that their families had resorted to tying them to a tree with a rope so that they wouldn't wander off and hurt themselves or other persons.

Almost universally none of them had delusions along the lines of the CIA putting radios in their dental fillings, antivaccine nonsense, or "5G causes cancer" stuff. Their delusions were all based on traditional cultural references such as djinns.

<comment><USER23> Reminds me of one cultural interaction - patients from western cultures tend to have far more negative and evil voices perhaps related to more Judeo Christian possesion by demons cultural baggage and descendant myths like "slasher who kills because the voices tell him to" (which defense attorney strategy cases aside are ironically real manifestationd of the culture bound delusion).

Interestingly those other cases tend to be more positive or neutral despite other posession myths in the host culture.

I guess anxiety and paranoia makes the "demons" whatever is believeable to the cultural zeitgeist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> When talking about basic income I noticed a pattern where people who didn't like the idea would drop off the same comments seen 100 years ago then leave. You could bother answer the query but they didn't read it and a new comment would appear repeating the same statement.

It gave me an idea for a discussion platform. For example politics, each candidate delivers their election program AND a list of multiple choice questions for users to answer. The questions are reviewed for sanity.

THEN when someone writes a comment about candidate X we display under their post if they completed the test for X or not. (with 100% score) Other users can then see the person doesn't know what he is talking about. :-)

</comment><comment><USER24> I strongly urge all people who wish to be informed citizens to consume news sources from diverse sources. Selection bias of what events get covered is a huge source of political spin, and using diverse sources is the only way to eliminate selection bias.

Consider any statement with morally-significant wording to be the spin, and whatever is left over to be the facts on the ground worth considering. The vast majority of the time, reliable news sources get the facts on the ground right and, and only introduce spin with the moral phrasings and choosing what to omit. This is still true if the source is from the evil other party, and only starts disintegrating once you really get to the fringes.

<comment><USER25> By way of alternative, I'd suggest not consuming news at all. Or at least, delaying your consumption of news to sources that have had a chance to digest and consider the news, such as a weekly news magazine.

It's very, very rare that you require up-to-the-minute news. Continually- updated news sources, like Internet sources or 24 hour news channels, are more for entertainment than information. They focus on keeping your attention, which pushes them to pick up unverified stories and magnify their importance out of proportion.

You will lose very little actual knowledge by hearing about the news a week later. Switching to a delayed news source doesn't automatically remove political spin, but the people most interested in manipulating your views have mostly switched to more immediate media, which are more powerful.

<comment><USER26> I strongly encourage people to reduce / remove news consumption as well.

News is not a good way to learn about the world - news is precisely what is unusual. Consuming news gives you a distorted sense of what real life is like.

<comment><USER27> Also don't just rely on your own experiences. Not everyone is like you

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> On one hand, we've had a generation of persona-based sales/marketing where it is key to understand your customer, numerous multi-billion dollar companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc, etc that function because they let you target your ads down to excruciating detail, the entire Obama campaign's 2012 micro-targeting data efforts, and the rise of communities based on every interest, habit, and niche.

And on the other hand, we're supposed to believe that ad targeting doesn't work.

<comment><USER19> I think the mistake is conflating all types of advertising. Direct response ads can work, no doubt! But branding ads and things more subtle, are trying to influence behavior that has many inputs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> > _Those who attributed the political upsets of 2016 to secret algorithmic > influence were unwittingly echoing Matthews's hi-tech conspiracy theory. Two > hundred years ago, envisioning a scheme like this was such a drastic dissent > from common sense that it landed you in the madhouse. Today, similar notions > are among the default ways we think about technology._

This article is infuriating in how it tries to dismiss the manipulation that happened. We saw the Facebook ads, fake events, profiles and dissent propaganda. You can argue how _effective_ it was, but waving it off as a delusion is nothing short of malicious.

<comment><USER30> >> attributed

Attribution to a single cause may be an indicator of unrealistic thinking about these events, but to dismis all concerns about the subversion of democratic processes by algorithmic influence as delusional is a staggeringly uninformed position to take.

As Emma Briant wrote[1],

> this isn't just a scandal about an obscure, unethical company. It's a story > about how a network of companies was developed which enabled wide deployment > of propaganda tools - based on propaganda techniques that were researched > and designed for use as weapons in warzones - on citizens in democratic > elections. It's a logical product of a poorly regulated, opaque and > lucrative influence industry. There was little or nothing in place to stop > them.

> Cambridge Analytica's parent company, SCL, and its founder, Nigel Oakes, > have done everything they can to distance themselves from Cambridge > Analytica but politics was important to SCL's work far earlier than many > thought. And SCL's main clients - NATO and the defence departments of its > member states - have managed to get away without being asked how much they > knew about what one of their key contractors was up to.

the "SC" in Cambridge Analytica parent company SCL's name is _Strategic Communications_ \- the modern military term for information warfare designed to sway and influence populations both in regard to acts of war and terror and in their behaviours as members of a democracy. It encompasses a range of activities such as psychological operations, propaganda, and so on.

See Briant's article[1] for an indication of how SCL activities and state sponsored strategic communications are intertwined.

The point is not that SCL / CA are some kind of government conspiracy, but rather that the present author would, by dismissing fears of democratic subversion as delusional, be denying the efficacy of an entire industrial sector devoted to meeting the "strategic communications" needs of governments around the world.

1: [https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/as- cambridg...](https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/as-cambridge- analytica-and-scl-elections-shut-down-scl-groups-defence-work-needs-re/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is mostly off-topic but:

An author made a book series with a metal based magic system in which aluminum was inert/block magic effects. And there was emotional magic there, so wearing an aluminum foil hat could block covert attempts at influencing you. He was really proud of that :)

</comment><comment><USER32> It's not a very good article and others have criticized it fairly, but I just want to harp on the constant degradation of anything even remotely resembling "conspiracy theory" as innately batshit crazy, delusion, and based on some on some other reason than any form of logic (as the author attempts towards the end dismissing it as entertainment). Of course those versions of "conspiracy theory" exist, but there is a vast and lengthy history of the world chock full of evidence that conspiracies of various types and degrees have been sucessfully (and sometimes not) executed regularly. I have taken to Michael Parenti's labeling of those who constantly take this approach as "coincidence theorists", and in particular his criticism that incompetence theories distract from proper understanding and analysis of malice.

>In retrospect, the entire story starts to look like a classic conspiracy theory, attributing complex, multi-layered events to the secret machinations of shadowy behind-the-scenes operators deploying cutting-edge technology.

As if this is so far fetched. I can name countless cases where this is exactly what has happened!

> "technical delusion" — a term that may encompass any and all delusions about > technology, but usually designates a belief in machines that can control, > surveil, harass, and deceive humans.

Machines and technology enable and empower the humans with the desire to do these things. The technology of the authors over-abused reference of James Matthews may have been fanciful then, but the things that concern those with "technical delusion" today exist in reality.

The author even later admits that there is a basis in reality of "elites were secretly manipulating political events behind the scenes".

>Suspicions regarding the hyper-concentration of wealth and power have attained broad bipartisan currency — in part because they are grounded in reality.

I've been down so many rabbit holes and have read so many conspiracy theories I will admit some of them border on psychosis manifesting, but I have also found the ones that aren't, and the constant attempt to label all or almost all of them under the label of psychosis or some variant itself reeks of conspiracy. The irony being that the oft-abused term itself was largely pushed into modern parlance by the CIA seeking to discredit critics of the Warren commission[1], or for example the 2008 Cass Sunstein paper [2] prior to his appointment as the head of White House Information affairs that called for cognitive infiltration of discussion boards et al.

I could blather on about this kind of out in the open subversion for a while, but that's not the point. The real point is that it is a fact that conspiracies are real and that they happen rather frequently, even if not always on the scale or level of impact often purported by those in that realm of discussion. Another note that I have tried to emphasize is that it is important to distinguish the type of logic used to reach conclusions. We generally should always prefer deductive logic, which is evidence based, but in many of the topics discussed there simply is no or is a dearth of evidence to be had, which is where the importance of inductive logic comes into place.

Unlike the authors proposition that those who think some conspiracies to be true must be rooted in anything but truth, my anecdotal experience has been from starting with only one maxim. That I would rather know the truth than the lie, in particular the ugly truth over the beautiful lie. What started out for me just as the meager attempts of a USMC Iraq combat vet to understand his own place in what could truly be called a vast conspiracy (the war), became a lifelong journey of transformation in understanding the bigger picture of the realities of this world. Let me tell you, it is so much more conspiratorial than most would ever want to know (and I base this upon good, strong evidence, and where that is lacking, good inductive logic). I think most people honestly would prefer the beautiful lie. My problem always has been and probably always will be when those who prefer the lie try to tell me the lie is truth, and then attack when incredulity inevitably rises as a reaction.

[1][https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:Countering_Criticism_of...](https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:Countering_Criticism_of_the_Warren_Report)

[2][https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585)

<comment><USER33> Amen.

Tell any given hall-monitor type about a seemingly coordinated effort toward a single goal, then watch them scoff and dismiss. It is so tiresome.

Then reveal the steady paychecks behind the effort--that the endeavor was ordinary commerce all along--and watch the same awful people hamster up even more fantastical conspiracy theories to support the original take.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Very strange article for several reasons, predominantly on the politics of it all.

The first problem I have with it is comparing CA manipulation to schizophrenic delusions. fact of the matter is that _there was a conspiracy_. CA really was hired by wealthy elites trying to shift politics by engaging in mass influencing campaigns. Whether it was technically effective is another matter, but the thing happened, that's not a delusional person talking to the radio.

The second big issue is the flat-out rejection that manipulation is possible, mocking 'mechanistic' views of individuals and politics. This is a very romanticized story of decision-making and arguably close to being debunked. Bartels and Achen in _Democracy for Realists_ showcase how incoherent and flimsy political decision making is, behavioral research has shown the effectiveness of nudging in policy, Nick Chater in _the mind is flat_ drawing on lots of research casts doubt on the narrative of 'deep beliefs' and so on.

The idea that we're inoculated against manipulation because we're all deeply complex people with coherent ideologies is not really tenable.

Overall much of the article really strikes me as a rant against 'centrism'. The author seems to think that the focus on CA is a product of people wanting to blame tech or shadowy organizations and builts up a strawman likening it to delusion, without offering a compelling reason to buy that argument.

</comment><comment><USER35> I do believe that most people need to be manipulated into anothet truth or belief, otherwise they would become truly insane - in the clinical matter.

The more harsh truth is, the more manipulation is needed.

<comment><USER36> That's a nice variation on the theme of Lovecraftian fiction. Not just that delving too deeply into the truth of the universe will make you insane, but that it's far too easy to get there unless you're actively being manipulated away from it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Let's not ignore the even greater influence: Clinton was a terrible candidate and people like Trump. The article reads as if the outcome of 2016 was primarily because the public was duped by advertising. I'd argue that even if (or especially if) all we got was video clips or live streams of each candidate speaking, it would have gone the same way.

In fact if I put my tinfoil hat on I'd say Hillary Clinton ran to make sure Trump would win ;)

</comment><comment><USER38> The idea that targeted political advertising is unreasonably effective to the point of constituting mind control is ridiculous. It assumes people have no independent agency. While advertising can be effective it's definitely not mind control.

It's the same story with money on elections. People were and are extremely paranoid about monied interests dominating elections, but we have seen Trump beat Hillary with half her money and now Bloomberg will inevitably drop out of the Democratic primary even though he is outspending everyone else combined.

People have far more agency than armchair psychologists and sociologists would like to believe.

<comment><USER20> Obviously advertising is not 100% effective, anyone claiming that is being silly. Likewise it's silly to think that ad surveillance companies such as GOOG, with its near trillion dollar market cap, and the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on advertising each year in the US does not have a disproportionate influence of the consciousness of society.

<comment><USER38> But Google's, influence on society comes from its ability to control all the information you see - if you use Google for all searches - over an extended period of time.

Crucially, we are exposed to political advertising from many different sides of the political spectrum. I regularly see both Bloomberg and Trump ads. The _domain_ in which we see political advertising is not controlled by the advertisers themselves, so that is a fundamental difference from Google's influence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Bleurgh. I don't like the conflation of unsupported-by-evidence talk of telepathy and that kind of "mind control" with the heavily-funded and somewhat evidenced effect of targeted political advertising. It acts to discredit conversation about the latter by conflating it with the former. They even manage to quote Foucault on the process of labelling people as delusional in order to exclude them from politics.

I hate to bring the big hammer of logical positivism down on someone who is having fun with a literature review, but the difference between delusional and non-delusional thinking is important because figuring out the truth and maintaining the ability to operate as a rational society making decisions based on evidence is important.

> Under present conditions, is "paranoia" — a term Sconce deploys frequently > but does not interrogate at length — still a recognizably distinct > phenomenon? Or has it become mostly indistinguishable from the average > person's worldview?

Could do with considering [https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid- style-in-am...](https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in- american-politics/) (note date)

<comment><USER40> Careful, the hammer of logic is quite small. It is a mighty but very restricted tool.

Cambridge Analytica was made responsible for large scale social media manipulation. I don't think logical positivism lets you confirm this widely believed story. At least not without even identifying the type of manipulation.

What kind of message was employed? Who and how many were targeted? Did it really change the opinions of people and influenced their voting behavior?

These questions were just left unanswered.

Additionally and maybe a completely different angle, but rational society doesn't mean that much.

The criticism in your link seems valid, but I see it can be applied to the behavior described in the original article.

<comment><USER39> I think the distinction I was looking for was between statements like "advertising affects behaviour" and "propaganda affects behaviour" which, in the 21st century, are generally considered true and almost obvious even if we can't identify the specific pump handle to remove to stop the cholera epidemic; versus "wifi is beaming images into my brain".

Certainly "person X made a political decision based on the information they saw on the TV news and on Facebook, despite that information being either false or grossly misleading" isn't delusional in the same way that "person X made a political decision because the electromagnetic radiation of wifi disrupted their mind" is.

(I can sort of see if I squint how they're drawing an analogy between being affected by having images "beamed into your head" via some kind of scifi process and the plain old regular one of having them beamed to some kind of screen then interpreted by your eyes into images which have an effect on your mental and emotional state. But the former is witchcraft and the latter is media studies.)

> rational society doesn't mean that much

Only if you care about, say, coronavirus, and taking evidence-based interventions like handwashing rather than faith-based or panic-based ones.

Edit: someone downthread has provided the name of Bernays that I was thinking of and couldn't remember.

<comment><USER40> There certainly is a qualitative difference, I agree. But the societal relevance cannot be derived from the degree or order of irrational thought. Someone believing he is regularly abducted by aliens is perhaps more irrational than someone saying a company distorted and manipulated voters on a large scale. The latter allows you to dismiss a whole plethora of different opinions without effort and it was used for political talking points while the former might summon some smiles from others.

On the other hand it is quite rational for people getting angry if they are told they are the victim of propaganda or anything really. And this is where both cases you presented can converge. I think the author of the article was hinting at this. A case where both perpetrator and victims can be dismissed as irrational.

> even if we can't identify the specific pump handle

I think we often can and it is shocking we use the handle excessively and with glee. We know it for classical advertising at least. Although today there are more empirical approaches because social media allows to conduct various tests. In these cases the handle is indeed yet unknown.

>> rational society doesn't mean that much > Only if you care about [..] evidence-based interventions

I was thinking more about the self perception as a rational actor. The 18th/19th century had a lot of rationalists and they were instrumental in secularizing societies. But in the end their approaches fell flat somewhat. Some went the way of utilitarianism or egoism because they were lacking answers they thought could be rationally derived. I think the criticism of Kant is on spot here.

I don't think that many people would want to live in a purely rational society on that matter, because it would be horrible. But you see it resurfacing a lot. You like the color blue more than red? -> Irrational, your mental state needs fixing... Exaggerated of course.

<comment><USER41> There's one candidate who has spent billions of his own money laying the groundwork for his campaign. He's spent hundreds of millions on both traditional ads and "gray area" social media stuff like paying influencers to post memes.

Wouldn't a rational back-and-forth about the efficacy of his spending happen _after_ the election results come in?

<comment><USER39> Couldn't we have a postmortem about the previous elections first? People are still happily claiming that the advertising and use of Facebook had no effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> "In the ads world, just because a product doesn't work doesn't mean you can't sell it." - arguing that targeting does not work and can be sold no the less.

Seems self refuting when talking about selling _Ads_.

<comment><USER23> Well I have pointed it out before - the person they need to convince to sell ads is the client and not the end customer.

We see that all the time with "not advertiser friendly" content that is popular and their foolish attempts to shape it because they fear the backlash of the irrelevant noisy "church lady" types upset that Coke advertised to a musician who admits to having had premarital sex once. The New Jazz/Rock and Roll/Heavy Metal/Rap being shunned at first until it gets huge and the opportunity always being missed by the one who captured the prior wave comes to mind as a reoccuring generational foolishness.

In order to sustain technically all that needs to be done is to convince the adseller that you are responsible for success and the adseller's situation to be sustainable. The performance itself is irrelevant until they can actually audit the effectiveness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Advertisements are mind control.

Look around you. How many brand logos do you see? Each brand logo is an attempt to influence and manipulate how you feel, think and spend your money but your subconscious blocks them all out.

<comment><USER44> I believe advertisements should be declared illegal psychological experimentation and manipulation: abusive tools of gaslighting designed to shape our identities and perception away from healthy norms.

<comment><USER45> In certain countries billboards are illegal (New Zealand) and for example cigarette advertising of any kind is illegal in Australia.</comment></comment></comment>


Why We Need An Independent Invention Defense - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/01/why-we-need-an-independent-invention-defense.html

<comment><USER2> Personally, I don't value software parents much.

I think they are a giant waste of money. You spend $20K on lawyers, to get nothing more than the right to spend more money on lawyers in the future.

That $20K could be better invested elsewhere (like on product improvement).

I think it would be worth considering eliminating software patents.

However, I don't think an "independent invention defense" is a good idea. It would essentially eliminate all patent protection. Basically, the absence of proof that you knew a patent existed, would get you off the hook for infringing on it. This means that as long as you had the right set of rigorous policies in place, you could operate with complete immunity from patent infringement claims.

If all employees were trained (by mandatory corporate training) that "under no circumstances should you ever read any patents, ever", and "if you ever have any doubts about anything being patentable, direct the question to our lawyer", and you were very strict about enforcing it, you could make a case that pretty much every invention was discovered independently.

That would defeat the whole purpose of patent protection. The idea is that by getting inventors to disclose details of their invention (which benefits society), that they get a monopoly on its use. Without the monopoly, there is no point in having a patent.

If software patents pose a fundamental problem, then I think the best course of action is to eliminate software parents, not to undermine the entire patent system.</comment>


Ask HN: Sell me something. - <AUTHOR>

Tell us why we should use/buy a product. What set's the product out from the alternatives. Please avoid the obvious (Adobe, Microsoft) <comment><USER2> Well, that's a little hard when we don't know anything about you or your needs. Why don't you tell us something about yourself? What do you care about? What do you do for a living? What do you enjoy doing? What do you wish you could do?</comment>


Horizon – a free and open source electronic PCB design package - <AUTHOR> https://horizon-eda.org/ <comment><USER2> The PCB EDA space really needs some competition. Kicad is really getting there, it "just" needs some UI improvements (Automation of the Schematic->Netlist->pcbnew flow would be nice) and also some of the big boy features like signal integrity and heat etc.

Altium is probably the only clean PCB experience at the moment, and even that sits at 10% CPU on my machine with an empty schematic and no PCB open. The more esoteric tools like Mentor and Cadence's tools (and presumably Keysight's offerings although I can't get a student license through my university * ) are powerful but quite difficult to use working alone in the sense that schematic capture is quite slow because you need to (if I'm not doing something wrong) source your own library or make your own - not really competing with Kicad as such.

* The student license options these companies have are absolutely insane. You'd think they don't want people to learn to use their software. Altium's site doesn't work with non-american email addresses, Mentor doesn't include any RF/Thermal/Mixed-Signal simulation addons i.e. the only reason to learn to use it over kicad, Cadence took about 2 weeks to respond and ended up publishing a Photo of my student license with my name on their website if you know where to look (Indexed by number)

<comment><USER3> As an absolute beginner learning how to design PCBs and simple circuits for hobby projects - I have to say while KiCAD is getting there, it really still has a learning-curve of a sheer cliff. The interface and workflow seem arbitrary and unnecessary complex for what should be a relatively straightforward process. I realize this tool is far more powerful than I'll ever need but it really does feel like I'm in way over my head most times. While it "Just" needs some UI improvements, those are non trivial for me.

Electrical engineers are willing to put up with so much more it seems.

<comment><USER4> >Electrical engineers are willing to put up with so much more it seems.

In general, IMHO. EAGLE, a golden-standard proprietary EDA tool, while still being quite a bit ahead of KiCad on the UX front, features no fewer pitfalls and completely unintuitive controls.

<comment><USER5> YMMV. I started learning on Eagle and switched to Kicad. It's correct that library handling and pcbnew/eeschema interaction is a little weird, but just for laying out things I always found Eagle's user interface to be obtuse and idiosyncratic, whereas Kicad was quite natural in comparison.

<comment><USER6> The elephant in the room is back annotation. No one who has used EAGLE professionally will (or at least _should_ ) ever be happy with a package that doesn't keep the PCB and schematic synchronized automatically without user assistance or interaction.

I've heard the KiCAD people are working towards this goal. If they pull it off, it'll be a game-changer. I'm definitely rooting for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As much as I do like KiCAD, and use it professionally, the UX at times is literally a comical design-by-committee dumpster fire.

I gave this a spin, and it's so refreshingly the opposite of that.

My main barrier to using it for my next project is this - am I going to get 100 hours into a project then hit a brick wall and have to port back over to KiCAD. If I had some confidence around this I think it'd give it a shot.

A gallery on the website of projects completed with it would probably do the trick.

Seriously pleased this project is a thing. In 2020 there isn't really an excuse to be using software with such a poor UI/UX as KiCAD

<comment><USER7> Sorry replying to my own comment here, but this needs to be said. THANK YOU KiCAD developers. Yes it has issues but I am very grateful, comments above aside.

<comment><USER8> I'd like to pile on here and say that, for all its issues, KiCAD is an extremely valuable and important tool in the EDA space. Hobbyist PCB making at this scale simply would not be possible without it.

That said, I am very happy to see new entrants, like Horizon. I watched a presentation by the author in the 2018 FOSDEM and it looked like a great idea even back then, I'm going to try it for my next project to see how it has progressed.

Wayne Stambaugh, the KiCAD project lead, was in that presentation, and they're very much aware of the problems KiCAD has. They're working in that direction, as KiCAD 5 no longer requires you to export/import the netlist, I believe (I'm not sure because I reflexively always do it anyway).

One of the first questions they had towards the Horizon developer was "why make a new tool instead of contributing to KiCAD?", and the answer, IIRC, was "It was easier to make my own", which sounds reasonable given the amount of innovation that went into Horizon and the constraints a project as widespread as KiCAD would have, regarding backwards compatibility etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Would love to see more features supporting RF. Obviously the dream would be a 2D or 2.1D mesh/simulate built in, but would settle for less.

An easy starting point is better import/export of layouts. Designing an antenna in my RF-specific CAD suite is great, but when I actually have to build the thing, all I get is DXFs. Converting DXF to gerbers is a mess in KiCAD. Same goes if I want to reverse the pipe and simulate my layout.

Staying in the OSS realm, QUCS (open source ADS equivalent) has RF circuit simulation, just needs some help implementing auto-layout. This would make it trivial to e.g. optimize a simple transmission line circuit, and have it fabbed. That'd be huge for opening up simple microwave circuits to the DIY/"hacker" community.

<comment><USER10> Ok but I think this really should be a separate application. Let's stick with the Unix philosophy and have many tools that do one task well.

<comment><USER11> Absolutely! As long as those tools can communicate with each other à la unix pipes

<comment><USER12> Why limit with OS specific tools? Why not just communicate via markup files?

<comment><USER11> Who said anything about limiting to OS specific tools? I just referred to unix pipes as that is why the unix philosophy works. I wasn't suggesting unix pipes are used for this, there just needs to be a way for these tools to communicate if they're split.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Author here, ask me anything.

<comment><USER14> I installed the software in a Windows 10 VM to try it out and it fails pretty early with a message that says:

Glib::Error: No GL implementation is available.

Couldn't find much to help me out figure out how to fix that issue, I assume it's some missing dependency but... where do I go from here?

<comment><USER13> Gtk's and horizon's OpenGL requirements (3.3 core profile + extensions) likely aren't met by whatever graphics adapter your VM implementation provides.

<comment><USER15> That seems a little excessive.

<comment><USER16> It is, but I also understand where the author is coming from. OpenGL 3.2/3.3 with the introduction of the Core Profile is where I remember the OpenGL API getting seriously more ergonomic - no screwing around with GLEW to load extensions for basic functionality, etc.

Similarly, gtkmm is so much cleaner than Qt as a modern C++ library with none of the preprocessor / codegen quirks. Unfortunately it limits the platform reach, because GTK isn't really polished anywhere except Linux.

I raise a toast to the obsession with clean code and clean design. Sometimes "works on my machine" is the counter to "worse is better." At the same time, it's pretty inconvenient for me to use the software. Oh well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Tangent: I'm about to start learning EDA and what I really want is a data format for my designs. Something that I can write my own code to generate and manipulate as well as using standard GUI tools.

Is there any "data first" EDA package? Something more "docbook" and less "Microsoft Word"?

<comment><USER18> At KiCon 2019 there was a presentation on SKiDL which allows you to describe circuits in Python. You can then output a netlist for use in KiCAD's PCB tool (or potentially other EDA tools). I have not tried to use it personally.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WErQYI2A36M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WErQYI2A36M)

[https://github.com/xesscorp/skidl](https://github.com/xesscorp/skidl)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> As someone who's pretty naive about EDA software, how does this compare to KiCad or Eagle?

<comment><USER20> Same question -- I've been using Kicad on personal and light-duty professional projects for about 5 years (yeah, Altium is the real deal, but when you're making a small run of prototypes for a university lab, sometimes you use the tools you have). It definitely has some rough edges, but it's also got a very established ecosystem, so I feel like Horizon will have to be a massive improvement to compete.

<comment><USER21> I've been using Kicad for the same workloads as you, and Altium + Cadence for heavier ones over the years, and I must say they hit the nail on the head here with their comments about KiCad: [https://horizon- eda.readthedocs.io/en/latest/why-another-eda...](https://horizon- eda.readthedocs.io/en/latest/why-another-eda-package.html)

I'll have to find a simple project to test this out on though, because as you say, It needs to be a huge improvement on KiCad to warrant a switch.

<comment><USER20> Thank you for linking to this. That's a pretty compelling story he's telling, I'll have to give it a go if I can find a low-pressure project to experiment on it with!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> For another open-source EDA effort, see also: [https://librepcb.org/](https://librepcb.org/)

<comment><USER23> Discussed earlier today: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23059615](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23059615)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Having tried Eagle and KiCad I am enthusiastic about any new free PCB design package, as it offers up the hope of a usable PCB design package. Eagle and KiCad are both UI disaster areas that make GIMP look usable.

<comment><USER25> Agreed. That's exactly why I've been using [https://upverter.com](https://upverter.com) Sure it's not as feature rich, but I found the interface much easier to get a hang of that for my small TTL and 6502 projects it's been great. I'd much rather put time contributing to the component library than dealing with a bad UI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've been using Altium for years professionally and would love to see a FOSS project unseat it. My own efforts to advocate staffing a few FTE to work on KiCad didn't get very far.

There are some things about it which drive me nuts and which could easily be done better in an open tool:

\- The UI is extremely slow. Clicking on a component often causes the entire app to pause for 1-10 seconds while it loads all of the part parameters and redraws panels.

\- It doesn't handle large libraries gracefully. We have something around 30000 parts and the library compiler crashes more often than it succeeds. The Altium sales folks have attempted to get us to switch to vaults but can't explain to us what the data store is, what the concurrency model is, why it's not further lock-in, and why it should be more performant.

\- Better geometry importers and exporters. Getting fancy RF geometries in and out is a huge pain. For one thing, Altium's DXF parser renders at a fixed resolution. So if you have some very small feature it will often get turned into a line or a dot. And even if not, it'll be coarse.

\- Never do anything in the UI thread that isn't strictly responding to user input.

There are some things it's mediocre and it would be somewhat difficult to implement better in an open tool:

\- Really good understanding of mechanical mates. Basically Solidworks-grade constraints for putting things together.

\- Tight interconnectedness between schematic and layout rules, and a really powerful and expressive language for writing rules. Altium's rules language is simultaneously constraining and often lacks coverage for obvious cases. As an example, there's no way to do same-net gap analysis. You can make unmanufacturable spaces between two traces of the same net all day long and the design rule checker would never care.

Some stuff Altium pretends to do but doesn't, and it would be fiendishly difficult to do a good job in a FOSS tool:

\- Physics modeling. I want to know how much coupling I'll have between nets. I want to see discontinuities in transmission lines. I want to know what will radiate and absorb and how. Basically I want to be able to have my CAD tool also be Ansys HFSS with varying degrees of fidelity.

\- Real schematic hierarchy. The schematic compiler is chock full of bugs that it's dangerous to rely on hierarchy and also dangerous not to. I want to draw schematics with the same type of composition and repetition that I use to write software.

Then there's stuff that Altium doesn't even pretend to do and someone totally should write an EDA tool that does.

\- Useful diff of schematics and layouts. I want to be better able to tell where I might have made an unintended change.

\- Real time collaboration. Google Sheets but schematics and layouts. I want to be able to drop in on my layout artists' work and be able to point things out or share in the burden.

Lately in my office there have been lots of new people coming from places that use Cadence and they're slowly trying to get us to switch over. I haven't figured out what about it is supposed to be superior.

</comment><comment><USER27> Looks good. Installed it and will try it this week! Thanks for sharing.

I was about to start learning KiCad, but I think I'll explore this first.

</comment><comment><USER28> Any chance of macOS support?

<comment><USER13> It can be built on mac OS and starts but isn't really usable due to OpenGL issues: [https://github.com/horizon- eda/horizon/pull/290#issuecomment...](https://github.com/horizon- eda/horizon/pull/290#issuecomment-583775371)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Title should contain "written in C++" (as this also happens all the time with Rust).

</comment><comment><USER29> Downloaded, installed, got repositories, created a test project. Finally open it, new schematic, selected a resistor to put on schema. Damn thing too big, tried to zoom out, failed. Then tried to move it, failed as well. Unintuitive, not in the mood to learn its quirks so I just uninstall it.

<comment><USER30> Scroll wheel and middle mouse button, as commonly used in most software. Home button reframes the view.

<comment><USER29> In my commonly used software I click on damn things, little boxes appear on corners and I can just drag them in/out to decrease/increase the size. Or if 3D software I have 3 more lines to rotate/roll for each axis. That's my commonly used software.

<comment><USER31> EDA is a type of CAD software, there's a bit more to it than "baby's first schematic editor".

Things are going to be different and if that's what's making you quit the software I have to imagine you wouldn't even be using it anyway and you just thought it looked cool despite not being an actual EDA user.

<comment><USER29> I would not call CorelDraw, AutoCAD, OrCAD "baby". Those are the "babies" that implement what I said above. This one here can learn a thing or 2

<comment><USER30> Onboarding users more easily was the idea. I think having icons with tooltips that include shortcuts is of similar importance and something like a "First steps" Project where it just tells you about navigation and the spacebar menu.

I myself would probably not assume that because there is no explicit button it cannot be done ( I'd rather try the usual thing like spacebar drag, middle mousebutton, etc).

However I understand that this might depend on your background and your willingness to learn the damn thing, which is why lowering the entry bar is worth it imo.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>